SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

The pressure on his left arm eased, as the magnetized mace wavered, torn between the pull of the magnet in his other hand and the huge hunk of iron Grace was moving toward it. The pull was easing, nearly neutral…

“There!”

Grace froze. Liam held his breath. Slowly, carefully, he let go of the maces, trying not to jostle their positions in the air. Then he stepped away. The two weapons hung, perfectly balanced between the attractive force of the iron shelves, the central stairway, and each other.

Liam let out a long, slow, breath. No one moved.

“Time?”

“Four seconds to sunset.”

Three. Two. One.

The Archives remained silent. No winds. No flying books.

Grace looked at Liam, impressed. “Field is holding. Nice work.” Then, she frowned. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“High-pitched sound. Like a fluorescent bulb that’s slightly off-cycle.”

Liam shook his head. “No, but my high frequencies aren’t great.”

“Too much time with your headphones on,” said Asanti.

Liam shrugged. “Probably.” Then a sound tickled at the edge of his hearing. “Wait. Is it kind of…?”

The high-pitched noise exploded in his head like someone was driving an ice pick through his eardrums. Liam gasped in pain. He heard Asanti shout. And Grace…

Grace, who could take a fist to the face without blinking, whom Liam had seen head-butt armored demons twice her size and not even bruise, crumpled to the floor, unconscious.

From the instant Menchú and Sal stepped into the courtyard at sunset, it was obvious that everyone at the Market knew what was going on. Not that Mr. Norse had been at all subtle with his threats the night before, but Menchú couldn’t help but notice how every whispered conversation paused as they passed and then resumed as soon as they were out of earshot. He wished that Asanti were there with them. Actually, he wished that Asanti were there instead of him. Menchú had learned over the years to take people as they came. His easy manner with all sorts was one of the reasons he had been recruited into Team Three. But the Market, with its casual magic use and even more casual classism, made his teeth crawl.

He did his best to shake off his annoyance. It wouldn’t help, and railing against the good fortune of people who did evil over those who did good was bush-league theology of the first order.

As if she could read his mind, Sal let out a sigh. “It’s not fair.”

“What isn’t?”

“We probably have the largest collection of magical books and artifacts in the world in the Archives.” She gestured to the crowd around them. “We could be sitting on something that could not only stop Mr. Norse, but also make his balls fall off the next time he even thinks about going after our people, but it doesn’t do us any good because we never use any of the artifacts we find.”

Quickly, Menchú drew Sal off to the side where they could speak without being disturbed. That kind of thinking had to be nipped in the bud. “We are fighting this, Sal,” he assured her, “and we are going to win. Liam, Grace, and Asanti are going to be fine.”

“You don’t know that. We can’t give Mr. Norse the book because he would use it to destroy the world, I get that. But look around us; this place is full of people who use magic every day. It doesn’t seem to be driving them insane.”

“You don’t know them very well yet.”

Sal shook her head. “I just don’t understand why you won’t even consider—”

“Because I know what happens when people try to use forces they don’t understand.”

Sal was clearly still in the mood to argue, and Menchú realized they would be at it all night if he didn’t give her something productive to do. “Why don’t you call and check in with the others? Let them know what’s going on and make sure that they’re still all right.”

“And what are you going to do?”

Menchú couldn’t stop the grimace. “Look for allies.”

Sal’s conversation with Liam had not gone well. A burst of static exploded from the phone the instant he picked up. She tried to tell him what had happened with Mr. Norse, but wasn’t sure that he could hear anything over the bad connection. From what she’d been able to tell over the interference, the situation in the Archives had only gotten worse, and there was still jack-all that she could do about it from goddamned Liechtenstein.

When Sal hung up, the techno-cultist who had been staring at her the night before was standing at her elbow. She jerked in surprise, and her phone went flying from her fingers.

The techno-cultist’s hand darted out, picked her falling phone out of the air, and handed it to her. All without ever once breaking eye contact. He worked his mouth for a moment, as though he had to remember how to talk. Finally, he said, “You’re Perry’s sister, aren’t you?”

Sal felt her heart lurch in her chest. She checked the courtyard. Menchú was nowhere to be seen. “Yes. Who are you?”

“You can call me Opus93.”

“How about I call you by your real name?”

He shrugged. “What makes Opus93 less real than the name I was born with?”

Because Opus93 is a stupid-ass name , Sal didn’t say. “What do your friends call you?”

“Opus93.”

Sigh. “What do you know about my brother, Opie?”

“Word is he got his hands on something real, but he brought it to his sister the cop. He goes nova, puts out a huge spew of phantom data, then goes dark. And now Cop Sister is a Bookburner, and no one’s heard from Perry since.”

“What are you implying?”

“Implications are imprecise. Facts are what’s needed.”

Sal didn’t know whether to roll her eyes or fight back tears. It was too much like talking to Perry when he got into one of his esoteric fugues.

“Fine. Are you offering facts? Or just fishing for them?”

“Information wants to be free, doesn’t come without a price. You want help with your little billionaire problem, you need to ask the Index.”

The Index. Even Sal could hear the capital letter. She looked around again for Menchú. Still no sign of him. She swallowed. “Tell me more.”

Either the small room the techno-cultists had reserved for their use during the Market was not normally part of the castle’s museum, or it had been lovingly restored to its original purpose of storing dirt. Though dirt wouldn’t have required the window the cultists were using to vent the portable generator they had brought. That was the only familiar piece of equipment in the room.

Through a shared childhood with Perry, Sal had become passably familiar with circuit boards, resistors, and the various shells that computers and their innards came in. Not that she could do anything with them, but at least she knew what they were supposed to look like.

These computers—and Sal used the term loosely—had probably started their lives as standard PCs. What had happened to them next…One laptop looked like it had been repurposed as a planter, the keyboard replaced with a bed of moss ringed by yellow flowers. Above, a screen glowed with life. As Sal watched, Opie brushed a hand over the moss, and the blinking cursor and command line vanished, replaced by scrolling code that flew by faster than her eyes could follow. Another half-open desktop was filled with boards where glowing crystals grew among the circuits, absorbing the machine into their structure. A screen on the opposite wall connected to a large aquarium, complete with a herd of tiny sea horses milling in the purple-hued water.

Opie caught her staring. “Biocomputer. Only working example in the world.” He walked over to the aquarium and pulled a keyboard off a nearby shelf. A few keystrokes later, the blank screen above the tank changed to display a video of a baby panda. “Panda cam in the Beijing Zoo. It’s closed circuit. Not publicly accessible.”