No! called Martina. Not while he’s got a gun to a child’s head.
I find myself in agreement with Martina, replied Sir Walter.
Very well, agreed Chrétien.
“Please,” said Pfeffer. “Set the child down. There is no need—”
Georg cut Pfeffer off. “I decide what is needful. Take me to Martina’s room.”
At this moment, Martina made up her mind to deal with Georg in person. She came solid, her arms crossing. Possibly, she should have held them up to indicate she wasn’t a threat, but she didn’t want to be “not a threat” at the moment. She scowled at her half-brother.
“Why do you need my room?” she demanded. “Is it conversation you’re after? Well, here I am.” She flung her arms wide.
Georg backed away several steps. His left eye was twitching rapidly. He was nervous. But when he spoke, he only sounded angry. “I don’t want to talk,” he snarled. “I want … take me to the place you dwell. Or I shoot the child.”
“I’ll take you,” Martina said at once. “Don’t shoot the girl. What has she ever done to you?”
“Shut up, Martina,” said Georg. “Let’s go. You in front. Then Pfeffer. No talking.”
Martina led the group of four solid souls, trusting the four invisible souls would march alongside. She felt extremely grateful for Georg’s “deafness” to thoughts.
What do you have of value in your chamber, Martina? asked Chrétien.
Mutely, she answered: Nothing.
As the party of eight walked to the converted monastic cells, Martina overheard Chrétien conversing silently with Sir Walter. The child, Paige, had shifted from babbling nonsense to whimpering by the time they’d arrived.
Martina pushed the front door open. “This way,” she said, leading them all to her room. The bed was made, the desk organized, the entire room a model of tidiness.
Georg’s eyes flew from object to object, seeking something.
“Give me the child,” said Martina, holding her hands out.
“No!” Georg shouted.
Georg fussed with something on the gun.
The safety? Martina felt, rather than heard, Chrétien’s building rage. And then Chrétien’s thoughts came flooding through. The boy cares nothing for the innocent life in his arms. The child is no older than was my beloved Madeleine.
Martina spoke, advancing to her sibling. “Georg, just tell me what you want—”
“Stop right there!” Georg shouted.
Paige went from whimpering softly to crying.
Martina felt the precise moment Chrétien could bear his rage no longer. And as he rippled into solid form, several things happened at once. Martina, ignoring Georg’s threats, reached for the crying child. Georg shifted position, so that when Chrétien solidified, Chrétien’s raised fist swiped ineffectively through the air. And most horribly of all, Georg raised the gun and pulled its trigger.
9
ATTACK BY SLURPEE CANNON
Skandor hadn’t liked the way Georg had shrugged him off, saying “something like that” when Skandor had inquired as to whether the warmth of a human body would set the detectors off. Skandor didn’t like when anyone shrugged him off, but he took especial exception to being given the brush off by the skinny employee with the bobbing Adam’s apple and fidgety fingers.
It was another dull evening in the security office, and Skandor had decided to spend it learning everything he could about the perimeter security system and the weakness that had caused the false alarm. Perhaps if he showed a little initiative, he could get a better position in the company. Heck, he would settle for anything offering a better view than that of the rows of flickering monitors he was employed to watch.
Skandor liked puzzles. Of course, Georg had made things ridiculously easy. Skandor didn’t even need to hack into the system. The night of the oxygen tank incident, he’d simply gazed over Georg’s shoulder and memorized the sets of four-digit codes required to access the system. He’d also memorized the sequence for re-setting the alarm, just in case he ever needed to turn it off. Skandor had always been good at obtaining information he wasn’t supposed to have, but he felt especially proud to have done all this without using his ability to cloak himself.
Scrolling through various screens, it became evident that cold temperatures would set off the alarms. Extreme cold, such as spilled compressed oxygen. Skandor couldn’t find any evidence that something ninety-eight-point-six degrees Fahrenheit would trigger the alarm. It just wasn’t designed for that. So what sort of attack was this crazy system meant to forestall? Attack by Slurpee cannon?
Skandor stood and paced. Something was forming itself into a question, and he always did his best thinking while in motion. And then it came to him—the something that had escaped him at first. The night of the cylinder incident, the alarm had gone off before the oxygen spill. Skandor was certain of this. Once the tank had begun leaking, it had been noisy—quite noisy. The “noisy” had started within a second or two of Georg’s call. And the call had followed the alarm, not preceded it.
So, if the compressed oxygen with its extreme cold temperature wasn’t the thing that set off the alarm, then what was?
Another puzzle.
He stared and stared at the screen documenting the perimeter breach, but staring wasn’t getting him anywhere. The timing of the incident made no sense. No sense at all. At last, Skandor’s shift ended and he gave up.
Then, a few nights later, Skandor found out what made the alarm go off.
It had all started because he was hungry. He’d been standing and looking out the window at the bakery across the street. He remembered having seen a six-inch birthday cake iced with chocolate ganache. His stomach growled. He told his stomach it wasn’t even close to his birthday. But his stomach insisted the birthday cake and only the birthday cake was going to put an end to the growling.
He could just cloak himself and take it. Oma wouldn’t approve of taking it without some form of payment. Oma wouldn’t approve of quite a lot of what he’d done since moving to San Francisco. Skandor searched his wallet, but he knew it was empty. He’d given it all away to people who looked like they didn’t get three meals a day on the job. He pulled open his desk drawer and examined the contents. A package of Skittles stared back at him. He loved Skittles. Chocolate cake, growled his stomach.
“Fine,” he said aloud. “I’ll leave the Skittles in exchange.”
Cloaking himself with the Skittles in hand, Skandor ghosted toward the window and the bakery. Just as he crossed through the exterior wall of the Geneses building, the alarm sounded.
He cursed his stomach’s remarkably bad timing and rushed back inside his office, coming solid again. Accessing the screen Georg had used last time, Skandor glanced through the various levels of the building, looking for the location of the intruder.
That was … odd.
The intrusion was listed as being at the window of the security office. Skandor twisted around to look at the window. He was alone.
And then the whole thing came together, neat as a jigsaw puzzle when only a handful of pieces remained. When Skandor was cloaked, he was cold. He’d overheard comments about air conditioning often enough to know he must make it cold when he passed through someone.
“Just like a ghost,” he murmured.
Quickly, he disengaged the alarm.
And waited for Georg to arrive or call.
Only, he didn’t. And then Skandor remembered it was Labor Day and Dr. Gottlieb was going to be away all weekend. “He must have taken Georg with him,” murmured Skandor. Georg and Fritz were the only two who spent their nights at the facility. If they were gone, well, then Skandor wasn’t going to get any calls about this little incident, was he? He grinned broadly, relieved.
Now that his pounding heart quieted, his growling stomach reasserted itself.
Cake.
It was time to test his hypothesis.
He cloaked himself again, approaching the outer wall with
a squeamish feeling he associated with waiting for the camp’s fire horn to sound for drills. As soon as he passed through the wall, the alarm went off again. Swiftly, he returned and disengaged it again.
How odd.
His stomach was not going to let up, though, and besides, he would probably think better on a full stomach. This time when he left the building, Skandor left the alarm disengaged. He passed through the building without incident, crossed the street, and passed through the walls of the bakery. The chocolate ganache-covered cake lay waiting for him, so he took it, spelling “Thank You” in Skittles where the cake had sat.
And then he returned to his office and ate cake until he started feeling a bit sick from too much sugar or too much chocolate or too much something. He placed the rest of the cake in a deep desk drawer and began pacing. For a half hour, he paced and thought. Why was the building set to respond to the presence of icy cold within its walls? What sort of attacker or method of attack would use something cold to breach a building?
Try as he might, Skandor couldn’t make any sense of it. Georg had believed the presence of compressed oxygen explained the alarm incident of last week, and Skandor knew that his own icy presence passing through the wall set it off.
Suddenly, Skandor had the sense of having discovered something huge.
What if that was what Geneses was trying to prevent—the intrusion of someone with his same cloaking ability?
He considered the possibility for half a minute, before laughing at himself. There were no others with his abilities. Whether he did what he did because of evolution or a divine gift or some strange magic, no one else did this.
Well….
Unless they did.
What, exactly, did Geneses research, anyway?
It was a Friday night and the building was empty, except for him. The lack of response to the alarm had made that clear. It might be worthwhile to investigate what, exactly, went on at Geneses Corporation. If he were to travel around in his cloaked form, he could see things without being caught on camera. After a slight hesitation, he re-engaged the perimeter alarm. Then he vanished and passed through the empty second, third, fourth, and fifth floors. Offices—many empty—filled the sixth and seventh floors. Skandor found a large, empty lab on the eighth floor. It didn’t look like anyone had used the lab in a long time.
The labs on the ninth floor, however, were operational. But things had been tidied; cupboards and computers closed. Skandor couldn’t investigate without coming solid, which would mean the risk of being caught on camera. On the tenth floor, Skandor moved methodically through two small laboratories and through a ring of offices that encircled a central area. This central area was the last Skandor investigated. It also proved to be the most interesting.
Dr. Fritz Gottlieb’s office was here. And along the adjacent corridor, Skandor found five chambers. Two appeared to be completely empty; another appeared to belong to Georg. The final two rooms were the most interesting, however. They contained sleeping boys around Skandor’s own age, both hooked up to monitors and both apparently unconscious.
What was Gottlieb up to?
10
WHAT HE’D COME FOR
Georg’s gunshot, like Chrétien’s punch, was off. But Georg had the satisfaction of seeing the bullet graze the younger de Rochefort’s cheek, leaving a river of blood. In the confusion, however, Martina had grabbed his hostage and vanished. Georg cursed.
Already, Chrétien had recovered his balance. He was ignoring the wound to his face and appeared to be searching for something in a pocket. A weapon?
Georg vanished from sight, stumbling as he rippled.
The moment he vanished, tumbling to the ground, another person came solid. It was Waldhart de Rochefort. Georg swore again. He’d lost his chance.
Or had he?
Georg lay face down in the crowded room. At least one set of legs passed directly through him, but no one took note of his presence. Georg rolled until he was under Martina’s bed and then took inventory of who was in the room now: de Rochefort and his son and Pfeffer. Martina seemed to have vanished permanently.
A second later, two more people came into solid form in the room: Sam and Will, whom Georg remembered from the bakery encounter. How had they all managed to gather together?
Ah, of course. They, like Martina, were able to converse silently from mind to mind. Georg’s head ached just thinking of the times Hansel had tried to improve Georg’s communication skills. How many times had Georg shouted to his brother to just shut up, already! A wave of pain seared through him. He would give anything—anything—to hear his brother’s voice one more time. He sealed off the ache for Hansel. Sealed it and jettisoned it and returned to the task at hand.
The five in the room were conversing aloud, attending to Chrétien’s wound, not even attempting to hide their plans from Georg. Could they hear his thoughts? He tried to cover them with a counting exercise, but half a minute later, Chrétien murmured—and Waldhart affirmed—that Georg was still present.
And then the old Frenchman called out to Georg. “What is it you desire, cousin? Might we speak?”
Georg was not a fool. He was outnumbered five to one, and he was certain Chrétien had some sort of weapon concealed in a pocket.
They were resolving to keep someone posted invisibly in Martina’s room until they could figure out what Georg might have wanted to retrieve. So. He had lost his chance.
And then he saw what he wanted. It was at eye level from where he lay on the floor. Hanging from where it had been draped as a bookmark in a fat book, he saw Katrin’s starfish necklace.
Georg edged toward the bookcase, avoiding contact with the others.
Pfeffer had just finished attending to Chrétien’s injury.
Three of de Rochefort’s party vanished. They might be hiding in the room, exactly as he was. Georg listened, straining his mind to catch stray thoughts, but he heard nothing. Well, he was not leaving without the starfish necklace. He scooted over to where he could reach the book—he wouldn’t bother trying to remove the necklace from the book. That would take too long. Placing a hand beside the book, Georg came solid, grabbed the book, and vanished.
Sam, who must have seen him, shouted for the others.
But Georg didn’t care. He had what he’d come for.
Invisibly, he raced back to San Francisco.
11
GOLDEN-HAIRED SIF
Skandor was supposed to be in his office on the ground floor for another three hours, but he found himself very distracted by the things he discovered on the tenth floor. As it happened, it was this distraction that made possible the Overhearing of Interesting Things and the Seeing of Impossible Things which, in combination, were to change the course of his life.
First off, Dr. Fritz Gottlieb had returned to the building unexpectedly, swearing most excellently in at least four different languages. It was something to do with That Two-Faced Politician in Sacramento and a revoked invitation. The swearing was more interesting than the actual event inspiring it, obviously. Skandor rolled a few of the words around in his mouth, to keep them memorized for future use.
After unburdening himself of these most excellent curses, Dr. Gottlieb apparently felt he needed a distraction. Skandor followed him into one of the mysterious empty chambers.
Inside the empty room, Skandor saw something for which he was fundamentally unprepared: he saw Dr. Gottlieb vanish into thin air.
Skandor was so shocked he nearly came visible himself.
Dr. Gottlieb could cloak himself.
Dr. Gottlieb could cloak himself.
He was a cloaker!
Which meant…. Skandor’s mind raced with the information. Gottlieb might, truly, be monitoring the building for other cloakers. Were there more? There had to be more or Gottlieb wouldn’t have the perimeter detection system in place. There were more. What did it mean that others existed? What did it mean that Skandor just happened to become employed by a cloaker? Was it destiny or
coincidence?
These thoughts flashed through Skandor’s mind in no time at all, but they were utterly erased by what transpired next.
Dr. Gottlieb came solid again, and this time, he was not alone. He held a girl in his arms. This was strange enough—how did he make a girl appear from nowhere?—but perhaps more pertinent was the fact that the girl was sleeping, exactly like the boys in the other rooms. But as swiftly as these things flitted across Skandor’s mind, they vanished. The girl was beautiful. No, she was radiant. No, she was something else entirely for which Skandor’s vocabulary had failed to prepare him.
Gottlieb released the girl so that she lay on the narrow bed in the room. Then Gottlieb rose and paced.
Rising and pacing was so not what Loki would have done.
Loki would’ve snuck a kiss.
And Skandor was going to have to reconsider every spiteful thing he’d ever said against love at first sight.
Skandor gazed at the girl, alf-fair. Goddess-fair. She looked like golden-haired Sif—Thor’s wife. Or Gullveig, whose lust for gold burned hotter than fire. What if the myths were all coming to life? What if they existed not to record the past or the imaginary but to foretell the future? What if he really was, in some strange and unfathomable way, really, well, Loki?
Who did that make Gottlieb?
Dr. Gottlieb interrupted Skandor’s brain fever with the speaking of a handful of syllables. Skandor tried to break down the sounds: Sven-Leah-Tea. Or something like that. “Sven” wasn’t a common name in the US, but there was always a “Sven” or two at Camp Midgard because the clientele were Scandinavian, for the love of Odin. “Leah” was a name you heard a couple times a summer. He couldn’t think of any proper names that sounded like the word “tea.” Maybe he’d misheard the final word.
All these things passed through Skandor’s mind in a heartbeat, because, once the names or words had been uttered, the beautiful maiden awoke. It was like a story in Oma’s books. Only it was happening here, in the real world. Which was apparently a real world in which people could vanish and reappear and awaken beautiful maidens by uttering a handful of magic names.
Knavery: A Ripple Novel (Ripple Series Book 6) Page 7