by Jes Battis
“I don’t have time to worry about the genre of this crisis. Our lab isn’t equipped to analyze the Ferid. Ru’s DNA practically broke our machines. The problem is that we got used to dealing with local demons, and the Ferid are global. They’re capitalists, and they obviously don’t give two cyclonic revolutions about us.”
“I’m bored,” Lorenzo says.
Lucian’s about to retort, but I cut him off. “Lorenzo, do you think you have any spells that could help us?”
He brightens. “A few, actually. I’ve got feather-fall, limited invisibility, super-fast hands—”
“Let me use limited invisibility. I can tell my athame to remember it. Air charms are probably my weakest area.”
He draws out a thin chain of materia, which he drapes over my athame. The knife eats the spell. I’ll have to wait about twenty minutes until it’s properly digested, but it could come in handy later.
“We need to reach the fail-safe,” I say. “I know it’s in the subbasement, but that’s all.”
“I’ll scout ahead,” Lorenzo says. “It will be more interesting.” Then he evaporates into the floor.
“I like him.”
“He has his moments.”
“I don’t think he hates you anymore.”
“That’s only because you couldn’t understand our conversation.”
“I’ll just go ahead and be optimistic anyway.”
It’s slightly heartbreaking walking down so many stairs after we worked so hard to climb them. If they weren’t such shitty concrete, they’d probably have the presence of mind to laugh at our misfortune. We get to the lobby, which is slowly emptying. Outside, I see a typical maneuver in action. There’s a burst water main on one side of Granville and a sparking cable on the other, neither of which was there before. Agents are escorting people out of their vehicles and taking them to safety. I can still feel the vampires, but they’ve divided. Where did the other half go? It’s a question I’d like answered sooner rather than later.
We go through the emergency exit and down two flights of stairs. The quality of the air changes. It’s thinner, colder, and I can smell industrial cleaning products, which puts us on the morgue level. Another two flights of steps, and we’re past the data archive and reference library. We come to a locked door. I’m about to touch it, stupidly, like someone who’s forgotten about a hot element. Before I can, however, Lorenzo appears.
“Do not think about touching that,” he says. “Listen. It’s putting out as much energy as a respectable white hole.”
I inch closer and examine the lock. It’s made of old metal that’s been painted to look new. I might be able to work with it.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s come at this logically. First of all, door, I’d like to greet you as a wielder of materia. I’d also like to remind you that my family has close ties with the wind, the seas, and the elder rocks, which means that you can trust me. I get that you were told not to open. But this is an emergency. The building might be under attack, and we need to activate the fail-safe. Surely, you were never ordered to put your own substrate in jeopardy.”
I protect.
“What do you protect?”
The deep basement.
“Right. I respect that. But there’s something in the deep basement that we need to protect all the other basements, and the doors and carpet and everything else that makes the building possible. We just need to turn that thing on.”
Others asked, but were dismissed.
“Dismissed how?”
Made to leave.
“But no killing, right?”
The door doesn’t answer.
“Okay. I have a special deal for you, because you’re such a good door. If you let us in, I promise to remove that awful paint from your lock. I’ll sand you down and give you oil.”
I want a mural.
“Done. We’ll paint something nice and everyone will stop to check you out, just like they used to before you were moved to the subbasement.”
The door considers my offer. Then it opens.
“We’re in your debt.”
I want a mural.
“Right. Message received.”
We go down a hallway. I can smell iron in the air, and something else, which I can only describe as a dryer sheet gone bad. Then I smell vampires. I hug the wall and take Lucian’s hand before calling in the limited invisibility charm. My athame casts it, and we try not to move. Three vampires walk by. The Pharmakon has made them look slightly prehistoric, and extremely amped up. I think we could take them, but I remember how unpredictable the vampire was who attacked me on the beach. I don’t want to risk it.
They pass us and continue south. We go north. I keep trying to hear something from the fail-safe, at the very least the song of weak radioactivity, but all I get is static. I stop for a moment to listen more closely. It’s like standing in a blizzard. I close my eyes and cast a thought into the nullity:
Derrick.
There’s no response at first. Then I hear something extremely faint. I hold on to an image of Derrick and cast my thought again. The faint noise comes back. I listen closely. He’s saying something, but I can’t make it out. I give up and listen for the fail-safe again, which yields only static.
“We could use Miles in this situation,” Lucian observes. “He’d be able to chat with the generator.”
“That’s funny,” Lorenzo says. “I almost met a guy named Miles the other day, but then I lost my nerve and left the café.”
Lucian frowns at him. “Why were you at a café?”
“I was waiting for the ghoul, and I had some time to kill. I went to a café on Commercial Drive and noticed a deaf guy who was totally into his smartphone. I don’t meet a lot of deaf people, and he looked young, so I almost made myself semi-visible, like, so I could talk to him. But then his boyfriend came back, and was like, Miles, stop reading; pay attention to me.”
“Was his name Derrick?”
“Yeah. Miles wasn’t really paying attention, but when the boyfriend looked in my direction, I thought he could almost see me. So I left. I made sure to walk through both their coffees, though, which makes them gross.”
“You practically touched them.” I’m captivated by the idea of my family meeting Lucian’s, if only through a weak electrical charge. The diss of a ghost. Then I remember, for the first time in days, what Derrick told me after he examined Lord Nightingale’s body. That memory. “Lorenzo, what was Miles wearing?”
“I don’t usually pay attention to what dudes are wearing.”
“What color was his shirt?”
“I think it was blue.”
“You don’t think. You know.” I stare at him. “You were at the library that night. When you passed by Miles, you picked up the smell of his shirt. It would have been nothing to most people, but Derrick recalled it instantly. You left that stolen smell behind without even knowing it.”
Lucian’s eyes widen. “Lorenzo, is this true?”
He’s silent for a moment. Then he says: “He was dead when I got there. I was at the library looking for a cookbook. It’s easy to manifest because the university is so high above sea level. When I realized who it was, I didn’t know what to do, so I hid and watched. Your people came. I was surprised to see the boyfriend there. He almost saw me again, but I kept still.”
“Lorenzo, if that’s true, then you were the first person to arrive on the scene. Did you sense something? Did you see a possible weapon?”
“No. I felt sad, because he was kind to me. I felt the silence of his death. But there was nothing else.”
“Great. First you show up at a crime scene; then you start selling drugs. This is the kind of story that conservative moms love to hear.”
“Look. I barely dealt them, okay? The weird guy gave them to me, and I gave them to the squid. I think a vampire bought most of it.”
“Which vampire?”
“I never met him. But the ghoul said that he runs a community center.”
“I don’t know his name. The ghoul couldn’t even understand what he was saying half the time.”
“That’s him.” I turn to Lucian. “Modred bought the Pharmakon. He’s the one who’s dosing them.”
“That doesn’t seem like something that he would do.”
“Neither of us really know him. Patrick looks up to him, but he’s never been the best judge of character. He’s too kind. When Modred and I were at the party, he made certain that I never spoke with Quartilla, who was probably the only other person there who knew anything. He kept telling me to leave it alone and let him sort it out. I was right about him managing me.”
“Do you trust anyone?”
“Sure. I trust lots of people. But I live with those people. If they were lying to me, I’d realize it. Modred is hard to read on a good day, and when he reaches for the poker face, good luck. I think that he’s been working against us from the start.”
“Vampires are tools,” Lorenzo says.
“Well, if that were the case, we’d have nothing to worry about. But the vampires who just walked by are blitzed on Pharmakon and looking for a fight. I already used up our limited invisibility, so next time they appear, we’ll have to think of something while running.”
We continue down the passage. Eventually, it narrows and ends in a small enclosure. There’s a hole in the floor with a ladder leading down. I lay my fears about submarines aside, and use the ladder. It leads to a chamber that’s mostly dark, save for a pair of green eyes, which fasten on me the instant my feet touch the ground. I light my athame.
“Ru! We’ve been looking all over for you.”
“I’ve been here,” he says. “This is the safest part of the building. The storm outside is getting worse.”
I look around. In the center of the room is a glass chamber, which is empty. My athame starts to crackle as it picks up a bit of weak radiation still settling over the area.
“Is this the fail-safe?” I ask.
“It was,” Ru says. “But someone has stolen the battery.”
“Awesome.” I turn to Lucian. “If we can’t activate the building’s defenses, we’re humped. Anything can get in, if it hasn’t already.”
“It’s me that they want,” Ru says.
“Actually, they want both of us.”
“Did you also see something that you were not supposed to?”
“No. I’m just lucky that way.” I get down on one knee. “I may not be able to turn the power back on, but I can wake the building up. Everyone kneel and join hands.”
“I’m not solid enough to kneel,” Lorenzo says.
Ru notices him for the first time. “Where did he come from?”
“Everybody just fucking kneel. Now. And join hands.”
Ru takes my hand. “How do you wake a building up?”
“Like this.”
I touch my athame to the ground.
Wake up.
Floors, wake up. Windows, listen. Now is the moment to be who you are. Brackets, ducts, and pipes of every angle. Insulation. Carpet fibers, granite countertops, sleeping drywall: Now is the time to be. All you staples, frames, and hidden rebar, wake up. It’s a beautiful night for a battle. Marble, reveal your striae. Iron, remember your birth. Floors, shed your laminate; remember your ancestors who were Viking ships. Glass, look up and receive the moon. Walls, guard us and forgive us.
Oh, my building. You have known me since I was young, and before that, you knew my mother. I love you. Wake up and show yourself. Let your surfaces roar. Let the basements bare their teeth. Let every trace within you, every piece of evidence, wake up and remember what it is. Oh, my building. Now is the moment. You are not simply one building in a terminal city. You are my building, and I see your naked battlements. We matter to each other. We are tame to each other, like princes and foxes. I would recognize you in any light. Oh building, we’re so close—look, we’re touching now. Wake up, beautiful.
It works. The building rouses. A current passes through it, and suddenly, I can see the earth materia in the walls, clear as gold in water. I hear the thundering of the windows as they come undone. I feel everything around me remembering its potential.
Then I hear a sound that does not belong.
It’s like a roaming jigsaw.
Arcadia is outside.
She appears in the entrance, flushed and hungry. Detritus whirls around her. The building isn’t just allowing itself to be devoured. It’s throwing things at her. It’s screaming at her. But it’s not enough.
She is death in a doorway. She is more powerful than whatever miracle battery we were hoping for. She wears her helices on the outside of her body, which glow, like a necklace of coals. Her aperture seems big enough to swallow the entire room. I raise my athame. I don’t feel confident.
“Oh,” she says. “Good. Both of you are here.”
“You will not take me,” Ru says. “I will not return to my world in chains, as your experiment.”
“You misunderstand.” Arcadia ignores the outraged chairs and filing cabinets that swirl around her. “I have not come to collect you. Why do you think I am here, Tess?”
“Because you can’t let anything go?”
“Because the peace is over. The agreement that we made with your ancestors has become void. Just like Lord Nightingale, the Bercilak-demon, the Manticore—all dust. We tried it your way for a thousand years. We let you handle things. You could barely protect yourself from the night. And the necromancers were no better. They wilted after centuries of being ruled by a despot.”
“And your plan now is—what—to kill us both? You’re really going to kill your own sister?”
“You were never part of the family.”
“No. The problem is that you could never keep me out. I kept looking for my father, even after your nightmares, even after my mom lied to me to make things better. I kept looking. That only proves that I really am his daughter.”
“You were never anything.”
“That Manticore told me that I was. Mr. Corvid told me that I was. Even Basuram recognized me. Obviously, I’m something, Arcadia. That’s what pisses you off. I matter. All of my families love me, or else I would never have survived this long. Even he loves me.”
“He sent me to kill you.”
“I don’t think so. He would have come himself.”
“I am his general. I make these decisions.”
“Tess—” Lucian begins. There’s fear in his voice.
“No.” I raise my athame higher. I feel the building listening, ready to follow my move. I’m not afraid. “I said this was the moment, and it is.”
“When I pass through you,” Arcadia says, “it will be like you never existed. No part of you will remain as evidence. Are you ready?”
I feel both Ru and Lucian drawing power on either side of me. I feel the presence of those who love me, even if I can’t hear them. I remember what I thought when I first stepped into this building, years ago, when I was so young and nothing but beautiful doors. I’m thinking the same thing now.
This really is what I was born to do.
“Are you ready?” I ask her.
Uncertainty flashes across her eyes for a second. Then she moves. I feel the heat of her edges. Oh, my sister. You can take me, but not them. You will never have my little gods. I love them too much. I open myself completely to every substrate. I whisper to my athame:
Now is the moment. When I die, everything that I am will burst into light and angry neutrinos. It belongs to you. The building is listening. You must strike with all the power I have left. You must end her.
I look at Lucian. Everything I can’t say is in my glow. I smile. I beg the building to protect them both.
Arcadia falls upon me, and I aim for her heart.
Light breaks everywhere. I feel incredible pain as my athame sings. My bones are wind. I let myself scatter.
But I don’t. I spin. I am also a c
yclone, or part of me is. Every molecular bond shears from the impact. I spin until our orbits match, until I can see the division of her rings. I flatten to a wave. I’m about to lose myself completely in her, when a voice says:
“Stop.”
14
I stop spinning, but I don’t know if I’m alive or dead.
The pins and needles are so bad that I can hardly move. I feel cuts on my face, my arms, every part of me, but they’re shallow. I’m looking into Arcadia’s eyes. The brilliance of her hate drives her, and she continues to circle, but she’s slowed down. I look to my left, which takes a lot of effort. Lucian and Ru are unconscious on the ground. Most of the debris that was whirling around my sister has now settled to the floor. There are enough mundane objects to build several offices, but they’re burnt and pulverized, so you’d have to get creative if you were going to try.
“Thank you for listening,” the building says.
The lights are still out, but there’s a voice coming through the PA system. The voice speaks slowly and precisely, as a person often does when using a second language.
“That was ugly for a moment. It was difficult to tear you apart. But I see that the damage is minimal.”
“Who is speaking?” I ask. “Is this the building?”
“You know who I am.”
My breath catches. “Father?”
“You look good. I see you have grown up.”
“Are you here?”
“Yes and no. I am here enough for us to talk.”
“Then please tell her to stop trying to kill me.”
“Arcadia, you should go.”
“Father—”
“You have done enough. Go.”
She begins to say something. Then she just looks at me, once, before spinning herself out of sight. All the metal objects breathe a sigh. Lucian and Ru show no signs of waking up. It’s just me and his voice.
“Is the tapestry right?” I ask.
“It certainly tells a good story. Did you like it?”
“I suppose you planted the poem.”
“No. That was her idea. Obviously, there could be no public information about who she really was. But she did like poetry, and she wanted to leave a riddle. I think it is safe to say that most people would not translate a fragment written in eleventh-century Zaragoza. But you did.”