All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault

by James Alan Gardner

  But I took a long look at her. Derek said she hadn’t changed a bit since that night in the roadhouse: young and surgically beautiful, with her hair in dozens of colors.

  Even Kimmi felt Lilith’s allure. But Kimmi also wanted to scream and run and hide. Lilith’s Shadow projected a chill that stood out even in a room full of Darklings. Nicholas told me later that he felt it as strongly as I did. He’d lived around Darklings all his life, but back then, he was still human and Lilith scared him shitless. His hand trembled on the controls of his chair, and he nearly drove over someone in his haste to get away.

  We fled to his room. He was under orders to stay at the party, but he disobeyed and left. Very softly, whispering even though we were alone, he said, “There’s something very wrong with her. The others can’t feel it—they’re Darklings themselves. But I think Lilith is abyssing.”

  DARKLINGS ARE POTENTIALLY IMMORTAL

  They don’t age, they don’t get sick, and they can heal from almost any damage. Only beheading, incineration, and other such trauma will kill them (although specific Darklings may have quirky vulnerabilities, like certain werewolves and their problem with silver).

  In practice, though, Darklings don’t live forever. They may live a very long time, but sooner or later, they “abyss”: go bestial, catatonic, or delusional, sometimes turning so monstrous that they commit atrocities in front of non-Darkling witnesses.

  Usually, the decline is a slow progression. First, little slips of the tongue (saying “cattle” instead of “people”). Then, carelessness in hiding inhuman behavior (not making enough effort to conceal bloodstains on one’s clothing). Then, a genuine inability to understand how normal people live (offering raw deer intestines as a tip to a bellboy). One way or another, Darklings lose touch or control.

  Of course, they all believe they’re too strong to succumb—that’s why people continue to pay for the Dark Conversion despite the potential downside. And the Elders of the Dark are living proof that Darklings can live for centuries without losing their minds. Even so, every year a handful of Darklings abandon all sense of restraint.

  When that happens, the Elders protect the Dark’s reputation by whatever means necessary: reeducation, punishment, or worse. Particularly serious problems are resolved with quiet finality by a group called the Dark Guard.

  Because if the Dark doesn’t handle their own rabid dogs, the Light forcefully takes up the slack.

  NICHOLAS HAD BEEN AFRAID LILITH WAS PLUNGING INTO THE ABYSS

  Her Shadow was hyperprojecting, even at a social event. It seemed she was burning out.

  Three years had passed since then, and Lilith was still alive—as alive as a vampire can be. That was surprising. Also surprising that she’d turned up at the University of Waterloo.

  With a tranquilizer rifle in her hands.

  Which she’d fired at Richard without warning.

  And which she was hastily reloading.

  BUT I SMILED

  Lilith had targeted Richard first. I supposed since he was a guy, Lilith considered him the biggest threat.

  Let this be a lesson about gender assumptions.

  I LOOKED MORE CLOSELY AT LILITH’S COMPANIONS

  The skeleton in the tracksuit seemed nothing but bones. He’d left his jacket unzipped so we’d be in no doubt: no flesh on his ribs, no organs in his chest. Only ligaments held him together—ligaments and magic. I assumed he had demonic powers, but I couldn’t guess what they were. Mythology and folklore are full of bone demons, all with different ways to do you harm. Besides, Mr. Skinless might not match any historic precedents; many Darkling demons are brand-new one-offs.

  The demon’s face was covered with mud: a pale clay caked on his bones and smeared over his nose hole to close the gap. His mouth and eye sockets were highlighted with thick black circles. I couldn’t tell if he’d put them on as war paint, or if the mud and the circles were a permanent part of him. He’d drawn a swastika on his forehead with red lipstick, and it seemed to glow, but maybe that was only a trick of my Spark-o-Vision.

  The were-bat was like any other you’ve seen: huge leathery wings, a furry body, and a face only a chiropterologist could love. When I say “bat,” you might be picturing something small. Nuh-uh. Imagine a grizzly bear with wings. Wicked claws. Sharp teeth. But somehow as light as a bird, hopping airily up and down in anticipation of carnage.

  Lastly, Lilith, a vampire. She wasn’t as brutally frightening as I remembered from the party, but I put that down to my newfound status as a Spark. The Light confers resistance to a Darkling’s Shadow; Sparks aren’t completely immune to Shadow influence, but we’re far less susceptible than normal humans.

  So I could look at Lilith without cringing. Even so, what I saw made me wince. Her incisors had grown long enough to protrude over her lower lip.

  Your world may not have vampires—at least not out in the open—so maybe you’re fang-naive. Most of the time, vamp teeth look normal, but when vampires are aroused, they get a fang-on.

  Yeah. Ew.

  It isn’t just when a vampire craves blood: The fangs come jutting out at any sight of cruelty. Even worse, vampires don’t feel sheepish when it happens. One of Nicholas’s cousins told me, “Kimmi, everyone feels the same. Human, vampire, whoever. Everybody gets turned on when someone else takes a hit. They’re down and you’re not, which means you’re ahead. Everyone gets off on the thrill. With us, it just shows.”

  That’s how the Dark think. On one hand, they’re certain they’re special. On the other, they believe that secretly, everyone feels the same ugly urges they do. “We’re not different, just more up-front. That makes us better.”

  I SAW ONE LAST THING: LILITH’S TRANQ GUN

  I have experience with tranquilizer rifles. Since my father worked for Banff National Park, I hung around the park HQ. The rangers showed me the tranq rifles they used when bears wouldn’t stay out of town. I wasn’t allowed to fire the guns, but I was shown how they worked and was taught the dos and don’ts.

  Naturally, I asked what would happen if you tranqed a human. The rangers joked about shooting idiot tourists, but then answered my question seriously. “Kimberley, people vary a lot in sensitivity to sedatives. A dose that barely slows one person down might kill somebody else.” So darting Richard was reckless. Even now, he might be overdosing.

  That’s what Kimberley learned from the rangers. Years later, Kimmi learned more about tranq guns from Derek Vandermeer. What he told me had more bearing on Lilith.

  Why would a vampire own a tranq gun? To hunt humans for blood. Vamps tranq the homeless in alleys, or shoot people walking alone. Attacking hand to hand is dangerous, if only because a vampire might get caught up in the moment and rip out someone’s throat. Tranqing a victim keeps the situation controlled, and you still get a thrill from the hunt.

  Best of all, you don’t have to pay for the drink. You’d be amazed how Darklings resent paying trickle-down. “Why should I give my hard-earned cash to filthy parasites? Those deadbeats don’t have to work to make blood: Blood just happens, even to the laziest human alive.”

  Paying for blood was rewarding indolence. It wasn’t about the money, it was the principle of the thing.

  “HEY!” MIRANDA SHOUTED

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Lilith heard the shout and looked up from loading the rifle. The were-bat took an eager step forward; with the lift from his wings, he bounced as if he were walking on a trampoline. The skeleton laced his fingers and stretched, as if cracking his knuckles before getting down to work.

  “Answer me!” Miranda said. She couldn’t see the Darklings because they were still around the corner. “Who are you and what do you want?”

  “There’s no point explaining,” Lilith called back. “Shut up and let us finish.”

  “You want to dart us all?” Miranda asked.

  “That’s the plan,” Lilith said.

  “Get a Plan B.”

  “Got one,” Lili
th said. She turned her eyes toward the skeleton and the were-bat. The skeleton gave a Jolly Roger grin. The were-bat flexed his claws. “But,” Lilith told Miranda, “you’ll wish you’d stayed with Plan A.”

  SOMETHING FLUTTERED AGAINST MY HEAD

  Like being brushed by a moth. My Spark-o-Vision snapped back from around the corner to home base, where a tendril of violet had just penetrated my skull.

  I tried to jerk away. More violet strands appeared, reaching out from Shar’s forehead, holding my head like being clamped in an MRI machine.

  “Don’t fight,” Shar said. “Go back to watching the Darklings. I want to see.”

  “Darklings?” Miranda said. “We’re being attacked by Darklings?”

  “Shh!” Shar said. “I’m trying to concentrate. Kim, would you please stop resisting?”

  I couldn’t have stopped struggling even if I’d wanted. Claustrophobia: that judo-hold panic I’d felt with Hannah. I threw myself at Shar, ready to scratch, bite, and gouge, but that violet shell surrounded her and my fingernails skittered off like scraping on steel.

  “Stop it!” Shar snapped.

  A blob of violet came gulping down the tendril that connected her head to mine, like an embolism squeezing through an artery. When it reached me, I could feel it injected into my brain …

  Then I went dead.

  IMAGINE WHAT IT’S LIKE TO HAVE NO EMOTIONS

  Peaceful? No.

  Numb? Getting closer.

  Violated? Oh, yes. But with your emotions dead, it’s not an outrage, it’s just an adverse position in game theory.

  The game theory response: retribution. Possible strategies: anything, no matter how extreme. My first move should obviously be to stomp Richard in the throat and crush his windpipe. If Shar’s force field prevented a direct assault, I’d have to hurt her indirectly.

  I took a step in Richard’s direction. I stopped when Miranda yelled, “Gun!”

  LILITH HAD FINISHED RELOADING

  She’d thrust the muzzle of the rifle around the corner again. She fired almost immediately, perhaps hoping we wouldn’t have time to react.

  That was a miscalculation. The moment the dart left the rifle, a strand of violet snatched it from the air. The strand reversed the dart and slammed it hard into Lilith’s leg, exactly where the first dart had hit Richard.

  Shar was Buddhist. She believed in karma.

  LILITH WASN’T THE ONLY ONE WHO’D MISCALCULATED

  Shar had split her powers between her force field, her suppression of my emotions, and her trick catching the dart. She was new to being super and had spread her strength too thin. Her grip on my brain weakened and a flicker of anger managed to rise inside me. I dispassionately fed that anger with all the energy I had.

  It was like trying to lift something far too heavy, but I fought with all my strength. Something broke—I actually heard a crack. Like an earthquake fault slipping when the pressure becomes too great, my emotions surged back with a lurch.

  Shar slumped to the ground, unconscious.

  I NEARLY KICKED SHAR IN THE HEAD

  She was down. She was helpless. I wanted to hurt her so badly.

  But I remembered how matter-of-factly I had planned to kill Richard. Was that really who I was underneath everything else?

  Vomit stung my throat. Horror at myself replaced my fury at Shar. I wanted to crawl into a hole … to completely shrink out of the world …

  When you’re a brand-new Spark, be careful what you wish for.

  I SHRANK TO THE SIZE OF A HOUSEFLY

  That horror and self-loathing? It popped like a bubble.

  A boggled mind can only hold so much.

  THERE ARE TWO WAYS TO LOOK AT WHAT HAPPENED

  (I’ve thought about this a lot.)

  Maybe I was destined to be a shrinker from the moment the Light entered me. Maybe wanting to shrink from the world triggered a power I already had.

  But maybe my thought about shrinking determined what my power would be. Sparks are apparently malleable after they’re imbued by the Light; for a while, internal and external conditions can influence the final result. If I’d thought, “I want to disappear,” perhaps I would have become invisible. “I want to run away” might have turned me into a speedster, able to run as fast as lightning.

  I’ve learned a lot about the Light since becoming a Spark, but I still don’t know why our powers take the shape they do. It isn’t totally random: You’ll soon see what happened to Miranda. But if I were tall instead of short, would I be able to grow ten stories high instead of shrinking down to nothing?

  I don’t know. But temperamentally, I’m not suited to be a giant. I’m low profile, not “Hey, look at me.”

  Character is destiny, and the Light multiplies that by a billion.

  MY SPARK-O-VISION CHANGED SCALE WHEN I DID

  The pavement around me previously seemed smooth. Now, it was as craggy as a rockslide, with huge fissures between lumps of black asphalt. The minivan towered above me, as tall as the walls of a canyon. The buildings were distant mountains, far off but enormous.

  Jools was beyond a colossus. She’d been standing right next to me, taking cover behind the van. Now, her leg was a skyscraper; I was shorter even than the sole of her sandal. If Jools took a step in my direction, she’d squash me so flat I wouldn’t leave a smudge.

  On the plus side, my clothes had shrunk too. I wasn’t standing naked under a heap of empty overalls while trapped at the bottom of a hiking boot.

  You might ask, was I seriously worried about nudity when I had shrunk to the size of a bug?

  Yes. I was a science student, and I knew I was far below the minimum size where warm-blooded creatures can survive. The smaller you are, the greater your surface area relative to your volume. The higher that ratio, the more heat you lose to cold air. The smallest mammal is the bumblebee bat, about three centimeters long; any smaller and mammals can’t sustain their body heat, even in the tropics.

  I was half a centimeter tall, and Waterloo wasn’t close to the equator. Even with clothes on, I’d likely die of hypothermia.

  But at least I wouldn’t die in the buff. Em-bare-ass-ing.

  I DIDN’T KNOW HOW LONG BEFORE I FROZE

  But if Jools so much as shuffled her feet, the cold would become irrelevant. I had to scurry someplace I wouldn’t get stepped on, and the obvious refuge was under the van.

  I tried to bolt to safety. I took a single running step.

  HERE’S WHAT I DISCOVERED ON THAT VERY FIRST STEP

  No matter how small I shrink, I’m as strong as normal.

  Don’t try to invent a scientific rationale—you’ll only hurt your brain. Just smile and nod. “Yes, Kim, whatever you say.” Because it’s true.

  I weighed less than a gram. My urgent running step was powered by leg muscles that usually propelled a hundred thousand times more mass.

  I shot up like a rocket. That’s not a figure of speech. I launched off the ground with a stupid amount of thrust. By the time air resistance stopped me, I was high above the alley, with a bird’s-eye view of the scene. My vision was still scaled to the size of an insect, so it seemed as if I were up at an airplane’s cruising altitude.

  I was, of course, falling … but just barely. I was almost as light as a feather, so the breeze buoyed me up. Eventually I’d settle to the ground like a snowflake. For the moment, however, I floated, gazing down on the action below.

  AROUND THE CORNER, LILITH LOOKED PISSED OFF

  The dart in her leg didn’t faze her. A single dose of tranq juice couldn’t possibly knock out a Darkling. Besides, vampire blood doesn’t circulate—vampire hearts don’t beat. So the sedative from the dart would mostly stay at the site of injection. It would take many hours to diffuse through the rest of her body and have any tranquilizing effect.

  Lilith gestured to the were-bat and skeleton. “Go.”

  THE WERE-BAT TOOK TO THE AIR

  With a single flap of his wings, he rounded the corner. As far as he k
new, he’d been out of sight until this moment, so he paused in the alley’s mouth, his wings spread wide, deliberately casting an intimidating silhouette. To add to the effect, he pumped power into his Shadow and loosed a screech like a hawk that needed oiling.

  Miranda rolled her eyes. She turned off her force field, lifted her hand, and made a “bring it on” gesture.

  The bat plunged forward. With his wings outspread, he could barely fit into the narrow alley, but that didn’t slow him down. He dived headfirst at Miranda; his open mouth showed dozens of sharp white teeth. He looked more shark than bat. For all I knew, he could sprout additional fangs on demand—some were-beasts have tricks like that. They seem like simple maulers, only able to bite and scratch, but then they sneak out a magic power that takes you by surprise. Breathing fire, teleportation, nasty impossible stunts.

  But this bat was going straight aggro, aiming to chomp Miranda’s face. She waited until he reached point-blank range. Then she opened her mouth and sang.

  THE NOTE SHE SANG WAS A CONE OF GOLDEN LIGHT

  It emerged from Miranda’s mouth as bright as molten metal. It shot straight into the bat’s face.

  The force of the sound wave crumpled the bat’s snout and flattened his huge pointed ears back against his skull. Such a focused sonic blast would have hurt almost anything, but a keen-eared, light-boned bat had to be categorized under “Targets: Ideal.” Its fur nearly peeled back from its face.

  The bat’s nosedive was stopped by the sonic hammerblow. Before the bat could bounce backward, Miranda moved shockingly fast and grabbed the Darkling by the fur under his jaw. She heaved him up and over her head, sending him crashing into the van behind her.

  By then, Jools was in position to take over. She caught one of the bat’s legs in both her hands, and swung. The Darkling’s wings provided some drag, but Jools still slammed the bat downward into a face-plant on the pavement. The resulting crunch should have been sickening; really, it should have been. But I didn’t have time to think about my delight at the sound of a guy being hurt, because suddenly, I was struck by a boom of thunder.

  It was the backwash of Miranda’s blast echoing off nearby buildings. Think about that for a moment: In the time it took for a wave of sound to travel a few dozen meters, both Miranda and Jools had pounded on the bat. Super-fights happen fast—much faster than I can describe them. Also note that my own speed of mind was fast enough to watch what my super-roommates did and to analyze each movement.