by M. J. Scott
"It has enough grunt to handle them?"
"Yeah, I upped the processing specs last night. The screen is on the smaller size, but we'll be able to see what we need to see."
So far I liked his plan. I started grilling him on the rest of his approach. The quarantine system already sorted the various viruses, malware, techjacks, and other sundry nasty stuff into groups. I downloaded one onto a datachip for Yoshi to experiment on.
I wanted to see if he could defeat the virus rather than just scrape what data he could from the message before the virus ate his system. For one thing, I'd have to reimburse him for each one that got destroyed, and that could get expensive fast. I'd be better trying it on my own safe systems if he couldn't get to grips with the traps embedded in the messages. They had more grunt, and I had my suite of apps and bots and code-dumps to deal with this sort of thing. But navigating tech threats was part art, part science, and I didn't entirely trust my instincts at the moment.
After Yoshi finished explaining his proposed approach, I handed over the datachip and told him to have at it. He grinned like a puppy given a treat and got to work.
"You want one of these?" Lizzie asked, pointing at her sandwich. I nodded, and she got to work.
"Let's let the kid work in peace," she said, handing me a plate. "It's a nice day to soak up some sun."
We ended up sitting on the back steps, munching in silence. But my brain kept racing, bounding between Damon and emails and demons until I felt like I would go crazy if I didn't at least say something. I put my empty plate down as Lizzie wiped her hands on her napkin, staring out into the yard. Probably mentally planning the vegetable garden she wanted.
"You asked Damon if anything weird had been happening," I said, tracing random patterns with my finger on the step. I was probably risking serious splinters, but I was feeling too edgy to sit completely still.
"Yes," Lizzie said, still gazing at the yard.
"It made me wonder. About what exactly has been going on. I know you and the Cestis have been...cleaning up. What exactly does that mean?"
That got her attention. She looked back over her shoulder as though checking on Yoshi.
"He has headphones on," I said. "He won't hear anything."
"Do you really want to know about this stuff?"
No. My gut tightened. But I'd been living with my head in the sand for too long. Time to face the things going bump in the night again. "Yes. Or the summarized version of whatever it is you're allowed to tell me." I nodded at her sling. "Have there been many imps?"
"There are always a few around."
"More than usual, then."
She nodded. "It looked like things were calming down for a while, but there have been more again lately."
"That doesn't sound good. How can there be more if there isn't a demon controlling them?"
"It's complicated. When the demon got sent back, all its connections would have snapped. What usually happens if a connection to an imp snaps is that it goes into a frenzy. Like a rabid dog left off a leash. But some hide. Or get...knocked out I guess is the closest analogy. Or hibernate, maybe. They can go dormant until something wakes them up again."
"What can wake them up?"
"Humans doing dumb shit," Lizzie said, grimacing. "Or maybe a lesserkind. We don't know if your demon had any. No one's seen one, but that doesn’t mean there weren't. We don't have much information on them."
"And imps or afrits without a demon in charge can still cause problems?" The only times I'd encountered imps, they'd been specifically hunting me. I hadn’t let myself think too much about what they might have done to me had they caught me. But I knew it wouldn't have been good.
"Totally. Imps can kill a person, drain their energy. Afrits tend to just cause trouble. Though their version of causing trouble can be dangerous, too. Especially if there's a flock of them. It's like having magical roaches eating your wiring or your brake line."
"So you've been bug hunting?"
"Sort of. We've also been keeping an eye on Damon's beta testers. The ones who played the game with the old filter."
I blinked. Damon hadn't mentioned that. "Does he know that?"
"Not all the details," Lizzie said. "Like you, we thought it was best not to bother him until there was something to bother him about."
"And has there been?"
She tipped her hand back and forth. "Not yet. Most of them seem fine. There are a few who definitely had some mental health issues triggered by the filter in the game, a couple had minor demon taint, but nothing worse, far as we could tell. The last one of those was discharged from the hospital a few months ago. There were two, I think, who haven't been located."
"That doesn't sound...great."
"It depends. They may be fine and have left the country or something. They could be—" She broke off. "I mean, there's lots of reasons for someone to disappear, but we'd feel better if they were all accounted for."
"But the demon is banished. So if it had bonded with anyone or was controlling them, that bond should be broken."
A slow nod. "Yes. In theory."
I frowned. "In theory?" Then something that had been niggling at the back of my brain popped to the front. "Wait, you said demons usually control the imps. Does that mean sometimes something else does? Can a person control an imp?"
"Normally, no. That's why we kill them when we find them. But it's possible that someone who'd been controlled by a demon might have some sort of connection. Lesserkind can control them, of course. They're not as smart or powerful as demons, but they're not simple like imps. We know they can follow commands. They know well enough to hide themselves from our magic. They can cause trouble. But they must be hard for the demons to bring through to our world because they're fairly rare."
"My demon could have had some though?"
"Your demon was well powered up, so yes. And the imp activity is still higher than we'd like this long after you fried him, so it's a possibility. But like I said, we haven't seen any signs of one." She shrugged. "And if there is a lesserkind connected to your demon, we would have expected it to come after you, try for some sort of revenge on behalf of its boss. That's the kind of thing the demons tend to use them for. They can send them through when they can't get through themselves."
I stared at her, feeling suddenly ill.
"Don't freak out," Lizzie hurried on. "There's been nothing out of the ordinary."
"Other than someone claiming to be me sending death threats to my ex," I said.
She grimaced. "Yeah, well, that. That wasn't the greatest news ever. But hey, it could just be a normal screwed-up human. One of the missing testers or someone Righteous booted. Or any random weirdo with a bone to pick with Damon. Or you." She cocked her head at me. "You don't have any other enemies you forgot to tell us about?"
"Not that I can think of. I'm a computer nerd. We don't tend to get into feuds. My mom was the one with the talent for trouble, not me."
"Yeah, I guess someone would have to be holding a grudge for a long time to come after you now for something she did. But it seems easier to start with Righteous and Damon."
Before she could say anything else, Yoshi poked his head through the door.
"I've finished with that first batch," he said. "I think I've iced the virus, and the encryption was fairly simple once I got past that. If you have another datachip, I'll dump the text file for you."
"That was fast," I said, impressed again. Lizzie was right. The kid had talent. If he was older, I'd think about offering him a job once I built my clientele back up again. See if he could learn to do what I did. Or find his own way of doing it. Before the demon, I'd pretty much reached the limits of what I handle do on my own—another reason losing the chip had hurt—I'd been able to work faster with it—and I'd been turning clients away. But Yoshi was young. He needed to go to school and then decide what he wanted to do with his life.
I left Lizzie in the sunshine and went to find Yoshi another datachip. He was pack
ing up his bag as I came out. "Hey, Maggie. I have a shift at Redline tonight. I can come back tomorrow, work on some more of these." He nodded at the datapad. "I'll leave that here if you want to work through some more on your own. And I sent the text file to your safe queue."
He left after scooping up the sole remaining half sandwich on the platter and shoving most of it into his mouth in a single bite.
"I'm going to take a look at what he found," I said to Lizzie.
She just nodded sleepily. If she wanted to stay put, that was fine with me. She needed the rest.
I'd been looking at the data and tentatively forming a plan to tackle the next lot of infected messages for about an hour when Lizzie wandered back into the living room.
She yawned and dropped down onto the sofa beside me.
"What did he find?"
I shrugged. "Mostly stuff that looks like the standard nonsense spammers use. Some of it could be Latin—and not the lorem ipsum variety—and there are other words that aren't English. Not anything I recognize." My high school Spanish was rusty, and the scraps of the Mandarin for Business class I'd taken one semester in college were few and far between. But none of the odd words looked like that. "I’m running them through a translation program next. Do you want to take a look?"
"Sure. Shoot it over to my account. I can do the translation while you keep processing the messages."
"You have translation-bots?" I pinged her the file.
"We deal with lots of people from lots of different places. And the other Cestis members around the world. Translation-bots come in handy. Maybe you should drop a hint to Damon. If they could make an interface chip that somehow translated directly, they'd make a fortune."
I was sure he—or some other tech company—had already thought of that. There were AIs and bots that did a good enough job for your average tourist in a strange land or businesses dealing with overseas customers, suppliers, or vendors, and VR games did a basic level of captioning players who spoke other languages in English or whatever your home language was, but something that made translation seamless would be a game changer.
"Speaking of chips, Damon offered me a new one," I said.
Lizzie's head shot up from her datapad. "Did you say yes?"
"No." I shook my head. "But he said they had a new generation. And that it would be safe. He said they'd had a witch look at it. Was that you?"
"No." Her brows drew down. "No, it wasn't any of us. And whoever did it hasn't told us either."
Great. I'd just caused the Cestis more work.
"Do you think it could be safe?" I asked.
"Theoretically, maybe. Chips modify your nervous system. That changes your energy signature. We know that can affect spells—it broke your bond, after all. But I guess a minimal change shouldn't impact someone's magic. At least not any new magic they did." She didn't sound certain. "Do you want another chip?"
"I don't know," I said honestly. "There are things I can do with data with a chip that are much harder and slower without. That's the positive. Systems just get more complex over time. But the thought of opening myself up to another demon somehow...." I stopped, shivered. "I don't know if I'd want to go there."
"You sure you just don't want to play the game because she looks like you?" Lizzie asked. I knew she was teasing me, trying to lighten the mood.
"I'll pass on that, thanks. Wait, is that an option?" I'd assumed the character in the ads was a game character, not an avatar choice.
She grinned. "I don't know. I haven't played it yet. Do you want me to tell you when I do?"
"You're definitely going to play it?"
"Sure. I don't have a chip, and they've changed the filter. It seems safe enough to me." She tipped her head at the datapad. "I understand why you have concerns, but if you still want to game, you could." Her expression softened. "It's not disrespectful to Nat for you to have some fun, you know. She'd want you to be happy."
I opened my mouth to protest, but she held up a hand.
"I understand survivor guilt. I know this is all fresh for you still, but you've been holed up licking your wounds for most of a year. Going back to work is good, but you have to start living again, too. Go out. Drink too much." She looked me up and down. "Have an orgasm involving another person."
"If you're suggesting I do the nasty with Damon, then no."
"No. I get he broke your heart, but there are plenty of other nice guys out there. I'm not talking about Mr. For-life here, but maybe a Mr. Screaming-orgasm-or-two might be good for you. And if you really can't find someone who does it for you, then maybe that's something to think about—how you still feel about old blue eyes."
I was leaving that comment alone. Damon was a no-go. But Lizzie was painfully close to the mark. I hadn't felt a flicker of interest in any other man. Not that I'd actually left the house to try to meet any who might flicker me. Self-service had been just fine.
"How did we get from interface chips to my sex life?" I muttered.
"It's what friends do," she said. "I was happy for you to stay in your little bubble while you needed to, but now you've taken some steps, and I'm not going to let you stop walking back toward life because there are a few obstacles in the way. For one thing, I want you to have your magic back."
"So I can help out the Cestis?"
"So you can be safe. And fully who you’re supposed to be," she said gently.
I sighed. "I don’t think I know who that is anymore."
She shrugged. "Well, friends are here for figuring that sort of shit out, too." Her datapad beeped, and she looked down. I waited, assuming there was something more to her sentence, but Lizzie was frowning at her screen, bottom lip caught between her teeth.
After a minute or two, she snapped her fingers at me. "I need some paper. And a pen."
I didn't like the urgency in her tone, but I slid my notebook and pen toward her. I'd always copped some flak amongst my tech head friends for still using analog gear, but I found it soothing to move my hand across the paper and get stuff out of my overcrowded head at times. I'd filled far too many cheap composition books with midnight lists of worries over the last nine months.
Lizzie starting scribbling things down. I waited, tension creeping up my spine with each breath. When I couldn't take it anymore, I said, "Want to fill me in about what's so fascinating?"
There was a chance that she'd say "Cestis business," but I figured it was a pretty small one. Far more likely was that whatever her translation-bots had produced wasn't good.
"I'm not sure yet," she said, straightening in her chair. "There're snippets of phrases here that remind me of curses. And the languages themselves. There's Polish, Russian, German, Mandarin, Hindi, a few different variants of Arabic, Scots Gaelic, Ancient Greek, Latin like you said, and something my computer says is Middle Egyptian."
"That's quite a collection."
"Yes. All from countries with, as far as our records can tell us, strong histories of having witch populations throughout the centuries."
"Doesn't every country have that?"
"Not all. We don't know why. Some countries only have smaller numbers of witches, which means for a long time, most witches wouldn't have known another witch and would have had to figure things out for themselves. And of course, in some places, certain religions took over and caused witches to be persecuted or driven out or underground. The ones with larger populations, as I said, the witches either worked alongside religion initially or learned to coexist or held enough power in their own right to establish their traditions."
"All right." I could add History of Magic 101 to my list of things to learn.
Sara hadn't really told me much, and the sorts of small towns we'd moved through in my childhood didn't tend to have the kinds of progressive educational programs—or the funding—to want to spend money on teaching their kids much about magic when most of them weren't ever going to need to know much about it. Once I'd landed in Berkley with my grandparents, I could have taken classes if
I'd chosen, but I'd only had to utter one “No” and my gran made sure I was never asked again.
"So how do we find out if any of these words add up to an actual problem?"
Lizzie grinned at me. "For that, we need the library."
Chapter Thirteen
Lizzie didn’t mean our local library. She meant the Cestis’s research library. She’d never mentioned it to me before, but I was getting used to being the one in the dark about magic. If the Cestis had pulled out broomsticks and flown, it probably wouldn’t have shocked me too much at this point.
The library, as it turned out, was located beneath Cassandra's house. Which was in a much better state of repair than mine. It had clearly been rebuilt post-quake—I knew the subtle signs of a reconstructed house now—and as we descended the stairs beneath the house, I understood why.
The Cestis took their libraries seriously. Where most houses would have had a boring old basement finished to some degree, there was instead a thick steel door of the kind that conjured up mental images of bunkers and top-secret labs. The palm scan on the wall beside the door was expensive. The same brand that Riley Arts had in their buildings, unless I was mistaken.
"What exactly are you keeping down here?" I asked, only half joking as Cassandra pressed her hand against the scanner.
"The usual. Books, scrolls, information."
"Not sure your average library has scrolls these days," I said, curiosity pinging. How long had the Cestis been collecting this stuff?
"This isn't your average library, dear," Cassandra said. "We were lucky that nothing was lost or damaged in the Big One, but we learned our lesson from that, and we upgraded the facility."
The door swung open into a space that resembled the type of air lock/secure entry point I'd only encountered in state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities, Righteous, and virtual reality spaceships. White walled, with enough lighting that it was almost painful and obvious cameras mounted in all four corners.