Discord's Apple

She powered up her laptop.

Write anything. How long had it been since she’d done that? No scripts, no deadlines, no proposals for new projects to pay the rent.

Maybe she should try that novel.

Tracker’s story was still unfinished, still tickling her mind, not leaving room for new ideas. She picked up the thread again. Tracker, Jeeves, and Matchlock were traveling across Siberia in search of American spies to rescue. Jeeves had just guessed her secret—she was in love with their commander. Rather cliché, that, looking back on it. Evie could put a twist in it somehow. Then they were attacked. Which was a cop-out, really.

But she could explain it away. The Russians were suspicious of the Americans, had been following them, wanted to stop them, and hired mercenaries to make the attack look like the work of terrorists. Tracker was separated from Jeeves and Matchlock.

The Jeep swerved to avoid an incoming missile—the bastards had rocket launchers. Sheltered by the sparse foliage that dotted the edge of the tundra, she saw another one taking aim. She didn’t think about it. She jumped, handgun ready, rolled to a stop more expertly than she had any right to hope for, and fired.

She wasn’t a sniper. At this distance, with this much adrenaline in her system, she shouldn’t have hit him. But she did, and he slumped, his weapon falling. Jeeves, Matchlock, and the Jeep were safe.

Rising from her crouch, she looked ahead. The Jeep had swerved to a stop. A dozen soldiers carrying automatic rifles surrounded it. Jeeves and Matchlock held their hands up. Tracker caught her breath and flattened to the ground. She waited for the sound of gunfire that would tell her that her friends had been murdered where they stood. But the sound never came. Instead, the soldiers hauled them out of the Jeep. A thumping noise in the air signaled the arrival of a helicopter. The mercenaries loaded Jeeves and Matchlock into it, climbed in themselves, and flew away.

She didn’t have much cover here—a few tufts of scrub, a snowdrift. But they never looked for her.

In a way, writing prose was like relearning how to walk. She had to think about complete sentences. Describe instead of label. She didn’t have Bruce to draw the pictures for her. Like Tracker, she was alone.

She had a dilemma: Did she continue with the mission, or did she go after Jeeves and Matchlock? Her instincts told her it wasn’t really a dilemma. They could hold out for now. If the soldiers wanted them dead, they would have killed them immediately. She had no idea where the mercenaries were taking them. The helicopter had flown west, and Russia was a very big place.

The bunker at the edge of the defunct gulag, where the prisoner was being held, was ten miles away. She could reach it before nightfall if she managed a good pace. Never mind that she had only her gun and a short-range radio with her. The bunker would have food and water, and the equipment to contact Talon.

She could do this without Talon. If she ignored the pang in her belly the thought of him gave her. He’d tell her she was crazy, trying this on her own.

No, he wouldn’t, a voice inside her argued. He has faith in you.

She checked the body of the mercenary she’d shot, verified he was dead, and looted a pack of food rations and a canteen off him. The canteen held vodka. No good for survival—maybe she could use it to inure herself to a lingering death, if she became hopelessly lost or injured. She shook her head, chastising herself for such defeatist thinking. Maybe she could use the vodka as a bribe.

Then, loosening the collar of her coat and hardening her will, she set off at a jog across the wasteland.

Robin Goodfellow was matchless as a spy. But soon, Hera would need an army. She gathered the start of one in a bar outside town.

The bartender, his eyes a bit glazed, his movements meticulous, as if he wasn’t quite sure what he was doing, or someone else was guiding his motions, stood at the bar and finished pouring a glass of wine. He set the bottle aside, his face slack. The next day, he’d remember nothing, he’d be convinced that his bar stood empty all night, and know nothing about the four people gathered here. The place was frequented by bikers and truckers. Transients. She couldn’t have her people trooping in and out of her hotel room, so she gathered them here. They might have been holding an informal meeting of some innocent town club.

Smiling indulgently at the entranced bartender, she picked up the glass, took a sip, and went to the round table in the center of the room where the others waited for her, pretending to nurse their own drinks.

They were frustratingly young to her eyes. The oldest among them had only two thousand years behind him. The youngest, forty. One learned so little within the span of a natural life. Despite their youth, their inexperience, they were used to wielding power, and the world was not so rich in magic as it once was. These people would have to do.

She had drawn them here with a promise of more power than they could find or make in their individual spheres of influence. She had explained that through her, and only through her, they could combine their strength and reach for the divine. Because they were who they were, could do what they did, and knew something of power, however limited their understanding of it was, they believed her, and they answered her call.

Now she had to prove that their faith in her was not misplaced.

“I want to own this town,” she said.

“What will that gain us?” The Curandera was older than she looked, a mother and healer, a bringer of rain and storms, a speaker of the languages of the earth and sky. Still in her first lifetime, she was the youngest of them, but because her knowledge of magic had been passed down to her, from mother to daughter, for a thousand years, she was powerful.

“Here lies a power that can dictate the fate of nations,” said the Marquis. He was in his third or fourth lifetime, a British nobleman from the last century steeped in the culture of empire and one of the few successful practitioners in the revival of what he called ceremonial magic. He could bind, curse, break, mold, and summon. If only Hera could teach him how to do all this without his props, tools, symbols, and erroneous scholarship. He looked uncomfortable in a suit and tie, his brown hair tied in a short tail at his neck, as if the modern clothing were a costume. He ought to be wearing a frock coat and powdered wig.

“What power?” said the Curandera.

“How much do you know about chemistry?” Hera asked. “What happens to an unstable compound, where the molecular bonds are weak, or require too much energy to maintain? It breaks down. A reaction occurs until the molecules form more stable compounds. Do you see what is happening in the world? The political situation is unstable. The artificial borders, the nations constructed out of blood and misguided diplomacy are falling apart. The world is an unstable compound, and it must break down if it is to form a more stable unit. I plan to guide that reaction. I have access to the catalyst that will ignite the final decomposition.”

“That’s ambitious. Thinking you can mold the world, and that it will be better because you’re involved?” said the Curandera. Her eyes shone, and Hera knew the thought that inspired the brightness: the idea of a female divinity remaking the world, of a matriarchy restored.

“Yes,” she said simply. “It certainly couldn’t be much worse.”

The Curandera smiled.