by Jenn Stark
“Sucks to be you,” I said, squinting into the distance. “But, it looks like that luck is still holding.”
Nigel followed where I was looking and cursed under his breath. “You’re kidding me. This is not because of your cards. I refuse to believe it.”
“Don’t care how it happened, but it’s happening,” Nikki said, lifting her pack higher onto her shoulder. She swiveled her head to look at the next feeder street to the stupa’s courtyard and scowled. “Though it would have been handier if we’d gotten our intel down just a little bit earlier.”
I still stared ahead. Coming toward us, looking like extras from a war movie, was a knot of teens and twenty-somethings, all of them wearing fiercely determined expressions and projecting an aura of undiluted excitement that was palpable regardless of Connected status.
“Um, dollface?” Nikki prompted.
“What?” I glanced to where she was now looking, blinked. “Wait. Who are these guys?”
Chapter Twenty-One
“Jets and the Sharks, baby,” Nikki said. “Probably should back it up a bit, give the kids their room.”
She was right. The first group was mostly male, led by a tall, spindly guy who was doing his best impression of the scarecrow dressed as John Wick. That group numbered about twenty kids all in, none of them looking like they’d hiked anywhere farther than the local GameStop store in recent memory. The second group, however, gave me more pause. They seemed older, fitter, and looked like perhaps they’d come from someplace other than their mom’s basement. There were also more girls in this group, probably not surprising, but even they looked like they could knock off a cool fifty push-ups without breaking a sweat. What bothered me, though, was that neither group had the girl I was looking for.
“So where’s Hayley?” I asked beneath my breath. “Surely her Connected abilities are stronger than these guys’.”
“Maybe she’s not a joiner?” Nikki suggested.
“Actually, that’s a fair point,” Nigel put in. “From what Ginny was saying, Hayley wasn’t into groups in real life. She liked her online communities, but you can turn those kinds of communities off if they get too draining. In real life…”
“In real life, she’d be a loner.” I pulled my ball cap down farther over my forehead. “Either way, these kids are here for the same reason she is, assuming she’s here. They want to find the gates to Shangri-La. It’s like the end of The Amazing Race, only no one’s told them their final destination is bogus.”
“Maybe because it isn’t.” Nikki’s face was turned in sharp profile. “I’m sensing some weird mojo here. Like someone’s supercharging the area with electricity.” She turned, then turned again, scanning the monument. Then she gave a low whistle. “That’s not what I think it is, is it?”
“It is,” I said, and I was staring too. With nightfall looming, the monument was suddenly awash in a new pattern of bright, colorful lights…lights that looked remarkably like stained glass windows. “We’re definitely in the right place.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” Nigel said, still disgusted.
“Annnnd, bingo,” Nikki said, her eyes narrowing. I glanced where she was looking, and smiled. Beneath that gateway, with her hands braced against the eastern wall of the stupa, was a tall, lean blonde teenager. Hayley Adams.
“Bingo indeed.” I grinned.
“Hey!” A sudden shout from a kid caught my attention, and I jerked my focus back to the street. The kid looked barely sixteen years old, and he’d broken away from the group and was now only about twenty feet away from me. “Guys, guys!” he yelled. “It’s her! She’s here—it’s Sara Wilde!”
A chorus of shouts went up as Nikki stepped in front of me, but her sudden movement seemed to spaz the kid even more. I shot a look back to the blonde by the wall and realized she wasn’t paying any attention—in fact, her hands were moving rapidly along the wall of the stupa, searching the smooth surface, while a new swell of magic surrounding the monument in a skittering aura seemed to pulse outward, then spring back in. Out—back, out, back. As I stared, I could see the small shift in the energy of the wall too. There was no question in my mind. There was a door there, had to be. A door to…
“Sara.” Nigel’s hand was on my arm, gripping hard. “Might be a good idea for you to step away. We’ve got this.”
“Right.” I made a sudden decision as the excited cries of the gamers threatened to break the sound barrier. Instead of hustling away from the monument, I turned and dashed toward the wall and the girl who was searching it. Even as I approached, I could see her fists were gloved in leather, her blonde hair was braided tightly against her head, and her heavy neoprene jacket and pants as battle ready as Nikki’s, without the fashion sense. Whoever this girl thought she was, she was also convinced she’d found a doorway to Shambhala, and she fully planned on getting inside.
And what the hell. I wanted to see it too.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t attempt what I was trying to do—carry another human bodily through any sort of barrier heavier than the beaded curtain at a psychic’s tent. But this was Hayley Adams, and we’d played this game before, though I was pretty sure she wouldn’t remember our last date. When I’d pulled her and the rest of the children out of their dark prison beyond the veil, I hadn’t even begun to acknowledge my own abilities. As a result, anything I’d brought back had needed to be physically connected to me in some way. Connected as in impaled. Messy, but it’d worked.
But those days were gone, at least those particular days. As I raced up to Hayley, I flung my hands wide, surrounding myself with my own ball of fire. Not being completely unobservant, she seemed to notice the human torch racing toward her, and turned at the last minute. By then, however, it was too late. I wrapped her up in a hug and slumped forward, pushing my mind as well as my body out toward the sacred gates of Shambhala.
***
The sacred gates…hurt.
After a moment of white-hot pain, we were through and on the other side, sprawling into a mountain clearing. Hayley and I ricocheted away from each other as if we were polarized battery cells, neither of us stopping until we crashed into different sides of the mountain. Or at least that was what the giant rocks felt like.
“What did you just do?” she cried.
Hayley was up first, with the springiness of youth I remembered from all of ten years ago. I stood far more slowly, my lungs working hard. Then again, I’d just passed us into the realm of enlightenment with the brute force of a battering ram. Mad props for my side.
Hayley turned, then turned again, her hands going wide. I watched her with curiosity. She was Connected, there was no doubt of that, but I got the distinct impression that her abilities were severely buried…deeper than mine ever had been. I might not have always understood my capabilities, but they were right there beneath the surface, able to be accessed. Hayley seemed almost unaware of her own strength.
I instantly thought of Ginny, her aunt, another psychic with buried capabilities, even if hers were far weaker. Hayley had come by her denial strong, and yet—she was here, she was in Shambhala, and it wasn’t like she’d rolled a twenty-sided die to get here. This was real life.
I took in the pink-tinged mountain, heavy with mist, and the achingly beautiful vista around me, so gorgeous, it almost hurt to breathe. I was pretty sure this was real life, anyway.
“So this is it,” Hayley murmured, turning around. “This is the promised land.” She wrinkled her nose, scenting the cool, frigidly pure air, redolent with mountain flowers. “I thought it would be warmer.”
Screw the view, it did hurt to breathe.
“I’m right there with you,” I said, trying to suck in more of the thin air as I straightened. “Any mythical land of enlightenment should include a beach. With ocean. And sun.” And a tiki bar near the water, for good measure.
Hayley turned to me, surveying my trendy hiker-light attire. I’d gotten derision before, but there’s no derision like the stare a sevent
een-year-old can level at you. Still, I found it almost comforting, like looking at myself a decade ago, all full of myself and ready to set the world on fire…until the world actually had caught fire around me, and I was on the run.
Some things hadn’t changed all that much over time.
“You’re Sara Wilde,” she finally said. “I thought you’d be taller.”
“And you’re Hayley Adams. I thought you’d be smarter.” Before she could bristle—whoops, too late—at that, I gestured around us. “What is it you’d thought you’d find here, anyway? You and all those kids out there?”
She bristled in earnest this time. She was exceptional at bristling.
“They’re hardly all kids, and my name is Hale, not Hayley. Hayley went away a long time ago.”
I winced, but couldn’t argue with that logic. “Fair enough.”
“As to the gamers,” she continued, “they got a hold of Simon’s embedded Arcania game and they shouldn’t have, and they’ve gone further in it than he ever thought they would. He didn’t expect them to actually start looking for you in real life.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think they're actually looking for me outright—at least not on purpose. Every time one of them sees me, they seem genuinely surprised and unreasonably stoked. That’s not the mark of a serious hunter, more like a gamer who thinks he’ll get a new arcade stick by following the bread crumbs Simon has dropped. Then they find that I’m a real live person doing things they don’t expect, and they freak out. Which is a problem, because as you of all people should know, this world isn’t all that kind to people who react the way they shouldn’t or who can do things that they shouldn’t.” And something else that was bugging me. “How are they even able to find me anywhere? We’re talking places like Tokyo and Nepal now. Those weren’t only Nepalese kids out there, it was the freaking United Nations. Where’d they get the cash and ID to come to Kathmandu of all places?”
“The arcane web,” she said, as if it was perfectly obvious.
I blinked at her. “What?”
“These gamers, they aren’t your average players. They’re Connected, they’re resourceful, and they know the AW. You get good enough at games—not Arcania necessarily, most people don’t know about that, but video games in general, and you start winning tournaments, all of that—people notice. When people notice and, say, you need a ticket to Nepal, it gets funded by third parties.” She grinned. “A lot of Connecteds have made serious bank with their psychic skills, it would seem, and they’re happy to sponsor their gamers wherever they want to go—up to and including fake IDs.”
“Go back to the arcane web,” I said sharply. “What the hell is that?”
“Do you seriously not know anything?” she demanded. “The arcane web is like, I don’t know, Insta for Gen Z Connecteds. Where they go and talk about stuff like how awesome they are at gaming, which is where sponsors find them. There’s big money in winning tournaments, so it’s a hot topic.”
I couldn’t help staring at her. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Insta for Gen Z Connecteds…” I narrowed my eyes at her. “Tell me Simon is not behind this arcane web thing too.” No wonder neither I nor the House of Swords had heard about it.
“Duh, of course he totally set up the AW,” Hayley—Hale—said, rolling her eyes. Also a skill uniquely suited to her age, though I’d done my level best to maintain my excellence at it. “But what’s important is, the gamers are on the move, so all I need to do is stay one step ahead of them.”
“Hold up, Sparky.” I lifted a hand. “You know your aunt is worried sick over you, your parents too, right? They think you’re lost. In trouble.” Even as I said the words, they sounded lame. “You are only seventeen, you know.” I could almost hear the rest in my own ears: And get off my lawn!
Hayley sent me a withering glance. “Do I look lost? I’m perfectly safe. Simon arranges my transport and lodging everywhere I go. I’ve never had a problem. My job is to report back to him on what I discover so that he can put it into his game before the other gamers hit that level.” She paused. “Although, now you’ve caught up, so maybe I don’t need to do that anymore.”
I frowned at her. “What do you mean, what you discover? Doesn’t Simon know what’s going to happen in his own game?”
“Not this one,” she said, grinning, and real excitement finally broke through her teenage mask of indifference. “That’s how the game works. It’s based on predictive technology that is calibrated to the player—or groups of players, if they’ve teamed up. Simon can identify the next likely leap anyone might take, and he’s figured out how to set up circumstances to precipitate that leap. He just doesn’t know what will happen on the other side.”
“So you’re telling me he knew I would push you through the wall, here. All you had to do was show up, and it’d happen?”
“Well, it’s not that good. He knew that you would come to Kathmandu to find me, once Aunt Ginny tried to blow you up.”
“You knew about that?” I began, but Hale waved me off.
“And he knew that you would come to this holy place, because it’s the fabled gateway to Shambhala. He was pretty certain the portal was here, but…he’d never found it before. He knew you would, though.”
“But how could he have known that? I only drew the cards like a day and a half ago, in the privacy of my own car. It wasn’t bugged. I would have noticed that.” Not exactly true, but the cars of the House of Swords were routinely cleaned out and switched out, for exactly this reason. When you were frenemies with the Council, you couldn’t be too careful.
She shrugged again. “Then you should check your gear. All I know is that Simon’s been jammed like crazy for the last few weeks, creating a million and one game scenarios that all lead here. And that was before he realized how widely everything had been leaked. Now he’s trying to find a rockin’ conclusion to those scenarios that will satisfy the players without getting everyone killed.” She looked around the mountain vista. “I don’t think this is it.”
“No, this definitely isn’t it. Way too cold.”
Then my brain finally caught up with Hayley’s words. “My gear, you said. My gear. You mean that freaking leather bag that I pulled out of the Arcanum Library? That was what was bugged? How the hell did Simon get in there?” It was the only thing I could think of, but it didn’t make any sense. If the Fool had entered the Arcanum Library while Death was there, she’d have known it, and she would have told me. And she’d never have let me take the bag if it’d been bugged.
But Hayley—Hale—was shaking her head. “He didn’t get in there himself, not anytime recently anyway. But the bag you took, it’s his bag. Like—a bag he’d been given a long time ago or whatever. He sort of lost it, and when it showed up again with you, he realized it immediately and used it as a homing device. A homing device attached to you. He thought he’d died and gone to heaven. If he believed in heaven. Which I don’t think he does.”
“His bag…” I stared hard at her, but in my mind, I was still envisioning the hobo bag that Death had unearthed with relative ease to serve as a carryall for the wands of life and darkness. Way too much of a coincidence that it just happened to be out in plain sight…
“The librarian,” I muttered. “What game is she really playing?” Or was she really simply trying to get her library book back, and happy to do anything that helped that cause along?
Hale didn’t seem to be listening anymore. Instead, she was peering up the mountain, through the pink-tinged mists. We were high up—high enough that our breathing remained labored even though we were standing still, but when she pointed, it was to a place yet farther up the trail. “He’s there, I think.”
“Who’s there?”
“The man who originally stole the scroll of enlightenment you’re looking for. The next Buddha, or the wannabe Buddha. He’s waiting here for the end of the world. And if what Simon tells me is right, he won’t have long to wait. All he needs now is the right and left hands o
f darkness, or something like that, and he’s golden.”
“Um…Simon said that? He used those words?” I slid a glance at her. “When’s the last time you spoke with Simon?”
“Not since I got to Kathmandu,” she said. “He’s pretty freaked out.”
By unspoken consent, we’d started moving up the mountain. “Well, he has every reason to be freaked out,” I said. “When the Magician realizes what he’s doing, he’ll kill him.”
“Yeah, he’s afraid of that,” Hale said with disarming honesty. “But if Simon can give the Magician something of real value in the war on magic, he thinks he may have a shot of exonerating himself. So he’s dancing as fast as he can.”
My brows lifted at her words. “Exonerating himself from what?”
“I don’t know, exactly. But someone has something on him, something big. They funded Mongol Horde and forced Simon to create the blind room to Arcania as a collection point.”
Wait, what? “A collection point?” I asked sharply. “For what purpose?” Even as I asked the question, I already knew the answer. “Names. He’s getting the names of rank-and-file Connecteds…young Connecteds in particular.”
“Names, locations, relations. All of it,” Hale said. “He hands that information over to—whomever—and that person then feeds the player data of anyone who could open the door to places like SANCTUS and Interpol for months—and before you ask, it’s in the game. Arcania. Those names, those people. It’s all there, if you know where to look.”
“In the…game.” I was trying to keep up, I really was. But none of this was computing.
“Exactly. Anyway, Simon didn’t know where the data was going at first, but once he did, he realized just how complicit he was. So instead of just creating a secret room where people collected gold or something stupid like that, he created the actual game within a game, more out of desperation than anything. In that new section, he introduced gods and goddesses, plus the multinational governmental agencies out to get Connecteds, even the Council—and you, of course. And he staged battles and created war rooms where players could discuss strategy.”