All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault

by James Alan Gardner

  “What’s wrong?” Ninety-Nine said. She put her hand protectively on my shoulder and looked around, trying to spot threats out in the storm. I doubt if she saw anything; the generating station was only fifty paces away, but normal vision would only have encompassed the ongoing blizzard and the snow-covered road.

  Dakini seemed to have senses that went beyond eyesight. She shot out another violet strand, crossing the distance between us and the generating station and stabbing through the building’s front door. The door burst open and Dakini yanked the Widow roughly outside.

  “WHAT THE HELL?” ARIA SAID

  Whether or not she could see what had happened, she could certainly hear it. Her force field snapped into place and she flew forward toward the sound. She stopped in midair about ten meters away from the Widow. Aria’s eyes narrowed, likely trying to decide whether to hold her fire or loose a sonic blast.

  She opted not to start a fight immediately—probably a wise choice, because the Widow’s driver, Trent, came running out of the building. He thundered through the snow and threw himself between his boss and Aria.

  He held a pistol. It wasn’t a standard Glock or Walther PPK; it had unconventional weapon written all over it. The gun was made from some material so black it seemed like a hole cut out of reality. Even my Spark-o-Vision couldn’t focus on it. The pistol was an absence, not a presence. Its silhouette had bumps and protrusions not seen on ordinary firearms. They reminded me of how the sights and stabilizer arms used in modern archery make the bows of today look Frankensteinian.

  The pistol had the same Frankensteinian aura. It screamed Cape Tech with Dark magic as an add-on. If Trent pulled the trigger, I didn’t know what would come out of the barrel but I’d hate to be the target. Even Aria, with her force field, might not be proof against the gun; it looked like the sort of weapon a Mad Genius might design for those times when he really, really needed to put a hole through damned near anything.

  Ninety-Nine came running out of the blizzard. As soon as she saw the gun, she held up her hands and said, “Easy now. Let’s not do something we’ll all regret.”

  Trent said nothing. He held the pistol in both hands, rock solid.

  WITHOUT THINKING, I’D SHRUNK THE MOMENT I SAW THE GUN

  I was now too small to be seen by the naked eye, a particle of zircon clay. Silently, I flapped toward Trent and his pistol. If the situation went pear-shaped, I wanted to be close enough to spoil Trent’s aim.

  “No reason to get excited,” Aria said, putting her hands up too. “I think we’re all on the same side.”

  “She killed my sister,” the Widow said, in a voice exactly like the Bride’s: violin strings scraped too hard by a rough-handed bow.

  “Who did?” Aria asked.

  Dakini floated into sight. “I believe she means Zircon,” Dakini told Aria. “But our friend wasn’t the one responsible,” she added, turning toward the Widow. “Your sister was killed by a man named Diamond. He promised her superpowers, but he changed her into a walking time bomb. Zircon happened to set her off, but Diamond was the one who made her die.”

  “I’ll deal with Diamond when I find him,” the Widow said. “But your Zircon drove my sister over the edge. I felt everything as it happened. And I can feel Zircon sneaking up on us. If she doesn’t keep her distance, Trent will shoot.”

  I was well off Trent’s line of fire, but for all I knew, his gun might be able to shoot Spark-seeking bullets. I stopped advancing.

  Still, I had already closed half the gap that separated Trent and the Widow from my teammates. That meant I was near enough to ground zero when all hell broke loose.

  BANG, THEN BOOM, THEN SHUDDER

  Aw, hell.

  A GIGANTIC RIFT TORE OPEN

  It materialized on a patch of snowy ground between the generating station and a hill that was actually a twenty-story-tall mound of garbage. I don’t know how old the garbage actually was, but it had been around long enough that the heap was no longer used for collection. Instead, a network of buried pipes ran through it, siphoning off methane and transporting the gas to the generators.

  An instant after the rift split the night, a force-dome snapped into existence over the entire generating station. In Spark-o-Vision, the dome was a meter thick and transparent, like glass tinted a faint olive green. I was trapped inside, along with the Widow and Trent. My teammates were outside, and unless I missed my guess, none of their powers would make a dent in Diamond’s hard-shell barrier.

  The rift had opened outside the dome, but the rift projection machine was inside. To be more specific, the projector was inside the generator building. Diamond had cut a circular hole in the building’s aluminum siding. Light from the rift projector shone through the hole, then through the transparent dome in order to keep the rift open.

  If the size of the rift was anything to go on, the projector must have been several times larger than previous versions. The rift was as huge as the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings movies—if not for the blizzard, it would have been visible for miles. The rift was hot too: The instant it tore itself open, it released enough heat to vaporize a gigantic patch of snow. But I didn’t have time to see more because Diamond had one trick left.

  Ka-zap! Electricity flashed through the dome’s interior a moment after we were shut in. It was Diamond’s way of sterilizing his bell jar, like a Taser with the amperage of a lightning bolt.

  Trent and the Widow collapsed, their clothes smoking. I felt the zap just as hard. It was worse than any electric shock I’d ever experienced. Parts of my costume smoldered, and my cape caught fire. But I maintained enough consciousness to flap my coattails once more, driving myself straight toward the ground.

  I PLUNGED INTO THE SNOW

  In a heartbeat, the surrounding flakes melted and their water put out the flames from my burning clothes. I lay unmoving in a tiny pit of snow as my head turned cartwheels.

  I didn’t pass out. I’d been zircon-hard when Diamond’s jolt hit me, and maybe that helped a bit. I was also in the air, so I wasn’t grounded. Lastly, unlike the Widow and Trent, I was relatively uninjured. The Widow probably had inhuman levels of resilience, but Diamond’s trick at the auction had drained most of her energy. All the subsequent explosions had hurt her that much more.

  So I doubted that the Widow would wake up anytime soon. For all I knew, she and Trent were both dead. I felt half dead myself, despite my toughness. I lay weak and dizzy, not even able to shift my point of view.

  Mostly I just listened. Several times the rift gave deafeningly loud drumbeats. It was growing.

  I also heard thumps against the force-dome as my teammates tried to smash their way in. Negative results. As far as I could tell, I was on my own inside Diamond’s endgame.

  EVENTUALLY, MY HEAD CLEARED

  By then, my partly burned costume had nearly stitched itself back together. Thanks, Goblin.

  But when I tried to use my comm ring to talk to my teammates, I got no answer. Either the force-dome blocked the ring’s signals, or the electric zap had fried the ring’s circuits.

  Well, poo.

  On the one hand, I was trapped and cut off from my teammates. On the other, maybe I was better off than they were. The rift was on their side of the dome, and I could see what it contained: the were-bat, Mr. Skinless, and Lilith.

  Ouch. Those three had been hard enough to fight the first time. When they came out of the rift, they’d have superpowers.

  Admittedly, they might blow up as soon as they got hit. But if Diamond had fixed his process, the three Darklings might last long enough to raise unholy hell.

  A MOMENT LATER, I SAW SOMETHING ELSE, MAYBE WORSE THAN SUPER-DARKLINGS

  Gulls.

  A flock of them emerged from the blizzard, approaching from the garbage mounds. There must have been a hundred of them: big white birds with orange beaks and gray or black markings. Dakini had called their thoughts “squawky,” but these gulls were utterly silent. Not a whisper as they landed in
a circle around the rift; no jostling for position, no fighting, just quietly settling down on the snow.

  They were met by a flurry of fireball-bees from the portal. Each bird was immediately surrounded. The multicolored ping-pong balls ghosted in and out of the gulls, the same as the balls had done in the E3 lab. Apparently, the spheres of Sparkhood were just as interested in birds as they were in humans.

  More birds arrived: not gulls, but the others Dakini had sensed. Hawks. Owls. Eagles. They landed in perfect silence beside the gulls. No aggression from the raptors, no fear from the gulls, just all of them touching down on the snow, then being enveloped in sparks.

  Two raccoons hurried in. Raccoons aren’t built for speed, but these ran in the awkward way that their species does when crossing a road. They stopped when they reached the outer ring of the flock of birds. They lay down. Got surrounded by fireballs.

  A skunk arrived. Another raccoon. Then rats.

  I DON’T KNOW HOW ARIA RESISTED THE URGE TO BLAST THE RAT HORDE

  Maybe Dakini did some subtle psychic soothing. The only thing that happened when the rats swarmed in was that Aria flew higher—perhaps high enough that she couldn’t see the wildlife through the falling snow.

  But ignoring them wasn’t an option. My teammates would soon have to decide whether to start a mass slaughter. The little fireballs had to be trying to bestow superpowers on the assembled fauna. Much as one might hate killing innocent creatures, we’d hate even more having to deal with superpowered eagles. I imagined my friends were already using their comm rings to discuss the dilemma.

  I felt guiltily glad to be out of it. I could likely find a way to escape the force-dome, if only by shrinking to a subatomic level and squeezing between whatever particles the dome was made of. But I would contribute more by staying inside and dealing with “big-picture” problems: disabling the rift projector and finding out if Diamond had any more ugly surprises up his sleeve.

  I HEADED FOR THE DOOR TO THE GENERATOR BUILDING

  But before I went inside, I checked on Trent and the Widow. No heartbeats—I looked inside their chests to make sure. With the Widow, the lack of a pulse might not be a problem. Who could tell with Darklings? But with Trent …

  I truly considered growing to full size and giving him CPR. But my greatest advantage was staying unseen. Diamond might not know I was inside his dome. Even if he did know, he might think his electric ka-zap had taken me out of action.

  Trying to save Trent would destroy my advantage. It would also take time, and likely wouldn’t even work. When I’d studied first aid, the instructor stressed that CPR failed more often than it succeeded. “But don’t beat yourself up,” the instructor had said. “You only use CPR on someone whose heart has stopped. Technically, that person has already died. Whatever you do, you won’t make them worse.”

  I decided not to try to make Trent better. I decided to let him stay dead.

  AT LEAST I DIDN’T TAKE HIS GUN

  I wanted to. Trent’s pistol lay on the ground beside him: a scary-awesome weapon that was either Cape Tech, magic, or both. I could definitely use something so badass powerful.

  But I left it alone. And not just because I’d have to grow to a visible size in order to pick the gun up.

  Letting Trent die was bad enough. Stealing from him was worse. Since I didn’t do that, I wasn’t a truly awful person, was I?

  Terrible logic. But I clutched at it.

  I SLIPPED UNDER THE GENERATING STATION’S DOOR

  I crawled out into a tiny entrance area. It was just a place to scrape the mud off your boots. But what I saw on the floor wasn’t mud; it was Nicholas.

  He looked more deadish than ever. His face was more ravaged, and spattered with flecks of rot. His stringy hair had fallen out in patches. The previous times I’d seen him, his clothes had been similar to what he’d worn when he was alive: nice quality, well-maintained. Now, they were rags. If I touched them, they might have disintegrated.

  Two things struck me more than anything else. First, his color, gray on gray. He seemed like something snipped out of a black-and-white movie and Photoshopped onto the normally colored world. Nothing in real life is truly devoid of color; there are always faint reflections from nearby colored objects, and hints of coloration from the light itself. But Nicholas’s body simply didn’t allow color to touch it. It rejected color completely.

  The second thing I noticed was Nicholas’s legs. I’d gotten used to him discreetly fading away at the waist. Now, his body went all the way down. He wore no shoes, and his pants were so threadbare, they ended at the knees. That made it easier to see how withered his legs were. They had the emaciated look of a famine victim: literally skin and bones.

  By contrast, his arms were normal, actually quite muscular. But the Dark Conversion had given Nicholas the legs he saw in his nightmares. (He’d told me about those nightmares—the most intimate confession he’d ever shared.) For the first time, I was seeing the new Nicholas completely undisguised: changed by the Dark into the thing he’d most feared.

  I FLEW DOWN AND LANDED ON HIS FOREHEAD

  His flesh was just barely solid. It had the temperature and feel of cold grape jelly. Ectoplasm? Was that what he was in his natural state? He was as gooey as quicksand—his skin surface sucked at my feet. I had to flap hard to take to the air again.

  I could see that he wasn’t breathing. When I looked inside his chest, I saw a heart but it wasn’t beating. So what? Nicholas was a ghost. This wasn’t death, it was deathiness, just like truthiness is to truth. Eventually Nicholas would regain consciousness—I was absolutely sure of that. If he were really, truly dead, I’d feel some emotion, wouldn’t I? I mean, something more than just being mad at him.

  But I had to wonder how he got this way. Unconscious. Burned out.

  Drained.

  Ah.

  Opening a rift required magic. I didn’t know how many ways there were to acquire such energy, but Diamond liked draining magical power from unsuspecting Darklings. The extra-large rift that had just opened must have required an extra-large dose of energy, maybe from an extra-powerful Darkling. Sphinx level.

  Somehow, Nicholas had gotten suckered. Probably by his sister. She must have laid a trail of bread crumbs that he followed to the station. Perhaps she left telltale hints at Red Pine Villa: things that Nicholas found in her room before I arrived. All the time we’d been talking in that room, Nicholas had known that the real action would happen in Waterloo’s landfill. He’d still done his best to send me on a wild goose chase.

  Bastard.

  A voice in my head said, He got what he deserved. The judgment was cold but not unjustified. If Nicholas had asked for my help instead of lying …

  But asking for help was something Nicholas never did. That was one reason we were simpatico.

  Nicholas, I thought, you’ve set me such a good example. You’re the person I have to stop being.

  I HAD NO IDEA HOW TO HELP NICHOLAS, OR IF THAT WAS EVEN POSSIBLE

  I left him where he was and headed deeper into the station.

  A security door blocked the way forward. It was solid steel, requiring both a keycard swipe and a passcode punched in with numbered buttons. I wondered if those buttons could be booby-trapped. Suppose Elaine had “conveniently” left a passcode in her room. Suppose Nicholas had tried punching the number in. That might have been what drained the magic out of him.

  Not that the details mattered. Elaine had tricked him. The specifics were irrelevant.

  I crawled under the security door and into a nondescript corridor. To the right was a break room for the station’s workers; it held a fridge, microwave, and coffeemaker, plus tables and chairs from IKEA. The left side of the corridor had two washrooms—unlabeled, not gender-specific. My kind of place.

  Except one of the washrooms had a dead guy on the floor.

  He was dressed in green coveralls. Fortyish. Shockingly pale. His pallor told me all I needed to know, but I checked his throat anyway.
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  Two puncture wounds on the jugular. It was one of those sights we were never supposed to see—not in movies or on TV because “inflammatory” images were a hate crime, and not in real life because our good and noble Darklings didn’t do such heinous things. But the marks were still painfully familiar. I’d seen look-alikes on my arm for months after that night with Elaine. If I rolled up my sleeve, I’d still see the scars.

  I was willing to bet that the marks on my arm matched exactly what I saw on the dead man. Made by the same teeth.

  “GOOD EVENING! I’M CALLED DIAMOND. WELCOME TO MY GRAND FINALE!”

  The words boomed from above my head. Oh crap.

  I was already as small as a bacterium, but I shrank by another order of magnitude. Then I zipped to the wall and put my back to it. Even if I could see 360 degrees, it still felt better not to be out in the open.

  “Surprised you, didn’t I?” Diamond said with a chuckle. The voice didn’t come from the corridor. I shifted my viewpoint through the ceiling and saw loudspeakers mounted on the roof.

  Sigh of relief: Diamond was speaking to my teammates, not me. He still might not know I was inside the dome.

  “Before you go getting ideas,” Diamond went on, “this is a prerecorded message. Being a genius, I can do almost anything, but I can’t resist a soliloquy. Besides, I have to respect the Third Law of Dark and Light: If you want to break the rules, you need to sell it with a story. Say I want to set off a doomsday device. I can’t just push the button; I have to start by making a big brass-balled speech about why what I’m doing will work. Otherwise, everything fizzles. Believe me, I’ve tried some bloody ingenious stuff in places like Antarctica—no muss, no fuss, just mucking up reality where no one will ever find me.

  “It doesn’t work. The Light and Dark want drama. Public spectacle.

  “On the other hand, I know not to waste my time on oratory when I ought to be … oh, committing mass murder, something like that. Whenever I start a speech, there’s always some beetle-browed hero who can’t be arsed to listen. I say, ‘I’m going to blow up the city of—’ then boom, the bugger blasts me. His teammates are all, ‘Couldn’t you have waited one more word?’ but for some of these yobbos, it’s a point of pride not to let me finish my sentences.