Sages of the Underpass

by Aaron Michael Ritchey

  “Better I know now if he doesn’t have it in him. It’s part of the deal. Paying your dues.” Barton pointed. “That Erosion, he’s waiting in the back, waiting for the yahoos to drop before he strikes. I like that.”

  “Better to be smart than strong,” Andrew quoted.

  “Is that The Pranad?” Barton asked.

  Andrew felt himself a bit disappointed his agent didn’t know. “No. That’s from A Princess of the Changing Winds.”

  Barton laughed and drained half his beer. “Books, movies, Moveez shows, comic books. God, comic books are the worst. It’s not like that. We both know it’s not like any of that. It’s real. That’s all just fantasy.”

  Andrew felt the anger. He let it go. After a lifetime of cycling, letting go of emotions came easy, most of the time, unless he was dealing with family. Unless it was Linda or his children. His son had taken his side. His daughter had taken Linda’s. It felt like a bloody civil war that no one could win.

  Andrew would play along. He wasn’t about to argue the merits of his favorite novel. Instead, he agreed. “But everyone knows you can master your prana enough to use every single Zodiac skill.”

  Barton huffed. “All the Studies. All the signs. Unlimited prana. Indestructible sharira. These are the gods that walk among us.”

  Andrew caught the reference. It was from a new show streaming on Electric River. Zodiac Overmen, based on a comic book from the 1930s. If he thought hard enough, he could remember the cast of characters. He’d read the comics growing up but hadn’t cared much for them. They didn’t have enough romance for him.

  Linda had laughed at him, on more than one occasion, that he was too soft, too romantic, and not realistic at all when it came to relationships. He thought of the woman he’d signed the autograph for. She’d be in the bar. He was relatively single. He’d taken off his wedding ring to fight but hadn’t put it back on. Forgetful? Or was he wanting a night of romance? Probably a little bit of both.

  A wide swath of the forest was on fire, sending plumes of smoke in the air. Another section, destroyed by the Woda’s Ice Strike, was an open field now of downed trees.

  The Erosion Artist, a thick Asian guy, finally entered the battle. He rushed into the open field. He brought a Sanguine to his knees, siphoning away his prana using a Third Study. Then, when a Forge Artist came at him, he brought up his Fourth Study, his back covered in thick golden Chitinous Armor, like the back of a scorpion. He took the Forge’s attack on his back, turned, and ended her with a First Study strike.

  “Terran Belt.” Barton smiled. “I’m definitely going to be looking at that Scorpio. If he’s Unrepped, he won’t be for long.”

  The Asian guy was at least twenty years younger than Andrew. Barton had only so many slots. If only Andrew could get some traction, new fans, more followers on his So-Me page. Barton was looking, always looking, and ready to replace him. It was the business. Both he and Linda knew it.

  Andrew returned to the topic of conversation. “Okay, Barton, so you’re not ready to commit Timothy for the Niko Black fight. I’m guessing Marjory is next on your list.”

  “I like her. She’s tough. She’s older, yes, but she fights with an intensity that Timothy doesn’t have. She has the warrior’s fire.” Barton leaned in his seat, trying to get a view. The Erosion was the last blue standing, facing two reds, a Metallurgy wielding a gray hammer flecked with glowing green, like oxidized iron, and a Sky with swirls of air spinning around her hands.

  Andrew thought of Barton’s bestseller, The Art of the Inner Warrior. Maybe he was so hard on A Princess of the Changing Winds because it hurt the sales of his book. It hadn’t caught on like they’d hoped, but Andrew was smart enough to keep using the language from the book. His agent liked that. Ego-stroking, ass-kissing, whatever you wanted to call it, was necessary in the business.

  Barton pursed his lips. “But I’m thinking Timothy and Marjory are going to make it on their own. I like Henry. He has a solid fan base, and Vannix House was using the Energia Agency to scout him. If I don’t grab him, and soon, he’s going to get scooped up.”

  And there goes seniority and loyalty, Andrew thought bitterly.

  “Diana is pretty, and she’s hungry. I get her in my stable, and I could be making fifteen percent on her for thirty years.” Barton shook his head. “But I don’t like to think about money.”

  And that’s bullshit.

  “Did Seo-yun give up on her cusp nonsense?” Andrew asked.

  “She did. And Niko likes her. She likes him. That would add spice to the fight. We could bill it as two cusps, battling it out.” Barton raised a fist. “Yes!”

  The Erosion landed a well-placed punch and took out the Sky. It was just him and the Metallurgy artist left. They had to retreat from the growing flames. The crowds could feel the heat, but the Arena Master kept them safe. And the field underneath the prana might be a bit scorched. That was fine. It wasn’t football season anyway.

  “I don’t think Seo-yun is ready. But you have to admit, she wants it. She has fire.” Andrew then went out on a limb. “I’d go with either Timothy or Marjory. If you don’t, it’ll hurt the morale of the group.”

  Barton laughed, a bit too loud, a little drunkenly. “And if they all quit? We have fifty more to take their place. I like your kid, Andrew.”

  “He’s not my kid. You scouted him. You were the one who suggested him.” Andrew didn’t want to connect himself too closely to some young cusp with a crippled core. However, he didn’t want to totally distance himself either. If Niko did become something, he’d tell stories about how the great Andrew J. Coffey had helped him. It was a dance. You didn’t screw people over. And you didn’t throw yourself in on any one Artist.

  “Niko wants it. I like that,” Barton said.

  The Erosion went down from a well-placed hammer strike. The red team won, championed by the Metallurgist, a tattooed woman with a shaved head. She lifted her hammer.

  They all stood to applause. Even Barton. Which brought Andrew to his feet.

  His agent talked as he clapped. “It breaks my heart. Fire is one thing, talent is another. I just don’t see Niko going very far. His technique is sloppy, and he likes the flash and fanfare far more than the Arts. I’m afraid he might be a heartbreaking A minus.”

  That was in Barton’s book. The almost great. The A minus. Artists who were better than ninety percent of the fighters, but who still weren’t good enough. He referred to it as divine mediocre. That was most of the Battle Artists Andrew had ever met.

  And it was him. Andrew was good, you didn’t get to be a professional Battle Artist if you weren’t good. But did he have that special something like LJ Crown? It was unlikely. Or why was he in his late forties, fighting for his career?

  He and Barton sat down. The Arena Master cleared the Arena, and people started to leave. Barton sat, thumping his empty cup against his leg. “You’re right, Andrew. Niko should fight Timothy or Marjory. But I like Henry Banks. I like him a lot. I’m going to keep up the suspense until the day of the fight. At the very last second, I’ll let them know my decision.”

  Andrew saw Barton clearly for a moment, a man who held the lives, the hopes, the dreams of these people in his hands. He could make them. Or he could put them aside until their own frustrations snuffed out the fire of their inner warrior.

  That was one part of the agent. Another? He truly loved the Arts. And when he was his best self, Barton loved his Artists, every single one of them.

  Even Andrew. Maybe Andrew most of all. They’d been together for two decades. They’d built their careers together. While other Artists had played the swap-an-agent game, looking for the better deal, the better contract, Andrew had stayed loyal.

  “We value loyalty, don’t we, Barton?” Andrew asked.

  “We do.” The agent sighed heavily. Loyalty was a burden. That was how you knew it was real.

  Andrew would stay faithful to his wife. There was wine back in his room. He’d go there, drink a nightc
ap alone, and sleep alone.

  Linda deserved that much.

  Later that night, Andrew Googled the Erosion and the Metallurgy. Both were signed, the former to Anvil Incorporated, the latter to Heaven's Gate International. The Blood Moon Battle Agency repped them both.

  Good. He and Barton were right. If you weren’t good enough to get an agent, you shouldn’t be good enough to win. He felt better. The knowledge helped him sleep... that, and the wine.

  The Board Meeting

  MONIQUE LAMB GAVE LOGAN breakfast. It wasn’t a great day for him, but it certainly wasn’t the worst. Either way, Monique didn’t mind. He woke with the sun, like clockwork, and went to bed with it as well, sleeping longer in the winter.

  Daylight saving didn’t affect his schedule a bit. Logan clung to his schedule, but then, most everything else had been taken from him. He could still walk, could still wash himself and take care of the basics, and that was a definite blessing without a doubt. Yet, eating baffled him.

  She fed him at the breakfast nook, a small table and chairs next to a window facing west. She’d taken off her rings and put them in a special bowl by the sink. At some point, if things got bad, she’d sell the stupid wedding ring, a bad joke, but she’d never part with her aquamarine jewel.

  The fog clogged the bay, obscuring the tops of the Red Gate; the headlights on the bridge were smudges, as if Monet had decided to switch from flowers to cars.

  Monique lit a candle that morning, like she always did when taking care of domestic chores. The Romans had their goddess of the hearth, and when she lit a candle, it was as if she were paying homage. Cooking, doing dishes, feeding Logan, she didn’t mind the tasks, but she didn’t exactly like them either. Her ego would try to tell her that she was too important. Her true self knew that as a human, it was part of the job description. If she went down the path of servants doing everything for her, she’d lose a bit of what made her human.

  Besides, she couldn’t afford to pay help, other than the night nurse and the day nurse. Even then, she’d cut their hours, which meant feeding Logan breakfast and cutting back on trips so the night nurse wasn’t needed.

  Logan was exactly sixteen years older than her, in his fifties, long, lean, spare, like his body was looking for another dime. He had iron gray hair and blue eyes. Most of the time, the blue eyes were unfocused, other times, they stared with an eerie intensity. Like that morning. They kept ending up on Monique’s face, pleading with her. For what? She couldn’t say. Was there recrimination? Probably. Guilt? Definitely. Gratitude? That only came in snatches, unexpected, jarring, like a sunny day in Bay City.

  Monique scooped up oatmeal, heavy on the cream, sprinkled with sugar, thick with raisins.

  Logan opened his mouth and she gave him another bite. He was a clean eater. Another little blessing. Being a caretaker, she’d learned to appreciate the small blessings.

  “No, I don’t know what happened to the money.” She didn’t know how much talking to him helped. She did it more for herself. The Pranad said, The Artist serves all. They serve their own needs first. A strong, healthy back can more readily bear the burdens of others.

  “For weeks, I’ve had software engineers looking. Whoever took it knew what they were doing.” Monique glanced at the clock. She still had some time before that morning’s board meeting. It would be another duel between her and Alvin Fujimori, with Phil Lord sitting and watching. It was fine. If there was one thing Monique knew how to do, it was fight. “Russian hackers are always the prime suspects. It’s cliché. And there’s no evidence of that. There’s no evidence at all. It seemed I made several transactions, using several passwords, and there you have it, we’re poor.”

  That was a laugh. She’d known true poverty. Logan had as well. Living in a luxury apartment with a view of the Red Gate, with a C-level job at one of the big corporations, was very far from where they’d come from. She was back to living hand-to-mouth. Or that was the old way of speaking. The new term was paycheck-to-paycheck. She could’ve cut back on her charitable contributions. That didn’t feel right, however. She and Logan had escaped the Underbelly. Others hadn’t. And in fact, the bad parts of Bay City were growing as more people fled the Nowhere to try and find work in the city.

  The split between the haves and the have-nots was growing, and in her worst moments, she felt helpless. In better seconds, she knew what she was doing was contributing, not just with money, but with her work at SoulFire. But oh, how quickly the executives voted themselves raises. When she demanded a pay cut to fund a project, all her peers grumbled. It was a bad precedent, or so they claimed.

  If Monique was a betting woman, and she was, she’d have sworn it was Fujimori who had taken her life savings, eight hundred thousand dollars, gone. All of her stocks and mutual funds? Five million dollars gone. It was probably her punishment. Or was it to show Fujimori’s power? People with power not only liked to keep that power, they also liked everyone to know they could always acquire more.

  Logan finished off the oatmeal. He stood and wandered back to his room, and Monique smiled. “You’re welcome, Logan, it was the least I could do. Yes, the oatmeal was delicious this morning. The extra raisins?” She brought her fingers and her thumb to her mouth and made a smacking sound. “Très bon. My compliments to the chef!”

  She was the chef. She was also the dishwasher. She handwashed the dishes, then checked on Logan, and he was back in bed, reading her old copy of A Princess of the Changing Winds. She wasn’t sure how much he retained, but seeing him reading made her happy. Logan had always liked to read.

  Then it was time to go fight. The boardroom made a fine Battle Arena. And she liked it when her opponents were tough.

  MONIQUE WALKED ALONE into the executive conference room at the top of the Trinity building in downtown Bay City. SoulFire had built the three intersecting skyscrapers to mimic their corporate logo, three flames of skyscrapers, rising out of the urban sprawl, shrouded in the morning mist.

  She’d found Mother Hen another job at SoulFire. It hadn’t been a good fit, and she was considering his replacement. She’d liked that Aleksy Kowalczyk, but it wasn’t like a god-level engineer would give up his job to become her personal assistant. For now, she was fine working alone. Actually, she preferred it.

  Alvin Fujimori, the COO, and Phil Lord, the CEO, had their assistants there, as did the other executives, the CFO, the CIO, and the rest of them. Every seat at the table was full.

  Monique walked to the windows. June, and it looked like winter out there. She turned. She was a bit late for the meeting, which wasn’t unusual for her.

  Fujimori, a fit Japanese man in his sixties, and a former Kyoto champion, stood up and pushed his chair back.

  She could almost hear the Arena Master. Artists ready?

  Her mind was sharp. Her soul was strong.

  “Glad you could join us,” Fujimori sneered. He was a man who liked to sneer, though he was better at smirking.

  “I would apologize, but then where would we be?” Monique asked, matching his sneer with a joyful smile. “Every meeting would have to start that way. And we have a lot to talk about.”

  “Your mysterious cambion pair?” Fujimori asked. “There has been no new information. There have been no new sightings.”

  “And no new murders,” Monique countered. “As for sightings, that is erroneous. Daemon scrappers saw a shadowy man-shaped cambion in Fort Tahoe.”

  “No new confirmed sightings.” Fujimori stood with his hands clenched into fists. “We cannot continue to pour resources into your suspicions. This has become your own private crusade, and I do not want to finance any one person’s...” He searched for the word.

  “Goose chase?” Monique offered. She went on before he could. “What I fought in Winnemucca was a new goose, a powerful goose, one that might lay golden eggs. If we could harness all that energy, if we could understand it, use it, well, it would give us an edge in the marketplace.”

  Phil Lord spoke up. “We defin
itely want to exploit any new kind of daemon before Vannix House gets their hands on it. Or anyone else. But Alvin has a point. Is this a goose chase, Monique?”

  “Isn’t it all a gamble?” Monique asked. “We’ve been utilizing daemon energy for close to two hundred years, yet we don’t understand what we’re dealing with. If we had, the Cambion Crisis might not have hit us so hard.”

  Fujimori sighed. “The Cambion Crisis is why we could afford this building. It’s why we have jobs. It’s why we can employ twenty-five thousand people. For years, I’ve said we should call it the Cambion Opportunity.”

  “That didn’t poll too well in the focus groups.” Monique didn’t lose her serene smile. “This is clearly a new opportunity. But let’s compromise. Give me six more months. I’ll halve my team, and I’ll take full responsibility. If I have no new information in six months, I’ll step down.”

  “You might be stepping down a lot sooner than that.” Fujimori motioned to the head of marketing, Geri Poulson.

  Poulson didn’t get up. “Barton Hennessey has this thing he’s doing with the local Bay City Battle Artists, at one of their Quarterly Cons. He’s offering to represent the winner of a fight between some no-names in their Premier Critique Group. It’s generated a fair amount of buzz, yet the methods are questionable. As are the Battle Artists.”

  “That is your arena, isn’t it?” Fujimori smiled at his own joke.

  This was something new and odd, unexpected and bit insipid. Monique ran with it. “Okay, so, why is this a problem? For one, it’s not on the national stage—it’s not an LBA fight. For another, Barton Hennessey, last time I checked, doesn’t work for SoulFire. He could get a contract for the winner with Rocks & Rams, Vannix House, or any of the other corporations.”

  “You cut a deal to work with Hennessey,” Fujimori accused. “How much money are you getting?”

  “Not a dime. I didn’t spend any money, didn’t sign any contracts, and Alvin, if there’s no ink on paper, it doesn’t exist.” Monique found herself on the defensive. She didn’t need to be. “Yes, we’ve done well working with Hennessey’s agency, and we’ve signed some exceedingly good talent. But it’s not exclusive. This isn’t an issue. Searching for the new daemon in Fort Tahoe is. Can I have my six months or at least until the end of the year to find it?”