“Well, I thought—”
“Tesla,” Kristin said firmly. “What’s this Tesla thing?”
Ben shot Thea another desperate look, but this was what she had brought Kristin here for. She turned away and started to piece together the story of Tesla and the Elemental cube. Kristin didn’t say anything until Thea ground to a halt; then she sat back and started ticking off points on her fingers.
“Okay. First. How much about that cube did Humphrey May know when you started out?”
“He said that it was an Elemental cube as soon as he saw it.”
“I don’t think he knew that it had anything directly to do with Tesla, though. Not until later. Not until Terry—” Ben began, but Kristin turned on him with a scowl.
“I wasn’t talking to you.” She turned back to Thea. “Did Humphrey May know that you were Elemental? When all this started?”
“I’m not sure when he began to believe that, actually,” Thea said. “But everything that happened with the spellspam…that gave him some clues.”
“Humphrey May gave you that thing you’re wearing? The keypad?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t get it—how come he gives you something like that, without even telling your parents?” Kristin said. “Nobody knows that you’ve got it, or that he gave it to you. And even if he didn’t know about Tesla, quite, when he gave it to you, he did at least suspect what you are. And he certainly knew what you could do with it. And he knew that you would, because you’ve done it before. He was setting you up.”
“Why?” Thea said blankly. “Why would he do that?”
“He was trying a few shortcuts of his own, probably. It seems to me as though he is after an Elemental mage of his own. He figured you for one, and gave you something that he knew you were going to use. You would either prove him right and take it and run with it, and he gets the credit for it. Or you would use it to help him retrieve Tesla, the greater Elemental mage, and he would still get the credit. Or nothing happens at all—but nobody knows about it in that case, because you aren’t allowed to discuss it. Any way you slice it, he gets something out of being generous to you.”
“Thea,” Ben said, “are you sure about Tesla? What we saw could have been just a visual record, like a sort of home movie of a life. You seem to think that he’s actually real in there, alive…and apparently so does Humphrey. What makes either of you so certain?”
“Humphrey said the first Nexus, the very first ‘supercomputer,’ was similar to that cube that we’ve got, which means that Tesla is more than capable of doing that. As for me…I talked to Tesla myself.”
“Directly?” Kristin asked skeptically.
“At least twice,” Thea said. “Once as a grown man in New York, after a fire in his lab—after he lost everything—and once as a kid. Where do you think I got that whole Kaschei idea from?”
“So you do believe that he’s real, that he’s still alive?” Ben asked.
“As alive as you or I,” Thea said.
“Then you’d better be careful,” Kristin said. “Because if you’re right, and Humphrey believes you’re right, something very valuable is at stake here. And if nobody except Humphrey knows what you are, then it’s easy for him to use your talents to get what he wants. Tesla is a known quantity—his work is known, his potential value is huge. You…are an unknown. Your own potential is still only theoretical.”
“Like hell,” Ben said loyally. “She’s proved what she can do. And others know what she’s done. Mrs. Chen. The principal. Her parents.”
“All of whom are subject to the FBM,” Kristin said. “All the rest of the world knows for sure is that you’re a failed Double Seventh, Thea. The seventh child of two Sevenths, who can’t do magic. Not that you’ve come into any kind of power at all.”
“That…was necessary,” said Thea faintly. “The Alphiri…”
“Perhaps. But your shield can be turned against you. You might have to choose—reveal yourself and deal with the Alphiri, or stay wrapped in your silence and maybe get sacrificed for something thought to be the greater good.”
“Thea, do the Alphiri know about Tesla?” asked Ben suddenly.
“I have no idea,” Thea said, startled. “How would I know that?”
“Why do you ask?” Kristin said.
“Well, how did we get the cube, again?” Ben said.
“It was retrieved with Beltran when we went to get…oh dear…well, Corey certainly knows about the cube…”
Kristin’s head swiveled back to Thea, her expression confused all over again. “Who’s Corey?” she asked plaintively.
“The Trickster. Coyote,” Thea said. “He’s an Elder Spirit of the First World. He’s got his paws in this, and if he does, then the Faele do, because he uses them to do his dirty work when he can’t—The cube. They stole the cube.”
“Corey is of the Faele?” Kristin said, frowning slightly.
“No. He’s older than they are—he was here when the world was made and the first humans dreamed the first stories about it. There’s probably a part of him in all of us; that’s how we know him when he crosses our path.”
“I don’t know,” Kristin murmured. “The Faele have been around for some time, too, as part of our stories—creatures we thought we had invented, or thought we had maybe glimpsed but then dismissed because they were too unbelievable, until they crossed the polity borders and revealed themselves to be real enough.”
“The Faele were always the other, something outside of us,” Thea said. “Corey is supposed to be an incarnation of our own oldest instincts. But he can learn, and he can adapt—it’s one of the most astonishing things about him. When the Faele crossed his path, and ours, he took what he could from them—tactics, ideas…perhaps artifacts.”
Kristin ran her tongue over her teeth. “The Faele are trouble.”
“Duh,” Ben said, rolling his eyes.
“Two things about the Faele,” Kristin said. “They might seem mutually contradictory, but that’s the Faele all over. The first is that they live absolutely in the moment, and don’t care about the consequences. If something sounds like a good idea at the time, they’ll just do it, and leave someone else to deal with the fallout. The second is that they hold grudges like nobody’s business.”
“A grudge is a consequence,” Ben said.
“I said they were contradictory,” Kristin said. “They might have been recruited into this, either by your friend the Trickster, in which case anything they did was purely innocent and they were just having a high old time, or else by the Alphiri, who might have fed some old grudge to get them to throw a wrench in the works. Just because the Faele could. Just because it would screw up someone else’s plans. If they disliked that someone else enough.” She ran her tongue over her teeth again. “I should know,” she added morosely.
“But if Humphrey knows the cube was stolen, or thinks he knows…”
“The question is, what would the Alphiri want with the cube?” Ben said.
Thea stared at him. “The same thing,” she said, “that they might have wanted with me. If the Alphiri know what—or who—is inside that cube, they might be willing to pay any price for it. It’s high magic; it’s what they’ve wanted all along—and this time it comes in a conveniently prepackaged form. It’s buyable. Legally. We aren’t talking about a person.”
“I thought we were,” Kristin said, blinking. “This Tesla guy.”
“But he is real in a very different sense than you and I are real,” Thea said. “The Alphiri are literal. They understand that the human polity will not sell a human being—that lesson’s been driven home hard. But they could make a case that Tesla is not a human being. Not anymore, anyway. Not in this form. That it would not be slavery if they purchased what they could always represent as a hologram.”
“And he’ll never die,” Ben whispered, his face suddenly stark. “Oh, God. It’s forever.”
“They couldn’t make him do anything, though,” Kristin said
. “Like, what would they threaten him with?”
But Thea had suddenly gone quite white.
He’ll never die. Slavery. Forever.
Alone. Alone in his world.
Suddenly the face she saw in her mind’s eye was not Tesla’s, with its piercing blue eyes and careful, old-fashioned center-parted hairdo. Instead it had deep-set dark eyes, smooth olive skin, and dark hair falling wild to the shoulder.
Diego de los Reyes. Whom Thea herself had condemned to just such a fate.
“But they don’t know about the magic,” Ben said. “About the Kaschei maneuver. About the fact that the Tesla locked inside that cube may be utterly useless for what they want of him.”
“But he’s in the cube,” Kristin said obstinately. “That means that he does have the magic. Somehow.”
“No,” Thea said. “Terry said the actual transfer would be purely mechanical. That he had to have actually made the cube way back, when his full powers of Elemental magic were still intact. Whatever happened afterward didn’t affect that.”
“So he had magic, this Tesla…and then he didn’t…and now he does again?” Kristin said, frowning.
“He doesn’t…” Thea cocked her head to the side quizzically. “Wait a minute. What makes you think that he has it again?”
“Because it isn’t just a transfer, if what you say is true,” Kristin said. “If it was just a transfer, then it would be just a—what was it you called it earlier? A home movie of his life. If he transferred himself, and did it in such a way that his body died, in this world, it took more than a mechanical copying. He changed himself fundamentally with magic. And you said that the cube was sealed with Elemental magic?”
Thea nodded mutely.
“Well, someone had to have done that, in the end, didn’t they?” Kristin said.
“Would it be possible to preprogram it?” Thea asked, turning to Ben.
“Don’t look at me. You’d have to ask Terry that,” he said, shrugging. “But she’s right; it was sealed, and it took all of us to break that seal.”
The same thought occurred to both Ben and Thea at the same moment, and she reached out and grabbed his arm.
“The Alphiri couldn’t have gotten past that seal,” Thea said. “They wouldn’t have the first clue as to how to go about it, even if they had the Elemental magic, which they don’t. And whatever was inside that cube…they didn’t know about it. They couldn’t. We broke that seal…”
“And they’ll find out about that long before they find out about anything beyond that,” Ben said. “It’s information, and all information is for sale, and everyone knows that the Alphiri pay handsomely for it. It will leak. And they couldn’t get at whatever was locked up inside the cube before, but now they can. And they’ll want it.”
“They’ll try to buy it,” Kristin said. “They always try to buy.”
“They can’t buy,” Thea said. “They officially don’t know it exists. And if they knew it existed, they would also know that it wouldn’t be for sale.”
“Not by the Human Polity, anyway,” Kristin said.
“What do you mean?” Ben asked, but Thea was nodding.
“They buy from whoever’s selling,” she said. “And they don’t ask where it came from. The cube was stolen before—it could be stolen again.”
“The Trickster. The Faele.” Ben sat up. “We’d better get back,” he said. “We should tell someone.”
“Who?” Kristin said. “Humphrey? Wasn’t that the topic you came here to discuss?”
“There’s got to be a way of dealing with this without involving Humphrey,” Ben said.
“There might be,” Kristin said.
The other two turned to stare at her.
“Well, the whole idea is to keep Tesla from falling into the clutches of the Alphiri, in whatever form,” Kristin said. “It seems to me that if there’s anyone who’s actually equipped to be in contact with him—real or not, at this point—it’s you, Thea. Have you considered that it might be easiest all around if you were to steal the cube yourself?”
8.
“LET ME GET THIS straight,” Terry said. “You want to burgle the FBM headquarters?”
The safest, most heavily shielded place in the Academy—and also one of the few where Terry could speak freely without worrying about accidental magical utterances and their consequences—was the Nexus room. As soon as Ben had blurted out to Terry the idea of kidnapping the cube, Terry had sent his sister to Thea with an urgent message to meet him there. It was late, and even outside the secret room the admin building was empty and quiet, with offices locked for the day.
“I don’t want to steal trade secrets. I just want Tesla’s cube,” Thea said.
Terry shook his head in outraged disbelief. “Ben said this was the Walrus’s idea.”
“Kristin,” Thea said. “Please, those teeth really aren’t her fault.”
“But she put you up to this?”
“It sounds like a good plan,” Thea said defensively.
“Do you have any idea just how insane this is?” Terry said. “Let me ask again—you want to burgle the Federal Bureau of Magic…?”
“The cube—” Thea began, but Terry raised his hand to silence her.
“They keep it in a safe,” he said pointedly. “A safe, Thea. And it’s a safe at the FBM headquarters, secured by physical means and by heavy-duty protection spells. Given those circumstances, why do you think the cube is in any danger at all? And even if it is, how do you think you can possibly get at it?”
“I can weave my way around things,” Thea said. “Whatever barrier is thrown up, there’s a world where that barrier doesn’t exist. There’s a world where the safe isn’t locked at all. There’s a world where the safe isn’t even there.”
“You think other people might find out how to get to that place?” Terry said, sounding startled. “Are you seriously telling me nothing is safe anymore?”
“In the place where there is no safe, there may be no cube,” Thea said, shrugging. “But in this world, they both exist—one’s merely an obstacle to the other.”
“But the cube is already safely locked away in this world,” Terry said. “Thea, it makes no sense.”
“What if someone with access to that safe is somehow tricked into opening it?” Thea said.
“Like who?” Terry said, frowning. “I don’t get this sudden feeling you have against Humphrey. You aren’t suggesting that he—”
“Not deliberately,” Thea said. “But Humphrey isn’t there. He’s here, on this coast. That’s what Ben overheard. That’s what I think he was saying to Mrs. Chen. So who’s guarding the safe with the cube in it?” She grimaced. “Sounds like a Kaschei needle all over again. Tesla, in a cube, in a safe, in an office, on the opposite coast of a continent.”
“I don’t get how you think you can guard it better,” Terry said, perplexed. “Or from whom. I’ve heard nothing whatsoever about any danger in that quarter, and I’ve got an ear to the ground via the Nexus, and Humphrey May e-mails me regularly, and—”
“That cube was stolen at least once before,” Thea said stubbornly. “Humphrey himself said so. And look where it ended up.”
“Yes, in an uncrackable safe,” Terry said.
“Before that. In a duffel bag in the desert. By way of Corey the Trickster. And the only reason the Alphiri didn’t have it then is because they either weren’t aware of what it was, or they knew they had no hope of getting at it. But the Alphiri live longer than we do. They think in longer terms. They might have let it come into our hands so that we could do the dirty work—and then they’ll get the better bargain.”
“They could not possibly know any of it,” Terry said, shaking his head. “Besides…”
“I’m going to get it,” Thea said, and crossed her arms across her chest.
“You’re going to go against the Federal Bureau of Magic. The FBM. Because you don’t trust them with a major magical artifact, which it is their business to study and
protect. Seriously.”
“They aren’t above using whatever means necessary,” Thea said.
“What does that mean?”
“Luana wanted to blanket the entire Academy with an anti-spellspam spell, remember?” Thea said. “No matter what the fallout might be. No matter that people like Ben, like you, might have been seriously hurt by that.”
“Yes, but that time it was actually Humphrey May who stopped her,” Terry pointed out. “And now you’re basically saying that he’s turned into her?”
“No,” Thea said, stung. She wasn’t sure what she felt about Humphrey May at the present moment, but she was a long way from thinking he was like Luana Lilley. “And that’s another thing, anyway. If Humphrey’s over here—for whatever reasons—who’s back there watching the safe? Can you really tell me you trust Luana with this? Come on, be honest.”
“That’s not fair,” Terry said after a moment of silence. “She’s hardly a proper yardstick to measure anything by. She might have her own agenda, and she might be a complete idiot, but she’s FBM, in the end.”
“But she’s arrogant and vain and ambitious,” Thea said. “Even Grandmother Spider wasn’t totally sure about the Faele. She left me alone in the First World to go back and check on her dream catchers. What could we say about a fallible mortal like Luana?”
“You’re making this up as you go along, aren’t you?” Terry said, staring at her. “And just how do you think you can make that cube safer than it is now? Keep it here? That’s insane—it’ll be ripe for the plucking. And besides, do you realize what will happen if you get caught? You probably will get booted out of the school. It would mean burning quite a few bridges.”
“I have a plan,” Thea said. “And I don’t plan on getting caught. I’m going in.”
“Fine,” Terry said, uncoiling from his chair. “But you’re not going alone.”
“You think it’s a terrible idea.”
“Yes, but that’s neither here nor there. You’re going to do this anyway. You need someone to watch your back.”
“But it’s the FBM. It’s your own family business; you’ve called it that plenty of times. You’d be burning those bridges too,” Thea said.
Worldweavers: Cybermage Page 10