The One That Comes Before Read online

  THE ONE THAT COMES BEFORE

  by Livia Llewellyn

  ISBN: 978-88-99569-47-1

  Copyright (Edition) ©2017 Independent Legions Publishing

  Copyright (Text) ©Livia Llewellyn

  May, 2017

  Editing: Jodi Renée Lester

  Cover Art by George C. Cotronis

  Digital Layout: Lukha B. Kremo

  www.independentlegions.com

  Livia Llewellyn

  The One That

  Comes Before

  Date: 7:17 AM, Friday, August 22, 2079

  From: TMO

  To: +All at North Spur M37; +All at South Spur M37; +All at +East Spur M37; +All at West Spur M37

  Subject: Epoch I End Plans

  She’s ready – Epoch II is about to begin!

  ALL Team Members: please assemble in the sub-basements of your buildings to go over game plans at noon today. Ministry offices on every floor should be cleaned out and all confidential materials delivered to your floor administrators by EOB today, no exceptions.

  Floor Administrators: you are to report back to Ministry headquarters with all confidential materials by Saturday 8:00pm at the latest.

  Lead Supervisors: email us ASAP with confirmation that your tenant emails have been approved and are ready to send to building management at our go-ahead; and send us your final status reports on the readiness of your floors. And, please be diligent checking/scrubbing individual company responses - you should know by now who your problem companies and individuals are and how to handle them. As you know, it is absolutely imperative that ALL tenants and their employees be in the building on Monday, and that they be loaded into each floor’s anchor room by no later than 6:00pm - our keys’ power is dependent on the full complement of their energies and biomasses, including, of course, your own. Your teams should use any means necessary to complete this critical last phase of Epoch I, and be appropriately equipped for all circumstances that arise. Becher District’s entire raison d’être depends on it, and you.

  This will be our last transmission to you until Tuesday morning. We’ve all been training and working long and hard for this moment, and we have the greatest faith in you. We will see you all on the other side!

  In Her Name,

  The Ministry of Obstetrics

  El Torres del Pain

  Obsidia

  Date: 7:25 AM, Friday, August 22, 2079

  From: Diogenes.Sepú[email protected]

  To: TMO

  Subject: RE: Epoch I End Plans

  Diogenes Sepúlveda replied:

  Understood. FYI, the M37 tenant email is approved and ready to send as soon as I have the go-ahead. My floor admin is on schedule to depart for HQ later this evening.

  FYI, as previously discussed, due to the nature of their work, all 40th floor LBA Press employees have varying degrees of immunity to magic, but our engineers confirmed that this won’t affect the quality of their biomass additions - it will, however, make it more difficult to move them, as conventional means won’t work, and they will therefore be less susceptible to the chymical transition agents that are being used throughout the rest of the building. (Actually, we still have no idea how they may react.) However, by 1pm Monday, the engines in the sub-basement should be fully operational, and I will report to 40 with Palgrane to facilitate getting them into their anchor room before the deadline.

  Also, as discussed, there’s been no decision yet on the passing, non-trans employee working at the press. No magic properties - she can’t conduct or transmit, therefore her biomass may not work in the anchor room. Precautions will not work on her, she’s basically a walking Elder Sign. Also: severely mentally unstable. After many years of observation, my 40th floor administrator (who, I’ll remind you, is the replacement for my original 40th, whom she tortured and dismembered) advises that she be dispatched, but of course I need your approval for go-ahead. Please advise ASAP.

  Diogenes Sepúlveda

  Lead Supervisor

  MO Becher Project

  Anchorage North Spur, M37

  Date: 7:29 AM, Friday, August 22, 2079

  From: TMO

  To: Diogenes.Sepú[email protected]

  Subject: RE: Epoch I End Plans

  TMO replied:

  We can’t take any chances with that floor, it’s too problematic. Close it off the second the last employee arrives, and don’t let her near the anchor room. Kill her and toss her out a window.

  Date: 3:47 PM, Sunday, August 24, 2079

  From: Rucapillán-Tenants.Announcements

  To: +All at Becher.Merchants.Association; +All at CadwaladerandPitts.LLP; +All at Eichmann.Financial.Services; +All at FrankandFreisler.Associates; +All at Hulth.&.Company; +All at Lenkiewicz.Belanger.Apostolicum.Press; +All at Riverside.Café; +All at Sutavara.Surveyers; +All at Ui-te-Rangiora.Shipping; +All at Gyneas.Nuevo

  Subject: Building Heat Advisory for M37, Monday August 25

  Due to complications in repair work to the basement and sub-basements at M37, Anchorage North Spur, air conditioning will be shut down this afternoon through Monday, August 25. Maintenance crews will be working throughout Sunday night to ensure that the system will be up and running by no later than Tuesday morning. There may also be intermittent power and water outages throughout the day as we continue to repair damages from heavy sub-basement flooding due to the recent river surges, which means water to kitchens and bathrooms will be turned off. However, the building will be open for regular business hours, and your work attendance will remain mandatory as usual. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes, and will keep you appraised of any developments as they occur. We regret that portable fans will not be available in our management offices, so feel free to bring your own - building staff will be working emergency schedules,and will therefore not be able to accommodate special requests. As usual, we ask that you do NOT open your office windows without first making sure your thaumaturgical/pollution safety filter screens are properly installed.

  Even though these are extenuating circumstances, building management will of course not be held legally accountable for accidental dismemberments, transformations, and/or deaths.

  Rucapillán Reality Trust Tenants Services

  Monday, August 25

  3:32 am

  Alex wakes up out of dead sleep, lets out a single gasp, and freezes.

  She’s sitting at the head of her bed: eyes wide open, hands clasped at her sweating chest with her reading glasses entwined in her fingers, feet tucked under her rear. Something woke her. Was she sitting in her sleep? She can’t remember her head against the pillow before she passed out. She touches the handle of her beloved knife, always strapped to her left thigh, willing herself calm. To her left, the crooked window frame clutches a dying air conditioner in its maw, slow ticks and a trickle of cool air bleeding from it into the stuffy room—outside, the city drones its endless, mechanical night song. An unexhaled breath crouches in her throat. Something passed through the darkened bedroom—a dream or a sound—and tore the sleep away from her in its wake. Alex puts her glasses on and peers over at the lamp on her dresser. The small beaded chain clinks against the stand. Her tenement is in one of the oldest sections of the district, clogged with factories and smokestacks and machines that span entire blocks. Sometimes the distant flick of a single switch on a factory floor will rattle the rotting bones of the two-hundred-year-old building. Construction, too, sends small earthquakes through her apartment. Occasionally the couple downstairs fucks or fights or both, and the few pictures on her walls shake like chimes. None of these things happen now, though. Nothing indigenous or natural just occurred. She can’t say how she knows, except that at this hour when she’s usually asleep, she’s
never been so achingly awake.

  The chain’s swaying slows to a stop, and the air conditioner dies altogether into silence. Alex licks her lips carefully, as though something in the shadows might hear, and swallows. Her mouth tastes like shit. She’s used to that. Last night, another night, just like all the other ones before: standing in the tiny kitchen in her underwear, fingers tapping her throat, pretending to stare at the cereal when, from the corner of her eye, the whiskey glowed like Rapunzel’s golden plaits, the captive princess waiting for the black queen to release her from a tall glass cage. And then: hours on the couch, the soft clink of ice against crystal as pixelated television images washed over the room like a grey marine fog. The last night, she told herself last night as she has for every adult night of her life, as the hours bled out of the room and into the streets. The last night I do this. And then she tilted her head and opened her mouth, the nightly lie disappearing with the whiskey and her despair into the evening heat.

  Outside, in the far-off distance, the whine of a motorcycle sounds out, breaking the spell. “Fuck,” she says, to no one in particular, as realization steals across her that she has to pee, so much so that her muscles clutch and spasm in pain, so much so that she’s once again surprised she didn’t piss the sheets. Usually this is the moment in the night when she starts up, stumbles onto the floor and out into the small living room and into the even smaller bathroom, where she sits a bit too heavily on the toilet—none of this done with a single conscious thought, as her body knows the routine and guides itself, her mind barely acknowledging the nighttime journey, all done in a half-awake state, the better to collapse back into bed. Tonight—this morning—is different. She’s too awake, too aware. Alex grunts slightly as she slides her tingling legs out to the floor, then stands, stretching as she runs her hands over her greasy face. It takes only two steps to her dresser, but when she puts her fingers around the lamp chain, she looks back at the window, hesitating. The blinds move slightly—the glass doesn’t quite fit within the frame, and a small thread of outside air pushes its way into the room. She hesitates, then lowers her hand and walks into the next room. She doesn’t want anyone to see the lights at her windows, to know she’s here. No need to draw attention to whatever’s awake and outside.

  It’s only four steps to the living room. The apartment is really nothing more than a single square partitioned into four: a bedroom, a smaller room that serves as her office, a combined kitchen/living room, and a miniscule bathroom with an oddly undersized tub. Her parents’ living room, back at the old house just outside the ruins of La Noria, is larger than the entire unit. Still, Alex can’t complain. The rent is affordable on her salary, there’s enough space for all her books, and she still gets a selfish thrill whenever she tells people she has a real two-bedroom with original wood floors. The kitchen blinds are partially opened, and the light that sifts in through the slats, along with the shadows and the ghostly glow from the silent TV, now only a fixed station signal, makes the space seem larger. Using the light as a guide, Alex walks into the dark bathroom—as always, she leaves flushing for the morning, so the two floors below her won’t wake to the sound of water rushing through the pipes in the thin plaster walls and retaliate with the obligatory wall pounding and shouting. She’s learned to moderate her movements and behavior at all times, always aware that anyone and everyone in the building can hear everything, just as she can hear them. It may be her apartment, but how she lives in it belongs to everyone else, or so it often seems.

  She turns the TV off before going back to bed, then checks the thermostat on the kitchen wall. Ninety-two degrees. She shouldn’t have looked—knowing makes it worse, though she’s not surprised at the number. The building is a poorly insulated heat trap and this is the ugly heart of summer. She can expect nights like this until the end of October, when within the space of a week, the apartment will turn into a freezer. When did the soft seasons of her youth become so unforgiving, so hard? A sharp gust of air lifts the kitchen blinds: with a metallic ping, they fall back against the screen. Alex tenses automatically, even though the sound is familiar. A year ago, a lone mouse made its home in the walls, driven up from the lower apartments by renovations. It had taken her a week to plug up all the cracks and holes—only to realize she’d trapped the mouse in the apartment. Two days and fifteen sticky traps later, she was the victor; and there hasn’t been a problem since. Still, random sounds often startle her into thinking something else has found its way inside.

  She walks past the half wall separating the living part of the room from the kitchen part, and stares at the cupboards, the oven, the refrigerator. The blinds ping again, halfheartedly. Everything sounds dejected in this heat. Alex turns, checking the three dish towels draped over the handle of the oven. Each one is exactly three inches apart from the other. Alex smiles as she touches each one, a gentle pat with her fingers that she hopes bestows some sense of peace and balance on the invisible mover. Every evening, no matter how bad it’s been, she always remembers to slide the towels together. Every morning, she always finds that the towels have been moved apart, as if some quiet spirit has fixated on this particular task and no other. Ever since it started—a few weeks after she moved in—she’s kept the TV on at night. Just in case she’s not the only one in the apartment who gets lonely or bored. Yes, she’s drunk and delusional, and there’s nothing wonderful or wondrous in the world to believe in. Obsidia is a city in which magic is duty and currency, not wonder. But Alex lets herself believe in this one silly thing. Easier than believing in anything else.

  The blinds ping again, several times in rapid succession, then grow limp. Alex slowly pulls the cord, the prickle of goose bumps spreading up her arms along with the thin plastic slats. What’s outside feels like no sudden summer storm. The blades of the overhead fan slow into silence, and the usual sonorous song of all the district’s machinery vanishes, as the distant steady roar of the rest of Obsidia takes its place. “Brownout,” she whispers to no one. Beyond the windowpane, in the small valley of cobblestoned streets and squat brick buildings—the dusty nighttime slumberings of a usually bustling cluster of laboratories, factories, and their attendant warehouses—streetlights wink off, and all the delicate building lights follow suit. The only remaining electrical glow emanates at the far horizon’s edge, a determinedly dirty orange that shows that the brownout is, as always, local only to her area. Becher—the aging district with the most machines and equipment per square block, and the least ability to use any large number of them at once without blowing out all the circuit boards. Sometimes, walking home at nightfall, Alex gets the impression that Becher District is simply one giant machine, a great engine comprised of billions of strange and otherworldly parts, with its tiny human and non-human engineers living in its midst, perpetually tinkering, fixing, improving, until the great moment its purpose is revealed and it springs into terrible life.

  These are the ridiculous things she muses about at three in the morning. Smiling, Alex presses her nose against the mesh screen, her eyes quickly adjusting to the dark. All along the high brick factory walls, deep green and cobalt blue flames flicker behind rows of lead-lined glass panes, and faint rainbow trails of phosphorescence wind through alleys and across freight docks, their owners invisible to her mundane eyes. Occasionally something flows out of a doorway or up from a sewer grate, multi-limbed, multi-winged, languid and at one with the night. This is the side of the city she never sees, indecipherable and mysterious, a country seemingly a million miles away even as she crosses its borders every time she steps outside. There are people at her workplace, she sees them in the elevators and in the cafeteria, dark-eyed, magic-dabbling humans and hybrids who know these places, who visit them with impunity and ease. She wishes she had the courage to ask them to invite her in. She would learn their powers and rise over the district like a black empress of pain, reveling in every astonished, horrified scream. But she knows she doesn’t possess even a fraction of the strange abilities that allow th
em passage into that shadow city. When she holds up her hands against the world, the only thing that happens is nothing. A discontented voyeur, staring from a safe distance, jealous and alone. A thaumaturgically disabled dreamer. That’s who she is.

  Three stories below, the trees in the miniscule courtyard let out long, rustling shudders. A sudden wind is rushing out of the heart of the district, like invisible tidal waters being pulled away from rust-clogged shores. The thick chains that lower the fire escape ladder sway and creak, then grow still. Alex feels it before she realizes what’s happening—the unnatural absence of all sound, everywhere. There is never not sound in Obsidia. There is never peace and silence. And yet here it is; and it is horrifying. She touches the side of her slender refrigerator. The metal trembles under her touch. It’s running, but she can’t hear it.

  A low, heavy boom sounds out—an explosion. She definitely heard that. Alex steps away from the window as she watches the bruised artificial glow of the city lights disappear below the horizon. It’s like being punched in the chest. It can’t be. Darkness rushes toward her building, gobbling up all the light in its path. This is the ocean of true darkness that is swallowing all before it, the great cosmic deep that has always been here, since long before the city grew strong enough to push it back. “No,” she whimpers. There won’t be enough time to find a flashlight or matches and candles. She grabs hold of the oven door handle as the lights go out all around her.

  In the great dark, in absolute silence. Alex stands, shivering, hand painfully clasping the metal handle, squeezing harder and harder. There has to be something, some light, some mage’s queer glare in the cobblestone streets outside. Stretching forward, she raises her hand to the window, to where it should be. Her fingers never reach the blinds. They find nothing, no refrigerator to her left, no kitchen counter to her right. Is this magic? Is this death? Images flood her mind, fruiting like overripe fungi: the building is gone, the world is gone, she is adrift, and the tiny square of aging timber her feet rest on drifts with her like scum on a pond of water, naked and vulnerable, a weightless blip on the back of the slumbering land. And something is swimming up from underneath the city, something is pushing and gnawing all the layers of the earth away…