Mage Against the Machine

by Shaun Barger

  A Watchman’s staff!

  Nik nearly gasped out a sob of relief before stifling it, and with a ferocious grin he yanked the Watchman’s staff out of the water.

  Only it wasn’t a Watchman’s staff. It was . . . something else.

  A baton. A club, as long as his forearm. Rounded at the ends. Metallic but matte and soft. Plain and dull and black. So black it was almost hard to look at—hard to see.

  Every magi’s Focals were different, unique. But one thing they all had in common was dazzling aesthetics. Whether jeweled, chromatic, or intricate and colorful as delicately spun candy, a magi’s Focals were always things of beauty.

  This was not the case with Nikolai’s baton.

  An awkward silence fell across the chamber. The council members exchanged puzzled looks as Nik hunched in on himself. He’d never seen a Focal like this, and from the looks on their faces he knew that they hadn’t either and something was wrong with him or the Disc or who knows what.

  He could hear people tittering with shock and cruel amusement. One of the flyball players stage-whispered “Nikolai Half Staff” loud enough for everyone to hear, and when Nikolai made the mistake of glancing back he saw that many of the others had begun to laugh.

  Nikolai thrust out his hand, handing the first mage of the council his Focal.

  “Oh, um, yes—thank you,” she stammered, accepting the baton after a moment of hesitation, like it was radioactive.

  He could feel her hands on it. The baton was a part of him, a piece of his soul or essence or whatever the Disc took out of him and created in the pool, and it felt wrong for someone else to be holding it.

  Nikolai shoved the feeling of wrongness aside and looked expectantly at the next council mage, his cold gaze half lidded and uncaring because now he just wanted to get this shit over with and go home and sleep for the next hundred or so years.

  “Right, ahem, of course,” the councilwoman said, and quickly dipped the butt of her staff into the water. The water shimmered, ready for his second drawing. Nik reached in, fishing around without enthusiasm. He found his art Focal quicker than the logic, his hand closing around a handle with a rough, leathery grip. He pulled it from the water, uncaring . . .

  . . . and gasped.

  In Nik’s hand was a dagger, edge dripping with water from the pool. Not a carving knife. Not a tool for working leather, cutting cloth, or meat. It was a wicked blade—curved and black, like a demon’s steely talon.

  That was his art. A thing for wounding. For killing.

  A soldier’s weapon. The Focal of a Battle Mage.

  Just like his mother.

  There hadn’t been any laughter this time. No snide remarks, no giggling among the students. Just a deep, uneasy silence.

  With a groan, he stood up and snatched the black baton. He ran.

  The stairs were a blur, the citizens and government workers milling about the entrance hall out of focus and vaguely dreamlike as he sprinted through their midst, dagger in one hand, half staff in the other.

  As he ran, half staff swinging at his side, he noticed that as the baton moved it left a vague trail of light in its wake, a smearing of multicolored rainbow.

  The fake sun set in the fake sky, and he began to limp, feet blistered from running in the replica Converse sneakers his only friend, George Stokes, had made for him as a graduation gift.

  Nik finally found his way to the secluded lakeside beach he always fled to when he wanted to be alone. He sat heavily at the edge of the waves and pried off his sneakers from under his robes, sticking his toes in the icy water.

  He pulled out the dagger. The black blade glittered in the moonlight. Gently he touched the tip of his finger to the edge and instantly drew blood. He popped the bleeding finger into his mouth and laid the dagger in the sand. He could feel it there, waiting, hungry for violence.

  That’s what it was made for—to focus and strengthen the destructive arts. With this blade, he could make fire so hot it burned white. He could turn sand to glass, skin to dust, stone to lava.

  But the baton . . . it felt like more than a simple tool for violence. Nik waved it around, watching the smearing rainbow trail. It sucked at his magic like gravity, like wind trying to pull you over a cliff. The power was immense. It made him dizzy.

  Two years later, Nikolai still hadn’t been able to discover why he’d drawn such a uniquely strange Focal, nor how it trailed light or what purpose the light might serve. Even Captain Jubal had been stumped.

  “We like to pretend we’ve mastered the arcane,” he’d said, with the faintest lingering hint of his Blue Ridge Veil drawl. “But the fact of the matter is that most magi underestimate the indescribable scientific and quantum complexity of even the most simplistic spells. Any number of factors could have led to the anomaly that is your Focal—nothing to be done about it.”

  Through all the doubt and anxiety, Nik had been quietly sure that he’d become a Watchman like his father. That things would work out, like in the stories. The kids in stories were always orphans destined for greatness. Street urchins and outcasts who overcame their humble beginnings to become heroes and saviors, beloved by all.

  Nobody could tell stories like Nik’s dad. His mom, she’d go through these depressions—weeks when she’d barely speak, barely eat, when she’d come home from work, trembling and dead in the eyes. Nik couldn’t remember her face—he hated that he couldn’t remember her face—but he remembered seeing her, and even as a child thinking, There’s nothing there. There’s nobody home.

  She’d always hurt Nikolai the most during these periods of darkness. Always pushed him harder during their secret training sessions in the heart of the wood. It was then that she’d go as far as to crack his bones as she taught Nikolai to defend himself from her vicious strikes. It was then that she’d make him wait for healing after he’d burned himself on botched spells he wasn’t supposed to know, screaming at him for sloppy spellcasting while he writhed in the mud.

  Only his father’s stories could bring her back from the darkness. It would start with a laugh, and she’d seem surprised, every time, as if she’d forgotten that it was within her ability.

  Nik’s father had loved stories—loved hearing them, made an art of telling them. He had boxes and boxes of novels mostly written by long-dead human authors. Nik’s favorite memories of his parents were of being nestled on a sofa between them as they read to him by firelight, the both of them reading for different characters, doing all the voices. It was those nights that he most powerfully felt their love—for Nik, for each other.

  Nikolai’s uncle Red took him in after his parents died. And though he took care of Nik to his best ability, the man became withdrawn. Cold and distant. Nikolai’s only childhood friends, Astor and Stokes, had rallied to help him through it. But what really saved him were the stories.

  The humans had loved writing stories about triumph over adversity. Of good triumphing over evil. Of love conquering all and people defeating monsters without becoming monsters themselves. Of life having a way of working out in the end—no matter how bad things might seem at the time.

  But that’s all they were. Stories.

  The humans were dead. Nik’s parents were dead. And he was just a stupid orphan who’d never be like his father, no matter how hard he tried.

  He was his mother’s son.

  Click.

  The slender floating hands of the clock on Nik’s bedside table finally struck midnight, drawing him out of his reverie.

  Nikolai rose and quietly pulled on some clothes. He peered into Albert’s room, checking to make sure the junior lieutenant was asleep. Clad in emerald silk pajamas, snores muffled by his gauzy, enchanted face mask, Albert was dead to the world.

  Nik’s rank normally would have been insufficient to open the safe hidden under the loose, enchantment-masked floorboards. They’d locked it up tight under Captain Jubal’s orders, setting it so that not even Albert or Ilyana could open it—let alone a lowly sergeant.

>   Taking a deep breath to steady himself, Nikolai drew out the Moonwatch rank insignia. The crescent moon burned in the darkness, casting a pale white glow on the seamless black surface of the box.

  A line seared across the edges of the box, a hinge forming from mercurial beads. With a hiss, the safe opened to reveal an object wrapped in layers of enchanted lead mesh.

  The revolver.

  It was silent now. Muffled by the lead. But somehow he knew the revolver could hear him. And then, at the edge of his mind, he could hear it. Not hear it, exactly. But he could feel the words, sense the ideas—there, just within reach. The spell that would allow him to see for himself what remained of the human world beyond the Veil.

  He just had to ask.

  Like snatching gold out of a dragon’s mouth.

  Nikolai dragged his fingertips across the cold, rune-etched barrel, and as he allowed the creeping tendrils of ancient magic to enter his mind, he relived every pleasure he’d ever experienced in an explosion of blinding ecstasy. Every laugh, every kiss, every kindness. Every moment of tenderness, every night of passion—all in one single instant.

  He wasn’t in the apartment anymore, he was in an infinite space, sky and stars and songs he could see in colorful waves dancing around him, and he was screaming with laughter, he couldn’t stop, he was rapture incarnate, a being of pure joy, and there was a woman, a beautiful woman all dressed in red—he couldn’t see her face but somehow he knew she was beautiful, the most beautiful woman in the world.

  “Show me the apocrypha weave,” Nikolai begged her, fighting to speak through the crippling euphoria. “Teach me to bend Veil. To make a door in the sky.”

  Her Yes was a feeling more than a word. A color more than an idea.

  The woman reached out with crimson-clad fingers and took Nikolai’s hand.

  II.

  THE LAST BALLERINA

  Jemma Burton hid in the wooded fringes of Philadelphia, grateful for the rain.

  She hid, and she waited.

  Her orders had been clear. But the precautions were unusual, to say the least. Five separate couriers, each with a separate piece of intel. Four sets of coded dummy transfer points with overlapping patterns to reveal the true locations. An ETA for pickup with descriptions of the two women she’d been assigned to smuggle across the city into the hands of yet another Runner, who would then shuttle them to the safety of their final destination.

  There was nothing unusual about the description of the first woman. “Female, fifty-five,” the courier said. “Caucasian descent. Pale complexion. White shoulder-length hair.”

  But the second woman. The tremor in his voice as he described her. The hope in his eyes. Jem made him repeat the words. Then once more. And still, she didn’t believe.

  There weren’t any children on the streets of Philadelphia. Weren’t any children at all. Here. New York. Los Angeles. Moscow. Beijing. Anywhere.

  The world had ended when Jemma was a child herself. And with the end came the plague. And with the plague went the young. The old. The weak.

  Synthetic deities had found humanity lacking. And with the scattered dusting of a disease Jem had once heard a dying pathologist describe as elegant, the Synth had given them a death sentence—delayed by decades, but final nonetheless.

  Jem, at twelve, had been among the youngest of the survivors. Now, thirteen years later, she and every other surviving human remained infertile. The virus thrived in all of them, actively inhibiting their ability to procreate, and had thus far adapted to thwart every attempt at treatment or cure.

  So humanity dwindled, fading away under the gentle tyranny of synthetic life.

  “Female, twenty-five,” the courier had repeated twice. “Indian descent. Medium complexion. Black chin-length hair, shaved on the side. Visibly pregnant.”

  It was possible, of course. But even as fragile petals of hope bloomed within her, she crushed it. Maybe someone had found a cure. Or maybe this woman was just some genetic rarity unheard of until now who’d developed an immunity. Either way, Jem knew better than to think it would make a difference. Knew better than to think anything she did could ever do more than slow the gradual extinction of terrestrial humans.

  Raindrops clung to Jem’s close-cropped curls like dew. She shivered, fingers caressing the shielded holsters of the weapons hidden at her side. They would have her description as well, their current Runner scouting ahead to make sure Jem hadn’t been replaced by some Synth spy.

  She tapped her fingers against the damp denim of her jeans, impatient. She hated staying in one place this long, out in the open.

  There—finally. A stirring in the shadows. Three figures framed by an outcropping of dusky-leafed maple trees.

  Jem whistled, stepping out into moonlight dimmed by ashen autumn clouds.

  The Runner was a short, grizzled Asian man. He pulled back the cowl of his stealth cloak, which masked them from the infrared scanners of the watchful drones that patrolled the skies over the Pennsylvania wilderness as they traveled by night.

  He whispered something to the others, gesturing urgently for them to remove their cloaks. He nodded to Jem, scratching his beard as he eyed the silent city—twitchy and impatient to slink back into the velvety darkness of the brown-leafed forest. Jem could tell that he was the type who preferred wilderness runs to urban.

  Jem watched with eager curiosity as the women revealed their faces. The older woman was tall and bony, her thin-lipped face heavily creased in equal measure by laugh lines and worry.

  The younger woman’s dark, tat-sleeved arms lifted from the gauzy cloak to pull back her hood. She was curvaceous and soft-featured, her face and ears crowded with piercings.

  As the cloak fell from her shoulders, Jem’s gaze traced the woman’s figure to the gentle swell of her stomach, only barely visible through the baggy fatigues.

  “Here.” Jem tossed the women two vacuum-sealed packs of clean clothing, hoping they’d be loose enough for the pregnant woman.

  The Runner clasped Jem’s hand, back turned to the women as they removed dull camo uniforms, well-soiled from the journey, and changed into the new outfits.

  “Precious cargo,” he whispered. “For the love of God, be careful.”

  “I’ll keep them safe,” Jem assured him, and he nodded, confident in her ability. Though few in the Resistance knew one another by name or face, Jem’s reputation preceded her. The Runner with the mind of a Synth. The girl with uniquely high-end cybernetic enhancement mods.

  So far as Jem knew, she was the last human with such sophisticated enhancements. The other girl had probably been dead for a long time now.

  “This is Jem,” he said, introducing her to the women. “She’ll get you where you need to go. Jem, this is Dr. Blackwell. And—”

  “Blue,” the pregnant woman said, shaking the surprised Jem’s hand. Jem’s breath caught in her chest as their fingers touched. Christ, she was beautiful.

  “You’re in good hands,” the man said, hugging the doctor, and then Blue. He broke off the embrace, and reached down to touch her stomach. Thinking better of it, he stopped short. Pulled away. Eyes wet with tears. “Bless you. God bless you.”

  Their planned route across the city was a winding zigzag through lush, Synth-made gardens, an Immersion Farm, and abandoned SEPTA train tunnels.

  At its height, Philadelphia had been home to more than three million people. But after the initial rash of deaths in the uprising, and the slow dwindling in the thirteen years since, that number had been reduced by more than half. And it was still shrinking every day.

  There was no sickness, but in the face of such hopelessness, and without children to maintain the population, their numbers were in constant decline. Suicide was common—encouraged even, by the Synth. Pills that induced ecstasy, followed by slumber, followed by oblivion, were given to each and every citizen to use at their discretion.

  As such, the city was massively oversized to house so few. Housing, manufacturing, commerce, and ind
ustry were constantly shifted inward, leaving miles of darkened, empty infrastructure closing around the gradually shrinking light at the center.

  Some Synth Overminds allowed the abandoned architecture within the cities under their rule to simply crumble and fall into disrepair. Others stripped them for materials and demolished what remained, leaving countless empty lots where towers had once been. Empty gaps like the naked gums of an old man slowly losing his teeth to age.

  The Overmind charged with ruling Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, however, had slowly replaced each and every empty structure with stunningly designed gardens and nature reserves. Lush miniature forests and tiny lagoons. Ponds and lakes and thickets. Great open fields vibrant with wild flowers. All carefully crafted to appear real—as if the perfectly designed aesthetics of each plot had occurred naturally as they seamlessly blended in with one another and the surrounding Pennsylvania wilderness.

  Where other cities found their shrinking centers surrounded by husks and rubble, here it appeared that nature was slowly closing in on them, in all its heartbreaking splendor.

  Armitage, the AI was called. One of the more eccentric Overminds. Jem supposed the machine considered itself an artist.

  She could see the pattern of Armitage’s design. Could see that their Synth ruler had a great overarching plan for the gardens, plans that would only come to completion upon the death of Philadelphia’s last inhabitant. And then, as the final tower fell to be replaced by one final floral centerpiece, it would be as if the city had never been there at all.

  Jem was good with patterns. Her perfect synthetic memory banks, as well as her heightened ability to process and organize what all of that information meant, was what made her the most effective Runner the Resistance had to offer. She’d spent years memorizing every aspect of the city and the surrounding wilderness. Transportation. Population density. Synth and human peacekeeper patterns of patrol. A complex web lit with constantly shifting paths where one could hide in the shadows just beyond the peripheral vision of the great and powerful Armitage’s all-seeing surveillance.