They Promised Me the Gun Wasn't Loaded

by James Alan Gardner

  I can’t see a thing once I’m under the trees. I have to walk with short slow steps, grossly embarrassed at my awkwardness. I’m all hunched over with my hands out in front of me. I can picture people laughing their heads off if they’re watching me through the spy drone’s camera. (For sure, the drone must be able to see in the dark. It follows me perfectly through the night, a little wee nugget glowing faintly behind me like a firefly jail guard.)

  For all my caution, I still bump into tree trunks and lurch into brambles. The only thing that saves me from serious injury is Willow Scarlet’s costume. It shrugs off the collisions and scratches that would otherwise mean death by a thousand cuts. Padded bulletproof boots are awesome when you stub your toes in the dark.

  But the clothes can’t save me from my own stupid fear. My nerves jangle as I grope through the woods. Primal instincts, right? Back when we were monkeys, we knew that the forest was full of predators. Intellectually I know that Sherwood has no big bad wolves, but tell that to my hindbrain.

  Besides, there are worse things than wolves. I imagine Ninja Jane watching from the shadows. Marian hates me for breaking into her clean room. Also for learning that she’s actually Ninja Jane—that must be a secret she wants to keep hidden. And thanks to the spy drone, Marian surely knows where I am. Ninja Jane could slit my throat, and who would stop her? In this jet black night, who would even know?

  I’m vulnerable. A minnow among sharks.

  I’m soggy with fear sweat by the time I stagger out of the woods. I can smell myself; it’s not pretty. And this isn’t the time to relax just because I’m out from under the trees. In every movie ever, the moment you go “I’m safe” is the moment you die.

  After a while, I choke down my nerves enough to look around. Still no lights to speak of, but I think I’m facing Marian’s lab. I smell warm thatch from the roof, and when I reach out, I touch a flagstone wall. I want to run inside immediately; there’ll be light and and escape from the dark.

  But as I move toward the door, a thought hits me. What if Marian stops me from entering the lab? What if the spy drone, or the collar, or some other automated defense zaps me?

  Marian can’t be eager to let me back into her lab. She may even kill me for trying. Robin is too chivalrous for cold-blooded murder, but I’m not so sure about Marian.

  Still, I have to see her. I want this over. I fumble around till I find the door.

  I go inside.

  * * *

  FOR A SECOND, THE lab is as dark as the forest. Then a sensor detects my arrival, and the lights come on.

  They’re so bright it’s blinding. I have to cover my eyes.

  But nothing shoots me. I don’t even set off alarms.

  As I wait for my eyes to adjust, I realize that Marian can’t be here. Otherwise, the lights would have been on already. Maybe she’s still in the mead hall, guzzling champagne and pawing at the bazooka. But I’m not ready for another dark trip through the forest. I’ll wait till my heart stops pounding.

  What if Marian catches me here? What if she hurts me?

  Fuck, Marian has broken me. I’m walking on eggs, for fear that someone super gets angry.

  I stay standing two steps inside the doorway, afraid to go farther. I stare at the gizmos on desks close to the door. I remember when I got my first glimpse of this lab—I recognized almost everything. Now, I don’t.

  What’s the name of that thing where you can’t recognize faces? Pro -something. (Without this damned collar, I’d know the word.) I have that same condition, except for gadgets. I look at the stuff around me; everything seems half-familiar. But there’s a wall between me and my memories.

  I flash back to writing exams last term. I would read a question and think, I’ve seen that before. But my mind would come up blank. Like some YouTube dog that can’t get up the stairs.

  For a while, I stopped being that dog. That girl. But now I’m back at the bottom of the stairs. Without WikiJools to cheat and pass me answers, I got nothing.

  Shit.

  Shit.

  Shit.

  * * *

  TIME PASSES IN BLANKNESS. Not productive blankness, like when I enter Mad Genius mode. Instead, I shut down like some sedentary sea creature that attaches itself to a rock and spends its life eating plankton that just happens to drift into its mouth.

  I know such species exist, but I can’t name any. I should be able to cite phylum, class, all that Latin bullshit. But I can’t. I stand like a miserable dummy … until Marian opens the door and comes in behind me.

  She goes, “What are you doing here?”

  I try to get my shit together. “I came looking for you, okay? I want to go home. So please, just wash my brain and get it over with.”

  Marian doesn’t answer. She stares at me like a problem she hasn’t solved yet. Finally, she goes, “What do you want, Jools? Apart from leaving Sherwood. What do you really want?”

  I’m like, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Marian keeps staring at me, but I think she’s putting together a speech. Finally, she goes, “Being a Spark is an infection. It’s gets inside and changes you. With someone like Robin, the changes are obvious: impetuousness … an impulse to beat up bad guys … an utter certainty that he’s personally a good guy. Every other Spark is the same, just more subtly. Even people we call supervillains, from monsters like Diamond to the petty little sods who rob banks … they’re all true believers. Moral crusaders, even when they do horrible things.

  “Ordinary humans are different. A human mob boss … he knows he’s shite. He’ll rationalize what he does, but he’ll admit he’s a greedy violent smeg. He doesn’t think he’s good, he just thinks he’s justified. ‘Everybody does it’—that kind of excuse. But Spark mob bosses think they’re heroes. Absolutely doing the right thing.”

  I go, “Like they pretend they rob from the rich to give to the poor?”

  Marian laughs. “Exactly. Sparks offer many explanations for what they do, but seldom any doubts or self-reproach.”

  I’m like, “You want self-reproach, just ask.”

  “Well, Jools, that may be your thing,” Marian says. “Some Sparks are oh-so-conflicted … as if they got super-angst as part of their power set. But in that case, they deeply believe in angst: that the world is an anguishing place, and people who don’t feel tormented are monsters.”

  “Nope, that’s not me, either. I don’t want to be down, I just am.”

  “Oh, well, blame that on the collar,” Marian says. “I don’t mean the collar artificially makes you feel bad. It doesn’t impose any particular feeling. But when you stop being a Spark, you stop being certain of your…”

  She doesn’t finish her sentence. Instead, she crosses to a lab desk and opens a cupboard. She pulls out a metal collar like the one that’s clamped on my throat.

  “I made this for myself,” Marian says. She holds it up so that it catches glints from the overhead lights. “It doesn’t have a lock, but apart from that, it’s a twin of the collar you’re wearing.”

  She lifts the collar and latches it around her neck. Marian’s eyes unfocus a moment. She shuts them and takes deep breaths. “Bugger, I always forget what it’s like.”

  “You do it to yourself? Voluntarily?”

  “Yes.” Marian opens her eyes. “It’s useful to stop thinking like a Spark once in a while. To be my old self for a bit.” She makes a face and mutters, “As if I can ever be my old self.”

  Marian hops up to sit on the desk. She waves her hand at the desk directly across from her. “Why don’t we talk?”

  “About what?”

  “Whatever.” She gestures again. I don’t want to talk, but I go sit anyway.

  Marian waits for me to say something. When I don’t, she goes, “Jools, tell me what you want.”

  “I still don’t know what you mean by that.”

  “That’s because, at the moment, you aren’t a Spark. Neither am I. At the moment, I’m just…” She hesitates. “Ah, what’s
the fuss, you won’t remember this, will you? I’m Vanessa. My real name is Vanessa. Was Vanessa, anyway.”

  I snort. “You and Robin were Vernon and Vanessa?”

  She shrugs. “I rather liked that. It sounded like we were a pair.”

  I go, “Have you ever put one of these collars on Robin?”

  “I asked him once if he was interested,” Marian says. “He took it as a sexual proposition. A Spark version of bondage.” She sighs. “The man has a one-track mind.”

  “You never just sneaked up and collared him by surprise?”

  Marian glares. “There’s this word, Jools: ‘consent.’ You might have heard of it.”

  “I didn’t fucking consent when you put the collar on me.”

  Marian—or should I say Vanessa? —looks guilty. “You gave me no choice. Besides, when I put the collar on you, I was Marian. Convinced of my own morality.”

  “But you aren’t now? Then take the collar off me.”

  She shakes her head. “I recognize that at the moment, I’m not smart enough to make that decision.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” I say.

  I hop off the desk and am half a second away from storming out the door when Vanessa puts her hand on my arm. “Jools, please. Another minute. Tell me what you want.”

  I shake off her hand. “What the fuck do you want me to say?”

  “Anything,” Vanessa goes. “I’m not doing this for me, but for you, the real you. When you’re a Spark, you’ll want … oh, let’s call it truth, justice, and the Canadian way. (Is there such a thing as the Canadian way? No, let’s not get sidetracked.) The point is that as a Spark, you’ll have an agenda. You won’t even have to think about it. You’ll feel a calling, and see it as your destiny.”

  She grimaces. “When I’m Marian, I know that stealing from Darklings is the ideal way to spend my life. It feels so obvious: I have to keep the Darklings from winning. And taking their treasure is the best way to do that. I feel. No. Doubt. Don’t you have a similar conviction, Jools? Not necessarily that you ought to steal Darkling treasures, but that you have to fight the Dark in some specific way. Haven’t you ever felt that? A sacred calling?”

  “No,” I say. “Not unless you count kicking your ass once I get this collar off.”

  “Then you must be new,” Marian says. “New at being a Spark. It takes a while for the Light to seep into your mind and make adjustments. But it will. After a month or two as Sparks, we end up as different people.”

  I don’t like the sound of that. But hell, I’m a university student; I’ve seen the same thing in action. First-year students come to uni from high school, all fuzzy-headed and random. They get whipped into shape over the months of first term, so that by Christmas they think like scientists, engineers, or whatever they’re supposed to be. Their whole perception of what’s true and important gets transformed, like religious converts.

  Is that going to happen to me and my friends? Is the Light going to change us that much?

  Marian pats my arm, then gives me a little push back toward the desk where I was sitting. “This time-out is a gift, Jools. For a while, you’re a normal human. So now, while you’re not under the influence of the Light, what do you want to do with your powers?”

  This whole conversation just pisses me off. I’m like, “Why do you even care? You keep talking as if you’ve done me a favor, fucking up my brain.”

  “I have done you a favor,” Marian says. “And I don’t consider it fucking you up. I consider it disinfecting.”

  “Oh, fuck off.”

  If I were Ninety-Nine or Willow Scarlet, I’d punch her in the face. But since I’m Jools, I’m not that crazy. I don’t trust that the collar she’s wearing actually does anything. She says it makes her normal, but why should I believe that? If I lay a finger on her, she might turn into Ninja Jane. And even if that doesn’t happen, we’re in a lab surrounded by robots and superweapons. How do I know some robot won’t suddenly leap to Marian’s defense?

  I glare at her. She stares back, but doesn’t look pissed off. Finally, she slides down from the desk where she’s been sitting and takes off her collar. “You know what your trouble is, Jools?”

  “Yeah. I’m locked in a fucking slave collar and I want to go home.”

  Marian acts like I didn’t even speak. “Your trouble is you don’t have goals. No matter how often I ask, you can’t tell me what you want.” She puts her collar away in the cupboard. “Maybe you need someone to hate, Jools. If you don’t have something to fight for, you should at least have someone to fight against.”

  “Are you trying to make me hate you? Cuz, lady, it’s working.”

  Marian rolls her eyes. “No, Jools, you’re just angry. And anger isn’t hate—anger’s hot, hate is cold. Besides, I truly am not your enemy. I’m just pragmatic. And I’m trying to tell you something important.”

  “What?”

  “That you should do some serious thinking while you have that collar on. Decide what’s genuinely important to you, a goal truly worthy of your powers. Figure it out, then commit to it. Otherwise…” She stops to think. “You may not realize it, but you’ve been all over the news. The innocent girl who was murdered by Robin Hood. They say you’re a biology student. Is that right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m no biology expert,” Marian says, “so you may know more about this than I do. But you’ve heard about those viruses and parasites that make certain animals foolhardy? The bugs that get inside animal brains and change their behaviors?”

  “Sure. Like Toxoplasma gondii. Mice usually run away from places that smell of cat urine; but when mice get infected with T. gondii, they stop being afraid. La-la-la. Cats. LOL. So the mice get eaten, and T. gondii ends up where it wants to be: inside a cat’s gut, which is the parasite’s favorite place to reproduce.” (And thank you, baby Jesus, that I still remember this stuff. I may be a dumbed-down loser, but I’m still a third-year biologist.)

  “Okay, then,” Marian goes. “The Light works exactly the same. It has an agenda. The Light changes your behavior to further its goals, even if that means putting you in harm’s way against your better interests. I don’t know if Sparks can completely shrug off the Light’s manipulation, but at the very least we ought to be aware of what’s happening. Then we can try to achieve something that’s meaningful to our own lives, rather than whatever the Light wants.”

  In spite of myself, I have to ask, “What do you think the Light is making us do?”

  “Fight. Primarily against Darklings. But also against fellow Sparks whose agendas clash with our own.”

  “Don’t we have to fight? I mean, when dudes like Diamond try to murder hundreds of people…”

  “Yes, of course,” Marian says. “Sparks have to deal with emergencies if they arise. We can do things others can’t, and we often end up in positions where we have no choice. You may not realize it, Jools, but our band of outlaws deals with supervillains on a regular basis. It’s an occupational hazard—we stumble onto some horrid conspiracy and are forced to save the world. It happens with ridiculous frequency. But heroic derring-do is not the Merry Men’s core competency. It’s not how we define ourselves.”

  “How do you define yourselves?”

  “Jools, please,” Marian says. “We rob from the rich, and give to the poor.”

  “You really give to the poor?”

  “Yes. But not the actual treasures that we steal. When we break into a Darkling office tower, our primary goal is never the golden statue or the fifty-million-dollar Van Gogh. While Robin makes a show of swinging from chandeliers, the Artful Dodger quietly hacks into computers. He steals whistle-blower information, or tech developments that the Darklings are suppressing to preserve their monopolies. Then we leak everything to the public. That’s why the Darklings hate us: stealing a Van Gogh hurts their pride, but revealing illegal practices hurts them for real.”

  “But,” I say, “you still get to keep the Van Gogh.”

  �
�True. So every week, I publish schematic diagrams for easy-to-make items that will improve the lives of as many people as possible. This week was a water purifier that removes pollutants and bacteria. Last week was a solar-powered battery charger. The week before that, a neural soother for alleviating arthritis. I put every invention into the public domain. And these designs aren’t Cape Tech—you don’t have to be a Spark to construct them. I try to keep the build price below ten pounds, with off-the-shelf DIY components.”

  Well, shit. I’m impressed. I still hate Marian’s guts, but I’m impressed. And I believe she’s telling the truth. I don’t have WikiJools to check for sure, but I’ve heard of wonderful gadget designs showing up anonymously on open websites.

  Still, I’m like, “Couldn’t you do all that stuff without stealing the Van Goghs?”

  “I need funding for resources,” Marian says. “You think all this lab equipment was free? And robberies keep the Light inside me appeased. As I told you, I feel as if I have to steal from the Dark. So I do. It placates the urge. Then I can concentrate on making the world a better place.”

  Marian turns away and starts walking toward the door. “I’ll leave you to think about that, Jools,” she says. “Oh, and here.”

  She turns back and tosses something to me. I catch it. It’s a shapeless nugget of metal. “That’s what’s left of your ring,” Marian says. “It melted itself into slag when I tried to analyze it. But I assume it was a communication device?”

  I nod.

  “If it’s any consolation,” Marian says, “the ring wouldn’t have worked, even if you’d retrieved it from my vault. Sherwood is thoroughly shielded against transmissions out. That’s why we can’t be detected—I’ve blocked every form of emission known to science. Conventional science and Cape Tech.”

  I bet if I were still smart, I could find a way around that. But I’m not. I just tuck what’s left of the ring into my pocket, and simmer with resentment. I go, “When are you sending me home?”

  “Not quite yet,” Marian says. “Robin wants to see you before you go.”