Caped Page 4

  The motions of her feet started slowly, and she watched them to make sure she didn’t misstep. A crossing of the knees here, a rapid twirl that made the landscape a nauseating brushstroke, a raising of the shoulders and gyration of the wrists . . . This went on for at least five minutes, and all the while the air grew thick. She was sweating even as the sun began to vanish entirely, and soon a door had risen up out of the ground to meet her. It was drawn upward in all its unbreakable steel splendor, coaxed like a deer to eat from the palm of her hand. It opened to her touch, and she vaulted inside.

  Every library was a mass of chambers, each stacked to a thirty-foot ceiling with bookshelves. Each was an interface, a representation of the heart and soul of its subject. Every day, thought, feeling, written word, piece of knowledge, sexual fantasy, embarrassing secret and half-formed subconscious belief was listed here, each in its own little volume. She could only read them and take volumes out, and neither would have any effect on the person involved, although it was sometimes useful to pretend that she could rewrite passages if she so desired.

  Bibliosoph was, to the sort of arrogant paranoids who believed their secrets more dangerous than the next person’s, the most abjectly terrifying person in the world. To others, she was a particularly literal object lesson in securing your identity from theft by others. To anyone big in the powered circuit, she was small potatoes. The real action in Russia came from the assassin squadrons and the unnatural codebreakers, and even that was sparse compared to nations like Iceland and Japan.

  By God, though, she could find blackmailing material. She knew the locations of each book as clearly as if she’d set them all in place herself, and she strolled through the airy rooms for a few minutes until she could seize a simple volume on the weaknesses of his ability. Then his known fears, his unknown fears, his hidden weaknesses. Each volume was thick with experience, weighing half a lifetime in her hand. She learned not to read these sorts of books, long ago.

  It didn’t take more than a half hour to gather all the books she needed and walk the way back out. When she left, the door would disappear into the ground and never be seen again—assuming they didn’t send her out for a second try. When she emerged into the increasing cool of the night, the books suddenly felt much heavier, as if all the history and psychology had only now decided to become paper. She threw the stack of hardbacks into the back of the heli, and climbed into her seat.

  The takeoff was smooth, the weight of the books negligible to the rotor. Fukayna reached up and removed the mask as they lifted from the sand, letting the air move over her. There was something symmetrical to all of it, although they’d be switching up their path on the way back to the Russian embassy in Ulaanbaatar. They were home by morning.

  * * *

  The Zapatista didn’t have much experience in making high-security prison cells, and it showed. They did, however, have a very talented individual named Lazo, who could pull things with incredible force. He’d dropped Russian satellites out of orbit, and then her aircraft when she’d come investigating. A young man named Lagrange had been wounded in the crash and separated from her, kept somewhere else despite her protestations.

  The building had once been a barn, but it was reinforced with metal, and a thick futon was added amongst the fresh-cleaned hay. Bibliosoph was allowed to do whatever she liked in it, but her ankles were chained close together for the sake of security. A little bookshelf had been added for her benefit, although all of the books were in Spanish and so closed to her.

  That would happen in her libraries, too, sometimes. No books were closed to her there, but every so often she would find a deep room, far away from the entrance, where the writing was in symbols that weren’t letters or numbers or pictograms, at least not that she could tell. They creeped her out, most of all because she could almost tell what they meant instinctively, but never quite managed it. As a result, every time she read something in a language she didn’t know (e.g. most of them), she felt a sense of dread tumble over her.

  “You are here to prove a point,” the jailor had told her. She never learned his name. He was tanned but unmistakably English, with practiced eloquence clogging his sentences. “You represent a monolithic world power in a time where military reputation is the sole seat of international conflict. You must understand that an anarchic state, largely ignored on the world stage, has a lot to gain by capturing someone of your status. I expect you’ll be out of here in a week’s time and back to drinking vodka with the best of them.”

  At the time, she’d sighed and laid back on the futon.

  “I take it you’re mute,” he continued. “I’m solely a neutral party in all of this, but I’ll see if someone can bring you a notepad.”

  That had been the last time she’d seen him. The notepad had arrived a while later, and from then on her only contact with the outside world was the check at a high window, once in a while, that she hadn’t manifested a library. It would’ve been impenetrable to anyone but her if she closed the door (in her experience, only she could move it), but it wouldn’t have done her any good tactically.

  Although, when she really thought about it . . .

  It was around this time, during this thought (and she’d become adept at measuring life in thoughts), that she heard arrhythmic buckshot in the distance, moving ever-closer. She stood and shuffled away from a nearby wall, expecting it to break apart and reveal her rescuer. Instead, it was the window. It shattered in a series of thwacks, and a teenager jumped in.

  “Hey, lady! It’s time to get out of here!” said the boy. His name was Rugburn, young and blonde with lots of screaming fangirls and a lot of news coverage. Fukayna’d spent a little bit of time researching him. He disliked his mother, and was terrified of being rejected by girls.

  Hello. She signed, and within ten seconds the ankle chains were unlocked.

  “Let me get a lookout.” he said, and climbed like a spider-monkey to the window. When a bullet whooshed back at him, he dropped back down and looked thoughtful. She was perfectly aware that he didn’t know how good at it he was, although it was possibly the only thing keeping him alive.

  Why did they send an American to Mexico to rescue a Russian from Egypt? She asked.

  He shrugged. “Can’t understand a word, babe.”

  The bullets had stopped flying, likely because she was more valuable alive than dead, but there were footsteps trudging everywhere. She never knew she was so well-guarded.

  He snapped his fingers. “Got it!” Then, he jumped on the futon.

  When Fukayna didn’t follow suit, he patted the cushion and nodded at her. Once they were both sitting, he crossed his legs and waited for her to monkey him. They started moving.

  In a way that he’d practiced to seem effortless, he could take the friction away from himself, things he was touching, and things very close to him, and nudge them just a little in the right direction. In this case, it was the ground, and the entire barn started speeding across the countryside like it had the soul of a jaguar. The futon was crushed against the far wall, and Rugburn folded his arms and watched it happen.

  “Yee-haw!” he said, without a shadow of irony.

  They rode the barn until it fractured and split apart, and then they were near a jungle. An American pickup team grabbed the both of them, and they sat in relative silence for the hours to neutral ground.

  The Zapatista Republic dissolved, under mysterious circumstances, four years later.

  * * *

  Fukayna’s test was interrupted when Alice walked over and collapsed onto her. With an attractive blonde girl draped over her shoulders like a cuddly boa, it took some effort to close the door and let it drop back through the carpet again. It screeched when it slid downwards, which was awful but necessary. She was in her late twenties now, and she’d grown obscure enough that she could indulge in her abilities sparingly.

  She was living in a very artsy apartment, with the thick soundproofing mats decorated over with local paintings and little
bits of jewelry. It was a little claustrophobic by some standards, but location didn’t mean as much to Fukayna as it used to. On some nights, when she and Alice fought an awful lot, she took some bedding, danced up a library, and slept in the mind of Neil deGrasse Tyson, or someone else brimming with bright knowledge.

  But there weren’t any fights happening today, and Alice’s weight was something reassuring, like her voice, and the way her hair framed her head. Alice was patient, with an infectious love for life and an endless enthusiasm. She could’ve been a therapist very easily, though evidently she preferred life as a meteorologist.

  “Quit working so hard and come to lunch,” she said, her words muffled by the shoulder into which she was speaking.

  In a minute. Fukayna signed. I remembered something I wanted to try a couple years ago.

  “Can’t it wait a bit? We can go somewhere you like this time . . .”

  It won’t take much longer.

  “You always say that!” Alice said, and soon the great and tricky Bibliosoph had been dragged away by her girlfriend to a meal.

  After breadsticks, the sights, a local theatre troupe, a sunset and a very long night, Fukayna finally returned to her work. One-two, backstep, twist . . . And then the door flew back up to her, and she threw it open to look inside.

  Then, she smiled.

  * * *

  With her early thirties came war, and a drop of true flashbulb fame. Her name changed from ‘Bibliosoph’ to ‘Atalburu’ almost overnight, when she showed her superiors what she could really do, and she gained a small cult following. Nobody ever came up to her on the street when she was in costume, but every so often her superiors would forward her a little piece of fan mail.

  Chicago had become a hot button in the world after a handful of violent riots. Things had been getting worse and worse for the city, and now it was time for Russia to throw its two cents into the hat. When preparations had been made, she was flown over as fast as possible, checked through customs to instill a sense of safety in whoever was watching, and flown straight to the Windy Remains.

  “Nice to meet you,” said a tall blonde woman, holding a gun to Fukayna’s head. Her voice was lithe, her face scarred. She hung in the air, standing, perfectly still, just off the side of the roof. The bitch didn’t even wobble.

  The gun was something compact, more like a dollar-store toy than a real revolver. It was a few inches from her head, to be entirely accurate, but that was an academic point.

  “Reckon I should share some of my hospitality with you?” the woman asked, and suddenly Atalburu was floating away, being held up by something else, and they were moving very quickly to the grubby, waiting arms of a group on the ground.

  The whole gang, she learned very quickly, was called the Six Kings Nation. It was their chant as they pushed her around and, when she snapped and broke one of their lips, they started beating her as a group. She regained consciousness in a parking garage somewhere, unmasked and chained to a wall. She was bruising very badly, and couldn’t tell if it was night or day.

  She could tell from a glance that the door wasn’t going to open from the inside, and so decided that this place was as good as any, and started dancing. She’d been getting steadily faster in years past, as time constraints grew shorter and shorter. It was more of a jig, now, and she was glad to be in private. The door rose up at roughly the same time the garage door was opened, letting in the nighttime.

  On the other side was the bitch, who flopped on one side and didn’t touch the ground, gloatingly aloft. She paused to look at the door, and that was all the time Atalburu needed to throw it open.

  Each library remained unchanged when it was sent away and called up again. Anything in it stayed inside for all time until it was brought back. She’d emptied flooded streets with doors and then opened them again in dried-up lakes. She’d smuggled things into small countries under various disguises, things that no one could get in on their own. Weaponry, medicine, propaganda, people . . .

  The bitch stared as soldiers came piling out of the door like it was a clown car. Ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty. Every one was heavily armed and armored. When they were all assembled and pointing guns, her eyes were panicked. She zoomed away into the air, and they rushed out the door after her, filling the air with a volley of bullets.

  There was a cracking explosion over the city, and a flash of light that reached straight to the garage as she was freed from the wall. She later learned that the woman was named Regina, and that she controlled hydrogen. She could split it from the other elements and prevent it from immediately igniting or destroying the metal around it. When a puncture wound came between her and her concentration, it detonated.

  The Six Kings Nation wasn’t one of the larger players active in city limits, but it was a fair start.

  * * *

  When she was thirty-seven, Alice left her. They’d been married for eight years, and Fukayna had become too distant to live with. She was never home, and when she was she didn’t have the time to do anything. Deep down, she wanted Alice to leave; she knew that she could never really contain someone so lively and kind and beautiful.

  Fukayna had killed people, and it had actually started haunting her. She thought about the way Regina exploded, the way that the action in her life came in such short bursts and seemed to end in death somewhere. She kept the apartment, which they’d never really moved out of. Alice took the paintings, decorations, and music with her. There were only soundproofed walls and thick couches, a padded environment for her contemplation.

  The war . . . well, the war never really came to anything. It fizzled and guttered into a few desecrated cities and some scattered worldwide skirmishes. Some Eastern European nations changed hands a few times, and some treaties were made, but nothing else happened.

  She began to wonder if, even in the world she lived in, her life was really so dramatic.

  A sweltering Australian beach in the dead of night, bringing in bounty hunters and vehicles to capture one of the songline-protectors. The whole mission was completed in four days, most of which was spent waiting quietly and patiently while other people searched, and finally bringing up a door to hold the captured woman while they went back home.

  France, the nuclear reactor Chivaux B, soon to explode with the countryside evacuated and a large group of people, powered and otherwise, working around the clock to fix it. Being flown in close to the last minute, dancing a library full of radiation equipment, getting everyone inside and shutting the door. Spending a couple days waiting inside, and realizing how maddening it was not to know what the outside world was like. Understanding all the faith that the people she’d carted around had exhibited, how helpless they’d really been.

  Argentina, transporting a pop-star under fire by mercenaries. Nothing happening at all, nothing but interminable rides here and there and letting the man out in hotel rooms. Feeling the cold on her skin in the night air and trying to make it stick so all the other jobs won’t be so awful. Wondering why she chose to do this in the first place.

  Ten minutes with a clairvoyant woman with dreadlocks, somewhere in the Caribbean she couldn’t be bothered to care about. Being told where her father was. Traveling there with a little of the excess money she hasn’t put toward food or rent, searching Rivercess, Liberia until she finds a cemetery. Learning his name was Hakim, and buying a bouquet of pepper flowers to put on the untouched dirt.

  Oh, Alice.

  * * *

  The dusk of her forties, and time had shambled on. The tapestry of nations wove new patterns, and all that jazz. Atalburu fell back into total obscurity as the new generation started taking over. She spent years thinking about quitting, wondering whether she should go do something else with her time.

  Eventually, they retired her. They weren’t even the same superiors, really; she didn’t know who the replacements were, but reasonably they must’ve all switched over at some point in the last thirty years. She wondered at what point she was
working under a completely different set of people.

  She threw off the apartment and bought housing in Greenland. Sometimes she received mail, or callers. The world wheeled around her all the while, even under her feet. Her legs started to become fragile, and her bones lost density. The dance couldn’t last forever.

  Fukayna didn’t mind that as much as she thought she would.

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  DAMN THE DARK, DAMN THE LIGHT

  K. H. Vaughan

  I was at a waterfront bar deep in Helltown when I first saw him. The Raven was dark with no windows, the way a real bar should be, flat and low, filled with sailors and longshoremen. The owner lined up a hundred shots with beer chasers along the mahogany every afternoon when the day shift ended and the men went from zero to drunk in about fifteen minutes. That late though, The Raven was quiet and surly, half as full but twice as mean. Last call was ninety minutes past due when the lights went out and everyone froze because they knew something bad was about to happen. Then the lights came back on and we found out what kind of bad.

  The Harlequin stood in the middle of the floor, smiling at no one in particular, and even though I’m one of the good guys it scared the shit out of me.

  “Where’s the Russian?” he asked quietly.

  There’s always a tough guy who’s drunk and stupid enough to take a shot at the guy in the mask, especially if you’re a skills-based hero. A hulking biker with full sleeves of skulls and neo-Nazi symbolism tried to bury a pool cue in the back of his skull. The Harlequin took it from him and broke it across the bridge of his nose in a single smooth movement, so fast I could barely see it. The drunk hit the floor moaning with blood pouring from his face and the hero laughed, low, flat, and dry. Heh. Eh-heh-heh. Heh.