He had been given an illusion, and he seemed perfectly happy with it—but the more he had of it, the less human he would actually be.
The road had come to a fork, and Thea was the only one standing there. The responsibility was hers, and if she chose the wrong road, or even just the easy road, what lay at the end of it might be no less than extinction for her kind.
But she could stop Diego. She had to stop him. There was nobody else.
It was too great a burden.
The carousel continued on its endless journey, round and round and round, the carnival music still driving the painted pony onward, but Thea was no longer the innocent child that she had once been. It was herself—not the enchantress Diego had shown her the first time she had come here, but the reality of what she actually was, a long-legged, fair-haired girl with sad eyes who was going to imprison the bright and dangerous spirit that was Diego de los Reyes forever.
She watched the central column of the merry-go-round begin to turn dim as she began turning inward the bright mirrors with which it had been tiled, facing inside, facing that place where Diego was—giving him what he needed, a reflection of what he thought of as true. And then the column began to change shape, its smooth cylinder bulging out, swelling into an ovoid, then a sphere—a dull-surfaced sphere pocked with scars and scuffs and scratches, with a single beam of coruscating, multicolored light like a shaft coming out from the top, dancing out into the void, the only light in the world.
The sparkling lights of the carousel winked out one by one as the music began to fade; only a memory of the shape of the painted pony remained underneath Thea as she clung to the pole that had once anchored it. She found herself crying, softly, quietly, as the last of the mirrors came flying through the shadows—a butterfly, shiny-winged, veined with dreamcatcher strands and tendrils, floating gently near the shaft of light that rose from the sphere that now contained Diego’s spirit…then beside it…then pushing a wing into it like a blade, the light going into eclipse, darkening by slivers and notches as the wind crept across ever so slowly until it was finally hovering right on top as though the light was what was holding it up. Then it settled, gently, folding its wings down over the light. For a moment a ray or two of it still escaped—gold or amethyst or neon blue—and then, soundlessly, the wings came down. The light went out. The sounds faded away.
There was nothing except darkness. Thea found herself drifting, beginning to forget, the shape of the pony under her hands losing any meaning at all, just a piece of darkness more solid than the rest.
Quiet…empty…alone…alone…
She never knew just what it was that brought her back. She remembered falling, and then being hurled back through the improbable portal of the laptop screen as though rejected by that other world—and at the time she even knew why. The guilt she carried within her would not be silenced; she had to return to face her choices in this world, the real world—the world for which she had traded Diego de los Reyes, and all that he might have been. The pain was real, and violent, and she found herself on the floor of Terry’s room in the Elemental house, curled up into a ball. She had the dim impression of Tess crouching beside her with a frightened expression on her face, but beyond that there was nothing except the formlessness and the dark, and the sense of being left adrift and alone. For all she knew, she might have simply passed out, and the whole thing might have been no more than a dream…except for a tiny charm of a painted carousel horse tightly clutched in her hand.
Humphrey May had to run a restorative spell on Thea twice before he pronounced himself satisfied that she should be left to rest; it was only after the second time that Thea could gather enough strength and concentration to rasp out a question.
“Professor…Diego…Alphiri…are they back…?”
“They’re back. We’ll talk after you’ve had a couple of hours’ sleep. Trust me.”
Thea did trust him. She thought she saw her aunt’s worried face hovering on the edges of her field of vision, but she was too tired to do more than smile wanly and then close her eyes.
2.
SHE WOKE SEVENTEEN HOURS later.
The house was almost back to normal. Most of the Bureau personnel had left; Beltran, apparently rendered almost comatose by the loss of what had been his other half, had been taken to a hospital for observation, and the paramedics had been dispatched back to base, together with the security person and his imps. Nancy Dane had left with Tess—the summer internship that had brought Terry to this house was, by mutual consent, postponed to a more auspicious time, but he had asked to stick around at the house until Thea herself was ready to leave. The only people left were Isabella, who was not much in evidence, Larry, Zoë, the professor, Terry, Thea herself, and Humphrey May.
Humphrey took Thea out into the garden in the late afternoon on the following day. As the sun’s low golden rays dipped down toward the western horizon, he asked her to cast her mind back and tell him what had happened between her and Diego de los Reyes.
“I honestly don’t know,” Thea had said. “All I can give you is the visions.”
“That might help,” Humphrey said.
“He was…a little like me,” Thea said, looking away. “But he never had the sheltering harbor that I had, not ever. He spent his entire existence by himself. And when he realized that he could reach out…”
“He was a child, in so many ways,” Humphrey said. “He was just learning to play. If we’d gotten to him sooner, maybe we’d have had a chance—but the Alphiri got there first, and when we did get there, it was too little, too late.”
“What happened? What did they say? Did they talk to the professor?”
“Professor de los Reyes and Kevin MacAllister spent a very long time cooling their heels in the antechambers of the Alphiri Queen’s throne room,” Humphrey said, “and then they were told, without ever being admitted, that the situation they had come to discuss was no longer valid and to return when they were prepared to present a case that better matched the current state of affairs. They came back frustrated and furious, I can tell you—in fact, Kevin went straight to the capital to talk to the president. And then Terry was screaming up here that you were in trouble and we found you, practically a shell of yourself, and by the look in your eyes, whatever you’ve brought back with you is still haunting you. Did you dream, while you slept?”
“No,” Thea said. “Not that I remember.”
“That’s good, I tried to specify a dreamless sleep when I gave you that restorative spell,” Humphrey said. “But you still might dream. Traumas come back to stalk us, and whatever happened to you, it was traumatic. Meanwhile, it seems we haven’t found the right coach for you yet. But for now, is there anything at all you can tell me?”
“I don’t even know where to begin,” Thea said helplessly. “Diego had somehow found a way to reach out to the ’net without the benefit of a computer, Nexus or no, and he could access that cyberworld that he and I could somehow weave and manipulate in a way that transcended having the basic tools that I need for the job.”
“That much we gathered,” Humphrey said. “There was more spellspam, after the ’net access was cut off, when Beltran was taken away…”
Thea was shaking her head. “No, Terry explained that—some of those were queued messages he had left in the computer, and without him to send them out one by one, a whole heap tumbled out at once—that was different—but the way I got into his world this time…” She paused, remembering the frustration on Terry’s face as they tussled over the laptop, the message that he couldn’t see. “Back when I first visited the Anasazi time,” Thea said, “I made…a portal, I guess. A gate between one world and another. He did the same thing, upstairs, yesterday. Diego. He made the computer into a portal. I stepped through my own laptop’s screen to get to him.”
“Oh, my,” Humphrey said softly.
“And when I got there, there were the mirrors. Hundreds of mirrors. And they were the kind that showed…what you w
anted to see, what you put into them. And he had an eagle in his, flying free, and then I tied the eagle down in hood and jesses and made it sit on an Alphiri hand, and he told me I would never understand him.” She was crying now, openly, and Humphrey fished in his pocket and came up with a fine linen handkerchief. “The thing is, I do understand him. I know how lonely I could be, sometimes, and I have people surrounding me all the time, whenever I want someone, I can touch them, even my wretched brothers…”
Humphrey laughed, and Thea managed a small watery smile. She wiped at her eyes ineffectually with the back of her hand.
“I could have liked having him around, as a friend, if things had been different,” she said.
“I can understand that,” Humphrey said.
Thea shook her head violently. “No, you don’t! I liked him…despite everything…I would have been a friend…but I betrayed him, I locked him into those mirrors…I made a sphere, and the last thing I can really remember is closing it. He’s inside it now, the sphere of mirrors, and everything he thinks and does is reflected back at him. He may not even realize yet that he is trapped in there, but he will, sooner or later, he will—and he is a bright and vivid spirit, and it will drive him mad eventually. And I did that. I did it to him.”
“Thea,” said Humphrey with a strange little smile, “do you know what the last recorded spellspam was?”
“What?” she asked, looking up.
“The subject line was invisible,” Humphrey said. “The message was, Nobody will ever see you again.”
Thea let out a small whimper. “I did that,” she said. “I made him invisible. Nobody will ever see him again. I don’t even know if I would have the first clue, myself, how to ever even find him again—let alone how to free him…”
“That might be just as well,” Humphrey said, “if you’re right about what will eventually happen inside that sphere you locked him into. Even arguably sane, Diego de los Reyes was something to be reckoned with. If ever he lost his reason, it’s just as well that he is locked away from us permanently. You did well, under difficult circumstances.”
“I killed him,” Thea said bleakly.
“He was never alive, Thea. Not in the sense that a life can be taken away. He existed, certainly—but by our definitions of life, he was no more than a spirit, a ghost, a speaker from the shadows.”
“But real,” Thea said. “For all that.”
“Yes,” Humphrey said, and there was a world of compassion and understanding in his voice. “Real enough…to the few who could reach out and touch him. Like you. But all you did was close the mirror wall—he himself built that. Right now his existence is still undimmed—he exists in that sphere just as he has always done, he’s alive in there, alive and surrounded with his illusions…”
“And he might as well be dead,” Thea said. “I feel…like I need to wash myself clean of it. Every time I look down at my hands, the shadows still cling to them.”
“That’s twice you’ve taken those shadows on,” Humphrey said. “You’re making me look bad. It’s people like me who should be stepping up to save the world, not kids still in high school…and now that I think of it…if you need a job after you graduate, come knock on my door. There’s always a berth at the FBM for you.”
Thea shot him a black look. “And work with Luana Lilley?”
Humphrey threw his head back and actually laughed. “We could make sure that wherever she’s stationed, you were posted to the opposite corner of the country,” he said. “But I’m afraid you’d have to get in line, as it were. For a talented mage, that girl sure has a knack for annoying people.”
“Have they figured out that stuff we brought back yet? The tapes? That cube?”
“The tapes are awfully corrupted; they’re trying to restore them manually—you don’t have to worry about running across Luana for a while, she’s in charge of that project and she’s got her hands full with it. The cube…the cube is my problem, and I have a few ideas on that score, but it’s premature to talk about that.” He got to his feet. “The sun’s set, the house should have dinner ready, and you and your aunt are going home tomorrow. You need a rest, and the professor needs to figure out how he is going to reconfigure the Nexus so that this sort of thing doesn’t ever happen again.”
“What happened to having the professor figure me out?” Thea said.
“I think you figured him out,” Humphrey said, grinning. “I know you feel very much alone. I realize that Diego’s very existence was kind of electrifying. None of us thought the cybermagic you do could ever happen again—that you were a fluke. But we did find out otherwise. I talked to the professor about all of this, after he returned from the Alphiri court, and he thinks…and I agree…” Humphrey took a deep breath. “Thea, it was Diego who was the fluke. He was the wild card, the thing we never looked for, never expected. You…”
“Nobody expected me, either,” Thea said.
“But we should have,” Humphrey said. “That is the way things have always worked. Magic grows, finds new channels, blossoms in new and unexpected places. We should have realized that the neutrality to magic that we so relied on in computers was only a temporary thing. It was just…too new. We hadn’t become used to it yet. But I think we are beginning to do that—and you are the living proof of it. For what it’s worth, Thea, it’s looking very much like you aren’t the only one with the cybermagic gift. Just the first.”
Thea stared at him. “You mean, you think there will be others?”
“Perhaps there already are, in their own way—your friends from the Academy have, at the very least, been able to follow the paths that you have blazed, if not make their own. I think we are going to grow into cybermagic, make it as much our own as we once did with spells and cantrips and magic potions.”
“So if we had left Diego alone…if the Alphiri did take all our magic away…it would only have been the magic we have right now,” Thea said. “We would have found another place to go, another thing to be…”
Humphrey was shaking his head. “Our primary gift of enchantment is that ability to make new things out of old, to reshape, to transfigure, to hope, to dream, to learn. If the Alphiri had taken our gift, that would have gone, too. And without that we would never have survived.”
“That still leaves me…alone,” Thea said.
“Oh, no. Never that. You will never be alone,” Humphrey said. “We are all with you. Every step of the way.”
Thea knew he was right. She was surrounded by family and friends; all she had to do was reach out and touch them, in this world or in some other that she could weave for herself to be happy in. But that still left a small dark place inside of her. She had had no real idea about how much the very idea of the existence of Diego de los Reyes had mattered to her until it was far too late.
3.
THE HOSPITAL COULD FIND nothing physically wrong with Beltran, and sent him home after twenty-four hours.
“I should go and see him,” Thea said to Terry as the two of them sat out on the patio the day after Beltran had come home. “I feel…responsible.”
“You hardly know the guy,” Terry objected.
“Not true,” Thea said. “I met…the other half of him. I know that much of him. And I can’t help thinking…wondering…how much of Beltran was in Diego?”
“You mean how much of Diego was in Beltran,” Terry said. “Sometimes…you sound as though Diego was the one that was real and Beltran was the one that was the shadow.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Thea said.
Terry gave her a strange look. “You can be very weird.”
Thea slipped off her chair. “I think I’ll stop in and at least say hello,” she said.
“You mean good-bye,” Terry said. “We’re more or less on our way out of here. Assuming they are letting him have visitors, anyway.”
“You coming?” Thea said, pausing at the French doors.
Terry sighed, slipping off his own chair. “I suppose you’re right,�
� he said. “He sure did get a raw deal.”
The door to Beltran’s room was ajar, and Terry and Thea slowed down in the corridor as they heard voices coming from within. A woman’s voice. There was something about it that was familiar, something else about it that made that familiarity seem…strange.
A softness. A gentleness. Almost the kind of tone that a mother would use to a sick child.
“Madeline…?” Terry hissed to Thea as they hesitated outside the door.
“Isabella,” Thea whispered back, even as the voice inside the room fell silent.
Terry knocked softly.
“Who’s there?” The imperious voice belonged to Isabella de los Reyes.
Thea stook a step into the room, poking her head past the door.
“It’s Terry and me,” she said. “We just thought…we’d come by and see how Beltran is doing.”
Terry followed Thea into the room and now they both took in the sight of Isabella, her hair pulled back into a simple ponytail and wearing a faded T-shirt and ratty jeans, sitting cross-legged on the bed where her brother sat propped up with several plump cushions. There was a book in her lap. Apparently she had been reading to him.
Isabella’s usually alabaster skin was suffused with an unaccustomed blush, as though she had been caught doing something illegal.
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