The Brilliant Dark

by S. M. Beiko

  “Another orphan,” Grant snorted. “That’s what Roan Harken was. That’s how this all began. Orphans. And fire.” He tucked the screen into his breast pocket, then thrust a sheaf of papers into Mi-ja’s surprised hands. “This report is your only concern now. It will be public knowledge in a matter of hours, as well as all these shenanigans that went on tonight. We try to leave nothing to chance, but from chance comes opportunity. We must forget pity. Remember why you joined up, Lieutenant.”

  Mi-ja’s eyes skittered across the internal memo, originating from NASA, and her mouth dropped open in disbelief as she slowed down to re-read it.

  “Tell me how precious you’re going to be now towards Denizens and their willing protectors,” the chancellor said as he left the room, swift as a snake, and Mi-ja was glad for it when she leaned against the desk, hand at her mouth.

  * * *

  Oh gods oh gods oh gods.

  Saskia clenched and unclenched her hands, trying to get the feeling back in them. The hands that had brought her here in the first place. A hysterical idea came to her mind: if she cut them off, they couldn’t prove anything. Maybe she really was going crazy.

  Her calves ached, and she didn’t know why. Ached to run the hell away from here, maybe. Ached with the memory of how close she’d come to making an escape. Instead she’d stood there, like an idiot, probably hallucinating. Oh gods.

  She slammed her bound hands into her forehead, trying to get her heart rate down. She was terrified. She was ten years old again, in a distant forest, feeding her brother’s dead body into a monster’s furnace, hoping to be the hero then as much as now. For a while she tried to convince herself that memory was all some terrible nightmare. That she hadn’t really done any of those things. But the evidence was in the sky, every day, just as there was evidence now that she’d made the wrong decision all over again tonight.

  She slid to the cell floor, scuffing her Keds, her jeans. A hero she’d never be.

  But this is what you wanted, she thought, on repeat, like a corrupted MP3. Not like this, she snapped back. Really did not anticipate the imprisonment.

  The walls were thick stone, black and cold and sealed tight. No windows. The isolation unit, she’d heard one of the guards say. Saskia wondered what this room had been before the Elemental Task Guard had taken it over, turning the parliamentary building into a compound-cum-prison — what some claimed was a secret experimental lab. Who knew how far underground she was, how wide the compound stretched? Maybe they were watching her now through secret cameras. Or maybe they had thrown her down here, oubliette-style, and were intending to forget all about her.

  You knew a pit like this one once. Beneath a castle made of ash, with a new father who loved only his daughter wreathed in fire . . .

  She rested her head on her knees. The dark fairy tale of how she got here. Sometimes telling it to herself made her feel at least somewhat special, or touched, in a world of people with powers. Sometimes it helped. Right now it was just making her nauseated.

  And then, when the little girl became a tree to split the rock monster in half, she thought, This dark place is at least mine. But then a little flutter still inside her. A light, reminding her she felt regret. Love. And a Rabbit saw this light and pulled the tree apart with the roots of his hands, and the burning sickness inside her stayed in the tree as she was pulled out of it. Maybe a scar inside of her remained, as a reminder, but when she woke to thank the Rabbit, she was whole. She was healed . . .

  The cell door was steel, its locks crushed hard into place behind her — but she’d memorized the code on the digital glass panel in the seconds before she was locked up. A lot of good it did her on the inside. But despite the digitization, the door was still tangible metal, and Saskia was convinced it was closer, closer, every time she looked up.

  Now she looked at her hands, the zip tie removed and replaced with a heavy magnetic cuff. She didn’t regret any of it. Not really. And she smiled because Ella was safe, hopefully had taken the hint to lie low. Ella wouldn’t go home. She was stupid, but not that stupid.

  Home. The joy of knowing her friend was free instantly withered when she thought of home. Of what Phae would say. Never thought I’d be longing for Phae to yell at me, Saskia thought. After all, maybe Saskia wasn’t going to see home ever again. No government would be happy to find out their sophisticated defenses had been crushed by an eleventh grader.

  Saskia let herself breathe, and her chest felt a little lighter as she looked at the cell walls again. Just walls. She touched the concrete and wondered if Barton had been in a cell like this. She closed her eyes, feeling him there with her, even though he had been lost and probably would be forever.

  Barton had been the one to teach Saskia about regret. He’d begged her not to feel it, especially in the wake of doing what was right. Maybe she was still hero material, after all.

  The locks in the steel slid inward, and she jumped to her feet as the door slammed open.

  And then Saskia forgot all about bravery and heroics, pressing her quivering spine into the back of the cell before the guards reached in and dragged her out again.

  * * *

  Grant’s mind was a burdened thing. Writing in these notebooks helped to calm him, though he had not felt a state of calm, or anything remotely close to it, in too long to remember.

  While he waited in the interview room for the prisoner to be brought up, he wrote feverishly.

  Bloodbeast activity was our first priority, he wrote in his careful printing, which he would type up later, rather than sleeping, because he felt such a vicious urgency to get this information to people before it was too late. They burst out of the earth like weeds, with teeth in unthinkable places aimed directly for us. The Denizens I talked to, back when I was young and naïve and I believed they had anything useful, let alone true, to say, said that Bloodbeasts were caused by the corrupted, restless Denizen dead. Or else other entities brought up from environmental destruction. The reasons all read like fantasy dogma. But we didn’t need the reasons. Denizens wreaking havoc, alive or dead. Something had to be done. At first, Denizens were trying to put out these fires, but innocent folk were getting hurt. Intentionally or otherwise.

  This was our bread and butter in the beginning. You could call us a militia — many did — but we got the job done when the Denizens couldn’t. We made it our responsibility to annihilate the bogey-creatures plaguing more than just children. This was key to rebuilding the trust that the Denizens had broken with everyone. The bad guys were not going to win. We would not allow it. In a way, we were protecting Denizens, too. That’s all we ever wanted. To protect. To preserve.

  Now we must be prepared again. The Darkling Moon has sent us a message, and we must interpret it quickly to use it to our advantage, to end this conflict, once and for all . . .

  Grant laid down the pen, flexed his left hand, knuckles grinding. Remembering those early halcyon days, he allowed himself a grin. Bloodbeasts from the Bloodlands. Apt names for bloody business. Grant often dreamed of the Bloodlands, that weird underworld of ash and wreckage from which the Darkling Moon had sprung, like its progeny still creeping up in the cracks it’d left behind. He dreamed of the place vividly and often imagined he’d conquer it, given the chance. Maybe that chance would be soon. Maybe everything did happen for a reason, despite what he’d just thrown at that simpering lieutenant. Project Crossover might be inevitable after all. And he imagined he’d be the first to plunge through into that scarred otherworld and claim it for himself.

  He would make all of this right again.

  He put the pen back to the paper. We will master the realms and send these monsters back into the hellmouth they came from. And I’m not talking about the Bloodbeasts this time.

  His pen faltered. He had already divulged, in one of the earlier published volumes, what had led him to this path in the first place, yet it always came right back each ti
me Grant sat down to write at all. He’d been a writer first, a twenty-five-year-old journalist, looking at this freshly darkened world through an investigative if naïve lens. If history taught him anything, it was what would happen next: fear prevailed the moment an alien group with firepower showed up. Grant had tried to hear the aliens’ side of the story. Learn about them. Know thy enemy. He’d been younger, after all. But that hadn’t saved Kelly, or the other Mundane protesters his sister rallied with, from that Rabbit dropping a building on them. It had been the last straw not only for Grant, but for the world. Five years later, seeing the work it had all led to, it wasn’t a terrible legacy; Kelly was never going to amount to much more than a martyr, anyway.

  And that suited Grant just fine.

  Footsteps approached and Grant closed the journal. The room, made entirely of plexiglass panels, lit up with a message scrolling in front of him — a rotating image of the prisoner, the statistics from the report he’d practically memorized. He tapped in his security code on the console to his right, and all the panels turned black. With his confirmation, the door at the far end of the room opened, and two guards, each with a light hand on the prisoner’s elbows, guided her in.

  He did not stand.

  “In unity.” He nodded to the two female guards, their faces stoic. They brought the stunned girl in by the cuff on her wrists and attached it to its magnetic pad on the table opposite Grant. They nodded back to him and retreated to the door. When the door slid back into place, locking behind the guards, Grant dropped his gaze to the girl.

  She was still staring at the table, mouth closed tight as a fist.

  Grant cleared his throat and she flinched, looking at him as if she’d only just realized he was there.

  “Saskia Allen Das.” Saying her name seemed like an invocation, but Grant was no fool. In most mythologies, names had power, and if you knew a demon’s name, you had power over it. Not that this girl looked like a demon, or remotely dangerous. But Denizens used to call down their gods to put their power onto their names. This girl didn’t look like she could pull power out of a light bulb.

  Grant felt a pang of disappointment as his finger flicked across his console. “There’s no need to look like I just shot your mother, Bambi,” he snipped, unconcerned about the barb in his throwaway comment — Saskia’s mother had died when she was quite young. “You’re underage. Which means the crime you committed can’t be considered a federal offense. Yet. Laws dealing with these things are put into practice rather rapidly these days.” The girl swallowed. She looked younger than sixteen. He really had no idea how to talk to kids.

  Grant shut his eyes, folded his hands in front of him, and tried to recalibrate. When he opened his eyes, he said, “Let’s start over. I wanted to tell you that I’m impressed.”

  Saskia worked her jaw, leaned back in her chair as far as the mag-cuff would allow. “Impressed?”

  Grant felt the tremor start at the corner of his eye. “You’re in trouble, sure, but what you did out there . . . Let’s just say that when a person your age is able to override some of our best tech, you’ve done well.” He smiled. It wasn’t a lie. He was impressed. Maybe even grateful.

  “Your friends,” he went on, and their faces flashed on the screens around them, with rap sheets eclipsing Saskia’s footnote of a file, “if you can call them that, anyway, got away. But it’s only a matter of time. You went to some lengths to protect them, and they destroyed government property . . . probably could have done more damage than that. We’re lucky they didn’t take any lives.” He leaned in. “But you let them escape. That might be the thing that troubles me the most, Miss Das.”

  He watched her look around at the faces of the Denizens — kids, like her — and linger over one girl, a blond with a deviant stare. Grant knew immediately what lay beneath that lingering look. “Love?” The word felt cheap in his mouth. Saskia’s gaze whipped away.

  “I understand,” Grant went on. “Love isn’t the crime here. But we’re at war. There are plenty of crimes to go around.”

  “I thought we were at peace,” the girl muttered, though she tensed as if she hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

  Grant waited. His finger shifted to the console. “Peace. Well. I wouldn’t expect you to have a solid grasp of global conflict. Or perhaps I’m underestimating you.”

  When she tensed further, he knew that he was right.

  “Can you tell me about yourself, Miss Das? That accent seems a little off.”

  She shut her eyes. Obviously this was painful for her. Grant was glad. He had it all in her file, of course, but he needed her to say it. It would make her weaker.

  “I was born in Scotland,” she answered miserably.

  Grant flicked another key, and her file scrolled around the blank screens flanking the interview table, like a shocking merry-go-round of things better left unsaid. She watched it all, expression doleful.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “My mother was from Japan. My father was a lorry driver from Durness. We lived in the country. The hills. My aunt helped out.”

  Another handful of keystrokes. “And are you an only child?”

  Her jaw tightened. “I am now.”

  On the screens around them shone images of children covered in black marks with red-ringed eyes, as if they were on fire from the inside. Overlapping these were more photos of black twisted trees whose bark gave the impression of grim faces, reaching dead branches skyward from roads, hospitals, shopping malls. The Cinder Plague in newsprint, sightings of a grim monster made of rock drilling a road beneath continents to let more monsters, more children, in.

  “They say that’s where it all started. Scotland.” Grant smirked. “The thing about peace, Miss Das, is that it’s hard won after a period of absolute chaos. We’ve all seen too much. Some more than others.”

  The screens around them seemed bloated now with the news stories, the images, the running footage scrolling.

  The girl’s eyes glistened, but her face was hard when she finally met Grant’s taunting stare. “We all lost something because of this.”

  For a moment, Grant felt a chill, and he shook it off like a wood tick before it could stick its head in. He thought of his sister, of words he couldn’t take back, a partially finished condo building and the protestors that Rabbit had crushed . . .

  Without looking away, he swiped a hand again, and the screens went dark, save for a single file behind his head. “Many people went missing in those early days. That’s inevitable when monsters are let loose. And with those awful Cinder Kids turning all kinds of innocent folks into nightmare trees . . . it’s hard to keep track of them all.”

  He knew that the image behind him was of a toppled truck with a jagged black tree trunk speared through the driver’s side, the door and aluminum crumpled like a toy.

  Saskia’s hand was tight and shaking in her cuff.

  “It was all catalogued eventually: every attack. Every victim. Every roadside accident. Every parent desperately looking for their disappeared children in the Highlands, only to meet their own grisly ends.” Saskia was crying openly now, chin tucked to her chest. “It’s any wonder that those children even turn up at all. Some might call it a miracle.”

  “Stop it!” the girl sobbed.

  Grant hadn’t realized how close he was leaning towards her, as if he wanted to crush her with more than the sad truth of a world gone mad, and her loss in it. He settled back into his chair, adjusted his suit, and stood. She seemed surprised when he flicked a code into her cuff, and it sprang open.

  He passed her a handkerchief, wordless, and gave her a moment to regain what little composure she’d had.

  “You’ve been able to build a new life here. Luckier than others, I imagine. But paperwork is paperwork, and not even with magic powers on the loose can a child emigrate from a war zone unchecked.” He grimaced. “I’m not sure y
our guardians would appreciate your behaviour tonight.”

  She stiffened, and then he added, “But I do.”

  Saskia didn’t have a chance to do more than cover her noise of shock with the handkerchief as Grant picked up the device from under the table and slammed it down in front of her. The bent plastic and cobbled metal clattered. He assumed it was entirely garbage-salvaged, but it had done the job of locking into their network, and locking everyone out, for more time than could be mentioned out loud. Such technology could be useful — refined, of course — if in the right hands, he thought.

  So could those inventing and operating it.

  He leaned over and pressed another key, and the images that this hacker’s nimbly coded mind had broadcast across the optical devices of the Task Guard’s best and brightest appeared on the screens.

  Grant folded his arms, the flaming illusions flickering. “I knew your other guardian, you know. The one who went around, mopping up as many of those nightmare trees as he could after Dark Day. Barton Allen. One of the few Denizens I grudgingly respected.”

  “What?” she growled. Grant felt a bit surprised at the fury in her voice, given she’d done little more than quiver since she sat down.

  Another tender spot, then.

  “He was a noble guy, I’ll give him that. For all his later . . . transgressions.” He watched her eyes narrow. “He could have done so much more, however, if he’d cooperated with us instead of pitting himself against us. And it’s because I can see his defiance in you that I’m making you the same job offer.”

  Her eyes widened. “What job offer?”

  Grant looked momentarily to the screens, to the image of the enormous Fox god, wreathed in unholy flame, tearing through the ranks of men and women who should know better. There was a frightening realism to the movements, to the shape of Deon. For a moment, he was mesmerized by the power there, even if it was just a projection. Even if it wasn’t real. That power felt closer every second. It was happening, at last.