Worldweavers: Cybermage

by Alma Alexander

  “We can watch,” Thea said, taking a few breaths to pull herself together. “We can observe, and up to a point we can interact with what’s going on back there, but the only one who can control it…is you.” She lifted her eyes to meet Tesla’s pale blue gaze. “You were in charge out there. You know what went wrong. Maybe there’s a chance, the faintest of chances, that if you were to do it again, you would do it right—that the Elemental magic would behave in the way that you wanted it to.”

  “What are you saying?” Tesla said, frowning.

  “I need you to…to be him,” Thea said faintly. “The other you. I need you to merge into him, to possess him, if you want to think of it that way. I want you inside that body, I want you controlling what’s going on, I want you to hold your hand in that flame. Again.” She drew a deep breath as she watched his stricken expression. “Did they tell you this would be easy?” she whispered, returning the barb that he had flung at her. She regretted it almost instantly, seeing the way he flinched as the words connected, but before she had a chance to apologize, Tesla turned his head away in a small, sharp motion, holding up a hand to silence any further commentary.

  Magpie and Thea waited.

  When he looked back at the two of them again, his eyes were terrible—full of pain, and power, and regret.

  “It is,” he said, “what I came here to do. I will do it. But, oh, you have no idea what you ask.”

  “I do,” Magpie said, reaching out to touch his wrist with her fingers. He twitched it away instinctively, and then he turned to smile down at her.

  “I am sorry, please forgive me,” he murmured. “I did not mean to reject a kind heart. I…am grateful.” He drew a deep ragged breath. “I am as ready as I can be to do a thing like this,” he said. “Let it begin.”

  It was as though they had simply rewound time on a spool. Things started happening again exactly as they had happened before—except this time, when the real Tesla entered the room, the ghost Tesla clenched his hands into fists, took another deep breath, and stepped out into the room.

  As the real Tesla busied himself with the thing on the bench that they could not see, calibrating the warding mechanism, the ghost Tesla walked up behind him until he seemed to stand with his chest pressed against the other’s back. Then, slowly, almost unwillingly, he brought his arms up and around, sliding them on the outside of the other’s, and then his essence simply seemed to fade, or flow, into the other body until there was only one Tesla standing there. He paused in his work and shook his head, as though he had been momentarily distracted. He cast an eye up to where the gap in the roof showed a ribbon of sky, and then bent over his task again.

  Events unfolded as they had before. When the pillar of flame was born, the bird came; then two; then three; then four…and then Tesla shut off the fire.

  Thea held her breath. At first, things seemed all right. The platform, at least for a fraction of a second, was empty—empty of life, empty of death, empty of anything at all to indicate that it had held a tower of fire only moments ago.

  And then a dead bird lay on the platform, just as before. Exactly like before.

  Thea heard Tesla’s cry as he picked it up, and it tore her up inside because she knew now that two men were making that howl of pain, that it was twice as real, twice as heartbreaking.

  She saw the two Teslas come apart, the ghost ripping itself out of the other body, stumbling away, wavering, weak, almost shredding itself. Thea frantically typed a reset on her keypad, wrenching them all away.

  They were back again at the moment before the experiment. Tesla was shaking, his eyes wild.

  “I had forgotten,” he said, “how badly this had hurt.”

  “Something felt different,” Magpie said. “There was…an energy. And then, for a moment, there was…a possibility. I could feel it. It changed back in less time than it takes to blink—but there was a difference. And there was no bird there, when you broke things off. Just for a moment, there wasn’t.”

  “What do you think?” Thea said, looking back at Tesla.

  “I do not know. I do not know.” He was still shaking, trying to calm himself. “There…may have been. I cannot tell. I only know I felt it all again. Felt it…just like it was the first time. Except that this time it is worse, because back then he…I…never even knew just what it was that had been lost, squandered, thrown away. Now I know. And knowing makes it worse. I did not know that it would be possible for this to be worse, but it is.”

  “Can you,” Thea said faintly, “do it again?”

  Tesla skewered her with a gaze that was a bolt of blue lightning.

  “Child, you have no idea what you ask of me.”

  “All I know is this: If we sensed a difference…if you thought you did…one more time and the pain could be only a bad memory. You could have it back. All of it.”

  Tesla stared at her. “You would do this? If it were you?”

  “I have no idea,” Thea said. “Would I allow my soul to be shredded as I am asking you to let yours be shredded? How could I know? I never had to choose.”

  “You have spirit, and courage, and integrity,” Tesla said. “Many would have given the easy answer, and lied. Very well. I will try it again.”

  Thea flushed, using the pretext of fiddling with her keypad to avoid looking up at Tesla in the wake of the compliment. “Ready,” she said faintly. “Here we go again. Magpie, we need to know exactly when…”

  The real Tesla entered; the ghost Tesla tensed his shoulders and approached his other body again. The events unrolled inexorably, as they had already done before—the flame, the bird appearing at the edge of the roof, the vanishing and the multiplying of the pigeons, and then it was over once more, and the two girls strained forward to see the platform.

  For a fraction of a second it remained empty, as it had done the previous time—and then the bird appeared on it again, the pigeon that had been given Tesla’s Fire Element.

  Except this time it was not on its back, its legs up in the air, dead. The pigeon was on its feet, staggering weakly, wings spread out for balance and support, emitting small, wounded noises.

  “It’s alive,” Thea breathed.

  “But it looks in bad shape,” Magpie said. She ran over to where Tesla had gently gathered up the pigeon into his cupped hands, and reached out with her own. She touched the pigeon’s small head, an improbable shade of lilac-tinged gray, and stroked it gently. “Let me see,” she whispered to Tesla. “Let me hold him.”

  He hesitated—the ghost could hear her, see her, but the real Tesla could not, and it was hard to say which of the two controlled the man’s body.

  “His heart,” Tesla said, through lips that barely opened. “His heart is beating so fast…so slow…the heartbeat is not right…”

  Even as he spoke, the pigeon freed one of its wings from his fingers, and Tesla loosened his hold a little so that the other wing would be free too. The pigeon roused, and its wings beat an astonishingly strong tattoo against both Tesla’s hands and Magpie’s. It turned its head, meeting Tesla’s eyes and then Magpie’s. The bird and the girl gazed at each other, and Magpie almost sobbed as she reached out for it, her fingers on the sides of the pigeon’s head.

  And then the bird simply folded, its wings fluttering down without any further control to splay at an awkward angle over human wrists and fingers; its head lolled on a neck suddenly boneless, coming to rest gently on the web between Tesla’s left thumb and forefinger, and it was still. A couple of small feathers floated slowly down to the floor at Tesla’s feet.

  “Wait,” Magpie said, unconsciously echoing Tesla’s own words. “Please…oh, please…”

  It all seemed to take a very long time, but in reality only a few seconds had passed before Thea came thumping down on her knees beside the two of them and the dead bird.

  “Is it—” she began breathlessly, and then broke off as she looked at Magpie’s stricken face. “Oh, God. Was there nothing you could do?”

 
Magpie shook her head mutely, her index finger gently stroking the curve of the pigeon’s neck where it lay cradled in Tesla’s hands.

  “Was there even a chance…?”

  “I don’t know,” Magpie whispered. “I felt it go. I’m not even entirely sure what killed it. It was just…gone. As though…as though it was not meant to live in this world at all.”

  Tesla stirred, gathering the pigeon a little closer, but he remained silent.

  Thea, torn between a terrible pity and a need to understand, to know, hesitated to intrude on a grief that he was wearing like armor. After a moment she, too, reached out and touched the still-warm body of the bird.

  “But it was alive this time,” she whispered. “Alive. We made it that far. Maybe…”

  There was a disconcerting wrench in perspective; the real Tesla did not move, bent protectively over the pigeon, his hands frozen in position with the bird’s head pillowed on his thumb, but the ghost Tesla, still contained in the same body, lifted his head to meet Thea’s eyes, and one ghostly hand appeared to leave the pigeon’s body and came up in a gesture intended to silence her.

  “No,” the ghost Tesla said, in a voice that sliced into Thea like a knife. “I cannot do this again. I cannot hold him and feel his life going from him, feel his heart beating inside of him as though it was bursting. This, too, was part of me. It hurts in too many ways. Not again. I cannot.”

  “But you lived for forty years or more after this day,” Thea whispered, tears standing in her eyes. “If we can bring back light and life to the rest of your days…”

  “I did this,” Tesla said. “I have already lived with it. I will have to continue to live with it. It was a grievous mistake on my part, and as long as I am here that death is with me. Every time we have repeated this a little bit more of me has died. No, Thea.” It was the first time he had addressed her by name. The ghost Tesla bent his head again, let his hand drop, folding back into the real Tesla body holding the bird in his hands. “What is, is. I will pay the price of my folly.”

  Magpie stumbled to her feet. “Give him some space,” she murmured. “It’s hard enough to say good-bye to the simple creatures who cross your life like shooting stars—here one day, gone the next. That thing that he is holding is so much more than that.”

  Thea became aware, as she accepted the pull of Magpie’s hand, that Tesla was humming a quiet, simple tune over the pigeon he held in his lap; the hum turned into words, but they were strange words, in a language she did not know, perhaps the language that Tesla had spoken from the cradle.

  He seemed to be oblivious of the two of them, to the room that surrounded them, to the smell of Elemental fires that still lingered in the air. He was alone with that part of him that was gone, singing a part of his soul to a sleep from which it would never wake again.

  “This might have been a very bad idea,” Thea said, her throat tight with tears.

  Magpie stroked her arm gently a few times. “You tried your best,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  Thea gave her a small smile. “I had hoped that with you here…You have helped so many creatures before, I hoped having you here would make a difference.”

  “Against Elemental magic?” Magpie said. “You heard him speak of it. What chance would I and the small things that I can do have against a force like that?”

  “They’re not small. Even if they were, it’s the smaller things that get past the great blundering forces, slip through the cracks that something grander and flashier might never even see.”

  “That was before we came here,” Magpie murmured. “Before we saw him do that. I think maybe I could have done something if I had been stronger, or more experienced. You saw the way that bird looked at me. It knew me. We could have come to an understanding, the pigeon and I—but on the other side of that…was Elemental magic.”

  They heard a noise and turned to see Tesla getting to his feet. He still held the pigeon in his hands, but awkwardly now, as though he didn’t quite know what to do with it. Without a word, Magpie unwrapped the black silk shawl tied around her shoulders and folded it into a smaller triangle, stepping up to Tesla and offering it as a cradle. He appeared to look straight through Magpie, as though she were not there—which, in a sense, she was not; the real Tesla’s body was not aware of her at all. But the ghost Tesla was still partly in charge of that body, and to him Magpie was a real and solid presence. It was the ghost Tesla who finally took control and gently placed the pigeon in the shawl, nodding mute thanks as Magpie threw a corner of the fabric over the bird. Empty-handed, with his arms now hanging at his sides, Tesla looked lost, dazed.

  “I’m sorry,” Thea said. “I’m so sorry. I really thought that we might turn it…”

  “I appreciate the attempt,” he said.

  He stepped out of the real Tesla’s body, and the real Tesla stumbled away toward his workbench, catching himself on it as though it was the only thing holding him upright. The ghost Tesla remained where the real man had been.

  “What was that tune you were singing?…It was quite lovely.”

  “When they asked me to show my magic tricks at the Chicago fair,” Tesla said, apparently arbitrarily, “I chose to twist fire into letters, make a name glow in the dark. What name did I choose? There might have been many—but I picked one, the name of a different kind of wizard, a poet who brought many lovely dreams into my head when I was young. His name was Zmaj, and that means ‘dragon’ in your language. It is his name I put up in lights in Chicago, a city he had never heard of, had no idea even existed.” He paused. “One of his poems was set to music, as a lullaby. It was sung to me and my brother and my sisters in our cribs. Tiho, noci, moje sunce spava. ‘Quiet, night, for my sunshine is asleep’—my sunshine, my child, the one that I love. The poem speaks of nightingales weaving a coverlet out of their song, to tuck around the sleeping child so that she sleeps safe, and doesn’t wake.” He turned his head, to where Magpie stood with the pigeon bundled up in black silk. “It seemed appropriate.”

  A faint ping from Thea’s keypad claimed her attention, and she glanced down almost unwillingly. Skimming the message on her screen, she brought her head up again with a sudden hope.

  “It’s Tess,” she said. “She’s heard from the others. They sent a message that they need snatching out of New York—it’s urgent, like they’re in danger or something, but she says it sounds as though they’ve done it. Give me a minute, I need to get them out of there.”

  “Good,” said Magpie faintly, her arms folded protectively around a dead bird draped in black silk. “I could use some good news.”

  13.

  “I HAVE GOOD NEWS AND bad news,” Ben said.

  Thea had gathered them all together—Tess and Terry from the Nexus room at the school, Ben and Kristin snatched from the shattered hotel room in contemporary New York, herself and Magpie from the wreckage of Colorado—and brought them back to Tesla’s world, to the New Yorker hotel room as it was in his time, a bank of old-fashioned filing cabinets against one wall and the pigeon coop in the window.

  Tesla himself presided over the meeting, sitting in his favorite leather armchair, gazing at the six of them with stern blue eyes.

  Kristin stepped out from behind Ben with the birdcage held in both hands. The two pigeons inside were awake, and fluttering about.

  “Great! You got them!” Tess exclaimed, and then did a double take. “Two—there’s two—shouldn’t there be—?”

  “That’s the bad news,” Ben said.

  “Is that one dead too?” Magpie gasped.

  “Worse,” Kristin said, hanging her head. “And it’s all my fault.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Ben said. “I had my share of stupid ideas. You were just doing what you were there for.”

  Thea gave a small exasperated sigh. “What happened?!”

  Kristin and Ben exchanged a troubled look, and Terry frowned at them. “That bad, was it?”

  “Corey has the Water pigeon,” Ben said.
>
  But Kristin was shaking her head. “No, he doesn’t. Corey took the Water pigeon. The Alphiri have it.”

  In his armchair, Tesla roused. “Have it. How do you mean, have it?”

  “Your other self knows,” Ben said. “You were—he was—right there.”

  Tesla was gazing at the pigeons in the cage. “Air…and Earth,” he said. “I could barely believe that they still existed. That you would find them. That they would come to you, and that they never, in forty long years, came back to me at all. Not even to glimpse them. That which I did must have been ill done indeed, if pieces of my own soul chose to stay away from me for so long…and come to you, when you went to seek them.”

  “You’re wrong,” Ben said. “They came to you—they all came to you. When we were in the park, you were covered with birds, as though they were celebrating your return. And when these came, it was you who took them, your hand that they came to. They did not desert you, in the end.”

  “Forty lonely years,” Tesla murmured, reaching out to the cage and pushing a couple of long fingers through the wire. One of the pigeons sidled closer, cooing louder, and rubbed his head on Tesla’s hand.

  “Yes,” he said to it, his voice suddenly very soft and gentle, his index finger ruffling the feathers at the back of the bird’s neck, “I am very happy to see you, too.”

  Thea suddenly flashed back to Tesla’s last lullaby to another bird, lying still in his hands; she met Magpie’s eyes, briefly, and could see the same thought reflected there. She cleared her throat, but before she could speak Terry stirred.

  “Humphrey won’t be happy,” he said. “Have you been in touch with him, Thea? He wants to know what’s going on. He’s been bugging me several times a day—e-mail, phone, once even a personal visit.”

  “He phoned us in New York. Twice. And I know he had an FBM shadow on us—it wasn’t just the Alphiri that were following us around,” said Ben. “For all I know, he might already know about the results of the New York expedition.”