‘You did spend an awfully long time chattering out there, I wondered when you’d trouble me. Works well enough from my point of view of course. In nineteen minutes everybody in this building will gain new powers from…’ Ash snapped his finger at the metal podium-looking thing behind him. ‘…this Brytech-constructed Wordstone amplifier.’
Sapphire took a deep breath. Let him monologue. Let him draw himself into a false sense of security. She just hoped Daz could stop themself from trying to rip his throat out before that moment came.
He was undeniably handsome, Ash Brytic. He wasn’t overly tall, and he’d obviously compensated for this in width – specifically around his shoulders. The tightness of the white top was specifically chosen to enhance that. Smart glasses over bright blue eyes gave him an intellectual air: rumours that he’d manoeuvred the real brains of Brytech out of the company suggested he hadn’t earned it.
All of it was lost on Sapphire, of course; and even if if hadn’t been, she didn’t adhere to his racial fetish. And even if she had, the man was a cunt.
Ash surveyed the group. ‘I see my son hasn’t….’
‘Child,’ said the group minus Rob pretty much in unison.
The corner of Ash’s mouth twitched. Sapphire was very glad they’d rehearsed that one.
‘Of course, that would be your fault wouldn’t it.’ With sickening inevitability, he turned to Hayley, the bright blue eyes sparkling with something poisonous. ‘Shame you got mixed up with this lot, Hayley Simmons. I keep tabs on promising computer science students, you know. You could have… oh, really?’
Because Kat and Rob, who’d been on either side, had moved protectively in front of her. Yes, they were all thinking while vomiting internally, it’s definitely Hayley’s academics that you were tracking.
‘What has he told you, my whining gender-confused accident? I presume he’s made up his own little stories about how I ruined each of my marriages, downplaying his own role and his bitch of a mother; and completed neglected…’
Here it came.
‘…how I’ve gone about changing and improving the world for thousands, nay millions, of people? And how my ownership of the Wordstone will bring humanity…’
It required an irritatingly un-Sapphire-like theatrical flourish of her hand to produce the sword stream, but she’d managed to get it down to a small stealthy one. The monologuing megalomaniac certainly didn’t seem to notice until the swords were on him.
Almost every single one shattered on impact.
There were rips in his clothing. The hits had landed. Yet apart from a cut on his cheek, Ash looked utterly unharmed. He looked annoyed, especially as he grabbed a straggler and shattered it into shards in his fist; but that was very far from being the same.
‘Sapphire Sharma,’ he growled. ‘Real name Mithali Vastrakar. I should have known.’
It wasn’t, that was an alias she’d planted; but him getting her name wrong didn’t have the same satisfaction as seeing him cut to ribbons. She needed a solar recharge, and time to figure out what was going on, and she didn’t have either.
But she did, because Ash was busy taking his t-shirt and gilet off. She shuffled behind Kat, keeping her eyes on the narcissistic spectacle as her panels emerged from the gaps she’d had to cut in her favourite and only shirt. Kat, sweating already, topped her up.
The t-shirt was flung to one side.
Ash Brytic’s body shone. His entire torso, up to his wrists and his neck, gleamed. Not with sweat either: those were hundreds of tiny panels, glimmering in the harsh electric light. As he smirked, they flickered from gleaming armour into hundreds of blades, then back to gleaming black like an eel in water. The prosthetics CEO had turned himself into one big prosthetic.
He snapped his fingers. Then he leapt, grabbed one of Sapphire’s charging panels, and ripped it off. Sapphire was almost too shocked to cry out.
Charlie jumped at him with his sword arm, but the sword bounced away harmlessly. Meanwhile Sapphire, the greatest of them, was shouting in pain as one of her wing tubes dripped black.
‘A child,’ sneered Ash. ‘Really, Miriam? You sent a child against me?’
His palm glowed yellow. Charlie realised too late that it wasn’t his palm, but a metal glove with wires running from it down his arm.
Then something barrelled into him from the side. The beam of yellow flew close enough to his face for him to feel the heat.
‘My wing!’ yelled Daz, as they skidded across the floor away from Charlie. ‘My fucking wing!’
One glowing yellow energy panel had a whole punched through it. It fluttered uselessly as Daz snarled at their back.
Charlie turned to see Ash’s fist plunging down towards him. It missed by centimetres, as he rolled away and Ash snarled, grasping at his eyes. Behind him, Kat was picking Daz up off the ground with one hand, a ray of light coming from the other.
‘No you don’t!’
Ash’s fist swept around in an arc, as Caitlyn hopped none-too-nimbly away from the “Brytech-constructed Wordstone amplifier”. He faltered for an instant as he looked at her, and Charlie wondered if all straight men were idiots in the same way. Then Ash’s skin became spikes again as he flung himself at the woman.
Caitlyn screamed. The noise sank deep into Charlie’s gut.
They had fifteen minutes. Only fifteen minutes to stop this ball of self-importance and self-satisfaction, before he drove everyone in the building to madness for the sake of his ego. Except he was, to all intents and purposes, unstoppable. They were never going to make it. They were never going to make it.
He took off after Ash, fear of failure raging in him and his hands glowing purple, as he realised what Caitlyn’s scream was accomplishing. Ash dodged the negativity swipe awkwardly, and Charlie saw his face as he turned.
‘You think I’m afraid of you, girl?’
He was though. His gritted jaw was pure terror. Charlie was too.
‘Caitlyn!’ Charlie said. ‘Sing to me!’
Whether Caitlyn heard him over her earplugs, he didn’t know; but she understood. Her scream focussed.
Charlie gazed straight into the full fury of Ash Brytic, his blue eyes almost red behind his smart glasses. The desire for recognition, control, and his own specific vision for improvement of humanity that didn’t involve consulting anybody else. The lust to tear down anything that stood in the way of that.
It horrified him. Good. He left fly with all his fear and dismay.
Ash’s spikes folded back into armour plating, but it didn’t shield his face or his hands. He saw that the boy knew it, and the fear sunk deeper into the both of them. He blocked his face with his forearms as purple despair burst against him, again and again. By letting off bursts of his power at the same rate as Caitlyn sang, he could stay just terrified enough to make Ash Brytic a lot more frightened than he was.
Something whizzed between them. It was a single sword of light.
‘NO!’
The wires from Ash’s gauntlets flopped impotently down between them. The yellow light in his palms died. Charlie laughed.
Shit.
The purple burst just as impotently in Ash’s face. A wrist grasped his left wrist.
‘With my own prosthetic, no less. You little prick.’
He grasped, twisted, tore Charlie’s arm off from the elbow, and brought it swinging down.
Rob softened the blow just in time.
Dear God. Was this what he’d been unknowingly serving? This half-human fiend?
He’d known about Ash Brytic, of course, the charismatic genius who’d made Brytech from the ground up only twenty years ago, seen it become the world leader in prosthetics technology, and became a billionaire at the age of forty-six while looking younger. Everybody knew that. He’d even known about Ash’s unsavoury tendencies towards women of colour. He hadn’t thought anything he was doing would even catch the eye of somebody that high up in the company, let alone somebody who was an actual monster.
Than again, he already knew he hadn’t thought enough about his job.
‘Ah yes, the reject intern.’
He could feel the barrage of Ash’s fists onto his body. A soft toy being slammed into you by a trebuchet still hurt. He didn’t know how long he’d be able to keep it up. Behind the man’s shoulders Charles howled, Sapphire winced, and Caitlyn coughed up blood.
‘Still wearing the fucking whale tie,’ said Ash through the punches. ‘How much Oliver and Hugo pitied you.’
‘I like this tie!’
What a stupid line that was. That was Rob’s thought as Ash’s fist closed around his neck.
‘Do you. Well let me implant it on your neck.’
Rob… couldn’t… breathe…
‘Can’t imagine a softened windpipe is easy to breathe through either.’
And suddenly a great peace passed through Rob Nevel.
This was his penance. He would die here, at the giant hand of Ash Brytic; and by doing so he’d distract Ash for long enough for his friends, and they were his friends even if he wasn’t theirs, to destroy Ash’s machine.
It was what he deserved. He’d accomplished nothing else in his miserable life, apart from betraying people who deserved so much better. This was the only way he could reclaim some dignity, even if it did result in him shitting his trousers as he went.
‘What are you smiling at?’
Ash’s soft squishy hand let up briefly on his soft squishy windpipe. Rob disabled the shield, took a breath he didn’t have any right to take, and spoke his last words.
‘You can take your internship… and shove it… up your arse.’
Ash scowled. Rob waited for the pressure to resume, and for darkness to swallow him.
That was when Ash Brytic’s body began to flash in different colours. He dropped Rob, and spun around in confusion.
‘You have no idea how promising I am,’ snarled Hayley.
Daz watched from their spot on the floor as Hayley lit Ash Brytic up like a particularly awful Christmas tree.
As it turned out, the wings could be repaired by thinking about it really hard; but it took a lot out of you. The process felt like somebody was wrenching nerve endings out of their back and making balloon animals out of them. So they’d been sat in a spot of Kat Pyre haze, hoping to avoid Ash’s stare, while they tried not to scream.
‘That’s my proprietary code you piece of shit!’ yelled Ash.
He took a lurching step towards Hayley, but his body froze in mid-air.
‘Your “proprietary code” is child’s play compared to the language of the universe,’ said Hayley.
One leg folded under Ash. The other began to bounce on the spot. The snarling billionaire hopped in a circle, his right hand stretched over his head like a pirouette, while slapping himself with his left. Daz would have laughed, but their back was still in tremendous pain.
‘Give me back my body!’ he wailed.
‘He’s toppling over,’ said Kat.
‘Yeah, hold on.’
Hayley pulled at things the rest of them couldn’t see, and Ash planted both feet. Then his prosthetic second skin flicked over to spikes, and he punched himself directly in the crotch. Rob winced noticeably.
Then his other fist did the same. Then again. Then again. Ash’s howls of pain grew more guttural with every blow.
‘Look at him cry!’ said Hayley.
‘Put your new toy down Hales,’ said Kat. ‘We’ve still got a world to save.’
‘Put him down? Why?’
‘It’s making the puppy feel uncomfortable, apart from anything else,’ said Daz.
‘Yeah well he would, wouldn’t he. He sees himself in Ash.’
‘What!?’ said Rob, with (Daz thought) justifiable indignation.
Hayley turned. She was smiling a smile Daz hadn’t seen from her before, and there was a new light in her eyes. Daz didn’t know if she’d coded it.
‘That’s what people like them do, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘They rule the world with technology and ego and the fact that being a white cis male allows them to do whatever the fuck they want. But what if they didn’t have their technology? What if somebody took it from under them? What if I took it from under them? How pathetic would they be? I can see it all now, every line of their code, every function that makes them the smug bastards they are.
‘I can do what you tried to Daz. I can tear it all down, recode their systems, recode their bodies from the base up. I can start everything again, but make it right this time. Make it fair.’
As she spoke Hayley rose off the ground, coding herself against the pull of gravity Daz presumed. Jesus fucking Christ. This was not what they’d tried to… Okay it sort of was, but without the risk of them becoming god-emperor of the earth by way of a degree in C#. They hadn’t wanted to become the World Government.
‘And even if I can’t alter humanity perfectly yet,’ the god-emperor proclaimed, her eyes aglow, ‘I can alter the systems they depend on. Their computers, their phones, their watches. What they rely on during every moment of their lives. I can change them on the outside, to change humans from the inside. Ash Brytic, your company won’t even remain as a memory. I’ll recode every search engine from the ground up, every website, every digital archive that exists so that neither you nor your empire ever left a mark on any living person. I’ll rewrite history so that Brytech never existed. How does that sound…?’
‘HAYLEY!’
As they flew across the room, it became a sickening inevitability that it would happen again. With the god-emperor in their arms, Daz cannoned into the far side of the small room, softened by the puppy’s best efforts – and, of course, with one wing seared through its middle by the beam that had come out of Ash Brytic’s glasses.
‘Not a-fucking-gain…’
Ash’s armour flickered back under his control, and predictably he lumbered towards Daz and Hayley, who were in a heap over by the wall. He drew his arm back, prior to flying off to the side as Sapphire kicked him in his unprotected face, shattering both his laser glasses and his nose. Another guttural cry emerged from his throat as he lay there, this time the cry of the defeated.
Point to Sharma, Daz guessed.
‘Hales,’ they said, their back hurting like an absolute motherfucker, ‘maybe we can go the more subtle route? We quite like you, y’see. We’d rather you didn’t get a laser blasted through your face by some operative for a higher power while you went about changing the world.’
‘”Higher power” again Daz? Oh, you mean…’
‘…shady corporations, yes. Or intelligence agencies. Or…’
‘Stop there, while you’re still on ones I believe in.’ Hayley sighed. ‘Yes. Yes, that sounds nice.’
Hayley stayed sitting down, burbling to herself. Probably the best way for somebody who could code the rest of humanity to her whims to be, Daz thought. They stood up slowly, along with the rest, their back wrenching itself like some demonic being was pulling it with its claws.
‘Hey Daz,’ said Hayley from the floor, the glow gone from her eyes. ‘I… I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m sorry.’
Daz didn’t say that when you were scared of everything, all the time, a god-emperor here or there hardly made a difference. What was the point?
There were others things they needed to pay attention to, like the cracked sad laughter coming from the bleeding broken face of Ashley Brytic. It shouldn’t have been Caitlyn who pulled his face up by his short hair and stared into his eyes, but it was.
‘Don’t make me,’ she said simply.
‘Make you what? It’s too late. I’ve won.’
Daz looked at their watch. 2359.
‘You don’t have time,’ crooned Ash, his Welsh accent stronger now in the moment of his collapse/victory. ‘In less than a minute, the next phase of humanity will begin. Beat me, kick me, kill me: I don’t care! The Wordstone is about to activate again. Every person in this building will become more than they were, and there’s nothing you can do about it! Oh and you won’t believe what I’ve been writing!’
‘Hayley!’ yelled Sapphire, wrenching at the podium in the centre without success. ‘Code the outside away!’
Hayley leapt to her feet, wobbled dramatically, fell on Daz, re-balanced, and rushed to the middle of the room. She swiped a hand as she ran: there was a grating sound of metal being ripped away. Inside the metal podium-looking thing, now open to the elements, was a black matt fist-sized stone – except it was glowing green.
2359 became 0000.
Nothing happened.
Everybody looked at each other. But nothing happened.
Caitlyn watched Hayley swipe the stone out of the podium. It was glowing, yes – but it wasn’t doing anything else. It didn’t seem to be activating the amplifier. Ash Brytic wasn’t rising off the floor in a golden blaze. Ash didn’t seem to be doing anything in fact, as she held up his face by the hair. It looked like every one-night stand she’d turned down, except its eyes were flickering sideways in panic.
‘This isn’t right,’ said Ash.
Caitlyn dropped the head. They all gathered around the Wordstone.
‘Maybe it’s running slow?’ said Rob.
‘It’s a mystical word-devouring superpower-granting stone,’ said Kat. ‘I don’t think they “run slow”.’
‘This isn’t right!’ moaned Ash. ‘Why am I not a dark assassin? Or a space deity? Where are my tentacles? Dear God, where are my tentacles!?’
‘Maybe it’s just decided it doesn’t want to give this fuckwit powers?’ said Daz.
‘Miriam would know,’ said Charlie, holding his crushed arm up with its broken camera and trying not to cry.
‘What have you done!?’ yelled Ash.
‘Is his code still broken?’ said Sapphire.
Hayley bristled. ‘His code isn’t broken at all, thank you, it’s expertly rewritten. But yeah, universe code debugs itself but Ash’s “proprietary code”, which incidentally is ugly and badly written, doesn’t. That should hold him until he can get an engineer down here.’
‘No!’
‘Good,’ said Sapphire. ‘Let’s get this out of the building, I don’t want to see him become an octopus. Oh?’
Hayley’s watch was buzzing. She put it to her ear.
‘Hello? Hey! Yeah we’re good, the Wordstone didn’t go off in the end. Not sure why. Your dad’s been tied down by some amazing coding skills… What?’ She looked at Ash as she put it on speaker. ‘It’s for you.’
‘Hello daddy dearest,’ said Alex’s voice.
‘Andrew!’
‘You’re on mute so I can’t hear you deadnaming me. I’m done with trying to get you to respect things you’re hardwired not to, so I’ll keep this short and practical.’
Of course Ash was going to talk over it, so Caitlyn gently placed a foot on the back of his neck. She wished she’d worn high heels.
‘If you come after any of us again, I’ll go to the press. I’ll bring evidence of your secret lab, and some of what you did down there. I’ll include some evidence of what you did to mum, and your general parenting… style. Don’t think I don’t have it. Don’t think I haven’t already sent a backup to somebody else either.’
‘YOU UNGRATEFUL SHITE!’
Caitlyn pressed down gently. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling.
‘I’ll go to the press… first. Then I’ll leak what information I have to your competitors. After that… maybe the courts would be interested in some of this. It could start with them looking into your lack of planning permission for the lab, but… well. It started with tax evasion for Al Capone, didn’t it?
‘Don’t come for me. Don’t come for them. Don’t come for the LLL. Please don’t. Because, despite everything, I have some Stockholm Syndrome-style attachment to you. Unfortunately, you are my father. But I have much more fondness for everybody else in that room where you are.’
There was a choking sound down the line, as if a sob was being suppressed.
‘My name’s Alex Holton, and I disown you. Bye, I guess.’
They hung up.
Nobody said anything. How could you follow that up? Nobody tried. They had the Wordstone, and Ash Brytic was a victim of his own invention (and Hayley’s amazing coding skills). Sapphire left the room first: the others trailed out behind her, Caitlyn following Rob at the back.
‘You’ve killed this world.’
She tried to ignore the ravings of the fallen clown, and Ravings of the Fallen Clown was one hell of a name for an opera. He kept going, though.
‘Humanity will sicken and die, wracked by pollution, by radiation, by disease, by war! I could have saved them. I could have saved us! But no, a group of freaks have decided they know better!’
Immaculately manicured nails dug into her palms.
‘You’ll spend twenty years being different for the sake of it, telling yourselves that your genders and your sexualities mean anything to anybody, and then the planet will burn without any of you having accomplished a single thing other than alienating other people! Well fucking done!’
Caitlyn grabbed Rob as he charged back past her.
She knew exactly how he felt. This group had given her so much. They’d helped her discover who she really was, given her friendships that weren’t based on how attractive she was and that wouldn’t break because she didn’t drink in them, provided a space she felt comfortable letting her guard down in, and maybe even given her a hope of a romance that was more than skin-deep.
It was Rob who’d started it all off. Rob who’d been genuinely friendly towards her without fancying her, Rob who’d been interested in her music without fancying her, Rob who’d actually seemed to want her and Kat to pair up. Rob who’d also discovered who he was with these people, who’d made his first firm friends here. Yes he hadn’t always been completely honest, but whose fault had that been really? That answer lay behind her, shooting his mouth off.
Rob had who stay who he was. An innocent welcoming friendly soul, who could welcome others who weren’t her into Novelber with a dopey smile and honest interest in their writing.
‘I’ll get this one,’ she said. ‘You follow the others.’
He looked at her with his big eyes, slightly narrower than they should have been. Then he nodded and followed the others.
As she approached the bulky white man with the wildly exaggerated sense of self-importance, she thought of Will, lying behind her in the lab. He hadn’t been the best person ever, to understate the fact dramatically; but he hadn’t been the worst either. He’d had a truly awful upbringing, and he’d shepherded them through the LLL’s first attack, and he had been trying to adapt to use gender-neutral pronouns, which was better than the man who’d killed him.
Will Gubbins had deserved ridicule, perhaps, and mandatory retraining regarding sexism; but he hadn’t deserved to die. His parents hadn’t deserved to die. The person responsible for all of it, though…
Ash’s stream of verbal diarrhoea stuttered to a stop as Caitlyn knelt down next to him. She put her face level with his, his breath smelling somehow of petrol. She turned on the third and brightest of her three carefully gauged levels of smile.
‘For the Gubbins family,’ she said, ‘and for all of us. Try snapping your fingers to this.’
She took a deep petrol-scented breath, and screamed.
Content Warnings: “anti-woke” posturing, dismemberment (prosthetics), intentional misgendering, loss of bodily control, racial fetishisation, real-life world issues, sexist language, suicidal ideation (minor), strangulation, very strong language
Balladeer - Ballads and Words 