All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault

by James Alan Gardner

  Richard, on the other hand … he practically expected Shar to order him about. Richard Chan was third-gen Chinese-Canadian like me, but his ancestors hailed from Hong Kong so he spoke broken Cantonese instead of my own inept Mandarin.

  Richard was cute in a meerkatish way, all bright-eyed and perky. He was one of those people who can’t tell when you’re joking, so he laughed at anything he thought might be meant as funny. Eager to please, that boy … which may have been another reason Shar kept him around.

  I OUGHT TO DESCRIBE THE PUMP LAB

  But the place was just a jumble of pipes and multi-ton equipment, all painted that shade of pistachio that seems compulsory for heavy machines. The lab also had more than a dozen computers humming away. (No one at Waterloo ever turned off computers. All across campus, there’d be thousands running through the whole Christmas break.) Circuit boards lay haphazardly on workbenches, some with Post-it notes saying where the boards came from, while others were completely unlabeled. I guess you weren’t a real engineer unless you could identify what a circuit did just by looking at it. And paper was stacked everywhere, a lot of it dating back to the days when computer output was run off on whacking huge line printers in continuous perforated sheets. The printouts were piled on tables and floors, forming a bedrock on which subsequent papers accreted like ooze on the ocean floor.

  I wonder if anyone has ever written a paper on the stratigraphy of laboratories.

  I’d visited Richard’s lab several times and never once asked him what any of the equipment was for. I knew all too well that he’d eagerly explain it. At length. With wiring diagrams. Until my heart quit beating just to make it all stop.

  “LOOK,” I SAID, “CAN WE FORGET ABOUT THE DARKLINGS AND GET THIS OVER WITH?”

  “Right,” said Richard, who’d weighed the relative importance of Darklings versus pumps and come to the only proper conclusion. “I’ve parked my parents’ minivan at the loading dock. The back’s cleared out, so it should hold everything.”

  “I assume,” Miranda said, “you have the proper paperwork to take this stuff away … cuz if the campus police show up, I don’t want to spend the night in jail. Been there, done that.”

  (Yes, Miranda was no stranger to the legal system. Not that she’d ever been convicted—her family could afford obscenely expensive lawyers—but you can’t take part in dozens of anti-Darkling protests without occasionally getting swept up in mass arrests. Even when you look like Miranda.)

  “This is totally legit,” Richard said. “My prof was just going to trash everything, but some other guy hogged all the space in the e-waste drop-off, so there wasn’t room for our stuff. We’ve got two new test beds arriving in January, so like, this is an emergency. Taking away this junk is doing everyone a favor.”

  Miranda and I shared dubious looks. “So no paperwork?” she said.

  “Not to worry,” Shar replied. “We’ll use Kim as lookout. A better use of Kim’s presence than carrying things.”

  She was right—I was more suited as a lookout than as muscle. But I didn’t like the suggestion that I couldn’t carry my fair share. On behalf of short people everywhere, I was going to protest, but I got interrupted by our last roommate, Jools, storming through the doorway.

  Jools: “How the hell can anyone find anything in this place?”

  JOOLS WAS THE ILLUSTRIOUS JULIETTA WALSH

  But she wasn’t a Julietta, nor a Juliet, nor even a Julie. Jools had to be Jools; nothing else fit.

  Our Jools: a jock. Almost as tall as Miranda; not as supermodel beautiful, but good-looking in an athletic healthy-as-a-horse way.

  Light-skinned. Brown hair and eyes. Given to wearing bicycle shorts and skirts, even in winter, because she knew her legs and ass were taut. Also because she didn’t give a damn about the cold—tonight, on the winter solstice, her legs were bare and she wore sandals.

  Jools came from Alberta like me, but from Edmonton: hundreds of kilometers farther north than my home in Banff. If you think I’m a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to dismissing coolish weather, Jools was a big honking log-in-the-mire. When she came to Waterloo, she didn’t even bring a winter coat—just a jacket in the bright orange and blue of the Edmonton Oilers.

  Jools was hockey-mad. In her first year, she’d even made Waterloo’s varsity team. They’d kicked her out when her marks started sliding—this is Canada, not the States, and school comes first—but Jools still played with an ultracompetitive intramural team that practiced at three in the morning because that’s when ice time was cheap. Getting up that early (or staying up that late) didn’t improve Jools’s grades. Since the four of us had met in our first year, we’d all helped Jools as much as we could, but we’d finally hit the ceiling. Jools was in biology, Miranda in physics, Shar in chemistry, and me in earth sciences. None of us knew enough about one another’s subjects to contribute anything useful.

  Jools had squeaked out a pass the previous year, but I suspected that she’d bombed her Christmas exams. Too much hockey. Too much beer. Too much throwing herself at guys. Plus every other flavor of self-sabotage she could think of. Jools had decided she was a fuckup, and was doing her best to prove it.

  Shar and Miranda were too self-involved to notice. Otherwise, they’d have held an intervention so fast we’d all have gotten whiplash. Me, I’d tried some heart-to-heart talks, but I’d messed them up. (I suck at dealing with emotions. Anyone’s.) So when Jools said, “Don’t worry,” and “I’m fine,” I mumbled dumb nothings and let her get away with it.

  Kim: not a confronter. Miranda marched in protests, Shar was a take-no-excuses life-boss, and Jools punched her hockey opponents until they bled. I just obsessed over rocks and high marks.

  But that was about to change. Five seconds after Jools walked in, we heard the explosion.

  BANG, THEN BOOM, THEN A SHUDDER THROUGH THE FLOOR

  I’d heard explosions before. I’d accompanied my father to watch mining operations; I’d stood beside park rangers in Banff as they set off preemptive avalanches; in my second year, I’d waited with forty other students as a highway construction crew blasted out a road cut, after which we had six hours to pick through the rubble for geological treasures.

  Controlled demolitions have deep, measured voices. You feel them more in your feet than your ears, because the point is to move solid matter, not fill the air with wasted energy.

  The explosion in E3 began with a bang, like one of those specialty fireworks made for maximum sound—the kind where you see the flash first, then hear the noise, loud and sharp enough to make you jump. The bang was still echoing when we heard a secondary boom: blunt thunder that rattled metal throughout Richard’s lab. Finally, the ground shook, earthquake style. The rattle of metal increased, the lab door thumped shut, and something in the wall went crack.

  I gauged it a four on the Mercalli earthquake intensity scale. I wasn’t in danger of being knocked off my feet, but I still grabbed a workbench for support.

  “What the fucking hell?” Jools said. She stopped and her face went wary. “You’re all feeling this too, right?”

  No one answered. The shaking subsided. The room went still.

  “Those damned Darklings,” Miranda said.

  “What damned Darklings?” Jools asked.

  “Kim saw some down the hall,” Miranda replied. “What the hell have they done?”

  I said, “It might not be them.”

  “Who else could it be?” Miranda demanded. “There’s nobody else in the building.” She turned toward Richard. “Do you have a phone here? An official university one?”

  “Probably. Somewhere.” He looked vaguely around the lab. Odds were, there really was a phone buried under the clutter, but who used landlines anymore?

  “Find it,” Miranda said. “Call nine-one-one. Don’t use your cell—you want the on-campus emergency line, not a generic one.”

  “Okay,” Richard said reluctantly.

  Miranda turned to the rest of us. “Let’s see what those
bastards have done. Kim, you lead. You know where they are.”

  “I should go with you,” Richard said.

  “Call first,” Miranda told him. “Getting help is the main priority. Fire trucks, ambulances, everything. Do it!”

  She strode toward the door. The rest of us followed, leaving Richard morosely searching for the phone.

  I LED MY ROOMMATES TO THE DARKLINGS’ LAB

  The door was shut, but the explosion had shattered the little inset window, spreading nuggets of safety glass across the floor. Copper-colored gas spilled out through the hole. Strands of the gas ran down the face of the door like one of those high, thin waterfalls in Venezuela. When the gas reached the floor, it spread across the terrazzo in a wispy brown pool.

  “That doesn’t look good,” Jools said.

  “Could be worse,” Shar replied. “The vapor is clearly heavier than air. It will stay close to the floor, and we won’t have to worry about inhaling it.”

  Thus Shar proved she was in chemistry. Every chemistry student I know delights in stories about people mishandling chemicals—grisly tales of acid burns and blinding. Chemists radiate contempt for first-year students who break the teeniest, tiniest rules of lab safety. But at the very same time, chemists believe the rules don’t apply to themselves. “I never waste my time with latex gloves or the fume hood. I just pour carefully.” As if genuine chemists have nothing to fear because chemicals know who’s boss.

  Shar went straight to the lab door. It was locked. She stuck her bare hand through the window (despite the scary brown gas that immediately surrounded her fingers), then felt around inside until she found the doorknob. She popped the lock and withdrew her arm.

  Miranda asked, “How does your hand feel?”

  Shar flexed her fingers experimentally. “Stings a little; nothing serious. We’ll be fine if we minimize exposure.”

  “Gloves,” Miranda commanded. “Everybody,” she added with a stern look at Shar. “If you have a scarf, wrap your face.”

  “Yes, Mom,” Jools said. She had neither gloves nor a scarf; she shoved her hands into her jacket pockets. Shar, on the other hand, had plenty of winter gear. Just as Jools and I made a show of saying, “Cold? This isn’t cold,” Sri Lankan Shar outfitted herself with approximately twenty-five layers of thermal insulation. Jools made a face, then grudgingly began bundling up. I did the same, fetching my full gloves and scarf from my backpack. I may sneer at Ontario winters, but not at weird brown smoke. The corridor was beginning to smell like burnt plastic.

  “Okay,” Miranda said when we all looked ready. “This is purely a rescue mission. Whoever’s inside, we drag ’em out, nothing more. And we do it fast, before we become the next casualties.”

  “If we’re talking about Darklings,” Jools said, “do they really need our help? They’re supernaturally tough.”

  “Most are,” I said, “but tough doesn’t mean invulnerable. A small-sized explosion they could probably laugh off, but a big one will kill them just like humans.”

  “Trust Kim to set us straight about the Dark,” Jools said. “You’re such a fangirl. Fanperson. Fanentity. Whatever.”

  “Enough,” Miranda said. “We’re in crisis mode.” She laid her hand on the doorknob. “Ready?” Without waiting, she threw the door open.

  GASEOUS BROWN GUCK GUSHED OUT IN A HEAP

  The coppery vapor was heavier than air and had been spilling through an eye-level window. Conclusion? The gas must have filled that great big lab from floor to window height. When Miranda opened the door, the effect was like that dorm prank where someone leans a big garbage can full of water against somebody else’s door. Open the door and SPLOOSH!

  The sploosh was gaseous, not liquid, so it wasn’t an actual flood. Instead, copper clouds billowed and flopped out into the hall. With them came a stink like nothing I’d ever smelled. Not just sharp like acid; not just thick like the manure local farmers spread on their fields; not just rank like the spoiled meat Jools threw in the trash, then let sit. It was all those and more: It hit every scent receptor in my nostrils, then cranked the volume to eleven. I smelled every smell I could possibly smell—the good, the bad, the flowers, the rot, the warm bread, and the vomit. All at maximum intensity. It was the olfactory equivalent of a blinding white light shone directly into my eyes … and remember, my scarf was covering my nose.

  In contrast, the lab had no actual illumination. All I saw was blackness, like the depths of a cave when you turn your lights off just to see how pure darkness can be.

  THE DARKNESS CONFRONTING US WAS A BLINDER WALL—MAGIC

  I’d seen such walls before. Kimmi had encountered a few, back when she spent so much time with Darklings.

  Blinder walls were standard enchantments for privacy. Converting to the Dark didn’t just make you a vampire, were-beast, or demon. It also gave you the power to cast magic spells.

  The creation of blinders was the first spell most Darklings learned. A blinder wall privatized a room. No sound or light escaped through the wall, ensuring that no one outside could spy on what happened within. A top-notch wizard could even shut out clairvoyance and other scrying magic, but that was difficult and invited escalation. Better blinders encouraged others to develop better intrusion spells, etc., etc.

  The blinder wall in front of me definitely wasn’t top of the line. After all, we’d heard the explosion, so the blinder wasn’t strong enough to suppress the sound of the blast. Either the blinder was weak, or the explosion had been so huge it could be heard despite being muffled.

  I reached out and touched the blackness. It felt like nothing at all. The wall blocked my nerve impulses, just like it blocked light and sound. If I reached through, somebody could chop off my hand and I wouldn’t know until I’d pulled the stump of my wrist back to where the pain could finally flow to my brain.

  I really hoped that hadn’t happened. I didn’t pull my hand back.

  Instead I took a breath and forced myself to step into the blackness. For an instant, I sensed precisely nothing. Then momentum carried me through the blinder and I saw what it had been hiding.

  A RIFT/GATEWAY/HOLE IN REALITY

  The portal that hovered in the middle of the lab was archetypically yonic in shape … or if you prefer, it was a football standing on end: taller than it was wide, with sharp points at the top and bottom. Copper gas spilled in torrents over the rift’s bottom lip. The stinking vapor splashed to the floor as a continuous cascade, then swirled outward in all directions. The world beyond the rift gave off enough light for us to see that brownish mist filled the place—no solid ground or other features, just that unending fog giving everything a rusty tint.

  The six Darklings I’d seen were floating in the mist. They seemed weightless, turning slowly at different heights and angles. Their eyes were closed, their bodies relaxed. I could see the were-beasts breathing, so I assumed all six were asleep, not totally dead.

  Flickers of light danced around them, like fireflies but all colors. Reds and blues, whites and blacks, golds and silvers. Moving sparkles brushed against the Darklings’ bodies and wove about them like the birds making Cinderella’s dress; patterns and orbits of light like an atom’s electron clouds.

  Where the lights touched the Darklings, they left no burns or wounds, but they bristled with power. The longer I watched, the lights seemed less like fireflies and more like bees: calm for the moment, but with dangerous potential.

  ALL THIS TIME, I’D BEEN HOLDING MY BREATH

  The vapor in the room came up to my thighs, despite the constant spillage into the hall. My nostrils felt chafed; if I inhaled, I knew the gas would sting all the way to my bronchia. I folded my scarf several times and pressed it to my mouth, hoping the multiple layers of cloth would filter more toxins. “What do we do?” I asked through the scarf. “Go through the rift and get the Darklings? Or just leave them in there?”

  Miranda had pulled a woolen toque from the pocket of her coat. (She always carried that toque but never wore it—s
he liked to pretend she was prudent, but when push came to shove, Miranda would rather her ears freeze than wear an unflattering hat.) She covered her mouth with the toque and said, “Do you want to barge into an unknown world with a poisonous atmosphere? I don’t. And the Darklings don’t seem to be in distress.”

  Shar said, “We can’t just walk away.” No effort to cover her mouth or filter the air. Chemists!

  “These Darklings opened a rift and jumped inside,” Miranda said. “Whatever they’re up to, they chose it.”

  “Hey,” Jools shouted. She’d gone around to the other side of the rift and was out of sight behind it. “There’s a weird machine back here. Kind of like a movie projector. It’s shining a light into the back of the hole. I think it’s transmitting energy to keep the portal open.”

  “Is there a plug?” Shar asked.

  “A cable into a wall socket.”

  “If we pull the plug,” Shar said, “the hole might close.”

  I said, “Then the Darklings won’t have a way out.”

  “We don’t have to do a thing,” Miranda said. “The situation is stable and nine-one-one is on the way. Let’s leave this to professionals with gas masks.”

  The portal chose that moment to pulse: a drumbeat so loud, I felt it in my chest. The rift opened wider. Its top shot upward, almost reaching the ceiling. The copper gas spilling into our world became a gusher.

  “Fuck,” Miranda said.

  “You jinxed it, dude,” Jools told her. “You said things were stable.”

  Shar asked, “Now do we pull the plug?”

  Another pulse: boom! This one I felt through my entire body—a shock wave that popped my ears. Chunks of concrete rained from the ceiling. The rift’s pointed top had spiked through the roof, and the pierced section of roofing material broke into pieces. Objects in our reality apparently couldn’t stand the touch of another realm of existence.

  Shar and Miranda yelled in unison, “Pull the plug!”

  “Give me a sec,” Jools replied.

  But Fate wasn’t in a giving mood.