06 – Breaking Bonds of Words and Promises

Erika did not panic.

“The Analyst and I appreciate The Eclipse’s cooperation with this matter.”

She wasn’t sure if she could panic. There was a moment, right when she heard the word stop, that she felt that spike of adrenaline. But it was gone now.

“Of course. The Emperor was most invested in this project. She will be pleased to hear it turned out well.”

The Hanged Man and the worn-out accountant were talking. Erika couldn’t turn her head, but neither had moved out of her view. At least, not yet. The Hanged Man opened the driver-side door and stood, only to pause as the accountant held up a halting hand.

“Further assistance is not required. The Church shall handle the matter from here,” he said, looking back to Erika. There was a brief moment where Erika feared he was about to reach in and manhandle her out of the back of the car. Instead, he just said, “Levitate.”

The pressure of the seat left Erika’s backside as she felt a new effect layer itself on top of the stop command. She wasn’t sure how he was doing it, but with the second effect touching her, she could feel… a film around her. Like someone had lightly wrapped a thin sheet around her. A second sheet, she realized. Stop must have been the first. It was almost identical to the film she had felt around the golden bar that The Strategist had brought her. She still couldn’t move herself, but it seemed like the mage had little trouble affecting her. He reached in and gave a light tug on the end of her shoe.

She drifted across the seat, to the door, and with a slight push against the top of her head to keep her from bumping against the car, right out of the vehicle.

“Very well,” The Hanged Man said, watching as she drifted, now free in the open air. “If you require any further assistance, do not hesitate—”

“Ope,” the accountant muttered, grabbing Erika by her ankle. “Don’t want you flying off to the moon.”

A chill would have run down Erika’s spine at the dismissive tone in his voice—like he didn’t quite care whether or not she did end up flying off under his spell—except she couldn’t quite shudder. Instead, she simply did the only thing she could right now.

She considered her situation. Specifically, the spells the accountant was using on her.

She could feel them, layered on her. Levitate wrapped around stop and stop fought against it to keep her still. There was something there. Something she could exploit. A little fracture that could break. If these films were spells, then she had broken one before. Thus, she knew that she could break these as well. The problem was, how?

How, without doing anything, could she do something to break these spells?

“Very well,” The Hanged Man continued. He lightly shut the rear door to his car. Before the door fully closed, Erika caught a glimpse of her bat, half under the rear seat. She didn’t know if he was intentionally keeping it or if neither of the two of them thought it was important enough to consider.

It wasn’t. She could use any baseball bat, but she had somewhat come to like that one.

But The Hanged Man returned to the driver seat, closing the door as he did so. A moment later, the car started rolling away. Its tires were distinctive against the road, with the lack of an engine noise overpowering the rubber against pavement sound. Perhaps an electric car? She hadn’t noticed earlier.

The accountant looked to her, let out a long, weary sigh, and started walking toward the Old St. Patrick’s Church. He paused a few steps in, only just realizing that Erika wasn’t with him. “Come,” he said.

Another layer wrapped around Erika, except it wasn’t fully around her this time, more like a slight pressure on her back that pushed her forward.

Erika didn’t know what to do with that information. She could only catalogue it away and hope it would come in useful before it stopped being irrelevant.

“As you can see, we’ve repaired the street in the time since our last encounter,” said the only one of the remaining two people who could talk.

And he was right. The entire road outside the church now sported fresh asphalt. Even a good chunk of the sidewalk looked brand new. Not that Erika cared at the moment. In fact, she was completely ready to tear the street a brand new chasm down its middle if it meant escape.

With everything going on with The Mummy, the gas leaks, and those maggots, she hadn’t focused on The Church and the bounty on her head. Her precautions, cutting the ID cards, seemed to have been working. The email The Church had sent The Fixer claimed that they couldn’t locate her for some reason or other. It just hadn’t felt like a priority next to fixing what she broke.

Some part of her assumed that The Fixer would have handled the bounty situation, given the existing relation there.

She should have known better. The entity that was her father had lived for a few hundred years now. His concept of time was probably more screwed up than Carter’s. He probably thought he could get around to it in a few years or decades. Assuming he ever made progress. His track record involving The Mummy did not reassure Erika in the slightest.

“Ah. You may talk,” the accountant said.

“Fuck you,” she snapped—a purely reactionary response. It was probably better to be polite and cooperative. Especially because, the moment she spoke, she felt the first film strain. The stop layer really did like her talking. Just those two words felt right, instinctively—it was the same instinctual feeling she got when she broke a bone or snapped that gold bar earlier.

The accountant gave her a loathsome, withering look. “Never mind.”

The talk spell fell away, slipping off Erika along with her ability to speak. Her mouth was stuck open in a half-spoken slurry of more cursing, but without being able to move more, she couldn’t finish even one syllable.

The accountant pulled open the front door of the old church building, allowing his spell to guide her inside. He paused to close the door before passing between the rows of pews toward the back of the building.

Erika’s mind raced, trying to analyze her situation. Her words may have been unwise, but they helped her realize one thing. She could still breathe.

She supposed it made sense. The accountant wouldn’t have made a spell to capture someone if it killed them. There was some part of it that was weakened specifically for her lungs to expand and contract. Similarly, her heart was obviously not stopped, nor could she not think.

Erika took a deep breath, drawing in as much air as she could. Her chest expanded. That first layer on her, the one she dubbed stop, didn’t like it. It allowed it, but it was a begrudging allowance, wanting more to hold her completely still than to allow such a violation of its existence.

She breathed back out, slowly, while some corner of her mind wondered if she was personifying these spells just a little too much.

But it was an in. An action she could perform that was allowed by stop and yet affected it all the same.

Behind the large altar, the accountant opened another door to a relatively small room. There were a few portraits on the walls of religious-looking people—Jesus, she recognized, the rest she didn’t—and a large wooden desk occupied the middle of the room.

“Wait here.”

As the man spoke, the thrusters on her back fell away, dispersed into the ether. Facing the wall and unable to turn around, she couldn’t see him. The noise of the door clicking shut and the silence of vacancy told her he was gone. Probably off to fetch that robot… assuming it wasn’t invisible and in the room with her.

Erika would have shuddered at the thought.

Since she couldn’t, she just started breathing.

Hard breaths, long breaths, quick breaths, staggered breaths. She breathed like her life depended on it for more than the oxygen, hyperventilating to the point of feeling a lightheaded wooziness tickling the corners of her mind. But she didn’t stop. Every breath—every movement of her chest strained stop all the more. The faster and more frequent the movement, the more strained it got.

There it was. She could feel it. Just like when she had placed the screwdriver against that gold bar and the film around it, she felt that point of weakness. One more quick breath, moving as much as she could, acted as the hammer’s blow.

Stop snapped. With it went levitate, ripped apart as the layer underneath broke.

Erika dropped to the ground, landing on her butt in roughly the same pose as she had been sitting in the car. She quickly scrambled to her feet. Her bat was gone, but she still had the hammer and screwdriver in her pocket. She pulled them out, completely ready to break down the entire church if necessary, only to pause.

Perhaps it was because she had been stopped, but Erika felt uncannily calm at the moment. She was not in a mad panic. There was urgency, but no massive spike of adrenaline clouding her thoughts.

Her first thought now that she could move was that, supposing she escaped now and actually got away, nothing would end up resolved. The Church would just up their bounty, and she would eventually fall into some trap again. They clearly knew how to find her now, so she might not even get as far as she had the first time around.

Erika really only knew of a handful of people on this side of the coin, but already she could tell that they had varied powers at their disposal. Erika thought she was pretty strong—she seemed to have impressed The Strategist with her breaking of the gold bar—but she couldn’t just look at someone and tell them to stop.

Erika was fairly certain that she could break out of his stop command much faster on a second try, maybe even in under ten seconds, but that was still too long. And that wasn’t even the biggest threat.

What if the accountant got her in earshot and just told her to die?

How far did his powers extend? He could teleport, seemingly suspend curses or enchantments based on their previous encounter, and now all of this.

Erika slowly lowered her weapons, straightening fully. Pocketing the screwdriver, she pulled out her phone and sent a quick message to The Fixer and Leah.

At The Church. Kidnapped but free for the moment. Going to try something stupid. If I don’t send a message again soon, launch a rescue please!

It took less than ten seconds before her phone started blowing up with texts and calls. Erika powered it down, not wanting to be distracted.

Rounding the wooden desk, she sat down in the black leather seat and reclined like she owned the place. It faced the door; otherwise, she would have taken a seat on the ‘guest’ side of the desk. No matter what, she wasn’t about to put her back to the door.

The door cracked open before she had fully settled. She had hoped for a minute to think about what she was going to say, but it looked like winging it was her only option.

The accountant stepped back into the room first, a flicker of surprise crossing his tired face when he saw Erika seated behind the desk. Behind him, that same nun from the park with The Fixer followed. Unlike the accountant, her eyes were sharp and active, darting about the room to take in its entire state in a mere second.

“Lingering spell fragments indicate systemic vulnerabilities present,” the nun said, stepping forward with small, precise steps. “Targeted exploit—overflow-stress attack.”

The accountant sighed, scratching at a patch of thinning hair on the top of his head. “I felt pretty good about that one, too.”

“All systems have failure states,” the nun continued in a tone of absolute neutrality. “Rapid thoracic movement is unlikely to free an average individual. Prior experience with this subject has proved her capable of affecting reality-level flaws.”

Erika kept her face carefully blank despite a rising tension in the back of her neck. Neither of these people looked alarmed that their prisoner had escaped. That meant that they thought the situation was still in their favor. To be fair, Erika was inside their base of operations. They had home-field advantage. She didn’t even have her bat. Just a hammer. It wasn’t even a particularly large hammer.

Perhaps she should have tried to escape anyway.

“I am The Analyst,” the nun said, now looking directly at Erika.

“Banker,” the salaryman said. “If we have to use silly titles.”

That rising tension diminished ever so slightly. They were introducing themselves. That was… good, right?

And they were waiting, looking at her.

“The Agent, I guess,” Erika said. “It seems to be what I’m being called.” Erika wasn’t sure that some impromptu title she had accepted on the spot was really the best, but it saved her from having to think up something on her own on the spot. Her eyes drifted to the salaryman. The Banker. That was… apt. Basically, what she had him pegged as in the first place.

Erika forced her mind back on track. She couldn’t wander. Not now.

“Look,” she said before they could speak. “I’m really sorry about breaking in here the other week ago. In fairness to me, I didn’t even know about anything supernatural at the time, certainly not that this place is run by some big shots. I thought I was just going to find some regular-old church filing cabinet, and I did call out a few times as I entered, I think—”

“But you did break in,” The Banker said, casually sliding around one of the chairs on the opposite side of the desk. He slumped into it like he just got off an eighteen-hour shift at the exhaustion factory.

“Well, yes, but there were extenuating circumstances.”

“You acquired confidential information through anomalous means,” The Analyst said. She remained standing, stiff and poised, just to the side of The Banker’s seat. “You assaulted me and The Banker, destroyed an original iron gate, caused approximately twenty-seven thousand dollars worth of damage to the street, costing money and manpower to repair, and another eighteen thousand worth of damage to the water main.”

Erika winced. “I… don’t remember attacking you?” she said, not sure what else she could say in her defense.

The Analyst raised an arm. Rigid lines ran through the nun’s arm, forming rows and columns of octagons that somehow tessellated despite lacking any other shape filling the impossible voids. Each little octagon flipped over, revealing mirror-covered machinery beneath the flesh and fabric. The mechanical arm extended far beyond the nun’s human arm, yet occupied the same space. Although the visuals were different, it reminded Erika of The Fixer turning into Leah and back.

“You destroyed my arm. It has been replaced.”

“I…” Erika really didn’t know what to say to that. She wasn’t good at the whole apologizing thing. Especially not a serious apology. It wasn’t something she had a lot of experience in. “Sorry. I had just been attacked by a monster robot—”

“Rude,” The Analyst said with an uncanny snip in her tone.

“I didn’t know about anything. You were literally the first non-human sapient being I had ever seen in my entire life! I didn’t know a thing about all these people with the in front of their name.”

“I find that difficult to believe,” The Banker said in a calm tone. “You proceeded to impersonate The Fixer a mere day or two later, sending us a request for information.”

Erika winced again. “You know about that, huh?”

“We knew the moment you sent it,” The Analyst said. “We chose to…”

“Play along,” The Banker offered.

“Yes. We played along to gather more information on you. There was an element of reciprocity as well, providing data in return for data.” She paused, then added, “We still wish to acquire the mask whose picture you sent.”

“Done,” Erika agreed easily. “I still have it. You call off your bounty, and it is yours.”

“There is no bounty,” The Analyst said. “It has been fulfilled. We are required to complete payment to The Eclipse for services rendered.” She paused and tilted her head, looking to The Banker.

“Payment that is likely worth far more than the mask,” he grumbled.

“So what do you want from me? Here to take your pound of flesh?” Erika sked through gritted teeth. Her eyes flicked to The Analyst’s arm, fully back to normal now. She tensed, fingers clenching around the hammer’s haft as she regretted her words.

Her arm couldn’t be replaced as easily as a machine’s.

The Analyst looked to The Banker again. This time, The Banker looked back.

“We require information,” The Banker said after a short moment.

“Thought that was your whole business,” Erika said. “Knowing everything.”

“It is functionally impossible to know everything,” The Analyst said. There was a bare hint of sarcasm in her otherwise neutral tone. “But we try our best. To that end, it is imperative to seek information. Currently, we seek information from you.”

Erika looked back and forth between the two. “That’s it. Information.”

“Information,” The Analyst repeated.

“Alright. I can do that. I—”

The door behind The Banker and The Analyst slammed open before Erika could finish talking. The Banker managed to both drag himself to his feet and move fast enough at the same time to almost appear as if he had teleported. The Analyst swiveled her head a full 180 while her body melted to the other side of her form. Even Erika popped to her feet, startled at the intrusion.

The Fixer stood in the doorway, recognizable only because of the apron they wore. Their features were a mess, a mixture of the suave gentleman they had appeared as after the museum, the hair and eyes of her mother, but the body of someone else that Erika had never seen before.

“Stand down, Analyst,” he said, tone harsh and commanding.

“Fixer,” The Analyst said in a cooler tone than she had used with Erika. “Do not presume that our dealings render you immune to retaliation. Invading The Church is what has landed your ward in…”

“Hot water?” The Banker provided.

“Indeed.”

“Your threats won’t work on me. You know—”

“Leah,” Erika said, then corrected herself. “Fixer. I had everything under control. If you wanted to help, you should have done something weeks ago. How did you even get here this fast? I sent that text ten minutes ago, tops.”

“You weren’t responding. I came to the rescue.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Erika said under her breath. Figures that she wouldn’t get an answer. Neither of them told her anything her entire life. Why start now? “Just… leave. You’re only going to make things worse.”

A pained expression crossed that amalgamation of a face, giving Erika a twinge of regret over her phrasing if not her sentiment. Nevertheless, she held steady, staring down her mother’s eyes with determination. It took a minute, but she could see the wearing down of her mother and The Fixer. Slowly, those eyes flicked to The Analyst and then to The Banker, then to the seat that Erika had been using up until now. A confused frown hit The Fixer before they looked at Erika one more time.

“I will wait outside.” They paused, staring at Erika. “Be cautious.”

Erika raised an eyebrow, but nodded. The Banker and The Analyst said nothing, though each glanced at the other. They didn’t nod or shake their heads or make any other visible acknowledgment. Erika wondered if they had some kind of telepathy going between them.

Few things would surprise her at this point.

The Fixer finally backed out of the room. He left the door open as if to listen in. The Banker wasn’t having any of it. With a resigned sigh, he approached the door, closed it, latched it, and then mumbled something at it. Erika couldn’t tell if that had been a spell or just a curse under his breath. Either way, he slumped back into his seat the moment he was finished.

“Where were we?” he asked.

“Information,” The Analyst said. “You answer our questions in full. We will determine the worth of the response. If we exhaust your responses and are still wanting, additional payment will be required: Service in the form of additional information gathering.”

Erika frowned, hands against the top of the desk. Her hammer was gripped in one hand. The other was flat against it. She thought for a moment before shaking her head. “No.”

“No?”

Maybe she was feeling a little more confident now that she knew The Fixer was on the other side of the door, maybe it was that warning. She could smell a bad deal when she saw one.

“No. Nothing is stopping you from determining that all the answers I could give are worthless. I obviously don’t know the value of my own information. If I did, I’d go be a spooky information broker myself. But if I agree to those terms, I’ll end up working for you my whole life.”

“We’re not that kind of people,” The Banker said. “We don’t need to trap people into contracts or hand out monkey’s paws…”

“Good for you. I don’t know that.” Erika glared him down for a moment. “I’ll answer your questions. I’m not even opposed to giving you more information at a later date if you want. I fully admit that I’m still in the wrong here despite extenuating circumstances, and I do owe something for that, but I’m not going to work for you.”

The Analyst looked to The Banker. This time, The Banker nodded back quickly. Although she didn’t look pleased, The Analyst turned back to Erika. Through thin, pressed lips, she said, “Take a seat. To begin, recite in detail all events leading up to your excursion to the Historical Gallery and Cultural Museum of Chicago…”