by Dan Willis
“Nice to know I’ll have you looking over my shoulder,” he said, tugging his arm free of the detective’s grip. “Makes me feel safe.”
Crookshank snarled something unintelligible as Alex turned and walked out the Ashers’ massive front door.
Fifteen minutes later, an open-top skycrawler scuttled up to the platform at Empire Station. Sparks of white-hot electricity arced from its blue energy legs as it skidded to a stop, swaying slightly before it lowered the car onto the support blocks by the platform. Alex waited for the lower deck to clear before descending, since the September weather was pleasant and mild.
His heels clicked on the marble floor as he made his way to the far side of the station where the beverage counter stood. Marnie was away, but one of her helpful young women handed Alex a thermos full of coffee without him having to even ask for it. She also gave him an interested smile, which Alex ignored on account of the girl being at least ten years his junior.
He thanked her and set out for the building elevators in the center of the back wall. In former days, when Alex had gone up to the top floors of Empire Tower, he’d had to go through the security station and take Andrew Barton’s private elevator up to the offices of Barton Electric. These days, however, Alex only rode up to the twelfth floor.
“How are you Mr. Lockerby?” a wizened man in a red velvet vest with gold embroidery greeted him.
“Doing well, George,” Alex responded as the man flipped the switch that would close the doors.
“Up to your office?”
Alex nodded and George pulled the large lever that started the car moving upward. When they reached the twelfth floor, he centered the lever and opened the doors.
Alex wished George a good day, then stepped out onto the landing. To the right were the offices of a law firm and an architect, while to the left were a Broadway talent agency and the new offices of Lockerby Investigations.
It was hard for Alex not to grin as he went to the end of the hallway where a burnished cherrywood door broke up the vellum-colored wallpaper of the hallway. Frosted glass windows ran out on each side of the door, giving vague hints about what lay beyond, but revealing nothing. This door didn’t have a window like his previous one, just a solid panel with the name of the business and the Runewright symbol in gold lettering. He’d given up the “Runewright Detective” name when he’d moved offices though; it just seemed a little crass, considering his new surroundings.
After the disaster with Bradley Elder, Alex had agreed to work for Andrew Barton on an as-needed basis, helping him link up his power relay towers. Instead of money, Alex got the Lightning Lord to pay him with this office and with an apartment up on the residence floors of Empire Tower.
Taking the gleaming brass doorknob in his hand, Alex turned it smartly and walked in.
It took Alex a minute to square what he was seeing with all the years he’d spent in his mid-ring office. Back then, the door opened on a room with two old couches across from it, and his secretary’s desk off to the left. Now the desk sat directly opposite the impressive front door. The old desk had been made of some cheap wood and painted grey. It had been serviceable enough, but it was nothing compared to the massive oak number with brass accents that occupied the new waiting room.
Gone were the old couches, replaced with two new ones, one on either side of the door. They were upholstered in an elegant art nouveau pattern and the arms and top had polished wood runners.
Behind Sherry’s desk were a bank of windows that completely covered the back wall, filling the room with light.
“Hey boss,” Sherry said, looking up from her desk as he entered. “Everything go okay with the Asher case?” Sherry Knox had tan skin, dark, shoulder-length hair with eyes of deep blue, and a perpetual grin. She had been Alex’s secretary for almost two years now and she’d fallen into the role with ease. It didn’t hurt that she was an Auger, possessed of an all-but-unknown ability to see the future. Or rather to see the future when the future felt it was convenient.
“Mornin’, Sherry,” he said, hanging his hat on a row of pegs by the door before crossing to her desk. “I think Ben’s in the clear. It’ll depend on what they find at the lawyer’s house, but at least I’ve established enough reasonable doubt that a jury should have a hard time convicting him.”
“I’ll get his bill ready and send it over then,” she said, scribbling a note on one of her various pads.
“Anything in the cards for me this morning?”
She looked up at him with a disgusted look on her face.
“Same old, same old,” she grumbled. For over a year, Sherry had been getting the same reading when she dealt her cards for Alex.
You’re not seeing what isn’t there.
It was a maddeningly unspecific message and he’d long ago stopped trying to work out what it meant. He’d just have to wait for it to come to him in its own good time.
“Any other messages?” he asked, pushing the riddle from his mind.
Sherry nodded.
“Mr. Barton wants to see you at the Brooklyn Relay Tower. He said it’s ready.”
Alex glanced at the heavy door on the right side of the office. Behind it was a short hallway that led to his private office, his map room, the records room, and another room he hadn’t figured out a use for yet. Over the last week, he’d used up many of his standard cadre of runes and he needed to spend some time in his vault to write new ones.
“Duty calls,” he said with a sigh, then picked up his hat and headed out the door.
2
Connections
It had been four years since Andrew Barton partnered with John D. Rockefeller to take his ground-moving crawler buses and run them on rails mounted thirty feet above the street. That was before Barton had expanded his power network with a relay tower in the Bronx and now one in Brooklyn. Back then, skycrawlers only ran from north Harlem down to the south side docks. Now the electrified rails that carried the insect-like skycrawlers ran all over Manhattan, up to Westchester, down to Brooklyn, and out to Long Island City and Queens.
Alex sat in the front of a skycrawler, watching the city fly by as he finished a cigarette. Normally Alex read the paper on a long crawler trip but when he had to visit Barton’s relay tower in Brooklyn, he always waited for an open-topped car and sat up front. The Brooklyn crawler line started from the City Hall station and ran across the Brooklyn Bridge. It wouldn’t have been too difficult to run the skycrawler track over the street on the bridge, just like it was in town, but Andrew Barton was nothing if not flamboyant. He’d insisted that the rails be run to the side of the bridge, out over the water. Newspapers and others had screamed it was dangerous, but Barton had already shown that skycrawlers couldn’t fall off their tracks even if they lost power, so the line was built the way he wanted it. Some people sill refused to ride it, but Alex absolutely loved the trip. When the ground fell away and there was nothing below the crawler but its electrified rail, Alex felt as if he were flying without an airplane.
Not that he’d ever been on an airplane.
It only took a minute to cross the East River. After that, it was only a few more stops until Barton’s power relay tower came into view. It rose up just south of Prospect Park towering over the surrounding buildings, or what was left of them. Just like Empire Tower in Manhattan, the more affluent residents and businesses wanted to be close to the tower and its constant flow of energy. The tower had only been operational for two weeks at half capacity, but already many of the surrounding structures had been demolished and new, more expensive buildings were going up.
Alex flicked his cigarette butt away and settled back in his seat as he waited for his station.
Ten minutes later Alex stood in front of the relay tower. Unlike Empire Tower, the relay was a ten-story structure that only looked like a regular apartment or commercial building. It had a ground-floor lobby with a security office and an elevator that appeared perfectly ordinary. The only giveaway that the tower was not what it s
eemed was the large, doughnut-shaped power distribution ring sticking up from the roof. Originally the Brooklyn Relay Tower had been built to house etherium generators, the massive machines Barton used to convert magical energy into electrical power. Thanks to linking runes and Alex’s plan to connect each tower directly to the main generator in Empire Tower, the Brooklyn Relay didn’t need any generators at all. As a result, the building was just an empty shell with the power room on top, the lobby on the ground, and an elevator connecting the two. All the floors in between were empty.
Alex pushed open the heavy glass door of the lobby. Empty or not, the Brooklyn Relay was one of Andrew Barton’s properties, and the door was suitably impressive. The glass had been etched to show a likeness of Empire Tower with waves of electricity radiating out from its top. Heavy brass handles adorned the front, and the hinges and frame were made of polished steel.
As Alex entered the building and crossed the tiled marble floor in the direction of the lone elevator, a paunchy security guard peered over his newspaper at him. Alex knew his name was Bill Grady and he hailed from Ireland originally.
“Mornin’ Mr. Lockerby,” he said in a polite but disinterested brogue.
“Good morning, Bill,” Alex returned as he pushed the elevator button. “How’s the wife?”
Bill’s eyes had already drifted back to his newspaper and he shrugged.
“Not good a’tall,” he said with a sigh.
“Still with you, I see,” Alex said in a somber voice…but he couldn’t suppress a grin.
“Aye,” Bill confirmed. “The old battle-ax.”
“Well, better luck tomorrow,” Alex said as the automatic elevator car arrived.
“From your lips to God’s ears,” he said, not looking up.
Alex stepped into the car and pushed the lone button for the top floor. When the doors opened again, Alex stepped out into a short hallway then turned left, emerging into the large open space that made up the building’s top floor. In the center of the room was a heavy cement pillar with a protective glass case covering the top. Inside were three marble slabs that had been cut to hold three square plates of pure silver.
Around the table in the center, there was a curving row of electrical fuse boxes, laid out in a circle. Heavy insulated wires ran from the boxes up through holes in the ceiling, attaching to the metal doughnut above. Behind the fuse boxes, a metal stair spiraled its way up through the ceiling as well. Windows ran around the walls, giving a view of Prospect Park to the north and Brooklyn proper to the south. Alex could even see the spot where The Narrows met Gravesend Bay in the far distance.
“Lockerby!” Andrew Barton’s voice called from the top of the spiral stair. “Is that you?”
Alex answered in the affirmative and Barton came skipping down the stair like a kid at Christmas. He wore a silk suit made of some deep red fabric with black satin lapels, a dark shirt and a tie that matched the suit. He was clean shaven, having shorn off his short beard some months previous, but he still sported a fashionable pencil mustache.
“It’s about time you got here,” he chided as he reached the bottom of the staircase. “I’ve been waiting over an hour.”
“Didn’t Sherry tell you I was wrapping up a case?” Alex asked, knowing full well that she would have.
“Yes,” Barton grumbled. “When I agreed to let you only work for me part-time, I didn’t imagine you’d be this hard to get a hold of. Aren’t you supposed to just sit in your office and wait for people to come to you?”
“Sometimes,” Alex admitted. “But usually after that happens, I have to go out and do actual investigating.”
Barton gave him a scrutinizing look as if he thought Alex might be lying and evidence of it might be found on his face.
“Maybe we need some kind of signal,” he said at last. “You don’t have some kind of rune that I could use to get your attention, do you? Let you know to call me?”
Alex shook his head. While such a thing would be incredibly useful, it simply didn’t exist.
“Are you sure?” he said, eyes half closed in a suspicious glance. “You didn’t tell me about your linking rune idea until I’d already hired that lunatic Bradley Elder. You wouldn’t be trying to get out of your job working for me now that I put you up in that nice new office, would you?”
“No,” Alex said with a chuckle. He knew Barton well enough by now to know that he was only half-serious. “I’m not hiding some secret radio rune from you.”
Barton shrugged in a gesture of resignation, then the bright, enthusiastic smile returned to his face.
“Well, you’re here now anyway.” He rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “Did you bring your kit?”
Alex hadn’t, but he fished his vault key out of his trousers pocket and held it up. The linking runes he made for Barton were both secret and expensive and he didn’t like to carry them around.
“Fine,” Barton said. “Get your bag while I open the case.”
Alex went to the wall near the elevator where he’d chalked the outline of a door during one of his many visits to the relay tower. Tearing a vault rune from his red-backed book, he licked the back and stuck it to the wall. A few moments later he pulled the heavy door to his vault open and went inside.
The drafting table where he wrote his runes sat at the far end of the massive space inside the door. Hallways ran off to either side, but Alex ignored them, heading instead for the half-height filing cabinet on wheels that stood next to the drafting table. Opening the top drawer, he withdrew a yellow-backed version of his rune book and dropped it into the outside pocket of his jacket.
When Alex returned to the power room, Andrew Barton was standing by the glass case. The massive glass top of the case had pivoted up on hinges and was held at an oblique angle by small chains that kept it from falling all the way back.
“It’s finally ready,” he said as Alex stepped up beside him. Inside the glass were three marble slabs, each one with a square depression cut into it. Inside the depression was a heavy silver plate, and on each plate Alex had carved a rune. Originally he’d thought that linking runes didn’t actually deteriorate like all other runes, but after months of testing, he’d determined that linking runes simply deteriorated much more slowly than normal. To combat that, Alex had used silver to hold the master runes. After he’d engraved them with a diamond-tipped stylus, he’d filled the lines with ink that had been infused with diamond and sapphire powder. They weren’t permanent, but they’d last for over a decade before having to be replaced.
The silver plate in the center of the glass case held the rune that linked back to Empire Tower. All of the electrical energy Brooklyn would need flowed into the relay tower from that single point of contact. The rune on the right sparkled as Alex looked at it, pulsing with colors that shifted from yellow to blue-green. Energy from the central rune flowed into this secondary plate and from there to each of the breaker boxes on the right side of the room.
The plate on the left was exactly like the one on the right, but it wasn’t connected to the central node. Without power, it just appeared to be an elaborate symbol etched in the silver surface of the plate. Alex couldn’t see them, but he knew that linking runes had been attached to the outer edge of the inert plate, connecting it to the left-hand breaker boxes.
“Okay,” Alex said, pulling out the yellow book. “All the links are in place, all I have to do is connect the transfer plate,” he indicated the one on the left, “to the main and you’ll be in business.”
Barton nodded, rubbing his hands together in eager anticipation.
“Go ahead,” he said. “I’ve checked and rechecked everything.” He reached out and patted the side of the glass case. “She’s ready.”
Alex tore out the top page out of the yellow book, along with the one behind it. He didn’t have to check to be sure, since the only runes in this book were linking runes.
Licking the back of the first rune, he stuck it to the transfer plate on the left. He re
peated the process with the second paper, but instead of sticking it to the main power node, Alex dropped it carefully onto the plate. There were no sparks and no hum of electricity, but millions of volts were moving through the innocuous-looking square of silver. If Alex had touched it, he would have been electrocuted instantly. That said, the rune wouldn’t link properly if the paper wasn’t in firm contact with the plate.
Leaning down, Alex peered through the glass. Before he could ascertain whether or not the rune was making good contact, Barton reached into the glass and pushed the paper down with his finger.
“Show off,” Alex said, standing up straight. Barton grinned.
Taking out his lighter, Alex lit the paper on the transfer plate. As it burned away, the paper on the central node caught fire as well. Both vanished in a fraction of a second, leaving a sapphire-blue rune hovering over their respective plates. After a moment the runes popped, like a soap bubble hitting a needle, and the rune on the left-hand plate began to pulse with light.
Indicators on the left side breaker boxes lit up and Alex could hear them humming as current began coursing through them. Barton moved to the box on the end of the left side and began walking around the curve, reading the power meters set into each box.
“They’re all reading full power,” he said, turning to Alex. “Let’s see if the antenna is working.” He turned and headed for the spiral stair, motioning for Alex to follow.
Up at the top of the stair was a landing and a door that led out onto a small balcony that jutted out from the roof and gave an incredible view of the city to the south. Above them, the massive doughnut-shaped antenna hummed and crackled as it projected its energy through the air. When Barton led Alex out onto the balcony, he reached into thin air and pulled a tripod into his hand. He set it up and then reached into nothingness again to retrieve a heavy brass telescope which he fastened to the top of the tripod.