The Malicarn
When it started, Glenn Mackey was across the ocean, in a Miami hotel signing autographs.
Glenn worked his way through his second meet-and-greet session in as many days in a haze, eager smiles pushing at him a host of paraphernalia.
Posters and comic books and action figure boxes and copies of the original Malicarn novels.
He signed people’s arms and chests. He signed photos and T-shirts.
He took pictures with fans young and old, a few squeezing their arms around him very, very tight.
He remained gracious and pleasant, answering stock questions (“What’s your favorite Malicarn film?
”) with stock answers (“Probably The Return of the Council, since that was our first one on the live set”).
After nearly two hours he finished and was escorted back to his hotel room.
In Kingstown, the remainder of the Council of Heroes assembled and pledged to fight off the rioters who had occupied the castle courtyard.
They marched out of the tower and at once were overrun by the angry mob.
Their throats were slashed and their bodies hung above the castle walls.
Glenn packed his suitcase and took a private helicopter to his chartered plane.
Coincidence, in Glenn’s opinion, was very lazy.
He didn’t like it in a play when two characters who needed to meet just happened to do so under strange circumstances.
How many times did Shakespeare pull off that trick?
The comedies did it all the time. The whole finale of Romeo and Juliet was built on just such a horrifying coincidence.
He didn’t care for it even in The Tempest, where at least the Duke ending up on Prospero’s island could be explained away by magic.
No, coincidence meant that the writer needed to work on another draft.
Lilly, angry and jet-lagged, did not consider this coincidence at all as she sat in the back of the briefing room on a Portuguese naval frigate.
Roger stood next to a Portuguese colonel who filled in his marines about the unfolding political situation on Madeira—how the studio was losing control of the set, how the locals were assisting the rebelling characters in overthrowing the existing leadership.
Lilly assumed that Jules was more than likely aware of and perhaps orchestrating the whole revolution.
It would be a good story, and that was what Jules cared most about.
To Derek, one of the studio security guards waiting with a car at the Funchal airport, the chaos in the city streets reminded him of his years in the NYPD.
He had seen this kind of lawlessness before, had cracked a few skulls in his time to keep it from escalating, and had taken his pension and left for a job on an island with the intention of never having to see this again.
But everything is always the same shit, he thought, no matter where you go.
After Glenn’s plane landed he met up with Derek, and as they drove out of the city Glenn tried to work out his plan of attack. He could go to the Citadel, make as if he was just checking in on Jules, and confirm the location of the neuroscanner. Who would doubt him? No one would question—
His train of thought was broken by a handful of fruit, which hit the side window of the car and burst open, pulp and juice sliding down the glass.
“Ide! Ide!” Derek shouted at the crowd harassing the car. “Sorry, sir, these protestors are getting worse.”
“Ah, yeah, it’s okay.” Glenn had not noticed them.
As the car wound its way out of the city and up a mountain road toward set, Glenn finally concluded a big coincidence was the simplest explanation, however unsatisfying and emotionally manipulative that felt.
Sometimes more than one important thing happened at once.
It was only the promise of Lilly—of seeing her again, knowing she might be safe—that convinced him, or rather allowed him to convince himself, of Roger’s true intent.
If he was wrong about that, well, he would find out sooner or later.
Lilly thought about Glenn, too, but desperately tried not to.
She was putting on a camouflage outfit, military issue but a size too big.
She had a radio clipped to her belt and an earpiece in her ear.
Roger was babbling on about protocols and rules of engagement and other stuff, and Lilly was thinking about what Glenn was going to look like, what he was going to say, what he was going to do.
All she had to do was meet him, get the neuroscanner, and then she could leave.
Right off the helicopter then right back on.
She could leave the Malicarn forever and never see Glenn again, if that was what she wanted.
In Kingstown, the mob completely surrounded the north castle tower, still bolted shut.
In the castle courtyard, they looted whatever they found.
Weapons, food, horses. They smashed the royal menagerie and burned the stables.
Inside the tower Sanderson and Quentin yelled at one another and tried to devise a means of escape.
The cook and kitchen staff hid behind barrels of ale.
Fennick the tutor collected as many books as he could in his arms. On the castle walls, commoners walked the perimeter, mooning and flashing those below for laughs.
They made lewd gestures at the bodies of the Council heroes.
Kreek deputized Wallace to lead the people inside the final tower, and then Kreek rode his carriage out of the city, the dragon rider still in back, waving at the adoring crowds as they made their way to another town, another village, to spread the revolution further.
Glenn asked Derek to drive toward the set’s northwest entrance, which allowed them to travel the road with direct access to the Citadel.
He could follow his plan, visit Jules, then get everything ready for that morning, when Roger would arrive.
He could spend the rest of the evening at his apartment in the Old Village, come back that night to distract Jules, maybe get him drunk, then take the neuroscanner and meet Lilly at the rendezvous point.
The wind carried a cool breeze. Glenn should have packed a jacket.
All he had on was a Philadelphia Eagles T-shirt.
After the car pulled into the underground garage, Glenn left his luggage in a locker by the garage entrance.
He left his phone with his luggage, too.
Reception was always poor in the Citadel.
But Glenn never was very good at thinking ahead.
Derek walked to the security office on the first floor. His coworker Paul sat in the chair, head in his hands.
“I don’t know what the fuck to do. I can’t get LA on the phone. No one upstairs is talking. Look at this shit.”
He pointed to a screen showing the security feeds. Portuguese teens driving all over the set, running people down, setting fire to buildings. Rioting in Kingstown. The security teams were spread thin, all over the island.
“I can’t get local police on the phone, I can’t get anybody. Derek, what do we do?”
Roger’s Black Hawk helicopter had an automatic machine gun.
Not that he needed it, but it was nice to have.
He was so eager to be in the air, the operation underway.
His contact in Funchal was reporting a sighting of the pilot.
There were riots all over the studio-managed sectors, but their rendezvous spot was still clear.
This would be easy, and it would be fun.
The Citadel was quiet now, because it was so understaffed.
Glenn rode up the elevator past the old dorms, cafeterias, and conference rooms, all closed now.
Most of the admin was off-site, housed in LA, and hardly anybody lived in the apartments.
The old implementations lab was used for storage.
The walls there were still charred from fire.
By the time he arrived on the thirteenth floor, a single knight, large gash across his belly, stumbled to the topmost room of the highest tower in Kingstown and lit a beacon.
An hour later, Sir Kellington noticed the mountain beacons burning from the Mountain Keep.
Buck Douglas, covered in mud, woke from his hiding spot behind a rock and saw the beacons, too, but he did not know what they meant and continued his vigil of the keep.
Hannah did not yet know Kingstown had fallen, had not yet realized that the very end of her reign as queen had already begun, and though these portents of doom were increasingly concerning, she sent the royal stablemaster to ride back to Kingstown for news and then spent the afternoon reading the book of astronomy she had borrowed from the keep’s librarian.
“Stars are pinpricks in the veil of Heaven,” she read from the book, which was very old but heavily illustrated.
“The whole Globe is surrounded by the protective blanket of darkness, within which circle the planets, the Sun, and the Moon. And in the center of all is the Earth itself. It is a system of perfect balance and symmetry.”
Hannah already knew this was nonsense, but she liked the idea of a perfectly calibrated system with everything in its place because that’s where it was supposed to be. The book was later burned with the rest of the keep.
On the thirteenth floor, Glenn entered a long white hallway with every other lightbulb burned out.
The old writers’ offices were empty. Even the reception desk acted as a repository for leftover packages and papers.
Glenn saw one intern making copies. At the end of the hall was a large oak door.
Behind it was the old writers’ room, where in the early days a few dozen people would congregate and bat around story ideas, fleshing out arcs and discussing how to make them work in the live, improvisatory set they were building in the valley below.
Now only one person sat there, and he hardly ever left.