He collapsed onto his back, hands beneath his head, beautiful enough to distract. Perhaps that was his purpose. It wasn’t going to work.
“So what is it?”
His eyes swiveled to hers. “Wild magic.”
She knew he was about to tell her something important, but this time she wanted to know. “What’s that?”
“The elemental force, I think. Fixers are born with magic. No one knows why. It doesn’t go in families. No amount of effort can create it or increase it.”
Okay, so she was weak. She leaned up on her elbow to trace the contours of his chest. “What about the training?”
“That’s not to teach us how to do things. That’s to teach us how not to do things. Here’s the truth, Jen. Hellbane U makes such a fuss about finding fixers because they daren’t leave a single one unchecked. We can’t have wild magic.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Remember when I fixed your finger?”
“But there was nothing bad about that.”
“What about the baby?”
She’d pushed that to the back of her mind. “Would it really be so terrible for fixers to heal like that?”
“Yes, yes it would. In that, the training’s right. We can’t fool with nature. That’s what drove Earth to the brink. Death’s natural. Without orderly cycling of the parts the whole will rot.”
“Then what are you doing with stones and grass?” She couldn’t stop a sharp edge in her voice.
“Looking for a weapon. What if wild magic is more useful than tame against the blighters?”
She stared at him. “Tell me.”
He rose and pulled her to her feet. “If I’m going to be coherent, we’d better get dressed. I have tea.”
He picked up his shirt and found her bra and knickers underneath. With a grin, he tossed them to her. She resisted the urge to make a performance of putting them on. They needed to find a way to survive.
She noticed his small campfire, tucked behind rocks where it wouldn’t be easily seen from outside the park. She dressed and went to sit there with him, holding her hands out to the warmth, though the night was not particularly cold. “Now tell me.”
“I’m not sure I have my thoughts straight yet.” He moved a metal pot onto a trivet over the flames. Steam began to curl out of the spout.
“Talking sometimes helps.”
“Yes.” He poured the tea into two cups. Had he always planned to draw her here?
“Talk,” she said. “How do you suspend something in the air, and what use is it?”
“I don’t know.” He picked up a stone and released it in midair. It hung there, but then fell. “We don’t understand what fixers do any more than we understand the blighters, but I think our…energy…comes from the same place.”
“Negative and positive?”
“Perhaps, but perhaps not.” He put his cup aside. “Look, assume that the blighters are not just energy but a species—undetectable to us, but following the same patterns as other species. They are born, they reproduce, they die, and they need to take in nutrients.”
“Do they?”
“I have no idea. This is a working hypothesis. It would mean that they ash animals to feed, transforming them into the same kind of undetectable energy that they are.”
“Like water transformed into steam by heat?”
“Or like green plants transformed into our ungreen bodies. That’s a kind of magic if you don’t know how it happens.”
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” she said, remembering his words.
He pulled a face. “I can’t see anything about the blighters we could remotely call technology. Perhaps that comment should say that everything we humans don’t understand we classify as magic.”
“And thus unreal.”
“Until the unreal starts to eat us.”
Jenny swirled the stewed tea in her cup, swirling what he’d said in her mind. “If the blighters are eating us, they’ll have to stop, won’t they? Otherwise…”
“Otherwise, they’ll be like people on Earth and the cod.”
“Good point. But they re-created the cod stocks from DNA.”
“And the blighters almost certainly can’t do that.”
“So what are you saying? That they’ll eat us all then die of starvation? That’s not much comfort.”
“I’ve been reading up on it. There are creatures that eat almost all their food source then go dormant until the supply recovers.”
Pieces of the puzzle clicked into place. “That’s why Gaia was so perfect for us! Fertile, lush plant life, but no large or sentient animals. The blighters had eaten it down to a nub. How long would they be dormant?”
“Probably as long as it takes.”
“But instead,” she said, almost breathless, “we arrived…”
“Like a delivery dinner.”
“But it’s been centuries!”
“Perhaps they’re not programmed to stir until now. Perhaps their life cycle is naturally measured in centuries. Perhaps it’s something to do with base energy stores…”
“Or perhaps,” she said, “they were waiting for the dinner bell.”
He nodded. “My guess is that the occasional blighters have been checking things out.”
“Like the drones combing the universe for usable planets. Fair’s fair, I suppose.”
“And survival is survival.” He broke a twig off a nearby bush and began to strip the leaves off it. Something he’d done as a boy when fretting. “Interesting, isn’t it? Gaia was the perfect planet, settled with extreme care to ensure infinite harmony and balance. But it all comes back to the jungle in the end.”
“Perhaps we had a good run because we developed fixers and learned to zap the blighters.”
“Screwed up their system a bit?” He tossed the bare twig into the fire where flames licked at it. “Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. This is all crazy speculation, you know.”
“But it makes sense.” Jenny looked from the spluttering twig to the statue of the little girl. “Ashes to ashes…Something’s told them dinner’s ready, and they’re rushing to the table. What do we do?”
“That’s the question. When we humans find a planet we like, the native life-forms can’t stop us from cleaning them out to make things right for settlers. Perhaps we can’t stop the blighters from cleaning us out for food. Some small animals will survive, and one day, who knows how far into the future, it’ll be dinnertime again.”
Jenny pressed her fingers to her head as if that might somehow make her brain sharper. “But you can beat the blighters. The fixers, I mean. So why can’t you beat them now?”
“Numbers. A fixer can beat a blighter one-on-one with power to spare. A fixer might be able to beat ten, or even more. It’s never been tested, blighters being rather rare.” He shook his head. “That sounds so crazy now. We aren’t efficient killers—it’s a real case of using a hammer to kill an ant, but it hasn’t mattered before. Now, if we have to zap one after another we’re soon drained—and then they eat us.
“If the fixers had concentrated to begin with, we might have stopped them, but by the time Hellbane U woke up to it, there were too many, too widely spread around the equator. It’s been like trying to drain a swamp by standing in it with a bucket. With the swamp eating the bucket.”
“How many have you zapped?”
“One, to graduate.”
“That’s all? No wonder the war’s not going well.”
He shrugged. “I assume some of the fixers near the equator saw more.”
She sipped the tea, then pulled a face at the bitter taste and put it aside. “What was it like?”
“We don’t have words for it. Blighter is too…mundane. Even hellbane doesn’t capture the sense of the alien that screeches against everything we know to be real and tries to latch on to parts of our brain that shouldn’t be there. But are.”
Jenny shuddered in recognition.
“T
hen there’s the awareness of ravening hunger, of a blind need to consume. Us. That we are nothing more to it than a food source. Like a cow, or a fish, or a loaf of bread.” She saw the shudder shake him. “And that’s just a start. You have to be there.”
“No,” she said. “I know exactly what you mean. I can feel it now.”
His look was quick and sober. “Then I’m sorry.”
She pushed back the sick feeling. “Let’s look at wild magic again. What can it do?”
He reached toward the fire. She saw him hesitate, but then he grabbed a glowing end of wood and held it, flames licking through his fingers. She gaped, but then he hissed and dropped it to blow on his hand. “Good job I’m a fixer.”
Jenny wanted to laugh and cry. She wanted to hug him and keep him safe. She wanted someone to hug her and promise her that everything was going to be all right.
“Pathetic,” he agreed, “but this is all we have to fight with. I’m sure it’s the way. It’s at the heart of Gaia.”
She turned it around in her mind. “So you’re magic and blighters are magic, and when a fixer pushes magic against one of them, it’s gone.”
“Not quite. The energy comes into us.”
“Ah-ha! So you get stronger from stopping them.”
“And they feed from eating us.”
“Ergo, you need to kill more of them than they kill of you.”
“Two problems. One: We get a lot less energy from one zap than we use. Two: I assume it works the other way for them because they’re feeding.”
“I’m not sure I follow that.”
“Imagine I carry ten units of power. I use them to zap a blighter and get five back. With a bit of recovery time, I get back to ten again. These days, fixers are having to fight one hellbane after another. In theory they should be able to use the energy gained from a kill to destroy the next, but it’s not working. As best I can tell, we become exhausted, so there must be leakage. When a fixer is drained, a blighter eats.”
“But if ‘dinner’ is exhausted, is there any energy there?”
“There must be since they mostly feed on nonfixers, and even cows and pigs.”
Something was teasing at her mind. She caught it. “But you said zapping one didn’t take all your energy, so why don’t you use less? Half a unit. A quarter. Then you’d be ahead.”
He tossed the remains of his tea to hiss on the fire. “Because we don’t know what the bloody hell we’re doing. We just swing that hammer as hard as we can. If we could gather a bunch of them, we might be able to get a lot with one blow, but they seem to hunt alone.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Yet. I’ve suggested that all the fixers left gather to work on it. There has to be something.”
“You have?”
“No one else seems to be in charge.”
She took his hands. “I’m proud of you for doing that.”
“I’m groping in the dark, Jen.”
“No, you’re not. You’re finding lights.”
He rested his head against hers. “You give me strength, Jen. When things were tough at school I used to think of you, that protecting Gaia meant protecting you.”
Tears filled her eyes. “I’m not worthy of that.” She unfastened the few buttons he’d done up. “I’m sorry for not doing this sooner. I was scared.”
“So was I.”
“I mean, of you. Of your magic.”
He slid his hand under her top. “Why not? It terrifies me.”
They kissed, and love came slowly, gently this time. Not hard, wild, and desperate, but like a secret flower in a winter garden, unexpectedly discovered and to be guarded from a killing frost until it bloomed.
They lay together afterward, talking over their lives. As dawn touched the sky, she said, “Can I come with you?”
“God, no. Go north.”
She thought of lying but shook her head. “Win or lose, I’d rather be here.”
“You’re a stubborn woman, Jenny Hart.”
“There’s more to life than living, Dan Rutherford. I’ll be here to meet you or the blighters, whichever comes first.”
They dressed, then sat, holding hands within the glow of the fire.
“I’ve never been one for the old Earth religions,” Jenny said, “but perhaps I’ll pray.”
“Pray for a bouncing bomb, then.”
“What?”
He shook his head. “Just something from an old film.”
When the sun rose, she helped him kill his fire and pack, then walked with him hand in hand to the southern gate. She cradled his face and kissed him, determined not to cry. “Come back. That’s an order.”
He smiled. “Yes, ma’am! I’ve coded my place to let you in. Keep an eye on it for me.”
He hesitated only a second more, then walked up to and through the small, pointlessly guarded postern gate.
5
Jenny watched the gate close, then turned back into the quiet town. She walked to the old building and put her hand to the plate.
The door opened.
Despite the night they’d shared, she felt like an intruder in Dan’s flat. Or perhaps she was afraid that people would realize what had happened. She wasn’t ashamed of it, but it was delicate, not yet for public attention. He’d left everything neat. Nothing unnecessary out in the kitchen. Nothing in the fridge or the larder that might go off. His bed was made, his clothes all clean and put away.
The meticulous preparations for a future tenant. For death?
She flicked her way along the hangers just to touch things that had touched him, enjoying the hint of him that lingered even after laundry soap. At the left side, almost out of sight, she found some clothes that stirred memories.
She dragged them forward. A yellow shirt, a pair of striped trousers, and a red jacket. Gaudy fashions of ten years ago, now outgrown. Dan’s favorite clothes from before he’d left Anglia. Tears escaped then, because the clothes showed how much he hadn’t wanted to leave, hadn’t wanted to be marked as different.
She pulled out the red jacket and huddled into it.
Wearing it, she wandered into the living room, where she ran her hand over his bookshelves, looking for a way to share his thoughts. Had he left his system open to her, too? She sat on the sofa and switched on his system. He had.
He’d mentioned films. He must have downloaded those from the archives. She pulled up his menu and found them, the war films he’d talked about, but the last thing he’d used was an audio.
Sir Winston Spencer Churchill, the title read. Speech on Dunkirk, June 4, 1940. (Radio with sim.)
She clicked on it, and a gravelly voice began. Dan had switched off the sim, and she left it like that, hearing it as it had been heard originally, when radio had been all they had. At first the flat delivery seemed ponderous, but then it began to shiver down her spine.
…we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
The man spoke as if surrender was not an option and death a strong possibility. Did she hear the tone of one who tastes the ashes on the wind? He’d won his war. Had Dan found hope in that?
When that finished, she scanned the list of films and clicked on one from that war—World War II, a concept that had boggled her until now—Reach for the Sky. She watched it, hugging the jacket closer; watched the pilot be victorious; watched him lose his legs, then take to the air to fight again. And without fixing. She understood what Dan had drawn from that. She didn’t like it, but she understood.
When the file ended, she clicked on the next. Lawrence of Arabia.
She didn’t move into Dan’s flat—there’d be too many questions—but she spent most of her spare time there. She watched the films, seeking what he’d found in them, using the lessons to keep going as the town emptied around her and the blighters came closer on the wind.
Keep going during the
blitz. Don’t let the enemy get you down. Keep a song in your heart. We’ll meet again. Wave a white feather. She even made herself a red poppy to wear. No one knew what it meant, and she wasn’t sure herself.
Red for courage?
Red for blood?
She stopped running the Angliacom cells of the screen because, even though the news was grim, it wasn’t nearly as grim as the messages in her mind. She used her drops and went to work for something to do. Paperwork, it seemed, never entirely stopped.
Then one day she awoke to realize that something had changed. A lightening. A lessening of pressure…
She clicked on Angliacom. There was no reporter—there hadn’t been one for more than a week. Instead, the screen showed a still, tourist-style picture of Hellbane U up in the mountains on a perfect, sky-blue day. Across the bottom of the picture ran: News in from our brave fixers atthe front. The spread of hellbanes has been halted. Repeat, the spread of hellbanes has been halted. The wave has been turned, and ultimate victory is in sight.
Jenny watched it five times, joy building, then dashed to the Merrie to see if anyone knew any details.
They didn’t, but they were all close to delirious anyway. There would have been another wild night if anyone had been there to spark it. As it was, it was wild enough. Tom and Yas were still around, and he and Jenny played rollicking songs. They even played the anthem again, and some people sang it in tears.
Most of these people were packed and ready to flee not just Anglia, but Gaia. Now they had hope. They drank round after round of toasts to the fixers, especially to Dan Fixer, their own hero.
Jenny had not heard from Dan, but he’d not called his family either. She didn’t think the blighters could knock out com-towers, so there must be some other reason.
He could, of course, be dead. It was a fact she lived with day by torturous day, consoling herself that no news was good news. Surely the families would be told, like in the old movies. Whatever the fixers were doing must make it difficult, perhaps impossible, to send any kind of message, but that would surely change now.
She slipped away, slipped home, to sit in front of the screen on max, showing ten different things. Maps on most tracking where the blighters had been stopped. The blighted area was still an appallingly huge belt around the planet, and the closest edge was only fifty miles south of Anglia.