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T
he black broach chased them
, spiraling in great circles around them, relishing their fear. Aliyah was certain: that Thing in the sky had noticed her.

What had that black flux done?

Yet they ran together, holding hands, united. They both triangulated Bastogne's location, then headed in the opposite direction, drawing fire. Aliyah saw Ruth counting off klicks as they raced through the woods, calculating how much distance they'd bought the locals.

She felt Ruth's fingers entwined with hers, remembering how Ruth had wanted to kiss her. Even if they hadn't kissed yet, that feeling of being bonded was not
at all
a bad feeling to go out on.

“Use your Unimancy!” Aliyah yelled, as they ran into a blackened grove of trees. “Call in the others to stabilize it!”

“
Don't you think I'm trying?
” Ruth reached out with her free hand towards the horizon, clutching empty air. “I can't connect! Something's gone wrong with the Unimancer network!”

The broach dropped eye-watering coils of otherdimensional colors around them, cutting off escape. The sky peeled into tatters, revealing a hellish empty white that threatened to consume them. “So reboot it!”

Ruth stopped, acknowledging the futility of retreat. “The network doesn't fail, Aliyah. Something… Something really bad just happened.”

Aliyah waved at the buzzsect-clouds gnawing photosynthesis from the forest. “This isn't bad enough?”

Her mother radiated calm analysis. “That's not even related, I don't think. The broach, it's… it's never cut off our connection. Something hit us hard…”

Ruth shivered. So much of her competence flowed from the collective. It must have been like losing a limb.

No, she thought; it was like seeing everyone on Facebook knocked offline, and wondering what disaster could silence everyone at once.

Do you remember what happened the last time someone kidnapped his daughter?
General Kanakia had asked.

Had
Daddy
done this?

She shivered, certain her father had done something unspeakable to the Unimancer network. She just didn't know
what
.

Aliyah grabbed an imaginary Nintendo DS, her fingers twitching as she pondered which game-magic might drive back this broach. Then she remembered how feeding her 'mancy to the Morehead buzzsects had accelerated them into hideous pregnancies.

“Ruth.” She shook Ruth out of her mother's clinical analysis. “Whatever you do to heal broaches… try it.”

“By
myself
?” Ruth looked like Aliyah had asked her to play a co-op deathmatch solo.

Aliyah waved at the trees as they crumpled into toothpicks, the spaces between the atoms chewed up. “Got a better idea?”

“God dammit.” Ruth knelt down on the ground, squeezed soil between her fingers to remind herself of the feel of good clean earth. She looked up at the horizon-to-horizon sweep of destruction…

“It's no good,” she said. “I remember parts of things. I can't remember Jose's memories of the sky, Ndego's love of grass, Aileen's sense of space…”

“Hook up with me.”

Ruth did a double-take.

“Not like that,” she clarified, blushing. “We'll do 'mancy together. We'll… share memories. We don't need to change the whole area, just create a bubble to hide in until this blows over…”

Ruth's hazel eyes widened. “Aliyah,
no
!”

“…No?”

“That's…” She slapped herself. “I
know
it's a secret, Mom, I
know
she's not supposed to know, I don't have a
choice
…”

“Not supposed to know what?”

Ruth clasped Aliyah's hands, pressing them against her chest in an anguished
promise-you-won't-ever-tell
gesture. “…There's no torture.”

“What?”

“
There's no torture
. We don't brainwash anyone. Unimancy isn't a… government program.” She hung her head low. “It's more like a virus. You do 'mancy together, you catch the hivemind.”

“That's… ridiculous, Ruth. You abduct 'mancers to break them…”

An angry crease appeared between Ruth's eyes. “Yeah, that's what we tell governments! You think we'd be so happily integrated if we'd been beaten into it?” Ruth's eyes jittered briefly, looking to her fellow Unimancers for support, then her pupils dilated in terror as she realized nobody was answering. “The governments feel
way
more comfortable handing 'mancers over to torturers. We do the zombie-walk whenever we're around mundanes, act like someone's beaten the identity out of us, and the presidents and prime ministers are happy to let us steal their 'mancers away!”

“But that's crazy…” The broach tightened around them; they stood on a shrinking island of Earthlike physics. Everything else had fallen into the demon dimensions.

“It's the truth, OK?” Ruth's cheeks were flushed with humiliation and anger. “To do 'mancy together, you have to share magic. And once you share magic, you get networked whether you want to be or not! We don't torture anybody! We're just
nice
to 'mancers until they cast spells with us! And then…”

She flicked her fingers towards the incoming maelstrom.

“Once they see our memories of what's at stake, most are eager to help. They've got new friends, a purpose in life, seven thousand 'mancers to wick their flux away. There's no insidious plan here, Aliyah – and now you know our greatest secret!” She hung her head. “Not that it's gonna help.”

Aliyah frowned.

Ruth genuinely seemed to
believe
this bullshit.

“Ruth…” She spoke as gently as possible, given the apocalypse bore down upon them. “I've done 'mancy with Aunt Valentine, and we didn't coalesce into Unimancy. I've done spells with Dad! And with… with all the 'mancers at Payne's institute! You can join up to cast spells without welding your brains…”

“
Sure
.” Ruth's sarcasm was cutting, but Aunt Valentine had taught Aliyah snark meant love. “The combined experience of seven thousand 'mancers is just
lying
, Aliyah! Or maybe you guys have cornered the market on craaaazy 'mancy – your dad can heal broaches without having other people help him remember what the world is like, and
now
you team up to do 'mancy without fusing?” She genuflected. “
All hail the bureaucromancy messiah!
”

“I'm not fucking arguing with you!” The broach erased the grove's edges; Aliyah lurched as the soil beneath them spilled into nothingness. “Link up with me!”

“
It's you or your dad
!” Ruth pounded her skull. “Hell, I'm half-crazy because my mom's in here! I've seen why General Kanakia needs your dad's skills – we're losing, Aliyah.” She pointed at the crumbling sky. “We're dying too fast, and
that
is growing too quickly.”

“So?”

“Better we die, and someone else gets your dad in. Because he's…” She swallowed; the gravity around slackened as they rose up into that unearthly whiteness. “His skills are more important than our lives.”

Aliyah felt such an outpouring of respect, her chest hurt. Ruth didn't know if her fellow Unimancers had been wiped out – and
still
she was willing to sacrifice herself and the woman she loved, just in case someone else
might
find a solution to the broach.

“At least we drew this rift away from Bastogne,” Ruth said sadly. “I don't think it'll touch the town.”

This was, Aliyah reflected, a terrible time to fall in love.

But she would not die without a first kiss.

“Mission accomplished.” She grabbed Ruth's chin, and wondered
Is this how Valentine feels?
before pressing her lips against Ruth's.

god she's so soft

Kissing was awesome, but awkward. Her kissing fantasies hadn't included the hard pressure of teeth behind the lips. She felt Ruth's breath on hers, so close, all these things she'd never considered…

Ruth taught you to appreciate the real world
. Ruth snaked her arms around Aliyah's back – those lean muscles so strong against her, and–

Ruth opened her mouth, offering her tongue's soft wetness, and joy coursed through Aliyah's body.

Berries she tastes like berries
, Aliyah thought, of course she tasted like berries.

I just ate berries

An electric spark leapt across their tongues, a tingling magic flowing between them.

That's us Ruth

Oh my God Aliyah that's us

And Aliyah sank into the kiss as she realized this was
their
magic, Ruth's Unimancy and her obsession intertwining like two lovers slipping their fingers together, and she felt Ruth's fear and Ruth felt Aliyah's uncertainty and pulled her closer.

Like this Aliyah

I want to feel you like this

That first kiss's awkwardness disappeared as they melded into each other, their kiss swelling into a chapel of adoration built with roaming hands and soft lips–

A beauty that staved off the apocalypse.

Distantly, they heard something bellow – the Thing's rage. They stood on a thin soil outcropping battered by angry buzzsect swarms, bouncing off as ineffectively as moths off a lightbulb.

They kept kissing – one slow kiss to fend off a million monsters.

Our first kiss shouldn't look like this, Aliyah

No

And Ruth's hands slid down the small of Aliyah's back just the way Aliyah had hoped and Aliyah nipped Ruth's lips just the way Ruth wanted and the ground trembled underneath them because a kiss like this demanded ground and they remembered the feel of solid soil beneath them, they remembered the smell of high grass and the trees flowered back into green healthy beauty and the black pushed away from the sky and something roared but that didn't matter everything should line up to make this kiss perfect.

Flowers blossomed from the fresh soil, spat death to the buzzsects.

The Thing in the sky smashed down. A rainbow nudged it aside, sent it sprawling back into its cage.

The universe needed this kiss to happen, and Aliyah and Ruth felt the truth of it, their fears mixing and melding as they understood how much love they held, inside the Unimancer collective, inside Ruth, how goodness could drive back this darkness, and they sighed as Aliyah understood what Ruth had all along:

She was born to be a Unimancer.

They broke that first kiss, looking towards Bastogne, knowing they'd die to protect it.

Their eyes jittered with love.

“
C
utscene
!
” Valentine yelled, as the crane lifted the shipping container out of the boat.

Paul's body was no longer under his control – his life had been transformed into a movie played between levels. The reference books on the shelves tumbled off in slow motion as heavy machinery hauled them skywards and Valentine's videogamemancy kicked in, but he was used to this. She'd practiced her cutscene magic to get them through storms in the Atlantic. Whenever the oil lamps tumbled to the floor, “
Cutscene!
” – and magically, the fire went only where Valentine allowed it to.

Player characters didn't die in cutscenes.

They got tossed around, but Valentine's 'mancy ensured no one got hurt.

He fell backwards onto the hard rubber mats; though the cutscene prevented damage, the impact still hurt like blazes. Weeks of hospital-grade antibiotics had barely dimmed his ravaging infections.

Paul laid prone once the cutscene finished, trying not to breathe – whenever he breathed in more than a shallow whisper, he coughed, and coughing was like being stabbed.

Not much further. A few hours, and this would be over.

They'd been cooped up here for a month. Valentine had passed the days by playing
Hatoful Boyfriend
and other dating simulators on her Nintendo DS, cursing because she couldn't boost her relationship scores high enough. Paul worked on an old-fashioned computer terminal, complete with thick black plastic keys and a monochrome green IBM 3270 monitor that glowed even though they had no electricity.

Imani jumped rope for exercise, occasionally using Valentine's 'mancy to practice her gunplay. In her spare time, she'd tended to ancient Grady in his wheelchair. He alone seemed content; after being trapped in the same room for decades, being confined to a new room was almost an adventure.

“Jesus, Paul.” Valentine leaned him against the wall to stabilize him as the crane carried the shipping crate to the docks; Paul still moaned. “Where've you been putting your flux?”

“Same as you.” He palpated his ribs. “In here.”

He couldn't risk his stray bad luck causing them to be discovered, so he'd pushed it inside. The flux fed his infections in painful ways.

“Paul, Paul.” Valentine slapped her crotch like she was giving it a high-five. “It's OK if I give myself a herpes flareup.” She had the same rueful look she got whenever she lost her true love on
Hatoful Boyfriend
. “I'm not using Little Priscilla anyway. But you?”

“I've got my meds.” Robert had stocked the container with racks of painkillers. To dull his ribs took so many Oxycontin, sometimes Paul passed out on the keyboard.

“This won't do any good if you collapse halfway to Aliyah,” Valentine said sternly. “You gotta get that shit under control.”

“A few hours,” he begged. “We'll know where she is in a few hours.”

“
Cutscene!
” Valentine yelled. The monitor toppled off the stand as the crane lowered the container onto the truck – but again, nobody got hurt even as everything crashed. Paul tried not to stay still, but he still had to breathe, so he sipped in a breath–

Agony.

He slipped another Oxycontin onto his tongue.

Soon
.

The truck rumbled away from the docks, carrying the shipping container with it – Paul had contracted the shipping companies to drop it off at the edge of town. The driver wouldn't bring them there, of course, but that betrayal was part of the plan.

Imani blotted sweat off his forehead.

He pushed the towel away. He hated being cared for.

“Is this…” He swallowed. “Your plan's gonna work, right?”

“If you can do what you say you can do, baby.” She frowned. “You got the juice?”

“Nothing can stop me.” It couldn't. He had no doubts about that.

Paul ignored the shooting pains as the truck bumped down a road. They were exiting Zwole, a large Netherlands city not yet encroached by the broach.

He kept track of how far they'd travelled, accounting for the additional distance. Things would travel fast, but…

“
Should
we do this?”

Imani let go of his hand, uncertain. “What do you mean?”

“Is this… Is this a good idea, sweetie? This is our last chance to back out.” He held up the Oxycontin prescription, displaying Robert's name printed on the label. “He told me… He told me he didn't approve. And me, I- I handed you this project to help you heal. Maybe that wasn't fair. I made you into a weapon. And this is… It's a big weapon. I don't wanna fire it unless we're all comfortable with it. So.” He gestured up at the sky, bringing his finger down in a final, fatal arc. “
Should
we?”

She chewed her lip.

“I don't know, Paul.”

He gave her the silence to process.

“I've always been a corporate lawyer. It's never been my job to set policy. I'll tell people what's prosecutable, inform them of their exposures, but… I don't tell people what to do. Because me? I'll do whatever it takes to win.”

Paul smiled. Her sharp-toothed ambition had always filled him with pride.

“
You're
the moral center, Paul.” She tapped his chest. “So if you tell me this is what we need to do… then we do it.”

“Valentine,” he whispered. “Could you come over here?”

She crawled through the wreckage to plop by Paul's side.

“Still no luck contacting Aliyah, right?”

She shook her head. “If she logged into our game networks, I'd know. She's… “ She blew on her hand and spread her fingers like a dandelion giving up seeds. “Gone.”

“Can you bring up a photo show?”

“Yeah.” Valentine waved in the air, and a shimmering hologram emerged in a flare of videogamemancy; a teenaged black girl, her disheveled hair combed carefully over the burn scars on her forehead. Aliyah's smile was defiant, tense; she held up her Nintendo DS defensively, like Thor's hammer.

Imani closed her eyes.

“Earlier,” said Paul. “Way earlier.”

A shot of a five year-old Aliyah, dressed in a frilly pink princess dress, shimmered into existence. Aliyah in the days before she'd been burned, before she'd been caught up in magic.

There was such
joy
in that smile.

“Back to the last photo.”

Even though he'd snapped that picture when they were in no danger, her shoulders were hunched, her fingers white around the controller. Her smile had curdled to a fierce
don't-fuck-with-me
grin.

Go live a quiet life somewhere
, that horrible teenaged girl trapped inside the Unimancer network had told them. Yet they hunted people like Aliyah – as long as the Unimancers existed, there could
be
no quiet life.

All the while, Paul felt that crawling certainty the black flux
would
brainwash his daughter. That young girl had threatened to use Aliyah to execute him. That soulless teenaged mockery would reshape Aliyah into her own image…

YOU WILL LOSE YOUR DAUGHTER IN WAYS YOU NEVER IMAGINED

“All right,” Paul said. “Let's do this.”

P
aul double-checked
the GPS coordinates as the truck rolled to a stop.

“Was she here?” Paul asked.

Grady clambered down from his wheelchair to take a deep sniff from the container's ventilation holes. “Yes. They brought her through here.”

Paul relaxed. He hadn't been sure if all 'mancers were abducted through the same European route.

General Kanakia's voice boomed down from speakers outside the container.

“
Please come out with your hands up, Paul. No 'mancy, please
.
I'm hoping this can be a quiet negotiation between equals.
”

Grady stiffened. “You promised, Mr Tsabo.”

“I keep my promises.”

“You know my brother's gone. Without him, I…”

“I know. I'd feel the same without Aliyah.”

Grady closed his eyes, peacefully preparing for the end.

“You've been betrayed, Paul. Mr Steeplechase called us, told us how even
he
thought you were out of control, told us how you were smuggling yourself into Europe – so we instructed your truck driver to deliver you to us.”

To think Imani had doubted Grady Steeplechase's acting ability.

“
Escape is not an option. Last time, you barely escaped fifteen 'mancers. Now? I've brought a hundred and fifty of our best trained men – and they are radiating normalcy at you, so the slightest 'mancy will create near-fatal flux. I've brought you to an isolated area where you can harm no one – and leaves you nowhere to run.
”

While Kanakia spoke, each of them hugged Grady in turn, thanking him.

“Unlock the back doors?” Paul asked.

Valentine unlatched the doors, the air crackling with the hum of prepared 'mancy. If they fired weaponry, Valentine would turn them into game-based annoyances.

It didn't matter.

The bird was in the air.

Paul stepped out into the light, shielding his eyes with his palm – after weeks locked in a container, it was so
bright
out here. But he made out the tangled barbed wire fences and bleachers and sniper towers, a miniature prison set in a country meadow.

They'd parked the truck in the center of a hundred and fifty 'mancers, each armed with cutting-edge anti-'mancer weaponry.

As Paul stepped forward, the Unimancers trained their sights on him. He saw the anti-'mancer landmines poking out of the soil, the yellow FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY lettering an implicit threat.

“You came out to visit me personally, general?” Paul spoke up, ignoring the shredding pain in his side. “I suppose that's an honor.”

General Kanakia sat behind a thick, blast-proof plexiglass screen. Given that Kanakia had outwitted him so thoroughly, he'd imagined a lean, sharklike man, not plump middle management.

Kanakia saluted Paul. “
It is an honor, sir. Away from the United States' eyes, we can talk as equals
.”

“Give me my daughter.”

“
Will you surrender?
”

“
Where is my daughter
?”

“
Aliyah is safe, and will remain safe. We've grown fond of her, Paul.”

Was she in their thrall? He tried not to panic. A top speed of 550 mph meant Paul needed to stall four more minutes…

“She's not Unimanced. We have no need for videogamemancers, Paul. We need you – you, and your singular talent for healing broaches
.”

He spat laughter. “You'll brainwash my magic away!”

“
No. We'll incorporate your skills, Paul. You haven't seen what we've faced yet. There are so few of us to combat it. You're a genius at working with limited resources – and once you've seen what Aliyah's seen, well… you're a good man. I know you'll help us…
”

“Where is she? I'm not asking a third time, Kanakia.”

“
I wouldn't bring her into a war zone, Paul.
She's safe. Far away but safe.
”

Valentine cracked her knuckles. “Wrong answer.”

Weapons
clacked
as the Unimancers shifted their aim to Valentine. Kanakia waved at them to stand down, which they did grudgingly; they glowered, radiating hatred.

Oh yeah
, he thought.
You remember being scared
.

Let's introduce you to terror
.

“
Her location's irrelevant, Paul
,” the general said. “
This is where it ends. We've assembled our best forces to stop you…
”

Paul whistled, looking up at the sky. “What if I
wanted
you to bring me somewhere you'd assembled as many troops as you could get your hands on?”

Kanakia frowned. So did the Unimancers; they stiffened, hunting for any 'mancy Paul or Valentine might be weaving – but the only magic here was theirs.

“There's not a lot of ways to destroy a swarm consciousness,” Imani said conversationally. “They're resilient against most attacks, because the knowledge is widely distributed among individual nodes. Only one way guarantees disabling a swarm's functional capacity…”

“
No
.” Blood drained from the general's face.

“…and that's to destroy enough individual segments to cripple the mind's connective tissue.”

The Unimancers checked the shipping container, worried they'd missed something – but the container had been scanned back at the docking port to ensure it had no explosives. They captured Paul, puzzled by his lack of 'mancy, even more puzzled by his certainty.

“Oh, I'm not doing any magic
now
,” Paul told them. “I couldn't. This many Unimancers would swamp any 'mancy in flux; Unimancy only allows the usage of conventional weapons.”

“
What have you done?
” Kanakia screamed.

Paul pointed one finger up towards the bright blue sky. A dot appeared high, next to the sun, grew huge–

“I did the magic that fired the missile nine minutes ago,” Paul said.

P
aul did not own
any subsonic cruise missiles, of course.

But the
USS Chicago SSN 721
patrolling the North Sea had twelve Tomahawk missiles ready to fire in vertical launching tubes. The crew of 118 men used a computer to monitor the missiles' readiness, to set coordinates, to tell them when to launch.

And what was computer code, if not the essence of record-keeping?

Paul had studied programming on and off for years on the chance it'd become useful. But in the last month, he'd learned to speak code as computers interpreted it – starting with the language of C++, whose syntax used helpful half-sentences, then descending into the dark bare-metal assembly language and its barked-out single-word commands, and finally settling into the dense foliage of machine code – a human-hostile language of two words, “1” and “0,” with a few registers to shift them in and out.