Clare considered: was it a matter of tracing lines of influence to objects rather than personalities? Difficult, when influence was a matter of motivation, which was not possible with inanimate objects. So many times their tasks would have been easier if they could change someone’s mind. But that was like bringing a sledgehammer down on delicate glasswork. So you changed the thing that would change someone’s mind. How small a change could generate the greatest outcome? That was her challenge: could removing a bottle of ink from a room change the world? She believed it could. If it was the right bottle of ink, the right room. Then perhaps a letter wouldn’t be written, an order of execution wouldn’t be signed.
But the risk—that was Gerald’s argument. The risk of failure was too great. You might take a bolt from the wheel of a cannon, but if it was the wrong bolt, the wrong cannon…The variables became massive. Better to exert the most influence you could without being noticed. That didn’t stop Clare from weaving her thought experiments. For want of a nail…
“I raise,” Major said, and Clare looked up at the change in his voice. He had a plan; he was about to spring a trap. After the hundreds of games those four had played, couldn’t they see it?
“You don’t have anything.” Marco looked at his hand, at the cards lying face up on the table, back again. Major gave him a “try me” look.
“He’s bluffing.” Ildie wore a thin smile, confident because Major had bluffed before. Just enough to keep them guessing. He did it on purpose, they very well knew, and he challenged them to outwit him. They thought they could—that was why they kept falling into his traps. But even Major had a tell, and Clare could see it if no one else could. Easy for her to say, though, sitting outside the game.
“Fine. Bet’s raised. I see it,” Fred countered.
Then they saw it coming, because that was part of Major’s plan. Draw them in, spring the trap. He tapped a finger, the air popped, a tiny sound like an insect hitting a window, that was how small the spell was, but they all recognized the working of it, the way the world shifted just a bit, as one of them outside of it nudged a little. Major laid out his cards, which were all exactly the cards he needed, a perfect hand, against unlikely—but not impossible—odds.
Marco groaned, Ildie threw her cards, Fred laughed. “I should have known.”
“Tuesday rules,” Major said, spreading his hands in mock apology.
Major glanced at Clare, smiled. She smiled back. No, she didn’t ever want to play this game against Major.
Marco gathered up the cards. “Again.”
“Persistent,” Major said.
“Have to be. Thursday rules this time. The way it’s meant to be.” They dealt the next hand.
Gerald came in from the curtained area that was his study, his wild eyes red and sleepless, a driven set to his jaw. They all knew what it meant.
“I have the next plot,” he said.
Helping the cause sometimes meant working at cross-purposes with the real world. A PTP splinter group, frustrated and militant, had a plan, too, and Gerald wanted to stop it because it would do more harm than good.
Easier said than done, on such a scale. Clare preferred the games where they put a man’s pills out of the way.
She and Major hunched in a doorway as the Council office building fell, brought down by cheap explosives. A wall of dust scoured the streets. People coated in the gray stuff wandered like ghosts. Clare and Major hardly noticed.
“We couldn’t stop it,” Clare murmured, speaking through a handkerchief.
Major stared at a playing card, a jack of diamonds. “We’ve done all we can.”
“What? What did we do? We didn’t stop it!” They were supposed to stop the explosion, stop the destruction. She had wanted so much to stop it, not for Gerald’s sake, but for the sake of doing good.
Major looked hard at her. “Twenty-nine bureaucrats meant to be in that building overslept this morning. Eighteen stayed home sick. Another ten stayed home with hangovers from overindulging last night. Twenty-four more ran late because either their pets or children were sick. The horses of five coaches came up lame, preventing another fifteen from arriving. That’s ninety-six people who weren’t in that building. We did what we could.” His glare held amazing conviction.
She said, “We’re losing, aren’t we? Gerald will never get what he wants.”
So many of Gerald’s plans had gone just like this. They counted victories in lives, like picking up spilled grains of rice. They were changing lives, but not the world.
“Come on,” he ordered. “We’ve got a door.”
He threw the card at the wall of the alley where they’d hidden. It stuck, glowed blue, and grew. Through the blue glare a gaping hole showed. Holding hands, they dove into it, and it collapsed behind them.
“Lame coach horses? Hangovers?” Gerald said, pacing back and forth along one of the bookshelves. “We’re trying to save civilization.”
“What is civilization but the people who live within it?” Clare said softly. It was how she said anything around Gerald.
“Ninety-six lives saved,” Major said. “What did anyone else accomplish?” Silent gazes, filled with visions of destruction, looked back at him. The rest of them: Fred, Ildie, and Marco. Their jackets were ruffled, their faces weary, but they weren’t covered with dust and ragged like Clare and Major were. They hadn’t gotten that close.
Gerald paced. “In the end, what does it mean? For us?” The question was rhetorical because no answer would satisfy him. Though Clare thought, it means whatever we want it to mean.