by Paul Duffau
She dropped the amulet and, mouth open and jaw trembling, scrubbed at her abdomen with claws for fingers. The ripping sound of tearing fabric from her T-shirt made her look down. Blood from dozens of cuts radiated from her belly button, red abrasions flaring out like rays of pain to the rest of her body, to the tips of her limbs.
The sight triggered a rage as red as the self-inflicted welts. If I wanted to eviscerate an enemy, this spell would do it, followed by a shock: This torture isn’t real.
It only attacked her when she sought magic. Her instinct was to avoid the pain, therefore to avoid magic, but it was part of her very existence, hence the constant prickling at her skin and her mind. The slightest touch of energy made it worse.
What if it was like a Band-Aid? What if she tore it off in one snatching movement? What if she brought all her power to bear at once?
Worms of fear curled in her stomach. It might be as effective as swinging a sledgehammer at her foot. She glanced to the amulet.
How much more could it hurt?
She gathered the jeweled amulet. Wide-eyed and with the skin tight across her forehead, she sucked in a deep breath. She gripped the jewel in her hand, knuckles white. Instead of tentatively grasping a strand of magic, she opened herself fully, absorbing it all in one full blast and tuning it to the crystal. She tumbled down into the gem, past the facets, into the heart, and deeper, to the precise latticework of atomic structure, shining clearly. Then, deeper still, into the fuzziness that hid the rules of the universe, obscured the source of magic. Tuned, tuned, and touched, with all she could handle . . .
The emerald exploded in shards of celadon green, semi-opaque liquid light lapping at the walls of her room, shocking her retinas. Soundless repercussions detonated inside her head, just as overwhelmingly vibrant. Her back arched and her eyes rolled so far back in her head that they hurt. The taste of blood filled her mouth, and she thought she drooled. She collapsed sideways to the floor like a blow-up holiday decoration with a leak, deflating to empty nonexistence.
Hold . . . on . . .
Just before the floor hit her, she burst through Rubiera’s spell with a stupendous burst of white light that rippled away from her, illuminating hidden valleys of magic. Sparks of energy populated the landscape. In her fading consciousness, some blazed brighter, some less. Some had names. The brightest flared, shot a beam of magic to her, retracted itself almost at once. In the space between two thoughts, it disappeared, but not before a terrifying maleficence threatened her destruction.
The effect was so palpable that Kenzie flinched at the evil. Her last reedy thought as she bounced numbly on the carpet was to get to safety.
Like a slow dawn glowing to red on the horizon, changing one hue at a time, Kenzie groped toward awareness. With the warmth of water against her thighs and the scent of lavender in her nose, the fact that she was upright and walking into the lagoon at the Glade percolated into her slow-working consciousness. The flow of water rippled against her skin, made her want to clench her stomach muscles tight. Her body operated under its own momentum, seemingly without needing or heeding her instructions.
A dream?
Her body dove below the surface and the sensuous caress of the lagoon startled her. She was nude. She tried to confirm, check, touch with her hands, look with her eyes, but for all her frantic and embarrassed effort, her body simply executed a long, sweeping breaststroke before breaking the surface and inhaling perfumed air. Six more graceful strokes brought her to the edge of the tumbling waterfall. Then, she stood with feet set on the firm, ridged sand, each grain distinct against her soles, pulled her wet hair back from her face with both hands into an unbound ponytail, and took a deep, refreshing breath filled with misty spray.
A wistful thought drifted by, accompanied by a wriggle that should have made her blush. I wish I could show you this place, Eddie.
Horrified, Kenzie mentally backpedaled, the arriving thought clear as mountain air. The image conjured by the name, Eddie, elicited a forbidden glow of pleasure, the kind she suppressed except when she was alone and near Mitch. The kind that scared her half to death and thrilled her at the same time.
The relevance of the name soaked in. Eddie. With it arrived new sensations, of a more pronounced weight to her chest, muscles that lacked the kind of toning and strengthening that martial arts training built, a posture exuding more confidence than Kenzie ever recalled possessing. Over it all, a playful lustiness, alien to her experience.
She was not her, this body wasn’t her, and these feelings . . .
Kenzie fought rising panic.
Elowyn—it had to be her mother—dove under the riotous surface at the base of the falls. She porpoised languidly through the tumult, eyes open, and entered an underwater passage. Whether due to the moon’s light or some natural phosphorescence, the details stood in vivid contrast from the feathery and faintly luminous green mosses on the black stone on either side to the wiggly line of the white sand. Ahead, the bottom sloped up and they broke the surface a second time.
Over her arched a tall cavern, not a bit dank or dark, but lit by crystals encased in the stone, like stars set in the firmament. White stalagmites tapered to the ceiling, pillars in a secret and holy place. Reinforcing her perception, she saw a broad stone workbench with a thick top of the same material as the floor, with broad legs of stout white stalagmites shouldering the load. The water cascading over the falls created a muffled drum-like noise that rumbled from the walls.
Feet—hers, Elowyn’s, theirs—padded up three steps, rising up from the water to rain droplets on reddish volcanic rock. The floor, flecked with greens and golds, was forgivingly soft and warm. Toes flexed and an arm branched out to select a robe. Disembodied, Kenzie noted the same emerald green that she wore in the Glade, but without the silver threads. To Kenzie’s relief, Elowyn clothed herself.
Elowyn raised a hand and spread her fingers like a blossoming. Fotinós, she said, and the captured stars shone more brightly. A sense of warm joy coursed through Kenzie.
Me? Or her?
In the space of time that Kenzie framed the question, Elowyn had approached the bench. A copy of the Incantaraus stood to the right, closed, with pages marked by slender ribbons. Her mother didn’t give it a second glance while Kenzie fretted over the duplication. There was only one, could only be one, so said the Family. It held the spells and potions and customs that gave the Family power.
A copy was . . . blasphemy. No one was permitted a copy. That was why she’d snuck into the Glade to steal the Fire spell to stop Lassiter. If there’d been an Incantaraus at home, she could have saved herself a lot of grief, not to mention the fright of meeting the gytrash.
While Kenzie ruminated, Elowyn’s hands were busy arranging materials. A band of gold rested in a notch in the rock. A bar inserted through the middle secured it in place. To the right side, delicate gold wire looped on itself. To the left, a ruby the size of Kenzie’s pinkie, cut to a teardrop.
Elowyn drew a deep breath, reached to the tome, and flipped to one of the saved pages. Kenzie recognized the spell instantly. The Fire spell.
Elowyn studied the page, and then reached for the wire. She snipped a two-inch segment off with cutters. Intrigued, Kenzie watched as Elowyn set pins into the rock in holes no bigger than specks. Her mother took the soft wire up in a pair of needle-nose pliers and proceeded to wind it to the pins. She adjusted the wire after each bend. Muscles stood taut under the tanned skin on Elowyn’s forearms as she maintained tension throughout the process until the outline of a flame glittered in front of them.
Elowyn let out a pent-up breath. “One down,” said Elowyn. Kenzie heard the words, filled with relief, echo inside her. With the pins removed, Elowyn carefully picked up the charm and set it to the side. In the same manner, she fashioned three more symbols, one each for air, water, and earth. After setting the last aside, Elowyn stood and stretched tall. Kenzie, lurking in the recesses of her mother’s mind, felt the iron control of concentratio
n. The respite from the exacting work of crafting the charms was purely physical; Elowyn’s brain stayed tightly focused on her task.
Kenzie could recall only a few times that she’d managed this type of focus. On the floor of the studio under the guidance of Jules; when she confronted Lassiter; when she triggered the amulet just now to break Rubiera’s bewitching. It made her feel . . . insignificant. No, that wasn’t right. Like a helpless child, like her first clumsy attempts at a hook kick and falling down, like a brand-new Wilder enchantress, all power and no skill.
As Kenzie’s thoughts wandered, her mother walked to the wall of the cavern. With a rock hammer, she mauled the stone with the tapered end to remove a blue crystal. Each attack rang a clear bell tone.
Why hammer at it? Just use some magic, thought Kenzie, envisioning the way she could do it.
To Kenzie’s amazement, the hammer paused as though her mother had heard her. “No,” murmured Elowyn with a twist of her head in denial, “that might taint it.”
She hesitated, but returned to the stone, each strike vibrating the air in the confined space, echoes coming back in harmonious waves. One last well-aimed whack and the gem tumbled into Elowyn’s outstretched palm.
Kenzie felt a burning cold in hands that weren’t hers. Curiously to her, the facets were cut and polished to a brilliant finish, but the interior swirled with a murky occlusion that wormed at her mind, and she recoiled. Her mother, though, nodded her head. Elowyn carried the gem back to the bench.
After putting the sapphire next to the ruby, which perplexed Kenzie, as there wasn’t room for both in the ring, Elowyn pulled a clay crucible to her. The colors on the exterior ran up the sides in waves, ruddy brown at the base, to coppery, and finally to a charcoal black like the edge of a fire pit. She snipped a long strand of the wire, folded it onto itself, and deposited it into the bottom of the crucible. Next, she pulled out an alabaster plaster form with a preset circle and four prongs pointing down, and a second circle twice the diameter with four projections to the sides. She set that beside tweezers and a graphite gray probe that resembled a cross between an awl and a chopstick. Elowyn took another long stretch, inhaled deep breaths, and bent to her work.
Kenzie sensed the gathering of the magic and, alerted, focused her attention on her mother and calmed her mind, in the same way Jules had taught her. Riding in sympathetic coordination with her mother, with all extraneous thought suppressed, Kenzie saw her mother’s fingers waggle up on rising palms. Heat from a less aggressive type of Fire spell roiled in a billowing cloud in the bottom. Without breaking concentration, Kenzie filed a mental movie of the spell away for future experimentation. The gold wire glowed coppery yellow, waxed under the heat, and coagulated into a pool. It was ready.
With single-minded intensity, Elowyn added degrees of heat to the metal until the thick, viscous substance swirled with convection currents. She reached out to the chopstick-y thingie. She dipped the tip of the tool into the gold, twisted it to draw up the reddish flux onto the slender shaft, and with careful, but deliberate speed, transferred the gold and her attention to the form. With a deft touch, Elowyn laid a bead of the solidifying gold into the circle and breathed “Anemosa.” The air spell forced the gold into the nooks of the form. Thrice more, she repeated the process. Once both forms were filled, Elowyn reversed the Fire spell, fingers descending. The structure of the ring cooled in an instant.
Elowyn stood up. A ravenous rumble vibrated in her midsection. Kenzie knew Elowyn’s surprise. Hands touched her tummy, and drifted lower, formed with a soundless question, hope and fear intermingled.
Stay on task, Ellie, came the self-admonishment.
Elowyn glanced to the gemstones and, for the first time, Kenzie detected some indecision. The ruby scared her.
Why?
I don’t know. A gap in the flow of thought. Now I’m arguing with myself?
Elowyn placed her right hand over the sapphire, her left over the ruby. Closing her eyes, she pictured her magic tuned to the stones, each in turn. The sapphire dropped in temperature under her palm and her senses jumped an order of magnitude. Switching to the other, a haze of black-tinged fire lapped at the edges, alive with vitality—and a consuming hunger. She understood, then. Because it lusts . . . and I like it and I don’t know if I could control it or whether it would control me.
Decision made.
Elowyn blinked rapidly, the fatigue of constant concentration wearing her thin. Using yet another variant of the Fire spells that Kenzie didn’t recognize, she wedded the four elemental signs to the outer ring and set the sapphire to the inner with another dash of flame.
The ring was larger than Kenzie preferred but undeniably beautiful. In the heart of the gem, the light from the assembly of crystal stars gleamed, lending it fire, cold and blue. The elements stood arrayed around it, taking the place of the heart-shaped leaves.
Cupping it in both hands, Elowyn removed the ring from the notch in the stone and cupped it in both hands. Kenzie could feel a growing swirl of magical energy and the strain on her mother. Alarmed, she watched the energy growing from a small dust devil into a tornado of violence. Elowyn was shuddering, but resolutely focused, and the force increased to a gale. At the last instant, when Kenzie was sure that her mother had lost control, Elowyn directed the entire magnitude of the magic into the crystal clasped in her hands. Diving in after it and dragging Kenzie along like a balloon captive to the winds, she battled to set the magic to the crystal, to tune it, just as Kenzie had the emerald.
Except where Kenzie had blazed into the murkiness where the magic lay hidden in the quantum realm, Elowyn pulled up short. A tendril of terror accompanied the massive forces arrayed around them, and doubt, debilitating at the crux of the moment. Elowyn sought to adapt the forces sparkling around them to the material part of the sapphire. Horrified, Kenzie saw the energy winning against her mother’s effort, twisting the uncertainty and kindling even more fear. Without thinking, she shouldered part of the load, without understanding how.
Like this . . . and she dropped deeper, and this time, it was Elowyn bobbing behind. The roar of the universe deafened her ears. In no-space, no-time, no-reality, Elowyn found her balance. She seized control from Kenzie, and bonded all her frightful load of magic into the essence of the sapphire in a single intuitive gesture . . . and fainted.
Chapter 28
This is stupid, Mitch thought, his hand trembling as he replaced the battery into his computer. His bedroom door was shut and locked, even though his uncle was noisily cutting Zs in their room. The nagging wouldn’t let up. What did I miss?
There had to be something on the disk, something that didn’t belong, and it wasn’t about robotics or MAGE. The computer booted up on command and Mitch entered his password. The home screen appeared, normal in every aspect. Next, he put the chip into the slot, waited for the system to recognize it, and then opened the folders menu. A cursory check didn’t show anything odd.
With a grimace to himself, Mitch settled in to searching each folder and file, all the while waiting for the interruption that would announce . . . what? The language used by whoever hacked his network didn’t match the skills needed to perform that bit of computer thievery.
He put the question out of his mind. Opening folders one at a time, he studied the contents, looking for anomalies, something that didn’t fit. Lots of data on robotics, lots of schematics that he glanced over. He checked his progress and suppressed a groan. At his current rate, it’d take three days, plus a bit, to get through all the files. And that assumed that all of them just needed a cursory check. Even as he processed the estimate, he clicked open another folder. Flipping through the individual files yielded him nothing except a growing appreciation for the range of products 3rdGen had in the research pipeline.
There seemed to be a pattern to the naming conventions, to separate out industrial use from those with military implications or from interpersonal applications.
The next file was on one of the �
��soft” robots. Mitch let his eyebrows rise at the artist’s rendering of the bot. Decidedly voluptuous, blond, and totally unexpected from his employers. He knew that there were two driving forces in the industry. One was to replace workers with machines that never slept, didn’t need benefits, and didn’t complain about working conditions or a living wage.
The other was sex. He wasn’t naive enough to discount the allure of the newest sex toys, but . . . yeah. He grimaced and checked over the image again, guiltily compared it to Kenzie, and decided he’d rather try the real thing first. His attention derailed from the project at hand, he mused about a future with Kenzie in it, and everyone else not. They hadn’t even been able to go on a simple date without the whole thing blowing up. Intimacy had been limited to kisses and hugs with healthy doses of frustration for both of them. His mind meandered past a meeting of lips. If they could ever find time alone? Mitch had no idea what she might think of the idea. Did she actually like him that much? Insecurity busted his fantastical bubble. With a start, he realized that he had been staring at the screen for fifteen minutes, accomplishing exactly nothing.
Angry at himself for wasting time and getting his hopes up, he shifted to a new folder. He silently acknowledged to himself that there was a third driving force. Military robots. This one seemed designed for rough terrain and sported two weapons. Revulsion welled up in him, but he forced himself to go through the whole set of documents, including the projected “kill rate” that 3rdGen advertised. Disgusting.
The next file was different. While the nomenclature on the file suggested another robot, probably military, there were no schematics or renderings. Just three documents with non-suggestive names. As he shifted the pointer to the first, his screen flickered. The arrow hung on the screen while he waited on edge to see if the hacker was back. Silently, he wished he had the diagnostic and tracking tools he’d played with in Jackson’s office. The screen flickered again. As chills ran down his spine, he double-clicked and the document opened. The title was a vague “Source Code Documentation.” Programming stuff, then.