The Wayward Star

by Jenn Stark

  “You are Justice Wilde, of the Arcana Council,” the woman said, softly but firmly. I shot her an interested glance. Her hair was a medium brown, parted in the center to reveal a serious, quiet face with features that most would consider nondescript. Wide gray eyes, a narrow-lipped mouth, and a small cleft in her chin. She dressed conservatively in a navy-blue business dress and heels and spoke in a quiet alto.

  Not waiting for me to confirm her assertion, she continued. “My name is Debra Glenn. We’ve been watching you for some time.”

  “We, who?” I asked. I was getting a little tired of being the subject of so much scrutiny, particularly when my shadows felt compelled to tell me all about it.

  “You are close to taking action against the Shadow Court. They were fools to go after you so quickly, but the Magician forced their hand. When he crafted the spell that erased his memories, the Shadow Court’s game was over. We expected them to go back underground, hoped for it, honestly, but instead, they moved forward, revealing themselves, taunting you, specifically. They’re quite obsessed, it would seem. We didn’t predict that.”

  “We, who?” I asked again, though I had to say I agreed with her assessment of the Shadow Court’s obsession. Debra didn’t respond, instead redirecting me a second time. “We also followed with interest your accumulation of the uranium cubes, which caused us some measure of difficulty. You guessed correctly that they had not originally been created for the purpose so many believed. We had hoped you would not make that connection quite so quickly either, but we underestimated the extent of your network of resources as well.” She smiled a little grimly. “We’ve had to eat a lot of humble pie these past several weeks.”

  I stopped stock-still in the middle of the corridor. “If you know so much, then you also know I can blast you into the next millennium,” I said with an undercurrent of irritation in my voice that surprised even me. It certainly surprised Debra. She paled and stepped back, and I pursued her until her shoulders were against the wall.

  “Let me guess, you also underestimated how pissed off I would be at your little game of cloak and dagger. So let’s start over. Who are you, why are you here, and what do you want?”

  This time, Debra didn’t hesitate. “I represent one of the ancient societies, similar to those you met in Nevada last week. Sheik Alsain Ahmad was not able to attend that meeting, and so he asked me to seek you out. He has information about the Shadow Court that he very much would like to share.”

  “Yeah, there seems to be a lot of sharing going around right now. What makes his information different?”

  “For now, all I am instructed to tell you is that it is good to have family on your side,” she said. I scowled at the word “family,” and she continued quickly.

  “I apologize for the need for discretion. But that is not my only message for you today. The Shadow Court has made its presence known, but they are not the only players in this game. The Connected who defy them must also have their say, and will have their say. We would ask most humbly that you allow that to happen.”

  I narrowed my eyes on her. “What are you talking about?”

  The chime sounded through the halls, indicating the start of a new session. Debra stepped away from me and bowed slightly, the movement unconsciously deferent, seeming foreign and yet strangely right for someone who was the assistant to a sheik.

  “I am expected other places, as there is much to prepare,” she said. “We thank you for all you have done and all you will do. The star that shines the brightest in a clouded sky brings the greatest hope.”

  She turned and hurried away before I could say anything to that, and once again, Simon appeared in my peripheral vision, hurrying toward me.

  “Did you get all that?” I asked, fiddling with my barrette. “Who was that woman?”

  “Exactly as advertised,” Simon said. “Debra Glenn, special representative to Sheik Alsain Ahmad, typically utilized for all English-speaking countries when a personal message is to be delivered. Because sometimes email just doesn’t do the job.”

  “And this sheik? Is he on the up-and-up?”

  “That’s a more complicated question to answer,” Simon said. “That family tends to keep to itself, but they are sitting on an absolute mother lode of influence. Sheik Ahmad makes it a policy not to choose sides in any conflicts among Connected, and he has been known to be ruthlessly fair in all his dealings.”

  I pursed my lips, thinking. “He doesn’t sound familiar as a target for any complaints into Justice Hall, so that’s something.”

  “Exactamundo! But that’s not the end of it. The psychic radioactive energy has been going off the charts in this place. It’s like we’re sitting down and drinking poison coffee right next to Chernobyl. You’re going to want to clear out after tonight’s keynote and probably spend some quality time detoxing. The higher your magical vibration, the more you’re going to be affected by it.”

  “I didn’t drink any of the coffee or eat the food. You’re telling me that’s not enough?”

  “It didn’t hurt, but it doesn’t have any bearing on the issue here. The psychic concentration isn’t coming from the food. It’s coming from these.” He opened his lab coat to reveal an interior pocket that held a very bulky square item. I recognized the dimensions immediately.

  “One of the Nazi cubes? Debra had mentioned those too, but I didn’t think…” I grimaced. “People are bringing those things here?”

  “Well, they’re not picking them up on-site, though that would be the best conference giveaway ever,” Simon confirmed. “So we’ve got to assume they’re bringing them in from the outside. Best I can tell, we’ve got maybe a hundred cubes in the building, and that’s only the ones that have been triggered in some way. It’s likely there are more being carried around in insulated cases, their energy under wraps.”

  “What’s the purpose of having them here?” I asked. “Have you figured out how to access and direct their energy?”

  He sighed. “I have not. But I have a sinking suspicion somebody has.”

  “The Shadow Court?” I asked, dismayed.

  Simon shrugged. “Honestly? That would be the best-case scenario. If it’s the Shadow Court, then they’re the bad guys and we can go in and take them out by force if they try to detonate these suckers. If it’s not the Shadow Court, and given that we don’t fully understand how to trigger the cubes, we’re going to have to tread a lot more carefully. And if we’re the only ones being careful, that could quickly become a problem.”

  I barely stifled a groan. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “There are many things I choose to joke about, but unidentified tech is not one of them. I flat-out don’t know what these things are capable of. I simply haven’t had enough time to study them. But they’ve been floating around since the Nazis were perfecting their stiff-armed salutes, and somebody certainly seems to know how to make them go boom, or they wouldn’t be the most popular accessory at this conference. And once again, I can’t nullify what I can’t understand. I even contacted Tesla to ask his opinion.”

  I lifted my brows. That had been a good idea. “Did he have any suggestions?”

  “Other than run, no. He was remarkably subdued when I told him. Apparently, the uranium cubes had not been discovered as late in Hitler’s regime as we thought. They’d been found in a storehouse of artifacts, legitimately exuding radiation that you could pick up on a Geiger counter, so of course that led to the speculation of their efficacy in building a nuclear bomb. But Hitler didn’t have the resources to fully investigate them. He just used them as props to distract our military intelligence from the real atrocities he was committing. Bottom line, though, Tesla’s best advice was for us to run. His second-most useful advice was to use a very specific device in order to create a grounding perimeter at the conference site, to control any use of the cubes to a highly confined area.”

  I shot him an amused glance. “Let me guess. He recommended the Nikola Tesla Grounding Rods.”r />
  “Patent very much pending.” Simon grinned. “I arranged to have some sent to us on Arcana Council Express, and I’ve already distributed them. Yours is with Nikki. You guys are going to have to split up and spread out, but it’s not a bad strategy to have the rods on hand, in case something goes kaboom.”

  “And you’ve picked up on a hundred here? That’s a lot. Where did they come from?”

  “Good question. We have about fifty or sixty of them ourselves, but that leaves an awful lot in play among the general public. I’ve been cross-referencing the data we’ve received from facial recognition software and the cameras in the small magnets Nikki distributed for conference attendees to use for their name tags. Not only are they a far more stylish alternative, the data intake they’ve provided has been incredible.”

  “Nice,” I said, checking out some of the summit attendees as we passed. Sure enough, about half of them were utilizing the magnetic clasps to affix their name tags to their outfits versus the lanyard option.

  “Yup,” Simon said. “It will take some time to go through the data and cross-reference the images, but assuming we don’t have a nuclear explosion here today, we’ll have that time.”

  We parted ways again. I dutifully attended a session on rebuilding infrastructure in the wake of a natural disaster with an eye toward preventing future catastrophes, but my mind wasn’t on the subject matter so much as the people attending. Perhaps due to the more pragmatic nature of this topic, the attendees here were roughly fifty-fifty in terms of Connected ability. Once again, it was the mortals without Connected energy who exuded the most hope. They didn’t know what was possible beyond the work of ordinary human hands, so they were dedicated to making that work extraordinary.

  Meanwhile, the Connecteds in the group had no idea how to bend their unusual abilities to their dream other than using it to think creatively or slightly out of the box. They had no avenue of practical application. But these were brilliant minds, souls dedicated to the greater good. How much more effective would they be if they had that practical path? Didn’t they deserve such guidance? It would remain their choice what they did with it, the path would ultimately be theirs to walk, but if they knew that path existed…

  It was another two hours of relative quiet before the summit broke again, this time to gather all attendees into the main conference room. I saw that dinner was being plated, and eyed the tables with dismay. Those Connected who knew to avoid the food had been largely successful up till now, but this particular hurdle might trip them up. If someone was keeping tabs on who was and wasn’t eating the food…

  Nikki waved me over to her table. She sat drinking a cup of coffee from one of the conference’s china cups. I glanced from it to her, and she grinned.

  “We’re good now, dollface. Something set the Magician on a tear, and he commandeered both Simon and the Oracle twins to head back to the kitchens. As I understand it, they put some sort of anti-hex on the food, then let Lainie and Eshe go do their thing as oracles, getting the message out to the masses. The masses are now cleared to eat some marinated chicken and Caesar salad, with no one the wiser.”

  “Really. That level of, ah, engagement didn’t disrupt the Magician’s do-not-interfere sensibilities?”

  Nikki shrugged. “I got the feeling that something else had already disrupted him today. He’s been in a dangerous mood for most of the afternoon. He’s pissed.”

  “He has a right to be.” Nevertheless, I watched with keen attention as the Magician entered at the far corner of the room. He took up his location near the main doors, and our gazes met.

  Are you okay? I asked him in my mind, but his response was quick and curt.

  “As I said before, there is much we cannot do, Miss Wilde, but we can do this. We can level the playing field. That has been our job for these past millennia, the primary purpose of the Arcana Council. We will do our job.”

  I scanned the room, picking out the hard faces, the set jaws. For the first time, I noticed Dylan Pendragon at one table, Mayah at another. Debra sat at a third, her cool manner aloof and reserved as she spoke with the women to her right and left. One of her hands remained under the table, as if she was cradling something in her lap. A Nazi uranium cube, I had no doubt.

  Dinner was served.

  28

  By luck or design, my table was almost entirely occupied by scientists, all of whom were about a hundred and thirty-six percent smarter than I was and all of whom apparently knew each other from roughly a million other conferences. As they excitedly deconstructed the day’s sessions, Nikki and I played our own form of catch-up.

  “Okay, so what do we have?” I asked.

  She leaned forward excitedly. “The intel from Simon’s tech is starting to pay off,” she said. “We’re cross-referencing faces and coming up with names for folks all over the globe. It helps that some of these people have public personas in the science community, masking their Connected abilities so they’ll be taken seriously by their peers. Once again, nobody likes to be the odd man out, even among a collection of nerds.”

  “Anyone in particular we need to watch?”

  “Affirmative. Doctors Yazin Kahtri and Bettina Franks appear to be the strongest personalities at the conference. We think there’s a reason for that. We think they have appointed themselves as the unofficial leaders in whatever throwdown is about to happen here with Dr. Rindon.”

  “Is there any possibility Rindon knows the magic has gone out of his Caesar salad?”

  To my surprise, Nikki nodded. “Almost certainly, particularly since the Magician went to some pains to pass the word along to the right ears. There was a low-level panic reaction and an influx of new attendees packing heat.” She giggled. “I always wanted to say that.”

  She gestured around the room, and I saw what she meant. Several very non-scientific-looking attendees had join the crowd, who were dutifully finishing up the last of the cheesecake before Dr. Rindon once more took the stage. His energy, however, appeared to be unchanged. “Does he not know the score?” I asked.

  Nikki’s smile was hard. “Oh, he knows it,” she said. “The Magician was on a mission to make sure he was right about Rindon’s issues. He finagled the opportunity for me to make the good doctor’s acquaintance.”

  I winced. “How did that go?”

  “Exactly as Armaeus expected it would, if that tells you anything. I have to hand it to Rindon, he recovered quickly. I’ve met a lot of people in my time who weren’t even able to have a conversation with me, not being able to get past the awesomeness of my essence. But Rindon knows his audience, and he knows that money can come from the most unlikely sources. Either that, or he knows that if he continues on his path, he won’t have to deal with folks like me for too much longer in the Connected community. Either way. But he’s definitely cagey. The memories I was able to access when we crossed palms were all on the up-and-up. There was absolutely nothing to indicate he’s meeting in the back room with his cronies, posting hate screeds on Reddit as they draw 88s on each other’s arms. He didn’t give up any candy to me, though I feel fairly confident he didn’t realize I was jonesing for a handout.”

  I grimaced. “Well, that’s no good. Where does that leave us?”

  “I told you, the Magician wasn’t fooling around. He decided to go off script.” She nodded casually to the center of the room, but I was distracted momentarily as Dr. Rindon stood and made his way to the stage. Spotlights swept the room, blinding me, and a woman’s voice gushed excitedly over the loudspeaker, introducing Rindon for the second time today and fawning over him with an appropriate level of adoration.

  By the time Rindon took the stage and my eyes had adjusted, I saw what Nikki had pointed out to me. There, seated front and center, at a vantage point that Rindon could not help but notice, was the Devil of the Arcana Council. As if he felt my eyes on him, Kreios turned toward me, his lips moving softly, murmuring words I could easily hear despite the cacophony in the room.

  �
��Speak your truth,” the Devil said.

  Rindon started talking.

  “I see before me today my friends and colleagues, both those I have worked with for many years and those whom I hope to work with closely in the months and years to come,” he began. “Our work here is nothing short of a call to preserve humanity at its finest core. A call we have the obligation and honor to answer.”

  As he spoke, I could see the movement in the room. Subtle, really, the tenting of a napkin here, the adjustment of a hand there, as one by one members of the audience brought their uranium cubes out from whatever pocket or briefcase they’d used to stash them to keep them closer to hand. There was a fraught sense of expectation in the room, but also fear. These people had no idea what they were about to release, but they were determined to release it anyway. Determined to stop Rindon from pursuing his agenda, or at least the agenda they believed he was going to pursue.

  Still, the man had not condemned himself yet. Individual prejudice was despicable, but it wasn’t genocide. I had to keep reminding myself of that. Rindon chatted on, talking about the sweeping new discoveries of his laboratory and through his collaboration with Solidarity Pharmaceuticals. Around me, the scientists at my table became increasingly excited. To them, he was the answer to their prayers, a rock star Nobel-Prize-winning peer able to harness the political and financial clout of multinational businesses to effect real change. And this was the man we were going to take out? The need to get to the truth was nearly overwhelming.

  Apparently, I was not alone in my frustration. Across the room, a short, compact man stood, his diminutive stature immediately overtaken by the sound of his booming voice. “What is in this drug you would bring to our shores?” he demanded.