Hallow London [Apocalyptic Urban Fantasy]

Agent Blackthorne leaned forward expectantly, calmly awaiting her answer. The tea, only a faint wisp of steam curling upward from it now, was left by the wayside, momentarily abandoned and growing cold as seconds of contemplation became minutes.

Lucy hesitated, unsure of exactly why. It should have been an easy answer for her to give, she felt. She knew what she wanted to say before the ultimatum had finished being delivered. And yet, just as she was about to open her mouth to speak, she couldn't help but notice the way Blackthorne was looking at her as he spoke.

There was… concern written on his face. The chilling seriousness of the agent's stare was borderline unsettling, and it bore down on her in a way that she hadn't expected from the seemingly unflappable man. A split second's difference had given her just enough time to notice it, but once she did she couldn't unsee it. He used no words past the ones he left unspoken. He expected her to be able to read between the lines.

Is he… does this mean that these people are as dangerous to him as they could be to me?

If they were, it would make an unfortunate amount of sense. Professor Smith was no slouch, so anyone strong enough to force him into hiding would, necessarily, have to be a very credible threat. If she went down this path, she would need to hope and pray she could find some way to fly under the radar.

Ultimately, however, her mind had been made up before she even entered the room. She took a deep breath, fully considering the dangers present in this choice.

"I need to know," she answered. "So say what you need to. I'm as ready as I'll ever be."

Blackthorne considered her words with an unreadable expression, but eventually acknowledged her decision with a curt nod.

"Very well."

The agent snapped his fingers, and the world plunged into… something close to darkness.

Lucy flinched as their seats were encircled in a strange sort of black light. Fractal patterns twisted up from the floor below, spreading upwards and outwards like rime frost until it surrounded them completely. No incantation, no common magical indicators, just inky blackness appearing all around them in a matter of moments. She was awestruck by the sight, even if looking at it while it formed made her head spin with vertigo. But, once it settled around them like a canopy and stilled itself, her thoughts went more to the strange properties of the magical construct than her previous unease.

It was as if a little bubble of reality was being separated from the outside world, keeping everything inside the circle plainly visible, but occluding anything past the walls of the barrier with a pure, black void.

"I've put up a privacy field," Agent Blackthorne stated casually, like such a thing were commonplace in the real world. "They'll probably guess what I'm about to tell you anyway, but it's always better to build plausible deniability, I find. I can only keep this up for maybe five minutes, so just sit tight and listen. Understand?"

Lucy nodded in confirmation.

"Excellent. Now, let's begin with some context. The events I'm about to explain to you have been slowly building for quite some time, going back as far as just a few years after the public introduction of Domains to the world. Up until very recently, these events have been little more than momentary blips. Troublesome, yes, but still something rare, something easily controllable. Easily disposed of behind the scenes should the need arise. This begs the question, of course, what do we have to hide?"

Idly, he began checking the current steep of the tea while he continued to talk. Or something to that effect. Lucy had never really learned all too much about making tea, despite the culture around it in Britain. Found she'd never had time for it, and more often than not she ended up reaching for an energy drink instead. Quick, cheap, and kept her up long enough to finish what she started.

...She could kill for something with caffeine right about now. The exhaustion of her previous ordeals was starting to set in bone deep. If it weren't for the next words to come out of the agent's mouth, she might have been well on her way to collapsing then and there.

"In truth, there are a wide variety of things we need to hide," he finished. "But in this particular case… we concealed a whole world of possibilites. For decades, we fought tirelessly to blot out every last instance of magic that falls outside the boundaries of the Ten Domains. Because they do exist. And, as London can so unhappily attest to, each one was a powderkeg waiting to explode."

A piece of the puzzle clicked into place. Then more. Many, many more. Extrapolating data had been her hobby, in a sad, boring way, before it became her life's work during the development of the Cloudpiercer. While she'd never jump at saying that she was the best at it, Lucy would be foolish to ignore the fact that she was at least very skilled at it.

A skill that was coming back to bite her, now, as she began to develop explanations why herself and her friends had been thrust into the limelight to spearhead an operation far beyond their imaginations.

We weren't chosen because our project interested them, she realized. That just got our foot in the door. The real reason they wanted us out in front was because they needed a figurehead to hide their cleanup operations behind.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Heedless of her revelations, Blackthorne pressed on.

"Just to be clear, when I say 'rare' here, I don't mean rare like Ghost of Tolkien." Blackthorne let out a light cough involuntarily, before washing it out with a quick sip of tea. "These events are orders of magnitude more unlikely than that, somewhere in the realm of, well… the conditions that made Edison Smith the man he is today. No rhyme, no reason, just every so often something showed up, falling outside the norm just enough that it had the potential to cause… problems."

"Both global superpowers caught wind of this during the tail end of the Cold War, of course, but after a few botched attempts at controlling these… hm. There's not really a standardized name for them, but I suppose magical anomalies works well enough as a catch-all. Anyways, We tried and failed to keep one in check, the Russians did the same but with more people ending up dead, both got wind of each others operations and by the end of it, myself and several others from both sides of the intelligence community were tasked with cleaning up these messes before they had a chance to wreak havoc on the world at large."

The agent set down the cup again, letting out a shaky breath.

"It worked well enough, for a time. Until, of course, it got to the point where one showed up every year. Then multiple every year. It only ever accelerated from there. More and more always showed up the longer we spent dispersing every last chaotic mana pattern we could find. Pretty soon, there was a new one showing up every week, in one random no-name hole in the ground or another. Pretty soon, we found we could no longer destroy them in their fledgling states, only neuter them so they couldn't grow out of control. We ended up fighting a whole damn secret war over a period of decades, and our little team was always being stretched to the limits even after the multiple rounds of resource allocations."

"And, as you might be guessing by now, it eventually became too much for us to keep up with, too quickly and too extreme for us to keep a lid on with the tools at our disposal. Everyone knows it. Everyone's seen it. It's honestly a miracle that all those anomalies finally decided to go quiet after our first unequivocal failure."

The exclusion zone, Lucy realized.

The unprecedented nature of what had used to be London was undeniable to even the most contrarian dwarves out there, but to have it confirmed like this by someone in the know – and to be shown just how extensive the rabbithole went - was… deeply unsettling. It played on a gut feeling she'd felt bubbling under the surface ever since she decided to start looking into the foggy expanse.

She still felt like she knew nothing about it. That, despite dedicating the majority of her early career to unraveling its secrets, she never seemed to make any real progress towards that goal. She'd been narrowly focused on this specific project, and sure, plenty of new discoveries had been made in that time, but at the end of the day they were still nowhere nearer to finding a solution from the outside.

Blackthorne kept the revelations coming.

"This posting is a bit of a punishment detail for my inability to arrive on the scene in time to stop anything. It's also served as the ammunition the opposition party's been wanting for decades now. With my team's failure fresh on everyone's minds, certain individuals had everything they needed to push through some more… autocratic policies behind the scenes. Starting with either containing or eliminating those in the know."

He did not stop.

"Edison was one of those unlucky few. I don't know how he managed it, but for whatever foolish reasons he had then, he somehow ended up in the Himalayas with the other Founding Mages at the perfect time to witness the creation of the very first anomalies. Truth be told, they all did more to keep them in check than I did, and my job was basically created on the spot that day. They all agreed to keep quiet, but evidently that is no longer seen as being enough."

An unending tide of world-shattering news that had the potential to upturn… everything.

"Fools," Blackthorne spat. "There was a purge order for any individual outside the direct control of a world government that had even a scrap of knowledge about anomalous magic. I had… hoped by directly employing him I could perhaps protect him from the motion, but…"

Sullen silence dragged on. Only for a few seconds. Long enough for the agent to find his feelings, package them into a neat little box, compress that box to a quarter of its size, and bury it deep down somewhere where nobody would ever find it again. Lucy thought it a depressing way to deal with his unbridled emotions. He seemed to feel it necessary to complete his job.

"I respected him. We had our differences and our quarrels, certainly, but… we knew each other like the backs of our hands. And now… now as far as I know, Edison is now the only one left standing. I only managed to warn him because I got wind of the sudden disappearance of Heinrich Gutenberg, the last surviving Founding Mage besides Edison himself. Today, I woke up to discover that Mr. Gutenberg was found to have 'mysteriously died suddenly' somewhere off the coast of Cyprus. Such a waste…"

Expression. Packaging. Compression. Buried. The process repeated a few more times, but the agent had said everything that needed saying already. Now, he was just trying to deal with the aftermath.

"What a shortsighted waste," he growled. "Don't they realize that this is exactly how we end up with a second tragedy on the scale of the London Exclusion Zone? What makes them so sure that we're safe now? Who's to say a new wave of Domain anomalies don't show up a few years down the line? What will we do then? Half the people experienced with keeping them in check are already dead and buried. And that's assuming they don't stop looking for new targets to pick off!"

Expression. Packaging. Compression…

The teacup shattered in the clenched fist of Agent Blackthorne, leaving porcelain shards crumbling in his white glove and spilling lukewarm tea all over the floor. Like snapping out of a trance, his anger fizzled, just as the darkness surrounding them began to dissolve out of existence.

"Oh dear," he said neutrally, back to his usual enigmatic self. "I appear to have made a mess of things. Perhaps while I clean this up, it's best if you leave as soon as physically possible."

There was an odd emphasis put on the last few words. Reading between the lines again, she got up, swaying slightly as the aftereffects of mana overexpenditure made her body feel sluggish to respond to the commands she gave it.

One foot in front of the other. One foot… in front of…

She made it around about three and a half corners before she collapsed to the ground, unconscious.