Chapter Text
A lot of trouble for very little food. The kids and Mudkip roamed over the deck, cold and quiet in the night. They were truly in the open ocean now, over three hundred miles away from the Hawaiian islands, and huge rolling waves unimpeded by rock rocked the ship from side to side. Ching had ordered her men to take the ship even faster, even though refueling was out of the question and this vessel was definitely not built for a months long trans-Pacific voyage. The haze of light hanging around the coast was long gone, and for the first time in her life Jen could see the Milky Way. A capable mage could pinpoint where they were by studying the stars, or perhaps gain some insight into how magic flowed through the world, but Jen was wrestling a cranky axolotl and her own growling stomach and didn’t even have a coven license, despite her best efforts.
Jo had actually fallen asleep earlier, but came along anyways after Jen insisted that tonight would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for powerful and sick loot. It wasn’t until Jo tripped over a fallen rotor that they realized Jen was planning on searching the helicopter wreckage specifically, and not just going around looting things at random like they had been the past few nights.
“Come on, this is all metal, how am I supposed to-” Jo grabbed a protruding bit of chassis and shook it, loosening some screws somewhere deeper in the wreck. “-what kind of loot are you looking for, anyways? Like, no offense, but I don’t think stealing gun stuff from Ros is a good idea.”
“No, I want my own parts,” Jen said. “I’ve gotten some weapon ideas while we were here and when else are we going to get this much free steel in one place?”
“Hmmm.” Jo knew that the San Francisco coven had a dedicated magesmith but didn’t know enough about smithing to say if this was a good idea or not. Jen rarely had good ideas, but that was why Jo was friends with her.
“Didn’t you learn how to fight with a staff and everything with your kung-fu school?”
“Kung-fu works with normal sticks, but this Nerf gun was a total pain in the ass to enchant. If it breaks for real, well...”
“I thought you already broke it at camp when we saw that bear.”
“And then the counselors yelled at me even though flare guns are basically the same thing!” Jen slid a white shard of glass around the deck with her rubber soles. “At first I was like, maybe they have a point and I’ll just wait until I’m old enough to get a hybrid gun, this is just shitty melting plastic anyways, but now...I don’t know, they didn’t straight up tell me this but Ros and Ada seem really certain that we’re going to see some serious fighting.”
“Against who, though?”
Mudkip flattened itself and snatched the glass from under Jen’s foot like it was a potato chip. The wreckage made rather unsettling clanging noises as the two mages started climbing it.
“We know that PIRCH is a big organization. Lots of money, a whole underground bunker with an advanced cloning lab and dorms for their Rifteds.”
“Rifteds? They’ve got Rifteds too?”
“Rosalind and Ada used to be their Rifteds and they say there’s more.”
Jo seemed rather distressed by this. When Mudkip crawled over their shoe they grabbed the slimy little creature and tried to cuddle it.
“You don’t know who they are, don’t you. Not that it really matters.”
It did, in fact, matter quite a bit, but the realization that they weren’t the only ones with a gaggle of superpowered undead in their hands was more than enough for the kids to handle. Jen kept looking for pieces of loose metal, not thinking too much about who they were destined for.
_____
Ching was actively trying to relax a little on this luxurious cruise liner but she still woke up at the crack of dawn. It had been many years since she was able to sleep peacefully through the night, but if her men thought she was simply an industrious sailor she had no complaints. She made herself a thermos of tea, put on her long grey parka, and took a seat on deck by the bow of the ship. The parka was a gift from Josephine: - she could be ridiculous with money sometimes, but she was nothing but considerate when it came to choosing clothes for other people. Ching’s view of the sunrise was cut by the blackened husk of the crashed helicopter to her right, one blade half-snapped and dangling slightly in the wind. She thought she could hear something moving behind it...
“Good morning, kids.”
Jen shouted “what” before Jo quickly put a hand over her mouth.
“You can relax around me. I didn’t expect you two to be up so early.”
“I didn’t expect you to be up either!” Jen said.
“Well, here’s some advice, the older you get the earlier you tend to wake up. I imagine that the other Rifteds are like this too. Did you have breakfast?”
They didn’t. Ching found a granola bar in her pocket. She leaned back in the deck chair and sipped her tea in silence while watching the kids play rock-paper-scissors for the bar. They were armed and apparently capable mages but Ching detected no sign of battle-readiness in them. Rosalind had promised Ching a fine sum and legal protection in exchange for assistance against PIRCH, and it felt safe to assume that Jen and Jo were here for the same reason. They were a bit young to be taking on mercenary work of this scale.
“Do you two spend a lot of time belowdecks?”
“Honestly, no,” Jo said. “Ever since the whole engine room incident I haven’t really felt like exploring there.”
“And all of the cool stuff is above the deck anyways,” Jen added between bites. “You can see the ocean.”
“We live next to the ocean, what’s so spec-oh, right. You have that contract thing,” Jo said.
“What contract?” Ching said. “Are you working for someone else?”
“No, no, nothing like that! I just have this, um...maybe contract isn’t the right word, but I’ve made a promise to an ocean goddess for protection and guidance and all that. Her name’s Mazu, and it feels like she gets stronger whenever I’m around the water. Does that make sense? I don’t know if I’m really supposed to just tell whoever asks...”
Ching was a bit dumbstruck. Memories of crude wooden icons and prayers floated around her mind. The men she picked up around Fujian were the strongest devotees of Mazu, but everyone knew Guanyin’s name. Ching never really understood why pirates expected a goddess of mercy and kindness to help them kidnap women and hold villages hostage, but she knew it would be cruel to deny a sailor his belief in the supernatural.
“Do Americans take worship more seriously? I haven’t met anyone in China that follows a particular god these days.”
“Uh...not really. When my parents complained to my grandma about me being a mage she just started praying to Mazu about it and gave me a little charm from the temple. My mom was really mad at both of us, but I felt bad throwing it away...that’s all. Doesn’t feel right to toss something from a temple anyways.”
Ching nodded silently.
“It takes patience to study magic. You’ll need all the help you can get.”
The horizon shimmered with orange light and Ching watched each vessel in her fleet gradually come to life as crewmen began their work for the day. She could also see something tall in the distance, too far away to be one of hers. It had been there ever since she made her explosive entrance on the cruise, always at a distance where it was difficult to identify, but visible nonetheless. Normally this was nothing to worry about: there were plenty of fishermen and cargo in the South China sea and Ching had no quarrel with most of them. But this was no shipping route, they were in waters haunted by scientists and sport fishers, Ching’s fleet should have been the biggest ships for miles around.
Rosalind and Ada spent most of their waking hours trying to gauge PIRCH’s strength and uncover their plans, and they shared whatever intelligence they had with Ching, no questions asked. But Ching could never get them to say more than one or two sentences about their time there, which irked her even though she was never a talkative person and usually didn’t care to probe into people’s background. The reports she received never seemed to capture why Rosalind was so anxious about this, or what compelled Ada to stay awake for days on end, bent over her keyboard. Was it because PIRCH had weapons and men? Many people had weapons and men. Ching had promised to defend the other ladies, and they could rest easy knowing they had an army behind them. Once Ching made the mistake of asking Rosalind why she couldn’t just relax and enjoy her position at King’s College now that she was free. Rosalind said that wouldn’t be just, that she had to get to the bottom of this and tell the entire world what PIRCH had done to her and what it would do to others. A very heroic dream, but not one that seemed to require Ching’s protection, and not one that jumped out of the reports she was given. Maybe Josephine was right, and Ching simply didn’t understand the west enough to fully grasp the gravity of the situation.
She downed the last bitter dregs of her tea and warned the kids to not touch the wreck before heading back to the bridge. Tracking down a ship and sending an entire enemy fleet against it? It seemed like an awful lot of trouble just to kidnap a single foreign man. But this wasn’t the first time she became tangled up in something exponentially larger than herself. Ching kept her eyes open.
____
Besides the obvious issues with the sheer size and inefficiency of cruise ships, the Rifteds had given themselves (or rather, Rosalind gave Ching) the burden of shipping and storing the precious cargo - two fully-functional prototypes of synchronization chambers - that had spurred the entire ocean leg of this mission. A month before the cruise left, Josephine and several of Ching’s men had intercepted them en route to the dump, catching the mostly unguarded truck by surprise and then quickly stashing it in a room below the auditorium. Due to the shocking lack of an outlet where one could connect a mind-melting device to the plumbing in a semi-cramped theater warehouse, Ada had to jury-rig a set of pumps that could cycle fluid from an open tank and fit into a 25-kg suitcase. Somehow it all worked, and she was able to mix up enough of the synchronization fluid to flood the room. When Franz and Arthur arrived they were assaulted by the tang of blood mixed with broth wafting from the orange fluid. An inflatable life raft bumped against the walls as the ship gently rocked the entire volume from side to side.
“Good morning, how did you sleep last night?” Rosalind asked.
Both men had the distinct feeling of being at the doctor’s office. The cold steel platforms that had been hastily welded above the fluid level did not add to the atmosphere of the room.
“Very well,” Arthur replied. He noticed Franz was smirking a little and glared at him until he stopped. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call the phone in our room again.”
“The alternative was having someone personally go down and knock on your door to get you here, which would have been far more disruptive. Especially if we asked Jen to do it.”
“Is it really that urgent?”
“If we don’t do this, everything with the dance machines would have been for nothing. And neither of use would like to see that.”
She’s not backing down at all, Arthur thought. Her awareness of their relative strength unnerved him.
“Very well.”
“Lovelace and I arrived on this ship to conduct research concerning the nature of people who have been resurrected through magic. For now, we’re calling ourselves Rifteds. According to the kids, the ritual involves opening a rift to...wherever people go when they die, and dragging them back to this world. I’ll take their word for it.”
“You seem rather calm about this.”
“At this point the only way to undo it would be suicide, and the 21st century has treated me well so it doesn’t have much appeal. To me, at least.” She walked towards the large, egg-shaped machine in the center of the room and clapped her hand on the door. “Today you will be using this synchronization chamber.”
“What does it do?” Franz asked.
“As far as I can tell, not much: just running a little magical energy through whoever’s inside,” Rosalind said. “Oh, don’t look at me like that, I’ve been in there before. It’s like sleeping through an alarm.”
“That sounds less painful than dancing, actually.”
“Will you promise to leave us alone and promptly deliver us back to California once you’ve finished with whatever it is you’re trying to study?” Arthur said crossly.
“I can’t promise anything right now.”
Arthur was displeased, but he decided it would be prudent not to push the matter any further. After all, they had apparently recruited some mages towards their cause, and Arthur couldn’t imagine them serving any productive purpose here beyond serving as fighters. He cast a wary eye towards Ada, who was ignoring the conversation in favor of the three different devices balanced on her lap. Arthur vaguely remembered hearing something about a collaboration between her and some scientist that was working on a calculating machine. Ada was still a girl then, the pretty young debutante that inexplicably chose mathematics as her life’s passion. He suspected it had something to do with her father’s character and the shadow it cast over her in society, but last he heard she had married well. Today Ada seemed like an industrious, thoughtful person, and he felt a little twinge of jealousy when he imagined her peacefully tinkering on the same machines that seemed hell bent on blocking Arthur’s path through the modern world.
“I’m ready when you are,” Ada said.
Rosalind took hold of the chamber door and with considerable effort pulled it open, letting out the characteristic hiss of a seal. A pair of chairs with bars and arm restraints was built into the back wall, and two respirators hanging from tubes on the ceiling. A bit of the orange fluid pooled on the floor and dripped from the bottom of the door.
“Why...why are there locks on the armrests?” Franz asked.
“Some of the data mentioned psychosoma-” Rosalind abruptly stopped herself and cleared her throat. “The sensors here are all targeted towards areas like the hands and lips that contain proportionally more sensory nerves than other body parts. It’s not entirely clear why this needs to be done, but when fully immersed in the chamber fluid and stimulated, the current will be directed through whoever’s inside. Like I said before, we’re trying to figure out more about how these sensors and whatnot work so I wouldn’t worry about the details. There’s not much we can do about them right now, anyways.”
Arthur’s head was spinning. The blurred memory of being laid out on a bed of sterile blue paper and sent through a metal tube began to resurface.
“Power running at maximum capacity, ready when you are,” Ada said, tracking the chambers’ status. The kids, by now fully awakened and invigorated by all of the sci-fi around them, started pushing Franz and Arthur towards the chambers. The men gave each other a look and had no choice but to sit down. Rosalind let them put on their own respirators but the locks had to be turned on remotely from Ada’s laptop. Franz winced when they suddenly closed around his arms with hollow, plastic clang.
“If you hurt either of us...” Arthur murmured through his respirator. His breathing was slow and heavy, and for a moment he wondered if these women were getting some kind of sick rush out of tormenting their fellow Rifteds this way. Did death bring out the sadism in them? He looked Rosalind in the eyes as the door closed and found no flicker of happiness in her. The door closed with a resounding bang and the men were in the dark, only aware of the other’s presence through the rustling and rushing of machine-assisted breath.
Without warning, the insides of the locks inflated and something opened behind the seats. The smell of blood mingling with rancid chicken broth seeped into the air as fluid started rushing into the chamber.
“Uh, Ros wants me to tell you this!” Jen shouted through the chamber wall. “We’re taking your blood pressure!”
“Blood? This is blood?”
“We’re going to drown!” Arthur furiously stomped at the door. Dear god, he couldn’t get up.
Two mechanical arms enervated with tubes unfolded from the roof of the chamber and grabbed both of their faces.
“In and out, guys, in and out, don’t worry if the bag doesn’t inflate, oxygen is still flowing.”
“Jen, this isn’t an airplane,” Rosalind said.
The seal between Arthur’s mask and his face wasn’t fully tightened and a little bit of pungent orange fluid had leaked inside. Grimacing just made it leak more. His surroundings had warmed up significantly but not so much that it was uncomfortable to keep his eyes open.
“Franz?” he said as loudly as possible.
His husband’s face was mostly obscured by the mask, but Arthur could see that he was leaning back with his eyes closed, as if they were still lounging about on deck. Little bubbles lodged themselves in his eyelashes and hair before dissipating.
“Can you hear me?”
“Yes. It’s too warm in here, it’s almost like a sauna.”
Arthur was startled. It was unmistakably Franz’s voice, but he couldn’t say which direction it came from, certainly not from the man sitting to his right. It was as if he spoke directly into Arthur’s head.
“You don’t seem scared at all.”
Another wave of warmth washed over Arthur.
What was it that Rosalind said about psycho- psycho-something? That previous trials had? Arthur wondered. The haziness of his vision did not bother him so much as the intense looseness that was filling his limbs. He felt like he was going to melt right through his chair and words were sliding out of his mouth as he fell. The last solid thought he had was about how this was a much stronger drink than dying.
____
The London streets were swimming with cars and the bite of the cold air felt distant, as if someone was merely telling him to feel an icy sting on the tip of his nose. There was a takeout bag in his left hand and without being able to see or smell it he knew there was heavy chowder inside. Someone was waiting for him in the park. Was it this park, though? Arthur saw his monument peeking over the trees and felt his pace quicken, cutting through the grass and nearly spilling the takeout while trying to stop on the icy pavement in front of the arch. His heart was racing but he could speak this time.
Arthur was almost enjoying the change of familiar scenery when he noticed that the other person was himself. He was looking a bit pale and kept sniffling while talking about the traffic and then asking him for his impression of Parliament, based solely on our letters. Our letters? He was moving through water again. Franz’s voice said that didn’t matter and he brought some soup because he couldn’t stand seeing him catching cold like this. Here, you can have my scarf. No, I’ll be fine, I’m done with consumption, but you aren’t, here...not in public? But you said nobody recognizes you anymore. If you don’t want the scarf I can take-no? I’m just glad to see you again. Don’t you like how soft it is?
He pulled the dense red cloth tighter around his chin and when the back of his own hand brushed against his jaw it felt like an electric shock that threw him into the murky, half-formed shades that filled the chamber.
____
“Hello? Can you see my light? Ada, move his head up a little, I need to get a better look at this...”
Arthur jerked away from the blinding penlight and spit out some orange fluid. He coughed violently and waved off Rosalind’s attempts at pushing him into a sitting position.
“Hey,” Jen said.
“Jesus Christ,” Arthur replied hoarsely. He realized that the front of his shirt was drenched now, and the smell was making him dizzier than he already was.
“Maybe we should have gone one at a time first,” Rosalind said.
“No, it was my fault,” Ada said. “The seals weren’t tight enough for a perfect vacuum.”
“Where’s...Franz...”
“Right here, Your Grace,” Ada said. Arthur had gathered his senses enough to see her crouching over a prone figure in a black suit. After examining him for a while she dragged him towards the box she was sitting on earlier and propped him up, lightly pressing her hand to his forehead as if checking for a fever. Ada was wearing something with roses and vanilla in it, and it grew stronger as she nodded to herself and her hair, tied back in something between curls and a ponytail, spread across her shoulders.
Arthur crouched beside her. “May I?”
“May you what?”
Arthur put his hand on Franz’s cheek and whispered something in his ear. There was a slight but obvious smile on Arthur’s face when Franz stirred and grumbled like he was being woken up from a deep sleep. He kept his hand on his cheek. Ada was nonplussed.
“Umm...if Dr. Kafka’s feeling well enough to walk, you can all leave now. And don’t worry about dinner, Ching made sure that there would be more than enough for each of us to-”
“I’m GOING to cook dinner...” Franz mumbled as Arthur helped him to his feet.
“Thank you for looking after him,” Arthur said. “Oh, and your perfume? It suits you quite well.”
“Why thank you.”
Rosalind watched the men leave and gave a perturbed look at the kids to confirm that she wasn’t imagining all of this.
“That could have been worse,” she said. “Could have been better. But it also could have been much worse. Did you two sense anything strange while the chambers were running? Magical or otherwise?”
“No, just a lot of rumbling and heat. Basically like a car engine,” Jo said. “But that’s probably a good thing, isn’t it?”
“Why ask us anyways, it’s not like we’re good mages,” Jen grumbled. “I bet the blacksmith guy at the coven could feel more magic than we do.”
“Oh come on, don’t say that! You’re just pissed that you had to come here and watch the experiments instead of digging through the helicopter again.”
“Yeah, I am.”
As Jen said this her stomach growled at a painful volume.
“A little magical sense is better than none,” Rosalind said. “Let’s call it a day for now.”