“So because she’s too powerful for a non-magical prison, she has to die?” Chase asked.
Karyn took the joint from his hands, inhaled deeply, then pitched the tiny stub out into the water.
“Our laws go back thousands of years,” she explained. “They haven’t changed in all that time, and neither has the punishment. Near the top of that short list of rules is keeping knowledge of magic out of the hands of those not born to it. What Trey and his crew did at the nexus is a gross abuse of power. Established mages may dabble in human sacrifice here and there without pissing off the Conclave. Montgomery showing ungifted how to filter nexus energy through a human conduit is about as acceptable as bringing a kilo of cocaine to a kindergarten party.”
“There’s only one punishment for something like that,” I said softly. “Montgomery has to die.”
“Okay,” The skin on Chase’s forehead wrinkled a little while he tried to make sense of everything we were telling him. “If this is such a big deal, then why don’t we just tell the Conclave to go get Montgomery?”
“We could,” I said, “but that wouldn’t get us out of hot water with Trang. Montgomery’s going to die one way or another. If we’re the ones holding the smoking gun at the end of the day, we’re also free of Trang’s wrath. I don’t like it anymore than you do, but it’s the only way for us to get him off our back. Trang knows how hard this is for me. We’re playing his game now, and the only way to win is for him to see me suffer.”
“Couldn’t the Conclave protect us?” Chase asked. “We’d be doing them a favor by telling them about this, right?”
Karyn laughed loudly. It echoed across the water, and although she’d been keeping up her hard-ass image up to this point, there was an edge of hysteria to it that caused it to dissolve into slightly nervous giggles.
“The Conclave are self-centered assholes,” she said. “Montgomery’s been around a while, and I don’t doubt she’s got half the Conclave in her pocket already. If we did force their hand and make them go after her, they’d probably just be annoyed with us. Best course of action where the Conclave is concerned is to stay as far below their radar as we can.”
Chase remained silent. He nudged the sand with the tip of his shoe, thrust his hands into his pockets, then turned and faced the water. For several minutes we all stood quietly, staring out at the lights across the way.
“Karyn and I were talking about the whole quantum magic thing while you were in with Trang,” Chase eventually said. “I think I underestimated just how hard fusing magic and technology is. Seems there’s more to it than saying a bit of latin and sprinkling a fifteen million dollar computer with dried toad dust.”
“If it was easy, I’d have to guess Trang or someone else would have figured it out by now,” I ventured.
“Exactly.” Chase turned to me, his actions becoming more animated the more he talked. “He’s supplying parts to Vector Zero, the world’s foremost authority on quantum computing. If he’s also working with them to try to create the same enhancements, there’s got to be some overlap between what they’re doing at Vector Zero and what Montgomery is trying to do.”
“You think Montgomery has a mole at Vector Zero?” I asked. I turned to Karyn. “You know anything about this?”
“Montgomery’s operation is highly compartmentalized,” she said. “Other than her bodyguard and Trey’s crew, I’ve never met anyone else in her organization. I’ve been to several of her offices, but I doubt any of them were at the lab where she’s doing her quantum computing research.”
Chase took his multitool out of his pocket, flipping it open then snapping it shut again while mulling over everything we’d just told him. The repeated clacking sound made me want to yank the tool from his hand and throw it into the water, but after a few more agitated flips, he gave up and shoved the multitool back in his pocket.
“I’m hungry.” He started walking to the car without waiting for Karyn or I to follow. “Let’s go get some food, then head home and start making a plan. I’ve got some surveillance gear I can dig out of storage. If we can get listening devices into some Vector Zero offices, maybe hack their intranet, we might be able to root this guy out by the end of the week.”
“I guess this is the part where I tell you we only have until sunrise to deliver,” I said, effectively stopping Chase dead in his tracks.
He turned slowly, and I braced myself for a verbal onslaught. Knowing I deserved it wouldn’t make it any harder to take. Chase just didn’t know what kind of people he’d gotten involved with when he’d partnered up with me. Fae like Trang enjoyed toying with humans like us. There had never been a chance I could have walked out of that meeting with a list of reasonable criteria. Maybe I’d been too eager to let Chase in on my secret in the first place. If my judgement hadn’t been so clouded by injury and perpetual loneliness, maybe I’d have tried harder to keep him from getting involved in things he couldn’t fully understand.
“Okay,” he said calmly. “Before sunrise. We can do that. We’re going to have to push the Vector Zero angle hard in order to root out our mole, if there even is one, but we can do it.”
There was the Chase I knew and loved.
We piled into the car, Chase grumbling about his legs being too long for the back seat. It would take us about fifteen minutes to drive to the Vector Zero office, and we needed a plan by the time we got there.
After a quick stop at the house where Chase had run in to grab a few items, we continued on to the Vector Zero campus. Chase and I had switched places so he could squirm around in an attempt to change outfits in the backseat. I kept my eyes off the mirror in attempt at trying to preserve his modesty. Mostly it was so I wouldn’t erupt into a fit of giggles at the sight of him thrusting his hips into the air while he cursed and tried to pull his pants up over his hips in the cramped confines of the sporty car. The brief flashes of fabric I saw flailing in my periphery made me think he was donning some kind of uniform. It wasn’t until we pulled into a strip mall parking lot next to the Vector Zero campus that I realized what he planned to do.
“Relax,” he said as he pulled a bulky fireman’s helmet from the duffel bag jammed into the seat beside him. “I’ll be in and out before the real first responders arrive on scene. You just do your job and get a massive fire illusion burning in the east wing of the building. Once everyone has left the area, I’ll charge in, find a terminal, and get into their system.”
“And you think you can flush out the mole just by getting access to company email and chat servers?” Karyn asked.
“Just leave it up to me,” he replied smugly. “You do your magic, and I’ll work mine.”
Karyn shrugged and got out of the car. I offered to help her with the illusion, but it was an empty offer and we both knew it. The only thing I’d be able to do was cast real mage fire onto the building. Since the supernaturally stubborn flames would eat through metal as easily as normal fire burned through paper, there wouldn’t be anything left of Vector Zero for us to infiltrate.
“You think we can trust her?” Chase asked once Karyn was out of sight.
“We can trust her to hold up her end of the blood oath, but even that’s open to interpretation.” I stared out into the shadows where Karyn was busy preparing a much larger version of the illusion she’d used on me back at her condo. “I trust Karyn to look after her own best interests. As long as we keep our goals aligned with hers, we should be fine.”
“This would be a lot easier if we didn’t have to worry about her stabbing us in the back,” said Chase.
I twisted in my seat to face him. A trickle of sweat ran down his forehead and he wiped it with the sleeve of his heavy flame-retardant jacket. He must have been roasting in that getup, but he wore it with a quiet professionalism that made him seem suddenly far older and more serious than usual. After a couple of days of not shaving or sleeping well, he had a grizzled and hardened look to him that made him appear surprisingly authentic in the uniform.
“It’s always like this with magic users,” I told him. “Our world is full of people trying to take advantage of us. It’s not easy never being able to trust anyone with your secrets. It hardens people like Karyn pretty quickly. We’re lucky she’s a witch and not a mage. Witches tend to be more grounded in their humanity since their power isn’t innate. I haven’t met a lot of other mages, but the ones I have had the misfortune of running into are either borderline insane, power mad, or both.”
Dull orange light flickered across Chase’s features. He nodded towards the Vector Zero building where fire raged up one side of the building. Thick clouds of black smoke billowed into the air. Now highlighted by the raging inferno behind her, Karyn returned to the car at a light jog, an impressive feat considering the size of the spike heel on her boots.
“Looks like she hasn’t run off and left us here,” he said. “Time for me to do my thing.”
Chase hopped out and jogged towards the front entrance. The klaxon of a fire alarm sounded across the mostly empty parking lot, followed shortly after by a few late working employees trickling out of the building just as Chase arrived to pushed his way past them on his way inside. If any of them thought it odd a fireman had arrived on scene so quickly and without a truck, they were too busy gawking at the now towering column of fire to stop him from entering the building.
“Hell of a spell,” I said as Karyn slipped back into the driver’s seat. “Full sensory, or just visual?”
“Visual and auditory,” Karyn replied. Her shoulders were uncharacteristically slumped, and she leaned her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes. “No way to pull of heat without affecting each person’s neural receptors. That spell I used on you was tied to the powder you ingested. It was more of a hallucination than an illusion.”
She opened her eyes and blinked a few times. Her eyelids drooped and she looked like she might fall asleep at any moment.
“Getting it through the walls was a bitch,” she said. “I had to draw a lot of energy using my body as the conduit. Not sure how much use I’ll be if you need help fighting Montgomery. She’s strong, Alex. Seriously strong.”
“Leave Montgomery to me,” I said. “Get us into her lab, and you’ll have done your part.”
I watched the flickering light of the fire, fighting the urge to check the time. The first distant wail of sirens filtered in through the open window, letting us know the real fire crews were minutes away at most. If Chase didn’t walk out that door in the next thirty seconds, he wasn’t going to make it. Every part of my brain screamed at me to run in there to try to save him, but when it came to breaking and entering, Chase knew his business far better than I did. As hard as it was, I knew I had to give him space to do what he did best.
The first fire engine pulled into the Vector Zero parking lot a minute later. Two police cruisers and an ambulance followed shortly afterwards. A steady pulse of red, purple, and blue lights flashed so brightly it was almost more distracting than the fire itself. The scene was so dramatic I almost forgot the fire wasn’t real. A few onlookers had gathered along the street, cell phones out as they recorded the scene.
“Come on, Chase,” I breathed. “Get out of there already.”
The car shook a little from the momentum of my knee bouncing up and down in a useless attempt at burning off nervous energy. Karyn put a stop to it by grabbing my thigh and pushing downward. Her fingers dug into my skin, pinching into bands of muscle and eliciting a howl of pain from me. It was enough to still my leg though, if not enough to quell the rising panic in my gut. Trang and Montgomery could leverage their connections and power to spring people from jail if need be, but I had no such pull. If Chase was nabbed by the authorities on his way out, there was nothing I could do to keep him from facing charges and jail time.
Having waited as long as I could bear, I flung my door open and jumped out of the car. I had no idea what I was going to do to keep the firemen out of the building, but I had do something, and I had to do it fast. There were a number of trees planted in the long medians between sections of the parking lot, and I figured if I could put enough force into a kinetic blast, I might be able to uproot one or two of them in such a way that they’d fall across the gathered emergency responders. The last thing I wanted to do was injure someone trying to help fight what they thought was a dangerous fire about to consume the entire building, but if I didn’t do something immediately, I’d be out of time.
My power burned white hot as I gathered enough force to knock down the trees from a great enough distance to not be noticed. There was every chance one of the bystanders might catch me in their attempts to record the fire, so I planted my feet and forced myself to shape the spell without any outward indication. It had become too easy to indulge the crutch of throwing my hands out as though physically hurling the spell at my target, so it took some serious effort to prepare the energy I was about to cast as casually as Montgomery had deflected my spell back at Karyn’s condo.
“Alex, what are you doing?” said Chase’s voice from behind me. “We’ve got to get out of here. Let’s go.”
Like a sneeze on the verge of release, I wanted so badly to let the built up energy go now that I’d set it in motion. Reining myself in took an enormous amount of discipline. Very carefully, I dismantled the barely restrained spell, un-working all the symbolic connections I’d attached to the formless power that was the essence of every bit of magic I’d ever done. It would have been much easier to have simply vented the magic out into the air, letting it dissipate in a useless stream of energy — something akin to steam pouring from a boiled kettle — but I couldn’t afford to waste it.
A little disoriented, and as frustrated as a lover interrupted in the instant before climax, I retreated to the car and sat sullenly while Karyn debriefed Chase on the status of his raid.
“No shit, I was terrified to walk into that fire even though I knew it was an illusion,” he said as he stripped away the remains of his uniform. “I thought for sure I was going to burn up.”
“But you got what you needed?” Karyn asked. “You figured out who the mole is?”
“Not yet.” Chase freed a slim notebook computer from a messenger bag by his feet. “It went even better than I’d hoped though. I was able to get into the security room where I created a new user with administrative access. I can view all the keycard logs for tonight.”
“How does that help us?” asked Karyn.
Chase’s fingers flew over the keyboard. The frantic clacking of keys was a metronome to my still wildly beating heart.
“The building is set up for omni-directional swipe security,” he explained as he worked. “With a supposed fire raging through the building, everyone should be heading for the nearest emergency exit. No keycard swiping is required to get out of secure areas. I was able to slip in through doors held open by employees until I managed to swipe a card of my own. In theory, there shouldn’t be any other log entries for the last fifteen minutes. If anyone was going into the building, we can assume it’s our mole trying to get their piece of the quantum computer out of there before they believe it’s going to be reduced to a puddle of melted silicon.”
A frown creased Karyn’s mouth. “Sounds like kind of a long shot. That fire illusion is only going to hold up for another five minutes. Ten at the outside. If you’re wrong, we may have just spooked our only lead into disappearing for good.”
“Or,” said Chase, spinning his laptop around to face us. “I just found our guy.”
On his screen was an unflattering employee ID photo of a man in his early forties. He looked pretty much like what you’d expect a guy who worked in quantum computing development to look like. Thick framed glasses. Awkward facial hair that wasn’t quite a beard but was too thin and scraggly for five o’clock shadow. He had the dark eyes and gaunt cheeks of someone who spent more time in front of a computer at than anywhere else. If I had to guess, I’d say he lived on a steady diet of power bars, energy drinks, and office coffee wi
th extra sugar.
“This guy’s card was used inside the area supposedly blocked off from the fire just a few minutes ago,” Chase said. “If he’s working with Montgomery, he’d probably be able to tell it wasn’t a real fire. I couldn’t pull up any kind of building schematics, but some of the security doors he passed through have IDs like DEVLAB119. It has to be him.”
Karyn’s brow furrowed a little. “How do we track him if he doesn’t need to swipe his card to get out? What if he’s already left from a rear door? I’ll buy that it’s him, but we’re fucked if he slips past us. We should split up and get into the crowd. There’s no way we’re going to spot him from here.”
“We could just follow that guy,” I said, pointing across the parking lot.
Chase and Karyn turned in time to see a man walking briskly away from the Vector Zero building. He had a large black plastic case in one hand, and he glanced back over his shoulder every few steps as if checking to make sure no one was following him. When he got to a newish looking VW Jetta, he popped the trunk and used both hands to haul the case inside. With a final furtive look around, he slammed the trunk closed and got behind the wheel.
Karyn started the car and pulled out of our neighboring parking lot shortly after our guy in the Jetta. She kept her speed low, hanging back far enough to keep track of him without alerting him to our presence. He seemed more intent on getting his piece of the computer to its destination than he did checking for a tail, so it was a relatively simple process until we were forced to catch up to him at a red light. Karyn began slowing down so we wouldn’t pull up beside him, but Chase told her to instead go around and pass him just as the light turned green. He explained that this neighborhood was largely residential, and that we could safely follow him from in front for a while.
Black Market (Black Records Book 2) Page 25