The Worst of All Possible Worlds

by Alex White

  “Sorry, sir. I know it was foolhardy to drink what we were served.”

  “Stay paranoid, Miss Brio,” said Cordell. “Don’t forget that, so far, we don’t have the Mostafa data cube and Baron Gaultier has convinced us to stay another day. If he’s working directly with the Children of the Singularity…”

  Sure, Valentino was a pompous, boisterous nightmare of a human, but she’d known him as a child. “Captain, he’s bad, but he’s not that bad.”

  “Please take this in the spirit it was meant,” said Cordell, “but wouldn’t you have said the same thing about Prime Minister Mandell a few years ago? What about your old racing coach? Did you ever expect to be at her daughter’s execution?”

  She deflated. “Ouch, but fair, sir.”

  He nodded and addressed the entire crew. “You will all remain on high alert. If you see anything out of the ordinary—”

  “Such as a bioengineered killkitty?” asked Boots.

  “I thought it was more of a murdermutt,” said Orna.

  “Anything more so out of the ordinary,” said Cordell, “you expect an ambush. We’re not the Children’s biggest problem—that’s the Taitutian Fifth Fleet—but they’d love to kill us.”

  “The baron is outside,” said Kin.

  “Right,” said Cordell. “Like if the baron is somewhere he’s not supposed to be, such as outside the ship.”

  “No, sir,” said Kin, and a projection spun to life, depicting Valentino on the tarmac, flanked by his retinue. “I mean that Baron Gaultier is standing outside.”

  Nilah squinted at the projection. Was he wearing sparkly pajamas?

  Cordell folded his arms. “What does he want?”

  “I’ll ask,” said Kin.

  “Respectfully, please,” said Malik.

  “I know all Carrétan customs,” said Kin.

  On the projection, Valentino craned his head as if listening to something. Then he shouted over the howling winds.

  “He says he needs to speak with Miss Brio,” said Kin. “It’s urgent.”

  “Let’s see what’s up,” said Cordell. “Miss Brio, Miss Sokol, and Boots, go out and parley. Zipper, get strapped and cover them from a concealed perch.”

  “Aye, Captain.” Aisha rushed off toward the cargo hold.

  Cordell stood, prompting everyone else to do the same. “Ferriers, get to the bridge and crew the scanners. Shouldn’t be any ships for a few klicks. Anything gets closer than that, y’all start squawking.”

  The twins departed.

  “Kin,” said Malik, “can you ascertain any more about the baron’s intentions?”

  They waited while Valentino’s projection had some unheard conversation.

  “It’s about Kristof Kater,” said Kin. “Miss Brio’s most recent racing teammate.”

  Nilah’s pulse quickened. She and Kristof hadn’t been close as racers, but after the Harrow conspiracy, they’d stayed in touch, trading messages about the world she’d left behind. Kristof, a fellow Taitutian, had supported her, flown her colors during her time of crisis, defended her to the press, and was her sole connection to her old life at Lang Autosport. The fear only intensified when they opened the cargo ramp to find Valentino and his guards standing in formation like a funeral procession. The comm chimed in Nilah’s ear.

  “Be ready for anything,” said Cordell.

  But she wasn’t, because Valentino stepped forward and inclined his head, fabulous boisterousness absent. “I needed to tell you this, face-to-face, Nilah. My concerns this evening include more than Kristof.”

  The whipping winds blew a curl of Nilah’s hair into her face, and she pushed it away. “What?”

  “It’s about your father.”

  Hearing that was like taking an asteroid to the chest, and Nilah’s hands rose to defend her trembling heart. The thought of his shining eyes stole the strength from her legs, and she staggered as her breath disappeared. Orna’s gentle hand on her shoulder kept her upright.

  Valentino was still talking, and she forced herself to listen to his somber words. “I may not like you, but as someone who lost his own father recently—”

  “Get to the point, Tino! What happened to my father?”

  The baron’s guards tensed around him but made no move toward Nilah. Orna’s touch vanished, probably so she could keep her guard up.

  “He’s alive, but… it’s easier if you see it for yourself,” said Valentino. “Your old boss at Lang just posted a video to the Link.”

  The baron led them through the dimly lit halls of Rampant Gardens to a spacious theater of carved marble. Posh seats ringed a projector platform, though no one settled into them. If Nilah sat down right then, someone would’ve had to drag her off the floor. She couldn’t stop imagining Darnell Brio’s chubby cheeks, or the way they felt when his stubble brushed her in a hug.

  “You have to stay focused,” said Cordell in her ear. “This could very easily be a trap.”

  Nilah removed her earpiece and dropped it into her pocket. She wasn’t sure why, but she believed the baron. It was something in Tino’s posture, the way he skulked, the way he didn’t blow up at her for shouting. He had to be telling the truth.

  Orna tapped her comm. “I’ll take care of her, Boss.”

  Valentino’s projectors whirred to life, spinning out motes of light, and Nilah took a moment to wipe her eyes.

  The imager turned to face the person holding it: Harriet Fulsom, otherwise known as Claire Asby. Her blond hair spilled across her shoulders in the moonlight, and she whispered, “This is for you, Nilah.”

  A large house filled the background, a mansion with sweeping lines of glass and steel, folded across one another like decorative paper. Harriet stood on the courtyard green, a wide smile on her face. Then she pulled out a coin: it depicted a plain metal ovoid with two vertical slits for eyes and the usurer’s mark carved into the forehead—the symbol of the Children of the Singularity. She held it up to the imager for all to see.

  “That’s Kristof’s house,” said Nilah.

  “Look for anything that indicates time,” said Boots. “We’ll be passing this off to the Taitutian authorities.”

  “This was posted to the Link, remember?” Valentino stroked Doudou, which rested across his shoulders like a fur collar. “They already have it. And we already know the time. Watch until the end.”

  Boots swallowed. “Okay.”

  The viewing angle spun once again to face away from Harriet. Nilah didn’t see anyone else pass through the frame. It seemed likely that Harriet was alone. She stalked up the front steps of Kristof’s manor to the locked double doors.

  “No guards,” said Nilah.

  “What?” asked Boots.

  Nilah ran her fingers through her thick mohawk. “The guards are all missing. There should’ve been someone in the courtyard.”

  “Maybe there was,” said Boots. “She’s a god-level teleporter.”

  In the projection, Harriet held out her hand, and a tiny glyph formed inside. She didn’t have to trace it—the magic emerged without her aid, like an animal coming to its master. A pair of dispersers ejected from the wall and blasted the spell into dancing threads of hot magic. Harriet snapped her fingers, and another instant glyph formed before her. She teleported and reappeared above each disperser, laying hands on it—and the machines vanished from their emplacements, leaving only perfectly circular voids in their stead. Before she could fall the twenty feet to the ground, she blinked back to the front walk.

  “She’s bloody quick,” said Nilah.

  Harriet touched the broad double doors, and they disappeared, leaving an archway for her ingress. She strode inside as though she owned the place, past Kristof’s many valuables, along the central foyer, and up the stairs.

  “I warned you, didn’t I?” whispered the god, taking each step at a stately march. “I told you to expect consequences if you continued to bother us. I showed you mercy, and you killed my daughter.”

  At the edge of the projec
tion, Nilah spied a woman in nightclothes, a slinger tight in her hand. It was Yu Yan, Kristof’s wife.

  “Stop right there!” screamed the woman.

  “I’m here to send a message,” Harriet replied. “A message from your husband to Nilah Brio. There’s no need for you to get involved. Put the slinger down.”

  Yu’s grip faltered, and in a trembling voice, she said, “Claire? How can you be here?”

  Kristof emerged from the master bedroom, panic in his eyes. “Babe, what’s going—” He drew up short when he saw the intruder. He blinked a few times, then shouted, “Shoot her!”

  Harriet held up a pebble from the garden in one hand, and her spontaneous glyph split the air. The rock disappeared, and Yu began to convulse. A trickle of blood ran from her nose, and her eyes rolled back in her head.

  “Yu!” screamed Kristof, rushing to his downed wife’s side. “Yu!”

  “I told her to put it down,” said Harriet, tossing her coin to the ground before him. “Don’t waste your meager time trying to wake a woman with a rock in her cerebellum.”

  Kristof tried to yank the slinger free of Yu’s hand, but it was trapped in her death grip. Harriet closed the gap to Kristof, seized him by his shirt collar, and snapped her fingers once more.

  Light bent and twisted as Harriet and Kristof teleported together. The house fell away, its walls and floors melting and flowing into a vanishing point. When the world stabilized, roaring wind filled the imager’s microphone. Clouds drifted past, rising beneath the full moon. Except they weren’t rising—the imager was falling.

  Harriet had popped them out in the skies over Aior, Taitu’s splendid capital. She gave him a hard shove as they both fell, putting some distance between them.

  “Oh god,” Nilah whispered, and Orna pulled her in close.

  Kristof was accustomed to speed and violent motion. His vision was perfect. He tumbled and shouted aimlessly for a moment before recognition came over his face. Nilah wished he would faint, so he didn’t have to see what was coming, but he was a steel-edged racer, just like her.

  “I know you’ll see this, Nilah,” Harriet shouted over the gale-force winds buffeting the imager. “This is what you get.”

  Kristof leveled himself out, going spread eagle. It made sense—the guy had probably gone skydiving before. He tried to say something to Harriet, but the mics wouldn’t pick it up. Whatever he was saying, there were tears in his eyes. He fixated on the ground, and Harriet followed his progress, diving this way and that to get a better view of his face.

  And when they were within a hundred meters of the ground, she cast her glyph again, bending away the light. A brick pathway snaked into view, surrounded on either side by lights, which mushroomed out of the sidewalk. People bustled past, though some stopped and gaped—no doubt confused by her sudden appearance. Harriet turned the imager to show a tall glass building, and with a quick zoom, Kristof’s falling body.

  “All those little fits you threw,” said Harriet, “your diva attitude. I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to do this to you.”

  He struck the ground, bouncing twice before coming to rest.

  A scream erupted from the crowd. Then another. Full-on bedlam ensued. Harriet turned the imager around in her hands to record her hateful face.

  “Stay with me, Nilah,” Harriet said into the camera. “We’re almost to the best part.”

  No.

  Another teleport brought her across the Capitol Gardens, to a block of buildings that Boots knew well: the Special Branch Archives, the Office of Investigative Affairs, and the GATO Tribunal Hall. Another blink brought her to a platform in the middle of the Weaver’s Interchange, the famous air-traffic pathways east of the capital. Harriet leapt from vehicle to vehicle like she was playing a game.

  Nilah’s voice spilled from her lips in fear, saying things she already knew. “She’s heading east. No, she’s headed east! No, no, no!”

  The projection congealed into a structure Nilah hadn’t seen for months: the Brio Estate. She cried out in anguish, but the recording carried on.

  “Stop playback!” said Orna. “Just tell us the rest!”

  “No.” Nilah’s voice broke as Orna wrapped her arms tightly around her. “I need to know what happens.”

  Harriet laid her hand across the estate’s facade as the brilliance of her instant glyph enfolded everything. A huge swath of the gate disappeared, reappearing over the manor roof and smashing into it. Two armed guards emerged from the gardens beyond, drawing their slingers and shouting for Harriet to stop. With a flick of her fingers, she was on them, and they both teleported down into the gravel pathway with just their heads above the surface—faces going red with poisoning as the rocks intermingled with their internal organs. The shock killed them long before the suffering and asphyxiation could.

  Harriet strode up to the house, her magic clearing a tunnel into the structure in exactly the same way she had at Kristof’s. She disposed of the dispersers and walked past the dining room where, only a few months prior, the crew of the Capricious had received Armin’s last will and testament.

  “I’m not going to kill him, Nilah. Not yet,” whispered Harriet. “Instead, I’m going to jumble him up, bit by bit, until he experiences the most painful death one could imagine. I wonder how many microscopic pieces I can extract from his head before he isn’t your father anymore. Perhaps I should turn his gray matter into a sponge—what do you say?”

  The witch quietly opened the master bedroom doors, and then she was standing over the unconscious bodies of Darnell and Theodora Brio, tucked away in their silken bedsheets.

  The sound of her own weeping shocked Nilah. “No. Not my dad. Come on, Claire.”

  The woman in the projection smirked. “Or, you kill yourself—someplace public, so everyone sees what happened. Make a speech about how wrong you were to stand against us. You decide.”

  The playback froze. “That’s the end. It’s all over the Link. I thought you’d want to see it here before you saw it in a news package.”

  “Back it up,” whimpered Nilah. “Please.”

  Valentino twisted his palm, and the playback reversed, stopping on Darnell’s sleeping body. Nilah stood and tentatively stepped toward the image of her father. Stroking his cheek with her fingers, she whispered, “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m so, so sorry.”

  “Baron Gaultier,” said Orna, “these people aren’t playing games. They’ll crush anyone who gets in their way. You included. We need that cube.”

  Valentino cut his eyes at Orna but said nothing.

  “You’ve had your fun,” she continued, squeezing Nilah to her. “Now I am asking you nicely—will you just sell it to us and let us go?”

  “Please, Tino,” Nilah added. “I’m begging you.”

  The baron bit his knuckle, looking around at his guards. “Fine. One of you may accompany me into the vault. The rest will remain on the ship.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Nilah, squeezing her eyes shut.

  Boots turned to her, took her hand, and held it. “You need to go back. You can’t help me if something goes bad, anyway. Orna, take care of her, okay?”

  “You know I will.” Orna led Nilah away through the maze of white halls and misery.

  Chapter Four

  Pickup

  Are you sure about this, Boots?” asked Malik over the comm. “Once you’re in Valentino’s vault, our comms probably won’t reach you.”

  “That basically means no backup,” Cordell added.

  “I’ll be in and out. I don’t think we need to worry about the baron.”

  With Nilah and Orna away, Boots and Valentino made their way down the stairs, deeper into Rampant Gardens. After a few twists and turns, they descended into the maintenance wing where the physical plant resided. Boots’s comm gave a sad chirp to alert her to full signal loss. She hoped she was right about Valentino.

  “When Nilah broke my femur, it was like the rest of me shattered.” Valentino turned down a dusty hallway
lined with thermal exchange pipes. This area was decidedly less about the aesthetic, with actual signage posted on the doors.

  “Sounds rough.”

  “My father was also a racer in his youth. He yelled at me when I was lying in my hospital bed. Said I’d crashed out of nerves. When I got back in the kart, all I could hear was his screaming. Had the shakes so bad I couldn’t even drive steady down the pit straight.”

  Boots tensed. “No offense, buddy, but we’re alone, and this sounds like the beginning of a ‘that’s why I have to get revenge’ speech.”

  “It’s my father’s fault. If it hadn’t been Nilah, it would’ve been someone else. Racers are scum.”

  “Yeah, she was pretty bad when I first met her. For what it’s worth, she’s ashamed of what she did to you.”

  “Hmph. She’ll need to take that up with me, then.” Valentino stopped in the middle of the hall. “Miss Elsworth, the year after I dropped out of karting was the longest of my life. My father told me I was worthless, the bastard, but then I jumped on the Link and saw you—someone else who was worthless—and you were out there having adventures. You were just a refugee, but you made yourself matter.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t matter after the Chalice of Hana got jacked at the last second.”

  “You still achieved. You found it. That was such a beautiful moment before… well, you know. That look in your eye when you first saw the Saint of Flowers… I thought, ‘I want that to be me. I want to find the most lost things.’” He inclined his head at the bare wall, and a secret panel slid open about a meter to the left. He traced his glyph across an ID pad in the recess and stepped back.

  The stone surface broke into thousands of cubes, which eagerly shuffled away from a regraded steel vault door. It swung open to reveal a spacious gallery, stark white on the floors, walls, and ceilings. In the neutral light of the space, hundreds of Origin artifacts seemed to burst with color like overripe fruits.

  Statues of long-extinct animals and several dozen dusty tomes hung suspended in anti-entropy fields. There were framed photographs—not printed replicas, but developments in silver nitrate from original negatives. Valentino had a score of mission patches from the first colonists ever to depart the lost planet, including one of the Clarkesfall Landers.