Geekomancy

by Michael R. Underwood

  “I don’t know, do you?” Drake asked.

  Ree looked at her phone. No bars. She wandered around the street, feeling foolish all the while. Streaming was out of the question, so she tapped through to her video library to see if any of it could help. What I really need is a whole weekend of downloading, indexing, and making playlists to build up an arsenal.

  Flipping through video podcasts, short skits, and the two episodes of her abortive webseries, she stopped on a film clip she’d ripped a while back. Hey, that might actually do something.She tapped on a video excerpt from the seventh Harry Potter movie, where she’d cut out the fantastic animated short to show off to people. “I think I’ve got something. Have you seen this?”

  She played the video for Drake, focusing on the feelings the video evoked, the implications in the story world, the cool of being a spell-slinging badass like Tonks or Hermione.

  As the video clip reached its conclusion, with the third brother greeting death, Ree felt the Geekomancy open a door in her mind, energy crackling through her consciousness.

  “If only I’d brought my wand,” she mused to herself when the video was done. She rummaged through her pockets and pulled out a fountain pen, one of the nice ones she practiced signing her autograph with when she needed a pick-me-up.

  I can do this. Your focus determines your reality, right? I can do this.

  She stared at the fountain pen, thought wizardly thoughts, and tried to come up with the right fake Latin for the occasion. “Obfuscari,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest as she remembered Eastwood’s trick in the tunnels. A second passed, and she didn’t feel any different. Ree sighed.

  “Hullo?”

  “Did it work?” she asked.

  “I believe so; I cannot see you at all,” he said.

  Ree fist-pumped in the air, and Drake’s smile dropped. “I can see you again.”

  Ree slumped at the fail. “Balls. Okay, here’s what you do.”

  She told the inventor her idea, and Drake obliged, pulling off his belt and offering one end to Ree so they wouldn’t lose each other in the crowd. After Ree had worked a cloak to cover both of them this time, they made their way into the dock area, dodging spirits of all shapes and sizes.

  It’s like Grand Central Station by way of Hayao Miyazaki.

  Some of the spirits were small, bouncing, flitting things that sparkled, making swooshing sounds as they zipped by. Others lumbered on the ground, each footfall striking a deep bass chord. Countless more were in-between, spiraling through the traffic, shuffling like busy commuters, or meandering like sullen teens in packs. Ree wended her way through the crowds, glad that getting jostled here and there didn’t bring down the cloaking spell.

  They reached the base of one of the immense towers, and Ree felt a tug on the belt, leading her inside. If our cover breaks in here, we’re toast. Worse than toast, we’re the crappy crumbs of carbon left at the bottom of a toaster oven that I haven’t cleaned out in three months.

  The interior of the tower looked like an airport. Spirits stood in a series of lines with eight-feet-tall sentinels that looked like they were nothing but suits of armor prowling around between them, inspecting each being before waving it through.

  Wishing she could just text Drake to coordinate, Ree scanned the room and followed his tugs, weaving around and through people, trying to stay as close as possible to keep some spirit from clotheslining itself on the belt, breaking the spell, and getting the two of them killed.

  Through one round of security, she followed the belt into what must have been a large supply closet of some sort. The room was about twenty feet long and maybe eight feet wide. The shelves inside were lined with squishy-looking eggs that glowed like the Easter Bunny’s overstock. They were the only source of light in the room aside from the faint crack at the bottom of the door.

  Ree let her hands drop, and the outline Drake appeared in front of her, his arms still crossed. She slumped into the shelf, which shook, eggs glorping into one another. Ree grimaced, hoping the sound wouldn’t escape the closet. Speaking in a whisper, she said, “Three things. One, this was stupid. Because two, we need a way to communicate while we’re cloaking it up. Three, what the hell is this room?”

  Drake nodded, responding in a stage whisper. “First, you were the one who suggested we follow the Muse. Second, I do not know of a way for us to be able to signal each other besides the belt, lest we spoil our disguise. Third, this room contains the coordinate icons for a variety of locations. When spirits need to travel to nonstandard locations, one of the minor functionaries will retrieve the appropriate icon from such a room as this.”

  “And how often does that happen?” she asked.

  Ree heard a thrumming at the door, the same noise it had made when Drake opened it.

  “More often than one might think, it appears.”

  Ree scrambled toward the back of the room, hiding behind a two-high stack of crates. Half-forced by their belt, Drake joined her, huddled under a dozen meter-long metallic rods that leaned against the wall. He unclasped the belt and looped it around his waist again.

  More light flooded into the room, then chirping. Some birdlike voice moved into the room. Ree heard the click of nails on tile, the steps getting closer.

  There was the glorp of shuffling icons, then a chirrup that sounded like a question. The clicking got closer, and she heard short chirps and the sounds of the bird-thing’s footfalls. Then the sounds receded until she heard the door close again.

  Ree peeked out from her hiding spot to check on Drake. “Did it see you?” she asked.

  “I suppose not. The transport gates will be upstairs, so if the Muse is attempting to leave or summon assistance, we will find it there.”

  “So we can get it?”

  Drake slid out from under the rods and stood. “Yes. Assuming we can find a way to corner it alone, or care to fight through an entire waiting room of aggravated spirits, yes.”

  Ree stood and looked at the shelves. “Is there anything we can do with these icons? Power spells, ransom them, or the like? We have to even the odds somehow.”

  Drake’s eyes lit up. “Actually, I may be able to do something quite incredible.” He grabbed one of the icons off the shelf, pulled up his goggles, and held the icon to his nose. “Yes, indeed. Rather brilliant. Should have thought of it the last time I was in a conundrum like this. I would still have that fine cummerbund and would not have had to go shopping before last market—”

  “I’m sorry, I’m shaky on my rambling Avalonian. What are you going to do?”

  “With the correct adjustments, I should be able to set my rifle with the coordinates in the icon and use it to teleport the other spirits in the room, or the Muse itself.”

  “I don’t want to teleport the Muse, I want to kill it.”

  Drake removed a cylinder from his rifle and turned the icon in his hand, looking back and forth to the rifle. “Yes, just so. But if we can transport the other spirits in the room, we will be able to deal with the Muse directly.” He studied the icon with a serious expression. “Now, how are you going to fit into the focusing chamber, my dear little thing?”

  Ree quirked an eyebrow. “You are a piece of work.”

  “I am as the creator made me, I suppose, though on my own terms.” Drake winked and thumbed down a lever with a click. “That should suffice for now. I do not imagine I will get much more than one minute of functionality with this modification, so we will need another exit strategy.”

  Ree scanned the shelves. “Can’t we just hop the tower-portal-whatever with one of these?” She waved at the icons. “Preferably not the same place we’ve just sent a bunch of spirits?”

  Drake nodded, considering. “Perhaps, but it would be highly dangerous. The portals are not designed for mortal transport, and I will have to see if there is an icon here whose destination is close enough to our exit to be workable.” He started a slow walk down the aisle, checking the icons.

  Ree sighed
, looking down. She saw a faint glint of silver, and scooped up the lifeline that had followed her since they entered Spirit. It was far fainter than when they’d first arrived in the otherworld. “Or could we just tug real hard on our escape threads?” Ree scooped up her silver cord and held it. Given that she couldn’t see Drake’s, she imagined they were an Only You Can See Yours thing.

  “That, sadly, is not an option. We are far too distant to pull the rip cord.” Drake picked up an icon, examined it, then clucked his tongue and set it down again, the slight downturn in his lips deepening.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked, staying close so she could whisper.

  Drake held up two icons. “We need one that has this sigil next to that one, but with three lines above them at a forty-five-degree downward slope.”

  Ree looked at the icons, then started scanning the other line of shelves for a match. She held the image in her head and was thankful for countless hours of puzzle games.

  After several more abortive hopeful sounds from Drake that ended in grumbling, Ree found what she thought was the one. Pulling it down, she took the thing to Drake, its semisolid goopiness cold in her hands.

  Drake looked it over, and his eyes lit up. “This will transport us to the park just south of the university campus. Brilliant.” He pocketed the icon and walked for the door. “It’s time to get out of the closet.”

  Ree covered her mouth to keep from snickering. “It’s ‘come out of the closet,’ my dear,” she said with a huge grin.

  “I do believe you are having a laugh at my expense. What have I said?”

  “ ‘Come out of the closet’ is a euphemism for telling people you’re gay.”

  “But I am usually quite gay— Oh. Not in the contemporary parlance. Though I did get to meet Oscar Wilde once. Quite a witty fellow. He asked if I wanted to see his scripts, which I rather imagine now was an invitation to examine his briefs.”

  Ree reached for the wall as she tried to keep the laughter in. She put her other hand on Drake’s face to shut him up—Damn, his skin is soft. No, focus! No time for mushy thoughts!

  She gathered herself as she let go of Drake’s surprised mug.All right, once more with feeling. She played the Harry Potter short for herself. Feeling the same energy build in her mind, she pushed it into the magic, using her pen as a makeshift wand.

  The obfuscation back in place, Ree opened the door.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Blue Stone Express

  Up a flight of stairs, they found the waiting room, filled with hundreds of seats of varying sizes and shapes. There was something for all of Spirit’s creatures. There were seats for spirits whose lower halves kind of faded out, seats for spirits who had octopi for tails, for those that were ten feet tall, and for many more configurations of bodies. At the center was a terminal with a team of busy spirits that checked the travelers’ shimmering-energy boarding passes and calibrated their machines accordingly, switching out the various icons and repeating rituals that activated a portal a few feet away.

  The portal itself looked like a cross between a Stargate and Stonehenge, covered in runes that didn’t match any language Ree recognized, real or imaginary, and with a large empty circle that stretched to the roof of the room.

  Ree was sure the runes weren’t any normal-people-known language, since she killed at fictional-language Trivial Pursuit. She ought to, since she made up the fifty questions for Fictional Languages back in college when she and the folks of the SF Club made a Far-from-Trivial Pursuit for their year-end party. All that work, and I still didn’t make president senior year.

  Ree continued to puzzle out how spirit-world travel worked. It seemed that a spirit would step into the center of the circle, and as the adminstrators’ rituals finished, a blue cloud of energy would wrap itself around the spirit, then collapse in on itself, leaving an empty space and a pop! sound. She was disappointed that it sounded nothing like BAMF.

  That’s just not right.

  Drake pulled on the belt, and she felt him put a hand on her shoulder. “On three,” he said in a whisper.

  He tapped once, twice, three times.

  The room turned into an action movie. Drake appeared in front of her, dropping to one knee and firing into the crowd. He’d done something to make his rifle shoot on full automatic. Instead of bursts of energy, his rifle hurled dozens of crackling blue blobs across the room. When they hit, each blob wrapped itself around the spirit like they had done in the ritual and pulled its target through makeshift vorteci, almost seeming to wink them out of existence entirely. The pops from Drake’s gun came fast enough that Ree had flashbacks to the Chinese New Year when she and her dad had lived in Oakland and spent the night on the roof wrapped in blankets.

  As the field narrowed out, Ree saw the Muse, all jagged edges and gaping maw. It stood out more on this side, like someone had run it through Photoshop and scaled up the contrast to distinguish its shades of gray and black. Ree closed on the Muse, large steps chewing up the space between them, and dropped the veil so that Drake didn’t accidentally port her to Botswana or wherever all those things were headed. She circled toward its flank, and the spirit surged forward to meet her.

  “Hey there, fucker. Remember me?” She rolled left, taking a swipe at the Muse with the sword. Her slash missed, but she avoided the thing’s charge.

  “When I’m done with you, you’re never going to hurt a single person ever again.” She came up to a kneeling position, blade out in front of her. All around, the room was in chaos, screams and shouts of stampeding spirits rapidly getting swallowed up by Drake’s machine-gun relocation program.

  She pulled the pen out of her coat, the wizardy fu faint at the edges of her mind. She leveled the pen at the Muse as it advanced, dug in her feet, and loudly proclaimed, “This is my boom stick!”

  She willed out as big a bitch-slap as she could, pouring into it her anger, her fear, and the memory of the pain it had heaped on her. She imagined the Muse getting ripped to shreds by pure energy, obliterated by her blast.

  The spell lashed out as a semitransparent wave with an orange tint. It hit the Muse and knocked it back into the side of the ritual circle. But as she moved forward and took a breath to shoot another blast, her grasp on the Potter energy dissipated and her pen was just a pen again.

  No time for a video break now. Just me and ol’ stabby.

  “Yo, Drake, wanna give me a hand here?” Ree asked as she chased the Muse. It float-limped away from the circle, trying to put distance between itself and Ree. I’ve got you now, fucker.

  “I’m rather indisposed, sadly,” Drake shouted back. “Security has arrived.”

  Ree glanced over her shoulder and saw a dozen of the all-armor guards storming up the spiral stairs. Drake laid down fire to cover the stairs, but the brutes had taken to climbing across the walls and flying around.

  “Then you’re all mine,” Ree said to the Muse as she dashed across the room. The Muse scaled up the wall to the ceiling, and Ree slowed, staring up to the corner. Well, crap. I didn’t think about that. Screw you, high ceilings.

  Ree shouted at the Muse, “You’ve got to come down sometime, you predatory piece of slime. I’ve got all day, and this sword is itching to rip you to shreds.” She stalked below the spirit, trying to keep it as close as she could manage while it probed the walls and ceiling like a frustrated fly.

  “Can’t just fade away here, can you?” She checked over her shoulder again and saw Drake run-and-gunning from cover to cover. Shit, no time for taunting. How can I get to you?

  Under the ceiling was a lattice of rafters, a honeycomb dome. Ree imagined it had something to do with the portal, but what it really meant was that if she could get up to the ceiling, she could swing around and chase the Muse monkey-style.

  Ree plotted jumping paths from kiosks and chairs, but the only way for her to get to the ceiling was the transport circle. She ran for the standing circle, jumped onto a chair, bounded up to a kiosk, and finally hurled
herself up and at the structure. Wrapping her arms and legs around the cool granite-esque surface, she held strong to it. Reaching up with her sword hand, she tried to pull her body high enough to loop a foot over the lattice. Her first effort failed, so she sliced upward and got her sword stuck in the ceiling.

  Well, that works. She hauled herself up by the sword and grabbed hold of the narrow stone bars. She wrenched the sword free as she plotted a path across the ceiling toward the Muse. She swung back and forth several times, then looped one foot up into the lattice. She rested her other foot beside it and reached out with her sword arm to get another handhold.

  She got the hang of the process, thankful for her countless hours on jungle gyms and for her finger strength from video games and martial arts.

  “I’m coming for you now, bucko.” She crawled toward the Muse, which bounced around a corner. She heard a louder commotion where she imagined Drake to be.

  “I am afraid time is running short, my sarcastic friend!” came his call. There was urgency in his voice, cracking through the normal bombasticity.

  “Working on it!” She sped up the swinging, but two rungs later, she flubbed the grab, her hand slipping off the loop. She tucked one foot in and splayed the other one out, stopping herself in a not-cool upside-down position. The pressure on her leg and foot was insane, and she hoped she hadn’t sprained anything.

  Wishing she’d kept up with her crunches, she hauled herself back up with her core, reaching for the lattice. Her lungs ran dry and her stomach clenched, but her fingers reached the stone, and she was upright again. In the meantime, the Muse had switched corners, so she had to move faster.

  “Get your ass over here, you low-rent nightmare machine. I’ve seen scarier shit on old reruns of Goosebumps, you grayscale leftover boggart. What does it say that all I wanted after our last fight was a warm mug of milk and more weapons? Maybe you were scary back in the BCEs, but these days, you’re about as terrifying as day-old espresso grinds, you spindly sack of shit. I bet you get frightened by Ugly Dolls!”