by Kai O'Connal
“You look like you could use some comp’ny.” The drunk reached a filthy hand toward Kyrie’s chest.
Almost faster than Elijah’s eyes could register, Kyrie popped the man in the throat with a two-fingered jab. No other part of her moved, and the gesture seemed light and casual. The drunk stumbled back, fell, and rolled under a nearby table, making thick, choking noises as he reached for his neck. One or two of the other patrons glanced over their shoulders, then returned to their drinks with a shrug.
Leung glanced at the fallen man as he returned from the bar. “Rejected suitor?”
“Yeah,” Kyrie said. “Not my type.”
“Well, I’ve got good news,” Leung said. “Our man is waiting upstairs. Just follow me.”
He led them to a narrow staircase at the back of the room. Filthy, wooden steps creaked and groaned as they climbed to a hallway lit by a bare, flickering bulb. At the far end, Leung stopped before a door with an upside-down four hanging on it. Elijah stood to one side of the hallway, careful not to touch the dingy walls. Kyrie stood on the other side, occasionally glancing back down the hallway—just in case this was a set-up.
He rapped three times, paused, and rapped twice more. They could hear someone approach on the other side, and after a pause they heard a number of locks disengaging. The door opened to reveal a small room. Its one window had a black plastic garbage bag tacked over it, and a bare, stained mattress with a crumpled blanket sagged in one corner. A table lamp with a mismatched shade, the room’s only source of light, sat on the floor in the other corner. An old, rusty radiator clunked and hissed against the far wall, although from the chill in here, Elijah guessed noise was all it could produce.
The lone occupant, standing in the shadows near the door, beckoned them inside, glancing out into the hall. The trio walked in and the man snapped the door shut and fired the four locks home, his shaking hands making it difficult.
Elijah got his first real look at their contact as he turned to face them. Thick stubble dotted his chin and cheeks, and his dark, clumpy hair glistened in the dim light. His blue eyes, however, were what really caught Elijah, for they seemed to have sunken into his skull until they were little more than pinpoints of dull light staring out of darkness. His white, button-down shirt was stained grey, sometimes brown, and over it he wore a ripped but otherwise intact teamster’s jacket. Torn jeans and a pair of ratty sneakers, held together with frayed strips of duct tape, completed the ensemble.
“Marick,” Leung said. “This is Elijah and Kyrie. They’re the people I told you about.”
Marick nodded shakily and stretched out a hand to them.
Elijah reached out to shake the man’s hand, but caught sight of a tattoo on Marick’s forearm above the wrist. He stepped back, whipping out his pistol at the same time. Pointing it at the man’s forehead, Elijah backed up to the door.
“Whoa! Hold it! What are you doing?” Leung cried.
Kyrie pulled her pistol as well and aimed it at Marick.
“Show me your arm! The tattoo!” Elijah demanded.
The man, shaking even more violently, turned his arm over and pulled up his sleeve, revealing a small tattoo of a black moon.
“Damn it, Leung,” Elijah spat. “Don’t you know what this guy is?”
“Of course,” Leung said. “Marick used to be a high-ranking member in the Aleph Society before he quit. It’s the reason I wanted us to talk to him.”
Elijah glared at the hacker. “This man wasn’t just ‘high ranking.’ That tattoo on his arm says that he’s a Society Initiate!”
He took a step closer to Marick, keeping the gun muzzle steady on his face.
“And no Initiate has ever left the Aleph Society and lived.”
CHAPTER NINE
Kyrie kept her pistol trained on Marick. Elijah was the last person she knew who’d draw a gun to solve a problem, so it was pretty clear that whatever the tattoo meant, it fell into the “very bad” category.
“Leung,” Elijah said. “Get to the van. Tell Cao and Pineapple we need to evac. We’ve walked into a trap.”
“This isn’t a trap,” Leung insisted. “I’m telling you, the guy is clean.”
“Not a trap?” Elijah said. “That tattoo marks your buddy here as a full Initiate of the Aleph Society. When you become an Initiate, you swear a magical blood oath to Gaf, the Black Moon. It isn’t something you can just break if you get tired of paying dues. We’ve been compromised.”
“Damn it, Elijah!” Leung shouted. “This guy is clean. You think I didn’t check him out? I put every ’bot I have on him, ran every standard search, even ran a deep scour. I’ve got references and cross-references. I’m telling you, Elijah, he’s legit. I don’t know how he did it, I don’t care how he did it, but this guy is ex-Aleph.”
Elijah didn’t lower his weapon. He just glared at Marick, his mouth drawn tight and eyes narrowed. It was the look he got whenever he faced a particularly challenging problem while on a run, as if he were attempting to will it out of existence.
A message from Leung popped up in Kyrie’s AR, directed toward the whole group.
Kyrie noticed Elijah’s shoulders relax slightly, but he still kept his pistol raised. Marick, meanwhile, hadn’t moved. In fact, beyond the twitching, he hadn’t even reacted to the pistol shoved in his face. It was the sort of thing Kyrie had seen in people down in the barrens, people who had seen so much horror that at some point the mind’s usual reactions to shock just ceased to function.
Elijah hesitated, frowned, then lowered his pistol and took a slow step back. Kyrie brought her pistol down as well, but didn’t take it completely off Marick. If Elijah didn’t like the proof the guy provided, she figured things would get bad again real quick.
“I’ll go with this … for now,” Elijah said to Leung, and then looked back at Marick, “but you’d better have an extremely convincing explanation. Initiates don’t just quit.”
“I can give you the proof you need,” Marick said.
“And no magic,” Elijah added. “You so much as twitch a finger or mutter anything that sounds like an incantation and she shoots. Got it?”
Kyrie kept her face impassive, but shot a message to Elijah.
Elijah kept his glare on Marick as he replied to Kyrie.
“You don’t have to worry,” Marick said. “I can’t use magic any longer.”
Confusion crossed Elijah’s face. “What do you mean you can’t use magic? The entire point of the Society is to imbue their members with the ability to use magic. The Initiates are the poster boys for this.”
Marick shook his head slowly. “When I broke my bond to Gaf, the magic was taken from me. Again.”
Marick swallowed hard, his eyes glistening. Kyrie understood his reaction. For a mage to lose his magic was life shattering. Suicide rates among burnouts were something like seventy percent. But to get the magic back and then give it up a second time? It was almost incomprehensible. If Marick was legit, whatever he was running from wasn’t just bad. It was gouge-out-your-eyes-with-your-fingers bad.
“Fine,” Elijah said. “Then explain how you broke the bond?”
Marick removed his jacket and dropped it on the mattress, then unbuttoned his shirt.
Kyrie’s eyes widened at what he revealed. “What the hell—?”
A blood-red crystal the size of a bullet hole was embedded in the man’s sternum. Bulging, red-black veins radiated out from it about six inches in every direction, and the skin a
round them was violently inflamed. Like snakes under a blanket, the veins pulsed beneath the skin in a strange, asynchronous rhythm.
“Jesus,” whispered Leung.
“This is how I did it,” Marick said. “The gem broke the bond and also hides me from Gaf. It’s the only reason I’m still alive.”
Elijah stared in amazement. “May I?” Before the other man could answer, he extended his left hand and stepped forward.
Marick nodded. Elijah gently touched the gem, watching both it and its host for a reaction. “It’s warm. Some sort of blood fetish, I assume?”
“Similar, but significantly more potent,” Marick said. “It’s powered by blood, but is bound to my soul. It displaced the binding between me and Gaf while clouding my aura. As long as I’m bound to it, I am free from Gaf’s power and his control over me … but at the cost of my magic.”
Elijah leaned in closer to look at the thing. Kyrie huffed. A minute ago he’d been ready to shoot Marick. One of these days, Elijah’s curiosity was going to get him killed. She just hoped she wasn’t around him when that day came.
“It looks old.” He ran a finger along the gem’s edge. “Very old. And these markings along the edge—they look like an archaic incarnation of cuneiform. Where did you get it?”
“From the Society vaults,” Marick said. “I was charged with cataloging a number of new acquisitions, and came across it in one of the deep vaults.”
Elijah stepped back and shook his head.
“So why help us? Why risk revealing yourself by talking to us?”
“Because your friend promised to get me out of the city,” Marick said.
Elijah looked over at Leung.
“And the reason you left the Society?” Elijah asked.
The blood drained from Marick’s face and he started to shake. “I won’t talk about that.” He turned to Leung. “You said I wouldn’t have to talk about that.”
“It’s fine,” Leung said. “There’s no change to the deal.”
Kyrie felt a cold tingle run up her spine. More and more she felt like maybe she should have skipped this job.
“Okay,” Elijah said at last. “Tell us about the map.”
“I don’t know too many details,” Marick said. “But it’s old. Real old. Library of Alexandria old. Probably spent some time there, just before the whole thing went ash. Supposed to show stuff there’s no way the cartographers could have known at the time. Supposed to light up the astral plane like burning phosphorous.”
Eijah cocked his head slightly at that.
“The Society’s all excited about the map. They’ve got it, other people want it. People keep coming, people like you, keep trying to take it. They don’t know what it is that’s got everybody all worked up, but they know they care. And they know that when people care about something, it’s worth money. They’re trying to figure it out, study it, before they lose it.”
“Because they’re going to lose it,” Elijah said.
Marick nodded vigorously. “Oh, yeah. Yeah. Aleph is good, they’ve got powers, but if the big boys come calling? Forget it. Draco Foundation, Atlantean Foundation, Lofwyr’s boys, Aztechnology, Mitsuhama—pick one. They’ll get wind of it, they’ll come after it, and Aleph won’t be able to hold them off. They’ll lose the map. So they gotta learn from it, figure out its worth before that happens.”
“All right. Where is it?”
“They took it Southside. Got it away from Rolling Meadows, which they figured would be the first place people look. Place is at 75th and Cumberland.”
Kyrie had no idea what the sprawl was like down at that area, but she figured—or hoped—it wouldn’t be worse than here.
“Tell me everything you know about the facility,” Elijah said. “Floor plans, security, astral overwatch—everything.”
Marick’s head bobbed, though Kyrie couldn’t tell if he was nodding or just nervous.
“Show me the SIN. Show me some cash. The more I like what I see, the more you get.”
Ten minutes later, they were headed west. The shortest route, Cao told them, was neither the fastest nor the safest. They’d spent enough time in the CZ as it was.
Looking out the window, Kyrie was inclined to agree. In a place like Chicago, what you saw—the dilapidated buildings, the crushing poverty, the miasmic air—was bad enough. What you didn’t see, though, was worse. The way shadows shifted in the corner of your eye, but then held perfectly still when you looked at them. The rumbles and creaks and weird flashes of purple light coming from buildings that looked like they should be abandoned. The people backing away from apparently empty alleys, pointing at the lurking darkness and then running away with a scream that could shatter bulletproof glass. Things like that tended to put one’s nerves on end.
It was a relief, then, when the landscape turned from horrific to merely dilapidated. The month-old-trash smell of the air didn’t change, but the feel of imminent danger did. People still occasionally ran for their lives, but generally it was from identifiable metahuman threats. This was the world Kyrie knew.
“So are you ready to be more specific about where we’re headed?” Cao called back from the driver’s seat. “Like an address or something?”
Kyrie shared a look with Elijah and Leung before answering. She sure wasn’t going to break the news to Cao and Pineapple—she wasn’t getting paid nearly enough for that.
“We’ll get to it in a second,” Elijah answered. “Leung. You want to do the honors?”
“Sure,” the hacker said. “Last month the Aleph Society moved the map from their Rolling Meadows headquarters to a facility in the Southside. Apparently, if an artifact starts drawing too much attention from the outside, they move it to this location. I can’t tell if what they’re worried about stems from previous attempts by our Johnson to get it, or if another group is trying for it as well, but either way they wanted it somewhere more secure.”
“If it’s another group, that could mean competition,” Kyrie said.
“True,” Elijah agreed. “But if there is another group, the odds of us running into each other are pretty slim. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to be ready for interference.”
“Marick provided us with a map of the Southside facility.” Leung fired off a copy via their LAN. It popped up immediately in Kyrie’s AR. “It’s the original construction plan from the ’50s, but at least it gives us the basics. It’s not like we can pop down to the assessor’s office to request this stuff. The good news is that this site is smaller and less populated than Rolling Meadows. We won’t have to worry about a couple hundred brainwashed cultists and Society wage slaves getting in our way. The bad news is that the Southside site has more security personnel, and it’s going to be harder to create a distraction when it’s time to leave. We can’t count on creating a mob scene to cover our escape like we planned.”
“What street runs along the north edge?” Cao asked.
Leung hesitated, but Elijah nodded. “That’s 79th. The street on the west side is Harlem.”
“79th and Harlem?” Cao frowned. “I know that area. Isn’t that…” She looked over her shoulder, eyes wide. The van swerved and bumped over some debris, forcing the rigger to snap her head back front and correct the van’s course. “That’s fucking Human Brigade territory!”
“It’s the edge of their territory,” Leung said. “Just the edge. If we play our cards right, I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”
“You don’t think it’ll be a problem?” Cao’s tone was beyond incredulous. “They string up metahumans on Sunday nights for fucking entertainment. They aren’t just going to let Pineapple and me waltz in there. They’re the most vicious bunch of psychos in the fucking city. And there’s some pretty stiff competition out there.”
The goblin glanc
ed at something on the dash. Following her gaze, Kyrie saw a printed photo taped there. Although the van was dark, it looked like a picture of Cao and four other people, all smiling with arms around one another, each with clear signs of HMHVV infection.
“Look,” Elijah said. “As long as we keep our heads down and don’t draw unnecessary attention, we should be able to get in and out before the Brigade even knows we’re there.”
“And if they do notice us,” Pineapple said, “then I get to start shooting. Sounds like a win-win to me.”
“Says you, chummer,” the goblin snapped. “You get to blow up whatever you please and waltz outta here afterward. I—” she jabbed a thumb at her chest. “—still gotta make a living here after you—all of you—are long gone.”
“We’re going to do our best to make sure it doesn’t come to that,” Elijah said. “As much as Pineapple would like to make a ruckus, it’s my hope that we can, as Leung said, be in and out before anyone notices us.”
“Here’s what I don’t get.” The troll leaned forward on the equipment crate he was using as a seat. “Maybe I ain’t an expert on all the political crap in Chicago, but why the hell would the Human Brigade agree to an Aleph compound in their territory? Last I heard, these groups don’t exactly get along.”
“From what Marick told us,” Leung replied, “the Human Brigade doesn’t know it’s there. It’s a stroke of genius, really. What better place to hide your valuables than in the home of your enemy? It’s quite literally the last place anyone would look.”
“It’s completely crazy,” Cao grumbled. “Then again, crazy is what those Aleph nutjobs do best. Doesn’t surprise me in the least.”
“Here’s what I got on the place. I used the van’s satellite uplink to access aerials for the site. Unless I’m totally off, I think our Rolling Meadows plan should work with a few adaptations. We’ve got an abandoned apartment building over here—” Leung pointed out the features in AR. “—that Kyrie, Elijah, and I can use to run our zip line to the main building. Considering the security we’re expecting on the ground and the general state of Chicago’s sewers, entering through the roof still makes sense.”