The greatest stories we tell are about ourselves, to ourselves. Magic weaves tales of terrible power into the Tapestry of Creation.

We are the thread and the needle. Listen:

A fist locked into a hammer, the triceps the last piston of a hip-driven meat engine, dipping the hammer into skin and blood and broken bone. Strike. Knockout. Victory: ten thousand roar. Maya drags her bruised legs to the middle of the cage, pulls the sponsor’s shirt over her, its fresh, vulgar logos paying her way, a rote speech . . .

. . . but her hammer never hits the Old Woman. Maya’s tried every time she visits her. “Contact’s good,” says the master, “Reality check. But you’re just a fighter, like a particular species of insect. Beautiful. Useless outside of certain parameters.

“You could be more.”

Five years later and Maya’s feet bleed; the desert is a field of black daggers. It was Outer Mongolia when she started walking but now the sky’s fucked up. Wrong color, and the sun has a lattice of darker fire upon it. In the distance, a rust-red rock. A door. Her door.

Listen:

“It’s a cheat.”

“Is that a noun?”

“It is now. I’ll update you to understand it. You’re still too stupid.”

His laptop doesn’t answer. Luc can almost see the code flowing out, distributed to the leviathan of the Net. Idiot databases grinding electrons. Stupid mechanisms with unthinkable memory and speed.

Unthinkable to most.

“Planck lengths. Foam and strings. Cheats to keep us from seeing below the best resolution the universe has to offer. It’s not so much uncertain as pixelated. That’s what I mean.”

A shape surfaces in Luc’s mind. The geometry of a perfect explanation, but it’s mostly hidden, lurching like an iceberg in black water: depths he can’t see. Luc blinks, gets back to the atomic force microscope to work on the Wire: his third implant, this one a fishhook to lower deep into his secret intelligence . . .

Listen:

Mor’s been able to read his father’s mind for five months (this is a secret) so he knows the danger’s real. Dad – Julius (but his name used to be Vernon, before the Order) keeps yelling at him, slapping. “You were born for this!” he says, and it’s true: Mor can see the shining moment of his conception erupt from Julius’ thoughts, the moment Dad seized his orgasm’s breath and hissed it into the rite.

Mor discovers his mother had red hair, just like him.

His eyes unfocus. The discovery was a distraction. Dad hits him again; Mor’s mouth tastes of salt.

“The spells are in there, Mordred! Translate! I know your Enochian outstrips mine, boy. I don’t have the knowledge to simply express what we’ll need to escape. They’re close!”

True – Mor can already sense the curious structures of their minds. Three blocks away the agents’ well-worn psychic gears spin into a killing attitude.

Mor takes their mental mechanism and makes it his own.

“I have it, Pater.”

His father thinks joy. Twitches hands anticipating sigils. Image of a hidden car.

Aasha Enesh’eth Kyraiyi Tsa Abbai Tathagehom, and Dad burns.

“It says,” whispers Mordred, then again, a scream: “It says that Enochian is a truth written in letters of fire, you stupid old fuck!”

Mor will not read his father’s pain or look up at his wilting black body. As he runs to the car the book will be the heaviest thing he ever carries.

Listen.