by Alyc Helms
Idealism is just a series of compromises waiting to happen, he’d told me in Shanghai. I thought again of Asha’s fear as Abby pinned her to the ground – a trapped woman. Afraid. Violently forced into a magically binding contract for no better reason than that her skillset was necessary. The justification that she’d deserved it for being in the wrong place at the wrong time made me ill all over again. I’d done that. I’d forced her into compliance, as surely as Abby, La Reina, or Sadakat. The road to hell looked remarkably like the past few weeks.
I found my way to the center of the labyrinth and sat on the rocky ground, not caring about the damage to my trousers. I rolled a pebble under my fingers and told myself that my clammy skin and shivers were due to the drifting fog and not my own self-disgust. I listened to the rumble of the surf at the bottom of the cliff, when I could hear it over the rush of blood through my head.
When the ground beneath me shifted, I assumed at first it was the product of a truck passing by. Until I recalled that I was easily a half mile from any road big enough for a truck. And then the shifting increased, a staggered back and forth strong enough that it would have knocked me over if I hadn’t been sitting.
I don’t know what self-destructive instinct prompted me to look across the veil when I should have been scrambling to find more solid ground than an erosion-prone ocean cliffside. But look I did and immediately regretted it.
If the Shadow Realms are an ever-present nightmare lurking just behind corners and under overhangs, the Voidlands are a place of mind-twisting wrongness. That’s what lay just across the fog-thin veil. The Voidlands pressed against the veil, against the land on both sides, powerful as a tidal wave, insidious as an invasive root system. It was the cause of the earthquake, seeping into the cracks of the real world and thrusting them apart like some eldritch horror version of frakking. From somewhere far off – I couldn’t be sure if it was in the Shadow Realms or the real world – came the creaking groan of shifting metal. I glanced north, where the Golden Gate loomed in a dizzying double image. In the real world, the span was shrouded in thick fog, only the rust-red towers visible above it. In the shifting border between the Voidlands and the Shadow Realms, the bridge burned the mottled, murky gold of its namesake. Black splotches broke off from the leading edge of the Voidlands and attached themselves to the cables and towers, seeming to consume the bridge, to overwhelm it. And then a light shone from somewhere further east, siphoning off the darkness. The bridge flared bright enough to burn my eyes, bright as La Reina’s wings. The void splotches seared away, leaving only wispy smoke behind. The Voidlands retreated out to sea, and I was left looking into the Shadow Realms once more. They seemed almost friendly in comparison.
I rubbed my face. Forced my senses to focus on the real world. The earthquake had passed. I wasn’t certain how long it had lasted, how bad it had been. I had to get home, check on Shimizu, find Mei Shen. I’d been so busy faffing around with Argent that I’d ignored her warnings about pending disaster. I hadn’t bothered to follow up on my puzzlement as to why the Conclave would want Argent’s tech in the first place, or what Lung Di’s protections had been protecting us from.
I stumbled to my feet, turned about, trying to figure out how to retrace my steps to the entrance of the labyrinth. I’d been so focused on getting to the center that I hadn’t paid attention to where I was going or how to get out. I stood a long time, irritated at the metaphor for being too on-the-nose.
“Fuck this,” I muttered, pulling out my cell phone and tramping a straight line across the furrows until I reached the edge.
Jack was kind enough to pick me up at the Legion of Honor parking lot, and even kinder not to mention the early morning hour. The earthquake had woken him, though it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had seemed – low fours, that was all. That was enough to unnerve me. Foreshocks. We’d had three of them that I knew of. How much worse would they get?
Jack took me to his place and fed me pancakes, loaned me a Giants t-shirt and green froggy flannel bottoms. He merely nodded when I told him that Mr Mystic was going to ground for a while, and that he should refuse all requests for contact.
“Missy,” he said softly as I was climbing out the window and onto his roof. “Just… don’t run away again.”
I gave him a tired smile. It did seem like running away was becoming a pattern with me. “I’m not running away. Only a bit of a regroup.”
“In that case, just remember you have friends.”
* * *
Friends. I surrounded myself with them over the next several days. Shimizu came back from Sheila’s couch, though she threatened to make it a pit stop on her way back to Iowa when I told her the earthquake thing might be a developing issue leading to the Big One. At least I could assure her that Lung Di’s Shadownomicon was locked away in the garage and sigil-warded to a fare-thee-well until I could figure out how to return it.
Shimizu’s departure should have been another hint that I was losing the plot. I buried myself in mundanity and minutiae as I struggled to regain my bearings. I read Patrick’s most recent chapter draft for his dissertation, went to a Bawdy Tales night with Vess and Andrew, helped Mason and Luis price wedding venues, and put in double hours on our house maintenance day because I’d skipped the last one for superhero stuff. I visited the bridge and even took a peek across the veil while I was there, but the Voidlands seemed to have been burned back to a sullen roiling far off the coast.
At my instruction, Jack forwarded the warding sigils and my polite regrets to Sadakat. He informed me that, after a few calls, things went silent on Argent’s end. I didn’t hear from Abby on either my cell or Mystic’s burner.
“I know you’re shaken up by what went down at the Academy, but you can’t keep not-doing anything,” Johnny said during our Friday afternoon one-on-one. He’d taken me down for the third time with the same leg sweep, and I still hadn’t worked out how to anticipate it or block it. There had to be a way, I knew. Johnny didn’t hammer home an attack unless I already had the tools to counter it.
“I know,” I said, kipping up to my feet. “But I’m not going to keep flailing blindly. I need to figure out the right action before I start acting.”
We bowed and settled into stance. It was my turn to attack. I led with a series of quick feints. Johnny danced back, caught my foot when I tried to follow up with a front kick. I relaxed and pivoted with the movement’s flow when he twisted my leg. He lost his grip and I rolled to my feet–
– And went down again from that same leg sweep.
“You should consider doing that on the mat as well.” Johnny reached down a hand to help me up. I took it, but then knelt rather than standing for another round of Rock ’Em, Sock ’Em Missy.
I closed my eyes, running through each time Johnny had taken me down. Johnny knelt across from me, giving me time to work it out.
Sort of. I had the chattiest sifu known to man. “Why did you start helping Argent in the first place?” he asked
I shrugged, and then followed the movement into rolling my shoulders. I was so damned tight these days. Maybe I could wheedle a massage out of Vess when I got home. “It was a shadow attack, and shadow’s my thing. I saw a nail, and I was all ‘I have a hammer! I have a hammer!’” I paused, glaring at his poorly contained smirk. “And no, the hammer is not my penis. Asshole.”
“Hey, it was your metaphor.” Johnny nudged my knee when I continued to glare at him. “C’mon. Grab your shoes. Let’s walk.”
I swapped my taiji slippers for my boots, pulled my coat on over my workout clothes, and followed Johnny down to the street.
“Is there actually a problem other than your desire to be a solution?” Johnny asked once we’d turned onto Grant. He nodded at the door hawkers outside the emporiums and received respectful bows in return. The sidewalks were fairly crowded – not even the events of the past six months could put much of a damper on tourist traffic on a sunny Friday afternoon in June – but the laowai tourists shied away from the
overeager door shills. The crowds were here to gawk, not engage. Certainly not to be tricked into buying cheap trinkets. The tourists wanted authenticity. The shopkeepers wanted to make rent. Observing the disconnect made me twitchy; I was neither fish nor fowl. This was why I usually took back ways to the kwoon. Why had Johnny wanted to come out into this?
I stamped my feet as Johnny and I got caught behind cluster after cluster of amblers. Johnny shot me an amused look and wove through the crowds like magic. Probably was magic. Become a Chinatown Guardian; never get caught in foot traffic again. There were worse job perks. Too bad I wasn’t descended from dragons.
I caught up with him further down the block, dodging a girl and her pet chow. At least it had given me time to consider his question. “The Voidlands seem to be encroaching. Which seems to be causing earthquakes. I’d say that’s two pretty big problems. And recent, which means they’re probably related to Lung Di’s defenses falling apart, which is what Mei Shen was trying to warn me about. The Conclave is staging coordinated attacks on our world, that’s… four? And I guess five would be: why? Who are they working with, what do they want, and why?”
“Any of that have much to do with Argent?” Johnny had led us down the hill to the Dragon Gate. The grey day dulled the gleam of the two guardian dragons topping the gate and the cinnabar pearl between them. A host of sparrows burst out from under the verdigris eaves, chased off by a larger feathered intruder. Tourists clustered around the weathered grey columns with their phones and selfie sticks and the occasional serious semi-pro kit. Someone had set their toddler atop the head of one of the guardian lions, which was causing a bit of a backup among the people waiting to take pictures. Despite her parents yelling at her, the crying child refused to make an acceptable face for posterity. I resisted the urge to lift the child down and tell the parents off. Everything I saw these past few days seemed like another reminder that it wasn’t always my place to intervene.
“The sigils at the Academy were most likely placed by someone inside Argent. And someone with high clearance has to be feeding the Conclave intel on Argent bases, but mostly… no. I got so caught up in their stolen tech and its recovery that I forgot that was their priority, not mine. What are we doing here?”
“Teaching moment. You’ll see.” Johnny leaned up against one of the supporting columns on the backside of the gate where fewer photographers were jockeying for a good angle. Something snapped, a building tension in the air that I hadn’t even noticed, releasing energy like the breaking of a rubber band. The tightness in my shoulders drained away, leaving me loose and limp. I glanced over at the other three columns. The girl with the chow was letting her dog sniff one of them. At another stood an old man with a bright green snake coiled under his collar and down his arm like a scarf. I was pretty sure if I scanned the eaves, I’d spot the red-tailed hawk that had chased away the sparrows. Johnny wasn’t the only Guardian of Chinatown, but I’d never noticed the others out and about. I nodded at the snake and wasn’t sure if the tongue flick that followed was meant as hello or piss off.
Someone took the toddler down and gave her a ring-pop for being such a good girl. The irritated crowd drifted away once they’d gotten their shots, replaced by new groups who were content to make goofball faces at their cameras.
I hurried to follow Johnny back the way we’d come. The crowds going up the hill were thinner. People were being lured into the shops. Chatting. Laughing.
Well shit. “What the hell was that?”
“Chi realignment. People living here. People coming here. They’re all here for different reasons. Usually things flow and it all works out. Sometimes the system gets gunked up and needs a bit of a tune-up.” Johnny flicked my ear. “Or did you think I was just around here to kick ass and take names?”
“Hell no. I thought you were just a pretty face to fuel fangirl moe.” Which earned me another ear flick.
“Lung Di’s protections against the Voidlands weren’t the only ones in San Francisco, though they were the strongest. The other wards are picking up the slack, which means they’re falling out of balance more quickly and need to be realigned on occasion.”
I could feel that realignment, the shift in energy. In flow. The crowds moved more easily, without the stops and stalls from before. The door patter as we passed rose and fell like a melody brought back in tune. It baffled me how I’d missed it before.
“My balance was off. That’s why you were able to take me down. Each time, you maneuvered me into some sort of roll because you knew when I came up, my balance would be off.”
Johnny chuckled. “She can be taught.”
I resisted making a face. I’d sort of deserved that. I followed him back up to his studio and grabbed my backpack. The kids for his Lil’ Ninjas class had already started trickling in. Johnny went into teacher mode, accepting their bows, greeting the parents.
I caught his attention briefly on the way out. “If you happen to see Mei Shen, tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I’m ready to hear what she and Tsung have to say. That I’m ready to help.”
Johnny winked at me. “I’ll make sure she knows.”
The kids waved at me as I headed out. They knew me; sometimes I stuck around to let Johnny use me as his demonstration dummy. I waved back, feeling lighter, happier than I had in days. I had something that might resemble a direction. I headed out to the main drag to enjoy the restored flow of Chinatown.
* * *
I walked home on autopilot, diverting through the alley behind the house because while the news vans had mostly given up, you never knew when some erstwhile paparazzo would get creative in his stalking.
I was so lost in my thoughts that I almost ran headlong into the woman lounging against our back gate.
“As – ah – ha… Hi.” Fuck. I backed up a few steps and weighed my options: bolt or play it cool?
I sucked at playing it cool, but it was too late to bolt. “Can I help you?” I asked, as though strange Indian women made a habit of hanging out at my back gate. As though I didn’t know her immediately. Stupid. She knew who I was. Had to. Why else would she be here, smiling at me as though she wished I was on fire so she could refuse to spit on me?
Asha tilted her head, one perfect brow arching. “Really? You’re going to cling to the pretense?”
My hands formed fists in my pockets. “Abby told you?”
“Abby wouldn’t tell me if I had a piece of spinach in my teeth. What makes you think she’d share your secrets?”
“Then…” Shit, had I given myself away?
“We met before, you and I. When you were Mistra? You made quite an impression, you and your little asura. When I saw Mr Mystic at the Academy… well, it is not that difficult to put this and that together.” She waved a languid hand at me, at the house behind her. “There are only so many Shadowborn sorcerers in the world, and few so naturally gifted.”
Shadowborn? I wanted to ask, but I was already feeling doubly off-kilter. Doubly exposed. I didn’t want to talk to her any longer than I had to. Certainly not out here in the open, and no way was I going to invite her into my house. I was still making things up to Shimizu for the last femme fatale intrusion.
“Look, Asha. I’m sorry. About the other night, about what we forced you into. If there is any way I can make it up to you. Any way I could undo it–”
Her laughter cut my apology short. “Oh dear, you mean Abby was right? Mr Mystic abandoned us because he felt guilty?”
Laugh she might, but I remembered her fear and fury. Just because she didn’t seem to hold a grudge didn’t make my actions right or righteous. I straightened my posture, pulled my hands from my pockets to let them hang loose at my sides, seeking balance in becoming a little bit more my grandfather. “I am not proud of my actions or their impact on you, and I felt it best to remove myself before I continued to act in a questionable manner.”
“My goodness, you’re as uptight as that Skyrocket fellow. They should team you two up. Get you a radio show. Someth
ing… old fashioned for the whole family.” She pushed away from the fence, searching my expression for a reaction. “Does this mean you have no interest in the Conclave’s agenda anymore? Not worried at all about what they took?”
“I’m concerned about their activities, but Argent’s problems are not my concern. Especially when I can’t agree with their solutions.”
“Hm. And if I told you I needed your help to fill the terms of my contract? The one you helped force me into?”
I studied my feet, the wide cracks in the old asphalt of the alleyway. I used to play lava monster out here, jumping from patch to patch and pretending to teeter at the edges, a moment of poor balance away from falling to my doom. “If there’s something you need of me, forward the specifics to Mystic’s lawyer and I will consider it.”
Asha nodded, smile fading. “Fair enough. I promise I’ll be circumspect about this rather silly ruse of yours.”
The tightness in my shoulders relaxed a hair. “My thanks.”
“Oh, it’s not a kindness on my part. It’s just more valuable to me as a secret.” She stepped aside to let me pass, smiling at my scowl. “You know it’s my own fault, getting this close to Argent. I was practically begging for Abby to come after me, all for some Ida Redbird pottery.”
I flinched at the rape culture rhetoric. I’d been guilty of it myself; I could hardly take her to task for it. And there was nothing I could say about it that wouldn’t earn me more mockery. “I hope this gives you and Abby a chance to work out your differences. Good day, Asha.” I slipped through the gate and shut it on the echo of more laughter.