All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault

by James Alan Gardner

  “Of what?” Miranda asked.

  Grandfather sighed. “Say a Mad Genius plans something bad elsewhere in the city. He sends a big dumb car-crusher to draw everybody to the harbor. It pulls in police, Sparks, even Darklings trying to make themselves look good by beating on a monstrosity. Meanwhile, the Mad Genius is miles away, making his real play.”

  “Miles away,” Shar said. “Perhaps Waterloo?”

  “That’s the problem with distractions,” Grandfather said. “You can’t tell where the real attack’ll be. Doesn’t matter either: This kraken may be a time waster, but we still gotta deal with it. You have any idea how many people live on Toronto’s waterfront? And God knows how many billion dollars’ worth of property.”

  “So you’re leaving?” Miranda asked.

  “Got to,” Grandfather said. “We’re Toronto’s guardians. Besides”—he smiled at us all with a look of so much grandfatherly affection, I could barely resist throwing myself at him for a great big hug—“you four can handle whatever’s happening here.”

  “How do you know?” Jools asked. “We could totally suck at being guardians. It’s not like we have training or experience. Maybe we don’t even care about doing the right thing. We’re just four random people who received powers by a fluke.”

  “That’s how the Light works,” Grandfather said. “It supers up everyday people and trusts ’em to do what needs doing. Surprisingly often, they do.”

  “Except for supervillains,” Miranda said.

  “Every family has black sheep. And even villains can come through in a pinch. This lake monster in Toronto? If things go too pear-shaped, we got bad guys who’ll lend a hand.”

  “Canadian bad guys,” Shar said. “Villainous but civic-minded.”

  “Nah,” Grandfather said, “they just love stomping the crap out of things. But we take what help we can get.” He lifted his top hat and gave a bow. “Nice making your acquaintance. I’m sure we’ll meet again. At which point I trust you’ll be suitably attired.”

  “Fucking masks,” Miranda muttered.

  “They’re important. They have power.” Grandfather put his hat back on and swept his finger along the brim in a little salute. “Walk in the Light, granddaughters.”

  He laid his hand on Invie’s head. I hadn’t even noticed the dog come up beside him—very odd, considering my power of sight. Could Invie make himself invisible? Or did Grandfather have the power to become the center of attention so that you ignored everything else?

  What powers did the two of them have? What made them so nonchalant about facing this kraken? I had trouble picturing either of them punching a giant squid.

  But Grandfather was smiling hugely as he and the hound disappeared.

  7

  Ground Truthing*

  LEFT ALONE IN THE LAB, WE LOOKED AT EACH OTHER

  “What now?” Jools asked.

  “I guess we search,” I said.

  “For what?” Miranda asked. “Not only has everything been smashed and burnt, but somebody clearly rummaged through the room before we got here.”

  “We’ll find something,” Jools said. “There’s always some clue—like maybe a scrap of paper with GPS coordinates written in blood.”

  “Helloooo,” Miranda said, “that’s in stories, not the real world.”

  “Dude, we left the real world two hours ago. You can fly. Shar reads minds. I know the fine structure constant. And Kim…” She paused. “What do you do?”

  “I shrink.” I dropped to the size of a Barbie, gave a bow, then popped back up again.

  “Fuck me!” Jools said.

  “Do you know how impossible that is?” Miranda asked. “How can it work? Do your atoms get closer together?”

  “No,” I said, “because my mass goes down too.”

  “Maybe you’re losing atoms,” Jools suggested.

  “That can’t be,” Shar said. “Kim’s made up of complex molecules. If they lose atoms, they fall apart. Then Kim falls apart.”

  “But maybe,” Jools said, “if Kim selectively lost exactly the right molecules in exactly the right proportions—”

  “Ahem!” I said loudly. They clearly hadn’t paid enough attention to Grandfather. “I shrink by generating an omnimorphic field that shrinks me, my clothes, the stuff in my pockets … everything. Plus anything I’m holding in my hands.”

  “What the hell is an omnimorphic field?” Miranda asked. “That’s sheer and utter…”

  I put my finger to her lips just as Grandfather had done minutes before. “I generate an omnimorphic field,” I said sternly. “It’s an amazing wonder of Science.”

  Miranda glared but took the hint. She held her tongue.

  “And I,” said Shar, “am psionically attuned to the energy flows of the universe. That allows me to make serendipitous discoveries, even in the midst of chaos. Like this lab.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s—” Miranda began, but this time, I pressed my whole hand to her lips.

  Shar grinned, then put on a deadpan earnest expression. She closed her eyes and turned in a circle, as if starting to play blindman’s bluff.

  “And I’m awesome at everything,” Jools said with a taunting look at Miranda. “Including searching. I’m the fucking queen of searching.” She too closed her eyes and started walking.

  I took my hand away from Miranda’s mouth. Under my breath, I told her, “If we have such high liminality quotients, there may be limits on what we can get away with, but I’ll bet they’re psychological. We hit the wall when trying for more feels like going too far.”

  “And if I declare that my sonic powers let me hear where evidence is hiding?”

  “You don’t believe that,” I said. “You disbelieve it so strongly, it can’t possibly work. Maybe you’ve completely set your boundaries already. But I think we’ve still got wiggle room. Our core identities are solid, but we’ve still got slack on the details.”

  Miranda looked like she was going to argue. Then she sighed and laid a hand on my arm. “Kim, you’re naturally inclined to be omnimorphic. Some of us are more constrained.”

  Suddenly, she leapt into the air and shot straight up to the ceiling. Miranda hovered for a moment with her back to what remained of the roof, like someone floating facedown in a swimming pool. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath as if steeling herself for a great effort, then sang a single piercing note. My hands flew to cover my ears, but the note ended as sharply as it began. In the ensuing silence, a single sound persisted: a ringing resonance like a small bell after it’s been struck.

  I WALKED TOWARD THE SOUND

  The ringing didn’t fade like the toll of a real bell would. It continued at the same volume, like in a movie where a phone rings endlessly in a dark empty house. As I drew nearer, I felt like the person who answers the phone and immediately gets stabbed from behind. Of course, with my Spark-o-Vision, I could see anyone creeping up on me … and suddenly I realized I could Spark-o-View the source of the ringing.

  I was close enough to tell that the sound came from a pile of charred metal and melted wires. I threaded my viewpoint through the wreckage, magnifying my sight to get a better look. Something vibrated in the middle of the heap like a plucked guitar string.

  The ringing stopped as soon as I spotted the object. Silence, eerie and thick.

  The object was the size and shape of a birthday-cake candle. One end had a metallic luster while the other was adamantine—brilliant, jewellike. The metal end resembled polished steel; it changed slowly but seamlessly along the length of the “candle,” morphing into the bright clear crystal at the opposite end.

  I’d never seen anything like it. It had no glow of power, but I couldn’t believe it was made by conventional means. This was either Cape Tech or a magical artifact.

  I PULLED MY VISION BACK INTO MY HEAD

  I swept aside debris to uncover the mysterious “candle.” As I picked it up, Miranda dropped from the ceiling and landed beside me. I held it up for her to see. “From so
me kind of machine?” she suggested.

  “Or magic,” I said. “Nothing natural could resonate that long.”

  “Might have been the effect of my powers,” Miranda said. “As it happens, I’m able to instill audible vibrations in materials that contain Light or Dark energies.”

  I smiled. “Now was that so hard? Everyone is a little omnimorphic.”

  “You wish,” Miranda replied. “I’ve been thinking of other tricks too.”

  The metal-crystal object in my hand said, “Hello, my name is Kim.” It spoke in my own voice. It didn’t sound the way I hear myself in my head, but I’ve heard enough recordings of my voice to know what I sound like. “So,” I said to Miranda, “super-ventriloquism.”

  “Sound effects in general,” she said. “I could simulate the noise of a freight train running through the room at full volume, but I don’t want to upset Jools and Shar.”

  “Now you’re getting into the spirit of things,” I said. I was about to say more when Shar announced, “Aha!”

  SHE STOOD ON A DISC OF VIOLET LIGHT HOVERING HALFWAY UP ONE WALL LIKE A WORKER ON A SCAFFOLD

  The wall was made of cinder blocks, originally painted a glossy cream color. The paint was now charred in some places, blistered with bubbles in others, and flaking off completely in many large patches. Shar pointed to an area where the bare cinder block was exposed. Miranda flew up to take a look, but I just stayed where I was and shifted my viewpoint.

  A symbol was carved into one of the blocks as deep as the inscription on a tombstone. It was an equilateral triangle, point downward: like a YIELD sign, but instead of a word in the middle, it had the ∞ infinity symbol.

  I said, “Oh hell.” I was looking at a powder keg.

  IT WAS THE MARK OF THE UNBOUND … MAYBE

  Officially, the Elders of the Dark claim that in 1982, all the Darklings of the world met in a conclave and agreed to issue the Dark Invitation. The story is a lie: There never was nor will be a time when all the Darklings agree on anything.

  The counterstory (told to me by Nicholas) was that a number of ancient vampires, were-beasts, and demons fiercely disapproved of what the majority of Elders decided. The dissenters became known as the Unbound: the bogeymen to the bogeymen. The Unbound were the enemy of conventional Darklings, always lurking in the shadows, conspiring.

  Rumors sprang up that the Unbound could liberate new Darklings from the bonds of the Dark Pact—a major attraction for many post-1982 Darklings who hated having their actions curtailed by restrictions. For the right price, the Unbound would supposedly free Darklings from all the magical geasa that prevented new Darklings from going too far.

  Of course, that didn’t make sense. Why would fierce old tyrants who didn’t want to sell the gift of Darkness in the first place then help the nouveau Dark in exchange for cash? But ignoring that contradiction, numerous Darklings began to seek out the Unbound.

  Mostly the Darklings trying to find the Unbound ran into stings set up by the Dark Guard: false fronts designed to uncover would-be defectors from the Pact. Executions swiftly followed. Yet rumors persisted that the real Unbound were out there. If they were, your family’s business rivals might no longer be bound by the Pact … in which case, they would eat your lunch.

  Nicholas told me that certain Darklings cautiously used the ∞ symbol in an attempt to attract the Unbound’s attention. Others used the symbol as a rallying sign, just as swastikas are used as symbols of rebellion by people who’ve never met a real Nazi.

  So what about the ∞ on the wall of the lab? Was it someone just trolling to make the Elders mad? Was it put there by Darkling rebels who identified with the Unbound even if they hadn’t actually met one? Or were the real Unbound connected with this somehow? Powerful, ancient entities who didn’t acknowledge the Pact or any other restraint.

  I hated all those possibilities. But some were worse than others.

  I SAID, “CAN WE GET RID OF THAT THING?”

  Its presence guaranteed an extreme Dark Guard response. I said, “Let’s use a sonic blast to wipe the wall clean.”

  Miranda glared down at me. “You mean destroy evidence?” She looked at the triangle-∞. “Evidence that will help us avoid blame for the explosion? Because a) this is way too high for us to have reached, and b) I have no idea how we could have chopped it into the wall even if we did get up here.”

  She had a point. We could have climbed a ladder to get to the symbol’s height, but the carving would have taken time and specialized tools.

  “To heck with evidence,” I decided. “There’s never going to be a trial. Look what happened with the police—that woman at the station shut them down. The Darklings have decided to hush this whole thing up.”

  “That’s the best-case scenario,” Miranda said. “But if it doesn’t happen…”

  “Then,” Shar said, “a team of brand-new Sparks will tell the media, ‘Look at that sign on the wall! Those four nice students were innocent bystanders and this is actually a plot by rebellious Darklings.’”

  She was right. We couldn’t take the symbol down. We had to leave the hornets’ nest where it was.

  JOOLS SAID, “STOP CONGRATULATING YOURSELVES; I’VE FOUND SOMETHING TOO.”

  She’d been rooting through debris near a heavy wooden table lying on its side. The table must have been heaped with papers; now the papers were scattered across the floor. The top layer was charred black, but underneath, Jools had found a massive green book that I instantly recognized: the famous “rubber bible,” otherwise known as the CRC Handbook for Physics and Chemistry.

  For decades, the Chemical Rubber Company had published handbooks containing information about everything under the sun: heats of enthalpy, logarithms, protein structures, and a million other things techies needed to know. Now, of course, they’ve moved their data online, but not so long ago, every scientist, engineer, and STEM student had to have their own CRCs. (Both my mother and father had their own CRCs, and both had tried to give me the books before I left for university. “You’ll need this; trust me.” “No, I won’t, I’ve got my phone, and if I carry fifty spare batteries, they’ll still weigh less than that.”)

  There was nothing unusual about this lab having a CRC handbook. Thousands of labs must contain abandoned CRCs, left by people who can find the same info faster using the Web. Nor was it strange that such a book had survived the explosion—it was a big honking slab of more than two thousand pages, bound by excellent rubberized covers. You’d have to work hard to ignite that sucker. The copy in Jools’s hands had a tiny bit of fire damage on the corners, but it was still mostly intact.

  As Jools walked over to join us, she hefted the book and flipped open the front cover so we could see. A name had been written on the endpapers in extravagantly fine cursive writing—the kind of penmanship that takes hundreds of hours to master, looking baroquely ornate while remaining easy to read.

  “Adam Popigai,” I said. “Never heard of him.”

  Jools glowed green. “He’s a prof in Chem Eng. Degrees from Lermontov, Princeton, and Cambridge. Hired six months ago—he got his picture in the Daily Bulletin.” She closed her eyes as if seeing the photo. I imagined she was. More and more, I suspected that Jools had a mental Internet connection with one hell of an amazing search engine. Her eyes opened. “Popigai’s skin is completely metal.”

  “So he’s either a Spark or demon.” Metal skin sounded more like science than magic, but Grandpa Tang’s woodcuts included a few cast-iron demons. “Did the Bulletin say whether Popigai was Light or Dark?”

  “That would be rude,” Shar said, which was true. As the official voice of the university, the Daily Bulletin would no more say whether someone was Light or Dark than it would casually reveal someone’s religion. You just didn’t mention such things unless they were very, very pertinent to a story.

  “If he’s a chemical engineer,” Miranda said, “he’s likely a Spark. Darklings usually avoid scientific nitty-gritty.”

  “Unless
they’re doing alchemy,” Shar put in. “With so many Darklings in the government, alchemy research receives an enormous amount of funding. Our chemistry department has hired several Darkling alchemists in an effort to acquire a share of that money. It wouldn’t surprise me if Chem Eng did the same.”

  Alchemy made me think of the “birthday candle” we’d found. The way in which it progressed so smoothly from metal to crystal might indeed indicate it had been made by alchemical transmutation.

  I still held the object; I ran my fingers along it, feeling no irregularities, no joints. What was it? What was it for?

  The simple answer was that it might be for anything, especially if it was imbued with magic. Theoretically, any object can be enchanted, but it’s easier to use high-level wizardry on specially prepared items rather than random old junk that’s lying around. If the “candle” I held was created by alchemy, it might be a talisman with extremely powerful effects.

  I set it down quickly. I shouldn’t have touched it in the first place. My annoying imagination envisioned terrible possibilities of what the “candle” might have done to me.

  “LET’S GET OUT OF HERE,” I SAID

  “Don’t you want to keep searching?” Shar asked.

  “We’ve found some interesting things,” I said, “and the longer we stay, the more chance of someone showing up. We really don’t want to be seen without masks or costumes.”

  “Masks. Costumes,” Miranda said. “Yuck.”

  “Oh, you’ll love whipping up a costume,” Jools told her. “That is totally your thing.”

  Miranda scowled, but Jools was right. Miranda was our fashion queen; clothes mattered to her almost as much as physics and opera. Once she got into outfitting mode, she’d try to make costumes for all of us. “Fine,” Miranda said. “Let’s head home.”

  With the still-unconscious Richard floating behind us, we traipsed back to the van.

  8

  Metamorphosis

  LILITH AND THE OTHERS STILL LAY WHERE THEY’D FALLEN

  Good: That likely meant no one had witnessed the fight. If we got away fast, and if Invie’s tongue had truly erased the Darklings’ memories, they’d have no clue what had happened when they finally woke up.