Ideworld Chronicles: The Art Mage

Act 3, Chapter 47: Bed and breakfast, or bad and broken fast

Day in the story: 15th January (Thursday), morningGertrude MonkeyI hated being right so often when I assumed that the worst was yet to happen. That it would for sure occur as soon as I moved my eyes the other way. And this absurd Murphy’s law worked even though I had eyes pointed in every direction around my own, Alexa’s, and Elle’s heads—and a few other places as well. The universe was indiscriminate in making sure that my evil deeds would not go unpunished.

*I shall note it down.* Alexandra injected her own thought with open amusement.

What do you mean?

*We need a debt book like de Marco had. I would write down all the names that require payback from us to make sure no one slips from our memory.*

And you are going to put the Universe in there? I asked back, amused myself. She was crazy. I sighed—we were.

*Of course. In the first place. I’d make sure that it knew who’s the boss one day.*

I did not entertain her with an answer and instead focused on the problem at hand, the one that started this whole tirade of thinking about cosmic justice.

“We can’t get bored and we will move safely between them, is that right?” Thomas asked, watching a river of corpo-zombies pushing through and around each other like a city’s artery of human abuse.

“That’s exactly it,” I told him. “We could also get ourselves suits and be fine as well, but I guess you did not bring any?”

“I will deal with them,” Penrose told us, standing upright after he had spent the last five minutes sitting cross-legged on the glass and watching the mass of people move right ahead of him, on something that, relative to our position, could have been a wall just as well, but was a street.

“How?” Ramirez asked. “Sir, you can’t kill all of them. We can’t. We don’t have enough firepower left.”

Phillip brushed his clothes, dusting off the grime accumulated from constant fighting and running. He looked at Ramirez—sunrays illuminating his silver beard and face, giving him a regal, almost sagely visage.

“I know, my good man.” The reply came quick and precise, as was the aura he had about himself right at this moment. Aura in a non-soul-related way, of course.

He did not elaborate any further, but with a brisk step moved closer to the edge of the platform, from which we could all make a jump toward the street and be done with gravity fucking with us. Out there, against the moving mass of people in grey, black, burgundy, and navy, he stood like a solitary hero intent on averting catastrophe, but I knew better. Looks are only one thing, and they are the most deceiving of senses.

He brought a roll of notes out of the pocket of his jacket, tossed it once in his hand, right as a faint line of Shadowlight coiled around his arm, jolting at the item and engulfing it in a brief outburst of illumination. When he caught it, it was still evaporating in a misty glow, but when he took a swing, throwing it up and away from the direction we were supposed to take, it looked like a normal roll of notes again.

It flew right into the middle of the big group of zombies, building up my anticipation. I expected an explosion—a massacre of banknotes unrolling and cutting through the shadowspawned people, tentacles made of money, or weight strong enough to fucking suck them in like a money-made black hole. Anything destructive, really. Instead, it went in there with a silent drop and a small light show as it hit the head of one of the zombies, throwing that one down to the ground.

“That’s it?” Thomas voiced my own concern. “No boom?” he added with a completely serious face and arms thrown aside in a gesture of open question, while I laughed silently under my nose.

“Greed is a force more powerful than a simple act of violence, especially among those in the corporate world.” His words were flat and measured when he turned halfway to us. He still watched the point of impact, and the gravitas of him doing that forced me and everyone else here to look in that direction as well. There was authority in doing something without proper explanation. He was a prestidigitator directing attention, and we all followed his whims.

But not only us.

The first corpo-zombies took the hint that something was out of the ordinary. They dove for the roll that shone with silver Shadowlight, and even from here I knew that it was worth a fortune. It represented riches beyond human comprehension, far greater than the numbers written on the notes used for this trick.

And as the roll was lifted higher by the first of the unfortunate, hell ensued. It was a mass of arms and legs again, all fighting, diving, and crawling over each other as the roll disappeared inside that mess. This time, however, the arms and legs were evenly distributed among many, which in my humble opinion did not subtract from the repulsiveness of the whole act.

The waves of zombies moving back and forth to and from the buildings were redirected to that single point—a singularity of greed that attracted the mass toward it. Phillip shrugged once, looking back at us briefly, before he jumped over the small ledge, letting the gravity of Mirrored City claim him for the street below. I jogged after him, repeating the motion, accompanied by all the men who had gotten here with me.

“Nicely done,” I said quietly, reaching him at the front of the group, a few straggling men in corporate suits still rushing toward a mound of corpses dressed in the same manner. They waved their arms back and forth like literal zombies looking for brains in old horror movies. We weaved between the more manageable lines.

“I am glad that it worked. I’d look really silly if my act proved unsubstantial in attracting their attention, would I not?” he whispered back to me, somehow proud of himself. It was the first time in my entire life—the one shared with Alexandra—that I had seen him excited about something he had done. Maybe it was the only time he had done something novel in my presence.

“I’d love to see that one day.” The reply came out more unsure than I would have preferred, but it earned his approval. Phillip nodded once as we finally approached the hotel entrance.

The height distorted my sense of scale—it was definitely taller than the one built on Earth, or even the one cast into Ideworld, but not by much. Maybe it was just my assumptions playing tricks on my mind. It evoked that uncanny valley feeling of something unspoken being wrong. Nonetheless, the height compressed perspective and limited the visible sky to a strict rectangular strip. Two vertical masses of brick extended upward on either side, forming a narrow corridor of air between them. The repetition of windows created a grid mostly without variation. Just a few windows were misaligned on either side—enough to make my stomach knot in an unpleasant way.

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At ground level, the material shifted from brick to pale stone. The transition was abrupt and seemed deliberate. The stone façade was symmetrical: three arches set into a rectilinear frame. Those were evenly spaced, their curvature controlled and mathematically consistent. Lines were clean, edges sharp, ornament restrained… all except for one misaligned arch again. This was a pattern now—something broken by this world. Symmetry was important in the design, as in the whole theme of Mirrored City—so those small departures from the rule were here by the fucking design of whatever wicked idea had taken root in this building.

A horizontal marquee projected outward from the stone plane. It was rigid, black, and rectilinear, edged with a precise row of small circular bulbs arranged at uniform intervals. All except one, of course, that differed by a few inches from the rest. The hotel’s name was centered across the face in metallic lettering, aligned and balanced with exact spacing. It was wrong, however.

“InterContagental,” Penrose read it aloud, as if voicing my exact thoughts. “Doesn’t seem accidental. Excuse me, rhyming.”

“You noticed the breaks in symmetry?” I asked him.

“They fuck with my OCD,” Thomas answered in his stead, while I continued taking the sight in. Three flagpoles extended forward at identical angles above the marquee. Two of the flags moved with the wind; one moved in the exact opposite direction, yet the poles of all three did not yield an inch.

The entrance doors were recessed beneath the stone arches, set back into shadow. Light from inside was visible but diffused, contained by the threshold. There were no guards, nor any monsters out front, and yet none of us dared to move a step closer. Something had put us in mental stasis at the threshold.

“Open the doors,” Phillip ordered, and the remaining captain of the mercenaries delegated one of his subordinates to do it instead of him. He hesitated for two long seconds but surrendered to the task when Penrose directed his gaze onto him.

I did not want to be in his shoes for some inexplicable reason.

Alexandra MayI sat by the window, watching the snow fall outside. The cup of tea warmed my hands as I sipped the liquid inside and waited for both Zoe and Sophie to wake up. I let my encounter with Peter replay in my mind a few too many times, while my other selves were out there doing equally tiring things.

The decision whether to tell on him or remain quiet was not clear to me. Not until Zoe walked out of her—or rather his—bedroom dressed and ready for a morning run. She noticed me sitting there, and our eyes met.

“You saw him?” The hands that had been up in the air with her phone—scrolling through it—dropped the moment that question left her mouth. Whether this was some kind of seer power neither of us were aware of, or simply woman’s intuition—if that can ever be called simple—she knew. And suddenly lying for the sake of my brother became one of the hardest things in my life so far.

“No,” I replied, and felt a jolt within my soul. The other me did not like it at fucking all. “Yes,” I corrected myself through gritted teeth. “Just an hour ago. I—”

“He didn’t want to come back?” She did not let me finish. She braced herself against the couch with one hand and squatted beside it, holding the other around her belly.

“No.” I stood up and came closer to her, leaving the tea on the windowsill. I extended my hand toward her, but she rebuffed it with a single, clean sweep.

“I don’t need the pity,” she replied. Now her teeth were gritted. “Did he give you any reason?”

“He said that he’d seen a vision of New York being destroyed by waves and that he needs to be strong enough to stop it. They’re helping him, and he’s staying at Ideworld’s version of Quantico to train as hard as he can, to avert the catastrophe.”

“Are you serious?” Her brows knitted together in anger. “Are you fucking serious!?” she repeated, shouting. This woke up Soph in the next room. We both heard the ruckus from that direction.

“He also told me,” I started as the door opened and Sophie came barging in, her hair a total mess. She wrapped herself in a blanket and looked at us with questioning eyes but said nothing—just listened, “that he will use the time so he can be there for you when the baby is born.”

“Oh,” Sophie whispered under her breath.

“If you see him again, you can tell him to shove it up his ass. I am not going to wait for him.” Zoe turned and walked toward the door. She stopped at the threshold and looked at Sophie. “I’m sorry for waking you up, but my ex-boyfriend proved to be the same as every other fucking man I’ve met in my life.” Tears ran down her face.

Sophie moved toward her, but Zee stopped her with a gesture of her hand. “Don’t, Soph. I’m going for that jog I planned. No matter what. We’ll talk later.” She opened the door and went out, closing it carefully behind her.

“I think we should have stopped her, Ali.”

“She’d hate that. She’d feel trapped.”

“I don’t think so. She must already feel that way. Betrayed by contraception and the man she loved.”

“Loved? As in past tense?”

Sophie gasped. “Maybe I’m a fatalist, but I can’t see her ever forgiving him for leaving her. You know about her father, right?”

“I do,” I replied. “But it’s not the same. It was her and her mother who left him, not the other way around. It’s Peter who’s repeating the sins of his parents.”

“He better have a great fucking explanation,” Sophie countered, sitting down on the couch and staring at the paper spiders tending to her hanging vertical garden. I briefly focused on the necklace she carried. I never reestablished the connection to it after my fight with Eve, when Reality backlashed against me. The connection to me directly, that is. It was still connected to my soul core, somehow removing me from the equation.

“Yes,” I said, laughing under my breath. Chuckling. “Finally I’m cleaning up after his mess.”

“Eh. Men,” she mused, looking at the ceiling. “I wonder what mine will bring back home.”

“When?” I asked.

“He lands this afternoon.”

Elle EriksonUnfortunately, my folded birdy was not quick or strong enough to overcome the winter breeze and follow the cab through the air. It tried its best—flapping its paper wings with all the might of its avian frame and support from the Domain—but it simply wasn’t enough to follow through. Something to take note of.

The spider I sent, though, was adhesive enough to stick to the car for the whole ride and unlatch itself when it stopped by Mr. Laurent’s house, where it hid, waiting for me to come and find it. I felt good about myself and the fact that I did not rely on just one method.

I was currently at Montmartre Residence, waiting at reception and trying to get myself a hotel room I could use. My goal was twofold. First, I of course wanted to be closer to the group I’d been listening to. Secondly, I might as well secure a proper place to live. I found it funny that Gertrude was doing almost the same thing at this very moment, in another city and another world.

Gertrude MonkeyWe found ourselves in quite a problem the moment we crossed the doors. As soon as the last of the mercs passed through and the doors shut, they ceased to exist. And not just in a physical sense of disappearing behind us—that happened too—but I simply forgot there had been an entrance in the first place.

If not for my connection to Alexa, Elle, and the other free-thinking brains, I’d have never noticed it.

“Phillip.” I caught his attention as he stared at the hallway that seemed grand enough to belong to one of the most expensive hotels in the world. And contrary to our assumptions, it wasn’t empty, abandoned, or haunted.

I mean… it could still be haunted. I might even be looking at those ghosts right this very moment, but they certainly did not match the image I had in mind for someone dead.

The hotel was full of people—shadows, I guessed, but people nonetheless. The lobby was packed with whole families—parents and kids looking at pamphlets and planning trips somewhere. Young couples sat on comfy couches, vibing to the music. Service staff pushed luggage, cleaned in the corners, or moved somewhere at full speed that could still be considered walking. Everything was in motion in one way or another. Only we stood there, staring at it all, surprised by how it turned out.

“Phillip,” I repeated.

“Yes, dear?” he asked, clearly overwhelmed as he turned to me slowly. His eyes scanned everything around us and passed over an enormous floor-to-ceiling aquarium that now stood where the doors should have been.

“We are trapped in here,” I told him, pointing with my thumb at the watery wall.

“What do you mean? We just came in here,” he replied. “Come, let’s check us in.”

“Do you know why we are here?” I asked, looking at the rest of the guys who had come with us. They too seemed shocked by the sudden change.

“Why? Of course. We need to find Rei and find out why this building is not mine. And why all those people are in here.”