by Alisha Basso
“Fine.” I pulled out a page. “See the pretty graph?”
He cracked an eye at the plummeting black arrow and immediately squinched the lid shut again. “That can’t be right. The adepts would’ve noticed it.” His eyes opened on a roll. “The ones who bothered showing up for work, anyway.”
“Adepts?” I snorted. “Part-time school kids?”
“You’re barely out of school yourself.” He upped my snort with a Chiefly sneer. “Ms. Class of 2012.”
“I’ve had six months in the real world,” I said, stung. “And Mervyn…I mean Wizard Analyst Johnson will back me up. Chief, we’ve already gone beyond what a team of adepts can handle. Look at my numbers. You’ll see—”
“Wizard Jones.” The title was a slap. “It’s just numbers. You’re overreacting.”
“Chief, this is my job. Look.” I traced the line with a finger, starting at business-as-usual and plunging to screaming end-of-world oh-crap. “We’ll be past the help of full wizards in a couple of hours. Ground zero in four. We must attack this immediately.”
“Jones, I have enough shit to shovel in the final hours before Y12. I don’t need a newbie witch gone Chicken Little.”
I held my temper, barely. Thank you, mandatory unfunded anger management classes. “Fine. It’s almost too late to chart a neutralization spell anyway, much less set it up. So give me the secret.”
“Secret? What secret?” He slit both eyes, cutting-narrow. Yeah, he knew what secret but wouldn’t say it first. “What are you suggesting?”
No less than counter-doom, but the world was mere hours from its series ender, and I was dying anyway. With the cancer eating my lungs and my life, I was down to months, so this was my last chance to make a real difference. No time to hold back. I took a long breath for courage.
“Tell me how to call a jinni.”
“A jinni? No way.” He went red, paper white, and back to red. “No fucking—”
“Chief Wenkermann, please. We can try other things first, but we have to be prepared to take extreme action. The end of the world—”
“No.” He grabbed my graph, ripped it in two and tossed it behind him.
I guess he’d flunked his anger management.
“The Mayan calendar is ending, not the world. Even a desk-bound research wizard like you should know better than to panic just because an arbitrary cycle is ending.”
He was right—the End of World wasn’t really a Mayan thing. The end of a Great Cycle, or thirteen b’ak’tuns, was simply a time of bad luck, not complete cosmic meltdown. But something nasty had turbocharged the bad luck with a dose of worldwide hysteria. Something—or some one—was deliberately using Y12 to freak us out and make us vulnerable.
The desk-bound comment pinched, but I pushed it aside to try to make my boss understand. “John Q. Public doesn’t think it’s a hoax. Something shoving mass belief darkside—and the nightmare gods heard it, Chief, and they’re clamoring to rip into our reality. If they do, it’ll be Armageddon.”
Wenkermann popped at the A-word. “For fuck’s sake, Jones. No end-of-world scare has come true, not the 2011 rapture or Y2K or the Disasters of ’88 or Comet Kohoutek in ’73. Y12 is just more of same. The public loves its disaster drama but doesn’t know shit about karmic physics.”
“Y2K was a real problem that came out okay because smart, dedicated people—both wizards and not—worked years at it. This is a real problem too. I’m not saying a jinni would be my first choice, but we have to be prepared.” I straightened to my full five-two. In a war, even desk jockeys were sometimes called to fight. “Chief Wenkermann, as a Research Wizard for the National Center for Behavioral Physics, with all the rights that entails, I officially request the secret of calling the jinn.”
“Abso-fucking-lutely not, Jones.”
“Why not? I’ve met all the requirements. I filed a form S-1519J. I have clearance, and as a full witch, I’m more than capable—”
“I said no.” He speared a hand through the thin strands atop his dome. “Do I need to spell it out? You’re a full witch, ten times as strong as adepts, which makes you some hot shit, yeah. Except jinn are a thousand times as powerful, which makes them scary dangerous.”
“But—”
“Shut up and listen. Not only are jinn damned dangerous, they don’t give away jack shit for free. To pay the karmic balance that jinni’ll take a pound of your flesh. The harder the task the more he’ll carve. End of the world?” He made a loud, rude sound. “You’ll be the first to die.”
Dying already, so that didn’t scare me, but I wanted to save everyone else the grief. I wedged my original spreadsheet under his nose. “Armageddon is coming, Chief. Humanity has exercised its free will and united behind a single idea—fear. We think the world will end so it will. Imagine it. The nightmare gods set free, the world plunged into chaos, terror darkening each and every human mind and soul—”
“For the last time, Jones, it won’t come to that.” He snatched the spreadsheet and ripped it up too. “That’s what we’ve been working on, what you’re supposed to be working on. Project Y12 Serenity has officially met its deliverables for success, so your numbers are wrong. For fuck’s sake, do you think I’d send the teams home if we were in danger?”
“Nobody’s chanting Serenity on seven?” My cheeks iced. We’d had round-the-clock Serenity going on the seventh floor since the first squeak of Doom. If Chants, Rites and Rituals had stopped production…no wonder the graph was plummeting.
“Listen up, Jones. The problem’s solved. Damned good thing too. The overtime was eating my budget alive. Speaking of—it’s quarter to eight, and you’re not salaried. Go home.”
“I can’t. Those numbers clearly show—”
“Shut it.”
“Just give me the secret—”
“No. And in case you have a problem with English, nein, non, nyet, fucking N-O!” He spun and stalked away. At his office door he spun back, every inch the sergeant, so much so that I expected him to bark “down and give me twenty”. He gave me the civilian equivalent. “Go home.”
He slammed into his office hard enough to rattle the window.
“Wenkermann!” I snatching up the torn halves of my proof, balled up the ruined pages and snapped them into a recycling bucket ten feet away, hitting it dead center. “Don’t you dare shut me out. The Mayan Doom—”
The door slapped open. “I said no. Since you have trouble with that word, let me use another one. Suspend. As in, if I hear another word about any Mayan Doom, you’re suspended.”
I stopped breathing. Squeaked, “Look, maybe I can just get a group of wizards together—”
“You want me to use another word? Like fired?”
Air exploded from my lungs along with every Joule of body heat. “I don’t—”
“Then don’t. Listen up, Jones. You are not, under any circumstances, to call a jinni. You are not to ask anyone for the secret. In fact if I even hear a whisper of you and jinn in the same sentence you are fired. Is that clear?”
“Yes.” All too.
He raised his voice to carry to the rest of the cubicle farm, where the handful of second-shift wizards too junior to escape the holiday ghost town were heads-down pretending to work. “Calling a jinni is fucking dangerous, people. I hear anybody in my office has tried, they’re fired. You—” he poked a stiff finger at me, “—have too much time on your hands if you think anything is happening at midnight besides the Maya starting a new calendar.”
“And the Ball dropping,” I said automatically.
“What?” He bit the word off. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Should have kept my mouth shut. I swallowed my foot and bulled on. “At midnight. You said nothing’s happening but a new Mayan calendar, but the Times Square Ball is dropping too. That’s why the public has glommed onto Midnight EST as The Time. Why it’s vital to nip this in the next four hours. Once midnight passes we’re safe but—”
“Rein it in, Jones! Yo
u are over-the-top catastrophizing. Obviously you need some real work to keep you busy. I’m assigning you to the karmic math project, effective immediately. One helper. And listen up—any work outside normal hours will not be paid.”
“Chief, no. Not FKME.” Should definitely have kept the old trap door shut. Full title Project to Facilitate Karmic Mathematics Education, Project FKME had turned into the mindless job of taking spreadsheets and kerchunking out stupidly simple graphs. Insert a UC after the F and you’ll get the picture of what we all thought of FKME. “I have far too much to do. You can’t—”
“Fight me on this, Jones, and I’ll take away the helper. Dismissed.” Bang.
** Rafe **
Today was Rafe’s birthday. His human birthday, his three thousand nine hundredth…and some-odd. He’d lost track of the years but marked each anyway.
Trying to remember his humanity. There was a losing battle.
Stars swirled around him, diamonds sparkling in the black velvet of space. The glittering dance of spangled dust and gas had lured many a jinni to stare upon its beauty forever. To forget their messy, painful origins, pretending they were something greater, simply because they were something more powerful.
Rafe had promised himself he’d never do that. He’d never lose himself in the stars, never forget Earth’s people.
He’d never be like his father. He’d promised.
But the centuries had taken their toll. Visits to Earth became rote, his promise a memory, then the husk of a memory. He eventually stopped visiting entirely.
Until one chance time, when she was born.
She was so…human. Toddling into trouble, into scrapes and bruises but always dusting herself off, laughing, and toddling on. Later she was running headlong into trouble but still always laughing, dusting off, moving.
Today he was strangely eager. Eager to scale down, to bend his eye toward the small dull rock of his birth.
To see Amaia.
His etheric eye was immediately drawn to her. She was arguing with her boss. She was in trouble again. Imagine that.
The whole planet is in trouble. The voice shimmered from beyond, like a phone call relayed by the stars.
Rafe knew the voice, and bowed low. “Jibril.”
As old and vast as Rafe was, Jibril was greater by far. The great jinni had sacrificed himself to save humanity and had passed to a plane so high he could no longer descend to the physical. Even maintaining his presence here on the ethereal was hard for him, like fitting a lion in a shoebox.
Destruction threatens your home.
Rafe widened his focus, an act Amaia would call “zooming out”. Humanity vibrated a sick, washed-out brown on the ethereal. “What’s wrong with them?”
I don’t know. From here, I can only see the sickness.
“The cause must be on the physical plane. I’ll have to descend.”
How will you do that? A physical cause means a physical location. Unless you’re called, you could end up anywhere.
Rafe smiled grimly. A challenge. Before Amaia, he’d had none for millenniums. After, well, life had certainly become interesting. “Then I’ll just have to make sure I’m called, won’t I?”
Chapter Two
I trudged away from the Chief’s office, my energy depleted. Not that I had a lot to begin with, not since the cancer.
“Find energy,” I told myself. “Mass doom coming. No time for vacay in the beautiful Pity Islands.”
I poked my emotions to prod up some quick energy. Getting taken off the project stung. Being threatened with suspension scared and angered me. Indignation straightened my spine. I was sooo filing a complaint with HR.
Trivial, compared with the world ending, forbidden to call a jinni, and no other plan. My shoulders sagged again, worse than before.
Amaia? Do you have need of me?
My spirits immediately rose. Hearing voices was normally a sign of mental instability, but this steady, masculine presence had actually saved my sanity when I was eighteen and left alone in the world by my parents’ deaths. I’d christened him Rafe.
My guardian angel.
Okay, probably just my subconscious manifesting as a self-support mechanism. But I preferred thinking of him as my angel.
Unfortunately, hearing voices in my head (especially on the job) would not convince Chief Wenkermann of my scientific detachment and objectivity. “I’m okay for now, Rafe.”
Then I will await your call.
As always, Rafe’s reassuring presence strengthened me enough to think. I needed to map another solution.
Mervyn could help.
He wasn’t a powerful wizard, but he had lots of experience. My colleague was also the best friend I’d made since moving across the country after college.
His domain was Analysis, on the third floor. I headed for the front elevators.
The Center was seven floors of cut-and-paste cubicles, decorated for the holidays government-style, meaning every tradition on the planet was represented. I hacked through a jungle of garland, tinsel, and artificial trees choked by strings of psychotically twinkling lights in eye-bleeding shades. The decorator elves, always exuberant, had apparently been chewing coffee beans this year.
On three, I cut through Planning, passing empty cube after empty cube, so quiet I could hear the secularized carols tinkling over the sound system. Second shift was a handful of part-time college students herded by a couple supervisors, but even that handful had been downsized by holiday vacations. Wenkermann must have been here only because Y12 Serenity was his project, and he had to stay to close it out.
But Mervyn would be here. He knew what was coming.
I got to his cubicle. “Bad news, buddy. The Chief didn’t believe the numbers. Do you think—”
The cube was empty.
My head blanked.
T-minus four hours, and no Mervyn? I edged inside the cube.
Everything looked normal. His computer screen saver shuffled pictures of his wife and young son. Stacked next to his keyboard were hardcopy Mayan Doom figures, penciled chicken scratching where he’d made his updates. Beads of water on his coffee cup indicated it had been rinsed, the last thing he did before he left for the day.
He was gone.
Ice froze me for a second. He’d left me to do this alone?
Amaia?
“I’m all right, Rafe.” I shook myself loose of the ice. Mervyn wouldn’t have left without a good reason. He was my rock a week ago, when I’d seen the sharp karmic drop and first suspected the Mayan Doom wasn’t just another fanatic’s billboard opportunity. He could’ve told me, “No project code for Mayan Doom, please go back to your cube and shut the fuck up.” Instead he encouraged me to dig deeper, to prove the Doom real. That took guts, because we were both working Y12 Serenity, the campaign to calm the public’s Armageddon fears and prove the Mayan Doom didn’t exist—with the goal of making it go away, a bit schizophrenic, but that was par for government work.
He must have had a very good reason to drop out on me now.
I called to Mervyn’s apprentice in the next cubicle. “Hey Mickey. Where’s—” I peeked over the wall.
Mickey wasn’t there either.
A centipede with cold toes crawled up my nape. Mervyn’s apprentice was new and still trying to prove himself. He worked first shift, second shift, and often part of third. He was never not here.
Hadn’t I seen him come in this morning?
Then again, young wizards were always up and leaving. Wanderlust, or seeking new knowledge and experience or a higher pay grade. Mervyn’s apprentice was especially employable, clean-cut and sober, his one nod to youth this year’s fad of a chunky silver necklace. He wouldn’t be the first to simply walk out on a job because he’d gotten something better. Wizard Specialist Smith’s apprentice had disappeared—last week. Planning Witch Handover’s had left…a few weeks before that.
My skin prickled all over, like the sick night sweats I’d started getting. Come to think of it,
there were an awful lot of apprentices overcome with wanderlust lately.
Amaia?
“It’s nothing.” I really needed to find Mervyn. We didn’t have a paging system—we were one of those chronically underfunded branches of government (our departmental name, in my opinion. The “Center”, how boring was that? I’d lobbied for something snappier like Area 42, but no go, so that quaint shoppe in New Mexico got all the bucks) but luckily, there was a cheap magical solution.
I lifted my hand. Tattooed on its back was my focus, a taijitu or yin/yang, the black and white fish swimming head to tail in a circle. The energy of behavioral physics can be tapped via meditation.
Yeah, some people call it magic. But the reality of karmic physics is a lot harder than point a wand and bamf. Using magical energy requires clarity and focus. At the beginning of my wizard’s studies I’d sit for hours just to get a five-minute trance. Now, with the aid of practice and my tattoo, I could do it almost instantly.
I found my center, my calm eye on the metaphysical plane. In trance, I siphoned a smidgeon of karmic energy from my personal well and used it to key into the life forces around me.
Dots popped on my internal radar. Like a Marauders Map, names appeared on some of them. Wenkermann, Smith, Handover…no Mickey.
Mervyn, though, was headed out the back way.
I broke trance and ran. By the time I caught him at the rear bank of elevators, I was wheezing.
He trotted into one, manbag slung over his lumpy parka.
“Mervyn! Where are you going?”
He hit a floor button and answered without really seeing me. “Home. The wife called. We’ve got a sick kid and I have to get a refill of his medicine.”
The elevator doors started to close.
“But…but…” My last hope, leaving?
He looked up at that, saw me and immediately hit the bumpers, knocking the doors open. “What’s wrong? The Chief didn’t turn you down, did he?”
I nearly nodded my head off in relief at my reprieve. “Flat. He accused me of Chicken Littling.”