Hyacinth tapped a brief knock on the connecting door and opened it with a smirk. “The burns are gone, he’s in better physical health than I think I’ve ever seen anyone, and we’ve finished our brief stint as a sex cult with only one victim, leaving the others disappointed. I gave them some more money for liquor and got them to leave, despite protests on both sides. Speaking of which, I can’t tell you what’s going on with his brain, because…”
Erik popped up in the doorway behind her, wearing his new funny T-shirt. “Hi, Maggie!” He waved.
She stood up, blinking, confused, and left the papers she’d been holding on the bed with the others. “Hi…?”
“Do you know what’s just about the best thing in the world?” Erik said, beaming. “Sex!”
Hyacinth pushed him away. “Kid, we know…”
He wandered back. “And I haven’t been having any, you know that? Holy heck, I don’t even know in how long! You have no idea…”
Hyacinth pushed him back again and held him that way. “Erik, that god has jacked up your chemistry like nobody’s business and you are high as fuck…”
“Yeah!” Erik’s muffled voice said happily.
“…and you can’t consent, so you’re all done with sex.”
“Auntie Hyacinth, sex while you’re high is possibly even better than just plain sex and you know that. Just because you’re not up for it… Are you up for it…?”
Mordecai stood urgently, and Maggie followed him. He turned and pushed her back. “No. I warned you about this.”
She let go a weak laugh. “But you didn’t say he’d be cute about it…”
“…I’m just saying,” Erik went on, “I have been girls…”
“…and willing to talk to me for the first time in over a year,” Maggie finished, with a determined frown.
Mordecai shook his head, still blocking the way. “If you go in there, there will not be any talking. He is going to remember all of this, and that god is no longer blocking him from feeling hurt or humiliated by it. We don’t know if his brain will be back in working order later, but it isn’t now. If we’re lucky, it’ll only be a few hours to wait, and he’ll be able to talk to all of us.” He pointed to the bed. “Sit down and help explain this fucking atrocity to Hyacinth, I will deal with him.”
Hyacinth laughed. “Fuck you. I’ll deal with him. He’ll be more embarrassed if it’s you, and I think it’s hilarious. Whatever all that shit is…” She gestured to the piles of papers and photos. “It can wait.”
“Hey!” Erik noted, from some distance away. “Did you know clothes just come off?”
“I know, right?” Hyacinth called back. “Why do we even bother!”
Mordecai snatched her shoulder and dragged her into the other room, striding past her to take her place. “I have done this before, you haven’t. I can handle it…” She’d caught him by the arm, and she wasn’t letting go. He glared at her.
“Handle it how?” she said. “Emotionally? Because I have some serious doubts…”
“I will handle it practically!” he snapped. “I will get him to sleep so he doesn’t hurt himself, and if he’s not willing to do that yet, I’ll buy him a dirty magazine…”
“You’re not buying anything, these people will kill you.”
“Totally!” Erik put in. “But it is so worth it! You think my Fyver still works? Hey, Fyver, how much is in my account?” A brief pause. “Aw, darn. Does anyone have money for a magazine? Or sex? Hey, do you guys have enough money for…”
“There’s a magazine on the desk!” Mordecai cried. “Look at that one!”
“‘Tuna casserole recipes’?” Erik read aloud. There was a faint sound of turning pages. “Sexy tuna casserole recipes…?”
Mordecai addressed Hyacinth in a ragged snarl, “You need to know what’s going on and I would rather deal with Erik than deal with that, now let me go!” He shoved her back, hard, reclaimed his arm, and shut the door in her face.
“The fuck…?” She rattled the handle. He’d clicked the button lock, but that wasn’t going to keep her out…
Ann touched her shoulder and pulled her away, altogether more gently. “Cin, no.” She shook her head. “Let him do that. Please. He’s right. This… This is the hard thing.”
“What?” Hyacinth once again regarded the piled papers — there were a few on each bed, and more on the desk. “What’re we doing? It obviously wasn’t a bug, or a bomb…”
“It is a bomb,” Maggie said softly. She picked up a scant pile of papers from the desk. There was an irregular piece of brown cardboard with black marker printing on top. “It’s an info-bomb. John sent it.” She huffed a sigh that was not quite a laugh. “And a top hat, I think because it had a big piece of cardboard in it…”
The General broke in, “It did not occur to him he might’ve hidden these things just as well in a box of stationery. We are still sorting through it, but it seems as if a lot of things failed to occur to him, among them that a comprehensive explanation might’ve been helpful.”
Hyacinth noted a woman sitting in a dim corner with a damp rag over her eyes and disregarded all else, striding towards her. “What happened?”
“I assisted in sorting an envelope stuffed full of text and images,” said the General. “My eyes are tired.” She lifted her right hand, which had a small adhesive bandage on each knuckle. “I have also punched a wall and destroyed a lamp, but my loss of self-control requires no more than the basic first aid I have already applied. Please return to the subject at hand.”
Hyacinth put a hand up, intending to confirm this for herself. “Let me…”
“No.”
Ann pulled her away, with a wary glance at the General’s frown. “John left us some notes,” she told Hyacinth. “But…”
“They’re all over the place,” Maggie said. She huffed another not-quite-laugh. “Literally. We’re still trying to put it together.” She held up the pile with the cardboard. “This is stuff for taking care of Erik, including two passports — one for him and one for him in David’s makeup — and another one for Uncle Mordecai. The rest…”
Ann put up a hand. She drew Hyacinth farther from the door and lowered her voice, “John kidnapped Erik because they needed help and they knew we wouldn’t let him do this. Erik has been helping the Rainbow Alliance save coloured people and get them the hell out of this fucked up country, because Prokovia wants them dead, or… or worse…”
“De-magicked,” Maggie said. She took a sheet of paper off the bed. “It’s an apograph. Most of ‘em are, but you can read ‘em in the mirror. This is the important part. This is what Prokovia wants to do.” She held up the paper so both of them could see. It was divided into four equal parts, all of them moving and displaying text and images at once. “This is what happens when you try to take the magic out of an immie.”
In each quadrant there was a brief, animated snapshot, five seconds at most, followed by backwards text and further still images. They cycled endlessly, somewhat out of sync, as if whoever set them in motion had activated them one after the other, going clockwise from the top left.
The figure at the top left was a milk-white young man with threads of blond in his matching white hair. His complexion had the look of a broken mirror, with cracks running in every direction, except they weren’t open or bleeding. They were what Hyacinth couldn’t help thinking of as a normal human skin tone, but pale tan certainly wasn’t normal for this guy. He was smiling vaguely, almost vacantly, and holding politely still while the person with the camera moved to photograph him from either side. There was a round scar on each temple, just below the hairline.
The scowling blue woman to the right of him had a similar pattern across her face and bare shoulders, just a bit more fair. Her mirror had shattered more violently — there were patches of fair skin between some of the cracks, as if some of the glass had fallen out. She had a set of yellow hands holding her, and she was turning her head from side to side, not quite struggling but clearly uncomfortable. The five-second image ended with her swatting the camera and a split-second shot of a tile floor.
The orange child at the bottom left had no cracks at all, only patches, and much larger ones. The close-cropped hair suggested a boy, but it could have been either. Tears were welling in their eyes as they clutched a stuffed toy, curling their whole body around it and wincing from the camera’s flash. In the last two seconds, a brown hand intruded and gently nudged their head up, allowing a brief three-quarter profile view of a face with an olive-toned patch that included one dark eyebrow.
The final figure, another young man, did not seem to be coloured at all. His hair was dark, his eyes were blue, and his skin was fair. His hands were bandaged and bound to the chair he was sitting in. He was smiling, not unlike the other man, but his brief image also ended with the camera falling or being knocked over, for reasons unseen.
Honestly, the first thing Hyacinth thought was someone had painted up a bunch of coloured people for a weird theme party — except for the guy in the lower right. But then, as the image reset once more, she caught a thread of purple drifting across his face like smoke. It was gone so fast she wasn’t sure she’d seen it at all.
“What the fuck…?” She tried to pause the image and rack it back, dragging her finger from right to left, but it didn’t respond.
Maggie sighed. “It’s an apograph.”
“Smart paper has a backlight,” said the General. “It makes excellent apographs. Mr. Green-Tara seems to have figured that out at some point and copied a great deal of information he was certainly not supposed to keep, or share.”
“He did it for us,” Ann said. She touched the pile with the cardboard on top, but left it where Maggie had abandoned it on the bed. “It’s not much to read, it looks like he wrote it in a hurry, but he knew we’d come for Erik. He’s been trying to put things together for us, the whole time. The Rainbows haven’t told anybody because they don’t know who’s safe to tell…”
“I am the lone holdout,” said the General, “in insisting our government would not be complicit in an attempted genocide…”
“But they must know something is happening,” Maggie said. “They have intel. They’re not stupid. At the very least they’ve seen the ads, and they must know they’re not getting a bunch of coloured Prokovian tourists. It could be they don’t know because they don’t want to know. If they find out, there’s no guarantee they’ll help, and all this evidence is enough to blow the whole rescue operation out of the water if they take Prokovia’s side. The Rainbows aren’t wrong about that.”
“I am willing to admit,” said the General, “that it would be difficult to sell another war at this point, especially one with Prokovia, politically speaking.” She lowered her voice to a snarl, “Although it would be the only appropriate response.”
Hyacinth was standing in front of the mirror with the reversed copy held up at chest height. “Damn it, it’s too fast,” she muttered. She leaned in with eyes narrowed. One finger futilely, instinctively tried to tap the top left image to pause it. “What the hell is all this stuff? ‘Crackle-lacquer’? ‘Cracks-and-chips’?” She sputtered and rattled the paper, “‘Self-inflicted amputation’?”
“It’s some kinda quick reference,” Maggie said. “You’d be able to pause the original, and scroll it. It’s like…” She paused, shaking her head. “Fractures, I guess. Different kinds of fractures. Symptoms and treatment. They’ve found four patterns so far: crackle-lacquer, cracks-and-chips, piebald, and smoke. Smoke is new, that guy is the only one they’ve found, but he’s a mess.” She sighed. “They’re all messes, but he’s the worst, and that is saying a lot.”
Ann nodded. “Prokovia is trying to break the part of innate magic-users that makes them magical. But it looks like they can’t control how it breaks.” Her teeth clenched as if swallowing bitter medicine. She picked up a bed pillow, her clawed hands digging into its white case. “When they don’t like how it breaks, they… they do things to people trying to force them to act like they want, and when that doesn’t work they box them up in cattle cars and send them on a journey to nowhere to starve to death. That’s why the Rainbows have been robbing the trains, they have people on them.”
“Prokovia has the longest railway system in the world,” Maggie said flatly. “They beat out Xin by about a thousand miles. John clipped out an article about it, from a travel magazine. He circled the map of all the tracks with a black marker and wrote, ‘We can’t stop all of them.’ He also said ‘they’re heading south’ and he doesn’t know if when they run out of Prokovia they’re just going to keep going…”
She dropped another pile of papers on the bed and latched on to Hyacinth’s arm, stricken. “We stopped Erik from helping and people are gonna die. More people. And we’re sure on some level he knows that. That’s why he didn’t want to come home.” Her fingers curled under and dug in. “They were hurting him. John and David. The fucking Rainbows. They were shocking him with a goddamn car battery to keep him from smartening up and maybe getting away, and he still didn’t…”
“What?” said Hyacinth. She sat on the bed and collected the hat cardboard. The first words, in ragged capitals, were: I’M SO SORRY. Skimming from there, she found that John had specified that the battery was for “a sub-compact,” as if that mitigated it.
“Oh, we fixed him,” Maggie said miserably. “We think.”
“Em thinks Beauty must’ve cleaned up everything physical,” Ann put in. “They…” She shook her head, mouth drawn tightly with disgust. “They just kept doing it, so the damage never had a chance to scar.”
“It never damaged me,” said Hyacinth. She shook her head. “But I never fucked around with a fucking car battery. David used to…”
She blinked and stood up, but that was all. She had not yet begun to pace.
“David used to lick nine-volts,” she said. “That’s what the burns were from. He fucking licked it. He’s been making Erik do that for over a year.” She picked up the cardboard and goggled at it. “‘At least once a week’? Oh, my gods…”
“We fixed it,” Maggie reiterated. She turned away, shaking her head. “We think. I dunno. We hafta wait and see. He was hypnotizing Erik all the damn time, too, or whatever that is Erik’s learned how to do. There’s a list of suggestions in there, but we’re missing the first page. It’s in one of these piles somewhere.”
“I may have misfiled it,” said the General. “Frankly, I may have misfiled a lot of things. I became distracted after the photograph of the abused children on the train.”
“So, almost immediately,” Maggie added quietly.
“And understandably so,” said the General.
Hyacinth began, “Abused children on a…?” but was interrupted by a sharp rap on the door.
“Hello?” said a cloying male voice. “Is there anyone at home?”
“Oh, what the hell does he want?” Maggie muttered.
“I miss Annie for dinner!” Andrej declared, though somewhat muffled. “I make for everyone my special goulash…”
“I’ll get rid of him,” Hyacinth said.
Maggie cut a hand at her and pointed to a bed. “You read. He speaks Anglais. I’ll get rid of him.” She unlocked the door and opened it only a few scant inches. “What do you…”
He shoved open the door, bearing a large casserole dish in two oven-mitted hands. “I have room service! Sur…” He regarded the piles of paper, and the striped paper bag on the desk. “Oh? That was your shopping…?”
“Get out!” Maggie propelled him back into the hall and shut the door behind her. “Mind your own goddamn business! What do you want?”
“I make dinner,” he said weakly. “We eat in kitchen, but you don’t…”
“I have no time to shoot the shit with you, Andrej, we are busy!”
He blinked at her. “What is this ‘shit to shoot’?”
“Nevermind.” She pulled open the door, warding him off with a hand, and slipped back inside. “Just go away and leave us alone!” She shut the door, opened it a split-second later, and took the casserole. “You can leave the goulash.” She shut the door again. “Ow, fuck, it’s hot!” She dropped the casserole on the floor, and the dish cracked in two, leaking noodles and red sauce. “Shit.”
“But I have the bowls and the spoons!” Andrej’s voice said faintly.
Ann slipped past Maggie, opened the door, and collected the bowls and spoons.
“What is,” Andrej began.
She overrode him, “I’m sorry, Andrej, dear, we’ve had some upsetting news from home and we really must deal with it, but thank you for the dinner…”
“What sort of news?” he said.
Ann frowned at him. “You really do ask an awful lot of questions and it’s rather unbecoming for a gentleman, Andrej.” She gently shut the door between them, and locked it. “Are you all right, Maggie, dear?”
“Irritated,” Maggie allowed. She examined the palms of her hands. “And lightly toasted, but I ruined our dinner instead of myself.” She sighed. “I’m not hungry, anyway.”
“Most of these people aren’t like the ones in the apograph,” Hyacinth said.
Maggie blinked at her. Holy shit, Cin had just failed to respond to a medical emergency. “Oh, gods, we really are fucked, aren’t we?”
“Are you reading the train pile, Cin?” Ann asked. She picked up both halves of the broken casserole dish and set them carefully in the wastebasket. “The one with the children on top?”
Hyacinth nodded absently.
“Look near the bottom. It’s a flyer. The sound and the photo work.”
Hyacinth ruffled a few papers and drew out one with a large, still image of a train at the top. ARE YOU MISSING SOMEONE WHO GOT ON A TRAIN? the header asked her in bright red Anglais. Below it was a list of Prokovian towns and cities, with a date beside each. Touching the photo failed to result in any sound or motion. Swiping changed the whole flyer into Prokovian, and then back to Anglais. “I don’t get it,” she said.”Is this the right one?”
Maggie planted one foot on the floor but did not quite stand. “You have to…” She shook her head and knelt down again. “Ann, you show her. It’s my mess, I’ll clean it.”
“You don’t have to,” Ann said softly. “But would you rather?”
Maggie nodded.
“All right, dear. That’s all right.” She stood and sat on the bed beside Hyacinth. “There are a lot of stills. It cuts down on the storage space.” She touched one of the earliest city names, Tvinksta. The image of the train vanished, replaced by three boxes with text: INDIVIDUALS, FAMILIES, CHILDREN. “Not all of them have children. Most of them don’t, but I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.” She selected INDIVIDUALS, it was a little less upsetting.
A list of names appeared where the text boxes had been. Swiping up and down made it scroll. Altogether, there were several hundred INDIVIDUALS.The last dozen or so were listed as UNKNOWN, male or female, and an approximate age.
“These are all crackle-lacquer and cracks-and-chips,” Ann said. “It seems like only children can be piebald.” She scrolled up a few lines more, and found two names, with city names beside them, just above the header DECEASED. “They found these two. They found their families, I mean. These poor people have no idea who they were or where they came from, but sometimes they find their families.” She tapped on one of the names, MARINA SOBOL — ZIMINSK.
This brought up an image of a smiling red woman with pale cracks running through her face and hands. FOUND was stamped across it in black ink.
Ann swiped up and brought back the list. “But the important thing is the cities and the dates. We squared this up with that railroad map. They are moving north-to-south and west-to-east, clearing out the towns and cities. First, they collect the children, or try to. Then they come back and sweep up everyone else.
“The fractured people on the trains are always from farther north, adults and children. Prokovia finishes whatever they wanted to do and then ships them down to the latest city to die with the rest. None of the fractured adults the Rainbows have found are from anywhere lower than Cinovec. At some point last year, Prokovia decided they were getting better results from the children, and they started killing everyone else.”
“But that could change,” Maggie added. She peeled the spilled soup from the floor like a giant sticker and sighed. “You’re still bleeding, Mom.”
“At least I’m of some use,” said the General. Nevertheless, she picked up her bandaged hand and clasped it in the other.
Maggie quickly dumped the soup in the trash, before the magic could give out and render it liquid again. She stood and sat on the bed, on the other side of the train pile. “That new guy, the one who barely looks coloured at all, if they want more like him, they might start working on adults and teenagers again. Trouble is, the Rainbows don’t know how it works, and Prokovia probably doesn’t know how it works either.”
She picked up the apograph with the four types on it. “This could be like a dice roll, you get one of four — or there might be even more kinds — but it’s a random pattern every time. If there’s no way to roll the number they want, all they can do is throw out the mistakes. Or maybe there’s a way to load the dice and they’re working out how. The Rainbows can only guess based on who’s on the trains. Up until a few weeks ago, it looked like Prokovia wanted the piebald kids, but the last three trains had piebald kids on them.
“I don’t know why they’d want more like this guy,” she muttered, indicating the man tied to the chair. “Him and his fucking ‘ghost.’ Did you read that shit? He keeps trying to kill himself with magic, and everybody else, but he’s got no idea. He thinks he’s just, like, normal, and he’s always been normal. And he sits there making conversation, nice as pie, while he tries to slit his own wrists and set you on fire. But if the other smokes are hallucinating normalcy with no magic, I could see Prokovia being all-in on that shit.”
Hyacinth plucked the paper out of her hand, puzzled over the backwards writing, and wandered back to the mirror.
“It’s easier to read if you fold it,” Maggie said. “One at a time. Or I could just tell you.” She sighed again, exhausted by the prospect.
Ann stood up and offered, “They only have one smoke, so they don’t really know what they’re like as a type. That poor man hurts people with magic, and he’s so divorced from reality he doesn’t know what he’s doing and he can’t stop. Absolute Zero doesn’t work on him, so they’ve got him in an anti-magic cell… It’s a room, he has furniture and books to read,” she was shaking her head, “but it’s a cell, because he can’t leave.
“But the others aren’t like that at all,” she assured. “They can help the others. They’re trying to help them all.
“Crackle-lacquer…” Ann shrugged and sighed. “I’m just going to say ‘crackles and chips,’ the Rainbows do. They’re similar, and it’s hard to tell them apart. They can still do a little magic and they have some memories, but they can’t put anything together in a way that makes sense. They make new memories based on what they see, stories or even just pictures, and they don’t know what’s real.
“Crackles don’t seem to understand there’s anything wrong with them, at least not at the start. They fill in the gaps in a way that makes sense to them, and it doesn’t need to make sense to anyone else. They don’t even know they’ve been hurt. They’re… They’re almost happy.
“But the ones with chips missing know something isn’t right. When something they remember changes, they know it, and they don’t like it.”
Ann flinched and turned her head away. “A lot of those things they do… It’s, it’s just stress. Sometimes when everything hurts, it feels better to hurt yourself. Em knows how that is and… and so do Milo and I. But there’s more. Something happened in their brains. Their memories aren’t where they left them, and their identities aren’t, and… and their minds don’t match up with their bodies like they should. There are pieces they just don’t feel anymore. Sometimes it’s just a finger,” she hedged. “Or it’s something that feels numb but they can still use it, but…”
Maggie spoke up flatly, “They had a guy who cut his whole leg off with an axe and bled out. I forget where it is, but there’s a fucking picture of him in case they find his family somewhere.”
“Oh, fuck,” said Hyacinth. She gave up trying to read about the man with the thread of purple, who seemed like a refugee from a devil movie, and folded the sheet to look at the blue woman and the information about others like her. There was no picture of a dead man with a missing leg, but there was a bright red frame warning her to Zero all crackles and chips, because chipping wasn’t always obvious, and never leave them alone…
“Some of them can still call gods,” Ann said sickly. “There are gods who will take pieces of you like that, too, and they don’t care if you live or die. I-I know someone who met a god like that. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to know your body isn’t right and not even be able to tell yourself that your mind is. To… To not even have that much…”
Hyacinth refolded the paper. “What about the kids?”
“Depends on the pattern,” Maggie said. “There are crackle and chip kids too.” She gestured towards the apograph. “But the ones like that have no magic and no memories. And they don’t make up new stories for themselves. They have nightmares, and they do all the stress stuff just like the others, so Prokovia boxes them all up in these fake-ass ‘schools’ and tries to beat it out of them. They tell them they’re sick. If they don’t get ‘better,’ they wind up on a train, and they’re scared out of their minds the whole time. Even when they get rescued. The Rainbows have to explain that those people who were taking care of them…” She shuddered. “Fuck, I can’t.”
“A child who knows nothing but an abusive situation,” said the General, “cannot understand that it is abusive, and will react with fear if removed. It offends one to call the treatment inflicted upon these children ‘care,’ but without further context, the children must see their abusers as caregivers, and will treat them as such. With actual caregivers able to provide more context, they can be brought to understanding…” She sighed. “But, in this case, it does not seem that their memories can be restored. Even in the rare instances where they are able to return to their families, it is as if they have been adopted by kind strangers.”
“It’s still better than the alternative,” Ann said weakly. She replaced the photo of the piebald children on top of the train pile, sat down beside it, and turned her head away. “Milo and I don’t want to think about the ones they haven’t found.”
“That kid from the farm,” Hyacinth began.
Maggie stifled a sob.
“We don’t know,” Ann said quickly. “We don’t know what happened to them. But the Rainbows are here, Cin. They’ve been right here with Erik and John the whole time. They evacuated Kirov! There’s a flyer for Kirov, just like for the trains!” She paused and regarded the piles of paper. “Oh, gods, where did we put it…?”
Hyacinth staggered away from the mirror, blinking. “Oh, shit, they were trying to evacuate the Kijeks, weren’t they? They’re running around with stickers trying to make friends, but they came on too strong and queered the whole deal. Goddammit, I get why, but… Oh, goddammit…”
“We haven’t been through everything,” Ann said. She picked up another pile, hesitated, and gave it to Hyacinth. “We haven’t read everything, and we haven’t even looked at these. There might be something about the Kijeks, but we keep getting distracted.”
“It’s a lot,” Maggie said. She gazed around the room, haunted. “It’s… It’s just a lot. I want to stop looking but I’m afraid if we do, we’re going to miss something that will get us killed. Or, or someone else.” She scowled and yanked on her braids in frustration. “Would it have killed that idiot to sit down and write us a real letter? Or even to organize this stuff or fucking edit it, instead of throwing all this random crap like… What even the hell is that?”
The papers on top of the unsorted pile, which Hyacinth was leafing through, displayed inexpert ink sketches of a unicorn with a black and white mane.
Hyacinth turned back to the first page and read off the header, “‘The Hunt of the Unicorn.’”
“That is a series of ancient tapestries,” said the General. “The unicorn is eventually subdued by a maiden and shut up in a pen in the garden, although I believe in the original myth, the hunters remove its horn and it dies…”
“Well,” said Hyacinth, “in this version the unicorn’s parents get tricked into sending it away to school, so they’ve also taken some artistic liberties.” She tapped the pages together and set them aside. “It says it’s for the kids. The kids like it. It gives the piebald ones nightmares, but eventually they like it too.” She smirked. “It also says it needs better illustrations if anyone has time. Maybe John thought Calliope would like to do that for them.”
“Oh.” Ann paused her search for the Kirov flyer and had a quick look through the unicorn story. “Well, I don’t know, maybe she would. Or Milo…”
“Oh, gods, what’s that one?” Maggie said.
Next in the pile was a photograph that had been entirely obscured by strip after strip of silver tape. John’s handwriting, in black marker, said, Interview w/ “Cutter,”13/3/87 You don’t need to see this.
Maggie sputtered, “If we don’t need to see it, why…?”
Hyacinth pushed up her reading glasses. “It’s got audio.” A tiny image of a phonograph horn was visible in the bottom right corner. Without waiting for permission, she tapped it with a finger.
“Interview with Cutter,” the photograph said, displaying shifting threads of colour behind the tape. “March 13th, 1387…”
Maggie shrieked and snatched the photo away. She silenced the audio just as a female voice began to ask, “Is there anyone helping you…?”
“I don’t have room in my brain for any more trauma, Cin! I don’t need to listen to something so awful that the stupidest man we know covered it in duct tape. Whatever it is, it can wait!”
After a moment’s consideration, she threw it on the pile with the other miscellaneous evidence of damages.
“Cutter,” said Hyacinth. She sat on the bed and retrieved the photo, earning a wordless growl from Maggie. “Does that sound like a god to you guys?”
“Of course it’s a god!” Maggie snapped. “They know it’s a god — gods,” she corrected herself. “More than one. But none of them will cough up how it’s done or where it’s happening, so whatever that is, leave it for Uncle Mordecai. Maybe he knows Cutter.’”
“I think Em has had enough trauma too,” Ann said softly. “For now.” She pulled the photo out of the blonde woman’s hand and pressed it firmly onto the pile. “We’ll have time for this later. We’ll understand it better later. Let’s… Please, let’s try to keep it to things for Erik, and how to keep him safe from what’s happening.”
Maggie uttered a short, bitter laugh. “If that date on there is correct, they were still investigating the god-angle two months after they took him. It’s looking more and more like they had no idea what was going on, and instead of tagging in all of us, they decided they just wanted him.” She shuddered, drew a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “Not that it makes any fucking difference, but did they even bother to confirm it was more than just Marc before they lost their damn minds and started kidnapping people and hooking them up to car batteries? Do we know?”
“Just the one person,” Ann protested.
“Is that any better?” Maggie snapped.
Ann dropped her head, not daring to shake or nod.
“Who’s Marc?” said Hyacinth.
“Oh.” Ann crawled across the bed and picked up another pile. “He’s over here. It’s not much.” She managed a faint smile. “But at least it has a happy ending.”
“Sort of,” Maggie allowed. “He’s the first one they found,” she told Hyacinth. “You’ve seen him already, he’s Bachelor Number One on that quick reference sheet. He tried to get a meal at the Black Orchid, but he consumed the entirety of The Sound of Music first, and the gods alone know what else before that, so…”
The paper on top of the pile was another flyer, with a missing-person-style format, except they’d already found the guy, they just had no idea who he was. The image at the top was of a smiling young man, pure white with a cracked complexion and threads of blond in his hair. Maggie touched it and cranked up the volume.
“…is for the newsreels?” the young man asked.
A female voice replied from off-camera, “Um, it’s for whoever might know who you are, hon.”
“I am Marc,” he replied, with a laugh. He waved to the camera. “Guten Morgen, Marsellia! Kak vy? We are pleased to be escaping the Gund oppression in your beautiful country! Danke to all the Sisters for sabotaging das Auto in dramatic third act…”
“What the hell is that accent?” Hyacinth muttered.
“We don’t know and neither does he,” Maggie said.
“…but I am fine,” Marc was saying, “so I’m certain they are too. Oh! And please let dear Rolfe know all is forgiven. I will cut him up however he likes, as long as we have some matches for the knife…”
“What the fuck,” said Hyacinth.
“It might be from another movie,” Ann said. “It-it doesn’t have to be real…”
“Look at him,” Maggie said. “He has no context. He has no idea he said anything wrong.”
“…We shall have a lovely wedding, or, uh… Was ist das…? Unfair Marselline civil union! Molly rights are human rights!”
Ann sighed. “He was at the Black Orchid. I do love them, but there is a time and a place for activism and this isn’t…”
“Shh,” Maggie said.
“…Hon, maybe you could tell us a little about the train?” said the off-camera voice.
“Train?” Marc said.
“Um… Someone was with you on a train?” the invisible woman prompted, reluctantly.
Marc clapped his hand and pointed. “Oh, yes! We climb so many mountains, I almost forget train! Da, da, my big sister and I take train!”
The camera wobbled. “Big sister? You don’t mean…” It sounded as if the invisible owner of the voice had muzzled herself with a hand.
“I am the oldest,” Marc said, nodding. “I have four little sisters, and two brothers, and Mama and Papa have come too. Rolfe and I took the train together with the movie people, but they throw us off for fighting about the politics, so we walk. He thinks I betray him, but is all big misunderstanding. I think my family take another train, but I don’t find them at the station. I get a little bit lost.” He laughed. “Maybe I am a little young to travel by myself. Only sixteen!”
“Do you know which station?” the voice behind the camera asked.
“San Rosille, Central!” Marc replied. “You show me photos! I know it anywhere!”
A hand covered the camera, and another voice spoke softly, “I think that’s the best he can do…”
The photo reset to the original still image of a smiling young man. The text below it informed all readers that “Marc” was not this person’s real name, and he was looking for his family. He had been found in San Rosille in December of 1387. He had ridden a train at least part of the way and also walked. He may have been travelling with an older family member or friend, male or female. He seemed to recall having a large family with a lot of siblings. He spoke Prokovian, Anglais, and some Alemanian. Maybe he had gone through Gundland or Aver-Abenland, or maybe he’d learned it in school. He had a scar on each temple, maybe from psychosurgery or electroshock, and one on his left knee, maybe from a fall. If anyone had any information, there was a phone number that had been blacked out with swipes of dark ink.
“It’s the first one,” Maggie said, indicating the redacted number. “They weren’t using the smart paper yet. There are a few more like that, but they start telling people to ‘contact Central.’ This is the last one…” She set aside a few more flyers, which had the same young man looking progressively less happy. On the last, he had dark patches under his eyes as if he hadn’t slept in a week, and he wasn’t even trying to smile for the camera. Maggie sent it playing with a touch.
The young man turned his head aside, displaying one of the scars, and spoke softly. “I don’t like that. Do we have to have that… that…”
“I’m sorry, Marc,” said the voice behind the camera. It was the same female voice as before. “We need them to see you, but…” The camera swivelled to one side, and began photographing a half-empty bottle of water and a vase with a few scraggly tulips in it. “That’s enough. It doesn’t have to be the whole time. Is that…” There was a blip in the image, a brief white frame indicating an edit. “We’ll just do one for the flyers, okay?”
A sigh. Marc spoke again, “You need, for the records…”
“We do, but this can be for the flyers. Just be brief.”
The water bottle was removed, and replaced an instant later, three-quarters empty now.
“Danke,” Marc said. A brief laugh. “Oh, gods. Where the hell did I pick up ‘danke’?”
“I don’t know, hon,” the woman said. “It’s not a hard thing to pick up, but I don’t want to guess…”
“…Because whatever you say, I’ll believe it,” Marc said weakly. Perhaps there was an unspoken reply. “Okay.” Another sigh. “My name isn’t really Marc. I was on one of the first trains, so I must be from somewhere north of Cinovec, but we’re just guessing. I think I remember being on the train with my big sister — not you, Nell, a girl like me, and I don’t think I’m making her up — but maybe I just liked her and I made up the part about her being my sister. I… She put water on her handkerchief and held my hand. Then… Then she wasn’t there anymore and I didn’t think I ever had a sister and I didn’t care…”
Another white frame. Now there was a new bottle of water in front of the camera, almost full.
“…No, I need to tell them,” Marc said shakily. “Please, Nell…”
“We’re recording, hon. It’s on.”
“Okay. No, I’m okay.” He drew a long, shuddery breath. “I think I had a big sister, I don’t know if that’s who she was, but that’s all I remember about her. She… She would be from north of Cinovec too. They erased her out of my mind and I can’t get her back. I can’t describe for you. I am sorry.”
“It’s not your fault…”
“I can still be sorry!” he cried.
“Okay,” the woman — Nell — said soothingly. “That’s okay.”
“Sometimes I think I am on a train going on a nice vacation and sometimes I think I am in a studio with people making a movie about me, but I don’t know which is first or what’s real. The train must be real, but I don’t remember it like the other people from the trains. There… There are seats, and windows… I-I think there were seats and windows…”
“It was probably a passenger train,” said Nell.
“You shouldn’t say…”
“No, we have that from other people. Passenger trains with seats and windows. And you’ve said that from the very start. You’re not making it up.”
“…Do… Do you think maybe I am on two trains? One with my sister, then I flunk out of school, so they send me to die with Rolfe? Or… Or whoever. A boy.”
“I don’t know. It’s not impossible, but I don’t know.”
“Da. Yeah. Of course you don’t.” He sighed again. “There was a boy, but I don’t know what he looked like either. I think they threw us off the train together. I think…” He laughed, entirely without humour. “I think the movie people ask me to tell them my story, like you do, Nellie, and I tell them all about Mama making us clothes out of the drapes and teaching us to sing, but that can’t be right. I’m sure I made up something else nice, and they didn’t like it. They don’t want me to make up my own story, they want me to spit out whatever they put in, like those poor fucking kids…”
“Could be,” the woman allowed.
Marc scoffed. “Damn it, I hate how careful you are, but I know why you do it and you can’t stop. I wish… I wish I just remembered. I wish I just knew. It’s so fucking frustrating…”
“You need a break?”
“No, no. Let’s just get it over with.” A brief pause. “I think Mama did make us clothes out of… A tablecloth. Mama made me a skirt out of a tablecloth — no, that can’t be right. Maybe my sister…?”
“Maybe.”
“Oh, fuck you and your ‘maybe.’” Another helpless laugh. “Does it help any, if she did? You don’t find anyone for over a year but maybe ‘Mama made a skirt out of a tablecloth’ gets me my family back? Huh?”
With mild irony: “Worth a shot.”
He laughed and sniffled. “Yeah. Sure. Why not?”
Someone picked up the camera — an instant later, it became clear this was Marc, and he aimed it at his own face.
“Do you see me, Rainbow Alliance, and all my fucked up, traumatized friends? I am a human being with a human life. But they don’t like who I am, so they try to cut it out of my body.” He pointed to the pattern of cracks. “And then they try to cut it out of my brain.” He turned his head from side to side, showing the scars. “And that don’t work, either, so they throw me out and try to kill me, but I am still here! This… This mess isn’t who I was, but I am still here! I come from somewhere. I had a family and I loved them! They are gone from me, but I want them back!”
He leaned in closer, the lens blurred trying to refocus, and lowered his voice to a snarl, “And if any of you out there can do anything at all about these fucking atrocities — I don’t care how little or how much — you fucking do it. Don’t back down. Don’t quit. If you know about this and you’re not doing everything in your power to make it stop, I hope you die and burn in hell!”
A brown hand covered the lens and turned the camera away. The image reset to the original still of a pale, exhausted young man.
“Wait,” said Hyacinth. “Damn it.” She tapped the photo again and dragged her finger back and forth, trying to replay the last bit. “Did you see it?”
Maggie and Ann shook their heads.
“I saw the guy cursing us for trying to take Erik back home,” Maggie said. “You mean him?”
“No,” said Hyacinth. “The girl…” She tapped the image.
“…I hope you die and burn in hell!”
“Wait, damn it…”
“… die and burn in hell!”
“There!”
She’d paused it just as the owner of the hand turned the camera away. She advanced the recording frame by frame, and at last found a recognizable, full-face image of a girl in a zippered sweatshirt with gorgeous long blue-black hair. “That isn’t any ‘Nell,’ that’s John’s little sister Jenny.”
Maggie snatched up the flyer and stared at it. “Shit. How did we miss…?”
“It’s too much information,” Ann said. She spread her hands helplessly and shook her head. “We can’t. We just can’t.”
“Wait, holy shit, they found his family?” Hyacinth snatched up the last flyer in the pile. “Is that…”
“No,” Ann said. “Not quite.”
Hyacinth played the photo.
“This is Rolfe!” Marc crowed, pointing at the green young man who was sharing the frame with him. “Seventeen going on eighteen!”
“At least eighteen,” the kid said, laughing. “And I’m not Rolfe!”
“Sorry! Sorry! Wer bist du? Ha-ha-ha… Freder!”
“It’s not ‘Freder’ either!”
“Okay-okay, but I bet it’s close.” Now Marc addressed the camera again, “We have no idea who the fuck we are, but we walked here through Gundaland and we’ve seen Metropolis! In Alemanian! At least once! Ha-ha!”
“Das ist Maria,” the green kid said, laughing.
“Not ‘Maria,’” Marc gasped, bent double with tears streaming from his eyes. “Ah-ha-ha, why do I keep picking girls to copy?”
“Well, they do kidnap you and try to turn you into a robot, there is that…”
“Da, da, yeah, you’re right!”
“I think I work in factory,” the green kid said. “In futuristic dystopian city… So probably big city, up north. And Maria…”
“Marc!”
“Ha-ha, yeah, Marc is big brother or babysitter with lots of kids, I remember he tell me about the kids. He like kids here, too, da?”
“Yeah! This is me!” Marc said, beaming. “I’m still me!”
“If you know us, please find us!” the green kid said. They both waved to the camera.
The image reset, showing two laughing young men in a loose embrace, both of them with cracks running through their colour. The text of the flyer was full of information, much of it speculative, but a great deal more than Marc had ever managed on his own. The thing about the tablecloth skirt was in there too.
The last line, in frustrated bold caps, said: STOP CALLING TO ASK IF THEY’RE GAY, THEY DON’T KNOW YET!
“It’s from three days ago,” Ann said. She flipped over the paper and showed a date written in black marker. Her faint smile returned. “Maybe they’ll find their families now. They remember a lot more now.”
“The gods alone know if any of it’s true,” Maggie muttered.
“They’re happy,” Ann said.
“That kid doesn’t have a hand,” Hyacinth said. “Freder, or whatever his name is.” She pointed at the image without touching. “Not even a prosthetic, not even hooks. Nothing.”
“He couldn’t use it if they did give him something,” Ann said. “He wouldn’t know how. He… His mind doesn’t know there was ever anything there. They’re happy,” she said firmly. “That’s all that matters.”
“That guy’s basically the same colour as Erik and it’s giving me psychic damage,” Maggie muttered. “Probably Uncle Em too. I know the Rainbows didn’t want to do that — they were fucking him up in a totally different way and they told themselves it was safe — but that’s what Prokovia wants to do with all of them. If these fake-ass passports and certificates don’t hold up, they’ll do it to Uncle Em and Erik too.”
Hyacinth had a look at the passports and certificates. The certificates said the Registry had decided Erik and Mordecai were barely magical at all, and exempt from labelling due to trauma-induced metal allergies. She scoffed at the implication that her repairs had been substandard in any way, but she had to admit it was plausible. The ink, formatting, lamination and stamps were also quite plausible. Flawless, even. Mordecai’s papers lacked photos, but John had attached a sticky note saying that if they slid some under the lamination spells, the stamps would lie on top of them just like the genuine articles.
“Honestly, these are better than anything I could do,” she decided. “If Erik smartens up enough not to blow his own cover, we won’t even have to stuff him in the suitcase.”
Maggie scowled at her. “He’s smart enough to pose for a passport photo…”
“No, that’s David.”
“The green one, Cin,” Ann said gently.
“That’s also David.” She flipped open the small folio. “Look at his eyes. He’s making fun of the kid. Erik only looks that dopey when he’s trying to get a laugh out of some tourists, not for a photo he’ll have to show the cops.”
Maggie picked up the passport and peered at it from a skeptical distance. “Motherfucker,” she said.
“He’ll be okay,” Ann said firmly. “He’ll rest a little and he’ll be fine and we’ll get him out of here and home safe. That’s all…”
“If,” said the General, “you were not humouring Mr. Eidel, and you do in fact believe that our government is complicit in this matter, our home is not safe, Miss Rose.”
“It’s safer than here!” Ann cried. “We have to get him out of here! We have to get them both out of here and find someone who can help…”
Maggie plunked down on the bed. “First, we have to finish sorting John’s goddamn papers so we don’t get blindsided by some shit we missed. I’m scared to even… Oh, heck.” She picked up the unsorted pile. “‘I’ve been using this to control Erik’s mind, I’m sorry.’” She held up the lined sheet with its hastily-scrawled ink header. “I think I got the other half of that list…” She read some more. “Aha. And I’ve found the endless loop he got stuck in. See? We do need to…”
Ann took the paper from her and read quickly.
“It would be helpful if you read it aloud, Miss Rose,” said the General.
Ann snarled and drove her fist into the wall, denting the plaster. A framed watercolour came unstuck and slid down, revealing a similar dent on the opposite wall, but at more the General’s height. “Oh, you bastard — you bastard!”
Maggie drew back with a wobbly frown. Hyacinth drew nearer, cautiously. “Ann…?”
“Did you read this?” she demanded of Maggie. “Didn’t you read this? Didn’t you see what he did?”
Maggie winced at her. “A bunch of stuff so Erik couldn’t get help or get away?”
“Erik’s words,” Ann spat. “Erik’s voice. Erik couldn’t talk to us and tell us what was wrong because John put this fucked up code in his head that said when he wants to yell for help he can’t. He… He hurt Erik. He let Erik get trampled and half-killed in the street and instead of helping him he kicked him. Oh, oh, but he was sorry. He felt bad about it. And he was never going to do it again. So we trusted him! And… And he stole Erik from us and tried to ruin his mind so he couldn’t even cry out when it hurts or ask for it to stop!”
The General spoke in a bored monotone, “Miss Rose, if you find it necessary to break down now, I would recommend you throw the lamp I’ve already ruined…”
Maggie tugged the list out of Ann’s hand and wrapped an arm around her waist, pulling her towards a bed, and away from the wall and the lamps. “It’s a lot. I know. It’s a lot…”
“Don’t touch us!” Ann shoved Maggie aside and backed away towards the closet. “You don’t understand,” she snarled. “Nobody ever listens and nobody ever understands… Erik has spent the last year of his life, every moment of it, wanting to scream, and John drilled that into his head so he couldn’t. He punished him for even trying by making him forget — you know how he hates to forget things! That is torture. He… He tried to ruin Erik’s mind and take away his voice before, and he did it again. There is no excuse for this!”
“Ann,” Hyacinth said helplessly. The excuse was all over the room. And it included innocent children.
“He’s back at the Hotel Vesely, isn’t he?” Ann said. “He has nowhere else to go — he’s severed ties with the Rainbows by giving Erik and all these documents to a bunch of strangers who could get all of them killed — and he’s an idiot, so that’s where he is!”
“Geez,” Maggie said, blinking. “I guess we better go pick him up…?”
Ann was pulling open dresser drawers. “I’m going to get changed so Milo can kill him.”
Maggie and Hyacinth cried, “Ann!” The General added, in a low voice, “That would be unwise.”
Ann had found a white shirt and a pair of dark trousers and that would do. “Letting that monster anywhere near Erik was unwise, and he obviously can’t protect himself, so we are going to fix it. The Rainbows will probably kill him for this anyway — so we might as well save them the trouble!” She shut herself in the closet. There were muted rustles of shifting fabric.
“I’ll go,” Maggie said quickly, quietly. She stepped into her boots. “We’ve got to get him anyway, she’s not wrong about the Rainbows killing him. He trusts us and I trust us but I wouldn’t if I were them. Look, I’ll grab a taxi and get out ahead of her. If the cage is still working, neither of us can get to him, but I can get to the window…” Her coat was in the Sex Dungeon with Erik. She sighed.
Ann and Milo’s boots were by the door. She collected both pairs and handed them to her mother. “Here. They’re not going anywhere with no shoes. Let me see if I can get to my coat without violating my boyfriend…” She tapped on the connecting door and opened it the tiniest crack, to be certain she was heard over the silence spells, “Uncle Em?”
“Shhh!” came the reply. The red man turned from the bed and put up both his hands. “I just got him to sleep,” he hissed.
“I need my coat,” Maggie whispered, pointing.
He snatched it and backed her out of the room, closing the door behind him. “Did you tell her?” He looked past her, at Hyacinth. “Do you understand?”
“I don’t understand any of it,” Hyacinth said dully. She looked away, at all the papers. “But I get why we need to put him back together and get both of you out of here as quickly as possible…”
“Good.” He began gathering the papers, indiscriminately stacking the piles.
“Em!” Maggie grabbed him and pulled him back. “We haven’t even…”
“We can’t let him see this. We can’t let him see any of this. We can’t let him know this!” He was trying to dodge past her, but she wouldn’t let him go. “Damn it! If he knows what’s going on, he will not let us take him home — and I have no idea whether he’ll be in any shape to protest rationally. If he just starts screaming, he’ll get all of us killed or… or worse. We have to get rid of all this shit! We have to burn it, or…”
Maggie shook the hell out of him. He dropped the papers he’d been holding on the floor.
“This is evidence of a genocide in progress and we need to get it to someone who can help make it stop!”
“This is not our mess and we can’t clean it! We have enough to do just trying to get out of here with our lives! I don’t know why in every god’s name that asshole wanted to pile all this bullshit on top of everything we’re already dealing with, but I will never, ever forgive…”
Milo shoved open the closet door and stalked past all of them, squinting to focus without his glasses. He noted a conspicuous lack of red boots in the pile near the hall door. A cursory examination revealed his black ones were also missing. He turned with his mouth drawn down in a snarl and signed at them: SHOES WHERE [ASK]?
“What shoes?” said the General.
Maggie turned on him. “You are not going to kill John, and you are not going to destroy any evidence. I’m going to go get John and he’s going to help get all of us out of here with every last bit of this information. Now stop being stupid!”
“We can’t just leave it like this,” Mordecai muttered. He knelt and began to scrape together the papers he’d dropped. “Not all over the room like this. Save out Erik’s papers and I’ll put the rest of it in the suitcase…”
“Five seconds ago you wanted to burn it all,” Hyacinth said.
“This is all very stressful for me and I do not have to make sense right now!” He wobbled and dropped all the papers again. “What the hell am I doing?”
“Having a freakout,” said Hyacinth. “Obviously.” She knelt beside him. “But I’ll sort the papers if you’ll stop Milo from committing a homicide.”
“What?” He looked up. “Milo, what the hell? We don’t need more cops involved!”
J-O-H-N — he fingerspelled it! — HURT RUIN BREAK [E]YEBALL STOP NOW STOP FOREVER STOP STOP STOP…
“I am going to bring him back here and he can explain himself,” Maggie said firmly. “We are not going to kill him before he explains himself. If he did break Erik, we need him alive so he can tell us how to fix him.” She pointed to Milo and one of the beds. “You stay here, sit down and cool off.”
GIVE SHOES, Milo signed.
“I have stored them in slipspace,” said the General. She flexed her bandaged fingers and reiterated, “At least I am of some use.”
She had stopped bleeding some time ago, there was no ambient left in the room, and so, in fact, she was sitting on both pairs of boots. But she didn’t think Mr. Rose needed to know that.
BAD MACHINE, Milo signed. WOMAN [BADX3] UNDERSTAND ME DURATION [ASK]? MADX3. NOSY. LIAR. SNOOP. SPY…
Maggie zipped up her coat and sneaked into the hallway. She’d rescue John first, then, if they had time, she’d pick up some food. Milo could have a candy bar if he was good and didn’t kill their only local informant and ally…
