SciFi and Fantasy Stories: Turquoise - Prologue + Ch 01

PROLOGUE

"And… This was your card," Saburo told them, flicking the six of hearts up from the top of the pack. His voice was chilling, a half-whisper that cut through the heavy air in the room without difficulty. The black eye-patches covering each eye gave the impression of empty holes in the semi-darkness, and highlighted his hollowed cheeks and sallow skin. Long, spidery fingers delicately held the card out to show his two visitors.

"By Lord Sekyn, that was amazing," Yori exclaimed, leaning forwards and examining the card. Rin, her dark hair scraped back into a ruthless arrangement of curls at the crown of her head, looked less impressed.

"So you can do card tricks," she said, her Eastern drawl laden with disinterest.

"Without seeing the cards," Yori reminded her. Rin flicked her hand as if brushing away her colleague’s words.

"Tell me how you claim to… I forget your word."

"Hypnotise," Saburo said softly. "For that, I must uncover my eyes."

"If you wish. I can assure you, I am not easily shocked." Rin’s mouth twitched slightly in a little, humourless smile.

"And your colleague?"

- He is replaceable. The message flickered in Saburo’s head. He disliked the mage’s tendency to use telepathy for private conversations, especially with non-mages who were only able to receive messages, but he couldn’t afford to express disapproval. He was unused to being subservient.

"You would like me to perform a simple hypnosis? Perhaps on Mr…" he trailed off politely, gesturing towards Yori.

"I’m sure Mr Junichi would be happy to oblige."

Saburo removed the eye-patches and looked up. Complex magical surgery had given him blank, white irises, and kept up the illusion that there was something other than logic and trickery to his role, as did the blindfolding. Rin’s brown eyes met his with a mild, disinterested expression.

"Mr Junichi, would you please step outside for a few moments?" Saburo said politely.

"Of course," Yori said, looking worried. He stood up, stretched, and headed for the door. As it shut behind him, the hypnotist turned to Rin.

"This pack," Saburo began, "is different. Ever so slightly different." He met Rin’s gaze again and held it. "Years of my research have found that changes like these, minute enough, can drive a person mad. They will begin to believe that something is something else. Nothing will be as they think any longer. Used in the right way, these cards, they will twist your mind." He removed the ace of diamonds from his original pack and placed it beside the same card from the new stack. "I will tell you," he said to Rin, "the difference is in the top right corner diamond. Don’t look too closely. I will tell Mr Junichi that it is the same. I will make him believe this, and then more. That is the part that I cannot explain." He shrugged.

Rin frowned, displeased. "But there is no magic involved?"

"None. You may test me, if you wish." He bowed his head and felt the skin on his bare scalp tingle as Rin's magic probed into his mind, checking for signs of Power. He straightened up again.

"It is a skill," he said frankly, "but no magic."

"Clearly not." Rin stared at him thoughtfully. "And you say that you can twist a person’s mind? You can make them think whatever you want them to think?"

Saburo nodded slowly. "I will demonstrate on Mr Junichi. I will… make him kneel. Nothing too cruel." He gave a little smile, which Rin returned.

"If you can prove yourself, then I think I have a job for you."

"May I know specifics?"

Rin sighed, and settled in her chair, arms folded. "This country has enormous difficulties with magical waste," she said. "How much do you know about these problems?"

"Little," Saburo admitted.

"I’ll give you a potted history. When we first discovered magic, we used it for everything and anything. It seemed like a wonderful gift." Rin snorted. "But these things are rarely free. Soon people began to become ill, and few people lived for longer than forty years. Nobody could understand it. Someone even created some sort of deity to whom everyone prayed, begging for forgiveness and mercy. I’m sure you’ve heard of Lord Sekyn, he is still spoken of today."

"I have," Saburo said, a little surprised.

"Eventually, scientists worked out that the illness was connected with magic. Every time someone casts a spell, waste builds up. No doubt you have seen the turquoise smog building up over areas of high magic usage. I suppose you could call it a type of pollution."

"And this is not widely known?" asked Saburo.

"The connection with magic is known, but the effect of the smog is not. We have recently found that the magical waste builds up under the cloud layer. Eventually, the current theory is that when it becomes heavy enough, it begins to fall. The precipitation is not visible, but is deadly. We think that anyone breathing in the waste for longer than… a year perhaps, will die within the next one. Objects, and people, become tainted and can pass on the contamination – the waste clings for as long as ten or fifteen years, we believe. Crops die. Land becomes dry and useless."

"And my job would be…"

"If we’re going to make any progress, we need to get rid of all contaminated objects. They have to be buried underground." Rin sighed and patted her hair carefully, checking that no strands had freed themselves. "The trouble is, nobody would want to work with magical waste, of course. Not voluntarily, at any rate."

"You would like them to be… persuaded?" Saburo asked, after a long silence.

"Exactly. They would not be important people," Rin said. "But they would need to see things very differently. I only ask that they are able to follow orders, and work hard. Unquestioningly. We’ll sort out cover for their disappearance, and I’m sure my superiors will contact you to discuss the payment..." She looked down at the table and very carefully traced a series of numbers on the polished wood. There were a lot of zeroes on the end of it, Saburo noticed. He nodded slightly, almost undiscernibly. They understood each other.

Saburo’s eyes flew open, pools of white in the darkness of his bedroom. His first meeting with Rin often came to him in his dreams, as if he wouldn’t let himself forget every little detail. He knew which dream would come to him next, when he finally gave in to sleep once more, because it always did. Saburo hated these dreams, the half of his life that he had no control over. A few moments later, he reluctantly closed his eyes and the pools of crystal white vanished.

The room was dark, as before, but Saburo appeared gaunter and the two vertical furrows between his eyebrows had lengthened and deepened, to become parallel stripes of shadow in his pale face.

The girl opposite him was unusually dark skinned. Her face was odd, almost beautiful in profile but twisted and alarming face on. One side of her mouth was lifted in a permanent, sardonic smile, a birth defect which didn’t seem to fit with her soft features and gave her a higgledy-piggledy, jigsaw look.

"Watch the card, watch the card. Don’t look away. Follow it, keep watching… Was this your card?" Saburo droned, his voice undulating, slick with practise.

"I… Well, yes, I suppose," the girl said uncertainly.

"It was your card," Saburo told her. "Six of hearts."

"Yes. But it doesn’t look quite right!" she said apologetically, the other side of her mouth lifting to complete the involuntary smile and sweeten her expression.

"Look into my eyes," Saburo commanded, raising his head to look at the girl for the first time. He gasped, a tiny little intake of breath, and remained frozen there.

He woke, sweating, and saw his blanket tangled in figure-of-eight knots between his feet. When he blinked he could still feel her face on his, and felt that tightening of his throat, that plummeting sensation that was so new to him. That taste, the taste of fear.

Her eyes. The perfect contrast to his own; irises abnormally large within their frame of black lashes. But the thing that had caught his breath was the colour, the turquoise green, startlingly similar to the hanging smog in the sky. Beautiful, in her twisted way.

He writhed, kicking away the blankets and clenching his fists. It was not her eyes that kept him awake at night. It was that flicker of shining intelligence that had refused to blank out, but most of all, it was the realisation that he himself had ruined the hypnosis. In a moment of weakness and uncertainty, he had looked away too soon.

CHAPTER ONE

"Dig," they said, so Amaya dug. "Stop," they said. Amaya stopped. Her muscles ached, her lungs flamed, her shoulders drooped, but her mind was a perfect blank. Almost perfect, that is.

The guards wore enormous white suits, covering their entire bodies and muffling the commanding barks from behind the air filter over their mouths. Their dark eyes peered accusingly from little, transparent windows, oddly magnified by the warped plastic.

The workers wore simple white tunics, like sacks. Every evening they would strip off and their clothes would be thrown into the freshly dug pit, to be covered over the next day, along with the contaminated objects. Their skin became dry and their hair lost any lustre within weeks. Thin almost to the point of weakness, many had peeling, red skin on their bony arms and clumps of hair missing from their heads.

Rin watched her bustling hive from the tower. She reflected on the logic of it all, the little haven of activity within the grand expanse of empty wasteland. It looked, she had often thought, like a giant mole had made its way across the land. Freshly upturned heaps of earth and recently filled pits tramped like footsteps in an erratic line, the oldest piles already producing tentative, waste-resistant turf.

Saburo had done well. It was amazing what he could do, without a trace of the Power in his blood and only a pack of cards. The workers did her proud. There had been no struggle or objection from them and fewer deaths than she had expected. The corpses joined the other contaminated waste in the pits.

"Walk," they said, so Amaya walked. "Turn," they said. Amaya turned. Her feet throbbed and her hands were covered in blisters like little white bubbles in a sea of red. She felt… defeated. Defeated. It was an emotion, and a tiny flicker of surprise surfaced in her mind.

Rin yanked her dark hair back, smoothing one hand over her frowning forehead to meet the other where it clutched the bundle of ringlets. Tiny tendrils of steel grey now laced through the curls and years of unrelenting abuse had left her hair duller and more disobedient than ever. Saburo was almost surprised that her reflection itself didn’t recoil from that scowl.

"The problem doesn’t appear to be going away, Rin," Saburo said eventually. Rin span around to face him, her back to the mirror. The hypnotist was pleased to see his own face reflected, suitably controlled and blank, behind her.

"Not yet," Rin told him irritably. "But look. The whole system is running perfectly. A honed machine."

"Surely you are simply covering up the problem," Saburo said quietly.

"This is the first step," she snapped. "Magical waste needs to be got ridden of before any kind of progress can be made."

"And you’re making a tidy profit, aren’t you? Paid to dispose of the waste, all for a good cause of course. But what are the chances that anybody is going to stop using magic? Our lives are nothing without it. We could no longer function – we can’t remember how. So you’ve got endless work, endless profit." Saburo stared straight at her with his white-on-white eyes. She held his gaze with her own fierce glare for as long as she could and then looked away, furious.

"If I were you," she hissed angrily, "I’d remember who pays your wages, or take your mind tricks elsewhere."

"Eat," they said, so Amaya ate. "Stop," they said. Amaya stopped. Her stomach tightened, sick with hunger, as she turned away from the piles of food she would not eat. One of her fists clenched instinctively in some forgotten gesture of anger. She stared down at it, bewildered, until a guard shoved her hard in the small of the back and she began to walk again.

The horizon was a dark streak, separating the muddy green landscape from the cobalt-grey sky. Rin had her head lain against the window and one hand tracing the pattern formed by the heaps of earth, making their way unsteadily into the distance. She laughed. It was not a pleasant sound, but full of pure and genuine amusement. It made Saburo feel slightly sick.

"What a start!" Rin exclaimed, following the workers tiny, retreating figures with one finger on the windowpane. "Look at them. They’re just… perfect."

"I came to discuss a pay rise," Saburo said flatly.

"It's a perfect solution, Saburo," Rin continued, ignoring him. "They can do everything - anything. An army of willing workers." She laughed again. Saburo stared at the back of her head, despising the perfect neatness of her hair, the rigid posture, the unnatural, emaciated faultlessness of her figure. She turned, caught him looking, and smiled. He took a little pleasure from the misunderstanding but refused to return her smile.

"The pay rise?" he repeated stonily.

"Whatever for?" Rin asked, turning back to the window.

"There have been few serious problems with my work."

"Nothing remarkable about that."

"I am being asked to hypnotise more and more innocent people."

"Now, Saburo, don’t turn all moral and virtuous on me."

"It is taking more and more of my time, Rin, and on top of that… I am losing sleep." Saburo stared down at his hands, fingers twisted together like the sheets between his feet every night for the past month.

"I recommend a glass of warm milk before you go to bed," Rin said airily, checking her hair in the mirror as usual and moving across the room towards the door. "If you cannot handle this, Saburo," she continued in a quieter tone, "don’t come crying to me with your complaints. Everyone is dispensable."

"No. You cannot do this without me," Saburo said, his voice barely above a whisper. "And I cannot do this without another six hundred thousand."

"Lift," they said, so Amaya lifted. "Carry," they said. Amaya carried. The muscles in her back flamed and her dark face was scrunched with pain, her teeth dug deep enough into the bottom lip of her twisted mouth that the dry flesh turned white. She had a sudden feeling of weakness and helplessness and it was all she could do not to let go of the load. A guard shouted for her to walk and, mindless once more, she obeyed.

The whole camp was a collection of domes in varying sizes, all painted khaki green to fit with the surroundings. The workers’ cabins were filling up now, six to each dome, as the sun set in a cloud of green-blue smog that showed no sign of disappearing. Guards ushered workers into domes, barking "sleep" when the dome was full and then slamming the doors. The rolling landscape echoed with the resounding, final sound of a hundred doors shutting. Locks were not needed and security was minimal. They didn’t have the creativity or independence needed to escape.

The guards’ domes were larger and curiously misshapen, dotted with purifiers and filters. As they disappeared inside and slammed their own doors, the silence became absolute, trickling away as the sun sank into the murky stripe of the skyline.

Behind it all, on the crest of the hill stood the tower, a watching silhouette. In the daylight it was a harsh, ugly structure of grey plastic with enormous windows glaring out across the landscape; in the waning light it became a looming, shadowy menace. To its left sat a small collection of grey buildings, each with the same cryptic message above the door:

"Kneel," they said, so Amaya knelt. "Drop it," they said. Amaya dropped her load. It was a body, flaking red skin clinging to the bones with hardly a trace of wasting muscle left, already turning cold. As it hit the top of the pile with a sickening thud, Amaya looked down carelessly. The eyes of the corpse were rolled back into it’s head so that only the whites showed, staring up to the heavens. Blank, white eyes.

Amaya screamed.