by Jenn Stark
“Anyone,” he agreed, breathing out the word with a joyful puff of air. “I know them best, of course, but any with the eyes to see may read the words. The catastrophe will be transformed into a storm of enlightenment, and all will be purified.”
Scowling, I glared down at the scroll a second longer. I couldn’t leave the thing with Viktor, but I didn’t much want it either. Purification sounded pretty bad, no matter how you sliced it. Still—I could at least get the scroll back into its case. Then maybe it was simply a matter of getting new locks.
I glanced back toward the path we’d come up. To my eye, the exit was obvious…the fractioning of light, of shadows that didn’t quite match the trees and shrubs behind them. I thought about Simon, who was clearly trapped by this place. If I was wrong about that shimmering rift being the doorway back to the real world, well… I’d crash.
But I wasn’t the shard of Simon, trapped here against my will, and I wasn’t going to be wrong, I knew it in my heart.
Not for this sort of thing. Those days were done.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Hayley—Hale and I broke back through the wall of the temple with an impressive crunch, hitting the ground and rolling several feet. No one screamed, however, or even shouted in surprise at our reentry into the real world. Because apparently, they were all on the other side of the temple, under a totally different set of Buddha eyes.
“We’re at a different gate,” Hale gasped, breathless as she hauled herself upright, staggering a little.
I didn’t feel all that great either, but I steadied myself as well. “They’re fighting,” I said, finally registering the commotion. “I thought they were gamers. Why are they fighting?”
“They want to be first,” she said.
“First to what?”
“To anything. It’s what they do.”
We jogged around the edge of the temple, the red and green and blue lights playing over us as we made our way to the disturbance. We slowed just as abruptly as we cleared the last gate. There were definitely two knots of young adults still raging at each other, but they were being separated forcefully by what looked to be local police. Nikki and Nigel were nowhere to be seen, undoubtedly monitoring the situation the way they should be. Most of those kids would land with their butts in jail for a few days, if not longer, depending on if they caused any damage. Good.
I turned away, but Hale grabbed my arm. “What, you’re just going to let them get arrested?” she asked. “What kind of leader are you?”
“I’m not—” I choked on my own words, surprised at my own vehemence even as I was forced to soften my statement. “I’m not their leader. Those are kids—young adults—people, whatever—who’ve fallen down a rabbit hole I never opened up for them. Simon created the game within a game, not me.”
“But why do you think he created it? He wanted you to find all that he knew, so he needed a place to store information, store clues. He couldn’t just keep everything he wanted to tell you in his mind. Someone would’ve figured that out.”
That slowed me down. “Someone,” I repeated. “You mean the Magician. Simon was afraid Armaeus would read his mind, so he…what?” I crinkled my brow, my attention still fixed on the writhing horde of officials and kids. “He acted like it was all for this game? A game he was not even officially working on?”
“A lot easier to pass off a random thought he shouldn’t be having if it’s fiction, right? If the Magician got too close, Simon could fob it off. All while keeping his promise to…to whoever he was afraid of.”
“It’s Viktor—that’s who is doing this to him.” My lips curved into a snarl around the name. “There’s no other explanation for them both being in that lockbox. Simon must have helped him try to unravel the scroll. And then…” I shook my head. While Happy Viktor was his own special kind of strange, Simon had been on a totally different level. He was crazed, insane. Was that the result of his captivity, or…or had he been that way before? Was his shard something that truly shouldn’t be rejoined to his base self?
Hale seemed to be thinking the same thing. “I don’t know what actually happened, but…but if you wanted to cut something out of your body and someone offered you a way to do it quickly, cleanly, and without any real memory of what you did… Wouldn’t you take him up on it? Even if you knew it wasn’t exactly right? It sounds like a whole lot of crap went down at the same time back in the day, and he was just trying to make the best of a bad situation.”
“But he was the Fool of the Council,” I said, still trying to wrap my head around it. “He ascended. No way could he have been truly screwed up. Armaeus wouldn’t have gone for that.”
“Unless the Emperor found him first, you mean,” Hale said quietly. “And…I don’t know. Fixed him.”
Unbidden, another face sprang to my mind. Roxie Meadows, the Empress who’d been on the Council when I first began working with Armaeus, and who’d now lost her abilities entirely, had no memory of her role on the Council, where she’d sat since the 1970s. She hadn’t been able to overcome her need for validation, for power, and eventually, she’d made a deal with the wrong group of sycophants. Armaeus hadn’t been cruel in his punishment, exactly—Roxie couldn’t miss what she didn’t recall. But Simon must have seen the disdain the Magician had held for weaker Roxie from practically the word go, and had no doubt doubled down on his own fears.
“Fair point.” I grimaced. This was way over my Council pay grade. “I need to talk to Armaeus about this.”
“No!” Hale’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head, and she gripped my arm. “No, you can’t do that—you really can’t!”
I stared at her, but this wasn’t a seventeen-year-old’s inherent drama rearing its head. Her panic was real. “Why not?”
“Simon doesn’t want him to know,” Hale said, letting go of my arm and coloring with embarrassment. “He—he has everything in a place where the Magician can get at it, if he fails to make things right himself, but he wants to fix it himself.” The corners of her lips turned down, and she pulled in a ragged sigh. “He knows he must have done something terrible, and if the Magician swoops in and learns of it before Simon can fix it, he’ll never be able to look him in the eye again. And…he wants that. He does. I don’t know why he cares so much, but he does.”
“Ah….crap,” I muttered, staring at her. “I can’t let more people get hurt, Hale.”
“Then don’t!” she snapped, flapping her hand at the chaotic scene in front of us. “Fix it yourself. Don’t go running to the Magician. Give Simon a couple more days, that’s all I ask! Two more days. Then, if you have to—tell the Magician everything. Or if people are really in danger—same deal.” Her face changed again, almost haggard in intensity, and I’d never seen a kid more sincere…or desperate. My heart tugged hard in my chest, and I knew the game was up. “Please,” she whispered at last. “Give him a little more time to make it right.”
“I’ll think about it,” I grumbled, though there was no question in either of our minds anymore. Simon would get his two days, and I’d help make that happen.
I sighed, seeing the scene in front of me continue to devolve. Both groups of kids were now being rounded up, and an official-looking bus was sitting off to the side, no doubt the paddy wagon to the prison camp. Well, good.
“They need to cool their jets in lockup,” I said aloud, though now that I could see the kids’ frightened faces, I knew I wouldn’t let that happen. “You can’t just go off half-cocked. That’s not how any of this works.”
Hale didn’t respond, however. I glanced back, then realized I was talking to empty air. She was probably off to report to her fearless leader.
Great. If we got out of this in one piece and I ever got the little rat bastard alone, I was going to strangle Simon within an inch of his life, shard or no shard.
I pushed my way forward, skirting the crowd until I came up to the bus, taking up position as a glowering adult. The kids approached us, and I drove my hands into
my pockets, sidling up to the driver.
“What’ll happen to them?” I asked.
He looked at me in officious derision. “American,” he fairly spat at me, a lifetime of hatred and condescension in that one word. I backed away quickly, lifting my hands in alarm.
Right before I shot a minute ball of fire between the man’s beady little eyes.
“Asshat,” I grumbled, whipping the driver’s hat off his head and rolling him away, scoring his coat while I was at it. I threw the jacket over my back, replaced my Patagonia cap with the driver’s hat, and returned my hands first to my pockets. I quickly realized I was a fair amount shorter than the driver, so I folded my arms grumpily over my chest and affected a scowl, grateful for all the practice I’d given to the expression.
The police were there thirty seconds later, herding the kids onto the bus. When all was said and done, there were fewer of them than I expected, and as I glared at their bowed heads, my heart crumbled a little more. Some were barely twenty-one, some looked like brothers and sisters, and all of them had the dejected look of the betrayed. They’d come here expecting a show, a path to glory, a chance to validate the clues and hints and pathways that Simon had woven into his online world, and they’d been confronted with the news that the real world could be a really crappy place.
While that was certainly true, and something they needed to learn, I wasn’t sure that they needed to learn it today.
The last of them filed on just as someone jogged up to the police officer herding the kids, yelling words I couldn’t decipher…in a decidedly British accent. The perfect distraction.
I grinned and clambered aboard the bus, sliding into the driver’s seat. Granted, I hadn’t driven a car in longer than I could remember, let alone a bus the size of the Queen Mary. But how difficult could it be?
I turned the key in the ignition, and the machine roared to life, even as the policeman broke away from Nigel and turned toward me, waving his hands.
I kicked the bus into gear, dismayed that there seemed to be a clutch required to move the thing. Who were these people, Neanderthals?
“Listen up!” I roared over the rumble of the engine. Behind me, two dozen heads popped up like ferrets, their eyes alight with surprise at my very American voice. I lurched the vehicle into the street and gunned the engine, grateful beyond measure that it kept going and that I managed to push it into the next gear without stripping anything or killing the engine. “I’ve got no idea where I’m going, and I’ve got no idea where you people are staying, but I’m going to get you as far away from the temple as I can as fast as I can, then I’m dumping your asses out. You got that?”
The vehicle picked up speed, and my stomach flipped as I struggled to keep control. No one spoke for a moment, and I growled a little louder, not needing to fake my irritation.
“I said, you got that?”
“Yes!” A tall guy, all arms and legs but still managing to look older than most of the other kids on the bus, surged to his feet. “Yes—you’re…you’re Sara Wilde, aren’t you?”
“Forget that for a minute. You know how to drive a damned stick shift?”
“I do!” Another kid darted forward, this one a girl, rugged and sunburned, her hair pulled back in a bandana, and her body thin and hard. “We’ve got these on the farm.”
I had no idea what kind of farm would host massive prison buses, but I wasn’t about to argue. I slid out of the seat, and she took the wheel, immediately kicking us into the next gear. As we lurched and rolled, I swung around, yanking off my hat and the prison guard’s jacket.
“Listen up, here!” I bellowed, though I needn’t have bothered with that anymore. I had the undivided attention of the group in front of me, some of them only a few years younger than I was. “I’m Sara Wilde, and I’m a real person, but this game you’ve been playing…you have to go back to thinking it’s just a game, guys. You can’t keep following the clues to someplace in real life. It’s not going to work. Somebody’s going to notice, and it’s not going to be somebody like me, who recognizes that you’ve got abilities and that that’s awesome. No. It’s either going to be somebody who’s going to try to stomp those skills out or who wants to use your abilities for their own game. And at this point, swear to God, I don’t know what’s worse.”
I looked around the bus. There were kids of multiple backgrounds, multiple ethnicities, but they were here, and whether they were funded by their lawn-mowing jobs, their trust funds, or the arcane web, they clearly had access to money. “You guys may have had it hard, but there are other kids—young adults, students, whatever you want to call yourselves—that maybe haven’t. They don’t have your money, they don’t have your resources, but they do have your abilities. They’re the vulnerable ones, and you’re going to need to protect them, all right? Part of that protection is by not drawing too much attention to yourselves, so that they don’t draw attention themselves. And another part of it is, if you find them somewhere and they don’t know how to manage their abilities, how to hide, you…you teach them. You teach them how to hide. Because I would rather have you hide and be safe than put yourself out there and get ground up by a world that doesn’t know how amazing you are.”
“But what if we want to fight?” It was the first boy again, and I could already tell he was going to be a problem. Not because he was an asshole, but because he was a crusader. Crusaders were the worst.
I tried a different tack, bracing myself as the young driver whipped the bus around a sharp turn. “Look. You guys are smart, you made it this far, you found me. Congratulations. But I need to get better at what I do. Problem is, I’ve come up against a whole lot of people who’d just as soon see me dead as let me get any stronger.”
“Interpol is after you,” someone else said. “I’d say that makes you pretty strong.”
“Okay, word to the wise, being wanted by Interpol is not a good thing. Do not aspire to be on a Red Notice. It’s not cool.” I could tell by their faces, though, my little well-intentioned speech was having the exact opposite effect that I was going for. Crap.
“Um, Miss Wilde?”
“Sara,” I said automatically, looking over at the young driver. Her face looked pinched, and I swiveled. There was a barricade on the road, complete with swirling lights. I hated swirling lights. I glanced back to the kids, and of course, they saw it too. It was coming up fast.
“Slow down, but not by much,” I ordered, and the girl obligingly took her foot off the pedal. We were still in the outskirts of Kathmandu, and there was a warren of side streets, none of them big enough for our bus. But they’d be plenty big enough for kids on the run.
“You guys know where you are in the city?” I asked.
“Yes!” a few voices said, a few others said no, and I grinned.
“Right. Honesty is good, honesty will keep you safe, okay? No shame in admitting the truth, not when the alternative will get you locked up. But no one goes alone, got it? No one. You all pair up, or I swear on all that’s holy, I will hunt down whoever left one of you alone, and I will beat that person into the next century, you hear that?” I took their hurried nods as assent enough. “Back door?”
“Locked!” the two kids in the back shouted, frantically trying the door as if they could do something about it.
“Okay, stand back—get away from there—and slow it down more, driver,” I barked. We were only a hundred yards from the barricade, and I could hear the distant sirens. If they were going to get out of here clean, they’d need to hurry. “I said move!”
The kids fell away from the rear entry, and I slammed my hands together, shooting a ball of blue fire back to the back of the bus, the percussive slam of the projectile blowing the door off its hinges.
The kids gaped for only a moment, then the boy who’d stood at the front of the bus started shouting. “Go, go! Pairs or threes, no larger groups. Get out and get scattered. They don’t know who we are, we’ve got no passports on us, so get back to the rooms. They don’
t have our pictures, they don’t know who we are. Get back to—go!” He exploded forward, moving through the rows and pulling kids out of their seats and hurling them toward the back of the bus. The kids were going too, spilling out of the vehicle like fish diving back into the ocean even as the bus kept rolling forward.
“You too, Baby Driver,” I said, jerking my thumb out the back as the girl wriggled out of the driver’s seat.
“I can weight down the accelerator,” she said. “You can escape too!”
“I can, but not and keep all those police people safe, who are just doing their jobs, God bless their beady little heads. You go. I got this.”
“You do,” she said, her grin a mile wide. “Because you’re Sara Wilde.”
And with that, she was off like a shot, yelling the all clear as she passed each successive row of seats. I slung myself back into the driver’s seat, pounding my foot on the brake hard enough to fishtail the bus as soon as the last girl leapt out the back.
“Okay, Sara Wilde,” I muttered. “Go ahead and get this already.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
It took another hour for me to rendezvous with Nigel and Nikki back at our hotel. Contrary to my attempt at responsibility that I expressed to my young driver, I had no intention of actually confronting the authorities in Nepal. I bolted out the driver’s side of the vehicle as soon as it went into its slurring curve, and hit the ground running. I was close enough to the police blockade that a few of them set off after me on foot, but I hadn’t been running for most of my adult life for nothing. Plus, I was wearing hiking gear, like pretty much everyone in the city. All it took was for me to find my first thick knot of people, and I was gone.