Lucky or Unlucky? 13 Stories of Fate

by Michael Aaron

  Gwynn softened immediately. “Please, don’t be afraid of me. The Temple is not right in what it’s done to all of us. We must change the rules and stop hobbling magi until we wither away.” Gwynn took Lunicia’s hand to stop her from shaking. “You are a good person, Lunicia. You were robbed of a special gift because the Temple didn’t have faith that you could use it for good instead of evil.”

  She looked to the others. “I cannot wait thirteen days to save my friends from Jarek’s abuse. He drains them even now in his vicious attack on the midwife. His sister is dead and others are falling. Oni told me to fight him tonight. I need you. He has a strong chorus in my peers, but we have this circle to enhance what you have left. I need to bring the power of the Temple wizards to fight alongside our ally, the free wizard, Oni.”

  The response was only rigid silence.

  “Oni told me something when I was alight with her. She said she whispered a secret to every gifted babe she ever turned over to the Temple. She said we are Mar Ici! We are The Light!”

  Lunicia felt a fluttering in her chest as the air around her exploded in brilliance. The simple truth of Oni’s subversive little spell seemed to unlock all the barriers the Temple had placed around her. It was suddenly only painful that so much of her life had been wasted in chains.

  “I have never been allowed to be The Light!” came the creaky voice of Wulfric. “If I am allowed before I die, I will join the chorus of this brilliant girl.”

  He winked, with a crooked smile. “Waste no more time, child.”

  In the way of people used to following orders and resigned to giving over themselves to the greater good, the elderly of Temple followed Wulfric’s lead and laid themselves down all over the stone platform. Their faces soon lost all traces of fear.

  Gwynn smiled and threw back her head. She closed her eyes and lifted her arms once again. The strands spun and danced around her. They swirled around the elders and Lunicia felt their call as they spun around her.

  Then she was lifted into the air, once again soaring through the night, this time as a darting filament of light in the company of Gwynn’s magi chorus. She felt the others all around her, full of wonder and the ache of long withheld freedom. There was no land, no sky or sea. There was only the bright blue lightning she was within, the ashy twines of malignancy and colorful globes of wisdom and humor, first in the distance, then all around her.

  Explosions ripped through her that were sound and light and crackling energy, flickers against a cliff of icy fire, blackness and something like the sun. She felt Oni, felt a surge of volcanic anger that was Jarek, felt the dwindling as a young boy died, shrunken and scared to a pinpoint of fright and pain inside the gray tendrils.

  A bang of sooty smoke struck her. It snaked around her tightly, grating like a roar in her ears, “My sister was for me!” it churned.

  “Clare!” she called, but the little girl’s light was absent.

  A blade of colorful light descended between her and oily twists of vibrant ash. She struggled to stay, to rip at the tarry strands with violent thoughts. Clare was like a young Gwynn, like a young her. She sliced at the strands with her own blades of hatred. Cast her own shimmering web across its foul surface and pulled tight until it was a dangling ball of trapped, black ooze.

  She woke. Something surely sat upon her chest, but she could not see in the pitch black and could not lift her arms to discover what it was. A long time passed. Nothing moved. She merely breathed her shallow best.

  Then there was light. It was torchlight from the wall of the chamber. Weak and flickering, it still managed to show her that she was not lying beneath the dead weight of some fallen man. Beside her, moving slowly, was Gwynn.

  “Lunicia?” The question was hopeful.

  “I live,” was all she could say.

  Gwynn managed to rise as far as her arms could hold her. “Oh, no,” she whispered, her face stricken by the corporeal remains of what she had done.

  Lunicia knew without having to look at the bodies of the old masters lying on the hard stone. There was no mistaking the twining ghostly threads that were slowly spinning up through the air toward the light of the passing moon. Stretching to the limits of her physical ability, she raised her own hand to pat the girl’s shoulder. “You freed them,” she said. “Freed us all.”

  Tristis Ward

  Tristis Ward lives and writes in Fredericton, New Brunswick. After a degree in English at Dalhousie University, she worked for years in community radio as a producer, station manager, and national lobbyist. She has written comic book scripts, short stories and plays as well as producing both stage and radio plays. She has long participated online in the SFFWorld.com forum and is a multiple winner in their flash fiction contests. Her first graphic novel, Bones of the Magus, was published by Broken Jaw Press.

  5. Fold

  Charlotte Ashley

  There are only two settlements on Allie: the Snag, and Beauform. We had always known that if anyone escaped the Snag, they would make for Beauform. They had to. There was nowhere else to go.

  Sure, there were the guards, and the escapee would have to cross miles of barren, snow-covered terrain to get to us, but these guys could do that, they could handle that. They were resourceful, and they had unexpected skills and abilities. If they escaped, they would come here.

  At the end of the day, it was my job to make sure they couldn’t escape. In college, I folded 1,000 paper cranes and hung them in the Bahen Centre’s Lobby. Now I fold aluminum boxes for people. Now, I fold prisons.

  In a lot of ways, Allie (or Al/13, if you live in the Snag) was a paradise for a guy like me. The planet was hospitable enough—by which I mean the water wasn’t toxic and your head didn’t explode when you went outside—and building materials were virtually limitless. I could make anything here. Anything that could be folded out of aluminum, anyway, but that really was almost anything. Space for building also felt limitless. If I wanted to build a 22-room mansion adjacent to my own private amusement park, I could do that here. People did do that here.

  Beauform was a great, tight-knit, vibrant little place filled with interesting people. We were all designers or maintenance-people, farmers and cooks and architects. We were people who made stuff, who built things. There wasn’t a man or woman that didn’t have what your grandfather might have called “get up and go.” Everybody here had three projects at any given time. We built, we experimented, we shared and we created. I love Beauform. But we wouldn’t exist without the Snag.

  It was Lundsday morning and I was on the tram to the Snag with pretty much everyone else. Unlike everyone else, I could usually work from home, but I had a meeting with the Warden about a particularly problematic inmate and he wanted me to see what he had done to my last trap. I had seen; they’d sent me hirez stills as well as footage. But the Warden felt I should see. I think he wanted to scare me, to drive home that if I wasn’t up to this task, we were all in a lot of trouble.

  As if I didn’t know that. But up the labyrinthine chain of command, the Warden was my boss, and so I went, trying not to grumble too much as I stomped my feet and tucked my fingers into my armpits alongside my stoic neighbours. They looked past me, out the windows at Allie’s landscape, wisps of snow blowing across the glaciers that covered the rusty land bridges between the lakes of liquid aluminum that gave the planet its name. The sun was a few thumbs over the horizon, small and red, and over the hiss of the tram’s rails you could hear the ice groaning and snapping. I found myself holding my breath, as if sitting perfectly still was going to lessen the likelihood of a “transportation incident,” which was what they called the devastating explosions that resulted if the rail arced and a glacier off-gassed at the same time. Transportation incidents were common enough that on any other planet, we’d have redesigned the transportation system by now: but on Allie, we built with aluminum or nothing. Lucky number 13. Regular commuters travelled with the spooky calm of dyed-in-the-wool Nihilists. It was all I could do not to shit
my pants every single time I rode.

  I drew my tablet out of my pack and flicked on my stylus, trusting work to keep my mind off the odds I would be randomly killed this morning. I had my next design ready to show the Warden, if he turned out to be interested in solutions rather than just obsessing over the problem. The inmate—referred to in the parameters as SAM46629, but whose mother had named him Agustin—had escaped two of my traps now, and both times had been due to “manifestations of unforeseen variables.” That was what they called it when the time bombs they had locked up in the Snag suddenly developed new superpowers. It happened pretty regularly. Most of the inmates knew they were dangerous and chose to submit themselves to the system so that when their genemods activated there was a trained team there to help them. They weren’t psychopaths, just stressed-out old Marines with a seriously shitty medical condition. They were, mostly, pretty happy for the care they got in the Snag.

  Not Agustin. Agustin wanted out. He wanted to go back home—for reasons which might be really good, for all I know—and he was prepared to do anything he could to get there. I felt bad for the guy, but the harder he pushed, the harder we had to push back. The last two traps I’d built for him were pretty cushy. Comfortable, portable, and frankly, pretty stylish. I wasn’t going to be able to do that this time. The Warden was going to need assurances that SAM46629 was going to stay in the box I put him in, no matter what “new variables” might crop up.

  I doodled a while, rendering a tricked-out, 30-module kusodama, then I pulled out a sheaf of aluminum foil squares and started folding. Fully assembled, the kusodama would not only be super-reinforced, but the living space at its centre could be latticed, allowing the free flow of air while maintaining the cage-within-cage structure. I finished folding 12 modules before the tram rolled past the Snag’s outer perimeter, and I locked them together into a mock-up that would at least give the Warden something to touch and feel, to punch and test.

  I stashed the model before we disembarked at the sally port, standing and lumbering towards the doors with the rest of the workers. The air was crisp and light in the outer courtyard, but I couldn’t stay for coffee and breakfast. I made for the gatehouse, steeling myself for the security procedures that would clear me to enter the heart of humanity’s most remote military supermax prison.

  Agustin’s trap had been peeled open like a banana. Strips of aluminum curled back in all directions like a starburst; like an octopus beached and dumped on its head. Like a heap of scrap.

  “Where’s Agustin?” I asked, noting a muddy, black stain along the torn edges of the aluminum peel, a detail which I hadn’t taken note of in the stills.

  “SAM46629 had to be tranquilized. He took more Ketamine than a herd of elephants. The doc thinks he should be in the hole for a couple of days, but.” The Warden gave me a meaningful look. But Agustin always exceeded our expectations. I nodded. The Warden was a good guy, respectful of competence and hard work. He was a career bureaucrat despite his military rank, a manager of the first degree. But like so many good managers, he got frustrated when things stepped beyond his control. This Agustin thing was an insult to his own competence, and he was going to buckle down hard to fix it. No more Mister Nice Guy.

  “Is he okay?” I had to ask.

  “Maybe you should see yourself. He ripped himself up pretty good tearing through the sheets,” Warden Khan lectured me as we passed through the corridors towards the infirmary. “He wasn’t careful. He started just before dawn yesterday—probably thought he’d be out before they came to bring him breakfast. It’s a forty-minute window. But one of the other inmates heard the screech of metal. They were worried about sparks, about getting blown up. He was almost out when the subdual team arrived. It was a close thing. Damn close.”

  I exhaled, stressed. Agustin was a model Marine—polite and respectful in the face of authority, but absolutely an ends-justifies-the-means kind of man. I could imagine him getting his huge, modified biceps up through the star-shaped skylights and ripping up the metal, calm and detached from the devastating damage to his flesh. If he was willing to tear through himself to get out, he would tear through any of us.

  “Here.” the Warden held open the door for me. Agustin wasn’t the only prone body in the wide room, but he was the biggest. That had been his first mutation: a 40% increase in body mass almost overnight. He’d gone from a lean, hardened soldier to a bulked-out monster over six painful hours and hit the ground running. He’d torn the door off his cage and used it to restrain the first four guards that had tried to lock him down.

  The straps on the medslat were obviously just there to make the doctors feel better. Even I could tell they wouldn’t hold the man down if he had control of his faculties. He’d been stripped to the waist and the meaty flesh of his forearms, biceps, deltoids and pectorals were scored with deep incisions, now cleaned and stapled. There was something wrong with the angle of his collarbone. His thick neck looked too long, or his shoulders too low. His ribcage seemed to have folded over his stomach and the muscles of his six-pack were skewed and disordered like a heap of toy cars.

  The Warden took me by the elbow and pushed me another step towards the medslat. “His last mutation gave him some kind of ability to collapse his skeletal structure. Like a fucking raccoon. He got his shoulders through the air vents and tore—”

  A strangled hiccuping sound interrupted us. Four alarmed medical staff skipped towards the exit, swapping places with twice as many heavily armoured guards bearing dart rifles. But the mangled body of Agustin didn’t move, and the hiccups bled into an animal moan. After a few tense moments, the medics crept back, nervously looking at readouts.

  “What? What?” The Warden had pulled out his own tranq pistol, and glared at the doctor.

  “I’m awake, Warden,” Agustin’s voice was muddied and imprecise, “dooooown at the bottom of the hoooooole.” His deep, clucking laugh sent shivers up my neck.

  “He can’t move, sir,” the doctor sounded relieved. “The Ketamine is still working.”

  “I need two days for the new trap,” I couldn’t help saying. “Can you keep him like this another two days?”

  “Is that you, Trevor?” Agustin asked after a pause. “I can’t turn my head.”

  “Yah, man.” I stepped closer, but the guards wouldn’t let me get within arm’s reach. “You alright?”

  More laughter. “Your traps are sharp, I’ll give you that. But still weak. They will always be weak, Trevor. You can’t keep me in with aluminum.”

  I felt blood flood my face. “I can, and will,” I said, “if you insist on pushing me.”

  “Oh, I’ll push.” Even with the frozen-mouth drawl of a dental patient, Agustin’s voice was thick with threat. I stepped back. “I’m sleepy, Trev, but we’ll talk. When it’s time for me to go, I’m coming for you to get off this ice-block. You’re so clever… with these… whachacallum… origami… friggin’… triksssssshhhhhh….”

  “I can have the new trap built today,” I muttered at the Warden as the doctor checked Agustin’s vitals. “The team can assemble it tomorrow morning. Tell me that’s quick enough.”

  “This flower-thing.” Warden Khan sounded skeptical.

  “It’s called a kusodama. It’s a modular sphere containing 30 pieces which reinforce—”

  “I know, Jesus, Trevor, I read the brief. But honest to God. Your design is all air. Look at him. Look at what he did.”

  “I know, I know. But that trap was a single layer, designed to withstand blunt force trauma. Each module of the kusodama is double-folded and reinforced by the neighbouring modules. Force exerted in any direction is redistributed along a minimum of eight lines, each of which is reinforced by eight lines again—” I was babbling, to convince myself as much as anyone. “And we don’t have to make it latticed if you think he’s going to slither between the bars somehow. It could be solid, with a non-contiguous ventilation system.”

  “What’s the highest gauge you can do on this?” the Warden
demanded, and I licked my teeth and looked away from him.

  “12-gauge at the most.”

  “He will tear that up like pap—”

  “I can’t fold anything thicker, Neil!” I spoke over his objection. Guards inched away from us as our voices became raised. “We have to rely on finesse this time, not strength. I’m sorry, but this isn’t Earth! We can’t weld together 6-gauge steel sheets here! But this is better! We have physics on our side. Trust me.”

  This last statement hung in the air between us. His heavy black eyebrows dipped deep over his eyes and he pressed his lips together until they disappeared beneath his goatee.

  “Tomorrow morning?” he confirmed. I nodded. “Fine. We’ll install him in a giant flower. But Trevor,” the Warden glared at me, “if he gets out again, we’re going to have to put him down.”

  Assuming he didn’t get away, of course. Assuming he didn’t come for me in Beauform.

  I threw myself into construction back home. This was where magic happened, here in my workshop. Beauform was kitted out with the most cutting-edge printing system known to man, and with it, we had built a society.

  The first colonization team to arrive on Allie had brought my printer with them. We’ve built more since then, but mine was the original: a 40,000 gallon tank the size of a swimming pool framed with precision seed coders. It was a simple beast built on 19th-century technology: fill the tank with the super-saturated aluminum solution that lapped in vast quantities all over the planet, then catalyze a solid condensation with a seed of pure aluminum. The printer’s coders guided the formation of the solid, causing the metal to harden in vast sheets, as aluminum is wont to do anyway. Then, with no melting, welding, or cutting required, the specially designed sheets could be folded into—well, anything. That was industrial origami; that was my job. I was a master.