Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  John looked at her soberly, still leaning against the railing. “An’ why precisely do you give a damn, miss?”

  She hesitated. It was not the sort of hesitation that usually came in a conversation. It felt for a moment as if everything around him was holding its breath, waiting to hear her answer. It felt…portentous.

  “Because…everything depends on it.” Her wings shuddered open wide, and her entire body took on a look of aliveness, of anticipation, and perhaps, of fear.

  “Well, gee.”

  He got no chance to say anything more.

  “I speak too much,” she cried, and in a burst of flame, arrowed up into the sky like a shooting star in reverse.

  Watching her fading into a speck against the night sky, and then vanishing, John was left alone with his thoughts. “That was strange,” he said to no one but himself. He was too tired to care terribly much, to be honest. He’d somehow accepted that meta’s presence, despite the fact that she preached to him as much as any church’s soup-kitchen Bible-thumper, and despite her having violated one of the few places where he felt a modicum of safety. She was nuts, that much he was certain of. But he had never seen anything like her, at all, ever. Too damned weird.

  Not wanting to think anymore, John took one last look at the sky, wondering if she’d be back again. Before he went inside, he desperately hoped for her sake, and his own, that she wouldn’t.

  Chapter Thirteen:

  Blackbird Fly

  Mercedes Lackey and Dennis Lee

  Greymalkin rubbed up against Vickie’s leg, purring. She scratched his ears as she stared at the blinking cursor. At this point, she had made contact with every magician on her extensive list. Some few had replied, most with extreme caution. A handful had indicated they would consider signing up with Echo. The rest would either answer her, or not. And until she started getting definitive answers, she was stalled.

  There were not enough metas. The mages were afraid, all but the scant handful that were passing themselves off as metas—or who, like her, were both meta and mage. And they should be afraid; in the past, the Nazis of the Third Reich had more than dabbled in the occult, they had made themselves masters of it. There was no telling if this new lot still had that mastery. If they did—magicians were in danger. The use of magic was an inexact science. It was all a matter of knowledge and training and will, and there were always X factors that could skew things, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of the Unseen.

  On the other hand, Vickie had seen and felt nothing yet to indicate that the Nazis had even the remotest knowledge of magic now. And if that was true, then magic and mages could be what tipped the balance, exploiting a hole in their strategy they didn’t know they had.

  Again, she heard her new friend Bella’s voice in her mind. Start small. Meet people a few at a time. And get yourself in shape. They offer to train all of us in freerunning—Le Parkour—Echo OpOnes and Echo SupportOps especially. Just like they offer to train us in first aid, paramedic training, hand to hand and firearms. That way even the ones with no powers or tiny powers can escape if they’re trapped, even if they don’t have a ton of athletic ability. And the ones that do, they’re like monkeys on steroids. They can get across a town faster than anyone without a chopper when there’s gridlock. Go to the Parkour classes. That’s a start.

  Well, she’d looked up Parkour. She’d downloaded a ton of video. It didn’t look that different from some of her early physical training. She didn’t need to go to the classes, face all those people…but she could use the Parkour course at the Echo campus. She could practice on her own. Maybe she’d meet one or two people there at a time. That would be doable.

  She shut down the computer, and went after her sweats, ignoring the armor on the stand. It wasn’t time yet for that.

  As always, she left the light off in the bathroom, changing in the comforting darkness. She did it all by feel: wrapping wrists and ankles for extra support; adding socks; long, lightweight sweat pants and long-sleeved shirt with a hood; gloves—this time with traction palms. She was as ready as she was ever going to be.

  Grey gave an approving flick of his tail as she snagged her Echo-logo vest that marked her as an OpOne with a right to be on the campus and carried an RFID tag sewn inside. She pulled it on over her shirt as she walked to her car.

  The drive was one she had made only once before, when she’d gone to meet with Bella and that Russian woman. She forced herself to be calm. She told herself that the course would be empty. It was the middle of the day, so who would be out there training or warming up?

  And after passing the gates unchallenged thanks to her ID, and passing the buildings still being reconstructed, she parked her econobox in a lot with only a scattering of vehicles and found that the course was, indeed, empty. She assumed it had always looked like this, and it was unlikely the attackers had bothered doing anything to a place that had already looked like a war zone. Building façades with wrought iron and steel balconies and windows faced reproduction ruins; from what she had seen on the videos, this place was a freerunner’s idea of heaven. Everything here was designed to be climbed, jumped, or otherwise traversed.

  Once, she would have thrown herself joyously into the challenge.

  Now, she stood there staring at it, her palms sweating.

  Start slow. No one said you had to be one of those amazing French monkeys the first day. And warm up before you try anything. Then follow the Parkour creed: move forward. Always forward.

  Forty-five minutes later, she was sweating, shaking with pain, and ready to cry with frustration. It wasn’t just that she was out of shape. It was that her body didn’t do what it used to. Scar tissue pulled and hurt as if it was ripping open, and she had scarred tendons in her ankles and wrists as well as scarred skin. Her balance was unreliable, thrown off again and again by unexpected pain. No! her muscles would scream, often right in the middle of something, and she’d fall, saved only because she still knew how to fall, thank the gods. Tuck in her head, arms pulled in and hands protected, twist so she’d roll diagonally across her back from shoulder to rump, scrubbing off momentum steadily instead of suddenly.

  And then, when she was most unbalanced, mentally and physically, flailing with heart and soul, came another push.

  “Yer doin’ that all wrong, ya know.”

  Fear stabbed her, and she whirled.

  A tall man, meta tall, which meant he towered over her and made her feel like a child. Bare chest, black pants, black boots, some sort of red scarf wrapped around face and head swathing his shoulders, matching red wrappings around his wrists. A memory that did not fail her, although everything else did, identified him from all the Echo files she had studied, committing to memory all the faces of the metas that survived. Fear had driven that close study. Fear and paranoia. You might have to work with them. Know everything about them so they can’t hurt you.

  Memory put a name to the not-face, the costume, the narrowed eyes that were all that was visible beneath that hood and wrapping.

  Red Djinni.

  And fear rose up to choke her, for she had no ammunition, no information. His file was mostly barren of everything but speculation.

  “I suppose you can do better?” she said, the words coming out harsh and grating. Drive him away with them. Make him not want to share the course with a virago. That was all she could think of to do.

  “You’re damn right I can,” he replied, with an undertone of a sneer. “Come on. Show me what you’ve got.”

  All right. She’d meant to come out here and maybe encounter one or two other people. Granted one of them wasn’t supposed to be Red Djinni, but…she set off at a run and made the first set of obstacles.

  He was ahead of her, moving at blinding speed, with extra double and triple somersaults, flips, even backflips. It made her angry, as muscles cramped and burned, everything tightened and pulled, like worms of fire under her skin. He waited for her at the first checkpoint. “Holding back?” he mocked.

>   “Just…getting started…” she said through gritted teeth, fighting pain, fighting to stay balanced, fighting to keep from running away. He shot off ahead of her again, traversing things she hadn’t even realized were obstacles, with the careless nonchalance of a gibbon. She pushed herself harder.

  “Yer fallin’ behind, darlin’,” he mocked at the second checkpoint.

  “I’m not your darlin’,” she snapped. Bad enough that he was doing this, after seeing what a fumbling infant she was at this. Worse to rub it in like this, to humiliate her. The anger was almost the equal of the fear, and she pushed herself harder still and felt all her muscles trembling with reaction and pain, her stomach in cold knots, her eyes stinging. She was trying, dammit! Why was he making a fool out of her for trying?

  He was off again, making it all look as easy as breathing; she was half blind with pain and unshed tears as he waited at the third and final checkpoint. “You should try doin’ this with a Nazi on yer tail,” he goaded. “Now that’s some motivation.”

  “I did, thanks,” she panted, stumbling to the end of the course, where she leaned against the wall, not out of breath, but gasping with so much pain that even her fear was temporarily gone.

  And then, a new voice behind her made her freeze with the start of an attack.

  “Enough with the horseplay, Djinni. We’ve got a job to do. I sent you over here to assess the new recruit, not show off for her.”

  Another male voice, deep, authoritative, unamused. Djinni came down out of the tops of one of the building façades in a series of extra-spectacular flips, landing in front of them. “What horseplay, Bull?” he asked, a glint of challenge in his eye and more than a hint of mockery in his voice. “Just working out. That a crime?”

  The voice behind her snorted, and the owner of it stepped around her to stand almost toe to toe with Djinni. He was a head taller than the Djinni, with long white-blond hair in a tight ponytail, chiseled features, and the usual sculptured body of most of the metas she was familiar with. She felt like a deformed dwarf, and shrank inside herself. Perfection. They were perfection. And she was a ruin…

  “Assessment?” The second man’s tone was brisk and impersonal.

  Djinni’s casual air of superiority vanished, and the laughter disappeared from his eyes. When he spoke, his tone matched Bull’s. It was cold and professional and unmasked. “She is physically unable to perform at our level, Bull. She’s got some fire, but she’s using most of it to keep from bolting. I recommend against. Put her in the field on our retrievals, and we’ll spend half our time watching out for her.”

  The brutally accurate picture made her cringe and shrink even smaller. Two strangers, two strange men, looming over her—it was pushing her fear. Hard. Add to it what they were saying…

  “Operative Nagy, I presume?” the newcomer said, deliberately turning away from Djinni to look courteously at her. He pronounced it “naggy.”

  “Nahzh,” she managed to get out, correcting his mispronunciation. “Vic. Nagy.”

  They both stiffened a little, then—she saw it, she was good at reading body language—forced themselves to relax. They’d reacted to her name. Her first name. Not in recognition of her, personally, it was more like a wince in reaction to the name itself. As if the name was painful, and they were wincing away from the pain.

  And neither of them had noticed the other doing it.

  “Operative Nagy,” the man said, with the correct pronunciation. “Tentatively OpOne, active. You’re listed as a magician?”

  She nodded stiffly. Djinni snorted.

  “Then I’ve asked Echo to assign you to my team for a retrieval. I’m callsign Bulwark, Echo OpTwo. We’re going after someone who’s being protected, I am told, by another magician, and I need a magician to counter him.” He smiled pleasantly. Or it would have been pleasant if she hadn’t been so frozen with fear. “Fighting fire with fire, so to speak.”

  He could not have chosen a worse simile, given that she was already on the edge of a panic attack. It was her turn to be engulfed in memory.

  Fire…the flames roared up around her and the pain, the pain, she was going to die…She couldn’t breathe for a moment. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t speak. Fear held her and shook her like a dog shakes a rag toy, when a spark of brightness, of more fire, up in the heavens behind the two men made her glance up. And with the look, somehow, she made contact.

  She couldn’t have said how. She wasn’t a psion. Yet she felt something touch her mind, assess her with compassion, and reach out to her. And that voice, that she had heard once before, echoed in her mind, washed over her, through her, mind and spirit; another fire, but one that countered the fear and the pain for just a moment. This was more like a caress, or like a mother’s embrace, that only manifested as firelike, but couldn’t possibly harm.

  Peace. Be still.

  It was only a moment, just long enough for the tiny glint of flame to wink out again, but it was enough, enough to break her out of the attack, and though she was still stiff with fear, she could, at least, speak again. “I—I’m not supposed to be doing fieldwork yet—” she stammered. Hadn’t he seen for himself? Hadn’t he heard the Djinni? She wasn’t ready. She burned with shame. Would she ever be ready?

  “You are the only Echo magician in Atlanta,” Bulwark replied, a touch of hardness under the veneer of pleasantry. “I’m afraid you’ll have to make an exception for this retrieval. You’ve been assigned to work with me on this. We leave as soon as you’re ready. We’ll be going to New Orleans.”

  His tone left absolutely no doubt in her mind that if she did not go with him voluntarily, he was perfectly prepared to force her. She went unbalanced for a moment, her vision briefly graying out. She scrambled for a way to get away from them long enough to get some control back. Maybe to get away? If she could lose them long enough…“I-I need to get back to my apartment. Leave my car. Change. Pack?”

  He nodded. “That would be wise. We may be gone a few days. Red Djinni and I will follow you in an Echo vehicle.”

  To make sure she went. There would be no escaping into the maze of Atlanta. No hiding in her apartment. She didn’t even try to protest; she sensed it would be useless. Instead she turned and stumbled a little back to the parking lot, fumbling her keys out of her pocket.

  Behind her, not even trying to lower his voice or disguise the contempt in it, she heard the Djinni say, “Jesus, Bull! What’re you thinking, hauling that along with us?”

  “We need a mage,” Bulwark said calmly.

  Djinni snorted again. “What’s she gonna do, pull a rabbit out of a hat to distract Tomb until I can pin him down? When are you going to stop insisting on bringing dead weight on these jobs? She’s useless, Bull! She won’t stand—”

  By then she had reached the shelter of her car, gotten inside and slammed the door on the last of whatever it was that the Djinni was saying. As she pulled out of the lot, hot, angry tears burned down her face. Useless. Of course she was useless. The Djinni had hit the bull’s-eye. She was useless. To them. To anyone. To herself. Useless, hideous, worthless…she cried, hopelessly, all the way home.

  They pulled in to park behind her, but didn’t get out of their vehicle. It looked as if they were still arguing. That was fine. She didn’t want them in there with her, in her sanctuary, violating it. She didn’t want the Djinni to have the satisfaction of seeing her in tears. She ran up the stairs and fumbled the door open, slammed it behind her, and wondered, for a moment, if she could just lock up again and pretend she didn’t hear them out there, hear the phone, hear her Echo radio.

  But no. No, she had to go through with this. If she didn’t, they’d come after her anyway. And she had to go through with this because maybe, maybe, she might be able to do something. She had a responsibility. She had to try.

  The panic attack ebbed, and with the easing of fear came the expected aftermath. Her gorge rose, nausea overcoming her.

  She ran for the dark bathroom, threw up in the toil
et, stripped off the soaking-wet sweats, and ran a brief shower. They could wait for that. She didn’t want to be in a closed car stinking of sweat and vomit.

  She used half a bottle of mouthwash and scrubbed every inch of herself furiously, using amber-scented soap and shampoo to eradicate the last of the stench, rubbing her burnt skin with the amber-scented lotion that was the only thing that helped. Then she re-dressed from the skin out in cotton underwear, black socks, black cotton knit trousers, black turtlenecked, long-sleeved T-shirt, black gloves, boots. She pulled the suitcase out of the storage closet, and packed more of the same. She paused for a moment, then added her lightweight armor to it. Not the heavier battle suit on the stand, but the chain mail equivalent. She could manage that. And she might need it. The mail, made of tiny black metal plates of an alloy that would surely puzzle the Echo scientists sorely, would stop bullets as well as the Echo nanoweave. She’d proved that before. And in New Orleans, in the wake of the Invasion…she would need something that could stop a bullet. Black-handled atheme went into the sheath in her boot. The techno-mage’s road kit, unused for so very long, went into her laptop bag. She scooped up the contents of her bathroom shelf and dumped them on top of the armor, and stuck a sample-sized bottle of mouthwash in a pocket just in case she had another attack.

  She turned to find Grey sitting behind her, looking at her with bemusement.

  “Fieldwork.” She went to the kitchen and made sure the connections to his refrigerated watering fountain were still solid. “You’ve got two weeks of kibble in the dispenser and I just cleaned your box—”

 

  “Yes.” She unplugged her keyboard and plugged in the one with the mousepad and the oversized keys. Ironically, Grey had trouble using a mouse. “There, you can surf too. I’ll be checking my email.”