by Battis, Jes
“Is Selena going to release your file?” Derrick asked.
I ran a hand through my hair. “I hope so. Either that, or she’s going to lock me in a padded cell and throw away the key.”
“At least you could bounce in there,” Miles said.
“Bouncing’s what Tiggers do best,” Lucian added solemnly.
I stared at him. “You’re really kind of a freak, aren’t you?”
He smiled. “Does that bother you?”
“Surprisingly, no. But I’ve never had good judgment.”
I ran for the shower.
Selena was nice enough to hand me a coffee when I got to the lab, which convinced me that she wasn’t about to confiscate my athame or set me on fire. Still, she was a hard one to read. Even though it was shit coffee from the break room in a paper cup, and I’d already had the good stuff at home, I smiled and took it. If ever there was a time to be twitchy and preternaturally aware, it was now.
I sat down in the chair across from her desk. She’d finally managed to clear most of Marcus’s old paperwork away, but there was still the odd file or two with MT stamped on it in red. I wondered how long it would take to expunge all lingering traces of him. I could still feel the weight of his deeds in this room, like a thick, unpleasant odor. Maybe Selena would finally take my advice and move to the empty corner office that overlooked the street.
“Okay.” She sipped her coffee, grimaced, then set it aside. “Technically, it’s been eight hours. Where’s our missing teenage boy?”
“Asleep. In my spare bedroom.”
I tried to keep the smirk off my face, but I don’t think I succeeded.
Selena shook her head. “You must have some badass connections that I don’t know about, Tess. How do you manage to score this shit?”
I shrugged. “It’s a gift. I’m a good detective.”
She gave me a long look.
“Fine. He showed up on my doorstep. Almost gift wrapped.”
“That sounds more plausible.”
I rolled my eyes. “Caitlin told him that he could trust me—that if there was ever an emergency, he should look for me. I guess she trusted my ability to protect him.”
“She may have thought there was safety in numbers. How many people do you have staying at that crazy house of yours, as of last night?”
“Just Miles,” I hedged.
“I call bullshit.” She drained her coffee cup. It was like watching a lifelong alcoholic drop a shot of whiskey. “Try again.”
I sighed. “Lucian’s staying with us, too.”
“Ah—so we like him now, do we?”
“He has a certain . . . skill set . . . that I think complements our case.”
“I’m sure he does.” She stretched, trying to loosen a cramp in her shoulder. “Just keep in mind that his skill set is incompatible with yours. He may be a tall glass of water in a black T-shirt, but he’s also a necromancer. He’s off-limits.”
I nodded. “Of course.”
“No, not ‘of course.’ I want to hear you say it. Yes, I understand that he’s off-limits, Selena, who is my boss.”
She stared at me levelly.
I’m a bad person. I’m a fuckwit.
“Yes, I understand,” I repeated slowly. “He’s off-limits.”
“Good.” She gave a long sigh. “You know what I need, Tess? I need a nice long sleep in a real bed. One of those feather mattresses with the eiderdown duvets, and those really soft sheets.”
“You don’t like your bed at home?”
Selena gave me a flat look. “My husband’s in it.”
“Oh . . .”
“Anyways”—she waved a hand—“that’s not important. When are you bringing the boy in so we can process him?”
“I told him to come by around noon. He was sleeping when I left.”
“He could have slept just as well in CORE custody, if you’d dropped him off last night instead of playing house.”
“He’s currently being watched by a necromancer, a telepath, and a dude who can see the invisible. I don’t think he’d get very far if he tried to run, Selena.”
She shrugged. “Fair enough. As long as he shows up, as promised.”
“So, then . . .” I let the question hang.
She raised a hand. “I’ve spoken with Esther in Records. She’ll unseal your intake file and let you see it. But first things first.” She leaned forward. “What made you drive all the way to Elder last night to visit your mom? I know it wasn’t because you love her spareribs, even though Siegel’s always raving about them.”
Give a little, get a lot, I thought.
“I’ll need to see my intake file to confirm it,” I said, “but I found out last night that my mother used to work for the CORE. She was an OSI, like me.”
Selena frowned. “And she kept it from you all this time?”
“She thought she was protecting me. She also did it with the blessing of my old supervisor, Meredith Silver.”
“Ah—Meredith was crafty. If she didn’t want you to know something, you’d never pry it out of her.” She sighed. “With both of them working against you, there’s no way you could have known. That’s tough, Tess.”
As far as I knew, Selena came from a normate family. Obviously, her husband knew nothing about what really went on at the lab. But lately, I’d been getting the sense that she had a pretty spacious closet full of skeletons. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that she’d been through something similar.
“Thanks,” I said. “It feels pretty—fucked up. But I’m working through it. For now, there’s something more important. I need to know everyone that was present and accounted for when I registered with the CORE.”
Her eyes narrowed. She was on to me already. “You think your mom has some connection to this thing? That maybe your link to it comes from her side of the family, not just your father’s?”
“I can’t be certain. But she thinks that it’s trying to enact some kind of ritual—a complex spell that will guarantee it a real, corporeal form in this world.”
She frowned. “You’re not just talking about a pureblood, then.”
“No. An Iblis. That’s what she called it.”
Selena paled. “A gatekeeper. One of those half-there, half-not things that guards the liminal spaces between life and death—between our world and all the strange shores beyond, where true demons and who knows what else make their home.”
“There’s still something that’s driving me crazy, though.” I tapped my fingers on the table. “We haven’t figured out where this thing got its tools from. It obviously has an athame, and it left us that cauldron. If it’s only semicorporeal, it can’t just carry that shit around all the time. It must have a place to put them. Even if it doesn’t ‘live’ there, all things considered, we must be able to track it. Like tracking a wolf to its den.”
Respect flashed in her eyes. She smiled. “That’s a good theory. Still, it’s not like you can buy an athame from a pawn-shop. They’re specifically calibrated to their user’s body. And they have to be forged. Your athame would probably burn it, or at least cause it physical pain to hold.”
“And that’s the thing . . .” I put both hands on the table. “I think it would need a human accomplice to pull this off. Someone who has access to a house, a car, an archive of magical tools. In essence, a mage with a vendetta. It needs all the trappings of a mortal life in order to lure its victims. Think about that poor kid, Henry. He was savagely raped, multiple times. Do you think some half-corporeal spirit could do that, or would even want to? Seems more likely that it was a real sick puppy. A flesh-and-blood mortal with an axe to grind.”
“Like a warlock?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. Or even someone who works here. A lab tech, maybe. Someone with access to the evidence locker. Chances are, it’s someone who retired a long time ago. But I’ll bet they were here when I first arrived. And I can’t explain it, Selena, but I have this feeling . . .” My eyes were wide. “I just kn
ow that there’s something in my file. Originally, I thought this creature was targeting me, that it was actually killing these people to fuck with me. But now I think it might be a bizarre coincidence. Like this thing, my mother, my father, and I are all spokes on some insane wheel. And the only record going far enough back to confirm it—”
“I’ve got you.” She rose. “You don’t have to push me over to convince me. Stranger things have happened around here. I want to make sure you’re prepared, in case this doesn’t all fall into place.”
I frowned. “Prepared how?”
“If you’re wrong—if this thing really has nothing to do with you—then we’re still left chasing a ghost. And there’s a good chance that it’ll swoop right under your radar and attack that kid, Patrick, if it really wants to.”
“I never said I could protect them all,” I murmured. “I understand that.”
“You understand, sure—but there’s a difference between understanding and actually keeping yourself from working a dead angle. If this goes cold, I don’t want to see you tearing through the lab like a maniac looking for some invisible scrap of evidence.” Her eyes were warm, but steely. “I want to see you at home, with a CORE surveillance guard, protecting yourself and your family. Got it?”
I nodded. “I promise. This is my last crack. After this, no more late-night car rides or cryptic excuses.”
“I don’t believe you for a second.” She smiled. “But then, if I were in your shoes, I’d probably lie, too. So I won’t take it personally.”
She stood up and walked out of the room before I could respond. I followed her down a long hallway, three flights of stairs, and through a security door. Then we stepped into a freight elevator. Selena smoothed her hair and pressed the red button, which made the tired gears scream to life. The Office of Records was almost as subterranean as Tasha’s morgue. Some employees suspected that it might bleed into another dimension.
The elevator doors opened onto a long brick hallway. This was a much older part of the building—or one of the buildings that the CORE had purchased at the turn of the century anyhow—and the black-and-white-tiled floor had a charming, sanitarium-style verve to it. I felt like Dorothy in Return to Oz. There were cracks running in all directions, since the maintenance folk were usually too scared to come down here.
There were no doors—only a long, interrupted expanse of brick wall. If you knew where to look, though, and how to knock just right, you could find entrances to secret storage chambers and other oubliettes—places where you put things to forget about. Rumor had it that a few of those doors acted as wrinkles in space and time, but none of us were qualified to find or use them properly. That was probably a good thing.
The hallway ended in a sliding glass door, which hummed silently open for us as we approached. We’d already passed through a dozen invisible security checks, so they knew precisely who we were and what we were allowed to access. Nothing surprised the Office of Records. Or rather, nothing surprised Esther, the caretaker, who for all intents and purposes was the Office.
She sat in a swivel chair behind a stainless steel desk. The only word you could really use to describe Esther was “nondescript.” Her height and weight were perfectly average. She had a sensible haircut, her brown hair ending in a completely even line just before it reached her shoulders. She wore a black turtleneck sweater that came practically up to her chin, and a long, black leather skirt. I almost thought I could see a pair of New Balance sneakers peeking out from the hem, but I wasn’t sure.
Her eyes were framed by a pair of light, silver-rimmed glasses. She smiled as we approached the desk, and I saw a dozen images flicker rapidly across the surface of those glasses, like a disjointed film. I caught my face in the image stream, but when I tried to peer closer, it was replaced by a blue-tinged shadow. No one had ever seen Esther’s eyes—only the ghost images that flickered across her otherworldly lenses. She was a living data medium. As far as we could tell, she was linked in to every computer system, every monitor, every fiber-optic cable in the CORE complex. Even Becka hadn’t been able to explain the symbiotic connection to me, but she’d used words like “biomechanoid” and “wet works,” which made me squirm.
“Selena.” She inclined her head. “Tess. How can I help you?”
I always wanted to whisper, “Showtime, Synergy,” like the holographic computer from Jem, when I was in Esther’s presence, but that didn’t seem like a good idea. I’d never been entirely sure if there was a sense of humor coded into the deep structures of her cybernetic personhood.
“I called down earlier,” Selena replied, a note of testiness in her voice that seemed to be disguising a broader discomfort. It was nice to know that even she got the creeps whenever she had to spend time in places like this. The CORE, despite its technological savvy, had an eldritch set of foundations—like ancient bones—beneath its glassy surface, and the magic suffusing this room was part of that older power. It could be a bit overwhelming at times. No one was quite certain how many long brick hallways like the one we’d just crossed were hidden away in vacant, inaccessible buildings, or how many strange caretakers—like Esther—waited patiently underground, communicating with people like us only when it was absolutely necessary.
“Of course.” Esther slid something across the counter—a small microphone with a flexible base and wireless receiver. “I’ll need your security code.” She glanced at me, and I saw something flicker across her lenses. It looked almost like a wash of purple flame, then the sheen of a pistol, then a locked room—empty—then blue and black shadows again. Like the feed had temporarily shut off. “Don’t worry. It will be updated as soon as you leave. It doesn’t matter if you say it aloud.”
It’s not like I could do anything with her access code, since it was voice-keyed. I guess Esther was just being careful. Who knew what odd supervisors she had to answer to. Maybe her boss was a big computer. Maybe the building itself was her master.
Selena cleared her throat, then spoke a string of numbers and letters into the microphone. “I heart kitties” wasn’t really an option for access codes around here. The CORE tended to prefer algorithms and protein sequences.
Esther slid the mic back under the desk. “Very good. Give me a moment while I retrieve the storage medium.”
The wall behind her desk was a pane of smoky quartz, at least twelve feet high from floor to ceiling and perfectly opaque. Esther touched something beneath the desk, and the wall vanished. Behind it were row upon row of translucent shelves, each filled with wafer-thin objects that looked like memory sticks. Each wafer fit into a steel port, and different-colored lights flickered next to them—red, gold, green, orange, and blue. I wondered what a red light meant. It couldn’t be good.
Esther scanned the wall of information, and images flickered across her lenses too quickly to discern. Then she reached up and withdrew one of the memory sticks from its port. The light next to it had been orange a second ago, but when she disconnected the wafer, it went black.
“What does an orange light mean?” I whispered to Selena.
She shrugged. “Probably better not to dwell on it too much.”
Esther placed the storage medium on the desk in front of me, and I saw that it was completely transparent. It wasn’t made of glass, though. It looked like some sort of lightweight plastic, or maybe a variant of silicone. Different-colored sparks played within the guts of the memory stick, like fireflies caught inside. I picked it up. It was warm, and almost weightless.
“You can view the contents in that room,” Esther said.
I was about to ask, “What room?” but then I looked up and saw that a door had opened in the brick wall to my right.
“Please don’t try to remove your flash drive,” Esther told me. “It has to remain in Records at all times. When you’re finished, bring it back to the desk.”
I smiled shyly. “Thank you.”
Her weird, polychromatic lenses fixed on me. I thought I saw Lucian’s face in the
m for a second, then what looked like a basement or a bunker of some kind, then Mia holding something in her hands, then Derrick—it was like scanning a DVD at 10X speed. I wasn’t sure if she was looking into my mind, or if she somehow had a hard line into my memories. If they were memories at all.
“You’re welcome, Tess.” She returned my smile. It was an odd gesture when I couldn’t actually see her eyes.
Selena followed me into the viewing room, which was an empty bank of LCD screens with no keyboards attached, just touch pads.
“I’m looking over your shoulder,” she said firmly.
I nodded. “It’s only fair.”
I plugged my flash drive into the nearest port and sat down. The screen was dark for a few seconds, and then I heard a chime, and the words CORDAY, TESSA ISOBEL, COMPLETE RECORD appeared in plain white letters. It was almost like one of those MS-DOS interfaces from years ago, before Windows XP and Mac OSX and all the pretty graphical operating systems that sprang from the nineties. I assumed that the interface was basic to keep it secure and encrypted.
I also wondered how complete it really was.
This is the CORE, Ben Foster had said. I’d be surprised if their records didn’t go back to well before the Flood.
I scrolled through the first few screens. Whenever I paged down, I’d see a block of impenetrable ASCII characters rather than text. Then the screen would refresh, and the symbols would transform into standard English characters. Heavy encryption. The first few pages were concerned with vital stats: height, weight, ABO type, allergies, materia proficiencies and affiliations, and hard-coded files of my epithelial and mitochondrial DNA.
Just in case they need to clone me.
I paged down to the intake form, which had to be filled out whenever a potential mage joined the CORE. It was both a legally and mystically binding document, signed and sealed with a drop of my own blood.
“I know you’re hiding in here somewhere,” I murmured.