by Jenn Stark
“She’d told me about the gamers they had in Tokyo, how excited they were—how advanced in the game. And she knew they were doing special work for Simon to find this door or portal or something…she wouldn’t tell me about it, other than to say it was a door, and he acted like he knew nothing about it. But he said kind of evasively that if she had been talking about all that, then well, she could have come here, could have wanted to take part in the search but…he couldn’t tell me that for sure. However, if I wanted to try to find Hayley, he could send me.” She gave a small wave of her hand. “You know the rest. You know everything I do.”
My head was beginning to swim. I flicked my third eye open again and, as before, Ginny’s electrical signature remained consistent. She was frightened, desperate, and now hopeful. She didn’t seem to be hiding anything, however. I hadn’t fully trained my third eye to read for lies, but I felt pretty certain about this.
Now Ginny was staring around. “You can feel it, can’t you?” she murmured. “There was something big that happened here. Something powerful.”
My gaze snapped back to her, and I stared harder. Ginny didn’t present as a Connected, not even remotely but…I looked harder, beneath the whirl of her thoughts and needs and desires and fears—and there it was.
“What is it?” Apparently, I wasn’t stealthy enough. Ginny was looking at me with alarm as I stared at her. “What’s on me?” she asked, lifting her hand.
“You’re psychic,” I said, my own hand going up. Now that I was looking for it, it was easy to detect.
“Oh! I’m not, not really,” she said immediately, her skin flushing bright red. As she backpedaled, I lost the pulse of power, watching as it wasn’t merely doused, it was practically deluged with a torrent of doubt, fear, humiliation, awkwardness. “I just sometimes get flashes of insight. Like to go to Vegas when we didn’t hear from Hayley right away, and to believe Simon. But I’m not really psychic.”
“And Hayley?”
“Oh no—Hayley wasn’t at all. I mean…” Ginny looked off, her mouth pursing for a moment as she struggled to regain her emotions. “She was so young when she was taken, you know? She had imaginary friends, like a lot of kids, she liked reading and being by herself and drawing crazy things. But she wasn’t psychic. I would have known. Her mother would have.”
And then you would have quashed it, I thought. No doubt in my mind.
What had Hayley learned in the ten years she’d been held captive by her demon keepers? They hadn’t abused the children in their care. They’d fed and clothed them and kept them healthy and as innocent as possible of what had befallen them. But they’d taught them as well, I realized now.
Taught them what?
Six demons of ancient Atlantis, fallen souls of the damned.
I grimaced, trying to put that thought out of my head, and not entirely succeeding. “If Hayley saw this, was a part of this, or came here and saw what we’re seeing…”
“Sara.” Nigel’s voice cracked across the space. “We need to move. Stealth operation bearing down fast, no chatter, no—”
“What?” Ginny’s voice went up in a cry of alarm as the sudden rat-a-tat of gunfire erupted at the front of the great room. My first thought was of the truck driver—had he pulled a weapon? No time to worry about that now. I tackled Ginny and went sliding across the floor as a burst of real live ammo raced through the air above us. I looked up with my third eye as Nigel pulled his gun and began firing, the single reports of his gun drowned in another burst of semiautomatic gunfire.
I flipped over a couple of tables, which would provide us exactly zero true protection but could at least hide us for a second or three, and peeked out from around one of them as silence suddenly dropped around us.
Nigel was nowhere to be found. He’d secured cover, hopefully, but he was only one guy. One guy who was about as Connected as one of Death’s hamsters.
The silence stretched…too long. Then was abruptly broken.
“We have your associate!” The shout finally made it to English after a flurry of a language I assumed was Japanese, and Ginny squeaked beside me. I popped my head around my meager cover again, glaring this time as a group of men walked slowly toward us. They did have Nigel. He was bleeding, with a gun to his head, and the asshats who held him might have been Japanese police, might have been Nazi storm troopers, might have been dickheads in cosplay—it didn’t matter.
I stood up without hesitation.
“Sara!” Nigel’s face contorted in agony, but not at any pain they were causing him. Instead, it was fear—terror, really—that crossed his face. Fear for me, that I’d be hurt, that I’d be killed.
Nigel clearly hadn’t been paying attention to those doodles on the board.
The flames that erupted in my hands were larger than anything I’d wielded so far, huge fireballs of blue-white fury that I didn’t throw so much as hurled, with the felling rage of a woman who’d been pushed one step too far before she’d been caffeinated for the day.
“You dare!” I seethed, the very air crackling around me.
The fireball rocketed across the room, and a huge cry of agony went up, the soldiers’ weapons becoming white-hot in the space of a millisecond, their bones sensing that same fire a moment later. They collapsed to the ground around Nigel, who staggered at suddenly being released, spinning and lurching away from the knot of soldiers.
“Sara,” he gasped again, and I leapt up, vaulting the table and running toward him, my astral self almost reaching him before my physical self did.
“Are you hurt, are you shot—” I didn’t have to wait for his answer to that question. A spot of crimson bloomed at Nigel’s shoulder, another at his side, and I pulled him up against me, my third eye immediately tracing the networks of his pain, his injury. He blacked out as I blasted the bullet out the other side of his torso and sealed up the wound with a tracery of fire. His skin smoked a little when I was done, but he was back in one piece again.
Ginny, to her credit, had scrambled up to us and was shouting something, but Nigel was surging back toward consciousness, and I had zero patience for her hysteria.
“Sara—” she cried, pulling on my arm and pointing, and suddenly I felt it too, the new presence, the new danger, the new—
I jumped to my feet, jerking my hands wide as if I was shaking water off them, flames erupting as I faced the new threat.
And I blinked.
Oh…crap.
About a dozen teenagers stood at the opening of the doorway, one of them bracing the truck driver upright, all of them staring at me as if they’d just seen the Messiah.
“Sara Wilde!” they screamed as one.
Chapter Eighteen
I didn’t have any choice in the matter, as I saw it. I flung my hands out a second time, but this time, I imagined the burst of power I freed causing the newcomers merely to lose consciousness—no one got burned, no one was hurt.
And just like that, it happened. The entire group dropped to the floor, simply because I willed it so.
Ginny collapsed as well.
I yanked Nigel up, making sure he was steady on his feet before I pushed him toward Ginny. “We need to get her to a hospital, and then out of here. We’ve got Swords in the city?”
“Plenty of them,” he agreed, blinking woozily as he took a step forward. I pulled his arm over my shoulder, grimacing as I took his weight. He wasn’t as steady as I wanted him to be, but he also felt lighter than he should. No doubt I was spiking an extreme adrenaline high.
“Call—I’ll call,” Nigel said.
“We need to get to the car.”
“Not the car.” He shook his head, shrugging me off after another few steps. “Someone’s got to have seen that. We need different wheels.”
I scowled to him as we exited the room, trying to ignore the bodies of fallen teens and young adults. Some of the kids couldn’t have been more than fourteen, I thought. They were mostly young men, and I hesitated, performing a quick search while
Nigel fumbled with his phone. There were four young women with the group, but none of them were blonde. I located the oldest of the group, an Asian male in his midtwenties, from his ID in his pocket, with an address in Kyoto. I scowled down at him. I was only twenty-seven years old…this guy was nearly my age. What was he doing caught up in a video game? Was he a player, or something more?
My search of the man had been brief, but productive. His name was apparently Lin Wei, and he hailed from Kyoto, but he also carried a business card next in his wallet that had only an address typed on it…and a very local address at that. Unless I missed my guess, it was right down this same street of commercial buildings. But what would that be, some sort of mailbox location? Were all these people off the grid?
There was a key card too. I took that, then put the rest back.
As I stood, Nigel was speaking Japanese into his phone, his color stronger now.
He pocketed the device as I reached him. “We’ve got cleanup coming in. They’ll take the lot of them, the truck driver too. We’re lucky this went down when it did, or this place would be crawling with police.”
“And Ginny?”
“Same. She’ll be questioned and released, followed, but our focus will be on the kids. We’ll figure out why they were here and why they knew your name.”
“I can already guess part of that,” I said grimly. “Simon clearly put me in his stupid Mongol Horde game. Probably as a joke, but people apparently have taken notice.”
“Apparently.” We moved out of the warehouse and to the street, walking up the sidewalk as casually as possible. The district was starting to move again, albeit slowly, and as we moved deeper down the street, the buildings took on a more commercial appearance. Still faceless, in many ways, but at least they looked inhabited.
We ducked into a curry shop and hunched in the corner until the call came in from Ma-Singh. I waved for the phone, and Nigel handed it to me.
“You are safe,” the general said gruffly, and I smiled despite myself. There was a wealth of worry in that voice.
“I’m safe. Where are the kids from the warehouse?” I turned my smile on the approaching waiter and pointed at two pictures on the menu. Nigel did the same, sending the man scurrying back to the counter, where the redolent scent of seasoning wafted into the small eatery and made my stomach grumble.
“In a local hotel, most of them still unconscious. You’ll be getting an update in a few minutes once our private doctor is on scene.”
I lifted my brows. “You guys work fast.”
“We’ve cleared the warehouse and removed all materials we could easily carry, wiped down the rest. We’ll have analysis results on those as soon as possible as well.” Ma-Singh paused. “How is your Ace? There was blood on the floor.”
I smiled. Ma-Singh might be one tough Mongolian, but he cared about his team. “Nigel’s good. I caught him before he hit the ground.”
“Not quite,” the Brit said, but he was smiling a little self-consciously at the waiter depositing bowls in front of us.
“Anything else you need besides the information?” Ma-Singh asked.
“Actually, yeah,” I said. “Put it out that I’m coming home to Vegas. Not in any big way, but mention it to your generals on open lines, let some of the House people know in whatever country you happen to be talking about. Send a few emails that I’m coming back to the city—private emails. Don’t put it on Facebook or anything, but don’t try to double down on secrecy.”
The general hesitated. “May I ask why?”
“Just a redirect in case I need it.” I rubbed a hand over my forehead. “I’m probably overthinking this, but those kids showing up at the warehouse, Ginny showing up at Madame Chichiro’s… I don’t like it. If people—kids especially—get it in their heads to look for me, I want them to find you, instead.”
“And what is it they think will happen, if they reach your home here in Las Vegas?” Ma-Singh asked. “Is there some sort of Achievement Unlocked bonus we need to provide them?”
I groaned. “I’m going to completely ignore that you just said those words out loud,” I said, but the question was valid. I thought about the energy of the young gamers in the warehouse. “I have no idea why they’re looking for me, but when they do make contact, they mostly seem excited. Excited, and ready to roll. But roll where?” I let the thought hang there, unfinished. I didn’t want to give Ma-Singh any more reason to worry about me. But I knew he’d do what I asked.
“Regarding Ms. Adams,” Ma-Singh said after a moment. “Background checks on her and her parents returned no flags. We had no indication of the departure of the father, but he is living with the mother once more, working at a local auto mechanic store. The mother works at a daycare. They appear to be stable, their internet traffic mostly consisting of emails to their daughter that go unanswered, but they haven’t posted anything publicly.”
“Good ol’ Aunt Ginny told them she’d take care of it, and she has. Good. Do me another favor and let Brody know about all this, including the Simon angle, that there’s some sort of video game he’s roped Hayley Adams into,” I said. “What about the others?”
“The remaining five survivors are enrolled in secondary or early college programs, with two in their freshman year of college. As you suspected, their tuition was paid in full by the universities in all cases where the students actually enrolled in college. The survivors who are high school students in public programs have not received such a stipend, but it can be assumed that they will. Interestingly, the parents of these students have had no additional contact with each other, on the advice of their psychologists.”
“Psychologists paid for by—”
“According to all accounts, a private hospital in Las Vegas that treated the children and who were aghast at their trauma.”
“So the Council, in other words.”
“The Council,” Ma-Singh agreed. “It appears they have remained in close contact with the families after all.”
“Uh huh.” I grimaced. “Has there been, ah, any other psychic manifestations among the survivors that we know of?”
“We are still working on that, but we expect the answer will be yes, though it may not be visible to the outside world. It’s only been a few months since they were released into their communities, and they are likely to be quite guarded. Even Hayley Adams, other than her apparent interest in video games, has not stood out in any significant way. We’ll be sending around Swords members to gather what information we can.”
“Keep at it,” I said. “And anything on Hayley’s schoolwork would be good too. We’ve got Ginny, but she doesn’t hang out with the girl on a day-to-day basis. We need to know more about her to understand why she was picked to help Simon out of all of them.”
Ma-Singh rang off, and Nigel scooped up more rice and chicken, staring at me thoughtfully. “She’s one of the older survivors, and she presented an opportunity with her interest in video games. It may not be any more complicated than that.”
“Maybe not.” I shrugged. “But I can’t shake the idea that we’re missing something important.” I handed him back his phone. “Plug in this address and tell me what you get.”
I gave him the address that I’d found written on the young man’s business card at the warehouse. Nigel keyed it in and then glanced up at me.
“This is only a few blocks away,” he said. “Can’t be a residence, it’s all commercial around here.”
“I know. Yet this Lin Wei was the oldest guy in the group by a long stretch, and I’d be willing to bet one of the few with an ID of any sort. He also had this.” I held up the key card. Nigel’s brows lifted, and he gave me a half smile.
“Seems like a shame not to use it, since you’ve gone to the trouble of nicking it.”
“I was thinking the same thing.” I glanced out the window, frowned. “It also seems like it’s a lot darker out there than it should be. Everything’s lit up.”
“Gloomy day, shorter day this late in
the year, add smog to it, and you have a sort of false night you don’t notice as much in the mountains,” Nigel said. He finished his bowl, glanced at me. “You didn’t eat.”
“I’m a ramen kind of girl,” I said, but in truth, I wasn’t hungry. I was nervous, uncertain, and more than a little unhappy. “We have to see where this guy lives.”
We exited the shop and headed down the street, the address leading us to a faceless office building—not sketchy, but not anything you’d look twice at either.
“Doorway?” I asked, and Nigel eventually decided on an unmarked door with a pass card reader set off from the main street. Even the approach to the building was oblique, hard to see, and I almost got the feeling of passersby on the street averting their eyes as we swiped the card.
The doorway clicked open, and Nigel and I stepped inside a long corridor. It was silent, but as we walked down the tiled corridor, hushed noises began to emerge behind the doors. They would still as we approached, then start up again.
“These aren’t offices,” I muttered.
“Apartments,” Nigel agreed. “But nothing on the doors.”
“No list of residents’ numbers with buzz-in capability either. Or any sort of doorman.”
“Or mailboxes, though that might be somewhere else.”
Still, something about the place definitely didn’t feel right. Based on the address on the card, we went up the elevators to the fifteenth floor, making the educated guess that the address of 15-400 would take us to the right place. Once we were there, however, we ran into the same problem. No door numbers.
“Four hundred?” I groaned. “There’re maybe twenty doors tops along this corridor. There’s no way we can figure this out without knocking on doors. I’m in no mood for that.”
Nigel slanted a glance at me. “Well, there is a way.”
I stared at him, and he shrugged.
“You can…do that thing,” he said. “The out-of-body travel and all that. I don’t know the words, but—”
“Oh, for the love of…” But he was right; of course he was right. I shoved the key card at him. “Fine. Don’t drop me.”