The Power (The Magnificent 12 4)

“You tell me,” José said. “I am watching a video of you, and you gave us words to say. And here I am.”

A slow smile formed on Mack’s lips. “You’re one of us?”

“I don’t know what I am.” José looked around. “Or where I am. Is this Brazil?”

“What? Why would you think . . . ? Never mind; it’s San Francisco.” He pointed down at the battle below. “That’s the Pale Queen’s army.”

“Those are, like, monsters or whatever,” the blond girl said. “This is not Banff.” She looked around some more. “This is, like, a bridge or whatever. Monica was just showing me this stupid video and—”

Just then two missiles went arcing overhead, broke the sound barrier loudly, and hit the leading edge of the monster army.

“You’re part of the Magnificent Twelve now,?

?? Mack said. “That’s Jarrah, Xiao, Dietmar, Sylvie, Charlie, Rodrigo, and Valin, and I’m Mack. And that’s Stefan.”

“Uh, right, so I’m going to call my mom, okay? Right.” The girl pulled out her phone and started to dial. “Oh great, straight to voice mail. Mom? It’s Hillary and I am, like, in San Francisco and they are having some kind of war or whatever and—”

Hillary was interrupted a second time, this time when the ground began to shake. It was the most severe quake yet. The bridge swayed extravagantly. Mack fell onto his back and, looking up, saw the vertical cables like ropes being yanked and released. The main cable, the one that was as thick as a subway tunnel, vibrated and swung just a little, but that little felt like a lot down on the road itself.

The quake went on for a long and frightening while. Both of the new Magnifica were yelling and praying. The more experienced Magnifica knew they were unlikely to be killed by a quake and much more likely to eventually be clubbed, stabbed, beheaded, disemboweled, or eaten by one of the Pale Queen’s minions or the queen herself.

The instant the quake settled down, Mack jumped to his feet and said, “Xiao, Jarrah, Valin: you three are strongest in Vargran; teach the new kids.”

“No one is teaching me—” Hillary began, but Stefan moved in close.

“Huh,” he said, meaning, “No time for nonsense.” He took the phone from her hand and tossed it over the side of the bridge.

In extreme emergencies it’s sometimes useful to have a bully.

“So, we are ten,” Mack said to Dietmar and Sylvie.

“But not yet twelve. Will ten be enough?”

Dietmar shook his head. “I believe the enlightened puissance has a logarithmic rather than linear progression. Like the Richter scale.”

That got him a pair of blank stares. So he explained.

“Two Magnifica are twice as powerful as one. But three may be six times as powerful as two. And four may be twelve times as powerful as one. The final two, or one, may increase our power a thousand times. Do you see?”

But seeing was about to become a problem. As so often happened in the San Francisco Bay Area, a wall of fog was advancing swiftly from the sea. It was like a great, gray fist aimed right at the Golden Gate.

It swallowed the volcano first, so that all that could be seen was a dull red glow.

It advanced up the causeway, disappearing the evil minions.

It reached the battlefront, obscuring good and evil alike and dampening and distorting the sounds of the fight.

It could totally have been just your average San Francisco fog. It could have, except for the fact that riding the fog like some kind of nightmare surfers were creatures, gigantic creatures, who seemed to have been formed of the very fog.

So, it was not exactly your average fog.

Mack pointed at this new abomination. “I think we better hope two more Magnifica show up, and fast.”

Twenty-three

Power is a funny thing. You think you want it. You think it’s great to be Spider-Man or the Flash or the Incredible Hulk or whatever. But power always has its drawbacks. Always.

In the case of the Magnificent Eight—wait, Ten—it was great to have the enlightened puissance that allowed them to use the magical Vargran language. But that meant they had to learn the Vargran language. And it meant they had to be careful in their use of enlightened puissance because that power had limits. It had to be used at just the right time, and only when necessary, because if they used it on one thing, they couldn’t use it on the next.