by Lee Isserow
“This is not what we are here to do,” Shana declared, obstinately. “The Circle is not mandated to kill for the sake of it. We should have helped these people―”
“Quit your sanctimonious crap,” Raven growled. “You know Faith's mandate. All these deaths can―and will―be dialled back once this is all done. They'll be dead for a day, maybe two, and then back to their lives as if none of this ever happened―”
“That is not the point.”
“It is the bloody point. Mundies die all the damn time from their own ineptitude, but when magick is involved, when the Circle is on the case, any mundy that dies gets a free pass and comes back from the grave. It's not fair, it's not right but―”
“This isn't about them,” Shana said, as she threw her arms out and extended the barrier to either side of the hallway, pushing the smoke out through the stairwells.
As soon as it was cleared, she let the barrier dissipate and squared up to Raven. “This is about you, about what happened in Cortenova. You are still screwed up over being mesmerised, losing your magick. . . and only having your magick back despite of the Circle.”
Raven scowled, but said nothing.
“If it were up to them, you would have been left with little more magick than a mundane. . . It is only because of the kindness of one outside the Circle that you had your magick returned. . .”
“Don't you tell me what my bloody problem is, you don't know me Shana, you don't know what kind of―”
“I do know you. I have read of your previous operations, I know that you were always hot of head, but never as wilfully destructive as you have become. . . since Cortenova, anger has consumed you. You almost lost an arm in Johannesburg because of that anger, and you have just been responsible for the death of many people. . . I cannot allow this to continue.”
“Yeah? Is that so?” Fire ignited on Raven's knuckle dusters as she stared Shana down. “And what are you going to bloody do about it?”
Shana let a slim, mournful smile come to her lips “I am going to do whatever it takes to heal your wounds.” Before Raven could act, Shana raised and opened her palm into her face.
The lightest puff of air blew out from inside Shana's hand, right into Raven's eyes. She blinked and looked away for the briefest of moments, and when her gaze returned to Shana, her pupils had shrunk to the size of pinpricks. Her anger was gone, pushed back to the farthest reaches of her mind, along with all her thoughts, her fears, and her entire consciousness. Raven had been mesmerised yet again, and was powerless to Shana's will.
She watched helplessly as the operatives that had been under her command rallied around the woman that betrayed her. As much as Leopold and Jacobian initially tried to fight in her corner, they had to admit that she was “a little more crazy than usual”.
None of her colleagues, her friends, fought hard on her side. Raven had never felt more alone in all her life. And as they called for a teleport back to the Epicentre, she vowed to herself that even though she would likely forget every thought that she had whilst mesmerised, somehow she would make herself remember. . . and then, she would take revenge on every single one of them.
20
Unstable
EPICENTRE, THE CIRCLE
Faith was not pleased to discover how little they had learned on the operation. He blamed himself, for not overseeing it as he should have. He was still not accustomed to his new position, and had got caught up in the bureaucracy of running the damned Circle. He found himself wondering, once again, how Comstock ever managed it. His predecessor always had time to watch operations play out. . .
That was a thought for another time, he reminded himself, there were more pressing matters at hand. He gestured at the window for Shana to enter, and as she walked across the Epicentre, Raven followed her footsteps.
“You have a lot to answer for, Miss Kanta, what the bloody hell are you thinking, mesmerising your superior operative.”
“With all respect due, she is superior only in duration of employment,” Shana told him, coldly. “Across the course of the three operations we have been on together since her return from Cortenova, it has become apparent that she is. . . unstable. It is not our place to deal death for death's sake. We, as operatives of the Circle, should be held to a higher standard than that.”
“Alright, shut up.” Faith growled. His eyes dropped to the floor, and he chewed on his lip before continuing. “I agree, you don't have to bloody convince me.” He threw his fingers to the side and gestured to call Tali. “Get someone from the psyche team in, want a full eval on Raven.”
“Yes sir,” Tali said in his periphery.
“There is still. . . the matter of the deaths she caused,” Shana said, as Faith huffed to himself.
“I understand where you're coming from, I do. When I was where you are, when Comstock was behind this desk, I would have said the same bloody thing. . .”
Shana let a small smile come to her lips, but it was not to stay for long.
“Thing is, now I understand exactly where he was coming from when he told me time and time again that we can't roll back every single death. . . That we have to wait until a situation is resolved before we can even begin to think about it. . . It takes time and effort to bring the Circle together, time that we don't have, and effort that should be spent more productively on actively searching for the cause of. . .”
“The knowledge, the gift, that is what they called it.”
“And on top of that, even if we did have the time to roll their deaths back, there's the chance that they would still retain this 'gift', and all we would have done is given this thing another sixty bodies back to its cause―”
There was a knock at the door. A tall, thin man with bright red hair smiled awkwardly from the other side of the glass. He wore a white lab coat, and Shana was fairly certain she had never seen him before. Whoever he was, he certainly wasn't an agent or operator. Faith gestured for him to enter.
“Doctor Martin Hilderbrand,” the man said “You requested that I take a look at one of our operatives?”
Faith gestured to Raven, who was still mesmerised, staring into middle distance, seemingly unaware of the world around her.
“Hello young lady,” Hilderbrand said, smiling politely at Raven's blank expression. “I know you can't understand me right now, but I assure you, we're going to make you all better.” He traced out the sigil for mesmerisation, and took over control of Raven. “This way,” he pulled the door open and indicated for Raven to walk ahead of him.
She did as instructed, and the doctor closed the door behind them as he led Raven away.
“Do you understand where I'm coming from?” Faith asked. “I'm not some cold bastard doing this out of some selfish desire to maintain control, or out of a lack of empathy for mundanes.”
With a reluctant sigh, Shana nodded. “I understand.”
“Good. Get to work with Tali working up a pattern of this thing's interactions. There's a method to what it's doing. It's building up the numbers with every interaction, but there has to be a reason for why it's speaking to those specific people. . .”
“You. . . believe that the pattern will aid us in discovering what the root cause it?”
“Right now it's the only lead we've got, short of visiting every damn dream in the world. . .”
“Speaking of dreams,” Shana said, with a quick glance out to the main floor, “where is Wilbur?”
Faith growled out a long, slow sigh. “In the Dream Realm, visiting every damn dream in the world.”
21
One and the same
THE DREAM REALM
Wilbur whipped through the glimmering ebony starscape of the Dream Realm. He had already checked hundreds of thousands of dreams for signs of outside influences, and there were still close to two billion yet to explore. So far, he only had the one observation to make: that the force that had connected the dreams had become smarter. The incursion in Paris had informed it that the Dream Realm had been compr
omised, and as a result, it was no longer connecting multiple dreamers' subconsciousnesses together in constellations.
With so many dreams to check, it was not going to be fast work, and Faith's grunts and growls in his ear every fifteen minutes with a request for a status update wasn't helping things.
He flew towards the next star, and adopted a diving formation as it became the size of a football, then a window, then a door, and slipped right through it with a twist, a flourish for his own amusement.
With a flip through the air, he landed on the ground, which crunched beneath his feet. It was gravel, dusty, and his landing sent up a thick cloud that puffed around him. He batted it away, and walked down the path he had arrived on, a thin dirt road in what looked like a ghost town. This was the centre of the dream, the focal point, he could tell as much because the further out from where he was standing, the less detail there was to the landscape. There were hills in the distance that looked as though they were covered in dense woodland―but he was experienced enough with such manifestations to know that they would likely never be explored by the dreamer, and thus if he were to go to the hills for himself, would discover that not only were they much smaller than they appeared―a forced perspective cheating the eye―but the trees upon those hills would turn out to be two dimensional, like cardboard cut-outs, rather than fully realised and realistic trees. It was a common occurrence, that the unconscious mind only formed as much information as the dreamer would need whilst they drifted in a state of slumber.
Wilbur knew time was short, and there were many houses and shops in the village. With no way to discern which might be the location of the dreamer, he took to an unconventional means of investigation.
“Hello?” he shouted. “Anyone here?”
There was no response. He sighed to himself, and walked to the nearest door, knocking frantically. “Hello? Anyone home? Heard anyone teaching you things you shouldn't know?”
No voice sounded out, no voice of man at least. A breeze picked up around Wilbur, and on the wind came words, a voice, a whisper.
“This is not your place.”
“Hello?” he asked. “Who's there?”
“You are not the dreamer, nor of the dream.”
“No. . .” He surreptitiously began to cast behind his back. “I'm just here on a visit, a holiday if you will, thought I'd take some time off, get out of the office, you know how these things are. . .” The prattle was intended to serve as a distraction, and he trailed off as the casting was complete. His hands thrashed through the air, and a massive ring of fire erupted around him. It seared the ground beneath his feet and ignited the house he was standing in front of.
“Your magick cannot cause harm, for we are one and the same.”
“Oh, I rather doubt that old chap.” Wilbur cast again, this time freezing the air within a three metre radius of where he stood.
The wind came to a sudden stop.
Wilbur glanced around for signs that his casting had harmed the whisper in any fashion―but there was no sign that it was even present, let alone that it had been inconvenienced by the icy blast. Nonetheless, he needed to report in, to let The Circle know that he had found the whispers' next location.
With a small jump, Wilbur left the gravity of the dream, and began to fly upwards, heading for to the portal back to the Dream Realm. He dialled for Faith―but his hands would not obey him.
A strong gust of wind threw him off course, sending him careering across the landscape, and lashed him head-first into the hills on the horizon.
“The elements are but the afterglows from the dawn of your universe. And I watched that dawn, I witnessed its majesty, I felt its heat and its cooling. Thus, elements do me no ill.”
Wilbur picked himself up, and looked around for signs of the speaker. There was no wind which carried the words. It was as though the speaker was in his head―not in his periphery, like in a call―actually in his head.
“I know you,” the voice said, louder this time than its previous utterances. “I know you through and through.” Its words became louder with every syllable. “I saw your conception, your gestation, your birth.” Wilbur clasped his head in his hands, as the voice reverberated around his skull. “I have seen every second of your life, heard every thought, witnessed every action.” He fell to his knees, felt his eyes water, and tears shed. “I have seen you mature, seen you age, and have seen you die.” Wilbur stared at the ground as droplets trickled down his cheeks and fell from his chin. They stained the dirt red, and continued to shed, painting the ground with his blood as he watched on in horror, and tried with all his might to fight the voices, to cast to block them.
“I have been with you through all these moments, and will be with you until the end.”
His castings were no use, the voice would not budge from his head. And even though it spoke in a mannered tone, the words felt as though each was ripping through his skull, tearing at his neural tissue with a blender.
“I am that knowledge, and I am all knowledge.”
Wilbur forced himself up to his feet. He might not have been able to call, nor able to cast―but this was the realm of his adept, and if there was one thing an adept could do, it was have control over their realm.
“I wish to share that knowledge with you, wish to gift you with all the knowledge of the realms and beyond.”
He lifted his body from the ground. It felt as though he weighed a ton, perhaps more, but he fought against that the mass. It was all in his head―the voice was counting on the fact that he would be so overwhelmed by its words that he would be powerless under its will. He was not going to be broken so easily, and soared through the air back towards the nexus of the Dream Realm.
The further he got from the ghost town below, the better he felt. The pain shed, and his head became clear once again. But as the exit was in sight, he heard it one last time, once again as nothing more than a whisper.
“And you, Wilbur Dickensian-Workhouse, Wil'Bah-doc Ch'iarkoz, are as much a part of me, as I am of you.”
22
So mote it be
SCHAGHTICOKE, NEW YORK
Schaghticoke had been a settlement of one kind or another for closing in on three hundred years, and even though the population had grown year on year, there were still fewer than eight thousand residents. Not that those that lived in Schaghticoke complained, they liked their small town life, living in picturesque surroundings, whilst still being within driving distance of Manhattan.
That morning, as the clock struck five, every single resident of Schaghticoke found themselves wide awake. And all of them found a smile on their lips. As much as they loved their small town life, there were things that they had wished they were able to change. And that morning, they finally knew how they could make those changes.
The local doctor got into his office early that morning, and took a look at the appointments that were booked for the day. He knew that a fair amount of them would likely cancel―but those who didn't, whether they were coming in for check-up or flu shots, sickness or injury, would all be cured. Even his patients with life threatening conditions would be healed. He was finally able to do what he had always dreamed of, since the first day he decided he would go to med school. He was going to get a chance to truly make people better.
Even though the town was relatively small, and its population was meagre, Schaghticoke still had a problem with homelessness. The root cause of the surge in rough sleepers wasn't the usual culprits hyped by the media, and they certainly didn't have the drug problems of larger towns and cities. The spike in homelessness was mostly due to a job market that wasn't exactly overflowing with opportunities.
However, the town had evolved to prepare for such occurrences. When one of the locals found themselves out of work, when their homes and cars were taken from them, there was a place they could go, a homeless shelter run by volunteers, paid for entirely by donations―even the building itself had been donated by the owner. That was the attitude across
the town for the most part, community was important to all who lived there.
But this morning, when the volunteers arrived at the shelter, they knew that they could actually make a difference, and change the lives of those in their care for the better.
It was not just the volunteers that had a change in attitude. The residents of the shelter also knew that their debts would no longer be hanging over their heads. For the first time since they had everything taken from them, all of the homeless population of Schaghticoke actually felt empowered. The world was their oyster, and they were going to repay the kindness of the town, with every fibre of their being.
All, that is, apart from Chris Fredrickson. Chris was the outlier, he always had been. His bipolar disorder had put a wedge between him and his neighbours, and when he lost his job, and then lost his home, he had fallen into a pit of despair. When Chris woke that morning, he had knowledge that he was well aware he should not have. He knew that every single one of his fellow Schaghticokians felt uplifted and rejuvenated by what had been taught to them in the night. But he could not feel any of it, and had nothing close to the jubilance that the others had in spades.
All he could feel was helplessness, darkness, emptiness. And the knowledge that had been gifted to him did not make for good bedfellows with those feelings. He wanted it to end―not just his life, but everything that had led him to that point, the town, the people, all of it.
And due to the gifts that had been laid at his feet, he was now able to make that happen. All he had to do was focus his intent, and so mote it be.
23
Time to convene
EPICENTRE, THE CIRCLE
Light poured out from the table in the conference room, and Wilbur flipped through the realms to be lying upon it once again. He was out of breath, and burst up, gasping desperately as he got his bearings.