Your Future Hasn't Been Written Yet
by K. Stonham
first released 13th June 2022
"They're here." Claire stopped in front of a building. "This is it."
Toby looked dubious. "Are you sure, Shadowdancer? This looks like an office building to me."
"Yes, I'm sure, Toby," she retorted. "Aja and Krel are in there."
"The door's locked," Jim reported. "We need to find someone with the passcode-"
Varvatos punched through the metal door, tearing it from its frame.
"-or we could do that," Jim finished.
"Varvatos recommends we locate the Queen- and King-in-Waiting before any local miscreants realize this building lacks a door."
"Yeah, that sounds good to me," Toby agreed, going inside.
"After you," Jim said, gesturing Claire in.
"Thank you."
Varvatos brought up the rear. The inside of the building was all identical hallways crossing at right angles. But more importantly...
Claire conjured a shadow portal that would take them directly to Aja and Krel.
Toby gaped. "Whaaaa?"
"We're inside the shield now," Claire explained, grinning. "I can't portal us in or out across that barrier, but around the interior of it? Fair game."
"You're brilliant," Jim told her.
"After you," she told the three boys, indicating the portal.
"This looks like a repurposed blimp hanger," Douxie murmured after Zoe let them in the building. "Why would they ever have had a blimp out here?"
"Spaceship storage...?" Archie suggested, looking around.
"Maybe?" Zoe rapped at the walls. "I boosted Stuart's ship from somewhere else in this miserable compound, but I think this is the oldest building here."
"Maybe it's the original," Douxie suggested. "They probably took a site leftover from World War Two and repurposed it."
"Sounds like a government thing." Zoe put her palm to yet another keypad, fried it, and opened the door, peeking in. "Jackpot," she hissed, and waltzed into the room. "Server central. You boys go find your crystals, I'll be in here giving this whole operation a black eye."
Douxie and Archie exchanged a glance. "Back in two shakes," Douxie told her.
She waved a negligent hand at him, the other already starting to run over the server racks as she dove into her power, eyes glowing pink.
Shaking his head, Douxie kept moving, ghosting from doorway to doorway. Some rooms were occupied; others were not.
The one he needed to get into, unfortunately, was.
He gritted his teeth and readied a spell.
Frying the keypad, he opened the door and stepped inside.
"Hey, you can't be in here-" one of the orange-suited figures started to say.
"Interminus Nocti Somburso!" shot out. Three figures crumpled to the ground, snoring.
"Effective," Archie commented as the two of them picked their way over the bodies.
"Why, thank you, Arch."
Spread out across the table the three minions had been gathered around were Krel and Aja's belongings. Why the minions had been scanning a perfectly normal physics textbook with a handheld detector, Douxie could not understand. But then, he didn't understand these people in general. He swiftly stuffed everything back into the two backpacks that lay crumpled in the far corners of the table.
"You only really need to bring back the crystals and serrators," Archie observed.
Douxie snorted. "And get Krel and Aja in trouble with the school district? Let alone leaving 49-B with whatever scientific comments Krel's scrawled in the margins? I think not." He shrugged one backpack on and held the other out to his familiar. "Here. Shift and carry."
"I am not a pack mule," Archie complained, but obeyed, turning into Douxie's doppelganger.
"All right. We get back to Zoe, find out what she's found out, and make our way home," Douxie planned.
"Let's hope it's that easy," Archie said, heading for the door. But Douxie paused, looking at the rest of the room. Beyond the inspection table, there were rows and rows of shelving, holding what had to be hundreds or thousands of boxes.
"This is an evidence locker," he said, blinking. There was something...
Something sounds different, he thought. It wasn't the hum of the fluorescent lights, or the drone of the air conditioning, nor even the far fainter sound of electricity within the walls. In fact, he wasn't sure it was really a sound at all.
Archie turned. "Douxie, we can't-"
"Something's here, Arch," Douxie said, heading for the nearest row of shelving. "I just need to take a look."
"The same way you just needed to take a look at those Etruscan carvings?" his familiar asked, following.
"Cut me a break, Arch, that was centuries ago."
"Holy shit!" Toby said the second he was out of the portal and saw Krel. "Dude, are you okay?"
Krel coughed. "Been better," he admitted.
"Prince Krel!" Varvatos was kneeling by his side in an instant, gently tilting his head up, getting blue Akiridion blood on his fingers. "Who has done this to you?"
"Colonel Kubritz," Krel said.
"I will pound her into Goran dust," Varvatos swore. "Her terror and pain will know no end."
"Yes, that is all very well and good," Aja told him. "Can we please get untied?"
Claire was already behind her. "I can't undo these knots," she said. "Jim, sword?"
"I think this will work better." A quick twist of Jim's hand summoned one of his glaive blades. He used a swift upward slice to part the ropes like butter. Aja's shoulders relaxed as her restraints fell away.
"Toby, get Krel free," Claire directed even as Aja stood, stretching her arms and working the kinks out.
"Sure, gotcha." He moved to do just that. Much as he loved his warhammer, it wouldn't do the trick for this, so he summoned Eclipse to his hand.
Which was when Varvatos fell to the ground, his crash-landing shaking the floor like he weighed multiple tons.
"Oh no, I don't think so." A slim gray-haired woman stepped through the room's open door, a gun in her hand. Toby felt like it should have been smoking. Why wasn't it smoking.
Aja tensed. "Birdie," she growled.
Krel dropped his head, closing his eyes. "Not you again."
"I have no idea who the rest of you are, nor do I care," the woman said in sterling upper class tones. "But I will not be deprived of my rightful bounty, so I'm afraid you'll all simply have to die."
On paper, it was ridiculous. There were four of them (okay, six, but Krel was still tied up and not in top condition anyway, and Varvatos was out cold) and only one of her. On the other hand, she had her finger on the trigger of a gun that had already taken down Varvatos, their heaviest hitter.
Nobody moved.
"Look," Jim said, raising his hands slowly. "I'm sure we can-"
"This is formulated to knock Akiridions unconscious," the woman said, like Jim hadn't even spoken. "I'm not entirely sure what it will do to members of your species, but I do suspect it will be rather... fatal." Her smile said she enjoyed that prospect way too much.
"It's like the warehouse in those Indiana Jones films, isn't it?" Archie murmured, following his familiar down the aisles of boxes.
"Mmm, it is a bit, isn't it?" Douxie was running his fingers up and down the shelves as he walked, making sure to touch each cardboard box. "Do you think they lifted the idea?"
"That depends on whether 49-B renovated before or after 1981," Archie said, trying not to read the labels of the boxes. He largely failed. Each contained the name of a presumably alien species, the date of the encounter, and what the box contained. There was a lot of death here.
Douxie stopped. "This one," he said, pulling a box off the shelf and setting it on the ground. He opened it, and pulled out...
"A coat?" Archie asked, surprised.
Douxie shook the garment out, revealing it to be a tan trenchcoat. "Oh no..."
"Wait, is that...?"
"Johnny's?" Douxie closed his eyes. He pressed his nose to the coat's collar and inhaled. "Yeah, that's his clove cigarettes, all right. Not recent, though."
"Do you think he's...?" Archie asked, trying to make the question delicate. Douxie had always liked Johnny. Archie had, too, deeming him amusing, even if his habit of cosplaying (before they'd ever known the term) as John Constantine had been a bit irksome. He hadn't been old for a wizard, certainly not above a century in age, but he'd had a rare flexibility in his magic, much like Douxie, that had seen them bond and even spend a while as flatmates in New York City.
He and Douxie hadn't crossed paths with the younger wizard in years. Decades.
"I don't know." Douxie bundled up the coat, stuffed it in the backpack he wore, and put the lid back on the now-empty box, replacing it on the shelf. It looked like it had never been touched. His fingers lingered on the sigil sketched on the box's label in faded Sharpie. "Noise's stopped," he said, which made little sense. "Come on, let's get back to Zo and see what she's found."
Claire hardly dared to breathe. She didn't know what the gun was loaded with, and she didn't want any of them to find out the hard way.
She also knew this smug bitch was one of the people responsible for kidnapping her friends and hurting Krel.
If I made a portal, Claire thought, in front of the gun...
But she'd have to do it instantaneously. Faster than a trigger finger could pull.
Was she fast enough?
Could she risk it, if she wasn't?
Paralyzed by indecision, she waited for something to change.
That something was Aja.
The Akiridion princess ripped Excalibur off Jim's back and charged.
The bounty hunter shifted targets, and shot.
There was a gurgling sound. A body crumpled to the ground.
The transduction flickered, and failed, revealing a dark blue body, nearly as big as Varvatos, with a hooded, bird-like face. Claire could swear she heard a hawk's cry fading away into the distance.
Aja spat on her fallen foe. "That is what you get for hurting my brother." The pool of dark blue blood under the figure grew. Claire edged backwards, not wanting to get it on her feet.
Toby's eyes were wide. "Holy crap that was awesome," he breathed.
"Thank you." Aja turned and presented Jim's blade back to him. "Thank you for the loan."
"Anytime," Jim said numbly. He blinked. "Wait a minute," he said, staring at the sword. "I thought only I was able to wield Excalibur."
"Escape now, theorize later," Krel mumbled, standing as Toby got rid of his bonds. He wobbled on his feet; Aja leapt to steady him.
"Uh. What about Varvatos?" Claire asked.
"Ugh." Aja gestured to Jim; he took her place supporting Krel. "Where is his serrator-ah, there it is!" She pushed the device into Varvatos' slack hand and fiddled with it. In a flash of blue light, he returned to his old man form. At the same time, Aja's transduction dispelled. She went back and picked Krel up, cradling him in all four arms. Ignoring his nearly inaudible protests. "Now, where are we going?"
"Through a portal or two," Jim told her. "They've got wards on this building, and on the whole compound. Getting to you guys has not been fun."
"Come on, let's go," Claire said, making a portal back to the building's front door.
Toby knelt down and managed to heft Varvatos, snoring, onto his back. "Ugh, the things I do for you, Nana," he complained, marching through the rift.
Claire shepherded her other friends through the portal. Closing behind her, it left the empty room with the cooling body of a bounty hunter, and a dark splatter mark on the ceiling from where Claire had barely managed to redirect her shot in time.
The server room was warm. And loud. In its own way, Douxie thought, it was the modern analog of the storage room from which he'd just come.
But Zoe, pink light sparkling at her fingertips, was clearly being more thorough in her searching of Area 49-B's precious data than he had been of their artifacts.
(Part of him said that it wasn't too late to go back, to do a more in-depth dig through the contents of that room...)
We're not here for that, he told himself. We're here to get Krel and Aja, and to find out how Johnny's involved with 49-B.
Or was, he admitted to the bad feeling he'd been having since finding his friend's coat. Because Johnny had loved that thing, far beyond its cosplay abilities. He'd loved its warmth, its utility, all the pockets it had... he'd even added a long one to the lining, so that he could do Highlander cosplay too. Bar brainwashing, Douxie couldn't imagine him ever just giving it up.
"Zoe!" He had to raise his voice to carry over the noise of the computers and fans.
She turned toward him, raised an expressive eyebrow.
Douxie grimaced and dug Johnny's coat out of the backpack, holding it by the shoulder straps, letting the garment hang free.
It took a moment for the penny to drop. He could see it as it happened, her smug expression falling away, wiped clean by shock, betrayal. Then disbelief, followed by fury...
Her rage was like a pressure wave, the servers behind her /exploding/ as she stalked forward. Zoe was yelling something; Hisirdoux couldn't hear it over the BANGS.
She snatched the garment from him, pressing her nose to the collar. Checking for Johnny's scent, as he had.
"That son of a bitch," she said, looking up at Douxie.
"Zo-"
She sniffed, and dashed tears from her eyes, glaring at him. "Can't believe I slept with that traitor-"
"We don't know all the circumstances," he said. Knowing his words were weak. "He might be a prisoner, or working under duress."
"I don't fucking care-"
"We should go," Archie interrupted. "They're certain to notice your destruction of their server farm sooner than later."
"I will kill him," Zoe swore. She shoved the coat back into Douxie's arms as she stalked forward. "If we run into him, I will kill him, and you won't stop me, Casperan."
They had been four coming in; they were six going out. Which had been the plan. Except two of their party were incapacitated, which mean two others had to carry them. Which left Jim and Claire as the only two able to fight, if they got into trouble.
Jim didn't like those numbers. He could see that Claire didn't either.
But it was what they had to work with.
"Before we go out this door," she said, nodding at the front door of the building, "where are we going to?"
"We can't go back the way we came in," Jim said. "Not unless we meet up with Douxie and Archie en route." They had no way of getting over the wall. Though, he guessed, they did have more dwarkstones...
"We should head for the taco truck," Toby said. "We can blow a hole in the front wall if we need to."
It was as good a plan as any. Jim made an inquiring gesture at Claire.
She nodded. "That's better than anything I've got," she said.
"Hey, maybe we can steal a Jeep," Toby added, shifting Varvatos higher on his back with a grunt. "Because, you know, he might not weigh as much in this form, but grandpa here is still pretty heavy."
"All right. So we head for the front gate, and if we happen to see a vehicle with keys along the way, we grab it," Jim concluded. "Everyone ready?" He got three nods, what might have been a nod from Krel, and a snore from Varvatos. "Let's go."
He opened the front door of the building to find a squad waiting for them, neurometers at the ready.
Jim yanked the door shut. A green blast splashed off the metal.
"Or not," he said, wide-eyed. "Okay, plan B."
"What is plan B?" asked Aja.
"I'll let you know as soon as we think of it," he told her.
She raised an eyebrow. "I am not very impressed with this rescue attempt."
"Do you have a better idea?" Toby asked her.
She thought about it for a second. "We go back to the torture chamber and get Birdie's gun. We use it, and our shields, to fight our way through our enemies."
Claire was pale. "She said the dosage was probably lethal for humans."
Toby swallowed. "Like those neurometers they were just firing at us aren't?"
"There has to be a way out of this without killing!" Jim said.
"I would love to know what your solution is," mumbled Krel. His blue blood was still dripping on the floor. Jim's gaze followed a drop of it, watched it splash with the others.
Jim's jaw set. He didn't know this Colonel Kubritz, wouldn't be able to pick her out of a lineup... but she'd done this to Krel.
Krel, who wasn't precisely harmless, but who never, ever struck first.
Jim took a deep breath, and tried to find his way. His friend, or his principles...?
"I have an idea," he heard himself say. He turned to Claire. "Tell me if you can do this..."
The three of them managed to exit the converted hangar with no fanfare. Slipping into shadows was almost second nature by now. Douxie glanced at the skyline; beyond the buildings, the sky was fully dark. Had Jim and the others gotten the Tarrons and gotten out by now?
The shape of the building opposite twinged something in his brain, though. Holding his breath, he held still as Zoe and Archie slipped past him. Trying to lure his thought closer. It was something about the layout...
"Zo," he breathed. Caught her wrist. "Do you still have the map?"
Her eyes bored into his. Then she pulled her phone out. A flick of her wrist set the holographic map glowing above it again.
Looking at it, Douxie's mouth narrowed to a line, his stomach dropping into his feet as his niggling notion fleshed itself out. Made itself real, and known. "Johnny's still here."
"What?"
He spun the hologram slightly, so that she and Archie would see what he did. A drop of power etched blue plasma lines through most of the thoroughfares. Drawing the sigil the entire site had been rebuilt to make. The same sigil that had been on the box holding Johnny's coat.
A sigil that depended on a wizard in the center to power it, to connect it to the local ley lines and draw on their unfailing strength.
A wizard in the center... dead or alive.
Zoe's eyes widened, horror drifting across her expression as her lips parted. "Johnny would never stay still for hours like this..."
And the center of the sigil was a street.
"Did you dredge up the site schematics in your data dive?" Douxie asked her. "Are there any underground cells here? Any way they could be holding him prisoner there?"
Her face paler than usual, Zoe shook her head.
Archie's face looked much the same. "They must have lured him here with tales of noble service," the dragon murmured. "And then..."
"Fucker always wanted to be a hero," Zoe agreed, faintly. She bit her bottom lip. "They buried him."
Douxie nodded. "I don't know for certain, but immurement's... always had power."
Zoe's face did a complicated thing. Douxie couldn't even read all the feelings warring for space. Finally, she spoke. "Give me his goddamned coat, Casperan."
He did. On Johnny, it had reached to mid-calf. Zoe was tiny; the trenchcoat reached nearly to the ground. "I am burning these fuckers to the ground," she warned him. "Don't get in my way, Casperan."
He caught her arm as she started to stalk past him. "Zoe," he said. She looked up at him, big blue eyes full of pain and determination. Douxie adjusted his grasp. "Allow me to help you."
She studied him for a second, before nodding. "Come on. Don't get in my way." She stalked off, trenchcoat flaring around her petite frame.
"Douxie," Archie said from behind him.
"We'll need to crack the road open," Douxie said quietly.
"Body theft or immolation?" his familiar asked. It was a fair enough question; they'd done both in the past.
Douxie swallowed. "We haven't seen Johnny in twenty years," he said quietly. "I don't know how long he's been in the ground, but I doubt he was put there last week." Stealing his body to give him a proper burial would be... messy. And traumatizing. "I think it has to be immolation." Hexfire would burn anything to elemental particles, breaking the spell.
Seems that I'll be indulging in some pyromania after all.
"Ready?" Jim asked Claire.
She nodded, hands raised before herself, waiting.
"Okay. Here goes." Excalibur in hand, he opened the door again.
A half-dozen neurometer pulses shot at him. Each one was swallowed by one purple rift in the air-
-and came out of another, firing directly back at the orange-suited individuals.
Orange hazmat suits or not, the green energy blasts knocked them all to the ground, and they didn't get back up.
Jim would have felt worse about it if they hadn't been the ones shooting at him in the first place.
"Good work," he complimented Claire.
"What's sauce for the gander, is sauce for the goose," she agreed.
"Is the coast clear?" Aja asked, peeking out over Jim's shoulder.
"I think so."
"Great," said Toby. "Let's get moving, Grandpa Loverboy here isn't getting any lighter."
"She is fury, she is grace," Douxie murmured, following Zoe to the heart of Area 49-B. She was no longer making any attempts to hide. Any camera near her got torched by the crackling pink lightning that danced along her frame. As did all the street lamps and bulbs on the buildings they passed. It was like they were walking in a halo of darkness, making the illumination of Zoe's magic all that more intense. Her eyes, he knew, would be completely overtaken by the glow of her power. As it was, he was surprised her hair wasn't floating in the air.
Too many comic books, he thought. Most of them your fault, Johnny. Why'd you have to try to be a hero?
Unbidden, his mind filled with flashes of sci-fi conventions the other wizard had dragged him and Zoe to. He'd even conned them into dressing up more than once. Zoe had been Death to Johnny's John Constantine, while Douxie had been Dream. There were probably pictures out there somewhere. But while ordinarily Douxie's reaction to his past outfits and mistakes was to burn the evidence...
He hoped that someone, somewhere, still had those pictures. Those memories.
Johnny had been a golden retriever; his death was one more light snuffed out untimely.
"She's a burning torch," Archie murmured from beside him, eyes fast on Zoe.
"She is," Douxie agreed. Those few employees of 49-B who had been unfortunate enough to approach Zoe had gotten shocked and lay, twitching, on the pavement. Douxie didn't spare them a glance as he passed them. They were still alive, and lucky enough to be so.
Johnny wasn't alive. And while they'd long since broken up, that didn't mean Zoe didn't still care about her ex. Even if it had sometimes been in the "no one gets to kill him but me" way.
"You're not even going to try to stop her," Archie observed.
Douxie shrugged. "Honestly? I'm not sure I want to."
"Douxie..."
"They murdered him, Arch. Used him and murdered him." Douxie let his anger show to his familiar. "Not to mention everything else they've done over the years. The mission of this place has always been warped and horrible. Burning it to the ground honestly seems like a thoughtful and measured response to me right now."
Amanda Kubritz stared in disbelief as monitor after monitor went black. Around her was a hurricane of noise, of shouts about the server farm and all its data just being gone, about Team Kappa, who'd gone to secure the prisoners, not responding, about-
She ignored it all, focusing on the figure that was taking out her systems one by one.
Female, wreathed in arcs and jags of pink light. Blowing street lights and security cameras as she came near them. Blinding Amanda, when she needed to know what she was up against...
"Security!" she snapped, making a decision. "Arm yourselves to your teeth and follow me."
Marching out of her HQ, Colonel Amanda Kubritz went to stop the threat that was destroying her organization.
Author's Note: Varvatos' line about pounding someone into Goran dust is borrowed from The Last Starfighter. Hexfire is being borrowed, with permission, from trell (qunlat)'s amazing story "the only way for us to go" over on AO3.