Trust in Oneself, Draft 1, CH 12 (Patreon)

Paul’s return to consciousness came courtesy of being shaken.

“Fuck,” he grumbled, hand going to his head. He felt like the morning after that party where he’d discovered alcohol.

“Wake up,” a woman said, “we got to talk.”

He forced an eye open, and a pangolin was watching him. “Fuck.” He’d been hoping the memory of the last few days had been an alcohol-induced dream.

“Let him rest, Shila,” Donal said.

“I’m up,” Paul replied. He didn’t think Shila would let him go back to sleep, and if his memory was in any way accurate, they didn’t have the time. He sat up and his phone slid off his chest. He caught a line on it that looked like what he’d see on a heart monitor, but more colorful before the screen went black. Wrapped in sections around his arms and chest and head were what looked like strips of kids’ sheets, with faded fire trucks and bright airplanes.

He wasn’t in pain. So he figured the phone, and the strips were part of the reason, not that he could understand how the strips worked. Practitioner magic was more about concepts than anything else, so… He looked at the squirrel.

“They’re from a children’s hospital that closed down a few years ago,” Donal answered his tilted ear. “They were supposed to have been packed and donated to shelters and people in need, but they got misplaced. I came across them a while back when I was badly hurt. They served me well since.”

Paul nodded. That was why they’d worked.

“How are we still alive?” he asked, “or free. Not sure what the Chamber would have done once they captured us.”

“You dealt with the browser,” Shila said. Paul raised his hand to stop her.

“I’m pretty sure Nina sent me flying, and I lost consciousness.”

“You went flying alright,” Donal said with a chuckle that earned him a glare from Shila. “Between you and that wall was a chimpanzee. You knocked him out as hard as you knocked out yourself.”

“Okay, how did we get here? Where ever this is?” the room had a sense of being abandoned for a while. The wallpaper was discolored and peeling in places. There was the distinctive scent of mildew and the mattress he was sitting on—he looked at it, worrying that was where the smell came from—was in great condition. The only thing in the room that was.

“I carried you,” Donal said, and Paul tilted an ear, looked the thin man over. “Yes, I used magic. We’re in an abandoned apartment building three blocks away from the hotel. It was the closest place I was sure the Chamber wouldn’t find us once those unconscious muscles woke up to tell their boss we got away with two of their staves.”

Paul saw them on the dresser that didn’t look capable of supporting their weights. The black microscope staff, and the brass knuckle one. Which meant. “Nina?”

“The bitch ran,” Shila said. “If I ever find her, I am going to rip her head off for what she did to Merlin.”

“Do we know she did anything?” Paul asked. “The sickness would have been enough to push him to overuse his staff, right?”

“That doesn’t make her innocent, Paul,” Donal said. “The chamber always picks someone to wield a practitioner’s staff and makes sure they’s close with they are forced to reach apotheosis. She probably told the truth when she said she was Merlin’s nurse.”

Shila snorted.

“And she was probably not the person behind all this, although I wouldn’t be surprised if she had come up with the idea to get other doctors and nurses to use the staff and quickly overextend themselves, since they didn’t have any training. When it’s about saving lives, it’s easy to think that little voice saying you should step back is cowardliness and push through. The fact she came to my house means that part of their plan was done and they had something in mind for me. Which you sidetracked.”

Paul sighed. “What do we do now? Go after her?”

“Now,” Shila spat. “You explain why you held out on us.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Paul,” Donal said, and was glared at again as he’d interrupted what looked to be the mother of all rants from Shila, “Nina didn’t attack you.”

“I have the blackout to contradict you.”

“That was the staff defending itself. They won’t let other magical people hold them. An attempt looks and feels like what you experienced.”

“So who are you with?” Shila demanded, “and why the fuck didn’t you tell me? Do you have any idea what I could have done with more magic on hand?”

Paul looked from Donal to Shila and back, trying to make sense of what they were talking about. “I don’t do magic,” he finally said.

Donal let out a defeated sigh. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

“Oh bullshit, you’re a Knife, aren’t you? You and your fucking secrecy.”

“He isn’t one of them, Shila. That’d I’d know.”

She glared at him. “Oh really? You would be able to see through the masters of misdirection? You going to try to sell me the Golden Gate bridge next?”

“Don’t be an idiot, from what Grant told me of them, nothing can find them if they don’t want to be. But Paul was the victim of Henry Stoker. I trust Thomas told you about him? Did he tell you I was the one who helped everyone regain their memories? That’s how me and Paul know each other. I don’t remember a lot from our session after all this time, but if there had been anything about the Knives in his past, I’d have remembered it. Not to say that I don’t think Stoker would have just left him on the sidelines.”

“So he joined since then.”

“A biotech student, Shila. You know a lot more about them than I do. Tell me if Paul fits the mold of a Knife.”

“Then he’s from one of the other factions and he’s keeping it to himself!”

“I don’t do magic,” Paul said calmly.

“You do,” Donal states. “You might not know it, but you do. Otherwise, you’d have been able to take the staff from Nina.”

“But I’d know if I was, wouldn’t I?”

“Fuck!” Shila yelled. “You really don’t know?”

“I promise you, Shila. If I had been holding out on you for some reason, I’d tell you now. But how can I be magical and not know it?”

Donal looked at the pangolin, and her shoulders slumped. “There’s the rare case like me and Donal, but if you were a practitioner who was about to come into his power you’d, one, still have been able to take the staff from Nina and two, have a staff of your own. With the other factions, because gods are in charge, you’re dealing with their stupid whims so even if nearly all of them have rules as to how you join and you can’t have magic unless you join, one of them can just pick you and boom. You’re one of them.”

“They can do that?”

“They’re gods, of course. They can do that. Read your history. It’s full of people who have no business doing stuff, but still do because they were picked for the job by a god.”

“Is she serious?” he asked Donal, and the squirrel shrugged. “I don’t care enough about them to look into it.”

“Okay, but without me knowing what faction I’m with. I’m basically just a normal guy.”

“No,” Shila said through clenched teeth. “A normal guy would be able to pick up that staff and put an end to this fucking thing.” She pulled out her phone, muttering to herself.

“Okay, so I’m out of the running for being a staff holder. Doesn’t Denver have a medical university? We can find someone who’d be able to use it, right? How about a hospital, plenty of doctors there?”

“They’re going to be too busy with emergencies to have the time to listen to us,” Donal said. “And with an epidemic, I doubt the university will have anyone. Those with enough skills will be out there helping, those who don’t have the skills will…” he chuckled. “Probably still be out there helping.”

Paul nodded. For as much as he didn’t always think well of people as a whole, it took a certain personality to make it through the gruesome years of medical studies. And that tended to weed out those who ran at the first sign of trouble.

“How about you?” Paul asked. “Couldn’t you find the right candidate and take the staff to him?”

Donal shook his head. “I don’t find stuff, or people, Paul. I find what’s lost or hidden. I mean, I could make a talisman and maybe that would guide me to someone, but it would be no more reliable than any use of predictive magic. It’s the rare person who had a reliable precognitive ability.” He chuckled. “And even those aren’t immune to getting stuff wrong.”

“So were fu—”

“No, no, no, no.”

Paul was on his feet and took Shila by the shoulder. “What’s wrong?” her eyes were fixed on her phone, but Paul couldn’t see the screen for some reason.

She looked at him, eyes filled with fear. Did something on the screen and a voice came from her phone.

“No one knows how a carrier made it so deep outside the quarantine zone, John,” a man said, “but Castle Rock, Strasburg, as well as Fort Collins are now reporting cases of infection and rapid spread of the sickness. Just ten minutes ago, half a dozen of the National guards fell sick, and I’ve heard reports of the CDC locking their doors because doctors inside the labs have fallen sick too.”

“Are we looking at a case of viral samples being released into the population, Marcel?”

The reporter laughed bitterly. “How would I know? We’re dealing with chaos here, and there’s no one to give us answers, and the way things are going, there isn’t going to be anyone in charge to keep this from getting worse.” He trailed off.

“Marcel, are you there? What can you—”

“I have to go.”

“Marcel, you—”

“I have to call my wife.” The call disconnected.

“Well,” the announcer said, sounding put off. “We will get in contact with Marcel as soon as we can and provide you more information on this developing situation. Until then, let’s go to Johanne with the highlights to last night’s football game.”

“Is Nina doing this?” Paul asked. The glee in those eyes as she inflicted pain on him. He could imagine her lashing out like this. He should have realized it wasn’t empathy exhaustion, but just plain lack of it.

“There’s no fucking way that bitch had the kind of power needed to pull this off,” Shila snarled. “She’s just Chamber.”

“But she knows the sickness,” Donal said. “Probably better than the doctors and the Rhinoceros, since she was on the front line with Merlin.”

“Is there any way this is the natural progression of the sickness?” Paul asked Donal. “I mean, what if this wasn’t so much that viral staff pushing the virus forward, but holding it back to a level that worked for them?”

“I don’t know,” Donal replied. “My interactions with the Chamber have been minimal, but Grant says they have a habit of taking on more than they can handle.”

“Okay, Look, I know some doctor or someone in the medical field would be ideal, but can’t we just hand this to someone out there and tell them what do to? I don’t think we have the time to get to a hospital or the university the way it’s now spreading.”

The squirrel shook his head. “The only thing we’d do is force someone to reach apotheosis for no reason, and that’s if the staff worked for them. What we need is to find someone close by with some kind of medical knowledge; that’s going to maximize the changed of them being able to contain this. But that’s not my area. It needs a search algorithm, and that’s…” Donal trailed off as he turned to look at Shila.

The pangolin had stepped away, but Paul had been too focused on coming up with a solution to notice what she was doing. She was mumbling something about viruses, anti-virals. There were medical-sounding words, but mixed with what Paul was sure was programming of some sort, and as he watched, Shila’s hand moved away from her phone and it floated between them, light dancing between her and her moving fingers.

“Donal, what’s going on?”

The squirrel didn’t answer, watching her for a few seconds. When he spoke, his voice caught. “Shi—Shila, are you sure now is the time?”

She didn’t stop what she was doing, but Paul had the sense the question made her pause. When she spoke, there was none of the snarkiness Paul had come to expect from the pangolin.

“after you told me I had to care about what was going on. Are you telling me now’s when I have to stop? Yes, now is the time. Get the staves to Grant. He’ll know how to deal with them.” She looked like her focus was about to return to her phone. “Oh Donal, for fuck’s sake, eat something. You aren’t broken and living off the streets anymore.”

“Shila,” Paul called, but she didn’t respond. She was there, before him, but she also wasn’t. She was lost in what she was doing. The light between her hands moved around the phone now, making patterns he didn’t understand, except for the instinctive knowledge they weren’t something any phone was capable of producing.

When he reached for her, Donal caught his hand and shook his head.

The light spread from her phone to over her hands, becoming brighter while at the same time not. As if it was light and whatever the conceptual opposite of light might be, that wasn’t simply darkness. Within that light, he picked up details, other lights, and non-lights in small packets, moving almost too fast for him to make out, starting deep within the light and flying out, vanishing as it crossed the event horizon.

There was something, a flash of that mix of light and non-light, and while Paul blinked the aftereffect away, he heard a phone drop to the floor.

When he could see properly again, Shila wasn’t there. Where she’d stood, her tracksuit was pooled on the floor, with her phone partially visible, poking out from under the fabric, the screen slowly shutting down.