Codex Born (37 page)

They invent a million excuses for rejection, a million ways to find others unattractive. Their skill at seeing ugliness in others is matched only by their ability to see it in the mirror, to punish themselves for every imagined flaw. No matter who I’ve become, I never understood that facet of humanity.

I remember when Isaac introduced me to
Doctor Who.
In one episode, the Doctor met a man who said he wasn’t important. The Doctor replied, “I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important before.”

I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t beautiful. People have simply forgotten how to see.

Frank Dearing was a selfish, petty, controlling bastard, but when he was working in the field, the hard muscles of his body shining with sweat as he coaxed life from the dirt…the man was an asshole, but he was a
hot
asshole.

Nidhi Shah was softer. She dressed to minimize the physical. Age and stress had mapped faint lines onto her face. And she was gorgeous. Even before you stripped off her clothes and kissed your way down her neck…

Then there was Isaac Vainio, a skinny geek of a man who lugged his pet spider around everywhere he went. But he had such passion, such raw joy and excitement. That passion transformed him into something sexier than any rock star.

The more we narrow the definition of beauty, the more beauty we shut out of our lives.

I
T WAS AS IF I had put the entire universe on pause. Time hadn’t stopped; I had simply sped myself up by a factor of a hundred thousand or so. If all went well, I’d have taken care of the dragon before the phial had fallen more than an inch.

I wanted to run, but even my cautious, steady pace warmed
my skin and clothes, courtesy of friction and compression of the air. Relatively speaking, I was a meteorite streaking through the atmosphere, and it would be all too easy to burn myself to a crisp.

“Why doesn’t the Flash ever have to worry about this?” I sank slowly to the floor to retrieve my shock-gun. Weapon in hand, I began climbing over the crumbled remains of our front wall.

Something stung the side of my face. I thought at first that Harrison’s insects had found a way to get at me, but when I looked, I saw a triangle of broken glass hovering in the air. Other shards sparkled like ice, frozen in time and sharp enough to do all kinds of damage if I wasn’t more careful.

I grabbed a broken section of shelving and moved it to and fro like a broom, pushing the glass shards out of the way. Even a relatively slow impact shattered the shards into smaller fragments. I was tempted to try to calculate the amount of kinetic energy in each swing, but Wells’ magic formula had a limited duration. I could play with the math later.

Once I had cleared a path, I ducked outside and made my way down the steps onto the sidewalk. An overturned Chevy Cavalier had smashed into the front wall. I couldn’t see whether there was anyone inside. The dragon’s tail was curved back like a bullwhip, ready to rip through the library a second time.

“My name is Isaac Vainio,” I said. “You smashed my library. Prepare to die.”

Everything went better with
Princess Bride
references. I aimed at the base of the tail and squeezed the trigger.

There was an interminable wait while the ionized pellet crawled toward the dragon. It took what felt like five seconds just to travel the six feet between me and my target. I watched, fascinated, as the pellet deformed and broke apart.

I braced the gun with both hands, waiting for the lightning and rethinking my plan. In real time, the lightning followed within a fraction of a second, meaning the barrel of the gun was still aligned with the path laid out by the tracer pellet.

What happened if the gun moved? Would the lightning make a new path? My arms were starting to tire.

Five seconds to travel six feet. The gun was supposed to have an effective range of almost a mile. Call it six thousand feet for easy math, and assume the speed of light to be more or less instantaneous, which meant the lightning couldn’t start until the pellet had time to travel the full mile. In real time, it all happened too quickly for human senses to follow. At my relative speed, I’d be waiting more than an hour.

Screw it. I let go, and the gun began to accelerate downward at 9.8 meters per second squared. It should fire long before it had descended the first inch.

I returned to the library and removed a hardcover of John Scalzi’s
Old Man’s War
from the shelves. Reading without utterly destroying the book was harder than I had expected. After accidentally tearing the binding and four separate pages, I was ready to toss the book aside and attack the dragon bare-handed.

Instead, I released the book and used both hands to slowly and carefully search for the chapter I needed.

The all-in-one superweapons from Scalzi’s novel were much too large to fit through the book. Even if I could create them, I wouldn’t be able to fire the CDF standard-issue MP-35 Infantry Rifle without some extra hardware in my brain.

The projectiles, on the other hand, I could create. Specifically, projectiles that had just left the gun.

The MP-35 had six modes. The only question was whether to use the rockets or the grenades…

I was dragging Lizzie Pascoe back into the barbershop when the shock-gun discharged a bolt of lightning into the dragon’s tail. I set Lizzie down behind the counter, away from the windows. I did the same with her husband and their single customer. I checked the post office across the street next. One by one, I dragged everyone into the back, laying them out like firewood. The antiques store was a lost cause, full of ceramics
and glass. I ended up hauling the occupants over to the barbershop instead.

The shock-gun shouldn’t have gone off yet. Either my math was off, or the time-dilating effect of Wells’ story was beginning to wear off. By the time I finished getting everyone behind cover, I was confident my math was correct. I couldn’t hear the thunder from my gun, but I could feel it, like a subsonic massage to my skeletal system.

I grabbed my gun out of the air and double-checked to make sure the street was empty. As I hurried back to the library, I could see the three small projectiles inching their way into the beast’s open maw.

My exposed skin felt like I was rubbing it with sandpaper. When I got inside, I brought Lena, Nidhi, Jeff, and Feng to the break room. After one last trip to grab Smudge, I hunkered down with them to wait.

By the time the explosion went off, the spell had pretty much ended. I heard glass shatter, and the shock wave shook the entire building.

“How did we get—Isaac, what did you
do
?” Nidhi shouted. I could barely hear her over the echoes of the explosion, and her voice was far deeper than normal, presumably due to a kind of temporal Doppler effect.

I crept out of the break room. The explosion had taken out every remaining window in the library. Books and papers were everywhere, and shrapnel had torn through the walls.

Outside, the dragon’s head lay in three pieces on the ground. The tail had snapped free, and spasmed like the death throes of a decapitated snake. The rest of the body simply stood there. “Maybe I only needed two grenades.”

We knew the destruction of Harrison’s insects pained him. I hoped that pain scaled with mass, and that I had just handed him the mother of all migraines.

I retrieved Smudge, who scrambled up to my shoulder and clung there, but he wasn’t—quite—hot enough to burn me, which I took as a good sign. Lena was already checking on Alex out back.

I sagged against the wall. The worst part was knowing every building on the block had been hit by the same shock wave. I had wrecked buildings and businesses that had stood here for more than a hundred years.

I couldn’t possibly come up with a story to bury this. Copper River was a small, tightly knit town. If gossip was a competitive sport, we’d have been sending teams to the Olympics and bringing back gold. There must have been at least fifty witnesses to what just happened, not to mention the dead metal dragon blocking the road. “I am so screwed.”

“You’d be surprised how much humanity will ignore when it falls outside of their beliefs.”

The calm words were an electrical shock through my spine. I straightened like a cadet coming to attention before an officer. Johannes Gutenberg stood by the crumpled book return bin, an oversized red book tucked beneath his arm.

“You couldn’t have gotten here five minutes sooner?” I asked.

For all his power, Gutenberg was a physically unimposing man. Short and slender, he looked to be in his mid-thirties. A thick black beard and mustache couldn’t conceal the narrowness of his face, especially the nose. A fringe of hair poked out from beneath a black small-brim fedora. He wore a brown vest and scarf over a white shirt, with matching white pants.

“We arrived ten minutes ago, in fact. Time enough to take care of the dragon’s keeper before he could counter your magic.” He bent over to pick up the H. G. Wells collection. “Temporal acceleration. That would explain your windburned complexion.”

“We?” asked Jeff.

“I have eleven field agents setting up a perimeter around the library. Two others will be going door-to-door. Jeneta Aboderin is safe, by the way. Myron Worster is keeping an eye on her.” Outside, the lightning-flash of automatons announced the arrival of more reinforcements.

Reinforcements who would be working their magic on my neighbors, editing the memories of people I called friends.
Lizzie Pascoe had tried to help against an enemy she couldn’t have understood. She had stepped forward despite her fear. In return, I had blown out every window in her shop, and now her very thoughts would be violated and rewritten.

“You certainly seem to have gotten Mister Harrison’s attention.” Gutenberg rapped a knuckle against the book he carried. “Fascinating spellcraft. Far more stable than I would have guessed, to last for so many years with so little corruption. The fellow imprisoned in these pages was able to contain our magic long enough for his master to escape. Fortunately, I believe I can eliminate that threat.”

He plucked a gold fountain pen from his breast pocket and opened the book.

“What are you doing?” Guan Feng shoved past me. “Stop!”

Gutenberg tilted his head, the nib of the pen hovering over the rice paper. “You must be one of the Bì
de dú
.” His expression didn’t change, but the air inside the library seemed to drop twenty degrees. “You neglected to mention a prisoner in your phone call to Nicola, Isaac.”