Chapter 5 – Fulcrum

The trailer house was small enough that privacy was more an agreement than a fact. Callum could hardly miss it when Lucy woke up in the middle of the night with a cry, sitting bolt upright and fumbling for the lights. After a brief adrenaline scramble he realized what was happening. He hesitated a moment, then crossed over to the bedroom to knock at the door.

“You okay, Lucy?”

“Sorry, big man,” she said, voice subdued. She seemed smaller than usual, hunched in on herself. “Just, you know, having trouble sleeping.”

“Can I come in?”

“…yeah,” she said, after a moment of hesitation. They were both pajama-clad, since the trailer house’s HVAC was only barely up to the job of dealing with Texas in December, but it was still somewhat intimate. He quietly twisted the knob and stepped inside, trying not to make it seem like he was barging in as he leaned against the wall by the door.

“Nightmares about being captured?” He guessed.

“That and the geas stuff.” Lucy flexed her fingers for a moment before pulling the blankets up closer. “Makes me feel like such a damsel in distress, I hate it. Never had nightmares before, either. Not even when I was a kid.”

“I think it’s pretty understandable in the circumstances,” Callum said. He’d managed to escape having too many nightmares himself, though mostly by virtue of being flat out unable to sleep or crashing so hard he couldn’t remember anything when he woke up. “If it makes you feel any better I have rough nights myself. It’s not easy.”

“You, big man? You’re cool as cucumber!” Lucy said, but she smiled.

“I am an absolute bundle of nerves whenever I have to do something major,” Callum admitted.

“I’m not sure if that actually makes things better or worse,” Lucy mused.

Despite the calm he forced onto his words, some part of Callum was seething. He hated seeing Lucy like this, hated seeing her hurting. He hated seeing her made less. Her current state was a kind of vulnerability that nobody should ever suffer, let alone be put on display for anyone to ever see. Callum was so very tempted to target some BSE agents and facilities and just wipe them out, but after Lucy went back to bed he cooled off a bit and started chewing on the problem seriously.

The problem was that most of the people involved had just been doing their jobs and hadn’t done anything too objectionable by the standards of the supernatural community. There was a difference between people who were doing their best, being as moral as they could within an unjust system, and those who took advantage of their authority within such a system to abuse people. Some of the people who had questioned Lucy were ordinary cops, just doing their job. Others, like the vampire that had left her in muscle-locked compulsion or the fae that put the very nasty bit of magic into her head, needed to be held to account for their abuse.

It was the machine of GAR that was the main issue. At first glance it was just a huge faceless bureaucracy of interchangeable parts, but like any organization it was made up of people. Some of those people had responsibility and authority, and thus were the ones who needed to be called to account for the behavior of those underneath them. Others were purposefully and personally cruel, and needed to be called to account for their own actions.

The second type was easy to deal with. They were obvious, the hunters and the abusers, and he had no qualms about taking whatever action was required to stop them. The first type, though, were necessary to deal with. Even if they didn’t personally predate on people, they oversaw it, enabled it, encouraged it.

It took him a few nights of brooding to look at it from all angles. There was a big difference between intervening to save people ⁠– dealing with what he saw – and becoming an actual vigilante. Holding accountable those with ultimate responsibility. Those whose hands were only clean because of the number of steps between them and the actual events. Though by his standards, that type was far more deserving of punishment than their catspaws.

“Do you really have to?” Lucy raised the question when he brought up the topic. “Can’t you just not?” She shifted uncomfortably as she ate breakfast, which was actually just fruit and oatmeal. And sugar. Lucy had a sweet tooth that was so severe it was worrying.

“This isn’t going to stop, Lucy,” Callum told her, choosing his words with care. Actually articulating his thoughts was astonishingly hard. “Not unless GAR changes. And it won’t, because it’s a bureaucracy staffed by people who live forever. Or hundreds of years, anyway. They won’t give up their power and their habits. The only way to stop what happened to you and me from happening again, to us or to others, is to force that change.”

“That’s an awful lot to shoulder there, big man. Sure, maybe things can use a change, but why do you need to do it?”

“If I don’t do it, who will?” Callum tapped his fingers against the table. “Is anyone else even in a position to? And it has to change. If I want to live in peace, if people like me want to live in peace, then I have to break the power of GAR. If I want to stop people being taken and killed by supernaturals, I have to break the power of GAR.”

“I mean.” Lucy swallowed a spoonful of oatmeal. “There’s all these big old houses with lots of powerful people. Are you really going to just start killing them off?”

“I hope I won’t have to,” Callum said. “There are some people who absolutely deserve what’s coming to them, but once some of them are held to account, it might inspire things to change fairly quickly.”

“Or it might not,” Lucy said. “The Houses and GAR are big old powers, pretty set in their ways.”

“It might not,” Callum allowed. “But I can’t just shrug my shoulders and give up. And it’s not like simple reason is going to work on people who would blow up a café because I’m inside. Which is another point to forcing that kind of change. There are people who are willing to flatten an entire town just to get at me.”

“That’s a fair point,” Lucy said, though she didn’t look particularly eager. “I wish I could say that we could negotiate with them, but yeah. Archmages barely listen to each other.”

“If it makes you feel better, it’s not like I’m going to be going there myself.” He held up his hand and teleported a portal anchor into it. That sort of conjuring trick was never going to get old. “Plus, it’s not like I’m just going to start randomly killing GAR employees. I’m going to need your help to know who is actually responsible. Sometimes it’s not even the people in charge.”

“I, uh. Wow. That’s a hell of a responsibility,” Lucy said, looking stunned. “Like, hey Lucy: you pick ‘em, I hit ‘em!” She affected a gruff voice in imitation of him. “I dunno, big man. If I do that, what if I choose wrong and you kill someone innocent? What if I screw up and choose someone you can’t handle and you die?”

“See, this is why I need you, because it is something that needs that kind of thought,” he told her. It was too deep a discussion to plunge into immediately, something that they could get lost in before they took the first steps. “I won’t force you, and we won’t start right away, but you’re the best person I know. You understand supernatural society, you have the contacts, and you’re neutral. Who else would I ask, Alpha Chester?”

“No,” Lucy said slowly. “I don’t think he would even say that. His pack comes first and that’s that.”

“Just consider it. There’s a lot of work to be done first, all the enchanting and hopefully getting the bunker finished and all that.” Callum waved it away. “Just thought I’d set it out so we both have time to chew it over.”

“Gonna take some chewing,” Lucy said, gesturing with her spoon.

“Yeah, I think we need a bit of a break. How about I make good on that offer I made a while back?” Callum nearly laughed at Lucy’s expression, the blank look and spoon hanging out of her mouth contrasting with the Sears-catalogue looks and prim and upright posture. “Take you out on a date,” he prompted her.

“Oh! Well, I think I could spare some time for that, big man.” Callum relaxed slightly as Lucy peered at him. Some part of him, a small part, had been worried. “I guess dinner at that burger place doesn’t count, then.”

“It does not. But it doesn’t need to be around here.” He held up the portal anchor again. “Travel is fairly easy, after all.”

“That’s a good point,” Lucy said. “Surprise me!”

So he did. While Lucy was working on some complicated version of the enchantment CAD drawings, Callum looked up some things and started moving the portal anchor. Pragmatically, he still wanted something relatively close to one of his permanent destinations and, more importantly, something Lucy would actually enjoy.

“So check this out, big man,” Lucy said. He looked up and she waved at her laptop, so he joined her the table to see what she’d done. The enchantment designs were familiar enough, though they seemed to have been rendered into vectors. Lucy had added notes on inputs and outputs for the various bits he’d identified.

“Now, this isn’t finished or polished or anything,” Lucy cautioned. “Probably will help though.” She demonstrated what she meant by running through a quick exercise in what was apparently a program that she’d made.

Each subsection of enchantment had been put onto its own tile, with the inputs and outputs arranged so they aligned with the cardinal directions. Enchantments could get really complicated geometrically, but the individual connections were generally linear, so segmenting things that way worked pretty well. She could click and drag copies of the tiles into a workspace, snapping together and even validating the inputs and outputs.

“I know it’s not all compacted like your portal enchants, and there’s a bunch of optimization that’s either really hard or just requires stuff I don’t know about yet, but we can at least play around. Plus, check it out, you can just send one of these tile setups to CAD.” She clicked a button and, after the laptop whined for a few seconds, a program popped up where the designs she’d just made were indeed properly rendered.

“That is fantastic,” Callum said, and meant it. He hadn’t actually had much time to try and tinker with enchantment stuff, for a variety of reasons. Even if the program Lucy had hacked together didn’t actually validate that the enchantment worked – and he didn’t see how it was possible for it to do that anyway – it meant he could experiment with possibilities without needing to wrestle with individual lines in a CAD drawing.

It’d get even better as they acquired more examples, which was something that Callum hadn’t entirely given up on. Maybe when things had quieted down more he’d slip back to pilfer more designs from one of the supernatural areas. As it was, Lucy had really taken advantage of his notes and separated things far more finely than he’d tried to do.

“Thank you so much,” he told her. “This is more than I could ever have done myself. We might even have time to actually experiment with enchanting!” He remarked.

“You’re welcome, big man,” she said happily. “But don’t count your chickens this early. I’ve seen how much work we’ve got left.” Callum nodded and sighed. Most of his time was taken up with turning the salvaged cold iron into new enchanting plates for Chester. That had involved another trip to get stuff machined, because while he could do some of it at home, he couldn’t do it all. When it came to actual enchanting, it was straightforward enough but tedious and time-intensive.

Corite, or at least the corite that he’d recycled, took substantially longer than fresh mordite for the enchantment to lock in place. Just holding the framework, as still and tightly controlled as he possibly could, for minutes at a time was a surprisingly tiring process. He was about halfway through what he could do with the metal, which was two pairs of telepads for Chester.

He kept enough of the stuff for himself to produce another set of portal anchors, but he hadn’t started work on those yet. Mostly he wanted to take a bit to chew on it and consider better designs, since it wasn’t something he needed as soon as possible. Clearly he’d have to bounce ideas off Lucy, too.

“That’s the idea,” Lucy said happily. “I don’t know what tools the guild uses but they probably don’t use CAD and mockups like this.”

“Probably not,” Callum admitted. “They’ve got more people and more history, though. We’re basically starting from scratch, so we need something like this.”

“Glad you like it, big man.”

“I do,” Callum said firmly. “Now that you’ve got that done, ready to take a break?”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“What did you have in mind?” Lucy asked, eyeing him.

“You did say to surprise you,” Callum said, waving a hand and opening a portal up to where he’d finally put the anchor. Warm air billowed through, along with the scent of salt air and greenery. “Might want to ditch the sweater, though.”

“Ooh, the beach?” Lucy asked, doffing her sweater and tossing it on the couch before she stepped through the portal. On the other side was a small walk of hotel and stores, in the middle of surrounding jungle.

“There’s that too, but there’s some really nice swimming cenotes down there,” Callum told her, following her lead. “Figured they’d be more picturesque than the beach. We’ll have to buy the swimwear here, but that shouldn’t be a problem.”

“You just wanted to see me in a bikini,” she accused good-naturedly.

“Well, I can’t deny that,” Callum admitted. “But my other idea was a ski resort.” Lucy shivered.

“You made a good choice, big man,” she said.

***

Lucy found the big man a lot easier to be around than she had expected. While she still found it hard to think of him as Callum even to herself, he wasn’t the towering, deadly assassin she’d built up in her own mind. He could absolutely focus, turning an almost disconcerting intensity on things, but he wasn’t that way all the time. Mostly he was easygoing and scrupulously polite.

Actually, mostly he was stable. Her entire world had been upended, her job was gone, her house was gone, everything she’d worked for was metaphorically burned to ashes, and even her few friends were out of reach. Despite all that, the big man talked and acted as if everything was going to be okay, discussing little things as if they mattered, without ever condescending to her or making light of the situation.

She was still surprised he was a compact, ordinary-looking guy rather than some buff brickhouse, but it worked. It didn’t hurt that he was actually genuinely interested in her, as opposed to the few sad sacks from GAR she’d tried dating. After being so utterly dismissed as a dud it was a nice change to have someone taking her seriously. Not that she believed she needed the validation, but it sure didn’t hurt.

The best thing was that she still had stuff to do. Lucy was pretty sure she’d have gone spare if she’d had to sit around all day sewing or something. Or just staring out the window, or even watching movies. Getting her teeth into the enchanting stuff was not only interesting, but it also distracted her from the lingering cloud of her time in GAR custody.