Columbine

“This is ridiculous!” Alice nearly cried when she saw the inside of the room.

“Don’t be so loud.” Damien told her. But it didn’t matter, because he was as angry as Alice. Learning that Jack had taken over the investigation entirely was one thing, but this was something in a completely different category of things wrong and unfair.

Here they were, locked up in a stuffy room, doomed to spend hours organizing files. The room was filled to the ceiling with files that needed to be put in the correct cabinet, or in another room entirely.

“Is this what they mean by ‘of the outmost importance’?” Alice growled, throwing her heavy Demataxt coat to the floor. Damien’s coat landed on top of hers, and he proceeded to kick off his shoes.

Both of them were wearing mud-spattered boots that were unfit for the Egyptian environment. Everything about them seemed unfit for the environment, period.

“Okay, I’m going to try this one more time.” Alice sighed, sitting down on the floor. “If it doesn’t work, we’ll have to risk heatstroke.”

She’d tried this spell many times before. It would seem that making the air colder would be child’s play, as opposed to turning oneself invisible. But turning herself invisible was all a matter or perception. If she truly believed that no one could see her, the vision barrier would build as a result. But screwing with the temperature was a direct violation of the laws of physics. A witch could do it in a heartbeat, since witches worked with those laws in a way that mages didn’t. Because Alice was the latter, she’d have to try especially hard.

“You want me to help you?” Damien offered.

“Maybe.” Alice said. “We’ll see.”

There was rarely any propaganda required for mages when they needed to cast a spell, but there was one thing Alice found that worked for her. If she sat totally still with her eyes closed and pretended that the spell was working, it usually did.

She did that now, let her eyelids clamp shut and tried to force the tension from her body. Her breathing slowed, and the heat seemed to become less agitating. Now came the important part -- the visual.

In her imagination, Alice envisioned a single, solitary tendril of icy-blue air come up from the floor, then more tendrils just like it sprouting up from the linoleum. She saw the tendrils combine and form a pure, white mist. If she focused further, she saw a white, Swiss winter in the mist.

Tall, hulking evergreens sagged with the weight of snow. Alice focused on that picture and remembered how her footprints went nearly half a foot deep until they hit the ground. How her skin went halfway numb with the cold and how her clothes seemed to get wet with snowy residue. How her fingers hurt from the exposure, and how her breath took visible form when she exhaled.

“Alice?” Damien’s voice broke through the vision.

“What?” She asked, still not opening her eyes.

“It worked.”

Her eyes snapped open in shock.

“You’re kidding!” She exclaimed. And then she noticed that the room was almost icy. “I can’t believe I actually did it!”

“Time must have been right.” Damien grinned. He, at least, appreciated what was truly a fine moment for Alice, even if no one else did.

Alice stood up and exhaled. She didn’t know how long her spell would last, since it was the first time that it had been successful. Most spells usually lasted until the mage didn’t need them any more. Knowing what the weather was like, Alice would been needing this spell every hour of the daytime.

“I guess we can get to work now.” She sighed, looking mournfully upon the mountains of un-filed documents that were waiting. But in any case, at least she wasn’t interrogating anyone.

She really did try her best to keep people from being tortured. She tried to explain that they were going to die either way, and that it was better to just skip the pain and go for the quick and painless execution.

It killed her a little bit each time to see the prisoner’s eyes widen as they realized that this really was all that there was left. There would be no escape and certainly no leniency with the Demataxt. There was something that overcame them when it finally hit them, when everything that they had hoped for failed them and they realized that they were going to die.

Everyone’s reaction was different, but the most common one was screaming. The screams that came as result of that final realization and the screams that came from torture were different. The tortured screams were merely a result of pain. Pain that meant nothing until it had gone on long enough to make life unbearable.

The former kind of screaming was even more heartbreaking than the latter. When a person wanted so much to live when they knew it couldn’t possibly happen, they couldn’t hold it in -- the grief, fear, and anger all wrapped up in a scream.

Stop it, Alice thought.

If she kept replaying those moments in her head, they’d never stop. People went crazy from much less. And even with all the terrible things that she’d been forced to sit in on, it was nothing compared to what Damien had been stuck doing.

He’d been made part of some demon lord’s legion -- one specifically responsible for keeping crime rates down. He’d basically been made into a policeman of sorts.

With the gradual fall of human governments once the Demataxt started running things, crime rates skyrocketed to previously unforeseen levels. Gangs, terrorist cells, pirates, and all other kinds of violent criminals formed groups, and even connections with each other. Given the Demataxt’s strict zero-tolerance policy, any criminal that was caught for any crime that was either stealing or higher up on the zero-tolerance scale was executed.

In the larger scope of things, despite fact that crime rates had dropped almost lower than ever, it still wasn’t right to kill them all off without even giving them a trial. What humans didn’t know was that they were the only ones that weren’t given a trial. If a mage committed a crime considered serious enough to warrant apprehension, they were always given a trial. The same went for demons and all other races.

All in all, the Demataxt regarded humans on the same level as animals.

Suddenly the door burst open. Alice looked up to see that a man practically sagging from the weight of his Demataxt coat and halfway melted from the heat had apparently just run up the stairs and to the filing room.

“You have to come downstairs.” He panted.

Alice and Damien looked at him, both a little reluctant to move from the efficient vantage points that they had occupied.

“What’s wrong?” Damien asked.

“We’re being attacked.” The man panted.

“What!” Alice yelped, dropping the file that she was holding. “How?”

“Bunch of…hooligans…with guns…rocks…torches.” The man couldn’t seem to keep himself disciplined enough to form a concrete sentence, but Alice got the idea.

“Everyone needs to come down.” The man finally wheezed before clumsily running back down the stairs.

Alice looked at Damien for some kind of support, since he was the one with the tactical expertise. He didn’t say anything, just stood up and followed the man that was breathlessly running back to the first floor. She followed his lead, not bothering to put her uniform back on. “Small fry” like her didn’t have to dignify themselves by always wearing it.

As they neared the entrance of the building, shouting and other heavy, shattering noises became audible.

“Stay beside me.” Damien all but ordered. Alice was scared enough as it was, so she didn’t object.

By the time they got to the scene of all the commotion, they saw that the first floor of the Demataxt building was a full-blown massacre. Windows were broken, some curtains going up in flames and various spots on the carpeting having been eaten away by a similar fire. Bullet holes speckled the walls at random, some going in straight lines, which suggested that there were probably one or more machine guns in the room. But it was the fight occurring within that was the most captivating of all.

An enormous army of men, some under twenty, some over forty, were doing their best to kill as many mages as they could while being thrown into the air. A whirling fiasco of bodies in battle gyrated in a frenzy of fists and weapons being swung.

Alice could feel her body going numb with fear. She felt Damien’s hand on her arm, but it wasn’t to comfort her. When he shoved her to the side, she saw that bullet holes had appeared on the same spot of wall that she’d just been blocking.

“Stay down!” Damien roared over the almost overpowering shouts and gunfire. Alice crouched down as low as she could, but Damien didn’t join her.

It was obvious by then that he was planning on joining the fight, and he had no qualms whatsoever about doing so. Everyone knew that if the army -- because, by then, that was the only appropriate term for it -- got any farther than the lobby, they had a good chance of seizing the building. If they accomplished that, then the Cairo Demataxt branch would be facing a horrific crisis, if not an outright defeat.

Alice shoved her fingers into her ears. The shouting and bullets whizzing through the air were making the situation impossible to think in. She had to do something, since it didn’t seem that any of the mages involved in the fight were getting very far. If Alice didn’t know better, she’d have thought that they were actually enjoying it.

The logical thing -- the only thing -- that she could do was protect herself. It was the only thing she’d ever been able to do properly.

Making a barrier was the easiest thing that Alice could possibly do, if only she could concentrate. If she couldn’t, it would be significantly tougher, if not impossible.

Alice couldn’t concentrate here, not amid the fighting and gunfire. It was asking too much of anyone to concentrate in an environment like this. But she couldn’t bring herself to risk standing back up or ascending the stairs. Coming out of her crouch almost ensured that she’d be shot and killed.

“God, Liz, where are you?” She sniffled as more bullets whizzed past her head. “You could deal with this in a heartbeat!”

It wasn’t an exaggeration. Elizabeth really could put the breaks on a scene like this. If only she were here now, it would all be over. The enemy would be dealt with, and all the fighting could just stop.

But it was just Alice now, with Damien blocking the entrance to the stairs so that no one could get any farther than the lobby.

“Shit.” Alice whimpered.

This was the worst possible scenario that could possibly have occurred that day, since it was the very day that she’d been forced to work in the building. Had it occurred a mere day earlier, she’d have been safely within the bounds of the flea market while all this was happening.

“Stop.” She whispered, focusing on the bullets as she said it. If it weren’t for the bullets, the fight wouldn’t be nearly as threatening to them.

“Stop.” She said again, voice picking up volume, each sound of gunfire making her angrier and angrier.

“STOP!” She finally screamed, hands clenching into fists as she did.

Nothing happened, of course. Why would it? She wasn’t nearly talented enough to make guns stop firing on a whim. If it was a matter of stopping one bullet that was aimed in a predictable way, she could do it. But her skills didn’t extend nearly far enough to do what she was hoping she could do now.

She hardly ever felt helpless, but she certainly felt helpless now. She could feel the urge to cry swelling from deep in her throat, forming a heavy bubble of lead that she couldn’t quite swallow.

So she focused on making herself a barrier, imagining a thick metal wall growing around her, encircling her in all directions. She felt the air tighten around her, particles being forced closer together to the point that they felt almost exactly like a wall.

She looked up, still uncertain whether it was safe to stand up. She saw that Damien was punching someone in the gut. She assumed that he’d been trying to get to the stairs, since he hadn’t moved from his spot. The man finally coughed up blood and went limp. Damien tossed him to the floor, rather than throw him into a wall. Considering the possibilities as well as his background, he was really being merciful.

“We have to do something!” Alice yelled into his ear. Damien didn’t say anything, but anxiously shrugged his shoulders instead, which meant that he was dry on ideas.

It was obvious that the situation was growing desperate. As far as Alice could tell, the mages were merely having fun rather than genuinely fighting their opponents. It was then that she noticed that it was only the upper-class mages that were in the fight. Menial workers were nowhere to be seen.

And then she looked out the window. She saw, to her surprise, that all of the more familiar faces of the low-key mages were lines at the broken windows, peering worriedly inside.

“Outside!” Alice shouted to Damien, grabbed his hand, which was almost too big for hers, and wildly lunged through the fighting crowd. The barrier covered both her and Damien, since she’d grabbed his hand. It extended a couple of feet from their bodies -- more than enough to keep them from harm.

Once they were finally outside and out of bullet range, Alice allowed herself to exhale.

“It’s crazy in there!” She panted. “How’d they even get in?”

“We don’t exactly have protection at the door.” The secretary explained.

Alice looked at the aging woman that was supposedly so low-key that she barely qualified for anything requiring an actual job. So she sat at a desk all day, sweating and sending mail to other countries.

“But an entire army of them?” Damien elaborated. “How did no one notice them until now?”

“You know these rebel organizations.” The secretary shrugged. “They mean well for humanity, but their strategy is a little off.”

“Doesn’t seem that off to me.” Damien said.

“Didn’t you notice yet?” She blinked. “No one is winning. If they wanted to, those guys fighting them could squash them this very moment.” She looked mournfully into the lobby. “All they’re doing is screwing around on the job.”

Alice didn’t want to look at the battle that was in the lobby. She didn’t want to be anywhere near the building at all.

She looked down and saw that she was missing her shoes. Her socks were already dirty and her clothes were decorated with the occasional spot of blood that had landed on her in the scuffle.

“You alright?” Damien asked.

“Not exactly.” Alice muttered. “We just almost got killed -- nothing big, really.”

“Don’t dwell on it.” He sighed.

But how could she not dwell on it? This was one of those things that just couldn’t be ignored, because it would only escalate. The very notion that what was happening right now in the lobby repeating itself with even more magnitude was one that Alice couldn’t help but dwell on.

It was probably then that it became obvious that a full-blown war would eventually break out, though it might start with little things like this. Eventually, every Demataxt building in the world would be facing a crisis far worse than a simple rebel attack on the bottom floor.