Existentially Challenged, page 2
“Personpower,” said Nita.
“Personpower, thank you, assigned to each subdivision reflects which . . . official procedures will have the greater emphasis, going forward.”
“And what does that mean?” probed Victor, his upper lip curling like an unfolding flytrap.
“Well, what it means is that the Department is still going to be doing a lot of investigating and tracking down of extradimensionally gifted persons and nonperson entities,” said Nita, eyes condescendingly wide. “But what we don’t intend to do as much of is setting them on fire and blowing them up.”
Victor’s mouth tightened like the chains on a torture rack as he fixed his gaze upon Nita. “I happen to identify as someone who sets things on fire and blows them up,” he intoned.
“Come on, Victor,” said Adam, after a cough. “She’s right, you haven’t had much to do lately. And look, your team still has Reinholdt, and Stoke, and Stewart . . . they’re all good people. At least you’re not . . .”
He had been about to wave his pudgy hand over the minuscule third column on the page, which had only two names: Doctor Diablerie and Alison Arkin. But then he accidentally caught Alison’s eye, and his hand returned immediately to his lap like a startled badger to its sett.
“Not . . . dying of cancer,” he concluded.
02
“Extradimensional rights,” muttered Victor as he wore a furrow into the cheap carpet of the corridor outside the meeting room. “Next they’ll be saying we can’t stop them murdering people anymore ’cos that would be oppressing their identities as transdimensional death monsters.”
Alison gave up trying to speed walk past without making eye contact, and offered him a wincing smile. She reminded herself to try to see the scrawny, shaggy-haired, emotionally vulnerable human being, rather than the tenuously stable fire-summoning pyrokinetic with the hypothetical destructive yield of a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb. “Everything okay?”
Victor scowled, jerking a thumb at the meeting room door. “What the hell do they expect me to do the next time some possessed bastard tries to kill me?”
“Person of dual consciousness,” said Alison, before she could stop herself.
“Perthon of dual conthiouthneth,” repeated Victor, with his tongue pressed to his teeth. “Seriously, what do I do? Ask a few probing questions to ascertain its position on the kill-all-humans issue in the three seconds before it bites my legs off?”
An unexpected wave of sympathy washed over Alison. She and Victor had recently encountered a person of dual consciousness that had come close to killing them both. Still, Alison was pretty sure that Jessica Weatherby–Shgshthx had been an outlier, even for the usual standards of people sharing their bodies with Ancients, the ancient godlike beings from another dimension.
Victor read her expression. “Yeah, remember the salt bitch? What do you think she’d have done if we’d stood around worrying about politics?”
“I . . . don’t think politics mattered much to her,” conceded Alison diplomatically, drawing a circle on the floor with one foot. “Unless wanting to kill lots of people counts as politics.”
“What is even the bloody point of having a ministry for magical defense if it’s just going to open the door to the next Ancient attack?”
Alison grimaced and quickly glanced around for anyone who might be listening. She was rarely one to openly disagree, but Victor’s language was making her more uncomfortable by the second. In the age of smartphone surveillance, careless talk cost social lives. “Victor, there are loads of dual-consciousness people coming out now, and most of them are normal people who aren’t trying to murder anyone.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry. I guess I’m just making knee-jerk presumptions about Ancients based on an unrepresentative sample of every single sodding time I’ve ever had to deal with one.”
“That’s not true . . .”
He splayed out a pale, bony hand and counted off the fingers. “One, the salt bitch. Two, the shadow thing that tried to eat the country ten years ago. Three, oh, almost forgot, the one that lived in my head for my whole teens trying to convince me to melt everything fleshy. Hey, Adam!”
Adam Hesketh had just tottered out of the meeting room with his gaze locked firmly onto his phone. “Mm?”
“Adam, think about it. When was the last time we had to deal with an Ancient that didn’t come across as even slightly kill-all-humans curious?”
“Yeah, probably,” said Adam, not looking up.
Victor let out an angry sigh, letting his hands drop to his sides. Then his hands almost immediately came back again to gesture at Alison’s face. “Remember I said all this.”
He turned on his heel and began to stomp away, but stopped after a few yards, one boot hovering a foot above the floor. He peered over his shoulder and frowned at Adam, who hadn’t moved an inch. “Adam?”
“Mm?”
“We going to lunch or what?”
Adam finally looked up, blinking in confusion, like a parakeet in the moment after the cover is yanked off its cage. “What? Oh. Sorry. I can’t right now. I’m supposed to be meeting with the new team to go over all the outstanding cases. Don’t you need to meet with your new team?”
Victor groped the outside of the coat pocket where he kept his phone. There was a distinct lack of vibration ensuing. “Apparently not,” he spat.
“Oh,” said Adam. “Well. Your work is probably a bit less . . .” His mouth tried in vain to shape the right word, and he struggled to avoid breaking eye contact as his phone vibrated yet again. “A bit less.”
“Meaning?”
Adam finally succumbed to his new text. “Oh. Ugh. I really have to go now, actually. Mr. Badger wants to know when I can come down to the school and look over the students.” He caught Alison’s eye, gave an embarrassed shrug, then shuffled away.
Victor tapped his foot three times in a slow, measured fashion, then turned to Alison. “You want to get lunch?”
“Erm. I think I’m supposed to meet with Ms. Lawrence in a minute. It’s that thing where I explain how our last assignment went. Debrief? Is that it?”
“Yes, that’s what actual professionals call a debriefing,” he said, nodding sarcastically. “Say no more. The Dread Pirate Pegleg says jump, so it’s all hands on deck . . .”
He trailed off as he saw her expression change. She reddened, her eyebrows came together, and the corners of her mouth stretched out in an urgent grimace, so if her nose had been an exclamation mark she would have been doing a convincing impression of a triangular warning sign.
Elizabeth Lawrence wasn’t physically built for looming over people, but nevertheless a shadow seemed to fall over Victor’s face as he sensed the presence behind him. Slowly, carefully, like a minesweeper suspecting that the thing his foot just nudged might not have been a manhole cover after all, he looked around. And down.
“Mr. Casin,” said Elizabeth, her walking stick rhythmically tapping the floor between them. “Go to lunch.”
03
“Ms. Lawrence, Victor didn’t mean anything,” said Alison, one nanosecond after the door of Elizabeth’s office finished closing.
“Hm?” said Elizabeth, taking her seat.
“What Victor was saying? He—”
Elizabeth pinned Alison to her own seat with a look. Between her large, professional desk and high-backed executive chair, she looked like a lost baked bean peering out from between two sofa cushions, but the effect of her gaze was unmitigated. “Victor Casin is one of the most powerful magic users in the country,” she said. “I can’t imagine why he would think he has anything to fear from me.”
She paused slightly, as she always did when she thought Alison needed a few seconds to digest the usual heavy dose of subtext in her words.
“Your last outing with Diablerie,” Elizabeth said, jabbing a few keys on her laptop to bring up the relevant email. “Someone called the new emergency line and reported that magic rituals were being conducted on Tooting Bec Common at night. Diablerie was dispatched to make an assessment.”
“Um, yes,” confirmed Alison.
Elizabeth closed her laptop and got comfortable, letting her back muscles melt into the chair’s cushioning. “Give me a detailed account of what happened.”
“We left the Department in Diablerie’s car at 7:17 p.m.,” began Alison promptly, sitting up. “The drive took twenty-four minutes and eleven seconds, engine start to—”
“Please stick to the most relevant points on this occasion,” interrupted Elizabeth, not unkindly.
Alison nodded. Working full time with other people, she had gradually come to understand that most people didn’t have eidetic memories, but she was still having trouble grasping the nuances of what they meant when they asked for a “detailed account.”
“We arrived after dark,” she summarized. “Parked near the lake and continued on foot. We saw three people gathering in a patch of grass surrounded by trees . . .”
“How long did it take you to find them?” asked Elizabeth, brow furrowing slightly.
“Diablerie went straight there practically,” said Alison, uncertainty slipping into her tone as she analyzed her own words. “I mean, he was doing that thing he calls ‘channeling’ where he holds one hand out and puts the other on his head and makes lots of silly noises with his lips, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t doing anything actually magic related.”
“You don’t say,” droned Elizabeth. “The three people you saw?”
“They were wearing robes with hoods,” said Alison. “They were standing in a circle in the middle of the clearing with their hoods low over their faces and their hands together. There was a bag on the floor between them, like a duffle bag. And they were chanting.”
“What were they chanting?” As Alison’s eyes rolled back and her mouth formed a narrow O, Elizabeth felt moved to add: “Just a general impression, please, don’t repeat it.”
“Well, they were all chanting different things,” said Alison. “And they weren’t repeating chants. It sounded a lot like Diablerie’s chanting, actually, like they were making it up as they went along. I thought they might have been making fun of him, but they hadn’t noticed us arrive.”
“Did Diablerie intervene?”
“Not straightaway. They chanted for a while, then they stopped, and one of them kicked the duffle bag a few inches along the grass, and that was when Diablerie . . . intervened.”
“What level of flamboyance?”
Alison winced in memory. “Probably up to a seven. It wasn’t just a smoke bomb. He dropped one of his flashy ones as well, one that makes a big noise and sprays glitter everywhere. Then when everyone was looking he said, ‘I am Diablerie, and I would know the nature of this magical mischief.’ ”
“And how did they respond to that? General impressions again.”
“Well, they were shocked. The one on the left was terrified. The other two were more confused. Then the one who had been chanting the loudest said that they were devotees from the Cult of Bathorax, and they had come out to Tooting Bec Common to commune with their Ancient.”
“Were they magically infused? Dual consciousness?”
“They all looked human,” said Alison, faintly worried that her emphasis was insensitive in some way. “Diablerie asked what they wanted from their Ancient, specifically, on that occasion.”
“I see.”
“And then the middle one, not the frightened one, said that this was just a general worship-and-praise sort of situation and they hadn’t thought that far ahead. Then the first one got quite aggressive and told us to leave them alone because we had interrupted their Holy Communion, which was blasphemy against Barothax.”
“Barothax,” said Elizabeth flatly.
“Yeah, that’s when I pointed out they’d pronounced the name of their god two different ways. Then they went quiet for four seconds, and then the one who hadn’t spoken yet, the one who looked scared, he made a sort of panicky noise . . .” She demonstrated.
“ ‘Pleh’?” echoed Elizabeth.
“It was most like a ‘pleh,’ yes. He made that noise, and then tried to run. And after he did that, one of the other two tried to grab the duffle bag, but Diablerie was holding the bag down with his cane and they fell over when they tried to run away with it.”
“And the contents of the bag?”
“Drugs,” said Alison, with a little shrug. “Turns out it was just a drug deal. We called the local police and left them to it, really.”
“The one that hadn’t tried to run, didn’t he give you trouble?”
“No . . . he surrendered. I think he got scared when the other person—the one who’d made the noise and tried to run first—ran into the invisible barrier and knocked himself out.” There was an awkward pause. “Oh. Sorry. I thought that was one of the details to leave out. While we were watching them chant, Diablerie set up a couple of rune circles around the exits from the clearing that created invisible barriers. Then he sort of waved his hand and said, ‘Fazoom,’ like, at the exact moment the first guy ran into the wall. That was what frightened them.”
Elizabeth frowned. “He set up rune circles? Openly? In front of you?”
“Yes. He told me to keep watch while he did it.” She found herself mimicking Elizabeth’s frown. “Isn’t that good? It means we know he’s still using runes.”
“And he must know that we know.” Elizabeth cradled her chin in her hand and thought aloud. “It disturbs me that he sees no need to hide it. He had a reason for hiding his use of rune magic from me. Now it appears that it no longer matters. Whatever his real agenda is, it appears to be progressing.”
“I still wonder how he got his rune circles made,” said Alison. “Since, you know, writing down runes usually makes people’s brains explode.”
“Not important,” said Elizabeth brusquely, still lost in thought. “What matters more is the extent of what he can achieve with them.”
Light depression settled on Alison’s shoulders like a pair of fat gray slugs. Archibald Brooke-Stodgeley, the Department’s senior researcher and resident doddering-uncle figure, had once said to her that an eidetic memory was a sign of incredible, almost superhuman, genius. He had probably meant it as a compliment, but if anything it had only highlighted how unlike a genius Alison felt.
She boggled at people like Elizabeth who could instantly zero in on the most important facts. To Alison, the facts, perfectly recalled as they were, were like three jumbled-together jigsaw puzzles with no edge pieces.
“Those drug dealers, the way they pretended to be Ancient worshipers,” said Alison. “That’s been happening more and more, hasn’t it?”
Elizabeth caught her inquiring look and snapped out of her pondering. “Yes. The anti–extradimensional discrimination laws were rushed through and badly phrased. Certain kinds of opportunists have been exploiting them.”
“Is that what the new Office of Skepticism is for?”
Elizabeth very nearly smiled. Alison might later have convinced herself she had imagined it if it weren’t for the perfect-recall thing. “No, Alison, I very much doubt the Office of Skepticism will have much effect on anything.”
“It won’t?”
“You still have a very important role,” added Elizabeth quickly. “Your continued monitoring of Diablerie will be all the more vital. Because when Diablerie is stuck in a position with little influence, he’ll get frustrated. He’ll make a play. Make a mistake.”
“Oh,” said Alison, trying to sound convinced.
The fat gray slugs of depression on her shoulders gained a few pounds. Back in the meeting, after hearing about the Office of Skepticism, Alison had had a vision of herself in dark glasses, confidently crossing the perimeter of a crime scene. She imagined a uniformed police officer trying to stop her, and her pace not slowing as she flashed an ID badge and said, “Arkin. Office of Skepticism,” in a tone of voice implying that the conversation had begun and ended in those four words. It had been an empowering thought. Now, she felt stupid.
There was no doubt in her mind that Elizabeth was right about Doctor Diablerie having a secret agenda, possibly a dangerous one. After all, this was a man who dressed like a Victorian-era stage magician, spoke in melodramatic pseudomagical nonsense, and put more effort into feigning incompetence than most people put into the things they were actually good at, and no one with entirely harmless intentions would devote that much energy to obfuscating them. But she also wanted to make a difference, and it was hard to think that Diablerie could be more of a threat than half of what the Department had to deal with most days.
She tried to resist it, but the memory of Jessica Weatherby–Shgshthx and their—for want of a better phrase—fight to the death on the beach rose to prominence in her mind. She didn’t want to think about that, because then she would have to think about how Diablerie had technically kinda-sorta saved her life.
“But, the new law they’re voting on today,” she said. “Isn’t that supposed to . . .”
“It isn’t going to pass,” said Elizabeth bluntly. “It’s even broader and more exploitable than the existing law. The government will . . .”
She paused and looked Alison up and down. The girl was, by now, sitting with her spine practically curving ninety degrees, and was looking at the floor as if she was expecting it to split open and devour her, and wouldn’t blame it if it did.
Elizabeth sat forward and clasped her hands before her. “Alison. I’m being honest with you, and you’ve been honest with me. You remember our deal.” It wasn’t a question. “Since you’re doing your part, anything you want to know about the Department, its history, its operations, I will tell you to the best of my ability.”
