The Law of Nines

22

ALEX SLOWED AS HE TURNED the truck into the well-lit parking lot. Even in the middle of the night it was half full.

“What is this place?” Jax asked.

Alex pointed off to the right. “That’s a gambling casino over there. Gambling isn’t legal on land, but it’s allowed on boats, so they build the whole place on big barges and tie them to docks at the edge of the river.”

“Do you spend time at this place?”

Alex knew what she was getting at. He remembered her admonition about places he was known to frequent. He had been afraid, though, that if he simply parked in a strange neighborhood or an empty lot they would draw unwanted attention.

“I know of it, but I’ve never been here before.”

She pulled a strand of hair back off her face. “Good.”

“This place is always busy, so we won’t look suspicious parked here. We can pull the cargo cover over the back and sleep under it.

It will be cramped, but it will keep us out of sight for the rest of the night.”

“I’m not so tired. I’ll stay up and stand watch.”

Alex shot her a look. “Stand watch? Anyone sitting in a parked car might attract attention. You, in that dress, with that long blond hair, this time of night, are bound to draw a crowd. That’s the last thing we need.”

“I look a mess,” she said as she glanced down at her dress. “Besides, I wore this dress so that I wouldn’t draw attention.”

“Trust me,” he said. “A crowd.”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw her start combing her fingers through waves of her damp hair, trying to coax it back into place. Alex thought that her disheveled condition somehow made her look all the more alluring. He had always thought that if he saw a beautiful woman with her clothes and hair in disarray and he still thought she was beautiful, then she truly was beautiful. Jax was more than that. She was gorgeous.

A thought he definitely didn’t like crossed his mind. He wondered if her looks helped her get close to men she intended to kill.

He forced his thoughts off of how attractive she was and pulled into a parking place between a couple of minivans. They would make the Jeep harder to spot for anyone looking for it. Centered between towering light poles, it was as dark a place as he could manage in the casino lot.

He knew that casinos had cameras that watched their parking lots, but as long as no one approached his Cherokee he doubted there would be any reason for security to notice them. People darted through the rainy night, hurrying to get to their cars or into the casinos. He hoped that none of those figures hidden by shadows and rain were looking for him and Jax.

Once he had turned off the wipers, with the way the rain was coming down, it was hard to see much in the blur of water flowing down the windows. Alex gestured off to the left.

“Over there are some outlet stores. We can get some more clothes there, but they don’t open until morning.”

She gazed into the distance where he pointed. “Morning is still hours away.”

“So we’d better get what rest we can.”

“But I—”

“Didn’t you say that you weren’t paying good enough attention and you almost got us killed? You need sleep to stay alert.”

Jax sighed. “I suppose you’re right. Maybe we should try to get some rest while we can.”

Rather than go out in the rain and get wet going in through the tailgate — and risk being watched by security — they both climbed over the seats into the rear cargo area. With the way the rain was coming down he was pretty sure that any security camera that happened to be pointed in their direction wouldn’t be able to see anything inside the Jeep.

Alex kept a blanket and a small duffel bag filled with emergency gear in the back. He spread the blanket over the floor, then pulled the cargo shade over them and hooked it in place. Once it was secure he turned on a small LED light from the bag. It wasn’t bright, but in the confined space it was more than ample. Jax watched him as he squirmed out of his jacket.

“Lie down,” he told her.

She didn’t object. He put the duffel bag under her head for a pillow, then draped his jacket over her, covering her as best he could. She had to pull her knees up to fit in the small area.

“Thanks,” she said as she watched him.

Alex nodded as he leaned back against the wheel arch. It wasn’t very comfortable, but he found it far preferable to being someplace where guys from another world could suddenly pop up and break his neck.

Once they were settled he turned off the light. Yellowish lamp-light from the tall poles leaked in around the edges of the cargo shade. The rain running down the windows made the light waver softly on her face. She was still watching him.

“We need to figure out our next move.”

Alex shrugged. “Maybe not. Maybe it’s over.”

Her face was a picture of incredulity. “Over?”

“Maybe we’ve finished it, tonight. Bethany is dead. Once they all realize that they’ve lost their leader, isn’t it likely they’ll quit? Maybe you’ve already accomplished what you came here to do.”

Jax twisted a thread sticking out from the edge of the blanket for a moment as if trying to find words, or maybe trying to decide how much she wanted to tell him.

“I can see why it would seem that way to you, Alex — I really can — but it’s more complicated than that. Queen Bethany wasn’t the real problem.”

She certainly had seemed like a problem to Alex. “What are you talking about? She came here from your world. You said that they have probably been interfering with my family for a long time. She killed Ben — you said so yourself. She wanted a Rahl heir for herself, and then she planned to kill me.” Alex folded his arms. “She even had some guy buy my paintings and ruin them.”

“The man who did that had no connection with her.”

Alex frowned. “How do you know that?”

“Because when I was looking for you through the mirror in the gallery I saw the man who ruined your paintings. His name is Sedrick Vendis. He had nothing to do with Queen Bethany.”

“Sedrick Vendis? Who the hell is he? And what do you mean he had nothing to do with Bethany? What’s this all about?”

Jax lifted a hand, urging him to calm down. “Queen Bethany was on the same side as these people, but lately she’s been operating outside of areas where she belonged.”

“You lost me.”

Jax sighed. “Bethany was a petty queen, but she was ambitious, so she aligned herself with powerful people. In the course of helping them she apparently learned about you and saw an opportunity for herself. Somewhere along the line she hatched a scheme to gain more power. She snuck here behind their backs.

“The people who have been coming here, who have caused your family trouble, the people who are endangering both our worlds, weren’t aware of what she has been up to. If Sedrick Vendis had known that Queen Bethany had taken to meddling — especially if he had known what she was trying to do with you — he would have killed her himself.”

“So who is this Vendis character?”

“He’s the right-hand man to Radell Cain, the real power behind all the trouble. I could hardly believe it when I saw Vendis here that day. It’s a bad sign that Vendis himself would come here, and that he was that close to you. Vendis is the one Cain sends to do his dirty work.”

“What do you mean about them endangering your world? What’s Cain after?”

Jax sighed. “Power. In the end it’s nothing more complicated than that. Just like other people throughout history, he lusts for power. He doesn’t care what or who is destroyed in the process, as long as he gets what he wants. It’s hard to believe, but deaths in the millions mean nothing to men like that. They only care about power for themselves.

“For the longest time we had peace and prosperity. People valued hard work and achievement. Most of us had a sense of the goodness of life. Over time, though, those kinds of things came to be seen as outmoded by more and more people who felt entitled to prosperity without effort. They resented being told that their desires were a recipe for ruin.”

“You mean they blamed the messenger.”

Jax nodded. “There are always people like Radell Cain who are ready to take advantage of public resentment. He played on people’s emotions by blaming everything on those who were still productive and prosperous, saying that they were uncaring and insensitive. People swooned at Cain’s simplistic, populist notions. He made what was really nothing more than simple greed sound somehow morally righteous. He made taking what others had worked to earn sound like justice. People ate it up.

“In the middle of unrest and difficult times, Cain won people over with promises of change — a new vision, a new direction. He made change sound like a miracle solution to all our problems. People mindlessly embraced the notion of change.”

“I guess people love hearing that nothing is their fault,” Alex said, “that other people are to blame for their troubles.”

Jax nodded. “For a lot of people it beats hard work and personal responsibility.”

“So, what was the great change that Radell Cain wanted?”

“He made magic into a scapegoat. He said that it tainted everything it touched because it was unfair. So, to solve all our problems, he called for bold change: a world without magic.”

Alex shrugged. “I live in a world without magic. What’s wrong with that?”

“But you live in a world with technology. In many ways technology and magic are interchangeable. You could almost make the case that for all practical purposes they’re really the same thing. Most of us don’t really understand the complexities of magic, like with my journey book, we simply use it. In your world there must be people who understand the complex technology of phones, but I bet that most people using phones don’t really know how they work.

“Technology, like magic, helps everyone live better. It doesn’t merely help you to survive, it helps you to be prosperous and healthy, to live longer, to live better. But because magic is used by everyone, and actually understood by so few, that knowledge has become distrusted and viewed as somehow sinister. Radell Cain plays on those common fears.”

“How is it that you know so much about the technology we have and yet you didn’t know how to make tea?”

“We’ve studied things here as best we could, learned what we could, but it’s only a dim overview captured in small snatches. We partially grasp the great sweep of how technology applies to life here, but we never understood all the details.

“We know, for example, that you somehow use cars and trucks to help you get places, deliver food and goods, but we don’t understand how those machines work. We know they’re important only because we see them all the time. We’ve seen people talk on phones, and while we never understood exactly what they were, we got the general idea. We once saw a red vehicle arrive to help an injured person, saw hoses and boxes and strange technology used to save their life. While we don’t know what was being done or how it worked, we grasped that it was something like a healer in my world would do.

“What little we know is mostly a result of trying to learn about the Rahls in your world as we tried to figure out what Radell Cain is after, here. During that search we saw things, learned a little about the technology you use. Our view, however, is profoundly limited. It’s like a deaf blind man trying to recount a visit to a new place.

“While our tools are limited, we did the best we could. It took decades just to isolate the Rahl line here. That’s why I know a little about your grandfather’s history and how technology is woven into your lives. We know a few random, isolated things. Making tea just wasn’t one of them.”

“So you’re saying that what Radell Cain wants to do in your world is the equivalent of stopping us from using technology?”

Jax nodded. “It’s not the same, exactly, but it’s a good enough comparison. And he doesn’t merely want to stop people from using it — he wants to entirely strip the world of it, take it entirely out of existence. He paints it as a utopian world.”

“Do you think it would be as bad as you fear?”

“Some of us understand exactly what it would mean for us, and we’re terrified.”

“Why?”

“Well, imagine life here without technology. Imagine life without the technology that heats your buildings, helps grow food in abundance, makes your lights glow. What would your lives be like without your phones, your trucks, your medicines and cures, without the means to supply the people in your cities with goods and services?

“Imagine all the people in cities deprived of every kind of technology, technology that they use every day to survive. Imagine everyone suddenly having to find a way to grow their own food, to preserve it, to store it safely.”

“People are pretty ingenious,” Alex said with a shrug. “I’m sure it would be hard but I think they would cope.”

“Cope? Think of the reality of your world, tomorrow, suddenly stripped of your technology — no phones, no computer devices, no way to find out anything. Think it through, Alex.

“Without your technology the fabric of civilization itself would come apart within days — if not hours. Everyone would be on their own. One city wouldn’t know what the next was doing, or if they were even alive. There’d be no planes or cars or anything else. You couldn’t travel to other places unless you walked. Do you have any idea how long it takes to walk just a few dozen miles? A distance that in your cars takes a brief time would be days of hard travel on foot.

“There would be no way for people to know what had happened to their far-flung loved ones. No one would know what had happened to their government. No word would come about anything. Everyone — everyone — would be in the dark, literally and figuratively. You would all be sitting there with no phones, no electrical devices, no heat, no way to get anything or summon help. Your world would fall silent.

“It wouldn’t be long until supplies of food started to rot and run out. How long would it be until roving gangs started to loot what they wanted? Who would stop them? How would the police know when and where crimes were being committed? How would they hear anyone cry for help? How would they get there? Law and order would quickly become a thing of the past.

“When it turns cold, then what? Millions of people will rush to cut wood to try to keep warm, that’s what. Makeshift fires used to keep warm will inevitably get out of hand. Your technology to fight the fires would be gone. Once fires catch hold, they will rampage unchecked, growing to firestorms that will gut cities and leave tens of thousands homeless.

“Disease will spread like a plague with no means to stop it. Life will be not merely cheap but short.

“When all the food is gone you will begin dying by the millions. Those still alive will not have the strength or the will to bury all the dead. In the end, in the grip of starvation, the living will eat the dead.

“The only law will be survival.

“Those who once held idyllic notions of how simple and clean life would be without the demon of technology — like those in my world who believe the same thing about life without magic — will die filthy, terrified, and confused. Their idealistic notions will crumble in the cold face of reality. Like those in my world, they will be unprepared for the consequences of their pompous beliefs.

“What before had been simple will become tremendously difficult or impossible. The ignorant, the frightened, the weak, the criminal, will defecate in runoff areas, in streams, and in rivers, wanting their waste to be washed away. They won’t care about anyone downstream. Finding water will be a monumental chore. Finding clean, disease-free water will be impossible.

“Sewage and garbage will lie in the open. Vermin will multiply into a nightmare of filth. The stench of human habitation will be unbearable, but you will live in it, sleep in it, have sex in it, bear children you cannot care for in it. Without technology, the product of your minds, mankind will be marked by the stench of sickness and death.

“Schools, of course, will be a thing of the past. Learning will be stopped in its tracks; knowledge will wither daily. Survival itself will be an all-consuming struggle. As people die in droves the aptitude for technology, the skills, the expertise that was so common and taken for granted, will be lost. Without it your world will plunge headlong into the depths of a bottomless dark age of filth and misery. Millions upon millions of lives will be cut short as they are born into profound ignorance, abject poverty, backward superstition, and the rule of the most brutal.

“That is the reality of a world without technology — brief lives of unimaginable misery, filth, and savagery.”

Only the rain droning on filled the sudden silence. Jax sat quietly for a moment, letting it all sink in, letting the horror of understanding settle over him.

Alex knew that the Dark Ages had been a time much like she described. The knowledge built up by past civilizations had been lost as mankind plummeted into a black abyss. Survival was such a struggle that there were stretches of centuries about which next to nothing was known. That mankind emerged in the Renaissance was a testament to the nobility of the human spirit. It was only when mankind rose up and began to develop technology to shape the world that light came into their dark existence.

But it had taken a thousand years for that light to return.

“That is what Radell Cain’s ideas mean to our world, Alex,” she said softly. “That will be our fate. We will be stripped of everything we’ve made of our world and our lives.”

Alex sat sobered by such a description. He’d never really considered the far-reaching ramifications of such a thing. He now realized that Jax had. If anything, she was painting a kinder picture than what would be the horrifying reality.

If technology were suddenly taken away, the suffering and dying would be beyond imagining. Without all the factories and common technologies that people whined about, they’d be lucky to be able to grub enough worms to keep them alive.

Alex gestured vaguely. “You could use technology instead — build things, make things, create the things you need — just like we did. Mankind here developed what we have from nothing.”

She cast him a reproachful look. “And how many millennia did you live in a world of darkness lit only by fire?”

He knew she was right.

“It took the people here centuries to create, invent, and discover things to improve your lives. We, too, have spent countless eons developing parallel abilities that enable us to live without suffering the most common afflictions and wants. We use those abilities to tell us the best time to plant, the best time to harvest. Without those methods, thousands would starve. There are endless examples of how abilities developed over a long history help us live — help us live in an unnatural and evil way, according to Radell Cain.

“Because he wants to rule, because he needs something to blame simply so that he can gain power, everything we have will be forever lost, and once lost, it can’t be recovered.”

“But why would Cain want to do that? He would rule a wasteland.”

Jax arched an eyebrow. “You just said it. He would rule. He is willing to lay waste to civilization just to gain immense power for himself.

“If he really cared what became of people under his rule he wouldn’t incite such hatred for values, hold the victims responsible for the crimes against them, and shift blame to the innocent whenever anything goes wrong. He would work to solve problems instead of using them to seize complete power for himself.

“After Cain gets what he wants, no one will be able to challenge him. He will rule the world — a cold, dead, starving world — but he will rule it nonetheless, living in lavish excess with all the trappings his heart desires. What little of everything there is, he will control. That’s all that really matters to him. He is a man completely without empathy for others. It only matters to him that he gets what he wants. If a few million die he doesn’t really care — the dead don’t eat.”

Alex stared off as he listened. “It seems impossible to believe that people would go along with such a thing.”

Jax sighed. “I know. It’s hard for us to believe, too, but every day people willingly undergo a process called ‘the Cleansing’ to remove any gifted ability — that means magic. Afterwards, after this rebirth, the magic they were born with and learned to master is forever gone. They tell other people that they feel free for the first time in their lives and pressure them to give up their ‘tainted’ abilities as well. Crowds wait in lines to have it done, to go along with everyone else, to prove their virtue.”

Jax looked away, her eyes filling with tears. “That’s the worst part, that so many would not value their own unique abilities, not value themselves, much less respect those who have fought and died so that they could live free to make the choice to surrender that precious right of choice — along with their gift and their individuality.”

She gripped the blanket in a fist. “I often think that they deserve everything they’re going to get. I only regret that those of us who value what we have will suffer the same fate. They’re the ones I fight for. The rest of them be damned.”

Alex swallowed at the pain so clearly evident in her voice. “We have people like that in our world, too. People who say that freedom is no longer practical, that we must surrender it for a greater common good.”

“Fear them,” she whispered. “They are the heart of evil. They tolerate tyranny, excuse it, compromise with it. In so doing they always bring savagery and death upon the rest of us.”

Alex listened to the rain drumming on the roof for a time. There was something about the power in her voice, the fierce intensity, the conviction, the passion of purpose, that added to his impression that this was no ordinary woman. This was a woman who knew what she was talking about.

This woman was not a follower of anyone. She was a leader.

“If Sedrick Vendis is Cain’s right-hand man, and important in his own right, then why would he travel to this world and buy my paintings just to deface them?”

Jax glowered with dark thoughts for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “At the time I thought it seemed rather strange, to say the least.”

“So,” he finally asked, “you really think that Radell Cain wants something from me?”

Her eyes turned back up to lock onto his gaze. “The Law of Nines says that you are central in this.”

He didn’t budge from her steady gaze. “Bethany told me that you’re an assassin, and that you would kill me.”