Page 29 of All Out of Flux
I had Max, my new friends, my new home in Dos Lunas. I was a finder out of necessity, because it was the job that matched my skill set. It wasn’t because I was in some career dead end — I had to make ends meet, pay for food and a roof over my head. I believed all these things, but didn’t speak on any of them. He was smart enough to know.
“But you know the risks,” he said. “This stuff we do, it’s all too easy to end up with a pissed-off client, or to find yourself up against a rival finder, maybe even a rival spider. Couldn’t tell you which was worse. It terrified me, you know? Thinking I’d lose the only family I had left to something like that. Retribution from a competitor, punitive action from someone in our circles, or someone beyond.”
He shook his head, running his fingers through his wild mane of hair.
“I worried for nothing. I killed my little brother all by myself.”
My fingers clenched. God, I couldn’t imagine the horror. I looked up at last, our eyes meeting for only a fraction of a second. But it was enough. We’d both lost the ones we’d loved. For all the terrible and deadly things Brendan Shum had done in Dos Lunas, I knew there was something inside him trying to make things right.
I was doing my best to be a decent person, yet doing my absolute worst at understanding my position in this bizarre,tangled web. Here I was, empathizing with the enemy. But was the Quartz Spider really the enemy?
“At first it was just to dabble. Isn’t that the fascinating thing about life in the arcane underground? There’s always something to learn. Something to discover. So I learned about chronomancy. I discovered the power of time magic. And I discovered why so many mages shunned its practice.”
My teeth bit into the inside of my cheeks, almost hard enough to draw blood. I had to say it. I couldn’t help myself.
“Those men in the parking lot — ”
Brendan’s fist struck the ground. The entire crystalline structure around us rang with faint vibrations, his anger reverberating throughout the dimension.
“I told you already,” he said, softly, slowly. “I had nothing to do with that.”
“So you mean someone out there could be copying you.” I spoke matter of factly, worried about another outburst. This was news to me. “Someone else is toying with time magic.”
He rubbed the heels of his palms against his eyeballs. “I don’t know. Why would anyone want to follow in my footsteps? And no. I didn’t instantly turn my brother into dust. It was — no. I’d rather not say.”
Brendan Shum rose from the floor unsteadily, almost struggling, like his body weighed heavy with the gravity of his sins. He paced toward me. I didn’t move, putting on a brave face. He went back down as before, squatting on his haunches so our eyes were almost level.
“You would have been the same age, you know,” he whispered. “You and my little brother.”
The sorrow in his eyes, these deep, lightless pits of despair. I couldn’t decide what I felt, or why I felt it. Sadness. Sympathy. Guilt. Why? But there it was at last, at least one small reason he’d never really meant to kill me. On some level, in some way,Brendan wanted to be caught, afraid of the secrets he’d unlocked in his studies. He wanted someone to stop him.
“And that’s why I kept on researching time magic, even knowing its dangers.” He parted his hands, gesturing at the great crystal around us. “What if there was a chance I could rewind time, just enough to bring him back?”
I licked my lips, sitting perfectly still, throat as dry as a desert. This was the sort of talk that got quickly hushed, back when I was growing up with the Alcantara clan — back when there was still an Alcantara clan to grow up with. Life and death, that was the cycle, the way of things.
Even as practitioners of the occult, thebruhasof my lineage understood their place in the cosmos perfectly well. We could harness the power of the supernatural realm, but in the end, on this Earth, in this universe? The natural world reigned supreme.
Magic afforded us the ability to bend those laws, to tug at the invisible strings of the world, nudge nature along. But even as a child, I understood. Push too hard, and the universe pushes back.
“The dead deserve their rest,” I told him, echoing my ancestors, sprinkling some of myself on top. “Even ghosts need their sleep.”
He clucked his tongue. “You’re smarter than that. This isn’t about ghosts. This is about reversing the flow of time. Correcting errors. My brother didn’t deserve to die. Neither did your mother.”
My hand curled into a fist. “You can’t use me for your guilt, Brendan. That’s not how this works.”
“You could help me,” he continued, ignoring my words. “We could work on this together. Wouldn’t you give anything to bring her back? Your mother?”
I pushed my hands against the floor — warm, solid as glass — then stood up. “I see where you’re going with this, and I thinkyou already know my answer. So I’ll just be going, if you’d be so kind as to show me the way out.”
“Why?” rasped a voice inside my head. “Why do you spurn power when it is offered to you so freely?”
I staggered, hands reaching for my scalp, fingernails digging through hair, into skin. “You don’t belong here,” I growled. “Get out, Tiamat. You weren’t invited.”
Brendan scanned the chamber, then stared harder into my face. “One of your dragons? The ones you forged pacts with.”
“One of them,” I said through gritted teeth, my mind a fracturing jumble. Dossiers and harvests. Spiders and information. He knew about the dragons, but what could he possibly do to help me? “Two of them inside me. This third one — she’s trying to break through. Trying to take over.”
It was something about this place between places. The barrier protecting my soul from her encroaching influence was more fragile here, the membrane thinner. Like crystal. Like glass.
