by Jenn Stark
“I’m good,” I said, trying to hold on to my happy place.
“You’re not good, not against this,” he said. “It’ll be like moving through an electrical field that doesn’t let you go. Even though there’s nothing of your physical form passing through the field that can catch fire, that’s how you’ll experience it. As if you’re burning alive.”
I stared at him, incredulous. “You know, your pregame warm-up needs some work.”
“Stay focused.” He stood again, and he and Eshe began their crazy-pants duet, the two of them murmuring the ancient chant that I assumed Eshe had learned during her stint as an Oracle of Delphi or whatever it was she was doing back when Jesus was in diapers. I was almost able to picture her as a laughing young girl when—
I slumped forward.
Hands were on me immediately, guiding me back to a more or less upright position, but I lost the specific sensation of the people around me as I left my body and moved through the open doors of Armaeus’s penthouse suite and into the bold blue sky above the Vegas Strip. For once, I didn’t stop to gaze admiringly at the stunning skyscrapers that marked the Council members’ residences. It was full daylight, and the enchanted towers were best viewed at night. I also was more than a little nervous about Armaeus’s warnings. Normally, he just let me bumble my way into danger, no alerts necessary. Was he simply trying to be a better boss, or was this truly going to be a rocky ride?
By unspoken agreement, I headed far to the east, targeting a tech startup pod in Brooklyn, New York. Dropping into the lab’s coworking space was almost too easy, and I passed through walls and rooms without issue. The office was open and airy, inviting, populated by hipster kids with nary a white coat among them. You’d never know they were creating illegal drugs from Connected body parts, but then, as I looked at their bright faces and flowed through their lab, I got the distinct feeling they didn’t know it either. Blindness of youth? Not truly a technoceutical firm?
“That location was responsible for the synthetic mix called Air,” Armaeus murmured in my ear as I took a break from my recitation of what I was seeing. “Laced oxygen that serves as a part-euphoric, part-Connected performance enhancer. It’s only one percent of their total output of pharmaceuticals, something they don’t even notice when they’re creating it, but it accounts for one billion in revenue annually to the firm’s owners. It has only one buyer, who then distributes it exclusively. Mercault.”
Okay, so definitely a technoceutical firm. But for some reason, I didn’t expect it to look like this. I don’t know why I thought these multibillion-dollar technoceutical producers would look like back alley meth labs strewn with chicken wire and trash, but there you had it. I came anticipating thugs and junkies, and instead I got wheat germ smoothies and horn-rimmed glasses.
Either way, New York wasn’t the golden ticket.
I was desperately curious about Soo’s potential involvement in the Nashville location, so I headed there next. The city’s twanging country music offered the only resistance as I targeted an industrial park less than a mile outside the main population center. The building Simon identified for me was much less swank than its New York counterpart, a squat, serviceable structure on a nondescript lot, with a plain-font name affixed in large letters to the upper right corner, NashLab, Inc. Very original. Not the greatest area of town, I could see immediately, but not a huge amount of visible security either. I could have been entering a Walmart. When I said as much, I sensed the energy in the penthouse office shift.
“Have a care,” murmured Armaeus.
Eshe’s voice moaned in overlay. “Stop, I can’t see—”
I slammed into a pool of sludge with so much speed, I felt like my whole body was being shoved through a Play-Doh grinder. I was used to crashing through walls and floors and occasionally people. This wasn’t that. This was an energy suck, my every cell deadening and turning to concrete. Then I was through it, my incorporeal self collapsing on the floor of an empty storeroom.
What the hell was that? It hadn’t felt like anything the Council had served up. If anything it felt like…
A ward, I realized instantly. A ward against powerful magic. A pretty nifty one too, draining away energy so quickly and completely. If I’d hit it as a corporeal entity—or if I’d been a true member of the Council—I suspected the effect would have been even worse.
Armaeus and Eshe were arguing, so I made myself useful, flowing through the hallways and doors and walls. On the inside, there was nothing to stop me, and the computer setup of this firm was considerably more robust, while its lab appeared a little less developed than its New York counterpart. There was even a section that seemed purely given over to robotics.
So, did this place develop electrical-component or nanite-driven technoceuticals? I liked that idea better than eyeballs, frankly, but the place had a darker vibe to it, or maybe a more desperate one. Then again, they were based in Nashville. I’d have a chip on my shoulder too if I were a tech startup in Nashville, I don’t care what their glossy brochures said.
I found a cluster of techs bent over microscopes, and watched for a while. They were all dressed the same, but without inspiration—a parade of khakis and polo shirts, nondescript ID badges clipped to belts and pockets or hung on lanyards. This cutting-edge lab might as well be selling insurance.
More importantly, there wasn’t a hint of any rogue Power Ranger here. If anything, the place seemed unusually still, with only the whirr of machines and the murmur of techs to break the silence.
“He’s not here,” I finally determined, bracing myself for the astral exit sludge-a-thon when I realized…there had to be a regular door to this building. Maybe one that wasn’t warded so heavily. I slowed enough to triangulate on the sporadic flow of people through the building and found it quickly enough.
I emerged from the inner sanctum of the factory to an ordinary-looking lobby, lots of glass and gleaming tile and uncomfortable chairs, a low coffee table featuring magazines with familiar titles—no Hanged Man jabs here. That heartened me, until I looked through the glass top of the table to the wooden shelf below. There, centered on the shelf, was the company’s annual report. The logo of NashLab, Inc. remained in the same boring letters…but beneath it was a set of crossed swords.
Sweet Christmas. Swords. Grinning with a fierce upsurge of pride, I ignored Armaeus’s murmured question and flowed back through the building. Once I knew what I was looking for, it was easy to find. The ID badges boasted small embroidered swords. The equipment labels, the report covers. There was nothing on the outside of this building to suggest anything about its ownership, but I’d bet my last chocolate chip cookie that Soo didn’t merely contribute to this location, she owned it. Which meant I owned it. I owned a building that had wards designed to combat the Council itself.
Eventually, I was going to have to do something about that.
Not today, however. So as not to tip off the dynamic duo back in Vegas, I blasted through doors and walls in record time, zipping through the lobby and out the main entrance, bracing for another cascade of sludge that never came. I’d been right, the building’s front doors hadn’t been warded as heavily.
Twenty seconds later, I was soaring through the city low enough to read the house numbers, all my molecules recovering nicely. Excellent.
“Miss Wilde?” Armaeus asked mildly, but I could hear Eshe nattering at him again, demanding his attention. He didn’t push when I declared the place a dead end.
Louisiana was next, a rebuilt tech center outside New Orleans, and while everything was new-bright-shiny, the vibe here was dark enough to punch me in the gut. This is it, I thought, regardless of whether the ghost of Nikola Tesla was hanging around. This was the kind of place that Gamon would favor, where serious Connecteds with miserable black souls would come for their spa days. The building was glass and steel and modern, tucked on the edge of a swamp but once again mere minutes away from the city. There was no resistance to me dropping through it—but
there was also no sign of Tesla.
Armaeus and Eshe both were telling me to return to the base, and it made sense. Vegas was a quick jog up from New Orleans, and by process of elimination, it was pretty clear that if Armaeus’s theory held, Tesla would be in Southern California. But there was theorizing and then there was knowing. If I was going to be puking my guts out for most of the afternoon in the recovery from this little astral travel adventure, I wanted something to show for it.
I headed west to Silicon Valley.
The buzz of the tech explosion south of San Francisco Bay reached out to me with a visceral tug as I neared the area. Tensing for impact, I followed Simon’s murmured directions to the specific group of buildings voted Most Likely to House a Multinational Exploiter of Children and Dealer in Death. Sadly, there were quite a few options to choose from. Everything in this place appeared to dabble in multinational something or other, and they were all bristling with electronics. It seemed a likely spot for Tesla, and I reached out mentally as I dropped through the clouds, wondering what it would be like to meet the man—well, not in the flesh, I supposed, but in the sensors.
Surprisingly, nothing reached back. I dropped into the correct building almost by accident, landing in a crouch near the corner of a room filled with arguing techs. Once again, nobody was wearing lab coats, and I considered that a sartorial fail. Next thing you knew, French horn players would start showing up for their concerts in tube tops and bike shorts.
Fortunately, none of the assembled technologentsia noticed the disturbance in the Force at my entry. Their argument continued raging over something with long words ending in “acid,” but apparently having no connection to LSD. I tuned it out.
The room next door, more technical in nature, was seriously high-end. Everything was sleek, digital, and on camera, with the wiring in the walls so extensive, it crackled when I moved through it. There were large machines that looked like merry-go-rounds capable of holding a thousand capsules, each afforded their own slot to be shaken, rattled, and rolled. Drug identification? Possibly. Or they could be reverse engineering combinations brought in from the street.
I floated from meeting space to lab to examination room, and even to the open and welcoming lobby of the building, completely at odds with the serious nature of what lay behind it. This place oozed the laid-back vibe of SoCal much more than the intense, tech-hungry world of the Valley. Its feel was almost New Agey. Curious, I watched men and mostly women stream in through the lobby doors, the patients’ faces alight with relief as they entered and smug with satisfaction as they left.
“Is this some sort of spa?” I asked, relating what I was seeing.
“He’s not there,” Armaeus replied, his words unusually clipped. “Return, Miss Wilde. It’s time.”
“Yeah, but, since I’m here…”
Feeling like Casper the Friendly Ghost, I followed a young woman past the receptionist and into one of the receiving rooms, shamelessly eavesdropping on her chatter with the nurse as she weighed in and had her blood pressure taken. HIPAA laws didn’t apply to the Council, and I floated silently through the doors behind the woman, relieved to see the examination bed was off to the side of the room, while there were two prominently placed chairs to the center. Hopefully, nobody was going to get naked anytime soon.
A few minutes later, a man pushed through the door—and finally, I scored my first doctor’s coat of the day. He was older, attractive, and looked vaguely familiar but couldn’t be. The composite doctor for every TV doctor ever cast.
“Megan, you look great,” he said. They shook hands, and a flashing screen above the countertop caught his eye. “You’re not carrying your cell phone with you, are you?”
“Left it in the car.”
“Good, good.” He drifted over to a monitor on the wall and keyed a few buttons. “There’s an unusually high energy signature in this room. It’s upsetting the ideal balance.”
Whoops. I did my best to seem as unenergetic as possible, and in another few seconds, the doctor was apparently satisfied with my lethargy. He and the woman engaged in idle chitchat as he pulled her chart. Then he leaned forward and looked at her seriously.
“You had your seventieth birthday yesterday. Was that difficult?”
My eyes flew wide, and I shrank back, trying to make myself even smaller. The woman opposite the doctor looked maybe forty at the outside extreme, based on her face. Had she seriously had that much surgery done?
“No.” The voice in my mind was sardonic and soft, barely a murmur, and I waited for Armaeus to explain. When he didn’t, I refocused on the chatter.
“—can believe it. I…it’s hard, in a way. Coming here after John passed was a knee-jerk reaction but—” She held out a hand, as if surprised she could flex it. “I never expected this.”
“Your dosage is at the max level. We should definitely scale it back now that the study is over.”
“Scale it back?” For the first time, the woman looked nervous. I wondered if she hadn’t paid enough attention to the side effects pamphlet that came with whatever drugs she was sucking down and was about to reap the whirlwind. “Why, did I do something wrong?”
Wait, what?
The doctor seemed ready for the question, though. “Not at all,” he said with the kind of good cheer usually reserved for military recruitment videos. “But the study was fairly robust, and your experiences have helped us move to the next stage of research and development. To continue receiving the medications could be expensive if you’re not part of the next study group.”
“I want into the next study group, or—or I’ll pay for the medications myself,” the woman said quickly. “I can’t stop this now, Dr. Clark. Not with the way I feel, what I’m able to do. I have money, if that’s what you need. I have enough.” She reached for her purse, as if they were going to cut a deal right there in the examination room.
“That’s not necessary,” Dr. Clark insisted, still all smiles. He handed her his clipboard, with a sheet of paper on it. “If you’d like to be a part of the next study group, we’re happy to have you. You’re one of our shining stars.”
A queasiness struck me as the woman grabbed the clipboard, scanning the information far too hastily to understand it. But it wasn’t her willing submission to doing something else to her body that was causing my malaise. Instead, there was something in the air almost, a pressure on my mind that felt like Armaeus’s insidious intrusion but without a single ounce of sensuality to it. This touch was cold and clinical, almost robotic.
“Quit it,” I muttered, but though I could hear Eshe’s and Armaeus’s voices in the distance, I couldn’t understand their words. I frowned, scanning the room. There was the doctor and patient, the bed, the chairs, the counter, the flashing…
I looked up, and my eyes widened. The numbers on the monitor were gone now, and in their place, words streamed across the screen. HELLO, SARA WILDE slid by so quickly, I thought I imagined it, then the numbers flipped back to their original position as the doctor glanced up. The moment he looked away, the words changed. WHERE IS THE HANGED MAN?
Okey-doke. Time for me to go. “Armaeus,” I muttered, but I didn’t feel the familiar tug back to Vegas that I expected. I sensed nothing at all.
“Who’s Sara Wilde?” The doctor’s voice cut through my confusion, and he was staring at the screen now, where my welcome message scrolled through again. He turned back to the patient. “Do you know that name?”
I straightened, focusing on movement, propulsion, power. Pivoting quickly, I angled for the same door through which the good doctor had entered. I passed through it without issue, gaining speed…
Then ran straight into an electric fence.
Chapter Nineteen
“Aigh!”
I bounced back but knew better than to waste my time trying to figure out what the blockage was. Instead, I rushed not up but down, dropping a floor to a basement maze of workstations choked with lab equipment and ribboned with squeaky-clean floor
s. The wall of energy didn’t find me at first, but the moment I angled up again—bang. Right back into it. And now there was a second wall to my left as well.
I was being herded, I realized, and fear shot through me. Inexplicably, I thought of the silver mines in Granite, the dark passages filled with ghosts. But I wasn’t actually here, I reminded myself. I wasn’t actually—
Bang. Another wall cut off my movement, this one zapping enough electrical current into me to permanently scramble my electrons.
Screw this. I was immortal, and I had flower power cell structure. Wall boy wasn’t the boss of me.
I blinked and saw the world as pure electricity. As usual, lines wrapped and shot and wobbled and weaved, an instant symphony of light waves moving in perfect synchronicity with each other. But there were gaps in the matrix, black spaces that I pounded through now, twisting up like a snake until I reached the first floor again, then the second, then I was out of the building and hurtling toward—
Bang!
I went cartwheeling through the sky, my electrons jitterbugging in six different directions, and quickly reset my vision to electrical streams. Only there were no longer any holes to worm through, unfortunately. It appeared I was caught in an overturned bowl of energy, hemming me in, keeping me close to the building I’d just fled.
“Hello, Sara Wilde.”
The words that vibrated through me weren’t spoken, weren’t thought. It was more like they were coded into my DNA, emanating from my soul. Tesla? Had to be. Even if it wasn’t, the sudden immense wave of power whipping around me made me feel like a grasshopper in a hurricane. I tumbled in its wake, alternately scanning the ground, then the tight-lidded barrier that surrounded me. If it was a bowl, then it had an edge, right? Or did it continue through the ground, more like a sphere? Could I astral travel through the ground any distance?