Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  Asanti grabbed Liam’s shoulder to get his attention. “Try Sal and Menchú first.” Even though she was shouting directly into Liam’s ear, he had trouble hearing her over the creak of shelves and the thumps of falling books.

  “Why?”

  “Because the Market began tonight, and whatever this is, it started at sunset.”

  ***

  Once Sal had hung up with Liam, Menchú calmly returned his attention to Mr. Norse. “All right. You’ve shown that you can attack my people. Now stop.”

  The other man smiled. “No.”

  “I will report you to the Guardians. It is against the rules of the Market—”

  “The rules of the Market forbid any member to offer violence against another within these walls. I have not lifted a hand against you or your companion. But you killed three of my people. Return my book,” said Mr. Norse, “or the attacks will escalate every night until the rest of your team is just as dead as mine.”

  3.

  Sal and Menchú left the castle the instant the doors were unbarred at sunrise. Their landlady gave them a look as they arrived for breakfast through the outside door, but Sal was too strung out to care. As soon as they could, they adjourned to Menchú’s room and called Asanti.

  “The maelstrom stopped briefly at dawn,” she reported, “but it keeps picking up again, randomly and without warning. Which is almost worse.”

  “Is everyone okay?” Sal asked.

  “A bit battered, but so far, yes.”

  Well, that was something, at least. “Could Mr. Norse be bluffing?” Sal asked.

  Menchú shook his head. “Unfortunately, I think we have to assume that whatever Mr. Norse is doing will escalate to more lethal levels until he makes good on his threat.” Then he added, to Asanti, “We should be there with you.”

  “As much as I’d appreciate your company and assistance, I think you can do more good working on Mr. Norse where you are. Besides, we’re locked in.”

  Menchú said something in Spanish that Sal suspected he wouldn’t be willing to translate. She decided to get back to the matter at hand.

  “Okay, so if you’re stuck in there, what can we do from Liechtenstein to make sure that you don’t, you know, die? I mean, besides give Mr. Norse a book leaking demonic goo that wants to drown the world.”

  “It depends on what he actually wants,” said Asanti.

  “He sounded pretty clear about wanting all of you dead,” said Sal.

  “If Norse wanted to kill us, there are a lot of faster, easier, and more deniable ways to go about it,” said Asanti.

  Menchú grimaced. “Which means that this is just the opening of negotiations.”

  ***

  Indeed, Mr. Norse responded immediately and favorably to their request for a meeting, which Sal had to admit lent a certain degree of credibility to Asanti’s theory. They arranged to meet before sunset, in a small room that was normally part of the castle’s museum.

  Mr. Norse seated himself on a tapestried stool that must have been at least four hundred years old as though he sat on Renaissance furniture every day. Maybe he did. Menchú and Sal remained standing.

  “Thank you for agreeing to meet with us,” Menchú began.

  “Do you have my book?”

  “We do. Locked in our Archives.”

  “Then I suggest you unlock it,” Mr. Norse remarked drily. “If transport is a problem, I have an envoy in Rome who will accept delivery on my behalf.” He took a card out of his jacket pocket and held it out to Menchú. Menchú ignored it.

  “The book is both damaged and highly dangerous. We cannot hand it over.”

  Mr. Norse raised a brow. “I thought Catholics believed in the value of human life.”

  “We are aware that you purchased the volume, and are prepared to compensate you for your loss of property.”

  “My demands for compensation are very simple. I want my book. Since I suspect you will not provide it, I will kill your team. And then, I want you to live with the knowledge of the deaths you caused with your obstinacy.” His smile was flat and cold. “Unless you can offer me something better than that, I think our discussions are concluded.”

  So much for negotiations, Sal thought.

  ***

  “Time?” asked Liam.

  “One minute to sunset,” came Grace’s calm reply. As though they weren’t anticipating all unholy hell breaking loose in the next sixty seconds.

  Liam had faith in Menchú and his powers of persuasion. He believed that God would protect those committed to His work on earth. Liam had also been taught that the Lord helped those who helped themselves—and so that was what he and the rest of the team had spent the day doing. Now, Liam’s entire body felt like one huge bruise, and his ears rang from stress, hunger, and lack of sleep. But this time, they would be prepared.

  “Are you ready?” Asanti asked.

  “Gimme five seconds.”

  “Thirty seconds to sunset,” said Grace.

  Liam took hold of two heavy iron maces—originally part of some forgotten order’s regalia, now wrapped in wire stripped from every reading lamp in the Archive—and lifted his arms to their greatest extension, one on either side of his body. “Do it.”

  Grace and Asanti both jammed spliced electrical plugs into outlets on opposite walls, one for each mace. It hadn’t been easy to create electromagnets with things that were stashed around the Archives, but pain and annoyance were both powerful motivators, and Liam had plenty of both to egg him on. Now he just needed this harebrained scheme to work.

  “Grace, a little more on your side.”

  Liam heard a scrape as she pushed a set of iron shelves through the cascade of books covering the floor. He fancied he could see Asanti wince out of the corner of his eye, but she didn’t say anything. First, save themselves. Worry about the damage later.

  The pressure on his left arm eased, as the magnetized mace wavered, torn between the pull of the magnet in his other hand and the huge hunk of iron Grace was moving toward it. The pull was easing, nearly neutral…

  “There!”

  Grace froze. Liam held his breath. Slowly, carefully, he let go of the maces, trying not to jostle their positions in the air. Then he stepped away. The two weapons hung, perfectly balanced between the attractive force of the iron shelves, the central stairway, and each other.

  Liam let out a long, slow, breath. No one moved.

  “Time?”

  “Four seconds to sunset.”

  Three. Two. One.

  The Archives remained silent. No winds. No flying books.

  Grace looked at Liam, impressed. “Field is holding. Nice work.” Then, she frowned. “Do you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “High-pitched sound. Like a fluorescent bulb that’s slightly off-cycle.”

  Liam shook his head. “No, but my high frequencies aren’t great.”

  “Too much time with your headphones on,” said Asanti.

  Liam shrugged. “Probably.” Then a sound tickled at the edge of his hearing. “Wait. Is it kind of…?”

  The high-pitched noise exploded in his head like someone was driving an ice pick through his eardrums. Liam gasped in pain. He heard Asanti shout. And Grace…

  Grace, who could take a fist to the face without blinking, whom Liam had seen head-butt armored demons twice her size and not even bruise, crumpled to the floor, unconscious.

  ***

  From the instant Menchú and Sal stepped into the courtyard at sunset, it was obvious that everyone at the Market knew what was going on. Not that Mr. Norse had been at all subtle with his threats the night before, but Menchú couldn’t help but notice how every whispered conversation paused as they passed and then resumed as soon as they were out of earshot. He wished that Asanti were there with them. Actually, he wished that Asanti were there instead of him. Menchú had learned over the years to take people as they came. His easy manner with all sorts was one of the reasons he had been recruited into Team Thre
e. But the Market, with its casual magic use and even more casual classism, made his teeth crawl.

  He did his best to shake off his annoyance. It wouldn’t help, and railing against the good fortune of people who did evil over those who did good was bush-league theology of the first order.

  As if she could read his mind, Sal let out a sigh. “It’s not fair.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “We probably have the largest collection of magical books and artifacts in the world in the Archives.” She gestured to the crowd around them. “We could be sitting on something that could not only stop Mr. Norse, but also make his balls fall off the next time he even thinks about going after our people, but it doesn’t do us any good because we never use any of the artifacts we find.”

  Quickly, Menchú drew Sal off to the side where they could speak without being disturbed. That kind of thinking had to be nipped in the bud. “We are fighting this, Sal,” he assured her, “and we are going to win. Liam, Grace, and Asanti are going to be fine.”

  “You don’t know that. We can’t give Mr. Norse the book because he would use it to destroy the world, I get that. But look around us; this place is full of people who use magic every day. It doesn’t seem to be driving them insane.”

  “You don’t know them very well yet.”

  Sal shook her head. “I just don’t understand why you won’t even consider—”

  “Because I know what happens when people try to use forces they don’t understand.”

  Sal was clearly still in the mood to argue, and Menchú realized they would be at it all night if he didn’t give her something productive to do. “Why don’t you call and check in with the others? Let them know what’s going on and make sure that they’re still all right.”

  “And what are you going to do?”

  Menchú couldn’t stop the grimace. “Look for allies.”

  ***

  Sal’s conversation with Liam had not gone well. A burst of static exploded from the phone the instant he picked up. She tried to tell him what had happened with Mr. Norse, but wasn’t sure that he could hear anything over the bad connection. From what she’d been able to tell over the interference, the situation in the Archives had only gotten worse, and there was still jack-all that she could do about it from goddamned Liechtenstein.

  When Sal hung up, the techno-cultist who had been staring at her the night before was standing at her elbow. She jerked in surprise, and her phone went flying from her fingers.

  The techno-cultist’s hand darted out, picked her falling phone out of the air, and handed it to her. All without ever once breaking eye contact. He worked his mouth for a moment, as though he had to remember how to talk. Finally, he said, “You’re Perry’s sister, aren’t you?”

  Sal felt her heart lurch in her chest. She checked the courtyard. Menchú was nowhere to be seen. “Yes. Who are you?”

  “You can call me Opus93.”

  “How about I call you by your real name?”

  He shrugged. “What makes Opus93 less real than the name I was born with?”

  Because Opus93 is a stupid-ass name, Sal didn’t say. “What do your friends call you?”

  “Opus93.”

  Sigh. “What do you know about my brother, Opie?”

  “Word is he got his hands on something real, but he brought it to his sister the cop. He goes nova, puts out a huge spew of phantom data, then goes dark. And now Cop Sister is a Bookburner, and no one’s heard from Perry since.”

  “What are you implying?”

  “Implications are imprecise. Facts are what’s needed.”

  Sal didn’t know whether to roll her eyes or fight back tears. It was too much like talking to Perry when he got into one of his esoteric fugues.

  “Fine. Are you offering facts? Or just fishing for them?”

  “Information wants to be free, doesn’t come without a price. You want help with your little billionaire problem, you need to ask the Index.”

  The Index. Even Sal could hear the capital letter. She looked around again for Menchú. Still no sign of him. She swallowed. “Tell me more.”

  ***

  Either the small room the techno-cultists had reserved for their use during the Market was not normally part of the castle’s museum, or it had been lovingly restored to its original purpose of storing dirt. Though dirt wouldn’t have required the window the cultists were using to vent the portable generator they had brought. That was the only familiar piece of equipment in the room.

  Through a shared childhood with Perry, Sal had become passably familiar with circuit boards, resistors, and the various shells that computers and their innards came in. Not that she could do anything with them, but at least she knew what they were supposed to look like.

  These computers—and Sal used the term loosely—had probably started their lives as standard PCs. What had happened to them next…One laptop looked like it had been repurposed as a planter, the keyboard replaced with a bed of moss ringed by yellow flowers. Above, a screen glowed with life. As Sal watched, Opie brushed a hand over the moss, and the blinking cursor and command line vanished, replaced by scrolling code that flew by faster than her eyes could follow. Another half-open desktop was filled with boards where glowing crystals grew among the circuits, absorbing the machine into their structure. A screen on the opposite wall connected to a large aquarium, complete with a herd of tiny sea horses milling in the purple-hued water.

  Opie caught her staring. “Biocomputer. Only working example in the world.” He walked over to the aquarium and pulled a keyboard off a nearby shelf. A few keystrokes later, the blank screen above the tank changed to display a video of a baby panda. “Panda cam in the Beijing Zoo. It’s closed circuit. Not publicly accessible.”

  Sal was more disturbed by the sea horses. As soon as Opie picked up the keyboard, they fell into formation, then scattered. They were currently swimming in a very intricate pattern through the tank. Except that every few seconds, all of the sea horses would suddenly freeze in place, like a buffering video. The baby panda, meanwhile, rolled on its back happily, and a hand reached in from off-screen to rub its belly.

  “I thought biocomputers were still theoretical.”

  “In the rest of the world, yes. But if you have a little bit of magic to help you…” He gestured to the rest of the room. “All things are possible.”

  “Is that the Index?”

  “The Index makes this look like a Commodore 64.”

  “So why are you wasting my time? I have friends in trouble. Can you help me or not?”

  Opie gave her a smug look. “I can help you. But the Index contains the sum of all human knowledge. Like I said, you don’t get to access that for free.”

  Sal scoffed and held up her cell phone. “I already have access to the sum of all human knowledge. Costs me sixty-five dollars a month.”

  Opie snorted. “We both know that if that was enough, you wouldn’t have followed me, Cop Sister. The Internet is merely the totality of human knowledge that’s been written down and put on online. The Index is a repository of everything known by any human who has ever interfaced with it.”

  “And that includes Mr. Norse?”

  Opie nodded. “Ask your question, and know what he knows about what’s happening to your friends.”

  “What’s the catch?” asked Sal, torn between being fascinated by the possibilities and really disturbed by the implications of what Opie was saying.

  “For every question you ask, the Index takes one piece of knowledge from your mind, and you can never know it again.”

  4.

  Sal had found Menchú when they both returned to their B&B after sunrise. Predictably, he had not been enthusiastic when Sal told him about her encounter with Opie and his offer.

  “I don’t like the idea of losing a chunk of my memory any more than you do, but I don’t think we have a choice,” she said, trying to keep the impatience out of her voice. Sal couldn’t imagine that getting snippy with Menchú would
help matters, and it wasn’t like any of this was his fault.

  “We always have a choice,” said Menchú. “And we only have the word of one techno-cultist that this so-called Index won’t wipe your entire memory. We don’t know that it even works at all.”

  “I’m pretty sure that mind-wiping someone would be considered both breaking a deal and offering violence against another member of the Market. Do you really think they’d risk getting evicted?”

  “I’m sure their expulsion will be a great comfort to you after your mind has been destroyed by their infernal machine.”

  “That’s the other thing. If this is all a ploy, what’s in my mind that they’re so interested in? Out of everyone here, why target me?”

  “Your brother.”

  “You know more about what's going on with Perry than I do. Plus more secrets of the Society besides. Why haven’t they been eye-fucking you this whole time?”

  Menchú didn’t even crack a smile. “Because if they’d approached me, I would have said no, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”

  “You think they targeted me because I’m the weak link.”

  “I think they know what you want, and now they’re offering it to you. It’s what demons do—find your weakness and turn it against you.”

  “You think Opie is a demon? Seriously?”

  “I think something is powering the Index, and it isn’t love and light.” If possible, Menchú’s expression turned even more serious. “You haven’t been with us for long, but even so, these people would be foolish to pass up the opportunity to suck you dry of every drop of information you know about the Archives and the Society. You remember how Liam was possessed?”

  Sal nodded.

  “This wouldn’t be the first time techno-cultists tried to use the residue of a demon to access our secrets. And once they’ve touched you…Demons leave scars just like physical wounds. Break a bone once, you’re more likely to break it again in the same place.”

  “So where are you broken?” Sal asked.

  Menchú froze. “What do you mean?”

  “You recruited me after I fought off a demon possessing my brother. Liam was taken over by something out of his computer, lost two years of his life, and now lives to fight the kinds of things that stole that time from him. I’m willing to bet that Asanti had some brush with the arcane that got her so curious about magic, and for some reason, Grace isn’t afraid of getting shot. So what happened to you?”