Revisionary

by Jim C. Hines

  “The IAS project?” I asked.

  “I finished Talulah’s work.” Babs slumped. “It’s loaded and ready to launch.”

  ‹Deb and Lena, did you catch that? You’re going to be outnumbered four to two.›

  ‹Maybe we should wait for Kiyoko to gather a few more clones to make it fair?› Deb quipped.

  ‹Don’t get cocky.› To Babs, I asked, “Do you know who they’re targeting?”

  “China. Iraq. Palestine. Saudi Arabia. Denmark. Russia.”

  “Jesus,” I whispered.

  “You’re both traitors,” Potts spat. The pounding outside had grown louder. It sounded like they were smashing furniture against the door. “Today’s attack will kill between one and two million people in the short term. In the long run, it will save tens of millions. It will put America at the head of an international power bloc, one that will keep creatures like you in their place.”

  I was trembling with the effort to stop myself from physically attacking the man. I jammed my fists beneath my arms to control it. “Creatures like us?”

  “You’re not human. Neither of you.” He looked past me to Babs.

  There was no hesitation in his answer. Nothing I could say or do was going to change his mind. I reached for a book. “Where are the sirens?”

  He spat. A glob of spittle and blood struck my pant leg.

  “All right.” I touched the book’s magic and prepared to rip the truth from his thoughts.

  Smudge burst into flame.

  Something hit the window hard enough to rattle the glass. Another impact followed less than a second later. The third strike punched a small hole through the window and the closed blinds.

  Potts jerked and collapsed.

  “Get down!” Babs dragged her sister to the floor. A second series of gunshots struck the window. I dropped flat just as the next bullet broke through. It buried itself in the wall, directly behind where I’d been standing.

  “Kiyoko?” I guessed.

  “It has to be. The windows are bulletproof. From the angle she’d need to hit Potts, she must be firing from another tower, hitting the exact same spot with each bullet until she breaks through. Nobody else could pull that off. She must have another camera in here, helping her aim. I thought I’d found them all.”

  I dragged my bookbag off the desk and hastily crafted a shield that would protect me from gunfire. I crawled over to check on Potts. Despite the blinds and the distance, Kiyoko’s bullet had struck him in the center of the forehead. His dead eyes were frozen in anger.

  The guards outside must have heard the shots, because they’d stopped trying to break in. “Babs, how much trouble can you cause for Kiyoko from here?”

  A staccato burst of gunfire destroyed the monitor on her desk. Babs yanked open the bottom drawer and pulled out several hardcover books. She used the first to create a tablet computer, and the second for a pair of silver revolvers, one of which she handed to her sister.

  “Let’s find out.” She raised the gun and closed her eyes. Magic crept over the barrel, guiding her aim up and to the right. She squeezed the trigger, blowing a four-inch hole through the wall. She raised her head and waited, but there were no more gunshots from outside. “Guess that was the last camera.”

  I pointed to the tablet. “Does that thing have a USB port?” When she nodded, I handed her a black flash drive. “You had an audio file queued up and ready to go. If Kiyoko starts to broadcast, play this instead.”

  Babs held up the crumpled note I’d written. “Thank you, Isaac.”

  “What did he write?” asked Darlene.

  “I told her I understood why she’d helped Potts and McGinley, and that I needed her help to retake control of our home.” I approached the door. The outer office was quiet. Babs pressed a button beneath her desk, and the lock clicked. I cracked open the door and peeked into Kiyoko’s office. The room was empty. “Lock it behind me.”

  I headed toward the closest stairwell. ‹Talulah, I need a status update.›

  ‹Charles is at the Library Tower. He had the bright idea to create a dowsing rod to search for the sirens.›

  If he made the rod sensitive enough, it would pick up even small bodies of water, including any tanks for holding captive sirens. ‹Good thinking, but they’ve probably shielded the sirens against magical detection.›

  ‹That’s what I told him,› said Vince.

  Charles cut in. ‹Better than sitting around doing nothing. In my day, we didn’t wait for someone else to get the job done.›

  ‹Both of you focus on your work,› said Talulah. ‹You’re giving me a headache. Vince is prepping a surprise to keep everyone out of Research. Lena and Deb have reached the server room. They’re in a standoff with the Kiyokos. I’ve been able to get intermittent images out of the security cameras. I think Kiyoko has reinforcements heading that way.›

  ‹What’s the shortest route to the server room?›

  I spun and started to run, following Talulah’s mental directions. Alarms rang out around me. Kiyoko began speaking over the PA system, her steady, reassuring voice filling the building. “New Millennium is on secure lockdown. Security personnel should report to emergency stations. All others, please remain where you are. Lock your doors and remain calm.”

  I swung open a door and took a bullet in the throat. Without magic, Kiyoko’s shot would have gone straight through.

  “Sorry, I’m in a hurry.” I reached for the text that controlled her psychic connection to the other clones.

  Her foot hit my jaw like a wrecking ball. By the time my vision cleared, Kiyoko stood over me with a knife in one hand.

  “I have access to all Porter catalogs and databases,” she said as she brought the tip of the blade to my chest. “This appears to be a personal shield unit from Dune. Such shields are vulnerable to slower attacks.”

  I grabbed her wrist, but she was stronger than she had any right to be. The tip gradually slid through the shield, then punctured my skin.

  I abandoned finesse and tore viciously through the Japanese characters of her magic. She screamed. I levered the knife away and punched her in the nose.

  Kiyoko didn’t move. Whatever I’d done to her was the equivalent of running an eggbeater inside her skull. It wouldn’t affect the other clones, but this one was nothing but an empty shell.

  I tossed the knife away. I’d be hearing that scream in my nightmares for years.

  She’d probably seen me coming on another of the security cameras. I took out Small Favor and poked a finger into the text like a kid sneaking frosting from a cake. The character of Harry Dresden was a wizard, and in Jim Butcher’s universe, being a wizard meant nearby technology tended to fail. Tapping into that effect should take out nearby cameras.

  ‹Talulah, we know the targets. Any chance you could run a separate instance of the IAS software?›

  ‹Working on it, but it would be a lot easier if Kiyoko would stop trying to fry my systems.›

  Gunfire all but deafened me. I heard Lena cry out, followed by the thump of wood against flesh. A woman screamed. I couldn’t tell who.

  I grabbed two paperbacks from my bag and hurried around the corner. Deb and Lena stood in the hallway, battling to reach the server room.

  Lena must have created another sapling to try to breach the door. She’d gone all out this time. The tree was eight inches thick and continued to grow, roots crumpling the floor while branches tore the ceiling. The thick metal door was bowed inward. Another cluster of branches held a clone two feet off the ground, her limbs twined in wood.

  Bullets spat from behind the door. Dark blood soaked Deb’s thigh. Lena gripped Excalibur in one hand and the scabbard in the other. A bullet struck her shoulder, but even as it tore through wood and flesh, the scabbard’s healing magic flowed over the wound, pulling muscle and skin back into place.

  ‹Kiyoko and a group of at least ten armed soldiers are trying to break into Research,› said Talulah. ‹She knows where we are. I’m not sure how
long we can keep them out. I’m going to try—›

  ‹You keep working,› said Vince. ‹I’ve got this.›

  ‹What are you—ooh, nice. Quarantine override. We’ve got doors slamming and locking all through the tower. That should slow them down.›

  Another Kiyoko stepped through a broken door at the end of the hall. I hurled a gateway from Myke Cole’s Control Point past Lena and Deb. Three gunshots rang out, but the bullets vanished through the portal. Instead of using it to slice Kiyoko in half like I’d done with the Kagan days earlier, I forced the gateway around her like a blanket, sending her through to the other side.

  As the “other side” was a nonexistent fictional world, it effectively erased her from existence.

  “What took you so long?” Deb shouted. “Did you stop for lunch on the way?”

  I stopped before reaching the doorway. Having failed to kill me in the stairwell, Kiyoko would almost certainly have switched to those enchanted bullets to make sure she penetrated my shield. “Call off the attack, Kiyoko. This can’t work. Too many people know the truth. We can help you, but you have to end this.”

  The gunfire stopped. I blinked and turned to Lena, who shrugged. I wished I’d been able to read All of One, the book Kiyoko had come from. Was she independent enough to recognize a losing battle and surrender, or would her orders force her to fight to her own death?

  I cast a quick spell on Smudge and opened his cage. He scurried down my leg, now invisible. “Go find someplace warm to hide, buddy.”

  The oak creaked and bowed, further crumpling the door. Lena risked a quick glance through the opening, then beckoned me over. I saw Kiyoko—one of them—tossing a semiautomatic handgun to the floor. I yanked on her psychic connection to her clones, tying myself into that mental network.

  I saw through their eyes. I saw myself standing in the hallway. Another Kiyoko worked in a darkened room by several large tanks, each one containing a living siren. I saw unfamiliar faces and locations, scenes from this country and others.

  Three clones waited in the server room, hidden from sight. I saw their plan to kill us, retake Babs Palmer’s office, and lock Talulah out of the network. They had deliberately stalled Lena and Deb, knowing I would join them. Knowing they would have the opportunity to kill us all at once.

  My mind went numb, as if someone had poured liquid helium into my skull. Kiyoko collapsed in front of me. She had voluntarily ended her life, trying to take me with her. I barely pulled free. Before I could shout a warning, the clone trapped in the young oak tree turned her head and said, “Sleep.”

  A magically created being shouldn’t be able to perform libriomancy. Everyone knew that, but I watched the power of that word, drawn from Stephen King’s Firestarter by another libriomancer and stored in Kiyoko’s memory, slam into Lena, Deb, and myself.

  I did my best to claw through Kiyoko’s magical assault, to rip the power of that story apart before it could drag me into slumber. This wasn’t true libriomancy; it was a recording, a copy of the sound. Like any reproduction, it was weaker than the original. Slowly, I freed myself and reached out to help my companions.

  Lena had dropped Excalibur and the scabbard when she fell. A Kiyoko stepped from the server room to pick up the sword. She pointed the tip at Lena’s throat. The other two clones joined her, guns aimed at Deb and myself.

  I ripped Excalibur’s magic away, dissolving the blade into silver dust. I did the same to the enchantment on the bullets. When the Kiyoko standing over me pulled the trigger, her shots struck my shield and fell to the floor.

  Lena kicked the legs out from beneath her Kiyoko, rolled to the side, and punched both fists into the clone standing over me. Wooden spikes punctured Kiyoko’s side, and she fell.

  Bullets thudded into Lena’s back, but without their magical boost, none of them penetrated. Lena spun, slashing wooden claws.

  Kiyoko ducked. The third clone launched a kick over the head of the second, catching Lena square on the bridge of the nose. The second clone bounced to her feet with an uppercut to Lena’s jaw, allowing the third to snap a follow-up kick to the side of my head.

  Both clones stiffened and spun to look into the server room.

  “You had access to the Porter database and all of my reports.” I spat blood and wiped my chin. “You should have known better than to piss off the fire-spider.”

  I’d sent Smudge into the server room to hide. Fire-spiders liked warm, enclosed spaces. Like server cabinets. By now, he would be making a merry, melted mess of whatever cables and circuits he found.

  Lena grabbed a Kiyoko by the waist and throat and threw her into the oak tree. Branches snaked around her limbs, pinning her in place. Additional branches grew out to gag both captive clones.

  Only one Kiyoko remained free. She knocked Lena aside and seized my throat. Her thumbs crushed my larynx, and she spun me around so my body was between her and Lena. I tried to peel her thumbs away. When that failed, I punched her in the nose and throat. Her grip only tightened.

  My blood was pounding so hard I barely heard the gunshot. Kiyoko blinked, and her hands fell away.

  “You dropped your gun, asshole,” said Deb. She fired again, and Kiyoko fell.

  I crawled toward Deb. Kiyoko had shot her three times through the chest, and had probably assumed she was dead.

  “Thanks, Isaac. This has been the most fun I’ve had in years.” Deb dropped the gun. Her head thudded to the floor. “Finish this, would you? For all of us.”

  “Hold on.” I searched for Excalibur’s scabbard, but it had vanished when I destroyed the sword. I reached into my bag. The healing cordial was in the outer pocket.

  Deb wasn’t breathing.

  I found the potion. I could see her magic beginning to unravel, like insects fleeing the light. I forced her mouth open and poured a mouthful down her throat. “Swallow, dammit.”

  I plugged her nose and pressed her mouth shut. Nothing happened. I set the potion aside and reached for the fading text of Renfield, trying to force it back into Deb’s flesh.

  Lena picked up the potion and brought a droplet to her tongue. Then she gently pulled me to my feet.

  “I couldn’t stop all three of them,” I said. “Destroying the sword, stripping the magic from the bullets . . .”

  The two surviving Kiyoko clones watched impassively from Lena’s newgrown oak. I stepped past them into the server room. Smudge had turned the server towers into chimneys. I squinted until I found him, and returned him to his cage. “Nice work, partner.”

  Lena had done some damage as well. Oak roots cracked through the tiled floor and tangled into the electrical and cables. What little equipment hadn’t been destroyed in the fighting sparked and died as I approached, fried by the tech-phobic magic of Harry Dresden.

  ‹Talulah, we’re in the server room, and the electronics are dead. Can you confirm IAS is offline?›

  ‹Looks that way to me. The other clones probably have a copy of the software, but they’d need magical assistance to reconfigure and start again. We’ve got good news over here, too.›

  Charles’ mental voice broke in to say, ‹I found the sirens. They’re in a subbasement beneath Metrodora Tower.›

  It fit the mindset we’d seen from Potts and others. Put the sirens beneath the hospital, using the patients as human shields. ‹I’ll head over there next. Good work with the dowsing rod. I’d expected Kiyoko to have magic-dampers blocking your efforts.›

  ‹She did,› said Vince. ‹That’s how we found them. You can’t just take a marine creature out of the Atlantic and drop her in a bathtub. Sirens can survive away from the ocean, but they need time to adjust. If McGinley wants his sirens healthy enough to sing, that means salt water, a filtration system, pipes to circulate and oxygenate the water—›

  ‹I couldn’t find the tanks,› Charles cut in. ‹Vince suggested dowsing for pipes. We found several water pipes that weren’t on the plans. I traced them beneath Metrodora, where they all vanished. That empty area has
to be the shielded room where they’re holding the sirens.›

  ‹What we haven’t figured out yet is how to reach that room safely,› said Talulah.

  ‹I’ve got an idea about that. Keep the research tower locked down. Babs should have called security off by now, but we don’t know who else is loyal to McGinley. I’m on my way.› I turned to Lena. “Will she be secure here?”

  “They’re not going anywhere.”

  “Good.” I looked down. Even in death, Deb smirked like she’d just eaten someone’s canary. “Then let’s finish this.”

  I hurled another gate through the wall in front of us, sending a diamond-shaped chunk of steel and cinder-blocks into nonexistence. I stopped only long enough to use another book to conjure wings onto my shoes, and to grab Lena. Then we were flying toward Franklin Tower.

  Halfway there, with the two of us twenty feet above the ground, the sirens began to sing.

  TRANSCRIPT OF A CALL FROM U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR PETER MALIK TO SPECIAL COMMISSION DIRECTOR AAMNA BERCHA

  Malik: Aamna? This is Peter Malik. Approximately fifteen minutes ago, our security team moved us into the Metrodora Hospital Tower. They’re saying we’re under attack by an as-yet-unidentified enemy.

  Bercha: Is your team safe and accounted for?

  Malik: We’re all here, and nobody has been hurt. Security’s telling us we’re confined to this room, a cafeteria near the center of the tower, until they receive the all-clear.

  Bercha: What’s the nature of the attack?

  Malik: We don’t know yet. There was a commotion at the administration building, and we heard a series of gunshots. I saw what may have been a sniper firing at the admin building from another tower. Our escorts are muttering about another Vanguard attack. One mentioned a rogue libriomancer named Isaac Vainio, believed to be working with Vanguard.

  Bercha: I’m calling Washington. We’re pulling your team out of there.

  Malik: Understood. I recommend—

  [Transmission interrupted by singing in an unknown language. Screams are heard in the background. Transmission ends 36 seconds later.]