Cherished, eh? Aliyah opened up a dilapidated door into a long, empty hallway. Virtual dust kicked up around their feet; Aliyah produced a virtual candle to shed thin, quavering light on blank wooden walls.
There’s nothing here, Ruth said, confused.
Aliyah scraped off mold to reveal a long-forgotten door, then knocked politely.
Yoder? she called out. Yoder, can you come out?
I don’t want any trouble, miss. The voice was elderly, with a formal Amish twang. I do as I’m told.
All right. Aliyah warned Ruth to be on her best behavior. May we come in?
Please, don’t – a grumbling sound, like teetering rocks threatening to fall. I don’t have much left.
The rumbling grew, the collective’s voices pouring into the room–
– she’s not a child –
– she’s been a warrior for years –
– how dare you think of her as a child? –
The thin old man crouched down, clasping his straw hat. I meant no offense, when I met her she was the little burned girl to me–
The tide of irritation swept in through the door, smashing into a cramped warehouse filled with rocks. The rocks were stacked high into shapes – a farmhouse of flat schist, a half-crumbled church with a broken altar and shattered cross.
Ruth realized this was the rock-balancing Amish man who’d been swept up in a SMASH roundup–
The hivemind raced past Yoder, aiming straight for a slender pile of rocks shaped like Aliyah. They knocked it down–
– that’s wrong –
They smashed the Aliyah-replica into coarse pebbles.
Stop that, she admonished, bending down to stack the rocks back up again. She reassembled them into what looked mostly like his memories of her – though she couldn’t replace it.
In their rush to achieve consensus, the hivemind had eroded Yoder.
He can’t fight you, Aliyah told them. He was raised to believe harmony is more important than individuality. She tapped the crumbled church. Religion was important to him. But the collective doesn’t believe in God, so they knocked it down – and he wasn’t strong enough to fight back…
She swept her arm around, encompassing his broken memories.
Ruth staggered through the wreckage, sensing Yoder’s surrender, his terror at losing more of himself.
Aliyah felt her girlfriend’s heart break for the right reasons.
My God, Aliyah, Ruth asked, numb. What have we done?
Aliyah extended her hand out towards the hallway. Who knows how many Yoders are suppressed in the rush to consensus? I only heard him because I’d known him before.
We thrive in here, Aliyah continued, because our parents taught us to fight. We can stare seven thousand people down to tell them fuck you, you’re wrong. And even I–
Aliyah remembered shouting into the void, knowing her father was about to make a terrible mistake, her concerns negated.
Even I had a few moments of erasure.
Horror boiled out of Ruth – these doors had been buried deep so the Unimancers wouldn’t have to think about them, but Aliyah had made them impossible to ignore.
What are you saying, Aliyah? Ruth asked. That… that Unimancy is a lie? That… that our love is a peer pressure-created illusion?
Ruth backed away, horrified she might have brainwashed Aliyah into falling in love – Aliyah knew how deep that revulsion ran for her, Ruth terrified she’d turned Aliyah into an extension of her desires–
Oh, God no. She bathed Ruth in perfect love. Unimancy is really good – for some people. Daddy taught me to fight for what I believed in; that made this heaven for me. But for people like Yoder, well… you condemned them to selling off pieces of their soul to get along.
My God. The hivemind fractured with remorse. People delved into those lightless depths, found hundreds of abandoned souls.
Aliyah felt pride. The Unimancers hadn’t been evil. They’d just held onto their idea of paradise with a ’mancer’s certainty, blinded to the costs. They’d been unable to understand someone might not fit in, just as her daddy believed paperwork produced perfect fairness.
Most of the hivemind were as happy as Aliyah – but empathetic therapists escorted long-forgotten folks out of the catacombs, whispering apologies.
Oh God, Ruth said. Valentine was right. We’re evil–
We’ve done evil, Aliyah told her. Everyone does, from time to time. But the way you shift from “doing evil” to “being evil” is by looking at the choice and pretending it doesn’t exist.
Now we know. Aliyah felt Ruth’s Mom-construct calculating the force reduction from sending these folks to Project Mayhem for rehabilitation…
Which brings us back to Dad, Aliyah finished.
Paul still knelt on the ground, trembling, preparing to be brain-wiped.
If he’s evil, Aliyah said, then you’re evil.
Ruth swallowed, nodding. I think maybe we’re all a little evil.
Then it’s time to do good.
Ruth reached out to Aliyah, feeling the relief of an honest consensus – not a decision arrived at by peer pressure, but a genuine agreement brokered between loving peers.
We are in love, aren’t we? Ruth shivered with uncertainty.
Aliyah wrapped her in an embrace, poured conviction into Ruth until Ruth glowed with affection. I just stood tall against seven thousand ‘mancers, Aliyah grinned. Do you think I’d do anything less, if what we felt was based on lies?
No, Ruth said. Then: …that’s why I love you.
And your stubborn-ass nature is why I love you.
Love permeated the collective as they made up.
Ruth knelt down to take Paul’s hands, so gently Paul realized he’d been given a reprieve.
“I’m sorry,” said Ruth. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”
Paul spluttered nervous laughter. “Believe me. I get that.”
Ruth verified they’d come up with the right answer. Which had begun when they sought the answer to the right question:
Not how do we punish Paul? but rather, How do we ensure Paul never forgets?
“You killed one hundred and seventy-seven of us.” Ruth’s eyes were flinty. “When ’mancers die, we each take a memory from their minds and keep it safe. Your sentence, Paul, is this: we will give you a memory from each of the men you murdered. You will know them as we knew them. And you will carry their remains for the rest of your life. Can you do that?”
Paul had used up his store of bravery. He sobbed as Ruth confronted him with the enormity of his crimes.
“Can you do that?” Ruth repeated.
Paul sniffled his tears away, straightened his tie.
“Yes,” Paul said. “I am the recordkeeper.”
The air filled with magic as Ruth told him something each of the hundred and seventy-seven dead cherished. Paul engraved their memories in his soul.
Nothing could cleanse his crimes.
But he could spend his life atoning.
Forty-Six
The Secret That Saved the World
The general had assembled them beneath where It had taken Valentine, as if to emphasize how the invasion would erupt right over their heads.
The broach had swollen like a cancer to obscure the heavens, spreading further with every pulse. The sun crept between the dwindling patches of normal sky. That sickening heartbeat took longer, increasing in ferocity with each beat.
Hairs rose on their necks as waves of immense magical power rippled across Bastogne.
“All right,” said the general. “We tried this your way. Now we’ll try it my way.”
Yet his voice, Paul thought, held no anger. It was as though he’d expected everything to go wrong in precisely this manner – and now that he’d swept all objections aside, the healing would begin in earnest.
Paul watched as General Kanakia ordered the Unimancers into position. The Thing had, ominously, withdrawn – but every few minutes, a clicking noise rattled down from th
e heavens, and the cracks deepened.
The Thing had learned something, destroying Valentine. Something it was learning to utilize.
Yet Imani was convinced Paul had learned something of equal value. He didn’t know what he could have learned, but… he trusted his wife’s judgment. Which was why he felt partially redeemed for his sins when she stood by him in the field of blossoms.
Before, being surrounded by sixty Unimancers would have been a threat. Now, Paul felt the safety Aliyah felt; if his ’mancy spiralled out of control, they’d anchor him.
“I understand why I’m comfortable here,” Paul said to Imani. “But why are you?”
Imani blinked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…” Paul tried to pull Imani aside, but then realized it wasn’t like the Unimancers didn’t know. “You shot them in the face. You devised a plan to destroy them. All of them. Yet a week later, you’re assisting the general like you’d been on their side all along?”
“Oh.” She blushed. “That.”
“Yeah. That.”
She shrugged. “Something threatened my daughter. That brought out the beast in me.”
“Well, it brought out the beast in me, too, but…”
“Oh, Paul.” She kissed his cheek. “Your beast takes things personally.”
Paul realized: Imani had once believed the threat was the Unimancers – but once she’d realized the Thing in the sky was her real enemy, she’d decided to kill that instead.
Her bloodlust was flecked with frost – a glacial fury, satiated by killing anything sufficiently challenging.
“That Thing will do,” she told Paul, sensing she’d been understood. “And now that we’re back together as a family, there’s nothing that can stand in our way.”
A single flat click echoed across the orchard. The sky throbbed again, the crack-veins turning a deeper green.
“Except I’m the weak link in this plan,” Paul muttered.
“Oh?”
He massaged his artificial foot as though he could still feel sensation in it. “The black flux still fucked my ’mancy. I sidestepped it by becoming the War Bureaucromancer, but… without that, I’m still magically crippled. I can barely look up Aliyah’s birth certificate without having bad luck hamstring me…”
“We’ll solve that,” Imani assured him.
“How? Valentine was my magical advisor. Even she didn’t know why–”
“Are you really baffled why your ’mancy stopped working, Dad?”
Paul frowned at Aliyah. “I don’t believe I’m known for my sense of humor.”
“It’s the same reason you fucked up when you assaulted the broach–”
“–language–” Imani chided.
Though Aliyah rolled her eyes, Paul was grateful to see it was a good-natured protest. “Dad, I felt what you wanted to do before we took over. You wanted to spend weeks fixing the physics in one square inch.”
“I did, yes.” Paul polished his reading glasses nervously. “But… that was just what I liked doing. It seemed so foolish, dinking around with a tiny experiment…”
Aliyah huffed out in a perfectly teenaged Gawd, Dad look. “So what you’re saying is that you – the bureaucromancer – abandoned a careful plan involving incremental changes so you could swing big and see what happened?”
Hairs rose up on Paul’s arms. “My God…”
Aliyah crossed her arms, serene in victory. “When did the black flux hit you?”
“At the…”
The stink of burning fuel and bodies, Valentine unconscious, nowhere to run–
“At the airport. They’d tossed stun grenades at us. I didn’t–”
“You didn’t have time to do the necessary paperwork before the grenades blew, did you?”
“No,” Paul admitted reluctantly. “I just… willed it.”
“Well then.” Aliyah spread her hands. “It’s not black flux holding you back – you stopped believing in your magic.”
Paul felt so lightheaded, he had to steady himself on Imani.
“Why should I believe?” he said. “I spent five years working within the system, and I still hadn’t done a damn thing to make the world safer for you! One accident undid everything. And when it came time to protect my family, I–”
He swallowed.
“I’m always useless once the soldiers arrive.”
“OK, yes, you’re worthless in a fight,” Imani sighed. “But… the rest? No. If you weren’t so effective at raising support among the nonmagical, the government would have capped your ass a long time ago. And you did make changes.”
“I assure you, Mr Tsabo,” the general interjected, stepping in with a dancer’s grace. “Five years ago, the United States government would never have contemplated sanctuaries for ’mancers – even secret ones. But you humanized your plight to millions. You planted doubt where once there had been certainty – and never underestimate that power.”
Imani nodded. “The more liberal sides of the President’s cabinet are OK with the secret sanctuaries because they could justify the sanctuaries to their voters if the news got out. Thanks to you talking about Aliyah, now people wonder if those ’mancers who got hauled away could have been their daughters.”
“Look at the Unimancers,” the general said. “You’ve laid the seeds for their future. One day they’ll be able to stop masquerading as brainwashed zombies. You have made the world safer for Aliyah.”
Aliyah gave a guilty shrug as Ruth took her hand. “Just… not in the way you’d planned.”
The sky pulsed again. That sickness swelled. Paul dropped the clipboard.
“But… I screwed up so badly when I fought that Thing…”
The general snorted. “I reported the incident as a success.”
“A success?” Paul spluttered. “We lost Valentine! We almost lost the world!”
“I’m genuinely sorry for your loss.” The general held his right hand palm-open in a blessing. “But the broach has devoured Unimancers for seven decades now. On average, it kills five a day. That’s two thousand souls a year. Twenty thousand consumed in the last decade.
“One death gave us the first new information we’ve garnered in seventy years of unmitigated losses. That Thing spoke to you. It feared you. Now let us determine why.”
you hold the rules yet know not how to use them
One square inch, he thought.
we are war
He was racing against whatever It was building up to – and his ’mancy had never been an answer for violence…
“If I may share one last piece of assistance, Mr Tsabo?”
Paul tapped the clipboard absently, nodding, his attention upon the sky.
“The Unimancer collective is a precious, precious secret. We could never tell the world what SMASH truly was. Nations would never have allowed independent ’mancers upon their soil, even if those ’mancers were dedicated to saving the planet. If politicians had understood Unimancy was beneficial, well, they would have moved to execute ’mancers rather than handing them over to us.”
“I get that,” Paul muttered.
“Without the Unimancers, the broach would consume the planet. We couldn’t chance officials sacrificing long term stability for short term political gain. So we staffed carefully, Mr Tsabo – we only allowed people who understood the Unimancers’ true necessity into managerial positions. In that way, for seventy unbroken years, we have kept the Unimancers saving the world.”
Paul frowned for a moment, wondering why the general was telling him this–
Then he laughed, a hard clean laugh that felt like blowing cobwebs out of his lungs.
“You’re telling me the only thing keeping the planet safe has been… good middle management?”
The general smiled like someone who’d told a joke he’d been longing to share for ages. “Precisely, Mr Tsabo.”
Paul cupped one shattered square inch within his palms. He readied his bureaucromancy.
For the first time in
months, Paul looked forward to doing magic.
Forty-Seven
Pulsations and Reparations
Aliyah woke. Someone was sifting through her expertise.
She’d been working in shifts to protect Daddy; fourteen hours on, ten hours off, rotations ordered by General Kanakia to keep them as alert as they could be until Daddy was done.
Nobody slept well. Each time they woke, the sky had been chewed further away. The Thing’s erratic pulses crept into their dreams…
Daddy hadn’t slept the whole time – but unlike the mania that had turned him into a hateful revenant, this work seemed to energize him. He drank the gray nutritional fluid when Mommy prodded him, dozed on the general’s orders – refusing to leave the square inch of space he’d created.
And it glowed. That tiny cube hovered in his cupped hands, radiating a green CRT light as Daddy queried it with fine strands of magic.
He didn’t look angry; he looked joyous. He was playing with the space, tinkering with physics, laughing whenever the cube collapsed into a one-dimensional tesseract that he had to rebuild.
Aliyah would have shared his exhilaration, except the sky kept pulsing. Just when you relaxed and thought maybe it’s over, the heavens convulsed again.
Something was coming.
Yet the general had ordered them to relax, so she’d curled up with Ruth and drifted off.
Until something sifted through her Super Mario expertise.
That sifting feeling wasn’t unusual among ’mancers; it was a courtesy to leave your skills open to anyone, even while sleeping. Yet Aliyah’s skills were mostly videogame trivia – not a subject the hivemind needed often.
Aliyah knew the ’mancers with useful skills dealt with constant intrusions; the combatmancers’ and the biomancers’ and the psychomancers’ brains churned like frequently-accessed hard disks.
Who needed Super Mario this urgently? Someone vacuumed huge chunks of Mario from her head – every monster, every secret, every speed run trick.
Valentine? Aliyah thought – but no. This access was precise in a way Valentine had never been. It felt computerized.
“Ruth?” She tapped Ruth on the shoulder–
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