usability. It wouldn’t do to get caught without some way to defend myself, not here.
I spit on the blade and listened to them argue with each other. I glared up at the sign next to me, rusty and pocked with bullet holes, the remains of a crossbow bolt sticking out of one giant E.
I shook my head as I read it. “Fucking Seattle.”
Sixty years ago, the Large Hadron Collider at Geneva, created by a group called CERN, was supposed to usher in a new era of scientific achievement. Granted, more than a few people were convinced that the damn scientists were going to usher in a new era of the universe collapsing on itself, but trying to get a really passionate scientist stopped is harder than stopping a runaway train. They insisted that there was no danger and at first there wasn’t. They even found that God Particle that they were always going on about, something that would something something the entire field of whatever. I’m not gonna pretend that I understand any of it, even now.
Two days after finding the God Particle, CERN found something that they hadn’t expected. There’s some special name for it but most of us call it the O-S particle. That’s because the person on the recording where it showed up got to say “Oh Sh-“ before he turned into the world’s most disgusting coat of paint on the nearest wall.
The OS Particle wasn’t even a thing, really. Someone told me that it was more like opening a doorway than finding a physical object. But seriously? The only thing that mattered is what screwed up the entire world for the next sixty years. Magic came through.
At the time no one could believe it. Even when they were staring down a chimera or whatever, only a few people even knew what they were seeing and even fewer of them believed it. One estimate says that half the world’s population died, but it’s hard to tell because of the way that the magic changed some people.
Not all Humans were Human. Some of them were what I’ve always thought of as leftovers. The theory right now is that Human history is a lot longer than we used to think, and that sometime in the misty past there used to be magic. It got sealed off or turned off or whatever, and some of the races there got de-magicked, and they turned into Humans. The point is that when the magic came back, a lot of Humans suddenly turned back into whatever their ancestors had been. The world was subject to more than just European myths walking around, even with Dwarves and Goblins and all that weird crap that they had in Ireland suddenly real. Africa had its share of problems, though with more people living a little closer to the old traditions they at least had a fighting chance. Half of Australia went dark immediately. India had turned completely to shit, and the civil wars there showed no sign of abating.
It happened to a lot of animals, too. What, you think a platypus or a giraffe came from normal evolution? A lot of the problems in the civilized world centered around zoos in the big cities. There were plenty of things that showed up that no one had ever heard of before, which just added to the fun.
I’m part of the third generation after CERN. Geneva itself is just gone, wiped from the map. Some of the races didn’t waste any time setting up old-school governments; apparently, the old stories were based on the kind of truths that came through in the genes when they reactivated. Dwarves quickly arranged themselves in terms of kingdoms, Elves and other fey grouped up in their courts, and so on. Mom said that the Dwarf she met down in the mines was some kind of prince. I hear there are all kinds of settlements way down in the deep. Guess there was one down under that coal town in Pennsylvania, anyway. All I know is that she came up out of the mine that day pregnant with me. I grew up without a dad, mom blaming me for every fucking thing that had ever gone wrong in her life, and I couldn’t wait to get out of there when I turned eighteen. I joined a commune for a while, a group that called itself the Sons of the Particle and traveled around scavenging, but I could only eat so much “Elven granola” before I had to move on. From there I mostly wandered, earning my way with my axe when I could or my unskilled labor when I couldn’t.
Two weeks ago I’d managed to sign on with a cleaner crew. The big cities are still screwed sideways, a lot of them, and most of the cleaner crews try to unfuck them. You know how well that works if you know that old joke. Anyway, there are hundreds of these crews, mostly hired by what remains of the government. It’s a pretty familiar situation for most of the world, though some of the more primitive parts seemed to do okay. Now the parts of the world that used to wish they were America are just fine with letting us rot.
Places like Seattle, where everything was big and modern and no one was superstitious, got eaten. Some places were just gone, or no one could get to them. Washington DC, built on all kinds of symbols that no one understood and that didn’t mean anything until magic turned real again, was one of those. No one could get within five miles of it without just disappearing into the dark cloud that surrounded it. Sometimes people would leave care packages outside the cloud. Offerings, too.
Ethan ran Breakers Incorporated, the five-hand crew I’d joined two weeks before. None of them were real happy to see me, though I did my best to make myself useful. They took me because I fit the armor and knew how to handle a weapon; apparently the last temp had been attacked and killed somewhere along the way. I had signed on as a little added firepower but if I’d known that we were planning to hit Seattle then I never would have joined up. Seattle wasn’t as bad as Washington but it was full of plain meanness. Goblin tribes were just the tip, if the stories were right. Teams went in there sometimes but they didn’t come out very often. Ethan planned to change that.
Still, it was work. Breakers was a good crew, well-thought-of online and likely to be able to bring me out alive. And hell, when else would I get to use my axe? Well, when would I get to use it as much, anyway. Traveling mercs didn’t get the good jobs very often anymore. With Breakers I would get a percentage of the fee and whatever we found inside that was valuable. They paid in gold, bullets, and a promise that I could keep the armor if I survived the trip. Good enough for me.
I hadn’t counted on being treated like one of the fucking monsters myself. You had to have a little magic in you to survive the kind of thing that they did but outside of Gunner I didn’t see anyone on the crew who was obviously a descendant. Birgitte’s ass was magical but I wasn’t sure if that counted.
My part of the job was simple. I was supposed to keep the others alive. We were trying to find out why there was another one of those dark clouds gathering around what was left of the Space Needle; the people in charge thought that it might be useful to see what was causing it so that they could maybe figure out how to get into Washington again. The American government had relocated to Chicago in the wake of CERN, and they had a major hard-on for getting back into Washington.
Like I cared. I mean, interesting, but Seattle was just nasty. I mostly wanted to get in, get out, and get paid.
“Newbie!” Birgitte yelled. I looked up and saw that the rest of the team was gathering. Team. What a fucking joke. I was cannon fodder. Still, I wanted to be living cannon fodder when everything was finished, so slung my axe up onto my shoulder and hurried to join them.
Ethan had a map. Maps weren’t a hell of a lot of good anymore, since the terrain changed from time to time and the last really good ones were sixty years out of date, but it was marginally better than nothing. He’d blacked out the part of the city that had just split in half and sunk into the earth during the earthquakes sixty years before, and had used the same marker to make new lines that I guessed were the altered streets. He pointed at the place where the new lines sort of intersected. “The Needle. That’s where we’re going. And now I’m gonna let everyone know about the second part of the contract. We’re not just here to scout. We’re also here to check out reports about a new warlord. He’s supposed to be in the same place. He’s got a bunch of people in there and he’s supposed to be taking charge of a lot of the tribes, consolidating power. The brass doesn’t want that. Says that it’s a threat to their precarious power balance.”
Gunner sn
orted, sucking a huge volume of air out of the atmosphere. We all knew what he meant; the government was just as out of date as the map but no one wanted to admit it. Still, they paid, mostly in gold. They’d stopped trying to use paper money after the hysterical laughter had died down.
“So what do we do when we get there?” said Baran.
“Save the people he’s got trapped, if we can. At least figure out what he’s up to. If we’re real lucky we might get a shot at the bounty on him, but I’m not sure that’ll happen.”
Baran nodded and glanced at me, then back to Ethan. “So now what?”
Ethan pointed at a line. “We’re here. Just follow this. Kinda twists and turns, but that’s how everything is now. Baran on point, Gunner on rear guards, no guns unless I say.”
“Fucking got that, newbie?” Birgitte muttered.
“Fucking got that,” I muttered back. She looked surprised and then narrowed her eyes at me. Raine grinned.
We headed out, Baran on point. He liked his knives but while he was on point he stuck with his bow. I didn’t ask; this crew had been together a while so I figured they knew how everyone operated. I just stuck with my role and hoped that