Wearing the Cape 6: Team-Ups and Crossovers

by Marion G. Harmon

  She threw up her hands. “They don’t know? They don’t know what happened. They couldn’t track this monster’s mirror-jumps before, they can’t now.”

  “Wait a sec.” Jamal frowned. “The whole mirror breaking bit wasn’t normal?”

  She shook her head glumly. “No, it wasn’t. They’ve spent hours at the scene, and they still don’t know why it was different this time.”

  I nodded thoughtfully. “Shell, would you be a dear and review the news? Please look for any reports of mirrors violently breaking anywhere.”

  “What will that— Sure.” Her eyes unfocused and a series of data-points scrolled down on the main screen. “I assume you mean incidents not simply written off as property damage associated with a documented incident? We’ve got…hey! One that looks weird. And pretty spectacular.” An image of a generic box-shaped outlet warehouse popped up. All of its windows were shattered.

  “Freemont Glass, Portland Oregon, does windows and mirrors. Late last night it exploded. Initial police report is some kind of high pressure explosion, but they can’t find traces of the container or even the center point of the blast yet. Nobody else was on site or in the street, which is good because every sheet of glass in the place including the windows got turned into slivers.”

  “And the time of the explosion?”

  “It was reported at the same time as Hope’s disappearance!”

  “Well then. The form of mirror travel we have just seen usually requires a mirror at each terminus. If something catastrophic eventuated, it will have likely occurred at both termini.” I gave a sharp clap, making everyone jump. “We are going to Oregon.”

  “Hold on,” Mal protested. “Won’t we be interfering in a DSA investigation?”

  “Nonsense. I have an interest in mirrors myself, and we are merely going to observe an interesting spectacle. Come along.”

  Her witchy majesty insisted I get a real shower and change into civvies before we left. Fair enough, I smelled like a chemical spill. A shower and change later I found out that, by we, Ozma had meant just the royal we plus one; she took only her army (with Hope gone, currently me), and we went by Travel Dust.

  I hated Travel Dust. When it cleared and I decided I wasn’t going to throw up, I looked around the alley it had dropped us in. Blowing in out of nowhere in the street would have made it tough to be unnoticeable, even with the Anonymity Specs she’d insisted I wear.

  After being spun about topsy-turvy and dropped onto her feet again Ozma looked a bit pale. Putting a hand on my shoulder, she took a bracing breath.

  “Well!” she said brightly. “The Portland police are admirably efficient.”

  Both entrances to the service alley were sealed by yellow crime-scene tape, ensuring our privacy. When we took a step bits of glass crunched beneath our feet—even the thick and heavy-framed windows facing into the alley had been blown out by whatever had happened inside.

  The alley door was steel, but Ozma made quick use of Thieves’ Powder on the lock to defeat any alarm and I opened it with a single sharp tug. Shell had already assured us that the place should be empty. Budget constraints; once the Portland Police Department had determined it hadn’t been a bomb, they’d just taped off the site. Nobody had been hurt, so at worst it was a weird kind of arson or vandalism; they might look into the owner, but if they found nothing suspicious then the investigation would be closed.

  The inside was one large warehouse and showroom space, with a small office and staff rooms on one side taking up less than a tenth of the square footage. Every step we took crunched on glass. Every surface was covered in it and there wasn’t an intact freestanding mirror or window in the showroom. There should have been; a lot of the frames were at right angles to each other, and some stood on the other side of mirror-hung gallery walls.

  Ozma agreed. “This was not an explosion, Brian. Or rather, this was many explosions. Every mirror exploded at once. The windows were destroyed by the mirrors.”

  “What blew out all the mirrors?”

  “That is what we are here to find out.” She set her case down. For the trip she’d worn a pair of green coveralls with lots of stuffed pockets, but apparently that wasn’t enough; the case opened out into a witch’s kit of wands, crystals, vials, and weird stuff. Donning a pair of multi-lensed gold specs, she unrolled a set of tuning forks and began striking them against the empty frame of the freestanding mirror in front of her.

  As she patiently worked her way from the high to low range, I looked around. Nothing to see here, except for the steam-punk robot wavering into existence out of empty air. Shouting a warning, I lunged just as its metal feet crunched down on the floor and it grabbed for Ozma. She turned and screamed, falling against the mirror frame to narrowly avoid the buzzing, sparking claw that reached for her. When the robot lurched forward to reach again, I ripped its head off before kicking the body halfway across the showroom.

  Spiking the clicking head like a football in the end zone, I put myself between Ozma and the rest of the showroom. I was so hair-trigger focused I jumped when her hand touched my back.

  “No, Brian. We’re safe.”

  Looking down I saw that my claws were out. I’d also grown fang and started growling, and I forced himself to pull everything in. “What is that?” I asked as soon as I could talk around my teeth again. Riding on adrenalin, I looked for something else to tear into. The crushed head clicked unevenly, the robot body lay twitching, and nothing else moved.

  She knelt to touch the head, eyes wide. Her voice shook. “It’s a tick-tock. It’s from Oz.”

  Oz. It was from Oz. Of course I’d known the instant I’d seen it, and yet it was beyond all things astonishing. I’d quickly gathered up packets of mirror shards to take with us while Brian had collected the tick-tock’s body and head, and we had left in another whirl of Travel Dust before the crashes of the brief fight could be reported and perhaps summon an investigating officer.

  Why was it here? I was rather peremptory in clearing the lab even of Brian—the man wanted to break off a few more bits of the thing to make sure it was “safe” and I couldn’t allow that. Before the morning gave way to afternoon I considered that perhaps I should have kept him to help me unbolt and unhinge the automaton; my gloved hands ached and the clear oil that smoothed the functioning of its moving parts liberally coated parts of my face and hair. I rested my head on my folded arms, knowing I was getting more oil from my sleeves on my forehead. It stank.

  I considered the brass automaton.

  It had no windup gears for voice. Separate gears wound up its clockwork brains and motivational train. It was wholly recognizable as an evolution of the magic-mechanical concepts that had driven poor Tik-Tok. In the attack on the palace, Tik-Tok had held the doors to the Crown Treasury against the Mombi-armored nome hoard while I had sent away my magical treasures with the aid of the Magic Belt, the Magic Belt last of all so that it could find me. I still had nightmares about it.

  And I’d thought Tik-Tok destroyed. Had he instead been disassembled and studied for duplication? Neither the Nome King nor Mombi had the skill. Only the Wizard, with his rather mechanical approach to magic, had shown an interest in Tik-Tok before, and he—

  My head shot up. “Nox! Fetch me a vial of sundrops, quickly!”

  My tiny courtier and bodyguard leapt from the table where he’d been suspiciously watching the thing’s completely harmless head, and returned with a box. Opening it, I removed the shining bottle. I’d filled it weeks ago, the last time I’d been able to catch rain falling through the light of a sunset, and in the box it had not yet been able to release its golden store. Now it glowed joyfully.

  “The lights, Nix, please.” The artificial lights turned off, the room lit only by the warm yellow light, I began my examination. And there it was, inscribed on the thing’s windup motivational train: O.D., Tick-Tock Works, The Cascades, YF, in bright gold sunscript.

  Where the thing had been assembled, doubtless inside a factory, no direct
sunlight would ever have touched its inner works to illuminate the letters. They were for me.

  And that solved the mystery of the tick-tock. My hands shook, but I reboxed the sundrops and then retrieved the samples I had taken from the site. Now for the mirrors.

  “Think she’s found anything?”

  I shot another sniping enemy. “No. She’ll tell us when she does.”

  Jamal smirked, shot his own five targets. “Yeah, right, like she tells us everything ever. I still don’t know why she wanted my shoes.”

  “Ingredients. Don’t ask, you’ll get a headache.” We finished off the challenge and I saved the game. Playing with Jamal always made me feel slow, but the waiting was getting on my nerves. The only updates we’d gotten were from Braidwood, letting us know that everything was good, there’d been no radiation-contaminated leaks, and the DSA and Department of Energy was securing the site; soon the rest of the team would be home.

  “Besides—”

  “Everyone to the lab!” Shell called out. “Ozma’s got a show-and-tell!”

  “Never mind.” I put down the controller, stretched and cracked my neck. Jamal was already gone.

  Shell and Shelly were back in the lab, by dronebot and screen. Mal and Jamal circled the lab table, geeking over the disassembled robot. “How did it work?” Jamal was asking. “It’s gears and springs!”

  “It uses a…” Ozma stopped and smiled. “Magic. It’s clockwork magic.”

  “Cool!”

  “Slowpoke,” Shell shot at me before turning to Ozma. “So, what’s going on?”

  What was going on was we were going to do something exciting and dangerous. Ozma had cleaned up and changed into her “field costume,” a white flowing shoulderless gown over an equally white bodysuit, with her gold-wire circlet crown. She’d dressed for authority, which meant her witchy majesty was going to try and talk us into something.

  “I have determined what happened to Hope,” she announced, “and what we may do to find her.” She looked around, satisfying herself as to our complete attention. “The killer Hope faced used the factory warehouse as his base. Shell has confirmed that a man matching the biometrics of the mirror jumping clown we saw works there as a night-shift maintenance man and security guard. His current whereabouts are unknown. The mirrors appear to have been destroyed by proximate discharge of— Of a bad jump with a worse result.

  She indicated a petri dish of glass shards floating in a bell jar on the counter beside her.

  “I believe that when the killer attempted to flee back through the mirror his power could not carry him and Hope, to whom he remained attached. They stuck, between mirrors, until the bottled force discharged uncontrollably and catastrophically. It created an open rift, a weak spot in reality. And they fell through it. They are not in our reality anymore.”

  “So where did she go?” Shelly on the lab screen looked heaps more calm than her twin.

  “I don’t know. Somewhere else. But I believe I have a way to find her.” She gracefully waved at the dead steampunk robot, now just a spread out collection of copper parts. “This tick-tock interrupted our investigation, attempting to capture me and return me to Oz. I have determined that this was its sole function—its lightning weapon would have rendered me quite helpless had it not been for Brian.”

  “She’s in Oz?”

  “I do not think so. Rifts of this nature are like junctions or crossroads, allowing travel to and from a great many places where local rifts harmonically— Where they match. I believe that this tick-tock was planted in a corresponding rift in Oz, waiting as patiently as only such a thing can for me to appear on this side. If Mombi has been able to observe me at all, she knows that I am free and myself, preparing to return.”

  Mal nodded. “Got it. It’s a gate guardian.”

  Shell gave the thing an unfriendly look. “More like a trapdoor spider.”

  “Yes it was. I was very nearly captured by a trap similar to the one our Hope took part in. My presence triggered its response, and it came through the rift for me. Please look here.” She directed our attention to a silver ball just above what I guessed was the thing’s wind-up heart. It looked like it was made out of concentric silver bands—a fancy version of the old rubber-band balls I’d sometimes made for kicks at school. The silver had a milky, translucent quality almost like crystal, and the ultra-fine inscriptions etched into it made my eyes hurt but I could see that it was made of two halves that snugged together.

  “This is what allowed it to travel here. It has two settings, with the capacity for more. The first setting is for Oz, to return it. The second setting is presumably for me, triggered by my presence at the rift. It sought me, although if set later it might have been able to also seek out my trail from the rift.”

  “Oh!” Shell lit up. “You think that you can set it to find Hope?”

  “No.” Ozma smiled sadly. “I don’t know how it was set to find me, and I do not dare to disassemble it to see if I can work it out. But its creator might, and fortunately I know him. I propose to go and ask him.”

  “You know him?”

  Ozma’s laugh was the tinkle of silver bells. “Of course I do. He is my wizard, Oscar Diggs. And his current address, or his address when he built the tick-tock, is the Tick-Tock Works, somewhere upon the Cascades. It is the best news I have had in quite some time.”

  “Wait.” I poked the robot with a claw. “You’re saying the Wizard of Oz built this. To catch you? And that’s good news?”

  “Yes, Brian. I believed that he was dead, but it is obvious that he is too valuable to Mombi and the Nome King. They forced him to build this, but he signed his name. Here.” And she showed us.

  “YF?”

  “‘Yours, faithfully.’ I believe that he hoped that I would be able to defeat the tick-tock, and he knew I would study it.”

  “So he told you where to find him?” I barked a laugh. “We’re off to see the wizard?”

  “The wonderful wizard of Oz,” she deadpanned with the barest hint a smile.

  “Yay!” That was Nix—everyone else groaned or face-palmed as I wondered if I should write the date in my calendar; the day her serene highness told a joke.

  Naturally it wasn’t that simple. First, not all of us could go; we’d gone haring off before, following our idealistic team leader into messes that weren’t our business, and nearly gotten shut down over it. Jamal and Mal weren’t eighteen yet, and we were talking about a recon and retrieval mission into enemy-held territory. Extrareality territory. And Shell couldn’t keep a link with her robodrones across reality boundaries without preparations Ozma didn’t have time to make.

  We also had to report the Portland site to the DSA investigating Hope’s disappearance or pure shit would rain down on us when they found out we’d known about it, so we had to go now since we couldn’t risk them working the site and then deciding to close the rift of ban us from it. So it was going to be just Ozma and me again, with Shell letting the DSA know about it after we’d gone in; they probably wouldn’t close the gate with us on the other side.

  And we were going incognito, which meant Nix was going to dress me like her personal doll.

  It was getting more and more difficult to resist playing with Brian’s hair, and it shouldn’t have been an obsession of the moment since I was home. We were far from the Emerald City, but the red rock and soil of Quadling Country brought tears to my eyes.

  Twisting the ball to its home setting had brought us to a place I’d only read about but recognized; the Ruby Cave behind the Great Waterfall. The rift debouched into the cave’s roiling cauldron pool, and we had arrived with quite a splash. Querying the Question Box before our departure had told me that we would arrive safe and free and this time I had managed to quell my spontaneous scream (empresses don’t scream, and neither do superheroes), but I had been silently concerned of other waiting guards. There had been none. After drying us and our belongings with a simple chanted cantrip, I had found the exit to the cave a
nd now we stood beside the Great Waterfall, breathing the mist-filled air and looking out over the rolling hills and redstone ridges of Quadling Country.

  And I couldn’t stop thinking about Brian’s tight woven night-black locks.

  Fudge.

  Perhaps it was that he looked so at home here. In his loose black trousers, tucked into rugged boots, and red leather vest over an embroidered white tunic, he looked the image of a Quadling troll. Even his hair didn’t look out of place, since trolls were known for their extravagant attention to their locks and sported mohawks, braids, weaves, and wings of eye-popping styles and colors. A troll master hairdresser made as much coin as the fanciest chef. The great iron staff he carried, with the huge pack upon his back, announced his strength to anyone who looked. Strength and hair—a troll’s great pride.

  Fudge, fudge, fudge.

  “Are we going to stand here admiring the scenery?”

  I made myself laugh. It wasn’t hard; we were on an adventure. “Don’t be a gooch. Is your pack sitting right?”

  Nix had dressed us both; Brian as a Quadling boy, me as a Quadling girl. My vest and tunic matched his, though my short white embroidered bloomers and high gartered socks had made him comment about wearing my underwear on the outside (I’d ignored him—the linen and cotton clothing was not lingerie). Our identical embroidery designs announced to anyone we might meet that we were married; I was a traveling hedge witch, my profession proclaimed by my wide-brimmed pointed red hat, and my husband carried my pack of herbs, ointments, potions, pastels, and witchy tools as Brian called them. And bashed anyone I couldn’t hex.

  “And what was my name, again?”

  I rolled my eyes at his grumbling—a bad habit I had picked up from Hope. “Benagain. BEN-again. Now say mine.”

  “Pennigal.”

  “PEN-ee-gal.”

  “That’s what I said, Pennigal.”

  “Ben means strong in ancient Ozian. Pen means wise, but you’re an unlettered troll so you don’t know that.”