Worldweavers: Cybermage

by Alma Alexander

  “How would you know?” Kristin asked.

  Tess couldn’t help a quick grin. “Family business,” she said. “We’ve been around the FBM type all our lives. Starting with Mom and Uncle Kevin, and all the interns that come marching through the house beginning to cultivate the proper aura of arrogance and an air of invincible righteousness. You don’t get far in the system without those—you have to think you’re always right, or you can’t expect anyone else to believe that you are.”

  “I know,” Terry said, flashing a smile almost identical to his sister’s. “Thea, I think this is a negotiation, and you’ve got the upper hand right now. Humphrey badly needs a victory, and really quickly, too. I think he’ll be willing to give you almost anything you ask if you can guarantee one for him. For all he knows the Alphiri already have the cube, and all that’s missing from the equation is the pigeons.”

  “Where is the cube, then, exactly?” Tess said.

  “Safe,” Thea said, “for now.” She lifted her wrist, poising her left hand above her keypad. “Ready?”

  They were suddenly back in the real world; the temperature had dropped a couple of degrees, and it had started to rain. Magpie flipped up the hood on her sweatshirt, and all of them scurried for cover.

  “You think anyone saw us?” Thea said, scanning the grounds.

  “This is so cool,” Kristin said, grinning from ear to ear with those preposterous teeth on full display, hugging her elbows with glee. “I don’t think anyone was paying attention, Thea, but if they were, they’re probably thinking they’re working way too hard and have gone off to have a nap.”

  Ben stared at her. “This isn’t a game,” he said.

  Kristin turned to stare at him for a long moment. The ghost of a smile still hovered around her lips, but her eyes had gone serious.

  “I know,” she said.

  “If anything does come down on Terry and Thea, it’s all your fault,” Ben said. “If you hadn’t been so—”

  “Cut it out, guys,” Thea said. “Well, I suppose I’d better go find Humphrey.”

  “I asked him to give us a day,” Terry said. “You sure? You can make him sweat over this, just a little.”

  “No, I’d rather get it over with. I have an idea.”

  “You want me to come with you?” Terry asked.

  “You want us all to come?” Magpie said unexpectedly.

  “I’m hardly likely to be expelled or deported from this place on the spot, even if he does have a clear idea of what happened. But if he doesn’t know anything, there’s no point in putting anybody else in the cross fire just yet.”

  Terry was staring thoughtfully at the keypad on Thea’s wrist. “Does that thing do e-mail?”

  “I have no idea,” Thea said. “I’ve never really tried it. Why?”

  “Because, now that I think of it, you might need help at some point, and it would be a good thing if you were able to send out a Mayday message. But it might be set up so that it can communicate with only one outside port—Humphrey. And it wouldn’t be hard for him to keep tabs on you, if it is.”

  Thea lifted her head sharply. “You think Humphrey knows where I go? When I do use it?”

  “If he does, then he already knows everything, and then some,” Ben said.

  “Not necessarily. Thea, you write in your own shorthand when you do this stuff—things that mean something to you, and will take you to a place that only you know the precise details of. It isn’t like you’re writing in an exact set of directions. So even if he can keep track of your keystrokes, he still might not know where whatever it is that you’ve written down will take you. But all the same…you’d better use that thing very carefully.”

  Thea squared her shoulders. “Humphrey May knows what he knows,” she said. “Let me go and find out just how much.”

  “How do you know where he is?” Ben asked.

  “He wants to be found,” Terry said. “He’ll put himself in your way.”

  “He went toward the admin building,” Kristin said helpfully, pointing.

  “I noticed,” Thea said. “Thanks. I’ll get back to you guys.” She caught Terry’s eye once again, hesitating just a little. “Terry, about Humphrey…Are you sure…?”

  “We are,” Tess said.

  It had started to rain more heavily, and now Thea flipped the collar of her light jacket up about her ears and dashed out onto the wet grounds, racing through puddles as she ran. It took her only a few minutes to get to the administration building, but her hair was plastered across her face by the time she got there, and she paused for a moment to push it out of her eyes.

  “Oh dear,” said a contrite but humorous voice behind her. “You didn’t have to get soaked.”

  Thea pushed the wet hair behind her ears, shrugged down her damp collar, and turned around. “It’s only water,” she said. “Were you waiting for me?”

  “I guess I was,” Humphrey said.

  Thea drew a deep breath. She was about to call his bluff, to throw down the gauntlet to a fully fledged, trained mage of the Federal Bureau of Magic, all on the word of a friend. But Terry had trusted her when it mattered. It was time to return the favor.

  “If we aren’t certain that those birds of yours can be…rejoined, then we can just sit back and watch the Alphiri chasing pigeons in the park, and laugh about it,” Thea said. “The only person likely to have any kind of certain knowledge about this would be Tesla himself. Why don’t you let me, or us, go back and ask him?”

  For a moment she thought she had overplayed her hand, because his expression darkened into a thunderous scowl—and then the scowl vanished, and what was left was exactly what Terry had predicted would be there. Helplessness. A sense of vulnerability that bordered on outright fear.

  “We…can’t. The cube…I didn’t quite tell you the whole story. The truth is, they might already have it.”

  It took Thea a moment to parse this, and when she did it was with genuine surprise. “You think the Alphiri have the cube?”

  He really hadn’t come to the Academy to ream Thea out for breaking into the FBM headquarters. Part of her was simply relieved; another part was slowly coming to realize that the foray into the FBM, and the theft of Tesla’s cube, had been something quite different from anything she had done before. It had been a conscious, planned defiance of all the accepted rules. And she had done this under the very noses of the Federal Bureau of Magic, the highest authority in the land, and had done it without being detected.

  “We don’t know where the actual artifact is, right now,” Humphrey said, the words all but wrung out of him.

  Thea stared at him for a long moment.

  “I can get your pigeons,” she said at last.

  Humphrey shot her a startled look. “But we don’t know, not for certain, that the birds are even—”

  “We do. You do. And if the Alphiri are out there looking, then they know it too. If the pigeons are out there, we can get them.”

  She had spoken with confidence. Something had shifted; they had suddenly been transformed from mentor and trainee into something approaching equals.

  Thea could see Humphrey become aware of this; he looked surprised by it, and not entirely in a pleasant way.

  “What makes you so sure?” Humphrey said after a moment, his voice suddenly darker and lower.

  Thea looked at him steadily. “Because,” she said, “I have a Finder.”

  “A Finder?” Humphrey echoed. “One of you five is a Finder?”

  “No. Another.”

  “Someone…else? Here, at the school? We’d agreed that this whole thing would stay within the circle, that as few people as possible would know about any of it.”

  “Rafe told somebody,” Thea pointed out. “On the whole, my Finder is probably a lot more trustworthy. If you want those pigeons, use what you’ve got.”

  A memory of Humphrey’s own words came back to Thea, overheard on a damp night in a cedar wood. I use what tools are given to me, and Thea Winthrop is
the sharpest sword I have right now.

  “One of those pigeons has been hurt,” she continued. “Or even killed. We know that, from what the five of us originally saw when we entered the cube. Between Magpie’s connection to things that are sick or wounded and need healing, and Kristin’s ability to find the others, we can do this.”

  “Who’s this Kristin? Your Finder? How do you know that she is to be trusted with any of this? How did she get to be involved?”

  “Things happen for a reason,” Thea said.

  “I’m not sure I like this. I need to meet this Finder of yours.”

  “You said time is of the essence,” Thea said.

  Almost unwillingly, he nodded. “This needs to be done quickly and quietly, before the Alphiri get it all together.”

  “We can do it,” Thea repeated.

  Cheveyo’s voice suddenly came floating back to her—You cannot hide forever. If she did this—if she showed her hand at last—there would be no more hiding, in this world or in any other. And if the Alphiri failed in their quest to gather the Human Polity’s greatest wizard and make him do their bidding, they would know, in no uncertain terms, that there was an alternative—Thea herself, coming into her own place of power at last. Once she cast aside the concealment that had kept her safe, she would be exactly the thing that the Alphiri had wanted in the first place, a mage who could give their race the magic that they craved, who could give them a legacy, could make their race immortal. And it would be she, Thea, who would be on the front lines next time.

  “Are you all right?” Humphrey said. “You look very strange, all of a sudden.”

  “I’m fine,” Thea said, coming back to herself with a snap.

  “Are you sure you need to involve someone new in this?”

  “She’s necessary,” Thea said. “Without a Finder, we would be doing exactly what Rafe found so amusing—blundering around New York catching pigeons on a hit-or-miss basis. Which is probably what the Alphiri are doing. But with a Finder who is focused on a certain thing or a certain idea, we can do it.”

  “Do you have a plan?” Humphrey asked, and there it was again—that change, the difference in his tone. He was frowning a little, but he had accepted her as a partner rather than an apprentice.

  “Not yet,” Thea said. “But Christmas break is coming up. I can pull all of us together, with no schoolwork to distract us from this.”

  “You can always reach me, through that,” Humphrey said, nodding at her keypad device, answering Terry’s question beyond any further doubt. “Let me know what logistics support you need. I’ll do whatever I can to help. Go find Tesla, Thea. Thanks for doing this for us.”

  I use what tools are given to me.

  Thea Winthrop is the sharpest sword I have right now.

  Humphrey May had just shown his hand; the sword had been unsheathed. He had offered assistance, but he had also stepped back from the front line, leaving the battle itself to Thea. It was at once a gesture of trust, and a cold willingness to gamble Thea herself to win a game with much higher stakes.

  Protect. That’s what I am sworn to do.

  Humphrey’s words, again, but this time they resonated for Thea, too.

  “I’m not doing it for you,” Thea said. “I’m doing it for Tesla.”

  10.

  “OKAY, ONE MORE TIME,” said Ben, ticking his points off on the fingers of his right hand. “These so-called Elemental pigeons were somehow detached from Nikola Tesla; they’re little magical Elements, and they are still potentially alive and flitting around New York City decades after any ordinary pigeon would have kicked the bucket. The Alphiri buy this idea and send a pigeon-hunting team to New York. Humphrey May, the highest authority on this subject right now in our polity, speaking straight from the heights of the FBM and all of its vast and all-powerful knowledge, buys this idea—to the extent of okaying a pigeon hunt of our own, before, quote, ‘the Alphiri get them.’ But not even Humphrey May is sure whether said pigeons, assuming they exist, and can be caught, can even be…what did you call it, Thea?…rejoined to the original Tesla entity. And if they can, nobody has any idea what would happen next. How am I doing so far?”

  “Pretty much covers it,” Thea said.

  They had gathered together, all six of them, in what Kristin called Thea’s pseudo-classroom—a bubble-universe classroom emptied of its student population, shielded, warded, and made safe for Terry to speak his mind in. Thea had called them in to report on the outcome of her conversation with Humphrey May, and, with a twinge of guilty misgivings, to inform them that she had volunteered them all for the pigeon-hunting project.

  And Ben, judging from the sharper-than-usual edge of sarcasm in his words and the tone of his voice, wasn’t taking to the idea very well.

  “And you agreed to help him find these…these…” Ben waved his hand in front of his face, helplessly searching for the right adjective. “It’s a wild goose chase!”

  “Wild pigeon,” Kristin said, grinning.

  Ben growled at her.

  “Terry…it might come down to you, in the end,” Thea said, turning away from Ben.

  “You’re thinking that anything remotely like a rejoining would somehow have to happen inside a cyber-environment,” Terry said. “It makes sense; that’s the only place where all the pieces can actually exist together without violating all kinds of real-world rules. But what do you want me to do about it?”

  “You’d need to write something. Some kind of code that unifies the pieces that were scattered and makes it all whole again.”

  “That’s quite a job,” Terry said, a strange expression on his face.

  “Well, you’ve had practice,” Tess said. “The Twitterpat thing in the Nexus. You’ve worked with it for quite a while now.”

  “Yes, but Twitterpat wrote that. All I did was tinker.”

  “Yeah, right, and you’re so bad at tinkering that they handed you the Nexus on a silver platter,” Ben said.

  “I thought you were against this whole idea,” Magpie said, turning to him.

  “I am!” Ben said. “I think the whole thing is getting weirder and more out of control. I’d like to see a shred of concrete evidence.”

  “Your father is a scientist, isn’t he?” Kristin murmured.

  “So?”

  “Sometimes,” Kristin said, “you have to have faith first and evidence later.”

  “Oohhhh,” Ben said, turning away. “You started all this, you know. You and your bright idea of stealing the cube.”

  “Well, there is that,” Thea said.

  “What?”

  “You wanted evidence. We can get evidence, of sorts. From the cube. From Tesla himself. He was the one that did the split in the first place; he, if anyone, will know if anything can be done to reverse it.”

  “And you’re telling me that you can go back in there and actually talk to this Tesla spirit or whatever’s trapped in there? If he tells you it’s all a wild goose chase, will you go back to Humphrey May and tell him it’s all off?” Ben said.

  “Would that be satisfactory?” Thea said, and this time she couldn’t quite hide the grin.

  “You’re just making fun of me now,” Ben said, narrowing his eyes.

  “Some,” Thea said. “Ben, I don’t blame you. I don’t quite believe any of it myself. Still, we all saw what we saw. And then there’s the Alphiri. Something about all this made them believe that there’s a bargain to be had. Whatever else I might think of them, I trust their instincts on that score. They must think there’s something in this for them or else they’d be quite happy to let us do our own pigeon-chasing.”

  “Humphrey said that the Alphiri were seen chasing pigeons,” Tess said slowly.

  “Yes, and?” Ben said, turning on her.

  “There’s varying levels to this,” Tess said. “If they didn’t think it was worth their time, they would be doing nothing at all. If they were marginally interested, they might have contracted somebody to do this particular hunt for
them, and just present them with the pigeons, if found. But no—they themselves were seen in New York chasing birds. This is important enough for it not to be trusted to underlings.”

  “Important enough to break cover,” Magpie said.

  “All right, so someone believes there’s really something in it,” Ben said, conceding that point at least, however unwillingly. “What possible use can we—”

  “And how much attention would you give to a kid prancing around trying to catch a pigeon?” Tess said thoughtfully.

  “We won’t have to resort to random netting,” Thea said. “Kristin is a Finder. If she can turn her talents to Finding particular birds…”

  Kristin sat up. “You want me to…”

  “I thought we were going to talk to Tesla first,” Ben said.

  Thea sighed. “All right,” she said. “I need to go—”

  “We might as well all go,” Ben said. “It took all of us last time, and we would all be there to hear whatever he had to say.”

  “Skeptic,” Thea grumbled, pushing up her sleeve and staring thoughtfully at her wrist keypad for a second. “Fine. Hold on to your hats.”

  The sudden appearance of open sky and flat-topped mesas around her made Kristin’s breath whistle through her teeth as she gasped in astonishment.

  Cheveyo stepped out from behind a stone outcrop, his staff in one hand, the Tesla cube held in the palm of the other.

  “Catori,” he said, acknowledging Thea. And then, with a brief nod at the others, “And to all of you: welcome back. I told you that it would only be a short while before you would return for this, Catori. I did not realize myself just how short a span of days it would be.”

  “You may still need to guard it for me a while longer,” Thea said. “But we need to contact the man who lives inside it. We need…a few answers.”

  “Your wizard. Tesla.” The words were nothing less than the truth, but coming from Cheveyo, who had no way of knowing what the cube contained, they froze his visitors in their tracks.