Chapter Nine — A Tale of Two Cities

“I’m not sure it’s working.”

Isaac didn’t really like to complain, as everyone knew that time spent complaining was time that could be spent doing something.  But he felt a little bit disappointed that there hadn’t been any obvious changes from all the adjustments he’d been doing with his power.  The ticking of the demuto reassured him that he was doing something, but none of the cities they’d been in showed any obvious change. 

“At least there hasn’t been any more fighting, so that’s working,” Sarah pointed out, her voice coming through the crystal barding.  The three of them were on their raptors, gliding over a long, winding maer river that connected some of the larger lunar cities.  Though Lia hadn’t had much to say once Isaac had started applying leverage, and their lunarian guide was flying far enough ahead that the translator rune didn’t give him much insight into her body language. 

“True enough, but I was expecting to see some difference at this point,” Isaac said, considering the feedback from his talent.  He knew that a good amount of his investments were sticking, the war itself not shifting so quickly that the effects of his talent were resolved and cycled out, but his power had limits, and the war might well exceed them.  Just like he couldn’t make the entire world intertialess, no matter how hard he tried.

“If change happens too quickly, it is likely it won’t be for the best,” Lia pointed out, her voice flat over the crystaltech radio, seeming almost alien without the extra insight the translation rune brought.  It was interesting to see her take the counterpoint when she was the one who brought him into the war in the first place, but he thought he understood it.  In the end, it was her home, and while Isaac was absolutely going to be losing sleep over whatever happened, he was still going back to Earth when it was all done. 

“Or it could settle into a local minimum,” Isaac said, a term he only knew because of Cayleb’s work.  It turned out optimization problems were difficult even for tinkers, and Cayleb tended to ramble when he was stymied on one of his projects.  Sometimes what seemed like the best solution, compared to every other variation, was just okay, and the truly best solution was a radically different approach.  “My gut says that it needs more of a push, so I think I’m going to have to try the derivatives.”

“I guess this is the first time that they would actually matter,” Sarah mused, not at all objecting.  But then, she’d always been in support of him doing extra things with his powers.  It was just that, as she had said, there had never been a time when it would have been noticeable before.

The idea was a simple one, once he understood that metaphysical effects were possible.  Changing resistance was, itself, a change, and so could be altered by Isaac’s power.  It was one of those twisty recursive ideas that could go on forever, regressing toward more and more abstract resistances to change. 

Of course, it was also generally pointless.  His power was orthogonal enough that it was rare that he ran into something that couldn’t be altered enough.  If anything, when it came to conceptual changes, he had to be incredibly delicate.  It turned out that most conceptual entities were transient, fleeting in nature, and so making them easier to alter was not a problem.  He wasn’t sure if it was something intrinsic to concepts, or just that the very fact that they were hazier than a physical object, but they did seem more responsive than basic matter.  Isaac hadn’t tried messing with anything really large or primal, mostly because he didn’t have a death wish, but he assumed that something like a fundamental force or a god would be basically immune to his power.  Rather like how he couldn’t stop lights from turning off without electricity.

The intractability of the lunar civil war showed he was right.  He could make alterations, yes.  They were permanent, yes.  But compared to the entire edifice in motion, the difference in resistance was small and it’d take time for anything to show.  Possibly months or years, and Isaac wasn’t prepared to just sit and wait that long.  In fact, he was certain they didn’t have that long, since eventually someone would notice that there were humans wandering around the moon. 

Keeping in mind that the longer they were there and the more it was known they were interfering, the more resistance would mount against anything they did, Isaac went ahead and started working at the resistance to resistance to resistance.  Two derivatives back, just like acceleration to velocity to position.  Or perhaps it should be integrals, going the other way, but he didn’t want to tie his talent to math.  That had been his worst subject in school.

The simple tweak made a difference, even if he wouldn’t have been able to quantify what that difference was.  The demuto ticked faster, the enormous morass of the civil war seemed more fluid.  Nothing obvious happened, but of course they were out over farmland and wilderness.  If something obvious had erupted, exploded, or caught fire just then, he would have figured that things had gone dramatically wrong.

“I think that’s definitely helped,” Isaac said, breaking out of his internal ruminations to see that they were somewhere entirely different from when he started. It must have taken longer than usual to affect things, though most of the time he didn’t get caught up in his work like that.  At the same time, when he did work on conceptual things before, he had a physical or visual anchor, and wasn’t just feeling stuff out through his power alone.  “But we’ll have to check.”

“We are still some minutes from a city,” Lia said, as Isaac reached out to reinforce the current peaceful nature of what he saw.  But the demuto refused to tick, no connection formed between him and what he saw.  He knew the Tyrant could have done it, extending his reach through the connections of all things, so it was maybe a little bit disappointing that Isaac couldn’t do the same thing. 

He wished he had the ability, right there and then.  There were homesteads and farms scattered about, and he didn’t want any of them to go feuding with each other on the off chance they were on different sides, but he could hardly go down and get involved with each one.  He knew that things would slip the guiderails eventually, and he just hoped it wouldn’t be in places he couldn’t put up protections.

“Well, we’ve been at this for days, a few more minutes won’t hurt,” Isaac said, to a disgusted noise from Sarah.  He was aware it was custom and superstition and a little bit of fact among the super community to not tempt fate like that, but it wasn’t like he could do much even if things boiled over in the scant time between implementation and observation.  He was committed to ending the war, and while he wanted to do so as bloodlessly as possible, it still had to end.

When the coral spires of the nearest city did come into sight, there was no smoke, so Isaac counted it as a win.  At least until they got closer, and found that the city was absolutely silent.  No movement on the streets, no passers-by or tourists or spell-formed vehicles.  If it weren’t for the lights and occasional shadows on obscuring rune-created window shades, he would have thought the place was deserted.

“Everyone’s in their homes,” Lia said, as if they couldn’t see that.  “No, wait.  Not every home.  There’s a lot of empty ones…”  She trailed off, and while she was far enough away that he couldn’t see runes flash a hundred feet ahead of them on her own raptor, he could imagine it.  “It looks like people are grouped up in two areas, sharing houses and so on.  The two factions, I guess.  I don’t detect any fighting just yet.”  Left unsaid was that it probably would happen soon enough.

“Key word, yet,” Sarah muttered.  “Do you think they did this all in a few minutes? It had to have been started a while back.” 

“Well, I was working on things for a while,” Isaac hazarded as they drew in for a closer look at the city, the raptors landing on one of the upper bridges.  It felt very odd to consider that the entire situation was due to his power, applied to something fundamental and allowed play out over time.  He couldn’t have forced this outcome specifically — only the Tyrant could have done that — but without his meddling people would be working and living as usual.  And, he reminded himself, killing each other as usual. 

“I’m not sure that we can or even should do anything to interfere,” Isaac said, firmly reminding himself against hero work.  “I’d be afraid of setting something off.  But maybe I can reinforce the peace, make it more likely they just talk. It won’t take—”

“You’re not lunarian.”  The voice came from off to Isaac’s left, from one of the spires, making both him and Sarah jump.  Shay jolted under him, the raptors swiveling around to glare at empty air.  It took him a moment to realize that it was actually a rune speaking, and he felt like slapping himself.  Of course there would be surveillance and speaker equivalents.

At the same time, he could practically feel the inertia he’d put into the disguises pop, the demuto hissing like a pulse of static.  Just because he made the disguises more resistant to the vagaries of the world didn’t mean they were perfect, and if anyone was going to pierce them it’d be a bunch of paranoiac aliens being deliberately pushed to the brink by probability manipulation.  The three of them were probably not as affected, which meant they had to stand out more by virtue of not having a stake in the fight.  And with that investment driving so much behavior, it was probably inevitable that they’d trip someone’s instinct eventually.

“So what if we’re not?”  He spoke before Sarah could try to deny it, since he wasn’t sure if she’d have the same sense that the illusions surrounding them no longer mattered.  It was his power, but it was her smoke.

“That must mean you’re the one doing this,” the voice said, reaching the correct conclusion by dint of pure supposition.  The leap of logic was unexpected enough that he didn’t respond for a moment, which was a mistake.

“Incoming,” Lia snapped, and by reflex Isaac drove inertia into his armored clothing, under the illusion.  Sarah’s reaction was in the other direction, dispersing to smoke.  He could tell even with the moonie disguise up, subtle changes in the way things looked.  All of which was well and good, but neither Shay nor Astoria were so protected.

He couldn’t actually see any projectiles, but he saw runes within the spire flash and felt a spatter of force hammering at his armor, and Shay squalled as blood spurted from her side.  Immediately, Isaac pushed himself out of the saddle to shield Shay, whose barding reacted belatedly to cover her in crystaltech armor.  While Isaac didn’t care much if they shot at him, shooting Shay brought out a surprising amount of anger, and for the first time he pulled out the pistol that Cayleb had supplied, ready to use it in earnest.  He’d already spent time reinforcing it ontologically, making it more gun, but he hadn’t actually fired it fully augmented.

It clicked and whined as he switched it on, and he shoved inertia into it as it cycled one of the darts into place.  He touched his thumb to the stud, pushing even more physical inertia into the projectile, aimed it at the spire where he’d seen the runes, and pulled the trigger.  The gun made a sharp zing noise of capacitors cycling, the pistol bucked against his palms, and his target vanished.

Sarah had taken him to the range back in Star City to shoot with more conventional weapons, enough that he could at least hit a target. This was more than just hitting a target.  The dart moved faster than he could see, but the results were clear from the way that the entire top of the spire with the offensive runes exploded into gravel, followed by a big chunk of the city wall several hundred feet behind it, and then a massive plume of dirt fountained into the air several hundred feet beyond that.

“Cayleb, what the heck,” Isaac muttered, stunned out of his anger by the sheer destructive power of his weapon.  It was just supposed to be a dart, a simple bullet-equivalent for hitting things at range and breaking through heavy defenses.  Clearly, either he or Cayleb had underestimated just how much his talent added to the coilgun.

The rocky debris continued to rise into the air, one-sixth gravity not being nearly enough to counteract the energy of the impact.  Isaac blinked and turned away to examine Shay, ready to pull out a Qwik-Med in case it was a problem.  The raptor sent back a feeling more of annoyance than hurt; she had been built to receive more punishment than that as a matter of course, but neither of them had been expecting it.  Shay was designed for teeth and claws rather than rune-force projectiles.

One up side was that the rune-created force just vanished, leaving clean wounds with no debris, so Shay seemed sure that the puncture wounds would be just fine in a few hours.  A feat of regeneration that was staggering for normal people, but given the genetic engineering and crystaltech involved in Deep Kingdom mounts, that was probably not even trying hard.  Then, belatedly, he turned to doublecheck on his companions, to make sure there were no problems.

Sarah and Astoria had gone to smoke, so they were fine, and Lia hadn’t even been targeted, because, he presumed, she actually was lunarian.  He sent a quick query to Shay to see if she could fly, and got an affirmative.  Flying would actually be easier, as the almost clinical feelings passed over by Shay seemed to match up with perforations of the abdominal wall and diaphragm; things that could and would make walking or running annoying, but flight was mostly crystaltech and spine. 

“Don’t think we should stick around,” he said, as the stone debris still kept rising.  The gravel and dust was starting to be blown sideways by wind above them, making him uncomfortably aware of how much he still underestimated the impact of super-fights.  If they stayed, things might get worse, and he didn’t want to accidentally level an inhabited building.  He was lucky that the trajectory of his weapon merely destroyed the top of a building and an unfortunate bit of wall and field. 

“That was the city’s Guardian Spire.  It was at least eight hundred years old,” Lia said, not really chiding him, but more resigned.  There were probably going to be more buildings destroyed before it was all over.  “But yes, we should go.”

“I’ll shroud us,” Sarah said, reforming from smoke and banishing the lunarian disguises to switch for general invisibility.  “Let’s move.”  Isaac vaulted onto Shay again, and barely in time as moonies started appearing from both sides of the city.

It seemed that with all the pressure to change things, but an equally strong injunction from his powers to not fight each other, the simplest way to vent the pressure was to blame the outsider.  In a city of half a million moonies, maybe a dozen had enough magical juice and the experience to be a combatant, just like with supers.  But while having a dozen rune-sorcerers pursing him and flinging spells was maybe entirely predicable, it didn’t mean he enjoyed the experience.

“Why do you have runes that make swarms of bees?”  Isaac half-yelled as Shay winged along the ground at something near a hundred miles an hour.  They weren’t terrestrial bees, but some kind of three inch long, triple-winged thing rendered in strawberry cream, with prehensile white stingers and enough magical charge to interfere with the travel runes.  Probably specifically so.

“Totemic traditions,” Lia said, her voice sounding calm but the translator rune telling him she very much was not.  Sarah could have shifted them to smoke, but considering that someone could see through the invisibility or at least detect it, nobody wanted to give them the chance.  As smoke, the raptors couldn’t actually fly, and that was the only thing keeping the three of them ahead of the moonies, their combat flight formation keeping them in range to support each other.

Isaac thrashed about with his cord, physically knocking the insect constructs from the air and glad that they couldn’t actually get through his inertially boosted cloth and flesh.  Their buzzing did make his skin crawl, though, and he certainly wasn’t willing to test the upper limits on their strength or tenacity.  Thankfully, the insects had gone for him, not Sarah, though she probably could have coped.  One of the guns she’d packed was a wide-area energy flasher, because of course someone in the supervillain game had needed to deal with swarms of things before.

For the moment she was sniping with smoke-displaced hands, spaced wide apart to present essentially no proper target for return fire.  Part of him winced at the potential for something truly lethal, but it wasn’t like the moonies were playing nice.  This wasn’t the tacit restraint of a super-brawl or even the Deep Kingdoms testing-of-strength.  They were furious and murderous and skilled sorcerers with bags of tricks.  If it weren’t for the fact that the raptors let them outrange the pursuers, things would be a lot worse for everyone involved.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said, smacking the last insect construct with his bare hand, the magical force that made it up tinkling and dissolving away in the wind.  “Gonna try and screen us.” 

“That will help,” Lia admitted, by which he was pretty sure she meant she’d be able to actually energize the travel runes without issue and they could leave their pursuers behind.  Supersonic was definitely faster than most could travel. 

Once again he took out his pistol, only instead of aiming it at people he was aiming it at landscape.  As they zipped past a small hill, he briefly invested as much inertia as he could in both himself and Shay, and then repeated his performance from the city.  The gun made a little zing noise and then suddenly the hill was replaced with rising debris, dirt and stone flung in all directions.

Some of the pursuing lunarians no doubt ran into the mass, but it was harmless compared to a direct impact.  More importantly, it completely blocked line of sight, and while he knew that scrying was certainly a worry, casting through that morass was another problem entirely.  Though really, they only needed enough time for Lia to energize the travel runes.

“Got it,” Lia said, speaking to exactly his concern, and the land suddenly blurred as the trio of raptors shot forward.  A mach cone formed at the tip of Shay’s armored form as they hit the speed of sound, leaving any pursuit far, far behind them.  Belatedly, Isaac safetied and holstered his pistol again, hearing Sarah’s lectures about firearm safety in his head.  Something that went double for a gun that wrecked buildings.

“Well, that was exciting,” he said after a bit of flying in silence, once he was sure nobody was still after them.  “A little bit surprised they broke the disguises so quickly, maybe.”  He’d definitely been relying on the touches of ontological inertia to keep them hidden, perhaps to the point of laziness. Isaac had always known it wasn’t foolproof, and all the subtleties of runes meant that they couldn’t quite nail the impersonation. 

“There was a shelter-in-place rune up,” Lia volunteered.  “I only saw it after we got chased out, but I really should have noticed it earlier.”

“It might not have mattered,” Isaac said, not exactly wanting to blame Lia for the bizarre encounter.  “With how much stress they were under.”

“I thought that a bunch of magic-users would be more dangerous,” Sarah said, as if what they had run into wasn’t dangerous enough.  “I know that casters are generally the most annoying type to tangle with on earth.  Rarely did though, Dad usually kept me away from them.”

“Runic sorcery is not as arbitrary as human sorcery,” Lia said, the world blurring past.  “Deflecting or unraveling it is in some ways easier, and most war practitioners focus on a few types of runes.  The bees were relatively unusual.  If they had been closer, we would have been in more trouble.”

“Well, let’s try not to have a repeat of that,” Isaac said, knowing they’d be more careful next time, though being careful might not be enough.  If every city was like that, they wouldn’t be safe in any of the settlements.  He and Sarah would be a fracture point anywhere they went, a handy escape valve for tension that was otherwise blocked.  Though he didn’t want to assume it was like that in every place, since even the individual cities in the Five City Alliance had different flavors and characters.

“We’ll have to check on another city or two,” Sarah said, following the same line of thought as him.  “Then maybe head back to Muiraton?”

“I think so,” Isaac said.  They hadn’t heard from Lia’s granddad in a while, though they hadn’t been anywhere to check in, either.  Long-range comms on the moon were no more reliable than on Earth, so it wasn’t like they could talk to him on the go.  If they wanted to get a better view on things, a high level perspective, they’d need his strategic scry and that meant heading back to where they’d begun.

By the maps, the next closest city after their supersonic escape was actually the wooden one, which he remembered clearly just for being so different to the stone and coral that dominated elsewhere.  There were even aspects to it that reminded him slightly of pictures he’d seen of the Isle of Leaves, which also built with a lot of wood, instead of the metal and stone of the Five Cities Alliance.  He definitely didn’t want to shoot up the pretty wooden towers, and was glad to see, as they approached at a far more sedate subsonic speed, that there were people out and about.

In fact, far more than their last visit.

“That is strange,” Lia said, peering through far-seeing runes as they circled at a distance. Isaac pulled a pair of tiny binoculars from the saddlebags, carefully checking out the milling lunarians.  “Those are mixed groups.”

“You mean, royalist and reestablishment?”  Sarah sounded far more positive than Isaac felt, not nearly as affected by a brief fracas.  Not that she was wrong to be happy about the development, since it did seem hopeful.

“Yes.  It is rare to see the groups interacting this way,” Lia confirmed.  “And there’s no shelter-in-place up, everything’s normal here.”

“Should be safe to approach then, I would think,” Isaac said.  It didn’t seem so strained and paranoid as the last city, the stress working itself out rather than building up, so they weren’t likely to be immediately tagged and targeted.

“We can only try,” Sarah said, and Isaac nodded, nudging Shay to glide down to the road leading into the city.  They definitely wouldn’t blunder in like the last time, just in case.  Even if he could tell Shay was already healing up, he didn’t want to take any chances.

The other two landed only moments later, the three of them very slowly and casually strolling up to the main archway.  It put Isaac in mind of some of the minor training he’d gotten in Justice for Hire, infiltration stuff that he actually would have been good at, given how his talent improved disguises.  An alternate path, if he’d been more open to it.

Nobody paid much attention to them as they crossed into the city proper, his demuto still warning him about the reality-altering rune in place.  Instead, there was the normal business of a city, plus an awful lot of loud debate from people arguing on street corners.  Or the middle of the road, or in cafes.

The atmosphere wasn’t strained, but it was strange.  The amount of thankfully non-violet squabbling wasn’t what he would call natural, but it made sense as another fracture point from the leverage he was applying.  Two sides that probably hadn’t discussed anything in years or decades, suddenly feeling that they were willing to try.

“— told me you couldn’t talk.  But it’s been six months and now you want to connect?”

“— no I don’t get what that’s supposed to mean.  How do you not understand the —”

He could follow some of it, a lot of it even.  People griping to each other about life, or reconnecting after a long period apart.  That was all standard.  Then there was an undercurrent of arguing about runes themselves, and while the translator conveyed some differences and subtleties, they didn’t strike the kind of resonant chord with him that they clearly did with the natives. 

“— no, this is Run.  Not Run.  You can’t do Run that way!”

“Why am I even talking to you?  See done like See?  Your brain must be rotted.”

He didn’t dare try getting in conversation with any of the natives himself, specifically for that reason.  If they tried to ask his opinion on anything rune-related, or even just current events, he was going to embarrass himself with his lack of answers.  So he kept his mouth shut and just listened, letting Lia take the lead in meandering around the city. 

The lack of anyone coming to physical blows despite all the arguing was nice.  Far nicer than being chased by a bunch of overstressed rune sorcerers, that was for sure.  On the other hand, the longer they wandered the weirder it was that virtually everyone was talking and arguing with each other.  On sidewalks, in shops and bars and restaurants, even in houses and audible through the force screens that stood in for doors and windows.

The longer they wandered, the more uncomfortable it became.  The situation was wholly unnatural, and he was the one who had made it so.  Admittedly, it wasn’t his fault.  The entire city had been under the influence of a rune for who knew how long, and the entire civil war was being shoved under the covers, kicked down the road by people who didn’t want to deal with it or maybe couldn’t deal with it.  Isaac had to admit that some of the emphasis on the current state of slow rolling disaster might be because no individual time and place seemed to be worth the cost of truly resolving it.

He’d seen it happen at the hospital in miniature, as people put in stopgap solutions to problems, then quit or retired or were fired, and the new people coming in just saw the stopgap as the way it had always been.  And that was just in the few years that he’d been there.  Something as big and old as the lunarian problem was probably orders of magnitude worse, so he didn’t want to either pat himself on the back or blame himself too harshly for the weirdness.

It was still weird, though.

“I hope this means that people are going for diplomatic solutions,” Sarah said, quietly and over the raptor radio.  “Better than having to fight brawls.”

“Perhaps, if any of these discussions resolve anything,” Lia said, sounding doubtful.  While she had the best perspective on it, she might not have a good perspective thanks to living on Earth for so long.  He’d lived in Star City all his life, for example, but would hesitate to opine on how people in the top brackets thought, or those who tended the enormous farms and power systems under the mountains. 

“Is there anything we can, or should do here?” Isaac asked, not wanting to exercise his power and potentially ruin a good thing.  Even a slight nudge could send the city spiraling off in some direction he would really not prefer.  While he might not be living the consequences, he was still responsible for them.

“I think I would prefer to consult with Grandfather before making any further plans,” Lia said slowly.  “Recordings and accounts of what has occurred in the cities we have visited should suffice.”

“Which I definitely have,” Sarah said, patting her camera underneath her disguise.  He was pretty sure she’d brought enough microfilm to map half the moon, but he wasn’t going to complain about it.  Since everything was foreign, it was hard for it to stick in his head, but Sarah had images of all the places they’d been and the runes that he’d altered and so on.  It helped him keep track, not just for what he generally intended to do, but to mentally latch onto the metaphysical aspects of places and things.  

“Back to Muiraton it is,” he decided, sending that impression to Shay.  The riding raptor didn’t need a map nearly as much as he did, and just giving her the destination was enough for her to jump into the air.  Crystaltech plates spread under the guise of rune-force wings, and the three raptors lifted them out of the city and turned back toward the reestablishment stronghold.

Lia energized the travel rune and they broke the speed of sound again, rendering all the hundreds, or at this point, thousands of miles they needed to go almost irrelevant.  Without it, the whole process probably would have been impossible, given the sheer distances involved.  Even so, he felt the strain of running around constantly, and hoped that once they made it back to Muiraton there’d be some downtime.  The stress of continually poking and prodding the war’s various resistances to various kinds of change was getting to him, too.  Not that he was feeling the exhaustion that some supers described, mostly the energy-projector types, but he still needed some rest from it all.

Soon enough the semi-familiar spindly towers of Muiraton came into view, and they dropped their speed down to something that didn’t require the crystaltech force projectors to protect him.  They banked in past the waterfall, down toward the command center that served as their home base.  Isaac was ready to sit down and take a break, but when they walked into the command center, it wasn’t Lia’s Grandfather at the tactical display.

It was the weasel that he and Sarah had seen off on the first day, and a cluster of armed guards.