“Time travel.”
There are some things you just have to say twice. And I’d only said it once, so I figured I’d try it again, just to see how it sounded.
“Time. Travel.”
The second time didn’t really help.
“Well, it’s not really time travel.” CG didn’t look like he liked what he was saying either. Not ‘not like’ in the sense of ‘dear god, unicorns smell bad’. More ‘not like’ in the sense of someone who rather liked things making sense, and was having to get used to the idea that they really didn’t.
“Oh. That’s alright then.”
“It’s just that – well, it’s like, there are things that happened. Like, in the past. And they’re true, and everyone remembers them, and they’ve always been true – but some people can do - well, things…” for a moment a look of almost fear flitted across CGs face. I made a mental note to find out what caused it. Knowing what scares people can be useful. CG took a deep breath. “Some people can do things so that the things that definitely happened, and have always been true, never happened at all, and nobody remembers them. Er, apart from the people who did the things to…” CGs brow furrowed. He was probably trying to keep track of his things. I made another mental note to check his things out some time – just to be helpful. “I mean, the people who changed the things that never happened remember them happening. And...” CG shrugged. “Oh, bugger it. It’s magic, right?”
Magic. That made it OK. Sort of. In a not-really-OK sort of way. “Right. Magic. Which is something perfectly normal, and reasonable, and follows a definite set of rules – even if we don’t really understand what they are, and it looks like cheating.”
“Magic isn’t cheating!” CG looked rather upset. “It’s an art!”
I couldn’t see why he was upset. Being good at cheating was pretty much everything the Organisation was about, so I didn’t see that calling magic cheating made things any worse. But that was artists for you. All mouth and ‘look at my big paint brush’. “Whatever, CG. So I drink the Unicorn Horn, and I very definitely don’t travel in time, but I go make sure Little Miss Spencer doesn’t buy a lottery ticket. So that somehow she’ll never have bought a ticket, and I won’t have to go back and fix it. Right?”
“Right. Well, no. not right. Otherwise, since you won’t have to go back and fix it, you won’t, and so she’ll buy the ticket and… well. That would be a Paradox. And the Universe gets really, really pissed off at Paradoxes. I mean pissed off in a sort of ‘bugger this, I’m picking up my marbles and going home and not existing’ sort of way. That’s why you get to remember, so you know, and the Universe knows, that it all makes sense.”
“Sense. Riiiight.” I shrugged. “Whatever. So why?”
“Why what?”
“Why what what?”
“Why bother? So some stupid bitch won the lottery? Why do we care?”
That’s when he told me. And if I told you, I might sort of have to kill you – so it might be a good idea to check behind the curtains when you get home. Or are you there already? Don’t worry. It’s not too late.
Well. Probably not.
See, there’s a thing about Lotteries. Pretty much everywhere has them, and pretty much everyone knows some story about someone who won a ton of money on one. But you know what?
Pretty much nobody actually ever met anyone who did.
Oh, sure. Once or twice, maybe. Or your aunt’s kid’s friend’s baby-sitter’s uncle once won a hundred bucks. But the Big One?
Right.
And there’s a reason for that. See, people like the People I worked for now – we spend a ton of cash. And, or so CG told me, there’s only so much you can get away with using magic to transmute lead into gold, or junk bonds into stock market fireballs, without starting to look suspicious. So one day some genius came up with the idea. The Lottery idea. And now we need a lot fewer votes in secret committees for black budgets. Because every week a whole load of folks give us all the cash we need.
No. Not the ‘charitable donations’ bit. Don’t worry. The hospitals and the old folks and the kiddie play parks get that. Well, after we’ve taken our ‘collector’s fee’. No. The Big Ones. Because that’s what Lotteries are all about. Sure, we put some low-grade operative up on TV to pretend to collect. But next time you’re buying a ticket? Buy two. It’s your patriotic duty – plus it means I might not have to kill you just yet. And while we don’t put it in the ads you see on TV, every one of those tickets helps us do – well. Pretty much anything we want. Which is just how we want it. And that was why I had to drink the result of really bad Unicorn personal hygiene. Because someone had screwed up. They’d screwed up, and Little Miss Spencer had got a whole load of money that really should have gone towards getting high ranking foreign politicians killed accidentally-on-purpose. Of course we do domestic ones too. But those aren’t tax deductible. Not that we pay any taxes. Mom told me the IRS sent some accountants to see us once, to collect. The IRS is still looking for them. They won’t find them. See, people who tell you the pen is mightier than the sword never met the Organisation’s Accountancy section. They say there’s nothing like an AK47 to fix an unbalanced balance sheet. Or a too-curious auditor…
Anyway. It was my new job to make sure Little Miss S didn’t win. Or rather – it was my job to make sure I didn’t have to do my job at all, because she’d never won in the first place. And, apparently, to do it without the universe getting so pissed off with me none of us ever existed. And, if that wasn’t more than enough of a pain in the ass, according to CG Mom wanted it done loud and invisible. Which is Trade Talk for ‘something big enough that the right people know it happened, but slick enough that nobody who isn’t supposed to knows who the target was’. But even with my flaky memory, Mom’s homework sessions hadn’t been wasted. I had an idea. So I checked the load on my Glock and grabbed the bottle in CG’s hand.
He didn’t let go. “Hey! Not so fast! First, you get your homework.”
“More homework? Who do you think you are? Mom?”
“Hell, no.” Now CG looked really scared. “No. But the orders are hers. Anyway – how do you think you’re going to get where you have to go?”
“Isn’t that what magic’s for?”
CG sighed. “Yes. And no. You have to tell it where to take you.”
“And how do I do that? I’m no magician.”
“Sorceress.”
“What?”
“Sorceress. We don’t call ourselves magicians. That’s for idiots with top hats and disappearing bunny rabbits. No, you don’t know how. Nobody does.”
“So how…?”
“Oh. Right. Well, you’re trying to find someone. So we use something called the First Law of Contagion. Which means getting as close to your target as getting can get, without actually spooking them. But don’t worry. We have people for that. If you ever want the note Napoleon wrote to the Comte de Montholon asking if he could borrow the Comte’s wife, just before arsenic mysteriously appeared in his food (or didn’t – we make damn sure nobody believes a word of it), we’ve got it. Bloody man was in real danger of creating a united Europe. We couldn’t let that happen. We figure we hit him. Or we figure we will one day. One of those, anyway. So we grabbed the note. We grab lots of notes. And things. Anything we might need one day to lock on to a target.”
That’s when he gave it to me. The file. Not the one Mom had given me. The other file Because apparently a large part of my job was going to be reading rather sickly hand-written letters to prospective boyfriends who didn’t give a damn, and sniffing used and unwashed items of… well. Let’s just call it clothing.
I bet you never thought being a member of a Secret Organisation was this glamourous. Guess what. It isn’t.
Washington D.C. - 350 And Down
“So memories are souls.”
“DAMN, JA - I mean, damn, Jack. You’re getting better. It only took me three tries this time before you got it.”
The man in the leather duster raised an eyebrow. “This time?”
“Never mind, Jack.” The old man looked nervously at the bullet hole still oozing ichor. “That’s not important right now. But yes. What folk call memories? That’s what they are. Little bits of soul, scraped off and left behind. And you, you’ve got a thing for souls, Jack.”
“Oh I don’t know. I’ve always been more of a jazz man.” Jack smiled at an old memory. Or maybe, he thought, an old soul.
“Old soul is right, Jack. A lot older than…”
“That’s interesting.” Jack’s gun was back in his hand. “Not even P can read me. Well. Blondie could. You blond, old man?”
The sound of Jack’s gun was loud. The old man’s sigh was somehow louder. “Jack. We already did that bit, remember? Now pay attention.”
Jack’s finger tightened on the trigger. “Girl. As in, one I can’t see.”
The old man waved a finger. The shocked look on his face suggested something should have happened. He waved his finger again. When the thing that hadn’t happened stubbornly carried on not happening, he looked even less happy. “You know, by all the Laws of Magic your gun’s supposed to be a petunia right now. I swear Heffy gets too carried away for my own good sometimes. Never mind. So yes. Memories are souls. Or bits of souls. And the thing with souls is - well. You ever been sailing, Jack? No. Of course you haven’t.” The old man looked nervously at the shadow forming on the wall. “I mean, not yet.” The shadow got larger, somehow more solid. “I mean - oh, bugger it. So if you did…” The shadow grew. “NOT THAT YOU HAVE, I MEAN,” The old man winked at Jack, carefully ignoring the shadow, “YOU’D USE - I mean, you’d use a compass, right?”
The explosion from Jack’s grenade threw the old man off his feet. The wall where Jack had thrown the grenade didn’t come through anywhere near as well. For a moment the shadow hung in the empty air. Then it was gone, just like the wall. Jack raised an eyebrow.
The old man got back to his feet. “BLOODY HELL, JA…” The look on the old man’s face was fighting a war between fury and terror. One look at Jack, and both apparently decided being somewhere else was a good idea. The old man gulped. It didn’t look like he was used to it, and he must have needed the practice – he did it again. “Yes. Right. Of course, since I’m, like, a god and everything, you do know that’s impossible don’t you Jack?”
“What’s impossible? You mean the thing I just did?” Jack’s voice was flat.
“Yes, I mean…” The old man patted his head. The flames sputtered under his hand. “Jack! My hair!”
If Jack had been someone else, he might have grinned. But he wasn’t, so he didn’t. “What hair?”
“Exactly, Jack! I mean…” The old man looked down at Jack’s other hand. The one holding a new grenade. “I’m really going to have to have words with…” Jack’s thumb twitched on the grenade pin. “Ah. Right. Yes. Where was I?”
“Compasses.” Jack’s hand was empty. The old man had a feeling it might not stay that way.
“Compasses. Compasses? Oh. Right. Yes. So these bits of soul, you can feel them. Like a compass, Jack. And when you feel them, you can find them – and go to them. Because they pull you, do you see? Compasses – well, they’re just magnets, Jack. Getting pulled by a bigger magnet, right? And ordinary people feel them too, Jack. The memories. The bits of soul. They’ll go someplace and they’ll feel like they’ve been there before. And maybe they have. Or some part of their soul did when it was… Dammit, Jack! What do they teach you people in schools these days?” The old man sighed. “Anyway. They’ll maybe feel some event that took place long ago, and it was like they were there, and they’ll suddenly cry, or laugh. But people, well, they’re heavy, Jack. So the little bits of soul they’re feeling can’t move them back to when the bit was scraped off. And why are they heavy, Jack? Heavy like you’re not heavy?”
Jack’s nodded. “Because…” his hand drifted towards a lump in his leather “… because they’ve got soul. Real souls. Souls of their own.”
“Oh, your soul’s real, Jack. It’s just got some grow…” A shadow started to grow on a wall that was busy being a pile of rubble, so couldn’t possibly hold a shadow. The shadow didn’t seem to care, and grew anyway. The old man grinned nervously. “Er, right. We don’t need to worry about that right now. Anyway - that’s what you sense, Jack. Souls. That’s why nobody can ever sneak up on you.”
“Blondie did.” Jack’s brow furrowed a moment.
“Yes. But it wasn’t because she didn’t have a soul, Jack. Hers just was so damn big you couldn’t see where it wasn’t. It was everywhere. But that’s the Unborn for you.”
“So the girl with the gun. If I didn’t see her, or the kid, then…”
“Then if they weren’t dragons – and they weren’t – they didn’t have them, Jack. They didn’t have souls.”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t know from souls. Bullets in the head – those I know. But like the man said, I figure it’s better to give than to receive. So just tell me how to find her, and I’ll take care of it.”
“Yes, Jack. That’s what you said last time.” The old man’s voice was flat.
“Last time? You said that before, old man. Thing is, I don’t remember ever being here any ‘last time’.” The grenade in Jack’s hand would probably have looked better with a pin in it. The pin lying on the ground said the grenade wasn’t going to win any beauty contests.
“Yes, Jack. Last time. Lots of last times. Times we had this conversation. TIMES I KILLED YOU, JACK. KILLED YOU SO YOU WOULDN’T DO SOMETHING I’D REGRET.” If a sigh could be sighed in capitals, the old man sighed one. Jack’s grenade hung where he’d thrown it, but not where he’d intended it to arrive – it was hovering in the air halfway between his hand and the old man. It was also steadfastly refusing to explode. For some reason, the air smelled faintly of petunias. “I don’t want to kill you, Jack. I keep hoping I’ll remem…” The shadow not hanging on the wall Jack had blown to pieces got larger – got blacker.
The shadow of an arm reached out, and a very not-shadowy iron rod smacked down on the old man’s head. He fell to the floor. The old woman with the iron bar in her fist sighed. “You know what a trans-temporal quantum irregularity is, Jack? No. Damned if I do, either. But much as I hate to admit it, the old bugger’s right. You can’t kill her, Jack. And you’re right too. Someone has to, if you’re going to stay alive. And you have to stay alive, Jack. You really do. So I’m going to tell you a story.” Outside the room, the Universe imploded. The old woman sighed again. “And then you’re going to forget I told you a damn thing, Jackie boy.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “And who’s going to make me, old woman?
The old woman grinned. “Why, pretty much the only person who could – and make it stick. You are, Jack. You are.” A chair appeared behind Jack. “NOW SIT YOUR BLOODY ARSE DOWN. Once upon a time….”
* * *
The old woman sighed. She was good at it. “So that’s how it was. Well, or will be. Or won’t be… or maybe both. Unless…”
“Right.” Jack’s voice was bleak, his eyes cold. “Unless it gets fixed. Which it can’t. Because it’s impossible to fix it.”
“That’s about the size of it, Jack.” The old woman waited.
Jack smiled. The smile was colder than his eyes. “I guess I’d better get on with it, then. I’d just better not…” Jack’s head nodded to what was currently busy not being outside the room “… know why. So you’d better make sure…”
The sound of the old woman’s iron rod smacking over Jack’s head echoed through the room. The old woman crouched down, her hand running over the lump in the unconscious Jack’s leather. A faint mist seeped from her hand into the jacket. The old woman looked at the man on the floor, and smiled – a very, very old smile. Then she bent over, and kissed Jack’s forehead. She winked. “Towonda, Jack. Towonda!”
Where the old woman had been was a shadow – and where the shadow had been, was nothing.
Outside the room, the Universe heaved a sigh of relief, and exploded. By an amazing coincidence, everything ended up exactly where it had been before. Which probably wasn’t a coincidence at all. Inside the room, Jack got up from the floor. One hand rubbed the bruise on his head – the other brushed the lump in his jacket. For some reason, he smiled – a warm smile his face wasn’t used to wearing. Then it was gone. “P?” He looked over to where Prowess had tentacles tight round the throats of two Angels who were busy trying to remember they didn’t actually have to breathe. “Let ‘em go. We’ve got work to do.”
Prowess relaxed the teeth in her tentacles. “Work, Jack? What work?”
Jack shrugged. “Damned if I know, P.”
“So what…?”
“Don’t know that either.”
“Then why…. Er…?”
Jack’s hand brushed a lump in his jacket. He smiled. “Why? I guess… why not?” He paused. “Damn. You think that girl’s a cheer-leader?”
“Cheer-leader, Jack? What’s that got to do with anything?
Jack shrugged. “Oh, nothing I guess.” He paused again. “Save the not-a-cheer-leader, save the…” He shrugged. “No – never catch on. Let’s go, P.”