The Worst of All Possible Worlds

by Alex White

  “What was she saying?” asked Boots. “The AI was called the ‘Docent’?”

  “Yes,” said Malik. “And Alister is going to guide us, whatever that means.”

  “Did someone call for me?” came a male voice wafting into their midst. It took Boots a moment to recognize Alister—his tone was proper, but overpronounced.

  “Al! You’re going to guide us somehow?” Boots called up to the ceiling like an old-timey séance.

  “Do not name homunculi,” said Alister. “You’ll only give them the wrong ideas. I am the Docent, the AI administrator of the Graveyard of the Poets.”

  “An admin! Awesome!” said Boots. “There’s a man outside who has alchemy, and he wants the Wellspring. So, you know, you should kill him and stuff.”

  “Don’t worry. Even the best alchemist would take days to breach this place. I’ll make sure he waits his turn,” said Alister.

  Boots balked. “His turn? He doesn’t get a turn! Listen here, buddy—”

  “All humans may have a turn,” said Alister. “Would you like to speak with him? Maybe you can negotiate an arrangement between yourselves.”

  “What?” asked Boots. “No! Of course not!”

  “I want to talk with him,” said Cordell.

  Magic sparks formed into the figure of Henrick Witts, elegant robes untouched by the detritus of a ruined world. He cocked his head, as though hearing a distant sound, then removed his mask. He bore a half smile on his weathered face, like he knew some funny secret. He spoke to someone just outside the projection.

  “Hang on.” Witts held up a hand, rapt with delighted fascination. “I believe someone is listening to us, my dear.” His voice was clear as day, and what struck Boots the most was how average it was in person. He didn’t sound like a murderer.

  “Hey,” said Cordell, raising a shaky finger. “We’re going to kill you.”

  Good one, Boss. Really stuck it to him there.

  The old man chuckled, crow’s-feet gathering under sparkling eyes. “Is this Captain Lamarr? It’s wonderful to hear your voice. It shames me that we’ve never met.”

  “I’d be more ashamed of the genocide, if we’re being blunt,” said Boots, waving her hand through his face like a slap.

  “And Boots Elsworth!” said Witts. “What a treat to hear your voice!”

  “Oh, well, if you enjoy that, you should try letting me crush your windpipe,” she shot back. “It’ll really give you the full Boots Elsworth experience. Just ask your Mother.”

  Witts frowned. “Lenora?”

  “What? No!” Boots shook her head in disgust. “Major Gwerder. I killed her with my knee.”

  “I apologize for ruining your joke, Boots,” said Witts. “It was quite clever, and I should’ve gotten it the first time.” He rubbed his wrists and flexed his fingers, showing off a pair of armored gauntlets that probably poisoned one’s soul or some other ridiculous power. “I’m a great fan of your crew, Captain Lamarr. As I’m sure you know, I’ve always admired those who stand alone. Honestly, if I thought your folks could be trusted for one second, I’d make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. You’re a bunch of real go-getters. Talent… Creativity… Panache… You can’t train skill sets like yours; believe me, I’ve tried!”

  “Your money is worthless to us,” said Cordell. “So it wouldn’t matter.”

  “We only want your blood,” Boots added. “I’m happy to take payment in full right now.”

  “That was a much better threat!” Witts turned and spoke to someone off-frame. “Isn’t Boots the one who stabbed you, Commander Fulsom? You said I’d like her.” He turned back toward Boots, and she wondered if he could see her. His eyebrows knit together, as though he was explaining quantum physics to a toddler. “I really do like you, Boots. I was hoping I’d get to tell you that before I killed all of you.”

  “You like me?” Boots wanted to laugh, but the thought of his admiration disgusted her. “I’ll never get that stink off.”

  He gestured to the planet in a wide motion. “You’re a self-starter of the highest order, and a fantastic historian. It was you who found Origin, wasn’t it? Marvelous. Beyond me. I’ve always said you should hire smart people and get out of the way.”

  It was arrogant of him to stand outside the door like that, where an orbital sniper might get a lucky shot. Boots imagined the sound his flapping mouth might make if a mass driver round tore it off. But the longer she stared daggers into the projection, the more she realized she wanted to do it herself.

  “Please don’t take it personally that you need to be eliminated. That you’ve posed a challenge at all is a high compliment.”

  “Yeah? Do take it personally when I crack open that skull of yours and spread your ‘genius’ all over the Graveyard,” Boots spat. “Still like me now?”

  “Yes. I just wish you weren’t so easily manipulated into talking with me instead of planning your counterattack.”

  She’d be damned if she’d let him see that he was right.

  “Savor every breath, shithead,” said Boots. “Cut the call, Docent. Or however you do it. Make this asshole”—she gestured to Witts, who laughed bashfully—“go away.”

  The robed figure vanished as the interior airlock door opened. Boots’s comm chimed, alerting her to the reconnection to the hunting party.

  “Tell me you’re holding the Wellspring,” Cordell groaned. “Because Witts is coming inside in five minutes.”

  “Can’t talk. Mapping an invisible labyrinth, sir,” came Nilah’s curt reply. “Just get down here.”

  A silhouette appeared in the hallway, black smoke drifting from its features—Alister. “Hello, and welcome to the Graveyard of the Poets. I’m the Docent—”

  “Yeah, we got that,” said Boots. “And I’m sorry, Al, but I can’t snap you out of it right now.”

  Alister gave her his strange, corpse smile in response.

  “We’ll get the captain,” said Malik. “Run ahead, Zipper, and get set up any way you can. If we can’t find a way through”—he drilled the point home with a stern gaze—“we sabotage and resist to the last person.”

  Aisha leaned across and gave him a sweet kiss, and Malik wrapped his arms around her. Then she tapped him on the nose. “No more holes in you, husband.”

  He smiled back. “Put a hole in Witts, and I can worry less about that.”

  Then Aisha took her slinger rifle and snapped out the barrel to full-length for sniping. “Bet on it.”

  Boots grabbed one end of Cordell’s stretcher, and Malik took the other side as Aisha raced off into the depths. Though they did their best to keep up with her, she outpaced them at every turn of the endless emerald tunnels.

  “What the hell?” came Aisha’s voice. “Hunters, what am I looking at?”

  “It’s a maze,” was Orna’s huffing response. Whatever they were doing sounded like it involved a ton of running, which (Boots hated to admit) was a bit easier, thanks to Malik. “Each tile has two exits, and each edge teleports you—”

  “—so we have to get the right sequence of tiles,” Nilah finished, “because at the center—”

  Boots, Malik, and Cordell came stumbling down the path, into the magnificent stained-glass dome beyond. Her lungs pounded from the sprint, but the sight still stole the breath from her chest. Then she saw the gargantuan crystal, hovering in a suspension field at the center, and her skin grew electric.

  “—is the Wellspring.” Boots’s voice came out little louder than an awestruck whisper, hairs standing up on the back of her neck. “That’s great and all, but where do we hide? Witts is coming in!”

  Teacup and Charger flashed through the domed space, teleporting from triangle to triangle at breakneck speed. After a moment, Charger came bursting from the labyrinth, nearly bowling Boots over.

  “Sixteen wrong choices, and it spits you out,” said Orna, joining them. It was a bit odd to see Charger bend over to catch its breath.

  Teacup was hot on its heels, arriving almost im
mediately after. “But I’ve got some good news. It’s also the best hiding place in the galaxy. If we take fifteen branches before holding still, Witts only has a… one-in-thirty-two thousand or so chance of reaching us on the first try. If we all split up, he’ll never get all of us.”

  Everyone seemed satisfied with that plan, save for Boots. “You’re forgetting my teleportation allergy, Nilah! You don’t know what’s going to happen!”

  They all exchanged glances, and Cordell was the first to speak. “Everyone into the labyrinth,” he said, sitting up with a groan. “It was time to get off my ass and do something, anyway.”

  He stopped and looked at Boots, holding out his hand. “You up for an adventure?”

  “With you?” she said, taking his arm and wrapping it over her neck to support his weight. “Always.”

  “Get set up, everyone,” said Cordell. “Fifteen tiles. Count them. Me and Bootsie will be in last, since I’m pretty tapped, and she ain’t exactly a ground-combat specialist. You good with that?”

  “Yes, sir,” came the assembled response, and one by one, they flashed into the depths of the labyrinth.

  Some appeared close by, others quite distant. Nilah looked like she was right next door, and all of them appeared nervous about their apparent lack of cover.

  “Our turn,” said Cordell. “Let’s go, girl.”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m a horse,” she said. “You’re a fool for staying behind, you know that. Can’t be sure what this maze will do to me.”

  “Yeah,” said Cordell, voice low, “but between you and me, I’m not worth a damn in this fight, so if you’re going to die, let’s do it together.”

  They stepped down onto the first glass triangle, and Boots paused to look into his eyes, uneven from all the swelling. “Together it is.”

  Then they stepped off the edge, and Cordell was ripped from her arms in a flash of light and a scream.

  “Captain!” she called, and she found him lying on one of the nearby tiles, clutching his abdomen.

  “It’s fine.” His voice hissed through clenched teeth. “Just aggravated my injured… uh, everything… when I fell.”

  She took a step toward him, and as she did, she felt the strange sensation of pushing through something like plastic wrap. Straining harder, she broke free onto the next tile.

  It hadn’t teleported her. In fact, it hadn’t done anything at all. She’d made mundane, linear progress toward the unreachable goal at the end of the maze. Unbelieving, she stepped over the next edge. More webs of magic tugged at her, and she ripped past. Another few steps, and she’d be halfway to the Wellspring.

  She looked at Cordell, astonished, and he returned the wide-eyed gaze before adding, “What the hell is wrong with you? Go get the goddamned crystal!”

  Plunging forward, Boots pushed through edge after edge, making steady progress toward the Wellspring. With each step, the great crystal’s light grew stronger, and a strange giddiness slipped into her blood. She could stop and bask in its presence forever, but she forced her weakening legs to press against the folds in space.

  “Excuse me!” cried the Docents, but Boots would be damned if she stopped to listen. “That’s against the rules!”

  “Bite me,” she growled, ripping aside another shroud.

  Then she reached the plinth at the center of the Chapel and pulled herself up onto its golden orichalcum majesty. This close, the light of the Wellspring threatened to consume her mind, and she swooned under its rays. She reached up to touch it—

  And was about a meter shy.

  She jumped for all she was worth, but its power sapped her energy, and she nearly toppled from her perch. She’d always hated being short; she never thought it might destroy the galaxy.

  “Bring it down!” she called to the Docents. “I passed your stupid test, now give it to me!”

  Alister appeared beside her in a hail of magic sparks, his already unnatural face twisted in hideous ways. “You are nothing. A cheater. Lowborn. You cannot be the future of alchemy if you cannot pass a simple test of magic.”

  She went to slap him and found out that the AI controlling him was good at hand-to-hand. Within seconds, it had her in a headlock, cutting off her circulation.

  “Sorry… Al…” she choked before stabbing him in the hand with her hidden stiletto knife. To her horror, he didn’t react.

  The shapes inside the Chapel grew blurry, and the more she struggled, the less strength she found. As her eyes rose to the entrance, she could just make out the light show that accompanied Henrick Witts and his three lackeys.

  “It seems someone broke the rules!” Witts called to her.

  “You must follow the path,” Alister said, tightening his grip. “Cheat, and you will be dealt with.”

  Aisha traced her glyph and took a shot, the spell whizzing through a dozen noncontiguous spaces before striking Witts in the chest. The round shattered, the afterimage of its broken glyph the only thing that remained, and Witts laughed.

  When Aisha fired again, she killed the man standing to the right of him, and the laughter stopped.

  “This place is so”—Witts searched for the right word—“folded up. May I fix that?”

  “You must follow the right path,” said Jeannie, appearing by Witts’s side, and Boots could swear he was startled.

  It was getting hard for her to see around all the encroaching darkness, though, with all the asphyxiating she was doing.

  “Let’s simplify things, then,” Witts replied, and a set of five-meter glyphs throbbed into existence before him, their sounds deafening.

  Alister was thrown clear, and Boots’s vision returned—but she was seeing double. Or was she? The dome seemed to kaleidoscope around her, mirroring and spinning, separating and—to her chagrin—aligning. Invisible golden walls burst into existence as Witts’s magic unfurled the Chapel’s extra-dimensional expanses. Her friends disappeared within the nauseating whirlwind of stained glass and orichalcum.

  The spells complete, Boots now stood in a room the size of the plinth, maybe fifty paces across. Alister lay upon the ground on the far side, his breathing shallow. The Wellspring continued its lazy spin overhead, though gone were the stained-glass flowers.

  In their stead, Boots saw thousands of nodes, pointed at the Wellspring like the core of a reactor. In unfolding the Chapel, Witts had exposed its true nature, along with the sensitive equipment holding the stone in place.

  The reality of the Chapel of the Wellspring wasn’t some overwrought dome—it was a containment system to hold the magic inside.

  “Let’s see if I can get you down,” she breathed, tearing her slinger from its holster and taking aim at a fragile-looking electronics package.

  She would’ve fired, too, if Witts hadn’t grabbed her arm with his armored gauntlet.

  “Lovely to meet you in the flesh,” he said, spinning her around with an unnatural strength.

  She took a swing with the stiletto, and he blocked it with a glyph from his other hand, shattering her arm all the way to the mounting pin. Fresh pain ripped through Boots. She screwed her eyes shut just to keep conscious.

  “I believe this is quite a treasure you’ve brought me,” he said, expression suffused with delight. “But I’m not a fool. Let’s find out everything you know while my friends deal with yours.”

  Then came a pair of glyphs—Boots recognized the reader’s mark, but the other took her a moment to comprehend. As her body experienced the pure pain of a raging inferno, she understood its purpose well enough.

  Henrick Witts pried open her mind and ravaged her memories, and there was nothing she could do to stop him.

  Nilah looked around, shocked to be both breathing, and elsewhere.

  Instead of the open dome of the labyrinth, she found golden walls of orichalcum—which she’d already tired of seeing. She was in a long and twisting hallway, but the floor tiles were still the same triangular glass blocks that she’d stood on before in the big dome. Was she still ins
ide the labyrinth?

  “Anyone on this channel, come in!”

  “Babe!” Orna’s voice was a balm on her fears. “Go back the way you came.”

  Nilah turned to find a long series of chambers—the other fifteen decisions she’d made on the way in. They’d been unfurled, reoriented, and placed in the correct order. Boots’s terrible scream echoed over the comms, drowning out Nilah’s fears. She made to sprint when a blinding flash lit the hall.

  Harriet Fulsom teleported in, one slinger in each hand. An angry red scar ran down the side of her neck, the healed cut from where Boots had jammed a knife into her.

  There was no standoff.

  No stare down.

  No speeches.

  Just the white-hot lightning strikes of spells flying.

  Nilah whipped out her slingers and ramped up Teacup’s projectors to full, filling the corridor with spell bolts and dancing holograms. Harriet vanished over and over again, her godlike glyph strobing in time with each near miss from Nilah.

  She knew exactly what her opponent was looking for: a moment of inattentiveness. A single touch from Harriet could end Nilah then and there. She’d be teleported into solid rock, faraway space, or something worse—like her father.

  If a touch meant death, Nilah needed a better way to armor herself—the holograms Teacup projected from its arms would do nicely. Every time Harriet’s eyes darted away, Nilah added another few millimeters to her holographic bulk.

  Nilah rolled through her forms, a blur of metal, guns, and fists as she assaulted Harriet’s position. The god deftly avoided her strikes, weaving and teleporting far out of reach.

  Every day since her father’s murder, Nilah had considered this fight. Harriet could be anywhere in an instant. She could teleport any mass she could lay hands on. If Nilah wanted to win, she couldn’t risk even a split second of blindness. If she hadn’t seen Sharp’s death, she never would’ve stood a chance.

  “This is going to hurt. I don’t understand why you didn’t kill yourself like I told you,” said Harriet.

  “I didn’t follow your team orders,” said Nilah. “Why start now?”