by Martha Carr
“Something I’ve been wanting to do since you showed up at our apartment to introduce yourself.” She shrugged. “Trust me, this is on a small scale.”
Ember shot her a sidelong glance and shook her head a fraction of an inch.
“Okay.” Matthew squinted at the purple sparks bouncing between Cheyenne’s fingers. “I’m not sure why you’re threatening me with that stuff.”
“Because you’re the one making things much harder than they have to be.”
“Hey, I just found out the two of you are part of this whole different world, okay? Not as much of a shock as it could’ve been, but give me a few seconds.”
Ember and Cheyenne stared at him, then the halfling lifted her purple sparks and cocked her head. “All right, your seconds are up. Why are you working with the assholes powering O’gúl tech?”
“Why?” Matthew laughed wryly. “It’s just business. And I’m not sure if you’re calling them assholes because they’re working with me specifically or because they’re from Narnia or whatever.”
“Ambar’ogúl,” Ember offered.
He shrugged. “Okay.”
Cheyenne killed the purple sparks in her hand and cocked her head. “So, you’ll strike up a deal with a bunch of O’gúl loyalists, but you can’t be bothered to learn the rest of the terminology, huh?”
“I don’t understand why that’s such a big deal. I thought all you magicals stuck together over here?”
Ember’s shimmering violet eyes narrowed. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah.” Matthew glanced at the fae and the drow halfling sitting in his living room, then snorted. “Hey, admittedly, I don’t care about all the details. They came to me asking if I could help power these machines you seem so angry about because they’re not supposed to work over here.”
“You’re helping the wrong magicals.” Taking a deep breath, Cheyenne swallowed and forced her frustration back down where it belonged. Maybe I should’ve asked Lumil to come with us. “How did they know to come to you for all this?”
He frowned. “Guess I have friends in the right places.”
“Yeah, so do I.”
“Okay.”
“You know what? You need to start talking and giving up some information.” Cheyenne’s drow magic flared through her, despite how hard she fought to keep it under control. “I get a little unpredictable when people don’t answer my questions.”
“I’m under no obligation to answer any of them.” Matthew smiled. “Unless you pull out a warrant for that information or put me in handcuffs and drag me down to some Dungeons and Dragons precinct, that won’t change.”
“All right, that’s it.” Cheyenne lurched from the couch, a sphere of crackling black energy bursting to life in her hands. Matthew flinched back in his chair and stared at the ball.
Ember grabbed her wheels. “Cheyenne!”
“I tried, Em. I really did. If Matthew Thomas wants to play hardball, fine. I can play.”
Ember’s hesitation to say or do anything else made Matthew shrink back even farther against the loveseat’s cushion. “Are you serious right now?”
“She doesn’t mess around with those things.” Ember glanced at the black energy in her friend’s hand. “So yeah, she’s serious.”
“If you hit me with whatever that is,” Matthew muttered, “this won’t work out well for you. Somebody finds me dead or severely injured in my apartment by something like that—”
“Yeah, you’re right.” Cheyenne took one step toward him and studied his reaction. He’s scared and completely serious at the same time. “I’m not in the habit of attacking people who haven’t explicitly done anything wrong. You’re still sitting in a real muddy-gray area.”
“I told you, it’s just business.”
“Em, we have some rope in the apartment, don’t we?”
Matthew looked at the glowing fae in the wheelchair. “What?”
Ember narrowed her eyes. “We’re not tying him to the chair, Cheyenne.”
“Fine. No magic. No rope. Guess I’ll just beat the shit out of him until he says something useful.”
“What?”
“No, you won’t. Not yet.” Ember wheeled toward the loveseat and shot the half-drow a stern warning look. “Cool it.”
Cheyenne raised an eyebrow at her friend and snuffed out the energy sphere. Okay, she’s finally showing up to the party.
Ember pushed her wheelchair as close as she could get to Matthew’s loveseat and leaned forward to study his face. “It might not look like it with all the purple and pink and the glowing aura, but trust me when I say I’m just as pissed as she is to find out you’re the one behind making our lives way more complicated than they should be.”
“Ember.”
“No, I’m talking now. You’ll get your chance when I’m finished, and it better be nothing but all the right answers to every single question we ask you.” The fae gestured at Cheyenne without breaking away from Matthew’s blue eyes. “Because right now, I’m the only thing standing between this drow and your apartment being blown to pieces. After that happens, the whole thing’s out of my hands.”
“Jesus,” Matthew whispered. “I thought you were the nice one.”
“Funny. I thought the same thing about you.”
He stared into Ember’s fae-large eyes. “Okay.”
Cheyenne leaned forward. “Okay, what?”
“Okay, ask whatever you wanna ask me. I mean, these are all private business relationships, but it’s not like I have anything to hide.”
“No, just that you’re encrypting all the data about it under way too many layers.”
“That’s the way I have to do things.” Matthew frowned at her. “You of all people should understand how dangerous technology and information can be in the wrong hands.”
“The wrong hands?” Ember looked at Cheyenne and laughed in disbelief. Then she pointed at Matthew. “You’re the one who put it in the wrong hands.”
“Hey, I just helped write the programs. Put the resources I had into developing the code. These magic people told me the gear they brought from that other dimension was old-school and low-tech, and they wanted help getting it to work here. I can tell you the stuff they handed me in the beginning is way more advanced than ninety-nine percent of the stuff I’ve seen made in our own world.”
“It’s a portal to a connecting world,” Cheyenne muttered.
“Huh?”
“Not a different dimension.”
Matthew closed his eyes and shook his head in jerky twitches. “That’s an irrelevant distinction, but okay.”
“It’s not irrelevant.” Ember cocked her head, wrinkling her nose as she studied the cluelessness written all over his face. “And it sounds a lot like you writing it off as irrelevant is what got us into this whole mess.”
“I still don’t get it.” He glanced at the magicals hovering in front of his loveseat. “What do my business’ private transactions have to do with either of you? Beyond you somehow figuring out how to dig the connection up.”
Cheyenne rolled her eyes and stared at the ceiling, gritting her teeth. “He has no idea.”
“Obviously.” Ember folded her arms.
“Who connected you with these magicals wanting Matthew Thomas to write programs that work with O’gúl tech?”
“My uncle.”
“Your uncle?”
Matthew shrugged. “Yeah. I’m assuming you know about the Fantasy Realm, right?”
Ember snorted. “It’s called Ambar’ogúl.”
“What? No, not that place.” Matthew rubbed his forehead and searched for the words. “The organization. Fantasy Realm on Earth.”
She barked out a bitter laugh. “Matthew, someone’s been feeding you serious misinformation.”
“That’s what my uncle’s been calling it since he introduced me to these other weird-looking guys.”
Cheyenne grimaced. “Are you serious?”
“Look, I said I’d answer your questions, but that one does
n’t feel like a genuine question.”
“Stop talking.” Turning to face Ember, the halfling pressed her lips together and frowned. “He’s talking about the FRoE.”
Ember blinked rapidly and turned her head to shoot Matthew a sidelong glance. “Fantasy Realm on Earth?”
He spread his arms.
“That’s the worst name for any organization.”
Cheyenne snorted. “Well, we already know the FRoE’s pretty lacking in imagination. Their poor choices don’t surprise me anymore.”
“Wait, you know them too?”
“Hey.” Ember thrust a finger at him. “We’re the one asking you questions. Who we know doesn’t matter for this conversation.”
Matthew chuckled nervously. “Don’t you think that’s a little one-sided?”
Cheyenne whirled back toward him. “Yeah, it’s one-sided, ‘cause you fucked up!”
“Whoa.” He lifted his hands again and leaned back against the loveseat.
“Your uncle works for the FRoE, then?”
“No. He’s a private investor.”
“Oh, sure. Naturally.” Cheyenne ran her hands through her white hair, the chains clinking on her wrists. “When did he bring you the magicals?”
“About five years ago.”
Ember grimaced. “Shit, that’s a long time.”
“Yeah.” Cheyenne squinted at their neighbor. And we’re only now just hearing about it and seeing this tech powered up. Someone’s been sitting on this way too long for it to be about me passing the trials. “And you just took their money and said you’d do what you could to help, huh?”
“That’s business, Cheyenne. That’s how I make a living.”
“How wonderful for you. I’d say I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but I’m not.” She pointed at the metal sphere again. “You’re making a living off magicals who are sending tech like that, the tech you wrote programs for, into public spaces and trying to kill people.”
Matthew frowned. “Okay, now I can’t tell the difference between the truth and you trying to intimidate me.”
Ember swallowed with a pained frown. “You think we’d make up something like this for fun?”
“Honestly, I have no idea what you’d do. I have no idea who you are.”
“You tried extra-hard, didn’t you?” Cheyenne raised an eyebrow. “I bet that’s pretty disappointing for you right now.”
“Yeah, a little.”
“Okay, will you two just shut the hell up?” Ember shouted, extending a hand toward each of them. “Please.”
Taking a deep breath, Cheyenne stepped aside to give all three of them a little more space.
“Matthew, we’re not here to judge you as a person.”
Cheyenne snorted. “Speak for yourself.”
Ember gave her friend a long, intense warning stare, and Cheyenne turned away, scratching her nose. “We’re here because that’s exactly what’s happening with all this tech. The magicals controlling them are trying to kill people.”
“That’s insane.”
“And it’s real.” She raised her eyebrows. “Right now, they’re only attacking other magicals as far as we know, but it’s not that far-fetched to think the magicals running those machines will turn on humans eventually too.”
Matthew tried to glaze over his disbelief with a smirk. “I can’t even comprehend what you’re trying to tell me right now.”
Cheyenne scoffed. “You know, for someone who’s supposed to be a genius in cybersecurity and a leader in like four different industries, you’re pretty dumb.”
“Now you’re just being mean.”
“Hey! Come on.” Ember pointed at the halfling. “Cut it out. I’m serious. Look, Matthew, we’ve both seen these things in action. That metal ball on your couch came off an O’gúl war tank in action. And yes, it did attack us. I was almost killed in my sleep by a bunch of other machines that looked like beetles and had some nasty features, but this is all the same stuff. All the same technology you’ve been powering or at least connecting your programs to for the last five years.”
“Don’t forget about that thing that tunneled into Peridosh,” Cheyenne muttered.
“Oh, yeah. That one almost got both of us too.”
“And the fly in my classroom.”
Matthew cleared his throat. “What’s Peridosh?”
“Nothing you’re ever gonna get to see.” Cheyenne cocked her head at him. “We’re not making this stuff up. A lot of innocent magicals have been attacked and hurt by these machines. Not just us, and it could’ve been a lot worse for a lot more of us. We can’t hold it off forever, so you need to turn off your system like yesterday.”
“No.” The unsure smile on Matthew’s face disappeared. “I won’t throw away the last five years of highly advanced work successfully completed by my company. I don’t care who you are or what you’re trying to do. I won’t just scrap the whole project.”
“You really are stupid.”
“Sure, maybe.” The man’s voice rose in volume as he tried to keep his composure.
Cheyenne scowled at him. Either his voice is gonna break or he is.
“Do whatever you want to my apartment, Cheyenne. I can replace everything in here.”
When she took a deep breath and opened her mouth to reply, Ember quickly added, “Don’t do anything.”
“How else are we supposed to stop this, huh?”
“Well, it’s not gonna be by tearing down Combined Reality, Inc. and these programs.” Matthew sniffed and crossed one ankle over his knee again, but his casual ease wasn’t convincing. “Besides, these friends of yours already have their own control centers at this point. We just update the system once a month and monitor it for issues. Occasionally, someone has a good idea, and we’ll throw that into the mix.”
“Well, stop doing that.” Cheyenne shook her head. “Don’t give these people anything better to work with. That’s a good start.”
“I can’t make any promises.”
“And I can’t promise I won’t come back here in the middle of the night and tie you up the way I wanted to from the beginning.”
Ember hung her head and rubbed her temples. “I give up.”
Cheyenne and Matthew stared at her, then the halfling blew out a heavy breath, puffing out her cheeks. “Just tell us who we need to go see to make it stop on their end.”
He slowly looked at her, his nostrils flaring as if he’d suddenly developed a drow sense of smell. “You realize this is my business, right? I can’t just give away this information without incurring serious losses, especially with this kind of business relationship.”
“Yeah, I’m well aware. And you realize this is quite literally the end of Earth as we know it if you don’t grow a pair and tell me what I wanna know, right?”
“Exaggerating the issue won’t get you anywhere.”
“I’m not exaggerating!” A burst of black churning energy flew from her hand before she could stop it and ripped into the armrest of the loveseat, sending up a shred of tattered upholstery and fluffy filling. She and Matthew stared at that hole. Deep breath, Cheyenne. This isn’t how you wanna handle it. “Sorry.”
He swallowed thickly and gave her a weak shrug. “Better that than me.”
Cheyenne smoothed the hair away from her face and tried again. “Look, I’ve been fighting these things all week. I found a whole bunch of these machine parts being smuggled across the border, and now I know who’s responsible for them being turned into weapons—weapons those magicals want to use on all of us over here, no matter what we are. I’ve seen a whole bunch of stuff you can’t imagine, and we have to get to those clients of yours before they make that happen. You need to trust me on this.”
Matthew wrinkled his nose. “Why?”
She glanced at the charred hole in the armrest and shrugged. “Because I hit the chair and not you.”
Licking his lips in thought, Matthew glanced briefly at Ember, who stared at her lap in disbelief, then finally nodded
. “Okay. And before you ask for clarification, yes, that means I will give you a name.”
Ember jerked her head up in surprise. “You will?”
“Yeah.” He started to stand and paused when he saw Cheyenne still staring at him. Then he spread his arms. “Is it cool with you if I go get my phone from the kitchen?”
“If that’s what has to happen.”
“All right.” Matthew shot them each another hesitant glance, then stood and hurried around the loveseat to leave the living room.
“Don’t take too long,” the halfling called after him.
“I’m just getting my phone, Cheyenne. You can chill out.”
She snorted and met Ember’s gaze. The fae scrunched her nose and muttered, “I’m the only one who gets to tell you that.”
“I know.” Cheyenne glared at the wall separating the oddly sectioned living room from the kitchen and the rest of the apartment. “I’ll let it slide this time.”
“And if he does it again, I’ll blast a hole in the other armrest.”
Despite her growing frustration over the entire conversation, the halfling smiled. “You think you can do that?”
“Cheyenne, I have a whole spellbook. If you think I haven’t already found something as dangerous as your drow fireballs, I’m happy to demonstrate.”
“No, we’re good.”
Ember fought back a laugh and wheeled away from the armchair as Matthew’s footsteps headed toward them again.
Chapter Seventy-One
“Admittedly,” Matthew started as he scrolled through whatever contacts list he’d buried in his personal cell phone, “I’m sending you the info for a guy I seriously don’t like.”
“Huh.” Cheyenne folded her arms. “Does that mean it’s a good place for us to start?”
“Not necessarily.” He looked at her once, then returned his attention to his phone. “But if any of these magic people are doing something shady with this system like you think they are, he’d be my first pick.”
Ember closed her eyes. “Magicals, Matthew.”
“What?”
“Call them magicals, not magic people. You sound like you have no idea what you’re talking about, and it’s hard to take you seriously.”