Revisionary

by Jim C. Hines

  The magic of Lena’s bokken stirred, sharpening in her hands. “Shall I make us an entrance? Or would that count as an attack and blow my invisibility?”

  “I wouldn’t risk it. Someone might see the hole in the fence, or they could be running an electrical current to monitor for breaks. Don’t worry, I’ve got this.” I set a book on the ground. When I removed my hands, it became visible. After a few minutes of turning pages and setting gravel in place to hold the book open, I was able to reach in and create a handful of sparkling dust. I sprinkled a pinch over each of us. “Think happy thoughts.”

  Lena found me by touch and wrapped her free arm around my waist. “Happy thoughts, coming up.” She kissed me hard, and soon we were both floating over the top of the fence.

  Deb followed a short time later. I refrained from asking what she considered a happy thought these days.

  The fields around the building were unkempt and overgrown, but the prison itself looked well-maintained. Voices carried over the top of the wall, along with the buzz of machinery.

  We followed the walkway from the parking lot to the main entrance. State and national flags flew to either side of glass doors. I waved to one of the cameras, then peered through the glass, careful not to touch anything. Invisible or not, the oils from my skin would still leave prints.

  I squinted, trying to read the faint text of magic. The words darted about like crickets fleeing Smudge, wiggling and squirming too much for me to read, but they felt familiar. I stepped back a few paces. “It looks like the wards extend into the air over the yard, kind of like the setup at New Millennium. They probably cover the roof, too. I can’t tell what exactly they do.”

  “There’s no need to find out,” Lena said hastily. “So don’t go poking them.”

  “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “I must have misplaced it in the Atlantic, right around the time two military ships started shooting at me.”

  “Right.” I turned my thoughts to happier memories. “I’m going to take a quick peek over that wall.”

  I flew up, careful to keep a safe distance from the wards. Inside the walls, a small group of men, women, and children were working to clean an overgrown and mostly barren yard. A girl ran a weed trimmer along the base of the wall. An elderly man gathered broken concrete from the crumbling remnants of an old basketball court. I spotted one guard standing in the shade of the wall by a metal door leading back into the prison. He had no gun; just a metal club or electrical prod of some sort.

  He also wore a gleaming badge with a familiar black pearl worked into the center.

  “Damn.” That pearl was identical in both appearance and function to the one Babs Palmer wore around her neck. This could be trickier than I’d expected.

  As prisons went, I’d seen worse. That didn’t change my growing desire to tear it apart brick by brick.

  They’d attacked and kidnapped sirens without provocation. Had the rest of these people been targeted the same way? Locked up for the crime of being different?

  I studied the prisoners magically, trying to identify their species. They appeared blurry. I could make out bits of their nature, but most of the text was faded, little more than smears of ink. The effect was similar to the magic-suppressing amulet the guard wore, but more diffused. It appeared to have been implanted or injected inside their bodies.

  “What the hell did you do to them?” I whispered. I was fairly certain three were vampires. Another looked like a werewolf, as well as what might have been a selkie, and a confused-looking woman who appeared to be a pretty fresh zombie. I saw no sign of the sirens.

  I drifted closer. The wards shifted in response, angry words moving like a swarm of fish splashing to the surface to feed. I pulled away and dropped gently to the ground. I found Deb peering through the glass of the doors, while Lena sat with her hands merged into one of the bushes beside the walk.

  “I’m trying to grow the roots,” she said as I approached. “I’m searching for underground cables and pipes, anything I can disrupt in case we need a distraction.”

  “How’d you know I was back?”

  “Your coat. It’s not quiet.”

  I filled them in on what I’d found. “The sirens could still be here. If someone dampened their magic the way they did with the other prisoners, it would explain why my tracking signal went dead.”

  I approached the doors, my attention drawn to the wards like Smudge chasing a laser pointer. I tugged the sleeve of my jacket over my hand and gently tested the handle. The door didn’t budge. “Less than a year since the world discovered magic, and they’ve managed to renovate this whole facility. Wards over everything, armed guards with magical protection, and who knows how many inhuman prisoners snatched and locked up. Whoever’s behind this, they’re efficient.”

  The more I studied the eddies of text in the wards, the more the patterns began to make sense. There were currents . . . fixed points that seemed to anchor the magic in place. I concentrated on the closest, then swore.

  “What is it?” asked Lena.

  “Feist.”

  “English please, love.”

  “Raymond Feist. One piece of the magic here comes from his Riftwar series. It references a soul jar used to trap the life of a rather nasty necromancer.” I pointed to pale lines of fresh mortar, where bricks had been carved out and replaced. “I think they created the jars, then physically sealed them into the wall. There are other spells working in parallel, but the soul jars are strongest.”

  Lena sucked her breath through her teeth.

  “What does necromancy have to do with anything?” Deb asked.

  “Watch.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d wanted so badly to be wrong. I reached out, bringing my ring of invisibility toward one of the soul jars.

  I recognized the attack the instant it began. That didn’t stop me from nearly pissing myself as shadows converged on the spot I’d touched, then leaped toward me.

  My invisibility flickered. Two incorporeal beings of shadow and madness ripped at my magic. I jumped back, but even that single touch was enough to freeze my veins. These creatures sought not merely to kill me, but to unmake me. To dissolve my thoughts and erase my memories and burn my component cells until nothing remained but raw, angry magic for them to feed on.

  “Isaac?” Lena moved toward me, her swords raised.

  “Stay back!” I reached for the spells in the wall and poured my own strength and will into the text, strengthening their magic to drag my attackers back into their metaphorical jars. Slowly, they quieted. I tugged my invisibility back into place like a torn coat.

  “Who’s going to tell me what the hell just happened?” asked Deb.

  The first time Lena and I had fought these things was in Detroit. I’d reached deeper into a book than I’d ever tried before, reducing it to ash in the process. From that blackened ruin had come a thing of death and hunger and charred magic. It fed on my attacks and Lena’s strength. We’d finally had to drop an entire warehouse on the damned thing, and even that hadn’t been enough to destroy it.

  Later, we’d discovered more of them, echoes of long-dead magic users, trapped and enslaved. A young libriomancer named Jeneta Aboderin dubbed them “devourers.” They were also known as the ghost army. I’d destroyed hundreds of them the year before.

  Babs Palmer had been assigned to round up and eliminate the rest.

  “Basically, the walls are infested with incorporeal, magic-munching piranha.” Lena lowered her swords. “I hate those things.”

  “A lot of the stories about piranha are exaggerated,” I said. “They can kill, but the idea that they’ll reduce you to a skeleton in seconds is total myth. These, on the other hand . . .”

  There was no question of Babs’ involvement anymore. The pearls, the devourers, even the wards over the prison. They all carried her fingerprints. I tightened my jaw to call Nicola, but her cellphone went straight to voice mail.

  “Can you get us inside?” asked Deb
.

  “Maybe.” I studied the doors. “We could also head back to New Millennium and confront Babs with what we know. Bring in Nicola and the other masters.”

  “And leave those sirens here to die?” asked Deb. “Abandon everyone inside those walls? As soon as whoever runs this place realizes they’ve been compromised, they’ll either move or kill the prisoners.”

  “I agree,” Lena said quietly. “We can’t leave them here.”

  “All right. Let me fly up and scout around a bit more—”

  Lena gasped. Her fingers merged with the wood of her swords. She dropped to one knee and plunged both weapons deep into the dirt.

  “What’s wrong?” I reached for her, but she flinched away.

  She raised her head, staring at something deep within the prison. “We need to go in now.”

  “Now you’re talking,” said Deb.

  “If we bust through those doors, we could bring the whole place down on our heads,” I warned.

  “Please, Isaac.”

  I couldn’t see Lena, but I recognized the magic crawling over her skin, armoring flesh in supernaturally strong oak and bark. Spikes of wood grew from her joints.

  How had I ended up being the cautious one? “All right. Give me a minute to get the door open. I might be able to do this without setting off any alarms.”

  I unwrapped the compact mirror I’d been working on back at New Millennium and stepped up to the locked doors. Devourers shifted restlessly in the wall, like sharks sensing blood. I held the mirror perpendicular to the glass and hoped I’d strengthened the soul jars enough to hold the devourers back.

  When I’d experimented with mirrors for the Gateway Project before, I’d tried to use the reflection to help me with targeting. This time, the glass was invisible, leaving nothing but a ring of text and magic. I peered through that small circle to the pushbar on the inside of the door. Treating the mirror as if it were a book, I pushed my fingers through the glass.

  They emerged inside the prison. My fingertips touched cold metal. Very slowly, I eased my hand and the mirror forward. My fingers pushed the bar inward, unlatching the door and easing it open. Deb caught the edge.

  That had worked better than I’d thought. Without the reflections, I’d been able to concentrate solely on the magic and my destination. I’d have to try adding an invisibility spell to the mix back at my lab.

  Deb slipped inside, followed by Lena. I stepped through last and carefully pulled the door shut behind us.

  Two men jogged toward the door. They wore dark blue uniforms and badges like the one I’d seen in the prison yard. I pulled my companions to one side of the hallway. With this being a prison, simply opening the door had probably tripped a signal or alarm.

  Deb started toward the guards. I caught her arm and whispered, “Not yet.”

  Ever since I’d gotten my first close-up look at Babs Palmer’s magic-dampening work, I’d been thinking about ways to bypass it. Not for any nefarious purpose; I just wanted to see if I could do it.

  The flaw in such defenses was that they had to be magical themselves. I’d read the book Babs had used to create her magic-hating oysters. I knew the text bound up in the seeds of those pearls.

  I handed Smudge to Lena and crept closer. The effect of the amulets spread outward in a vaguely human-shaped cloud, a shield with indistinct boundaries. I waited for the men to move past me, then stepped behind them until I touched that outer edge. Their amulets ate away at my invisibility like acid. As my hands became visible, I reached for the text of their protection.

  It felt like grabbing an electromagnet after filling my veins with iron filings. Not only did the pearls physically repel my efforts, but every one of those imaginary filings shifted in response, tiny needles stabbing my hand from the inside.

  My arms were visible to the elbow now. The pain in my fingertips faded. The resulting numbness was even more worrying.

  I studied the carnivorous text crawling up my arm, twined it around my fingers, and pulled back, taking their protection with me. I dissolved the magic and tried to fix my invisibility. To Deb, I whispered, “Now.”

  I remembered the first time Deb had tried to manipulate my thoughts. She’d gotten much stronger since then, as more and more of her humanity slipped away. Her power touched both men and settled over their minds like gravy on a pasty.

  Her invisibility flickered. Apparently influencing someone’s thoughts counted as an attack, even if no harm was inflicted. She yanked the ring from her finger and switched it to her other hand, vanishing just as the guards shrugged and turned around.

  “It’s probably nothing,” said one. “Another electrical short.”

  His partner tested the door to make sure it was latched. “I’ll put in a maintenance ticket to get an electrician out here.”

  “I’ll do a loop through the halls. Think we better do another prisoner count to be safe?”

  “Safe from what?” He shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. Ain’t nobody got time for all that paperwork.”

  We tailed the second guard toward the front office and followed him inside. Two more uniformed guards, a man and a woman, sat in front of a bank of screens. Unlike the other guards we’d seen, these carried Tasers and mundane firearms. I checked the video feeds from throughout the prison. Most displayed empty hallways and cells. I didn’t see the sirens anywhere.

  “Nothing,” said the man we’d followed. “Log it as an electrical short. José’s walking the rounds to make sure.”

  Lena and I moved toward an electronic map of the prison on the wall to the right of the video screens. According to the label at the top of the map, we’d broken into the Mecklenburg Correctional Center. LED lights marked the doors. Most were green. Others blinked yellow, including the front doors where we’d entered. I studied the map, trying to guess where they would have taken captive sirens.

  I’d memorized about half the layout when Lena stepped past me, yanked a Taser from the holster of the nearest guard, and pulled the trigger.

  He collapsed to the floor. Lena, now visible, caught the next guard’s forearm as she reached for a button on the desk. Lena hauled her from the chair and slammed her to the floor hard enough to expel the air from her lungs.

  Deb’s fingers caught the throat of the third guard, the man who’d inspected the doors. She hauled him close and whispered something. His face lost its color, and he fainted.

  I looked around the room. Two guards lay unconscious, with the third gasping for breath. “Lena, what the hell?”

  “You were taking too long.” Lena studied the map. Her bark skin strained against her shirt and jeans, and had torn several small holes at the knees and elbows. Her swords were tucked through her belt. Ridges of oak shadowed her eyes. “I’ll meet you back here.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s something I have to do, love. We’ll make better time if we split up. I’ll call you if I find the sirens.” She adjusted her ring, but its magic had been damaged from its proximity to the guards and their badges. I reached to try to repair it, but she simply shook her head and ducked out the door.

  “Huh.” Deb leaned against the wall and folded her arms. “When did she develop an independent streak?”

  I ignored her and crouched beside the only guard who remained conscious. Her badge reached out to interfere with my magic, giving me a shimmering, ghostly appearance. I removed her weapons and slid them to the far side of the room. “A group of sirens was brought here earlier today. What happened to them?”

  “I’d tell him, hon.” Deb smiled. Her yellowed teeth and taut skin gave the impression of a living skull.

  “I saw something about them on the books,” the woman said warily. “They showed up before my shift.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I don’t know! All detainees are chipped, then sent through decontamination and cataloging. We haven’t gotten any orders about new residents.”

  “Prisoners,” said Deb. “That�
�s the word you want. Or ‘victims,’ if you prefer.”

  “Deb, would you please ask her to take a seat at the computer and pull up everything she can find about the sirens?”

  “I can’t.” The guard pointed to the map. Many of the lights had turned red, and a larger light on the bottom left blinked red. “Command knows you’re here. They’ll have locked the terminals by now. Probably the doors too. You’re trapped in here.”

  Deb tested the door. It didn’t budge.

  I dragged the desk away from the wall. These weren’t computers, just dummy terminals whose cables led out of the room, presumably to a server somewhere. I climbed over the desk and studied one of the cables more closely.

  “What is it?” asked Deb.

  Each cable was as thick as my little finger. From the stiffness, they probably had a layer of metal shielding beneath the black outer coating. I yanked one from its socket. There was a spark of electricity and magic. “I’m not a network tech, but this is weird.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time, hon.”

  “Hold on.” I tightened my jaw and called Talulah. “I need help hacking a computer system at an illegal secret prison, and I don’t have much time.”

  “I’m off-site. Hold on.” I heard her whispering to someone. Music swelled in the background, followed by explosions.

  “What was that?”

  “It’s nothing. We’re at the movies.”

  “We?”

  She hesitated. “Vince asked me out. I know he’s a little young for me, but—”

  “You can date Smudge for all I care. I’m sorry for interrupting, but I really need to get into this system. Given what we’ve seen in the past twelve hours, it’s probably protected with firewalls and magic both.”

  “What kind of operating system?”

  I twisted around and glanced at one of the monitors. “Um . . . it’s a split screen. Graphic interface on the right, command text on the left.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “The text is green.”

  She sighed loudly.