Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series

by Virginia McClain

  Now it was my turn to frown.

  “How does that work? And what would that do? Could you make someone non-magical? Why would you do that to someone? As punishment? That seems fucked up.”

  Albert only nodded, taking another drag on on his swiftly dwindling joint.

  “All good questions, and indeed, it does seem fucked up. Unfortunately, I only have answers to some of your questions, and the rest is mere conjecture. I don’t entirely know how they accomplished it, though I have a few guesses, and none of them are pleasant. Still, regardless of how they accomplished it, its effect was to destroy the entire laboratory and all of the people within it. It was only contained because of the way those laboratories are built. It wasn’t the first time an experiment has ended in an explosion, after all. However, the destruction was thorough, and clearly unexpected, because all of the researchers for that experiment were in the laboratory, along with the recording equipment. If they’d thought that anything remotely like that could happen, they would have left all of the recording tools and at least some of the research team out of the room. So, we can assume they expected the potential effects to be contained within the test subject himself. Clearly, they were as wrong as it is possible to be, on that front. My suspicion, based on the resumes of the people involved in the study, is that, yes, they were attempting to find a way to make someone non-magical, quite likely as punishment, or simply as a weapon against MOME's many enemies. However, I have no proof of that. I do have proof that they were trying to strip the subject of his dark matter, although I destroyed that proof long ago, for fear that someone might decide to pursue the project’s goal again. And, as I was put in charge of the investigation into what happened, I became more and more suspicious that the people who had ordered the experiment done were keen to take up the research project again. Eventually, they asked me if I would be willing to head up the group attempting to discern what happened, so that they could replicate the experiment. I declined, and that was when I retired from MOME. Your parents left immediately after the explosion. It was the final nail in MOME’s coffin for them. They’d never particularly trusted MOME to begin with, but after all they’d seen while involved in my study, they decided to quit while they were ahead. They’d gained each other, and I vowed to destroy most of my notes on our research in hopes that MOME wouldn’t take too great an interest in them. Unfortunately, everyone registered for my research was already marked by MOME for a certain level of surveillance. Especially if they were likely to procreate.”

  My frown had been deepening throughout Albert’s account, and now it reached a point where I was worried my mouth was going to break off my face.

  “So that research is why Trev and I were MOME targets to begin with?” I asked, putting everything together as quickly as my brain could keep up. “Because my parents had been red flagged somewhere, so as soon as MOME put it together that they’d had kids, MOME came after us?”

  “I’m sad to say that, yes, that is likely the entire reason that MOME attempted to kidnap you, and successfully kidnapped Trevor, all those years ago.”

  I felt a lot of emotions run through me at that news, not least of which was rage, but I reminded myself that this was all a ten-year-old hurt, and that I had more pressing things to focus on.

  “But why do they want him now? They sacrificed dozens of agents to get him last night. I mean, I get that they want him back because he might know too much, but… that’s a bit extreme.”

  “I cannot say, for certain.”

  “That sounds like an evasion.”

  “It is.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I fear the answer might drive you to extremes.”

  “What can you tell me about MOME’s secret weapon?” I asked, hoping the quick change of subject might elicit an honest response.

  “What weapon is that?”

  “I’m not sure. That’s the problem. My parents left a… message, suggesting that MOME had been working on a secret weapon, but that they didn’t know what it was. They also suggested MOME might be creating an army of people like Trev.”

  Albert pulled on his joint until the flame reached his fingertips, then winced as he extinguished what was left in a large ceramic ashtray on the small table next to his chair.

  “Well, I can confirm that they’ve trained up a few hundred people like your brother over the past few decades, but I doubt any of them can match your brother in raw power.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “Your brother, and you as well, come to that, possess the most raw access to dark matter of any human I’ve ever encountered.”

  “How can you tell?” I asked, a small warning bell starting to go off in the back of my mind.

  “I’ve developed a spell that can detect dark matter in others. I cast it on most everyone I meet.”

  “Would MOME be able to tell the same thing?” I asked, more warning bells joining the first.

  “They have their own methods, though I haven’t shared this particular spell with them. They’ve likely run every test imaginable on Trevor, though. Over the years that they had him in custody.”

  “Albert… how powerful was the man they stripped of dark matter in that experiment?” I asked, despite being terrified that I already knew the answer.

  “Not very powerful. He barely qualified as magical at all. I imagine that’s why they started with him. They assumed it would be easy to strip him of what little power he had. And it’s a good thing, too. If he blew apart the room with barely any dark matter within him, imagine what someone with any real power might do. Why do you—”

  I didn’t have to interrupt Albert. He cut himself off mid-sentence. Then he leapt to his feet.

  “Oh bugger.”

  “Yes. Bugger about covers it.”

  “Vic, we have to get your brother back immediately.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  “Wait—did you say they’d taken his mate, as well? Who is his mate?”

  “Rhelia. How did you not—”

  “Oh fuck. Vic, take me to the dragon realm immediately. Please.”

  Since that was where I was headed anyway, I didn’t hesitate.

  I SHIFTED US back to the room where I’d left Sol, ostensibly Rhelia’s office, but Sol was gone and the lights were all off. Only the cool, dusty scent of a unheated home in fall greeted us.

  Albert cursed.

  “Where is Siara?” he said.

  “I have no idea. I’ve only met her once, and she came to me. I don’t even know where everyone else lives, in relation to where we are right now. I haven’t had much time to explore.”

  “Right. Then follow me.”

  He had conjured a largish ball of light and was halfway to the entrance of Rhelia’s home when the doorway flooded with light, outlining the petite shape of Siara before us.

  “Albert, always a pleasure.”

  “Siara, I hate to be rude, but we have urgent matters to discuss. I believe we know what MOME’s secret weapon is.”

  Siara stepped through the doorway into Rhelia’s home, waving a hand, which somehow set all the lights ablaze.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “My brother,” I replied.

  ~~~

  “Explain,” Siara said, as Sol pushed her way into the house through a crowd of what must have been weredragons. They were peering curiously through the door, making me wonder what exactly Siara had been on her way to do before we’d shown up with news about MOME’s weapon.

  “They plan to turn Trevor, and possibly Rhelia, into a dark matter bomb.”

  “There is no such thing as a dark matter bomb,” Siara said decisively.

  “There is now,” Albert replied. “I’m afraid all of our worst fears about Rebecca have come to pass, Siara.”

  “Wait, Rebecca?” I turned to Albert, my eyebrow raised in disbelief. “Rebecca Dryer?” I suppose it could have been some other Rebecca, but how many Rebeccas worked in the higher echelon’s of M
OME?

  “Indeed,” Albert said, turning away from Siara to confirm my suspicion. “She is the head of MOME’s Department of Justice, and she has finally taken full leave of her senses. I have questioned her morals for nearly a century, but this is too far by half. She is risking the stability of the entire world. Or worse.”

  “Wait. What?”

  Don’t get me wrong, I was already prepared to put everything on the line to stop anyone from turning my brother into a weapon of mass destruction, but the entire world being at risk? I hadn’t made that leap yet.

  “Beyond the devastation that you would personally experience, and of course the annihilation of whatever location Rebecca decides to target, my own research has led me to believe that these kinds of explosions might cause irreversible damage to time and space, the effects of which might be worse than that of a black hole.”

  “Wait, you’ve been studying these kinds of explosions? Does that mean you’ve created more of them?”

  “Heavens, no, Vic. That would require killing innocent magical beings, which I would never do on purpose. No, I’ve spent the years after I retired from MOME searching out natural occurrences of similar phenomena. Mostly through a telescope. That’s why I relocated to Flagstaff. Excellent skies there, not to mention the observatory. Easy to track interstellar phenomena.”

  “I’m afraid we don’t have time for an astronomy lesson, Albert,” Siara interrupted. “We have to get Trevor and Rhelia out of MOME’s grasp before it’s entirely too late. The question now is, where do they intend to strike?”

  “Who benefits if they blow something up?” Sol asked, speaking for the first time since she’d entered the house, albeit after she’d given me a quick hug and a gentle punch in the arm for leaving her behind.

  “Rebecca’s goal has always been to gather as much power as she can get her hands on,” Albert said, with a sigh. “In that, at least, she has always been consistent. At least, since her parents died. Before that, she seemed hell bent on doing whatever would please them most, but after… it’s as though they left a hole that she could only fill with power.”

  “That’s weird,” I blurted out, before I could stop myself. “I mean, hey, don’t get me wrong, everyone grieves in their own way, but… ‘I’m grieving and the only thing that will make me feel better is oppressing everyone around me’… seems like a slightly wacky way to do it.”

  Albert shrugged.

  “I’m not even convinced that it’s grief. It may just be what she chose to do with her newfound freedom. We don’t have time to analyze her motives, I’m afraid. We simply need to predict where she will strike.”

  “Well, if she wants power… who does she most need to take it from?” I asked.

  “She’s already largely in charge of MOME. There’s no branch more powerful that the Department of Justice, and she has all the other leaders there in her pocket, either through bribes or blackmail. So, she doesn’t need much help controlling the magical world on Earth.”

  “So Unterberg, then? Or here?” I asked, wondering how in the hells she planned to mount an attack through a seam. Although she had just attacked us in Unterberg two days ago, and we still hadn’t figured out how, exactly, other than the fact that Edik had led all the MOME agents there somehow.

  “Her biggest threat is muggles,” Sol said. “Non-magical people,” she clarified when Albert and Siara simply gave her blank looks. “They have guns, tanks, biological weapons, and nukes. Magical power can do a lot against those, but the magical world never had their own nuclear equivalent until now. If she wants to be in charge of ALL of Earth, then she needs to get the muggles in line. Which, in her mind, she can only do by showing them that she has something stronger than a nuclear bomb.”

  “Would stripping Trev of his dark matter really cause an explosion worse than a nuke?” I asked, chilled to my core at the very thought of it.

  It was Albert who answered.

  “Undoubtedly. Although Rhelia would cause an even more devastating swath of destruction, so it’s difficult to tell which one they would use first.”

  I felt like sitting down, all of a sudden, but I put a hand on Sol’s shoulder to steady myself instead.

  “Trev,” I whispered. “He would be the demo. Worse than a nuclear blast, but still not as bad as what they could do if people don’t comply. Save the big guns for long-term threat.”

  I wanted to vomit, even as the words passed my lips.

  “Where would they set him off?”

  Sol jumped almost a foot in the air, then put her hand in her back pocket.

  “Oh fuck,” she said, as she lifted up her phone and the blood left her face.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Apparently they’re planning to set him off in La Paz,” Sol said.

  “What? Why La Paz? How do you even know that?”

  Then she handed me the phone.

  “From my abuelita,” she added, her voice barely more than a whisper.

  Her screen showed a picture of Trev, tied to a statue in the middle of a circular plaza I’d never seen before. He was surrounded by a bunch of marble buildings and some nice landscaping, but his face was one of pure pain, and he was still tightly bound in that damned metal net that they’d captured him with.

  “Perhaps they chose La Paz because—” Albert began.

  “I wish I knew what that shit was,” I muttered, passing the phone to Albert and Siara, who were already hovering anxiously over my shoulder.

  “What shit is that?” Albert asked, looking closely at the photo and seemingly forgetting whatever he’d been about to say before I cut him off.

  “That weird metal netting they used to capture him. It repels magic, or something. It was excruciating to touch, and it wouldn’t let me shift us when I tried to grab him.”

  That had Albert zooming in on the photo, and I was surprised to see how easily he dealt with the tiny supercomputer he held in his hands. I didn’t usually expect folks with white hair to have a firm grasp of cell phones.

  “That, my dear, is Technetium—assuming they found a way to stabilize it—a metal not naturally found on earth. And I would bet dollars to doughnuts that is precisely what they are going to use to strip him.”

  “WHAT?” everyone else in the room asked at once.

  “Non-magical scientists believe that it breaks down too quickly to remain anywhere in the universe, other than in the stars in which it forms, and that is why it does not exist outside of said stars, though copious amounts of it are created on Earth as a part of the nuclear fission process. However, I have a different theory as to why it does not occur here naturally. I believe that it reacts with dark matter in a rather… dramatic fashion. I believe that is why it is never found outside of the stars in which it is created. I believe that as soon as it is ejected from the stars that create it, it reacts with the dark matter available, creating the dark energy that is pushing our universe apart. When this happens in the vacuum of space, it is largely unnoticeable, certainly by most human forms of detection. When it happens around other matter, however…. It’s the only thing that might possibly, if put in direct contact with the dark matter inside an individual, be able to accomplish what Rebecca wishes to do to your brother. They would need to inject it to cause that kind of reaction however, and in the meantime, she appears to be torturing him with it externally in the form of that net.”

  “WELL, FUCK,” I summarized, for the room. No one had moved from where we stood, in the center of Rhelia’s beautifully decorated living room, a setting that now seemed a strangely cheerful counterpoint to the rather horrific topic at hand. We were surrounded by comfortable looking couches that no one seemed inclined to make use of, and colorful tiles with bright patterns and warm lines.

  “Yep,” agreed Sol.

  “Indeed,” added Siara.

  “We need to break Trev free, like, yesterday,” I said.

  “Could you?” Albert asked.

  Everyone returned their shocked exp
ressions to Albert’s serious visage. This time, I really wasn’t sure what he was talking about, though.

  “Could I what?”

  “Could you break Trevor free yesterday?”

  “You mean, like time-travel?” I asked.

  “Precisely.”

  “You got a time turner hidden in your sweater?” I asked, nodding to the grey cable-knit he was wearing, baggy enough to look more like a bathrobe than anything. “Looks like you could hold a whole horde of treasures in there.”

  Part of my brain was shouting at me that we didn’t have time for stupid jokes, but part of me insisted that none of this was real. That the entire thing had to be some kind of stupid joke, so why not throw some humor around?

  “I do not know what a time-turner is, though the name is rather descriptive, but I would say that you, my dear Victoria, are the time turner to which you refer.”

  “Gwen gave me powers that let me reach through time and space to move around, but I’ve never—”

  “Never tried moving only through time? If the power takes you through one, it can take you through the other. They are merely coordinates on a map.”

  Weird. Despite the fact of always thinking about how Gwen’s power let me reach through time and space, I’d really never considered the time aspect. I mean, I may have had my world turned upside down in the past few weeks, learning that werewolves, leopards, dragons, and every other damned mythical/fantastical creature existed, but… time travel? Surely that was a bridge too far.

  “But, if time travel were possible, surely everyone would be doing it? I mean, wouldn’t someone like Rebecca Dryer be using it to go back and put herself in charge of every major government in the world? In the realms? No one would ever die, because everyone would be going back and saving them/curing them, discovering the secret to living forever, and then going back and administering it to everyone they loved? I mean, come on.”