Chapter Two: Why Did It Have To Be Fire?

When the warehouse’s electric lights flickered back on, only one guard remained standing, though three of the men she’d downed were rising again. The one she’d pistol-whipped was out, and the one she’d rammed into the ceiling hadn’t moved since she’d dropped him. The remaining four spread out to surround her. One of them was limping badly. Another had blood covering half of his face. They were all blinking in the sudden light.

“I’ll do for you proper,” one of them told her, his voice harsh with anger. He wasn’t Bloody-Face or Limp, so she decided he could be Speaky. Not a great name, but there really didn’t seem to be anything notable about him. Some people were like that. Bland.

She almost wanted to sigh, until she reframed this as a teaching opportunity. “That is not how you threaten someone. A true threat leaves no doubt as to the outcome. For example, thanks to your dear friend Radolfo, I know exactly how much I can hurt you without killing you. If you run, I will catch you. If you fight, I shall break you. If you beg for mercy, I’ll ignore you. You may beg now if it will steady your nerves.”

“That’s a bird,” another one yelled after hearing her voice.

“I don’ care if the monster’s a girl monster,” the one who’d threatened her shouted. “I’m gonna do for her proper,” proving he had learned nothing from the advice she had so generously given out. He charged ahead of the others.

She grabbed him with her tentacles and tossed him across the entirety of the room, more aggressively than she had intended. His threats were incredibly boring; he needed new ones, better ones, or to stop threatening people, or to learn when instructed.

The man whose face was covered in blood had found a length of timber, which he swung like a cricket bat. It broke against her shoulders, and she cried out as she stumbled forward. A fist came at her head from behind, and she jerked aside as she sensed it touch the edge of her hood. The blow glanced off her skull. Her eyes blurred as she stamped down hard on a foot, and a knife became entangled in a tentacle. She had the entire hand wrapped, so she pulled it up until the gangster was on his tiptoes and thundered a punch into his solar plexus. He grunted, and so did she as a boot connected with her left thigh and sent her stumbling to her right.

Limp caught her, but her clothes were shifting even as his fingers touched them, and all he had was material that wrapped around his hands and bound them together.

“What are you?” Bloody-face demanded.

There was no good answer to that, so she didn’t bother to reply. Instead, two of her tentacles took her body weight and she rose before him, both legs kicking out to take Bloody-face on the torso. She reached her hand to the side and, with a surge of power, her sleeve swallowed Limp’s head like a python. He started to scream.

Speaky turned and ran. Maybe he was going for a gun. Maybe he just wanted out. Either way, there was nowhere to go. Her tentacles seised the last man and threw him into Speaky, and they went down together as she chased after them. Limp stumbled along behind her, pulling desperately at her sleeve with his hands, as her silk appeared to digest him. It wouldn’t hurt, but it was perhaps a little unsettling.

She caught up with the others as they stopped rolling and struggled to rise. Her foot took one in the groin, and as he doubled over and she kicked him in the head, a tentacle was already hauling Speaky into the air. She kept him there, dangling upside down, out of reach.

Limp’s screaming was becoming annoying, so she carefully covered his mouth and nose with silk. This was difficult, something she couldn’t do in a fight, because not paying attention could be deadly. Her knockout tentacles were useless now as the chloroform evaporated quickly, so this one had to be done the hard way.

A moment later her sleeve released him, and he dropped to the floor, unconscious.

She ignored Speaky as she pulled the other men close to her, then checked them over. All of them were alive, even the one that hadn’t moved since he’d been rammed into the ceiling. Most were out cold. She made sure Speaky was the only one conscious, and then searched the rest for identifying marks.

Actually, she didn’t need the marks. She brought Speaky closer. “I require your assistance for a moment,” she informed him calmly.

“What? You bitch!”

She dropped him, then caught him before he reached the floor and hauled him back up, so he hung upside down, a body height above the ground. Her gaze flicked around the warehouse as she spoke, ready for anything. There was none of that readiness in her tone, her voice bland, as if she were discussing… tram timetables or whatever it was people usually discussed. She was never quite sure. She’d tried tram timetables once, as one of the boring no one cares what anyone is saying to each other social conversations people thought she should have with them, and it hadn’t appeared to have been well received. She wasn’t certain if it was the topic, the location as she had been in a cemetery at the time, or the situation as they had been at a funeral and she had been hunting rabbits and an old woman had screamed when she killed one. She’d apologised even if she didn’t know why, she’d double-checked it wasn’t a pet, and when they just stared she had tried the tram timetable conversation she had devised.

“What the fuck is wrong wi’ you?” Speaky said, and she turned her attention back to the man she had dangling in mid-air, swaying slightly. “I’m dangling ‘ere. Put me down and I’ll…”

“Do for me proper?” she asked, pre-empting him. “You are already helpless, you don’t have to prove yourself pathetic, too. Now, the sooner we are finished, the sooner this can all be tidied away.”

“What… what do you need?” he asked after a moment, giving in. She had been certain he would; people generally did, if she just silently looked at them for long enough.

“You shall tell me the name of each man here, including your own.”

He didn’t answer right away, so she shook him like a rug full of dust. It was surprisingly as effective on people as it was on rugs. It made everything come out.

He delivered their names, and her sleeve typed the message onto her aether brace. It wasn’t long until the reply vibrated on her other wrist. Four with warrants outstanding. One was wanted in question with a murder. Two were innocent in the eyes of the law. One of those was her dangler, Speaky, unfortunately. That meant her hands were somewhat tied, and he had really annoyed her with his boring threats.

The police had a somewhat different definition of guilt and innocence from her; they did so like their little paperwork filled out, and for things to be proven in front of people who weren’t there. She had a less bureaucratic, more observational impression. He was a gangster, he’d no doubt risen up Sabini’s organisation with violence, he was guarding a suspicious warehouse, he had tried to hit her, and he was really boring. That last one didn’t make him guilty, but it didn’t help his prospects, either. The second last one could be argued that it was done defensively. No, it was the first one that mattered, he was a gangster, and besides it wasn’t like she was going to do anything truly terrible to someone who was perceived innocent by the law.

She pulled the other innocent man up beside Speaky, so she now had two danglers swaying behind her, and left the remaining four in a heap for the police to sort out.

Now it was time to find out what they were smuggling through this building. Radolfo had only known the location, not the contents. It was a large warehouse, large enough that it held six railway goods wagons within it. Each one was twenty feet long, the wooden walls secured with iron bands, the sliding doors bearing heavy padlocks.

She moved to the first one, two tentacles reaching out to break the padlock, and the dull metal snapped with a little effort. She shoved the bar aside and slid the door open.

The people inside flinched from the sudden light. They were dishevelled, dirty, standing in their own filth. The stink of them was almost overwhelming, physically pushing her back a step as it swept out like a cloud. A few slumped bodies told her not all of them had made it.

One of them turned towards her, and his face twisted into a snarl of hate. He leapt out of the container, and raised his fists, which burst into flame. She threw herself backwards, dropping the two unwanted gangsters she’d gathered as she tried to put distance between them. Why did it have to be fire?

Silk was useless against fire. It burned easily. “Fekas mi,” she muttered, as a gout of flame burst past her. That had been too close. She sent a tentacle out and another burst of flame engulfed it. Immediately, she severed the tentacle close to her body before the fire had a chance to spread. It fell to the ground like an unwanted sleeve and curled into ash as the flames consumed it.

“No, no, no,” she yelled, her hands up in what she hoped was a universal symbol of peace. “This is a rescue.”

He screamed something in a language that definitely wasn’t English. His words were difficult to make out through the anger and flames, but she thought they might be Spanish.

It was her first time ever meeting a Spaniard, and she couldn’t even hit him. When she had been young, she’d sometimes imagined herself smiting the Unholy Inquisitors, avenging her father and ending the Second Aetherium War, but the war was over now. Burny boy was a victim. Etiquette demanded she be nice, even if Spaniards were the reason… no, best not to think of her father when she was trying to rescue a Spanish person. “Este es un rescate,” she said, some of her annoyance leaking into her tone.

He stopped, his body language still aggressive, his hands still on fire, but no longer sending bursts of flame shooting towards her. “Rescate?” he asked.

“Rescate,” she replied. “Ayúdame a abrir los otros vagones.”

His hands fell by his side, and the flames went out. He stared at her a moment longer, then gave her a harsh nod. Now she had a chance to look him over, she could see he was young. A teenager. Sixteen, she knew without asking. She was sure he was sixteen.

Looking into that first container, she was sure they were all sixteen.

Just like her, just like everyone she knew with powers.

Which, so far, had just been her and Brick, and she knew she was letting her thoughts wander to distract herself from the horror in front of her and the fact that she had no idea what to do next. This had never come up in any training or role-playing or planning they had done.

Actually, that meant she knew exactly what to do. There really was only one option. Come, her sleeve typed quickly. Help. I don’t know what to do. Help.

Then she sighed, squared her shoulders, and chased after Speaky. He’d almost made it to the door.

There was a cracked open Junction Box eight hundred feet from the warehouse, and two women were beside it. The dull blue glow of their low-light aether lamp made the entire scene look cold, but Selene Maris was warm enough as she stood in a relaxed stance, her eyes constantly scanning every part of the street. She had a shotgun held in her crossed arms, and a worried hint to her almost expressionless face that most wouldn’t have picked up on.

Farnika noticed and couldn’t leave it alone. She was on her knees in front of the open Junction Box, though her attention was on an open folder that lay before her. It had recently been acquired from a police station and was filled with identification photographs and warrants. “She’ll be fine, miri luludi. You’ve trained her for everything.”

That was not an exaggeration. Selene Maris had trained her daughter for every possible apocalyptic scenario she could imagine, because she had no idea what form the end of the world would take, only that it would come.

Selene didn’t reply. Her attention was focused outward, her job to protect Farnika, whilst Farnika handled the more technical aspects. It was only practical with Selene being experi and Farnika being a praedita. Farnika’s sorcerer-sight might help with the technical side of things, especially if there were any runes involved, and Selene was better at nocturnal scouting. She was much less likely to be distracted by the sky, for a start. Movement by some street bins briefly attracted her attention, but it was just a fox looking for food, so her gaze moved on. Absently, she reached up to tug her scarf, the black wool itching the skin of her cheek.

“You believed this to be a flawed approach from the beginning, did you not? You thought her too young.”

“Stella is too young, She’s only sixteen. She should be giggling at o manuš kaj les dikhel and writing over-the-top, melodramatic nonsense in her diary.” Farnika had read her diary. It was a sad, empty little thing with two entries per month, every single one a description of a tin of peaches she had eaten.

Selene had read her secret diary. It went into more detail on the peaches and occasionally mentioned her training. Her sixteenth birthday had only the word puberty furiously circled twenty-four times.

There was a pause in the conversation as they both tried to imagine her giggling, and both instantly failed. She was just too earnest.

“She needs to learn, Farnika. If she doesn’t learn now, she will be beset by enemies her entire life,” Selene replied.

“You hear yourself, right?” the other woman asked. “Normal folk don’t have enemies.”

“Normal folk are dull. And dishonest,” Selene replied, waving a hand airily, all her focus on the street outside. “We all have enemies, they just pretend otherwise. They call them rivals, or irritations, or John. It’s always John, Farnika.”

Farnika laughed. “You and your Johns. You’re impossible, miri dil.”

Selene shrugged, her eyes returning to the deserted street outside. She was about to reply when she heard a series of clicks over their aetheric receiver. “Darkness,” Selene said.

Farnika frowned. “I swear, I’ll never fathom how you two decipher that infernal clicking at such speed, and without writing a blessed thing down.”

“It is merely a language like any other.”

Farnika snorted. “I speak five, Selene. I know this does not sound like any human one. You’ll be chatting to crickets next.” She reached into the junction box, then pushed a wooden wedge further in, temporarily disconnecting the wire she had labelled earlier. The warehouse would have no electricity now.

“Alright, done,” she said as she took a drink from her water flask and screwed the lid on tight before setting it back down. “We ought to have a little treat after this has all finished, yes? Take a week away from it all. A holiday.”

“Stella must train.”

“Then a training holiday.” Farnika waved a hand. “The girl speaks six languages; we could take her somewhere that uses one of them. Let her try her Arabic in the Persian Alliance. See the pyramids, ride a camel. I’m certain you’ll find a way to have Stella fight a lion in the desert or something. Or she could use Spanish in Unholy Spain and punch an Inquisitor. Somewhere with a proper beach.”

“We live in the most cosmopolitan city in the world,” Selene replied. “Stella has ample opportunity to practise her languages without dragging us all to the seaside. She can punch people here, too.”

“I think you missed my point about the nice beach.”

Selene laughed. “You just want to wear your swimming costume. You may do that at home, you know. I shouldn’t object.”

Farnika grinned, and was about to reply, when the clicking started again.

“Lights,” Selene informed her.

Farnika turned back to the junction box, pulling the wedge out so the electricity could return to the warehouse. “All right, that’s us finished,” she said. “We can move to a second vantage point, if you want.”

“We’ll remain for the moment,” Selene replied. “I do not want Stella believing herself untrusted to handle a few simple gangsters.”

“Some humbling might be good for her, you know.” Farnika said as she slid the folder into a bag and lifted a bow from where it had been resting in the shadows beside the Junction Box. “What if we went skiing? She could stand to improve, luludi.”

Selene considered that. “The French Alps?” she asked.

“Yes. Somewhere peaceful. A little cabin, a roaring fire…” she smiled as she glanced over at Selene, “and a hot spring, perhaps?”

“Back to swimsuits, are we?” Selene replied, never stopping her vigilance. She was like a stone, sometimes, the impossible woman.

“You don’t have to wear a swimsuit in a hot spring.”

“Oh? And what should I be expected to wear?” Selene asked

“Something modest, I’m sure. A smile would do.”

Before Selene could answer, a series of clicks came across the telegraph. “She actually has their names this time.” Selene started naming them, one by one, and Farnika wrote the names down, then pulled the police folder from the bag and looked through it. After a moment, she sent a reply saying there were four with warrants outstanding, one of whom was wanted in question for murder, and then identified the two men the police had no interest in.

When she finished, she blinked and looked over at Selene. “I’m sorry, I missed what you said.”

“Nothing of consequence. What have we?”

“Six guards, four with warrants; one wanted for questioning in a murder. A prostitute in Camden.”

Selene said nothing, but Farnika could see her shoulders tighten.

“Hey, she brought them all down. It’s alright. You trained her well, miri zorali. Stella knows precisely what she’s doing.”

More clicks came through, and Selene announced them immediately. “Come. Help. I don’t know what to do. Come.” She stared intently at Farnika the entire time she translated them.

Farnika’s face fell as the words went completely against her statement, but Selene didn’t say another thing. She was already sprinting towards the warehouse. With a sigh, Farnika put the folder away in a bag, pulled her scarf over her face, and started sprinting too.

This wasn’t what she had meant when she had said her tikni stardi needed humbling.

Previous Chapter: Chapter One

Next Chapter: Chapter Three

Author’s Note

Three chapters, three queerguides. I swear not every chapter has one. Today is, strangely, a context post about why I post craft posts. It’s meta on meta, which means it’s practically facebook, but good. Here it is.