Rollerskater: Substance

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This instalment contains some scenes of graphic violence.


He dreamed.

Eternal darkness.

And there was light—

Then – there was a then – and a now – and a thenceforth

A time-lapse.

    Spiralling clouds of stuff stuff so much stuff collapsing stuff glowing stuff stuff gaining SUBSTANCE stuff  FORMING and out of the darkness emerging beacons beacons beacons of light coming into being and then dying ageless billions of years passing in a second don’t blink and don’t look down whatever you do you don’t want to miss this

    And he saw

A star, being born

Expanding, expanding – exploding – 

    and from its rubble…another star.

Expanding, expanding – collapsing – 

    and now, a yellowish star…smaller…and spinning around it, an accretion disc, impossibly large, stretching on far further than his eyes could see…

    Balls of dust rolling together in the gravity well, being torn apart, burned up and eaten by the hungry beast at the centre of it. Apocalypses unseen, unacknowledged, unrecorded.

    But some survivors.

    He counted eight of them.

Maybe nine.

    Count them, now. One, two, three. Look familiar?

    Yes, he felt he had seen this before, somewhere.

He was flying closer now to the third rock, its surface flickering with lightning storms, glowing with great fissures of boiling magma.

What is this place?

Could it be? It couldn’t be.

Moonless. It couldn’t be.

And he saw it – it was coming in fast – it was enormous.

Never saw it coming.

Another burning rock, screaming through space, hurtling towards the burning planet…

AND THERE WAS LIGHT

Instinctively he flinched, covered his face – magma now cooling into rock, searing past him, and he could feel the heat—

    The planet was wounded.

And he was descending, descending into those Hadean skies, black and endless and red, the infant sun bawling in that hideous firmament, descending onto the surface of that burning planet, through columns of magma, bolts of lightning, fire and smoke—

hell on earth

And there it was – in the middle of a boiling lake of fire and molten stone that had until quite recently been a proto-continent, jutting out of the wound, an enormous black mass of crystal. It stood, impervious to the heat, its gnarled shape curling and spiralling horribly out of the wound like tangled Morgellon fibres.

Order out of chaos.

A time-lapse.

The planet cooled…its surface pelted by comets and meteorites, scarring and etching their stories into the landscape in indecipherable glyphs…the great, arid plains were now filling with water – liquid water – and millions of years of history were disappearing into the depths…

In the sky above, from the debris and rubble left by that violent collision, there formed a small, grey rock. Its gravitational pull exerted its effect on the infant seas, drawing water into lakes and ponds…

And somewhere, in a small pond, something was squirming

He woke.

*

He sat up and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. The early morning light of spring was streaming in, and he could smell the fresh air coming in through the open window.

The dream faded immediately.

Some time had passed since his last conversation with the rollerskater, who had, amidst deadlines, fallen into the periphery of his priorities. His abilities had not manifested since, and he was beginning to suspect that the incident with the masked woman had, itself, been little more than a half-remembered dream. Or then again – perhaps he was telling himself that.

He opened the blind, through which the beams of light had been piercing, and looked out to the familiar sight of the adjacent block of flats and, below, the courtyard, which backed on to the car park. He could hear gulls calling, and the sound of water languidly passing by, quietly. His flats were built very close to the bank of a river, which had at one time been used for transport of imported goods, prior to the advent of the railways and, later, the motorways.

On autopilot, he padded into the bathroom, undressed and showered, and then brushed his teeth and got dressed, pulling on the Reeboks he’d been wearing since the loss of his Timberlands. He didn’t make time to eat breakfast, though he did pour himself a glass of water from a bottle he kept in the fridge, hurriedly drinking it as if trying to maintain some semblance of healthy living, then he left the flat. There was no time to waste.

He descended in the lift, which creaked and moaned and moved just slightly slower than the patience threshold of most human beings, and the doors opened on the ground floor, where he stepped out and briskly stepped through the entrance doors.

As he made his way across the courtyard to the steps, where he could cross a motor-bridge and be on the other side of the river, he opened his phone for the first time since last night. A single text message from an unidentified phone number.

meet me by the riverside. tomorrow morning.

He hadn’t replied. Hadn’t needed to – he knew at once who it was, and he didn’t have time to think about if this was another elaborate ruse. The woman in the evening gown had, of course, crossed his mind, but he also suspected that whoever was sending people after him would be unlikely to try the same tactics again.

He began walking down the public footpath that had been cleared along the riverside, watching  houseboats bobbing quaintly on this river. One got the sense that the river didn’t see much action these days.

He noted that the person who had texted him hadn’t actually specified a location other than “the riverside”, and had decided to walk along the riverside until they came upon each other or he was sent a request to double back.

The sunlight glinted off the murky brown water below.

He was struck for a moment by the idea that he could simply jump into the water; not for any reason, simply because it was there.

He heard the ringing of a bell behind him, juddered to a halt, and saw a man on a bicycle quickly on the approach. He stepped aside and the cyclist passed. His pulse had quickened. Shit. Maybe he really wasn’t over the events of the last few months…but what therapist in the land would believe him?

He continued to walk for maybe fifteen minutes. No sign of anyone. He looked up at the sky through the teashades – only a few contrails and some small, wispy cirri. No chance of rain. He continued to walk.

In the distance, he saw a young woman walking towards him. For a moment, he thought it might be her, but on closer inspection, she was entirely different. For a start, she wasn’t wearing rollerskates. She had long red hair, and she wore a wide-brimmed straw sun-hat and a pastel yellow sun-dress, which was decorated along the hem of the skirt with what he passingly thought resembled liquorice allsorts. Her eyes were framed by a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses. Slung on her shoulders was a  white handbag, and on her feet she wore a pair of wedge-heeled sandals, with a wide strip of PVC holding the shoe on to the top of the foot, and a thinner strip holding the toes in place. Her toenails – and her fingernails – were painted in an assortment of pastel colours.

The girl smiled at him. She was wearing bright red lipstick.

In a split second, he saw a flash of movement, and suddenly, her arms were out, and she was running towards him.

He found himself stumbling off the footpath backwards, looking at her, observing him with detached fascination. He was falling at an angle, and would land very hard on his neck. If he hit the riverbed, he would be killed

    A familiar flash.

He found himself standing by the riverside once more, and the girl in the yellow dress was walking towards him again, smiling.

The first words anyone had said to him all day passed through her lips.

“Very impressive, Socks,” she said.

He looked around him – the bewilderment that came with his abilities remained present as ever.

“Who are you?” he said, angrily.

The girl laughed. “A friend of a friend,” she said.

“…you know K-Os?”

“Yes, Socks,” the girl said, almost offended. “Whatever did you think I meant?”

“You just tried to kill me, so forgive me for assuming you meant…” Images of the masked woman flashed through his head. “…somebody else.”

The girl shrugged. “I know that your abilities don’t yet manifest voluntarily, so the only way for me to verify you had them was to put you in danger. And besides, I could have easily rescued you if you hadn’t done your little trick just now.”

“But I didn’t know that!”

“Yes, well, believe you me, Socks – I’m the least of your worries at the moment.”

Socks looked at the girl, then down at the ground.

“I never asked for this, you know.”

The girl’s smile faded in intensity, became more sympathetic.

“You’ll get used to it, eventually.”

“I wish things would go back to normal.”

The girl walked over and placed a hand on his shoulder. Déjà vu again.

“That’s the thing, Socks. There is no normal. There never was.”

Socks nodded. “So, what now?”

“Now we carry on walking by the riverside. You’ve been to the village before, I assume.”

“Yes, at the end of Fresher’s Week we went to the pub for drinks and dinner.”

The girl smiled. “Ah, yes. And there’s a sweet-shop there.”

“You like sweets,” Socks observed, looking at the liquorice-allsort decorations on her dress.

“In a manner of speaking,” the girl said, with a wink.

*

The riverside village was around forty minutes’ walk from Socks’ block of flats. It appeared to be in the middle of nowhere, bordered by a river and on all other sides by miles of rolling fields. In actual fact, the village had a rail-link to central London, but the village – quaint and Victorian, a former port – was about as far from central London as was conceivable. It was the sort of place Socks thought he might like to retire, one day, if he lived that long and could afford it, which was looking less likely all the time.

They were on the boundaries of the village now, where the river had been artificially redirected, its banks not a slope but a sharp, ten-foot drop into murky brown. Railings had been put up to prevent people from falling, and they stood next to them.

The girl in the yellow dress – who had still not divulged her name – reached into her handbag to pull out a small, vintage camera. She took the Wayfarers off, revealing her irides to be a deep amber yellow, not unlike honey or golden syrup, Socks thought, and peered through the viewfinder, snapping photographs of some of the vistas. She seemed particularly interested in an old, red-brick, Victorian water-tower, which loomed large from another village across the river, which was only accessible by land from the bridge near Socks’s block of flats – which happened to be the first crossing over the river before the sea.

“I do like this place,” the girl said. “It’s very pretty.”

“What camera is that?” Socks asked, fascinated by the old-looking thing.

“A Zenit 35mm SLR,” the girl said, peering through the viewfinder again. “Old Soviet camera. Bought it at a flea-market, back in the old country.”

“You’re Russian?”

Ukrainian,” the girl said, very particularly. “On my father’s side.”

“Sorry.”

“I don’t blame you. You’re not the only one that makes that mistake.”

She cleared her throat and snapped another picture.

“I’ve lived in England for much of my life,” the girl said. “Which is why you can’t detect the accent.”

“I see,” said Socks. “So, why have you brought me here?”

The girl put her camera down and looked at him. “K-Os asked me to investigate you.”

“Right,” Socks said. “But why, exactly? So I have powers. She does, too.”

“Yes,” the girl said, uneasily. “But your powers are…different to most.”

“How so?”

“She tells me you…” Her voice dropped low. “…broke an umbric blade. In your bare hand.”

“That’s true, I did,” Socks said. “It killed the woman it belonged to.”

The girl nodded. “It would do that,” she said. “But that’s the thing…you shouldn’t have been able to break the blade.”

Socks sighed, leaning on the railings and looking out at the river. He clasped his hands together.

“So people keep telling me. But I have no idea what this ‘umbric’ stuff even is. The shadow guy mentioned it. He had an umbric blade, too. He cut my hand with it.”

“The same hand you used to break the blade,” the girl observed.

Socks unclasped his hands and looked down at his left hand, a scar running across the palm where he had caught Tanizaki’s blade.

“So what is umbric?” Socks asked, peering over his teashades and looking the girl directly in the eyes. She seemed to recede into herself, took the glasses off from atop her hat and covered her eyes up, as if trying to avoid his gaze.

“Fancy a drink?” she said, sauntering up the riverside, towards the village. “I’ll buy.”

Socks nodded. He was beginning to worry that the girl in the yellow dress was not all she seemed.

Fool me once.

*

They visited a pub a short walk over a gravelled path. It sat opposite a wall, set into which was a postbox that had clearly not been touched, other than the occasional new coat of paint, since the 19th century. This town was old. A church in a churchyard was a short distance from the pub, and it chimed out the familiar Westminster Quarters, followed by twelve consecutive strikes.

“Noon already,” Socks said, looking out of the window at the narrow road outside. He sipped at a small glass of shandy, which he had purchased mainly so he didn’t have to feel bad about drinking a pint of IPA before twelve o’clock. His companion, however, had no such concern, and had ordered strawberry daiquiri, which this pub, by now used to the less refined tastebuds of the garden-variety student, offered on a discreet menu by the bar.

“Yes,” the girl said. “I think we should get lunch.”

“Here?”

“We could do. There’s a few cafés around town.”

Socks nodded. “So, why have you brought me here?” he asked, directly.

The girl smiled a little. “K-Os isn’t exactly great at communication, as I’m sure you’re aware. She asked me to speak to you. Apparently I have the human touch.”

“She hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with information.”

“She never has been. She’s a mystery, that girl. Pretty thing, though,” the girl said, running a finger round the rim of her cocktail glass. “A shame, really. She has very little time for romance.” She rested her chin on her hand.

Socks cleared his throat, as if to break her reverie.

She snapped out of it. “Yes, so, I suppose she wants me to help you. More specifically, I think she wants me to help you stay out of trouble.”

“Like a minder?”

“Like a babysitter,” the girl said, half-joking.

Socks nodded, half in agreement, despite himself.

The girl sighed. “I suppose I should explain a few things to you. This must all be very new and confusing to you.”

“That would be nice,” Socks said.

The girl began to explain, and as she did so, Socks found himself distracted. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a black saloon car pull up. It had boxy, unpretentious bodywork that even in the noon sun did not appear to shine. The windows were tinted too black to see inside, and even the wheel trim was black. The car did not appear to have any identifying marks for the manufacturer, nor did it have a registration plate.

The door opened, and out stepped a man, almost impossibly tall and lean, wearing a black suit, with matching shirt and tie, quite similar to what Tanizaki had been wearing on that night in December. His skin was corpse-pale, as though whatever force that had created him had deliberately contrasted his skin with the suit he wore.

He straightened his tie and stepped calmly towards the pub. Socks watched as he walked towards the pub’s front door, placing a bony hand against it. The girl’s explanations now faded into background noise, muffled.

The Man in Black walked up to the bar. The barman looked up at him, seeming somewhat intimidated.

“How can I help you, sir?” he said.

“Good afternoon,” the Man in Black said, checking his watch as though to be sure it was, in fact, afternoon. “Could I trouble you for a glass of tap water?”

The barman raised an eyebrow. “Right away, sir,” he said.

The man in black turned, robotically, as though scanning the pub with camera eyes. He looked over at Socks’s table. He smiled.

The barman returned with the glass of water. “Here you are, sir,” he said.

The Man in Black turned back to him and nodded in appreciation. “Many thanks,” he said, looking over at Socks’s table. He drank the full glass in one gulp.

Without blinking, he reached into his jacket, calmly pulled out a pistol, and shot the barman once through the chest, without breaking eye contact with Socks, who, quite naturally, leapt out of his seat and backed against the wall. The Man in Black calmly tossed the glass over his shoulder, letting it smash on the ground. The girl in the sundress was confused.

The Man in Black walked towards them calmly, pointing the gun at them.

“Put your hands up,” he said, and they did so. The girl held the cocktail glass in her hand.

“Hello, Mister Oxford,” the Man in Black said, pointing the gun at Socks. “I understand you are responsible for the deaths of not one, but two of our agents. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” Socks said, after a short pause.

“Hmm,” the Man in Black said, smiling. He had a very slight accent that Socks couldn’t place. “Yes, well, I am afraid that I have been sent here with the task of killing you in retribution for the unfortunate killings of Mister Tanizaki and Miss Chroma. We were unaware, of course, that you had acquired certain abilities after your altercation with Mister Tanizaki. Not to worry. We shall soon rectify that.”

The Man in Black turned to the girl, still holding the glass. “My dear, would you mind terribly putting down that glass?”

“I paid for this,” the girl said.

“What are you doing?” Socks said, a little anxiously.

“My dear,” the Man in Black said, sternly, “I have no quarrel with you. I am giving you the opportunity to leave. Even if your abilities are derived from…” He sneered. “The Product.”

“Take it from me,” the girl said. “That way, you know I’m not going to try anything.”

Socks’s eyes flicked over at her.

“A salient point, and well made,” the Man in Black said, stepping over, keeping the gun trained on Socks. He gently took the glass by the stem with his left hand. “Strawberry daiquiri,” he said. “A favourite of mine. Would you mind?”

“Be my guest,” the girl said.

The Man in Black nodded, raising the glass. “To a job well done,” he said, raising the glass to his lips.

It came as something of a surprise to him when the glass spontaneously exploded in his face, lacerating his mouth and spraying microshards of glass into his eyes. He screamed, clutching his bloody face.

“Socks, run!” the girl said, taking him by the hand.

They quickly escaped through the front door of the pub and ran over by the Man in Black’s car.

Socks saw something out of the corner of his eye – the headlights were both cracked, and blood had begun to weep from the cracks.

“Look,” he said, pointing. The girl turned and looked at the car.

“Car’s made of umbric,” she said. “That’s not good.”

“Why?”

“It means we didn’t kill him, we just slowed him down.”

She ran, making a beeline for the churchyard, and Socks followed, struggled to keep up, surprised she could run so fast in those shoes.

“Who was that guy?” he asked.

“Sounded like a friend of yours,” the girl said, sardonically.

“I’ve never seen that man before in my life.”

“No, but I reckon he has. Sounds to me like he has quite the dossier on you and your doings. Recon scouts, probably,” the girl said, breezily.

“But what the hell do they have against me and K-Os in the first place?”

They stopped in the churchyard. The girl looked at him, half in shock and half in amusement.

“My word, K-Os really has been keeping you in the dark, hasn’t she?” the girl said.

“Yeah, since the incident with that shadow guy she’s been keeping her distance.”

The girl nodded. “Trying to protect you, I suppose. I guess in her heart she was hoping you wouldn’t…erm…”

“Get weird powers?”

The girl nodded again. “Mhm.”

“Well, it’s a bit late for that,” Socks said, indignantly. “And still she won’t talk to me. She sends you to meet with me instead. No offence.”

“None taken. I don’t think K-Os really does people skills. I think she probably traded those for the whole turning into a puddle thing.”

“Well, she’d better learn some,” Socks said. “Because I want some damn answers.”

“Like what?”

“Like what? Like what? Like why in God’s name people want her dead. Like why in God’s name people want me dead. Like why in God’s name any of this shit is happening! I don’t even know what ‘umbric’ is, for fuck’s sake, and now a guy’s trying to shoot me in a pub!”

The girl put a hand on his shoulder. “Look at me,” she said, and Socks did so. “We’re going to get through this, yeah? You and me. And when we do, I’ll explain everything. To the best of my knowledge, anyway.”

Socks smiled a little. “Let’s survive first, yeah?”

“Good idea,” the girl said. “Now we just need to—”

There was a tremendous crash as a near-indestructible object crashed at high speed through brickwork, spraying bricks across the churchyard.

Bliat,” the girl said.

The Man in Black rolled the window down and leaned out. His face had completely healed.

“A valiant attempt,” he said. “But I’m afraid the time for fun and games is quite over. Mister Oxford, if you will not simply lie down and die like a dog, then I’m afraid I will have to use maximum force.”

Socks formed a defensive stance, clenching his fists.

“Then fucking do it,” he said.

“As you wish,” the Man in Black said. The car’s bonnet opened up and a machine gun that appeared to be suited to destroying armoured personnel carriers folded out of the engine compartment. What surprised Socks was that it didn’t sound at all like a machine gun from the movies. Instead, it went BUNT BUNT BUNT BUNT BUNT BUNT BUNT BUNT BUNT—

The church windows shattered as the gun sprayed, and Socks and the girl made a dash for the gate.

“The last two had knives, why does this guy get a gun?!” Socks said.

“They’re sending in the heavy reinforcements already,” the girl said. “They know how dangerous you are now. The last two you killed must have been low-level – absolutely deadly to a normal, but to one of us, little more than a papercut. This guy’s more like an axe-wound to the femoral artery.”

“You should write poetry,” Socks said.

“I do,” the girl said, as the car smashed through the wall again, firing the gun: BUNT BUNT BUNT BUNT BUNT BUNT BUNT BUNT—

They dived out of the way as the hail of bullets smacked into the wall behind them, kicking up dust. They leapt over a garden wall and ducked down.

“This won’t hold forever,” the girl said. “That thing can turn a tank into fucking Swiss cheese. And that’s with normal artillery. Those bullets are umbric, solid umbric. We can’t be reckless.”

“So, what’s the plan?” Socks said.

“He’s ontologically intertwined with his car,” the girl said. “Er, his being is, like, coiled round the car’s being. It’s hard to explain it. Any time he gets injured, the car absorbs it and disperses it.”

“That’s why the car’s headlights were bleeding,” Socks said.

“Right. So we know we can’t hurt the driver,” the girl said.

“That woman,” Socks said. “The one in the mask. I killed her. I killed her, by…breaking the blade she was carrying with her.”

“Yes,” the girl said.

Socks deliberated for a moment. “Do you think it would hurt him if I hurt his car?”

“It might,” the girl said. “But how are you going to do that?”

“By being reckless,” Socks said, standing up.

He quickly hurdled the wall and ran around the car, narrowly avoiding a spray of gunfire as he hid behind a row of cars, now utterly ruined. He popped his head up and another spray of gunfire issued from the car. Think, damn you, think.

    Okay. So. Umbric bullets. She said umbric bullets. Umbric kills people with weird powers. I’ve got weird powers. But I can touch umbric with my left hand. My left hand. My left hand. Yes. That’s it.

    There was a piece of brickwork lying on the ground just to the left to him. He picked it up with his hand and threw it at the car, scoring a hit at the machine gun’s tripod, sending it clattering to the tarmac. He jumped up on top of a car.

“Hey, Hugo Weaving!” Socks shouted. “You want me dead? Don’t just shoot me! Come at me!”

“Socks!” the girl shouted. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” Socks said, smiling. “I’m hurting his car.

The car’s engine rumbled and revved.

It spun round, black smoke being thrown up by rubberised umbric tyres, and it raced towards him. Socks leapt forward, ran towards the car, drawing his left hand back into a fist.

For a moment, he really hoped this plan would work, or else this would be the stupidest way anyone had ever died.

The car was on top of him now, he took a swing and punched—

The car’s bonnet immediately caved in as though hitting a lamp-post, bunched up, then flipped, careening over him and landing on its roof, throwing up a shower of sparks as it slid along the pavement.

Socks looked at the smoking car, its wheels still spinning, and cried, jubilantly: “WOO!”

“Your…your hand,” the girl said. “That was an umbric car.”

“I’m full of surprises,” Socks said.

The car’s door came open, and the Man in Black rolled out of it, struggling to pull himself up and steady himself against the chassis. He dusted himself off for a moment, and then looked at Socks. His face was now stained with blood, and his nose had been broken, as though he had been hit across the face with a lead pipe. Several of his teeth were missing.

“Zhat,” the Man in Black said, “Wazh your shecond mishtake.”

He clapped his hands and the destroyed car vanished in a column of fire.

“No matcha,” the Man in Black said. “Plenty more where zhat came from.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small black crystalline cube. He threw it on the ground and it immediately expanded into a black four-wheel-drive car, which he climbed into.

“Run,” Socks said.

They began high-tailing it up the high street.

“Listen, Socks, you’ve had your moment to shine,” the girl said. “Now it’s time to let an expert handle the situation. We need to get to the sweet shop.”

“Where’s that?”

“About two hundred metres that way.”

“I could use a workout,” Socks said.

As they ran, the Man in Black rolled down his window and leaned out, laughing. He pointed his pistol and fired.

“You can’t run forever, Mister Oxford!” the Man in Black shouted, having been rejuvenated by the new car. “You’ve got yourself a fan, sir!”

“The sweet shop’s just up ahead,” the girl said. “Try to avoid getting shot.”

Socks’s throat was on fire and he could taste blood, which made him think he should really consider joining the university’s gym.

The Man in Black fired again, striking the tarmac just behind him.

They reached the sweet shop.

Bliat,” the girl said.

There was a note in the window: “GONE FOR LUNCH – BACK IN 10”.

The Man in Black pulled up, leaning out of the window.

“Oh, I’m going to enjoy this,” he said, pointing the gun at the girl. He fired.

The girl winced, flinching away from what she expected to be certain death.

There was a sound of a bullet bouncing off of something and then a thunk of it smacking into something hard.

The Man in Black screamed.

The bullet had struck the headlight closest to them, blinding him in his right eye.

Socks’s left hand had a small bullet-shaped bruise on the palm.

“Bastard!” the Man in Black shouted. “You just don’t know when to give up, do you?”

“Apparently not,” Socks said.

The Man in Black revved his engine, steering the car around.

“He’s going to plough into us,” the girl said.

“Not if I can help it,” Socks said, taking her hand.

The car sped towards them, sure to crush them against the shopfront.

There was a flash.

They were standing a little down the road, and the car was revving again, and before its driver could understand what had happened, it was already speeding towards the shopfront, ploughing into it. They ran towards the shop to find the car stuck, covered in a variety of old-fashioned sweets from jars, American candies, breakfast cereals, foreign carbonated drinks and chocolate bars.

The Man in Black got out of his car, opening the shop door.

“They told me you could do that,” the Man in Black said. “Your mistake was assuming it would save you.”

“Oh, no, I didn’t expect that to kill you,” Socks said. He held up a brick in his left hand. “But this might.”

He launched it at the car’s driver-side door, denting it. The Man in Black’s right arm immediately snapped like a twig. He yelped.

Bastard!” he shouted, grabbing Socks by the throat with his left arm.

There was another flash, and the Man in Black was back in his vehicle. The driver door was now jammed shut, and his arm was broken. The left was stuck against a wall.

“Let me out of here this instant!” the Man in Black said.

“So, I figured out something about my powers,” Socks said, looking at his left hand. “When I smashed that machine gun off your car. That machine gun must have been made of solid umbric, but I broke it. So it looks like any attack I make using my left hand breaks your umbric. And that includes your car. I’ve weakened it.”

Socks turned to the girl.

“And I think I figured out what your power is, too,” Socks said. “The cocktail. The fact you led us to a sweet shop. I think I get it.”

The girl looked at Socks, then at the car, and smiled.

“What the hell are you doing?” the Man in Black said.

The girl leaned down and found a single Reese’s Piece on the floor, placing it on the car’s bonnet, gently as a whisper.

“Hello,” the girl said. “We haven’t been formally introduced. My name is Dolores Mykhailiuk. But, my friends call me a different name.”

She picked up a gumdrop, then a Skittle, then a liquorice torpedo, a piece of butter fudge.

“What is she doing?!” the Man in Black demanded. “Let me out of this car this instant or I’ll make sure your deaths are so painful it’ll make waterboarding look like a fucking spa day!”

Dolores smiled. “You see, I have a very peculiar ability, tied to the group of carbohydrates known most commonly as sugars. You see, sugar is very useful for storing energy. Indeed, that is what the human body uses it for – cell food. But suppose all that energy were to suddenly be released, in one great big burst. That is what most scientists would call an explosion.”

She held up a single M&M and it popped like a miniature firework between her fingers.

“Now, a single sweetie, that’s not particularly impressive. But, my love, you were so busy trying to kill us both that you didn’t look at what you’d driven into.”

The Man in Black looked around and realised with horror where he was.

“A…a candy store,” he said.

Dolores smiled. “Now, sir – tell me – how many calories of energy do you think are contained in a single sweet shop? I couldn’t even begin to calculate…”

“What the fuck do they call you?” the Man in Black said. “The Sugar-Plum Fairy?”

“No,” Dolores said, smiling. “They call me Dolly Mixture.”

“Let me out of here,” the Man in Black said. “Right now.”

“You had that chance when I flipped your car,” Socks said. “You’re going to stay right there.”

“You little shit,” the Man in Black said. “Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with? I am merciful compared to my boss. He wants your blood, boy. You and that bitch in the rollerskates are going to pay for this.”

“Well, he can want all he likes,” Socks said, leaning very close to the window. “But I’ve got a message for him.”

The Man in Black frowned angrily.

I’m ready for him,” Socks said.

The Man in Black’s car revved its engine, and Dolly took that as her cue, hefting a large jar of sweets off the shelf. The jar began to glow ever so slightly as its contents began to heat up.

“Black really isn’t your colour,” she said.

The Man in Black yelled as she threw the jar, hurling herself through the front door just as the jar’s contents went critical, setting off a chain reaction. Every single sweet and bottle of drink in the shop simultaneously sublimated into a plasma-cloud of pure energy, which for a split second would have looked like a psychedelic lightning storm, but which to their eyes appeared to be something akin to a small nuclear detonation.

The shopfront was left a burning wreck, shards of glass sticking out of the window-pane like a row of broken teeth, an unrecognisably smashed wreck of metal and flesh now the shop’s only contents, belching black smoke and fire like a portal to Hell.

Dolly and Socks stood and stared for a few moments.

Just then, a jolly-looking fat man with a moustache and an apron on appeared, holding a cheese and ham baguette. He had gone pale, and was staring in some disbelief.

“My…my shop!” he said.

“Real shame,” Dolly said. “Drunk driver, I think.”

“Bloody hell,” the shopkeeper said. “That shop’s been in my family for three generations.”

“I’m sorry,” Socks said.

“The insurance company is never going to believe this,” he said. “I…I suppose the leaky ceiling won’t be such a problem for me any more…”

They both looked at each other and patted him on the back. He sat down on the kerb, ringing the fire brigade, as they both walked away.

*

“You know, eventually people are going to cotton on to the fact this shit is going on,” Socks said, later. They’d moved to a different pub. “A man in a pub got shot today, several cars got ruined by machine gun fire, and now the local confectioner’s shop has blown up. People are going to think World War Fucking Three has started.” He sipped from a pint of beer, much needed after the day he’d had.

“Ontological manipulation,” Dolly said, sipping at a piña colada. “Works wonders. They’ve already explained away the shooting as a random robbery gone wrong. No witnesses.”

“Yeah, one of the many things you were meant to explain to me before we got, er, interrupted,” Socks said.

Dolly sipped at the drink. “I guess you’d call it magic,” she said. “It’s a sort of innate ability we all have. You have it, too, you just haven’t learned how, yet.”

“I can rewind time, I have a bullet-proof hand and now you’re telling me I can magically make the cops hold back from ringing MI5 the second a machine gun gets fired in a little village somewhere.”

“Stranger things have happened,” Dolly said, shrugging.

Socks opened his mouth.

Don’t mention Netflix,” she said. He closed it again.

“So, like, what else is real?” Socks said. “Fairies?”

“No.”

“Pixies?”

“Liked their first two albums.”

“Giants?”

“Sometimes.”

“Giants on top of beanstalks?”

“Definitely not.”

“Unicorns?”

“If you use a hot glue gun.”

“The Big Bad Wolf?”

“Aren’t all wolves, in a way, big and bad?”

Socks leaned back in his chair. “I always thought a world with magic powers in it would be a bit more…Harry Potter.”

“Don’t even get me started on JK,” Dolly said, with a look of disgust. “Her work is to manipulating ontology what James Bond is to working for MI6.”

Socks gave her a look she interpreted as a request to elaborate.

“Glamorous bullshit that cuts out all the boring bits.”

“Are there magic spies?” Socks asked.

“Probably,” Dolly said. “Ontological manipulation can be innate or it can be acquired.”

Socks nodded. “I acquired my powers.”

Dolly nodded. “K-Os was reluctant to divulge the details. But I pieced it together. Saw the scar on your hand,” she said, looking idly at Socks’s left palm. “Am I correct in thinking that you cut yourself with an umbric blade saving K-Os’s life and bled on her skates? Bad idea, not that you could have known.”

“Yeah,” Socks said. “She…turned into like, this light. Just pure light. Like an unstoppable force.  She made that guy, Tanizaki…she made him…she made him…”

“Explode?”

“Y-yeah. And then the next day she was totally blasé about it, like she’d just given him a bloody nose or something.”

Dolly sipped at her drink. She leaned forward. “I lied to you, earlier,” she said, so quietly it was only a murmur.

“What?”

“When I pushed you in the river. Or, rather, when I did that before you un-happened it. I had no way of getting you out of there.”

What?

“Most of us with chaotic powers, we have a primary and secondary power. For you, your primary power is the ability to rewind time, and your secondary power is the ability to break umbric with your left hand. For me, my primary power is that I can make anything with sugar in it go fissile.”

“And your secondary power?”

“Now, now, Socks. It’s not polite to ask a lady her secrets,” Dolly said, coyly. “But suffice it to say, it wouldn’t have saved you.”

Socks sipped his beer. “You know what?” he said. “I’m not even angry.”

“Really? I figured you would be.”

“Oh, I mean, I’m livid, deep down, somewhere I can bury it and let it turn into an ulcer. But at this point I’ve come to expect it from people in your world.”

“Sounds like learned helplessness to me,” Dolly said.

“Yeah, that’s pretty much exactly what it is. Since that night with K-Os, nothing has felt real. Speaking of which, how come she didn’t come here today?”

“She had…business to attend to.”

“I’m sure that’s the excuse she told you to give me. What’s the real reason?”

Dolly sighed, and looked up at the ceiling with her honey-golden eyes. Then she looked back at Socks. “Because she’s scared, Socks.”

Socks was taken aback. “Scared?” he said, thinking of the stoic, expressionless face she wore in lectures.

Dolly leaned forwards again, and her voice dropped low again, which Socks supposed was an involuntary thing she did.

Dolly rubbed her eye idly with her palm, smearing mascara across her face. “There’s a war coming, Socks. These skirmishes you’re getting caught up in are just the opening shots.”

“A…war?”

“Yes, a war. A war of the primordial forces of the Universe. And we’re right in the middle of it.”

Socks looked around him at the pub, at the various patrons, lost in their own idle conversations, listening to the clinking of glasses, the gentle gurgling of a tap water dispenser, the hiss of carbonation. He looked back at Dolly.

“Why here?” he said.

Dolly laughed, as though he wasn’t in on some joke. “Earth is one of the few places in the universe where unconscious, inanimate stuff somehow gets up and starts talking and shitting and fucking. Can’t get much more primordial and weird than that.”

Socks took the teashades off and rubbed his eyes. “And K-Os somehow figures into all of this.”

Dolly nodded. “There’s a lot she hasn’t told you. About her true nature.”

“Well, can you tell me?”

“Goodness, no. You’d have to talk to her directly.”

“And she’s avoiding me.”

“Because she’s scared.”

“Right. Scared because…she’s afraid that this battle that’s coming, this big war…it might kill her. And that if I’m involved with her in some way…”

“You’ll die, too,” Dolly said, gravely.

Socks nodded, and took a big gulp of the beer.

“Alright,” he said. “I’m in this, now, whether I like it or not. So you’d better start telling me what you do know. Because I can’t keep moving forward through this world if I don’t know my arse from my elbow.”

Dolly sipped at her piña colada. She smiled, slightly. “Happy to oblige,” she said.

“Let’s start with the basics: What the hell is umbric?”

Dolly put the drink down. “It’s some sort of crystalline organometal,” she said. “Made out of carbon and iron mashed together. We think that it somehow formed in the Earth’s crust a few billion years ago. Looks like bog-standard obsidian to the untrained eye, but when you put it under an electron microscope…”

“What?”

“Things get weird,” Dolly said. “It has an infinitely fractal crystalline structure in its unrefined form. Spirals all the way down to the sub-sub-atomic level, beyond which any meaningful measurement can be  made. All of them vibrating. You can’t see it with the naked eye, but its surface is like an infinitely sharp chainsaw. And what’s more, it’s harder than diamonds. Usually…”

She looked at his left hand. “Usually it’s near-impossible to damage umbric. Not without considerable effort and energy expense. And yet…you can do it with your bare hand.”

Socks took a sip of beer. “Any idea how it got here?”

“No, we don’t know the geological origin,” Dolly said. “We assume it came out of the Earth’s core, got pushed up to the surface during the Earth’s Hadean era, when the entire surface was volcanic.”

There was something he could remember, vaguely, but couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

“So how come it’s so deadly?”

“For normals it’s just a sharp rock,” Dolly said. “They have some sort of…protection field, I guess. But we lack that. Something to do with the nature of our powers, I suppose, letting chaotic energy commingle with our being leaves us vulnerable to it. If umbric touches us, it causes immediate and catastrophic injuries. Even a minor cut to the finger won’t heal. All the blood in your body will drain out of it, drop by drop.”

“Alright,” Socks said. “So why doesn’t it do that to my left hand?”

“That’s still a mystery. This hasn’t happened before, surprising as it may seem.”

Socks frowned. “There’s a lot you don’t seem to be able to explain.”

“We still can’t explain why we sleep scientifically, Socks. Cut me some slack.”

Socks swigged the last of his beer. “Yeah, I get you. So I need to be on the lookout for this umbric stuff.”

“Yeah. You’ve been lucky the last couple of times. Your left hand may be invincible to the stuff, but the rest of your body isn’t. You can make all sorts of things out of umbric. Cars, bullets, swords. You’d never see it coming.”

“Comforting,” Socks said, smiling. He nodded again. “I think we’re done here. Thanks for today.”

“My pleasure,” Dolly said.

Socks got up to leave, idly checking his pockets for his keys, wallet and phone. He surprised even himself with his quick return to routine after having nearly died that day.

“I hope we meet again, soon, Socks,” Dolly said. “Although, perhaps under less violent circumstances.”

Socks pulled his phone out to check it for messages. There were a couple from Daisy, asking about getting dinner, which he decided he’d answer later. Then he looked up from it and back at Dolly.

“I have one last thing to ask of you,” he said. “I need K-Os’s phone number.”

Dolly smiled a little, and laughed. “So very human,” she said.

*

He dreamed.

A world, somehow recognisable as his own, but alien, too, ancient, before the concept of writing had even been countenanced in the mind of a small, crawling mammal, shrieking in the dark beneath the footfalls of giant lizards. A world beyond history, beyond time, with no records of its existence save the geological; save the ancient glyphs of the Universe itself scarred and marred into the planet’s surface, as though God were trying to put forth a message that would forever go ignored, until it was too late, until the seas themselves had boiled away, revealing again those divine, unspeakable word-forms.

And beneath the sea, ancient sea creatures, some he recognised, some he didn’t, throbbed and bobbed among the waves. Somewhere below the surface, coral reefs were forming, reproducing, sending out plumes of gametes in blobs that, to his eyes, resembled strawberry milkshake…

Deep, deep beneath the waves, where life feared to tread, something was buried, under layers of sediment, in the darkness, all light a mere pinprick up above. Watching. Waiting. The right time. Opportunity must strike. It must be done. Wipe the slate clean.

And as suddenly as he had descended to those depths, he was now on the surface, locked in place, staring up at the sky. Something was burning. The sky was on fire. He could see it. A rock, not as big as the first, but big – several kilometres across – hurtling towards this prehistoric ocean, screaming down with a terrifying violence.

He cried out as it crashed into the water next to him, obliterating unknowable numbers of creatures in an instant, dead so quickly their consciousness, however faint, couldn’t even have known what was happening before it vanished out of space and time. Immediately, the Earth’s crust sundered, ejecting ash, water vapour and magma out of a fissure. He watched, as though in slow motion, as millions of tiny, black, tangled crystals were ejected high into the stratosphere. A billion Hiroshimas happening at once. There was a scream, a psychic scream, that could be heard through all of nature.

The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. The end of the dinosaurs as a dominant species, reduced to mere birds, who shrieked at the horror of what they had been reduced to – their supremacy, their very essence, stripped away from them by a random act of senseless, unthinkable cosmic violence…and yet, all according to the diktats of those most stable physical laws of nature.

Chaos out of order.

And on a beach somewhere, one solitary coral, cruelly forced away from its seabed, was refusing to die, squirming in air it had never evolved to even attempt to breathe. It had no idea what air even was. Though it was inaudible, he knew it was screaming. He watched as it transformed, transformed into an inert thing – a dead, pink rectangle, surrounded by a pink, opaque liquid, strewn across the sand.

The fluid was moving.

He woke.

*

He sat up.

This time, he remembered the dream, and the one before that.

It must have been three in the morning, but he wasted no time in calling K-Os.

He was quite surprised when she picked up, as though she had been expecting him.

The time had come for answers.

But what bothered him was that he might have more for her than she had for him.


Another time, another place…


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ARC ONE: UMBRIC SPRING
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