Cybermancy

by Kelly McCullough

  “And?” I asked.

  “And when we do, she’s going to tell us that the two of you found a twin to your girlfriend’s webgoblin haunting Necessity’s server cluster. At that point we’ll almost certainly be sent to take you to my mother.”

  “How do you know about the twin?”

  “I never left Castle Discord,” said Tisiphone. “I stayed and listened to the whole thing.”

  “Including the part where Eris—”

  “Said you should take me as a lover. Oh yes. For that I owe her something, though I’m not yet sure whether it’s kudos or curses. That conversation’s a big part of why I’m here. Eris reminded me that they don’t exactly mint new powers every day. The roster of possible partners for a Fury is somewhat limited, and over the years, history and bad blood have narrowed it even further. Once you had your fight with Cerice, I decided I had to at least take a chance.”

  “But how did you manage it?”

  “Brute force is not the only tool of the hunter, not by a long shot.” With those words she suddenly faded—not away, but very close.

  Like a chameleon, she changed her colors to match the background. I could see her, but only by keeping my eyes fixed on her. When I blinked, she was gone. I didn’t know where until I felt her breath on my face, her hands gently sliding into the hair above and behind my ears.

  “I shouldn’t be here,” whispered a voice inches from my ear. “I came to warn you as well as to make my offer. I’ll have to leave soon, and then we’ll be on opposite sides again. It would be good for you to have a friend in the enemy camp, wouldn’t it? Someone who could slip you information and sidetrack pursuit. Someone who could convince her sisters to go easy. All that can be yours for so little. A kiss even.”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not? Is a kiss that much to ask?” I could see her face again, or at least see where it was, by the tears tracking down her cheeks. “It’s been so very long since I felt another’s lips touch mine.”

  “It’s not the kiss. That, I’d give you for free. It’s the promise such a kiss would make. If you went easy on me for the price of a kiss, I’d owe you so much more. Surely you see that?”

  She faded back into view and sighed. “I do. Sadly, I do. Then I’ll have to find a way to deflect pursuit without even so much hope as a kiss.” She slid back and sighed. “Would you really have given one freely if I hadn’t made it a matter of bargaining?”

  “I would.” Moved to pity by tears on the face of a Fury, I said, “And I will.”

  Stepping forward to close the distance between us once again, I caught her shoulders in my hands and touched my lips to hers ever so gently. They burned, not with the fire that lived within her, but with a passion I found hard to resist. But resist I did, pulling away. She caught me in a fierce hug.

  “I—I—Damn! I don’t want to let you go.”

  “Then don’t,” said a bitter female voice. “Not on my account, honey.” Cerice!

  “It’s not what it looks like,” I said, as Tisiphone released me.

  “Really? Then what is it?” Cerice had come halfway down the stairs by then.

  “How dare you!” Tisiphone moved toward Cerice. “You don’t deserve Ravirn.”

  “And you do? This time last year you were trying to kill him.”

  Red light filled the room as the fires in Tisiphone’s wings and hair, banked till now, flared into brilliant life. She flexed her hands, and the soft fingers that had so recently stroked my cheek grew long claws hard as diamonds. If I’d been in Cerice’s shoes, I’d have been running, not walking, back up those stairs. Instead, she advanced on Tisiphone.

  “So, when you can’t hunt for real, you poach?”

  “I could shred you like paper,” said Tisiphone, “but I won’t, for Ravirn’s sake. I’d rather not have your shade hanging between us in the future. Patience is another hunter’s virtue, and it’ll be ever so much simpler to wait for you to drive him away, then pick up the pieces.”

  Pain flared on Cerice’s face, and she swung her hand back as if to slap Tisiphone. It was the pain in her expression that did it for me. The bigger pattern finally fell into place in my mind. Somehow I managed to get between them, preempting Cerice’s suicidal impulse before the blow could fall. I dragged her away from Tisiphone.

  “Let me go,” demanded Cerice.

  “No.”

  “Please,” said Tisiphone. “Pretty, pretty please. I promise not to hurt her . . . much.”

  “Cerice!” I said. “Listen to me. It wasn’t what you think it was. You can believe me, or you can tell me you don’t trust me. Which is it going to be? Because I can’t take much more of this.”

  “I . . . I believe you,” she said. “I’m just crazy right now. Everything in my world seems to be falling apart, and I keep taking it out on you because you’re there, and you’ve been willing to deal with it. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled at you back at Castle Discord, but it’s all so hard now. What Eris said about Shara . . . was that true? Is some part of her really living inside Necessity’s network?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And I think I know why. But I need to talk to Shara about it. Now.” I let Cerice go and turned to look at Tisiphone. “How soon do you have to leave? I think you should hear this as well.”

  “I should never have come at all,” answered Tisiphone with a sigh. “What’s a few more minutes? But you’ll need to hurry.”

  “Done.” Pushing Cerice gently in front of me, I headed for the stairs. She might have agreed to believe me, but I still wanted to keep her away from Tisiphone.

  As I stepped through Ahllan’s front door on Cerice’s heels, I found Melchior waiting just outside.

  “It’s about ti—” He stopped abruptly when Tisiphone appeared behind me.

  “Uh—” He made vaguely concerned pointing gestures. “Do you . . .”

  “Yes, I know I’ve got a Fury following me. She’s on our side. Sort of. Maybe.”

  “Very decisive, Boss. I’m deeply reassured. Does she know that?”

  “I do,” she answered, “though side isn’t quite the right word, and my reasons are complex. Ravirn, it’s your show, but I don’t have much time.”

  “Got it. Melchior, where’s Shara? I need to talk with her.”

  “Here,” said a quiet voice from just beyond the edge of the circle of light provided by Tisiphone’s internal fires. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Persephone.”

  “Oh.” Her shoulders sagged, and she looked both frightened and relieved. Waiting for that other shoe to drop couldn’t have been easy. “Then you do know.”

  “Not really, but I have some guesses. Persephone set me up. When she said she wanted something from me, I assumed it would come after I e-mailed you out of Hades, a quid pro quo. But that wasn’t it at all. It was e-mailing you out of Hades that she wanted. She needed to have you go out electronically, not embodied. I didn’t see it till now. Very, very slick.” Shara nodded glumly. I knelt and looked her in the eyes. “Why didn’t you tell us what happened to you in Hades? Or for that matter, where you went after I hit send that day?”

  “I—I didn’t remember any of it at first. Then I started to get flashes, but they were awful, wrong, like they were coming from someone else’s head. I remember incredible pressure to stay in Necessity’s system and do her bidding, and just as much pressure to leave because I knew you’d die if I didn’t come home. I felt ripped in two. Maybe I was ripped in two. I don’t know. I’m still fuzzy on details, especially about the early stuff, what happened in Hades. Persephone did . . . things to me. I know that much. She messed around with my core programming, the bits that make me, me, a complete recompile. That’s part of why it’s so hard to remember; I’m not who I used to be, not entirely.”

  “I’ll kill her,” said Cerice, her voice flat and hard.

  I couldn’t help but remember how torn up I’d felt when I thought Melchior might die. To some of my fam
ily, our webgoblins are nothing more than convenient tools, but for Cerice and me, they’re our best friends and, in some ways, our children. I understood her rage, but I didn’t know what to do about it. She had every right to be mad. I certainly would have been furious in her place, but at the same time, she hadn’t met Persephone. I was still trying to think of something to say when Tisiphone cut in.

  “Not a good idea, girl, but that’s no surprise.” Her tone was sardonic, cutting.

  “Did I ask you?” demanded Cerice.

  “No, but you’re being a fool again. While I’d encourage that on the Ravirn front—the sooner you drive him away, the happier I’ll be—killing Persephone is the stupidest suggestion I’ve heard in a very long time. And in my profession, I get to hear a lot of stupidity. Death would put Persephone in Hades year-round, and she’d take summer with her.” She paused, and a thoughtful look crossed her face. “Of course, chances are you’d just get killed in the attempt. Maybe I was too hasty. Go for it.”

  “Fuck you,” said Cerice, but she nodded reluctantly. “Fine, I’ll just have to find some other way to make her pay instead.”

  “There’s nothing you could do to her that would hurt her any more than she’s already hurting,” I said, remembering my encounter with Persephone and her terrible anguish. “Her eyes are pain, Cerice. That pain is what gave me the key to the whole thing, actually. You looked so hurt a few moments ago that it reminded me of Persephone. Then everything just sort of fell into place.” I spread my hands in a minishrug. “Well, mostly. I’m not sure about some of the details, but I’m getting there. Shara?”

  She sighed. “I was kind of hoping you’d forgotten about me again.”

  “No such luck,” I said, though I felt for her. There had been more than one occasion when I’d have killed to make powers forget about me. “Can you tell me why she didn’t just send you through the network herself? Why she needed me? And more importantly, what’s happening to the mweb?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Shara. “I have some ideas, but this isn’t a spy movie or superhero comic book. It’s not like she confided her evil plan to me in a burst of overconfidence. She just stuffed a bunch of new code into my OS and left it at that.”

  “So,” I stood and started to pace, “why don’t you speculate.”

  “I don’t think she can actually touch Hades’ computer, the one in his office. She’s got complete freedom within the underworld, but she’s not allowed any outside contact. That much I got from the little she said about the changes in my OS.”

  “But she IM’d me when I was going through Hades’ e-mail,” I protested. “Heck, she showed up when I was reading an e-mail from her. That was on his computer.”

  “No,” said Melchior. “Actually that’s not quite true. Yes, she appeared exactly at the moment you accessed an e-mail from her, but it was dated June. That means she sent it from outside the underworld. And the IM box appeared between you and the screen, not on it or even touching it. She never actually accessed the computer.”

  “You’re right. Why didn’t that strike me as odd?”

  “Abject terror is kind of distracting,” said Melchior. “I did wonder about it at the time, but I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself, so I let it slide. Later, it seemed less important than our more immediate problems. Sorry.”

  “All right, so she needed someone else to physically input Shara. But why did she pick me? How did she even know I was there?” Then it hit me. “Of course. Cerberus. Kira said that Dave was Persephone’s dog and that for all of them Persephone’s commands came next in priority after Hades’. I didn’t break into the underworld, Cerberus let me in. That’s why he was so much more friendly the second time we visited. Persephone guessed what I was up to and ordered him to befriend me. We were set up from day one.”

  “Probably,” agreed Shara. “Persephone’s a manipulator. But I can’t blame her. Not really.”

  “How can you say that after what she did to you?” asked Cerice. She looked horrified.

  “You haven’t met her,” said Shara. “You haven’t seen her pain. Think about it. What she did to me was bad, but it was one time, and it was out of desperation. But what Hades has done to her, brrr.” Shara shivered. “When Persephone was barely a teenager, Hades kidnapped and raped her. He raped her not just once, but repeatedly. He’s still doing it. Three months out of every year she has to leave her mother and go back to live with her rapist. It’s been going on for thousands of years, and it’s never going to stop. Really never. True immortality means no breaks. Ever. She can’t even kill herself, because then she’d be with Hades full-time. No, I can’t blame her for what she felt she had to do to me. It was wrong, and I wish it hadn’t happened, but I just can’t judge her.”

  Shara had put her finger on something that had been tickling the back of my brain as well. The goddess changed the way you saw things. I had to stop whatever she was doing to the mweb, and I had to fix whatever was wrong with Shara. The network was simply too important to allow anyone to destroy it, and while I might have busted Shara out of Hades, I clearly hadn’t finished the task.

  I should have hated that, hated the idea that I’d been set up, that something I’d been tricked into doing had loosed whatever was devouring the mweb and messed up Shara. But I couldn’t seem to work up a good head of outrage. Maybe that was because my new ties to chaos caused me to see the mess in a different light. Or maybe it was just because Persephone had pulled off a hell of a hack, and my inner coder had to tip its hat to her. Whatever the reason, I felt more sympathy for her than anger.

  “I guess I’d never thought about it like that,” Cerice said to Shara, visibly deflating. “Can I at least be mad on your behalf?”

  “I’d appreciate that,” said Shara. “That, a stiff drink, and maybe some TLC from blue boy over there, and I’ll be halfway to recovery.” The latter came with a wink in Melchior’s direction and some of her old Mae Westian growl.

  I was glad to hear it. I hated to bring her mind back to the problems at hand, but Tisiphone was fast approaching the foot-tapping stage of impatience, and we still had some ground to cover. I turned to Tisiphone.

  “Does that give you enough to work with?”

  “As far as keeping my sisters off your back? Not by half. I believe you, and the case against Persephone works for me. But I don’t operate independently. Necessity has final say over matters involving Fury-level action. Even in lesser matters, I’m only one vote out of three. Megaera and Alecto are not stupid. They know how I feel about you, and they’re not going to believe anything I say on your behalf without solid proof. Neither will Necessity. Finding that proof needs to be job one. I’d try to get it, but I don’t know when I’ll next have a chance to get into the master servers. If you can find it yourself, it would sure help your case.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You and your sisters are the security administrators for Necessity and the mweb’s core architecture?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you want me to hack into that system to do what you can’t?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And if I get caught? I’m guessing you won’t be bailing me out.”

  “No. I’ll probably have to kill you. If that’s what Necessity decides, it’s what I’ll do.” She closed her eyes for a moment, and her fires dimmed. “In fact, in full-on Fury mode I’ll even enjoy it. Tisiphone the individual and Tisiphone the Fury are fundamentally different creatures, with fundamentally different agendas. I’m sorry.” With that she opened her wings and leaped skyward.

  Before she’d climbed fifty feet she brought one clawed hand around in a vicious slash, tearing a ragged hole in the stuff of reality. A moment later, after she’d passed through, it closed behind her.

  “I’m sorry, too,” said Shara, “about my part in all this.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Persephone messed around with your OS, changed who you are. Like Tisiphone said, the individual and the role a
ren’t always in sync. Sometimes none of us has a choice.” Did that include me?

  I didn’t know the answer to that. Not anymore. I’d made some truly crazy decisions in the rush to break Shara out of the underworld. Was that plain old Ravirn’s love of a challenge? Or the Raven’s trickster nature calling out for risk taking? Who was I now? And what?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “What now, Boss?”

  “I guess we’re going to have to try hacking Necessity again.”

  “Do you think we’ll get anywhere?”

  “I don’t know. A lot depends on exactly what we’re up against. Shara? Can you tell us anything more? About what happened to you on the way back from Hades or about the thing that wears your face?”