He set Nebraska down, and the fox darted off, and Austin pulled the power of the land up into him and set off after, fast as the fox, no trail behind him.
It was two months ago Austin had come down from Winchester Mountain with Nebraska in his arms. The summoning ritual had taken days, and Austin was dizzy from lack of food. He blinked three times before he was sure it was really Grandfather Henry who waited for him at the trailhead and not some hallucination. The old man was sitting at the base of a hemlock eating an apple, truck idling nearby, no explanation for how he’d known that now would be the hour Austin returned. Grandfather gave Austin’s familiar a good look and nodded, satisfied.
That surprised Austin. “You can see him?”
“If you’d have done what I told you when you was younger, you two would have met long ago. A lot of suffering and confusion avoided.”
“You can see him,” Austin said again.
“It’s my job to see magical things, innit?” He crunched into his apple and chewed messily. “Most will not see him. The ones who care for you, though, he might choose to reveal himself to them.”
“That’ll be a short list,” Austin muttered.
He held the glittering fox up with both hands to the late-afternoon sun and looked into the star-filled eyes. Then Austin sighed, tipped his head to one side and grimaced like the creature had peed on him. “I don’t mean to complain, but he’s awfully small. He’s really not like me at all. He should be a mountain lion or a tiger or a cheetah or something. Something with claws and teeth.” The fox yawned and showed his tiny needle teeth. “Bigger teeth,” Austin told him.
“It has your ears. What will you call it?”
“Nebraska.”
“This is Washington.”
“And I wasn't born in Texas, either. Neither of us belong here. Nebraska.” He held him to his chest. “It’s just you and me, buddy. That’s all there is.”
Nebraska led him to a stone the size of a walnut. It was not a pretty stone. He nudged it with his paw. Austin picked it up. It had never been touched by anything living, and he could feel the power coalesced within it, enough to work magic by. “Good job. This will work great. Good job.” He put the stone in the small bag he wore on his belt. Then the fox took off running again, and Austin kept up with the same unnatural speed and soft footfalls as before. This was part of the magic Nebraska had given Austin: the fox’s speed and grace added to Austin’s own.
Within an hour, Austin and his familiar had collected four more stones. Then he sat cross-legged in the desert, the fox curled in his lap. Austin looked out to the east and fell into that strange half sleep elves had, something closer to meditation than to human or orc sleep, though not quite that either.
And he couldn’t put Roan aside, not even then. Not JT neither. But thoughts of those two stayed quiet like the people themselves standing at a respectful distance, and they didn’t pull him off-center so long as he had Nebraska with him.
He watched the stars rise. He watched the planets crawl. He watched the moon pass overhead. He watched the long, slow nuclear bloom of dawn, and every moment of all those things was a quiet celebration.
When the sunlight broke the horizon and warmed him, Austin stirred. The world was all right. Austin was ready.
JT had already prepared the vehicle they’d take. It was a brightly painted pickup truck on oversized wheels. The cab was so high off the ground there were ladders on the side to get to the doors. Written along the side of the bed were the words Country Orc in cursive against a backdrop of airbrushed mesas and deserts, and horses with flowing manes and tails.
Austin’s jaw dropped at the sight of it. “You can’t be serious.”
“This is my baby.”
“This is an operation, not a carnival.”
That earned Austin an icy glare. “This truck has got everything we need. Now get your things and let’s go.”
So much for starting off the day on better footing. From the non-trunk of the Corvette, Austin fetched a gym bag and a second, far larger, complicated-looking bag that carried his bow and arrows. He climbed the ladder to the cab and the door closed after him. The truck’s cab had no controls whatsoever. It was undecorated and looked unfinished. The seat molded itself to Austin—same technology as the ʼVette used.
JT held out his hand to Austin. “Here.”
“What?” But Austin held his hand out without waiting for an answer. JT dropped a rock in it. It was limestone and had a streak of green through it. Malachite probably.
“What’s this?” Austin asked, but he could feel the magic in the rock.
“I couldn’t sleep last night. So I went walking. I found that out in the desert. It was kind of pretty . . . Thought maybe . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I can never tell. Is it magic?”
Austin glanced from the rock to JT, but JT wasn’t looking. Probably he was going through whatever startup systems he needed. “No,” Austin lied, not knowing why he did. Maybe the idea of both of them out on their own in the desert hunting for rocks thinking of each other was too much to believe. Or maybe lying to JT was just a habit Austin couldn’t break. “But it’s a nice rock anyway.” He slipped it into his bag with the five Nebraska had found for him. “Thanks.”
And that was that: apologies and lies all told, they were back where they started. They pulled out of the compound, San Francisco bound.
They argued over music because JT refused to play anything written this century. They argued what direction to take into town because Austin thought it was more dramatic to come to the rescue via the Golden Gate rather than the Bay Bridge. Comfortable arguments, an easy rhythm to fall into.
They came in by the Bay Bridge listening to nothing. JT activated the truck’s transponder and the Bay Area Traffic Net added the vehicle to the millions it managed. JT had old override codes tied to emergency response vehicles and VIPs, but they would splash the system when activated and someone would be bound to notice the waves. Best hold them until needed. “I haven’t kept this software up-to-date,” he said. “I really hope those codes still work.”
Austin shrugged. “You’ll figure something out. Always do.” Austin stared out the window and JT did also, just as much a passenger as Austin now that BATN had taken over the truck. The Embarcadero glowed multihued through a thin fog, and the half-lit office buildings of downtown were a patchwork of blue-green blocks and streaks against black. Near the north edge of downtown, the Sorcerer’s Tower, five hundred meters high, twice the height of the graceless pyramid it had replaced, shimmered like water. Its rainbow of arcane sigils floated up its sides, broke away, and drifted like clouds written over the city. Some people said a dragon lived in its pinnacle. JT thought that was bullshit. Most of the time.
The city was beautiful.
JT’s desert was more beautiful still. And Dante and Duke and the others, they were all there. All there was here was Buzz. And the dead.
“Where you been living?” JT asked, afraid to ask because so far they’d skirted around things like that.
“Wherever I’m sleeping.”
“The City?” The way Austin had been after Roan’s death, it was easy to imagine him lingering in SF, obsessed like a ghost. That had been the path Austin had been heading down, hadn’t it?
“Sometimes,” Austin said, obviously as unwilling to have this conversation as JT was.
Pylons and cabling slid by. They were nearing the end of the bridge and BATN was requesting a destination update.
“So where is Buzz holed up? How do we find him?”
“He said he’d put up markers. City Netspace, I suppose.”
“And we’re just supposed to drive the streets looking for Netspace markers? We might never find him.”
City Netspace was a virtual reality that overlaid the city’s real space. Anyone with VR glasses or networking implants could access it. In its early days, it had carried tourism and historical information, making the city a museum of itself, including superimpose
d archival images dating back to the eighteen hundreds. All that information was still there, hyperlinked to academic papers and documentary footage. But after endless vandalism by hackers and virtual artists, the city administrators had thrown up their hands and opened the network to the public. The result had been a palimpsest of virtual graffiti that had begun the Fog City Renaissance back in the fifties. It was a part-genius, mostly-useless chaotic mess of graphics and animation wrapped ghostly over real-world space, perfect for artists, activists, and criminals.
JT accessed the Netspace and winced as the city went lurid with gang tags, one hundred meter adverts for every damn thing and then some, pornography, and Escherian trompe l’oeil architecture. He looked back at the Bay to see if Godzilla was still there, and he was, splashing around. Godzilla had always been there and always would be. No hacker ever messed with Godzilla. And if JT could have seen the ocean from here, no doubt there’d still be the water-walking Gundam battalion endlessly invading Pacifica.
He searched for a 3djinn tag—an asterisk made from three crossed scimitars—and found nothing.
“There,” Austin said, but Austin couldn’t even see into Netspace, so how he knew— “There,” Austin said again and pointed. The mark wasn’t in Netspace at all, and it wasn’t a 3djinn tag.
There was a monarch butterfly on the windshield, except monarchs were extinct. Roan, he thought. He said her name aloud before he could stop himself, and heartbeats of silence passed. Then he said, “That’s not real. That’s magic. Buzz has a wizard?”
Austin shrugged. The butterfly fluttered away.
They followed it through the Financial District, skating right past the Tower (“You think a dragon really lives up there?” “How should I fucking know?”) and into North Beach, where the butterfly’s route became erratic.
“I can’t tell BATN to follow a butterfly.”
“Park. We’ll follow on foot.”
“You sure?”
Austin shrugged.
JT put in the request to park and ten minutes later they were on the top level of a garage on Broadway. He blackened the windows, and Austin suited up, tying himself up in velcro straps and nylon string, bow, arrows, knives, and magic stones all where he wanted them, hands moving like getting dressed was some stage magician’s trick.
“Jesus, JT, do I have to tell you? Check your pistol.”
“What do I need a pistol for?”
“To kill things before they kill you?”
“There’s a pistol under the seat.” JT had never needed to use it. If something came after him that could punch through this truck, he’d need more than a pistol to stop it.
“Under the seat won’t do you any good when you’re out there with me.”
“Out there with you?” JT laughed, then stopped abruptly. “Are you fucking serious?”
“What the hell did you think I got you for?”
“Maybe you don’t remember, Austin, but I’m a glorified getaway driver. That and the bots—that’s all I do. Grayson had your back, not me.”
“Grayson’s dead. You aren’t. And you’re coming with me.”
“We don’t know where that bug’s going to take us. We get over the hill, I’ll lose the truck signal and we lose the drones.”
“Figure it out.”
“I don’t know the first thing about feet-on-the-ground work.”
“Time to learn.” Austin went for the door handle, but there wasn’t one. “Door, please?”
JT took the pistol from under the seat and slaved it. He took two clips from the glove box and stuffed them in the pocket of his jeans.
Jeans. Look at Austin in his military ninja costume looking like some anime hero. Now look at JT in his blue jeans and sleeveless flannel looking like he didn’t know what. All I ever wanted to do was fly planes. Look at me now.
JT popped the doors and climbed down out into the cool night air of San Francisco, as ready as he’d ever be, which was hardly at all.
Once Telegraph Hill had been high-class. Not anymore. The alley here was tight and filled with sodden litter and rubbish bins. Over the door, an old incandescent bulb sparked like it was about to explode. Beside the door was an old vid panel. The camera on it glowed red like the eye of a pissed-off orc to show it was on. On top of the panel an extinct monarch butterfly fanned its wings.
JT had dropped one land-bound bot as a repeater to strengthen the signal between himself and the truck. Four airborne drones—not much more than cameras and assault guns on toy helicopters—circled the rooftops and scanned alleys. A second land-bound bot stood beside JT, a sturdy four-legged spider, waist high. People always thought controlling drones was like watching a battery of monitors. It wasn’t like that at all. Drones were like removable hands and eyes, and it had taken years of training, a hundred thousand dollars of software, and a dangerous amount of black market neuropsychoactive drugs to make JT’s brain into something that could process multi-ocular vision for sustained periods of time without suffering a breakdown. With six drones and the truck slaved to him, JT felt immense, spread out, cloud-like, fog-like, and that runty green body was only the smallest part of what he was.
He watched the streets and rooftops and alleys all at once. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, and that made him edgy because it seemed far more likely that seeing nothing meant he’d missed something, not that there was nothing to see.
The door clicked open. Stairs, so JT left the bot behind. The butterfly led them up two flights, then down a corridor, past several doors, to the door at the end.
The butterfly vanished as the door opened. Beyond was a sorcerer’s apartment. He could tell from all the weird shit. There were enough lava lamps to light a disco, though what bubbled in them wasn’t wax, and the blobs in the one on the coffee table looked remarkably like an orc and an elf standing in a doorframe. The walls were covered in so many hand-painted arcane symbols they overlapped one another. There were even symbols on the ceiling. The paint had been slopped on too thick or too quick and had run in places like the walls were bleeding. A mobile made from the skeletons of small animals hung in the corner of the room. Its tiers spun lazily as the skeletons ran or flew or crawled on the air. And there wasn’t a bit of digital technology anywhere; even the clock was pendulum-powered.
The wizard sat cross-legged in the air next to his oracular lava lamp. He wore pajama pants and a red plush bathrobe, open to show his scrawny chest. He had long straight black hair and that mix of features and skin tone you got when you threw five different ancestries into the West Coast blender. His eyes were silver, actual silver orbs engraved with writing. Blue-violet plasma arced from one hand to the other, a spell he was just waiting for an excuse to throw at them.
And that was okay, because Austin had an arrow nocked, and one of JT’s drones aimed its cannon though a window at the wizard’s back.
Then there was Buzz. Buzz was an Irish human. Not black-haired Irish like Austin, but the other kind. He was shorter than JT, had curly ruddy-brown hair that would have shown copper in the sun, and big brown eyes. They were red-rimmed and bruised like he hadn’t slept in days. He was a bit on the stocky side; it showed in his freckled cheeks. He was just short of painfully cute.
JT couldn’t help but smile. He’d made the right choice by coming here, and he and Buzz—
“What’d you bring that animal here for?” Buzz said to Austin.
“Animal? What—”
All the warm happy glow died out of JT. “Hi, Buzz,” he said with a tone that meant Fuck you.
“Victor,” Buzz said to the wizard. “That orc comes after me, you can zap him.”
Austin shifted his aim from the floor to the wizard. “No! No, Victor, whoever the hell you are, you cannot zap the orc.”
JT shrugged helplessly. “Buzz, come on . . .” He’d barely even moved, but Buzz honestly flinched like JT was on the attack, and shouted, “Keep away from me, you cannibal!”
The plasma in Victor the Wizard’s hand snapped in
warning.
That worked JT’s nerves. “It’s not cannibalism if you ain’t the same species, Buzz. It’s just dinner.”
Five meters away, and JT felt that plasma go hotter.
“Everyone stop it!” Austin put up his hands, arrow in one, bow in the other. “Everyone put your weapons down!” Austin slowly put his bow and arrow down on the battered parquet floor. “You, Victor, get rid of that whatever it is you’re doing there with that light. Get rid of it!” The plasma dimmed to violet, but didn’t go out. “Good enough. Excuse us. JT, can I have a word with you?” Austin didn’t wait for an answer. He hauled JT into the hall. “What the hell is going on?”
“I might have bit him.”
“You ‘might have bit him’?”
JT shrugged. “I might have been worked up. You get an orc worked up, you know things might happen.”
“Worked up? Oh my God, you slept with him?”
Well, no, they hadn’t quite gotten that far, but JT didn’t like the judgmental tone. “And what’s wrong with that?”
“It’s Buzz, that’s what’s wrong with that.”
“He’s a nice guy.”
“He’s Buzz.”
JT’s startup business had required credit, and credit required an official history, something neither JT nor Austin had ever had. They’d both been born off the grid and had stayed off the grid, using stolen IDs when they needed temporary legitimacy. So when JT decided to leave his old life and build a new one, Buzz had been the natural choice to turn the fictional Jason Taylor into a real person, a person who could take out loans, sign legal papers, and pay taxes. Buzz was an artist. It had taken him six weeks to plant the evidence of a life lived: not just birth records and a SIN, but traffic tickets, a college degree, a master’s thesis, tax forms, annual employee reviews, even a student loan default. And when all those databases had been hacked and signatures forged and it was done, the two of them had sat on Buzz’s old beat-up couch and watched a holo of JT’s new record—Jason Taylor—turn lazily in the air, and celebrated.
The Glamour Thieves Page 4