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Converting magical energy directly to kinetic energy with enough control to manipulate objects without crushing them required a level of finesse I could rarely achieve. I could blast through doors or crush anything from beer cans to cars with an exertion of pure force. On a smaller scale, I could even punch people with a fist-sized ball of kinetic energy, which came in handy, for example, when a guy in a huge pickup parked in a handicapped spot and needed to have a small-but-painful reminder of why that was bad form. Of course, I never did that in real life. I would never.
What I could not do was wrap up a person and drag them backward through an unlit, abandoned mall, using just enough force to hold them tight and not squeeze them into a two-dimensional object. And doing it without line-of-sight, too... that was a good trick. How is Birnbaum managing that? Sonar?
For being a crazy fuck, Dustin Birnbaum could do some magic. Too bad he would be dead soon. Bold thought for a floating wizard burrito.
Wrapped up like a baby in a blanket, I slid through a set of black floor-to-ceiling drapes and squinted in the suddenly bright light. The bands of force released me, and I staggered from the short drop to the floor. My ankle barked a complaint. I slumped to one knee, overacting the injury, blinked, then looked around.
The food court had been transformed. Row after row of bubbling glass tanks lined one wall, fed by hoses and linked to electronic boxes with glittering panels of indicators and digital readouts. Forms floated inside about half the tanks—nope, not forms. Bodies. Some were human, but some not quite. The cadavers in the tanks appeared to be disintegrating in a flesh-turning-to-liquid kind of way. Mysterious fluids gurgled through spaghettilike swarms of tubing and flowed into the tanks. Other tubes carried gunk away and into an abandoned Orange Julius shop. Where does it go after that? Down the drain and into the city water supply? Into a slushie machine? Bleh. And yuck.
Cabling ran across the floor, connecting the instruments to a stacked bank of black boxes, which I presumed were servers. Green diodes flickered on racked machines as they clicked and hummed in happy service. Another rack contained rows of batteries, all connected to heavier cabling, which was duct-taped to a support column and trailed up past the construction lights, disappearing at the atrium skylight. An electrical source, I supposed, potentially solar, that fed the batteries their diet of electricity.
Putting two and two together, adding psycho and carrying the pucker, I came up with dead human tissue being used to construct living monsters. I hitched my chin at the setup. “This is how you get Skynet.”
“Terminator reference. Nice.” Birnbaum’s disembodied voice came from the shadows beyond the far bank of portable light stands. “And no, this is not when I start monologuing and give you time to kill me.”
My amulet had recharged enough. I had one good shot of magic available. Problem was, I couldn’t get a fix on Birnbaum’s position. I would be firing blind.
I worked on my pitiful poor-me body language, kneeling on the sparkling tiles of the nutso Frankenstein’s laboratory—literally, no shit, Frankenstein. One of the floating bodies under construction resembled Boris Karloff in the original Big-F makeup. “Why am I here, then? Why not just snuff me and be done?”
“You’re a little more dangerous than the average subject.”
The human bodies in the tanks ranged from the very young to the very old, male and female, of all races and sizes—diversity in death. “Subjects? Way to euphemism, dipshit.”
He giggled like a teenage girl. “I have a different plan for you, Mr. Judge.”
“So is this the part where you try and convert me?”
“No. No, I’m not. This is way more fun. I’m sending you a long time away.” The voice’s location shifted from the abandoned Burger King to a Sako Japanese Cuisine restaurant. “Now, shut up. I have to concentrate.”
“That would not be in my bessttt inntttteerrrreeessst—”
The light shifted to bloody red. My heartbeat slowed. I felt the thump-thump as it wound down, like a playing card flapping in a slowing bicycle spoke. A drop of sweat from my forehead oozed through the air before plopping on the tile and squashing outward like gelatin. My body elongated into a piece of saltwater taffy, and my vision turned murky and wet. Then... silence.
Calico John Shivers disappeared. At least, the meat creature that was once him—me, us—expanded to exist but not live. There was no me. There was no self. There was only the universe.
I knew but did not think. I sensed everything.
A roach crawled, deep in the darkness along the baseboard of a fast-food restaurant, its musky scent overpowering at close range. Its insect feet clattered on the floor. Behind the wall, hundreds more writhed, shifted, and skittered. Along with them were rats and silverfish and termites and spiders beyond counting. Though I—we, him, her... pronouns had become meaningless—could count them, if that is what we desired, for we experienced them all.
Gnats drifted in the air, each a distinct, individual bug. We knew their shapes and markings as individuals. We could name them if we so chose.
We expanded again and knew the air, the floor, the walls, the water in the tanks, all as a sea of atoms, some densely packed, nearly rigid, and some loose and disorganized, bounding free and colliding, giving off heat and kinetic energy.
We saw the connection of everything. Matter, energy, and time were all interlocked, interdependent, though both of those words fell infinitely short of reality. Everything was the same, yet different. Inextricably bound. In constant flux. A perfect, balanced, self-correcting mechanism that defined the cosmos.
For the first time in a very, very long time, Calico John Shivers wondered about the existence of God. Any god. In this place, in the present, we had all the time in the universe to think about it. Is this God, this machine? Or did a sentient being create this from the unformed stuff of the universe? We pondered this question for... well... time had no meaning, so we didn’t know how long we pondered it.
I saw and understood how Dustin Birnbaum interacted with the machine, how he converted magical energy to bend time. He created bubbles, little snippets of mass and energy that could move in time. The bubble containing Calico John Shivers had all but separated from the time we knew. Only a thin tunnel remained, and that shrank visibly as we turned our attention to it. It resembled a balloon in a lava lamp, lifting away from the base, soon to break. I fought to regain my connection to my selves. Focus on I, not us. It felt confining, like squeezing a watermelon into a Mason jar and clamping on the lid.
I tapped magical energy—it was abundant and with no restrictions or limits—and reached out. My control, as always, lacked precision. Like a toddler reaching for a birthday cake, I grabbed the molten elasticity that was the Cottonwood Mall of Somewhere, Ohio, and pulled hard. Pulled hard.
I poured energy into the tunnel between my existence and where I once existed, reaching back, trying to drag our—no, my—bubble down—though “down” was a sense more than a direction of the place, time, and energy of my former existence. Birnbaum fought back. My grip on the present slipped. Like the child pulled back from an imaginary birthday cake, I was more determined than ever to have it. My willpower found Birnbaum’s and latched on. I pulled harder, dragging myself back toward my time and place. I pictured myself in a tug-of-war with Birnbaum, using magical energy instead of rope.
A chunk of Cottonwood Mall separated from time, and we—I—became a bubble riding on a bubble. I envisioned pulling myself, hand over hand, along the rope of energy connecting me to Birnbaum. I felt the younger Magical’s grip slipping. Felt his fear. Felt him diverting some energy to anchor himself to the ground.
That’s right, kid. I’m coming to end you.
Stop, you idiot! You don’t know what you’re doing.
One more mighty pull, and I would have had him. Control wasn’t my thing, but brute force, I could do. I gathered energy the way I would ordinarily draw breath, vacuuming all the power I could hold inside my Mason jar existence.
No! Don’t!
I freshened my grip and heaved.
Something snapped.
Light. Incandescent light surrounded me, like existence inside a nuclear explosion.
My consciousness shrank, collapsing into a marble inside my jar. “Shrank” hardly conveyed the speed with which I plummeted from knowing and sensing creation into the limited and dull shell of my own meat and bone and blood. I went from full screen to a dot, just like an old tube TV picture. And like an old TV, the dot winked out then faded to black.