High above the Market, obscured by falling snow, hovered a man coated in metal. Adam Popigai had come to survey his handiwork.
HE WAS TOO FAR AWAY TO SEE CLEARLY
My vision still wasn’t a hundred percent, but I could make out his steel exterior—exactly the same surface as the replicator that had just destroyed itself. Popigai wore no clothes except his skin/armor, and his face appeared featureless. He reminded me of an Oscar statuette: sleekly anonymous.
I might not have been able to see him well, but I felt his Halo clearly. Anarchic. The gleeful Bad Boy.
Inside me, Kimmi said, “Meow.” Oh, stop, I told her. Teenagers!
As I watched, Popigai raised his hand. His arm turned to crystal from the elbow down to the fingers. A hole opened in his palm, about the size of a quarter. Out shot a missile no bigger than a Magic Marker, heading straight for the Market.
Damn!
The missile was small, but I had no doubt it carried enough firepower to knock down the ravaged building. Clearly, Popigai wanted a bloodbath. One way or another, he intended to get it.
I SNATCHED THE SILVER DAGGER FROM MY BELT
The knife had already shown me it could move on its own. My perception automatically switched into laser-targeting mode. The sights weren’t trained on the missile, but on empty air; I hoped they were showing me the trajectory that the dagger had to travel in order to intercept the missile. I held the knife in my right hand and plunged its blade into my left palm—lots of blood for fuel. Then I hurled the dagger as hard as I could.
No way was I strong or accurate enough to throw a knife and hit a rocket in midair. But the silver knife knew its business. It was also much faster than it should have been, given my pathetic throw. Even as the dagger was leaving my hand, I could feel it accelerate, pulling me forward until I released my grip.
The blade flew straight and true. It hit the missile like a hawk striking a sparrow.
Yet another explosion. But the dagger had moved so quickly, the blast was closer to Popigai than the Market. He was rocked by the detonation. His steely surface briefly transformed into shining crystal before flicking back into metal.
It was the same crystal his arm became when he fired the missile.
Crystal like the casing of the first rift machine.
Crystal like that object we’d found in the lab: the one the size of a birthday candle, steel on one end, morphing smoothly to glassy brilliance on the other.
“Oh fuck,” I said. “Fuck.”
*FACE-PALM*
For a geology student, I’d been painfully thickheaded. I should have recognized the name “Popigai” immediately. It’s a place in Siberia: a meteor crater where the heat and pressure of the impact transformed local graphite into diamonds. The Russians claimed that Popigai held more diamonds than any other site on Earth.
And “Adam” … in Latin, “adamas” means “diamond.” Mineralogists use the word “adamantine” to describe crystals with the brilliance of diamonds.
We weren’t just dealing with a random Mad Genius. He’d disguised himself with a steel exterior, but “Adam Popigai” was a blatant cover name for Diamond: the most lethal, Maddest Genius in the world.
DIAMOND HOVERED IN THE SKY ABOVE ME: TWINKLE, TWINKLE
Diamond’s face was inscrutable under his blank steel facade. Was he furious because his missile hadn’t worked? Or just coolly assessing the situation? I couldn’t tell. He hovered, unreadable.
I held out my hand. The silver dagger flew and slapped into my palm, like a scalpel being handed to a surgeon. I waited.
After a long pause, Diamond’s feet transformed from steel to crystal. Flames shot out of boot-jets. He rocketed southward toward Waterloo. Within a heartbeat, he was beyond the range of my perception.
I slumped, feeling as if I’d just run a marathon. “Uh, Zircon,” Ninety-Nine said in my ear, “whatcha doin’ with the knife?”
I YANKED MY VIEWPOINT HOME
Ninety-Nine’s back had healed from baked red to her normal color. She was in the process of tying the remains of her jersey to her shoulder pads, knotting the cloth around the fiberglass to hold her shirt up. As she worked, she said, “Did naughty Zircon do some shoplifting? Hey, have you gone deaf?”
I realized I wasn’t facing her. I could see her perfectly well without turning my head, and I felt so drained I hadn’t bothered to move. I hadn’t even known which way my physical eyes pointed.
I had only been super a few hours, and I was already losing normal human responses. Not good. I wondered if every Spark went down a slippery slope.
I aimed my eyes toward Ninety-Nine. It felt unnatural, like when you meet someone you really don’t want to look at and you force yourself to do it anyway.
I said, “I needed the knife to sabotage the replicator. I needed all the knives.”
Ninety-Nine nodded toward my blood-smeared palm. “You also need a course in knife safety. Cut away from your hands, not toward them.”
“The daggers don’t work unless … you know.”
“Magic. Fucking magic.” Ninety-Nine shook her head. “Be careful with that shit. You have no idea what those knives are drinking besides blood. And unlike me, you’re stuck in the old-fashioned ‘natural healing’ paradigm.” She nodded toward my cuts. “Sparks heal faster than normal people, but those’ll still take ages to go away.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “But…” I knelt beside Aria. She was unconscious, and her burns hadn’t regenerated. As Ninety-Nine had said, Sparks usually recover more quickly than ordinary human beings, but with burns like Aria’s, she still faced a long time in the hospital.
“Thanks for reminding me,” Ninety-Nine said. She reached into her belt and pulled out a vial containing cherry-red fluid, just like the one I’d seen at the auction.
“A healing potion?” I said. “Where’d you get it?”
“Salvaged it off some demon made of wood who was going up in flames. While I was putting out the fire … uhh … two of those potion bottles fell right out of his pockets. Cuz, like, his pockets were burned and couldn’t hold stuff anymore.”
I said, “You picked the pockets of a guy who was on fire?”
“Hey, I put him out first. And if he’d been conscious, I know he would have given them to me in gratitude for saving his life.” She handed me the vial. “Use that on Aria. I’ll take the other to Dakini. They need this more badly than you do.”
She moved quickly toward the stairs. I lifted Aria’s upper body, tucked my knee underneath her to maintain elevation, and poured the red fluid down her throat.
MAGIC WORKS LIKE MAGIC
When Ninety-Nine heals, it’s conventional healing on fast-forward. (By now, I’ve watched it several times close-up, internally and microscopically. Zircon, the human MRI!) Ninety-Nine’s cells grow over her wounds and restore underlying damage. Broken bones get reset as if by invisible hands, then the fractured ends fuse together. When Ninety-Nine rids herself of a bullet, tissues around the slug slowly squeeze it out of her flesh. It looks like time-lapse photography.
But the magic healing potion didn’t try to mimic normality. Its effects looked more like a transformation in old movies, where the “before” picture blurs for a moment and then you get the “after.” Beast turns into a prince? Just beast-then-blur-then-man, with no attempt at joining the dots.
Aria’s burns didn’t heal, they just blur-morphed into health. It took at most two seconds, like in a game where your hit points rise to full and you’re good to go. Apart from the wreckage to her costume, Aria suddenly looked fresh from the spa. Even her hair unmussed itself, blurring from rat’s nest to salon.
Aria’s eyes snapped open. I was still holding her, one hand behind her head, the other holding the vial to her mouth. She shoved the vial aside. “What are you doing?”
“Uhh, giving you a healing potion?”
She glared. “Don’t be … oh.” The classical phrase is “everything came flooding back to her,” or at leas
t that’s what it looked like: Aria remembered what had happened, and how the rules had changed. “Really?” she said. “A healing potion?”
“Yep. Totes magic.”
“Wow. Very suspension of disbelief.” She sat up and saw the remnants of her outfit. “Damn. This was a really nice dress. I’ll have to call my parents and renegotiate my clothes budget.”
“No one ever mentions how much Sparks must spend on their wardrobes,” I said. “Although now that I think about it, those posters of Tigresse always show her costume ripped to shreds.”
Aria snorted, then looked around. “I take it we won?”
I nodded. “I also learned something important. Adam Popigai is actually Diamond.”
“The Australian supervillain?”
“That’s him. I’ll spell out the details when there’s time.”
“But you sensibly shared the key fact,” Aria said, “rather than sitting on it and then getting kidnapped or killed before you could pass it on.”
I winced. “Let’s not talk about getting kidnapped or killed. That’s way past ‘tempting Fate’ and snuggling up to ‘foreshadowing’.”
WE GOT TO WORK ON EVAC
We hadn’t saved the building, we had only delayed the inevitable. Snow continued to fall; the weight on the roof kept building. There was practically no wind, yet the Market’s timbers creaked like the masts of a clipper ship in a storm. We could save any people still alive, but the Market itself couldn’t be salvaged.
Ninety-Nine had healed Dakini, so we were back to full strength. In our various ways, we transported the injured to the parking lot, with Ninety-Nine doing triage to decide which casualties needed special handling. Those people were left to Dakini, who immobilized them inside violet cocoons, then levitated them out to a covered stable where they’d be out of the snow. (The Market had stables for old-order Mennonites, who still used horse-drawn buggies to get around.)
Ninety-Nine was as strong as an Olympic weightlifter, so she had no trouble lugging people around. Her biggest problem was keeping her damaged costume from falling off during the process. Soon she “found” (stole) a poncho to cover herself up, and, looking like Clint Eastwood, she made trip after trip to the stable.
Aria did the same, but faster. There could be no doubt now that she was superhumanly strong; the old Miranda had been in good shape, but it takes more than yoga to cradle a quarter-ton were-boar as if it’s a toddler. She wasn’t one of those Sparks who could uproot oak trees and use them as baseball bats, but I knew whom I’d ask when I couldn’t get the lid off the pickles.
Well, okay: Ninety-Nine is an Olympic-level weightlifter. She can handle the pickles too. And Dakini’s telekinesis can lift a truck, albeit slowly.
I’m the only one who sucks.
I don’t like pickles anyway.
FOR PICKLE-JAR REASONS, MY ROLE IN THE EVAC WAS TO STAY OUT OF THE WAY
Pending the onset of belly muscles and an action-hero physique, I wasn’t much use in carting people to safety. Instead, I searched the building for threats and bennies.
No sign of Nicholas, nor the Widow, nor Elaine. Nicholas could still be hanging around invisibly, but the Widow and Elaine must have left by a fire escape. Either that, or they’d simply used magic. I wasn’t sure what spells Elaine knew, but the Vandermeers had appointed her the family’s next Master Wizard if and when Grandpa Vandermeer got put in a coffin permanently. Elaine could likely toss off a teleportation spell as easily as biting a jugular.
My search did turn up the Goblin. I thought he’d be hurrying to move his merchandise before the building collapsed, or maybe he’d just be moaning with his head in his hands. Instead he sat alone near the buffet, sipping from a purple teacup.
He didn’t look frantic or shell-shocked. He exuded the air of an introverted child who withdrew when the world got too noisy.
I’d never met a Darkling whose Shadow was so mild. Even ones who looked like children had a disquieting edge. When it suited their purposes, they could make a show of innocence, but they never fully committed to the deception. They always retained a tiny knowing smirk.
But the Goblin seemed truly childlike, like Piglet in Winnie-the-Pooh. I told myself it was only an act—he was a Darkling; he was dangerous. But I couldn’t force myself to believe it. Every time I thought, His Shadow is totally leading me around by the nose, I looked at him and said, “Awww.”
I wanted to give him a hug, and I’m not a person who hugs. I’m small and don’t like feeling engulfed.
But the Goblin was smaller than me, so hugging him would be okay.
SUDDENLY, I WAS STANDING BESIDE HIM
I didn’t remember deciding to approach him, but there I was. I almost hugged him, I really did. But I had enough self-control to walk around to the other side of his little table and sit across from him.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Zircon.”
“Hello, Zircon,” he said. “Thank you for saving my market.”
“It’s not saved, not really. This building could collapse at any time. You should go outside where it’s safe.”
“But all my stuff is here.”
“I can start hauling it out; at least the things light enough for me to carry. If the building falls on me, there’s no problem.” I tapped a fingernail on my stony skin. “I’m tough.”
“You don’t have to carry anything,” the Goblin said. “It will all disappear at dawn.”
I should have thought of that. Of course, that’s how a Goblin Market had to work. Probably a prearranged spell would teleport everything back to some warehouse. I said, “The building may not last till dawn.”
“I know.”
He sounded so sad, I nearly leapt up and hugged him. That hug loomed larger and larger in my mind, like a cookie you’ve sworn not to eat till you finish an assignment. I said, “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help?”
“Not that I can think of.” He brightened. “But I can help you. For being so brave and kind.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Yes, I do. You’re sort of messy.” He wrinkled his nose. With 360-degree vision, I couldn’t help seeing the blood and other effluents smeared all over my costume. “Your teammates too,” the Goblin said. “They’re all torn up. I’ll make you new costumes. With magic. I’m good at magic.”
“I’m sure you are.” I was beginning to think of this childlike Darkling as a savant: a one-track mind focused entirely on making enchanted things, without the usual Darkling hunger for power and status. I said, “We can fix our costumes on our own. Ninety-Nine is an Olympic-level seamstress. She’s very good at sewing.”
“She’s not magic,” the Goblin said. “Besides, sewing takes time when you could be saving people. And what if somebody bad tries to do stuff while your clothes are in the wash? I could enchant your costumes so they mend and clean themselves. Wouldn’t that be good?”
I couldn’t help nodding. I was Zircon, not Kim, but both of us hated spending time on clothes. A costume that would maintain itself? So I didn’t have to waste any effort, or ask for help from my roomies? No devil could have devised a stronger temptation.
It was hard for my brain to say, “There must be strings attached.” The poor little Goblin wanted so badly to thank us, it was cruel not to let him.
“Okay,” I said. “Go ahead.”
THE GOBLIN BEAMED WITH DELIGHT
He poured four dollops of liquid from his teacup onto the tablecloth. The liquid made chalky white stains on the purple fabric. (I wondered what the liquid was. Probably not milk.)
The Goblin touched one of the stains with his purple finger. “This one is for Zircon.” He touched another. “This one is for Ninety-Nine. What are your other friends called?”
“Dakini and Aria.”
He smiled. “Pretty.” He tapped one of the remaining blobs. “This is for Dakini. And this is for Aria.”
On the tablecloth, the blobs shifted and refocused, changing into white icons. Aria: an eighth not
e. Dakini: three open eyes arranged in an equilateral triangle. Ninety-Nine: the number with a hockey stick threaded through the openings in the two 9s. Zircon: a classic round brilliant–cut diamond (i.e., the shape most commonly associated with diamonds set in rings—faceted on the top, pointed on the bottom).
I sighed. If the Goblin was using a diamond to represent me, he was likely confusing zircons with cubic zirconia. Why didn’t anyone know the difference? But that brought something else to mind. I said, “You had a consignment here, sponsored by a man who called himself Adam Popigai. Popigai is actually the Mad Genius called Diamond. He’s the one responsible for all the destruction.”
“Really?” the Goblin said. “I’ll put him on the blacklist.”
“Can you tell me about your dealings with Popigai?”
“No,” he said like a petulant child. “I hate dealings. My staff deal with dealings. I just make things.”
He bent over the table and breathed on the tea-blob icons. They trembled as if they were tiny mice, not inanimate stains. The Goblin breathed again, and a purple glow misted out of his mouth. The icons soaked up the glow like humidity, then lifted off the linen and shot into the air.
The diamond flew straight at me, striking my chest above my heart. Purple energy splashed outward, covering my costume all the way to the tip of my top hat. The purple burned brightly, blazing into every piece of my outfit. Light flooded into the fibers, then disappeared, taking with it every speck of dirt, blood, and dishevelment that the clothes had acquired. My costume became an ad for laundry detergent: whiter than white, better than new, and cuddly warm as if straight from the dryer.
The other icons headed from the tablecloth toward my teammates. Just as the potion had magically healed Aria, I could imagine the purple magic restoring everyone’s costume.
I felt good about that. Only later did it dawn on me: I’d accepted a “gift” just like that girl in the Goblin Market poem. Oops.
“THERE,” THE GOBLIN SAID, “YOUR CLOTHES WILL BE GOOD FOREVER AND EVER”
“Thank you,” I said. “You’re very kind.” I tried to intensify my Halo—make myself more majestic. “But I really need to know anything you can tell me about Adam Popigai.”
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