The four sisters began to dissolve into vortexes of light even as Tesla stepped up to them and said gravely, “I am ready.” The four vortexes spun wider, then merged into a single sparkling whirlpool of light, swirled around Tesla until he was in the midst of it all as though he were standing in the eye of a hurricane. It was already almost too hard to see the shape of him through that veil. Then the whole thing lifted from the ground, hovered for a moment, shedding tiny stars into the night, and leaped into the sky, exploding high up like sparkling fireworks and merging into the whirling, shimmering sky above.
“Well,” Grandmother Spider said, “that was new and strange. Many of the names those stars bear—at least the ones they introduce themselves to you by, they have very different identities for someone of a different polity or a different race—they come from your own mythologies, and it is you, the human kindred, who have named them thus and know them by the names of gods and nymphs whom you have created in your own dreams and imagination. If those creatures had ever been truly human, and living, that is lost in the dawn of time. But it has been some little while since a human soul was taken up into the fellowship of the stars.”
“He was special,” Thea said, staring up at the sky. Her eyes were full of tears again, but this time the tears were not born of pain, but rather of awe and joy.
“That he was,” Grandmother Spider said. “The only quad-Element mage in human history, so I am told. But you, I think, have been named as holding three Elements in your own hand. That, too, is special. You have come a long way,” she continued, smiling, “from the last time you stood here with me.”
“Perhaps I stood still,” Thea said, “and the world changed around me.”
“Remember what Nikola Tesla told you, when he spoke to you of Elemental magic,” Grandmother Spider said. “An Elemental mage changes the world every day, by being there. That is your task now.”
Thea sighed. “Perhaps I had better return to the others,” she said. “Cheveyo will want his peace and quiet back, we need to get back to school, and I guess Humphrey May had better get that report of his in before too many other impossible things happen.”
“Remember,” Grandmother Spider said, “as Tesla said, so say I—you need only call and we will come to aid or counsel in what ways we are permitted. Nikola Tesla, Tawaha, and I are powerful allies, but we are allowed to do no more than advise in your world. Cheveyo told you once that if a battle is to come, then it is you who will choose your battle-fields—and in certain circumstances, we who watch over you may help, but not interfere. Your battles will still be your own to fight.”
“The Trickster worked directly in our own world,” Thea said.
“Yes, and you rightly brought him to us to take him to task for that. We are bound by the same rules,” Grandmother Spider said.
“I’m afraid,” Thea said. “When the Queen was right there in front of me, I felt pure panic, at those cold eyes, and the way she looked at me. And now, afterward, there’s this flutter in my stomach every time I think about her. I’m on my guard now, and I will be careful, and there are things I need to do to protect those who need protection—but I am afraid.”
“Remember those words,” Grandmother Spider murmured. “The Alphiri are not done with you; they will come back. But the fear will never have compelling power over you, not if you remember that you are not controlled by it. Your portal, the one you raised, stands behind you; it will take you back to Cheveyo’s house, as it did once before. Go, my granddaughter, with my blessing.”
Thea cast a final look at the First World sky, where stars danced and shimmered, and raised a hand. Then she turned to face the portal she once built out of starlight and the music of the world’s creation, and stepped through it.
She emerged right beside Cheveyo’s front door, and was able to contemplate the others for a fraction of a second without them being aware of her. Ben sat cross-legged beside the hearth with Tess on one side of him and Kristin on the other, sharing a bowl of something with the two of them; Cat was gnawing on something she held grasped in greasy fingers; Terry sat with his knees drawn up into the circle of his arms, staring into the fire; and Humphrey May stood with his back to a large rock, hands thrust into his pockets and eyes raking the distant horizon.
It was Cheveyo who acknowledged Thea first, without even lifting his eyes to her.
“You return, Catori,” he said tranquilly. “You return alone.”
Everyone exploded to their feet, Kristin overturning the bowl beside her with her foot and spilling its contents, Humphrey pushing off from his rock and turning around to stare at Thea, and then searching the shadows behind her.
“Thea! Where have you been?”
“We’ve been worried!”
“You just…disappeared,” Terry said, his voice a little tight. “Is everything all right?
“What have you done with Tesla? Where is he?” Humphrey said, raking the shadows behind her with his eyes.
“I’m fine,” Thea said, and lifted her eyes to the streak of stars against the Milky Way that spanned the sky above Cheveyo’s hearth fire. “And everything is fine. As for that report that you’re still mulling over, Mr. May, the answer to every question from here on…lies in the stars.”
17.
IT TOOK BOTH TOO long and no time at all to explain to everybody where Thea had been and where Tesla had gone. It took no time, because before she had gotten too far into the explanation, some of those present—Cat and, of course, Cheveyo—were nodding with complete understanding and approval; too long, because by the end of her account Humphrey May was still shaking his head in frustrated incomprehension.
“There are some parts of this that I can figure out,” he said. “The Alphiri Queen, the Faele angle—that they will understand, back in Washington. As for the Tesla angle, I can explain the necessity for the whole pigeon thing; that was already approved at the highest levels. But the Sun God. Really. And this star business. You have no idea how impossible it is going to be to go back to a government institution and present a report so short on fact and so overwhelmingly flooded with myth and fairy tale. They’re going to ask me what I’ve been drinking if I tell them the half of it. It’s going to take some juggling. I’d better get back to the office. I’ve been away for far too long as it is.” He glanced at his watch as he spoke, then looked up with an exasperated sigh as he realized that it had apparently stopped at twelve o’clock. “How does one get out of here?” he asked abruptly.
Thea lifted up the wrist with the keypad. “When do you want to be there? I can get you there within a specified time. Give or take a few minutes.”
Humphrey’s mouth thinned a little. “That thing,” he muttered. “That’s how you got into the FBM building without being detected, and snuck past every defense. When I gave it to you, Thea, I never expected you to use it selfishly, or against me.”
“I never used it selfishly,” Thea said. “And it was never against you. It was for Tesla. I was protecting him—and myself.”
“You used it to break into a guarded facility, and you took an artifact from that facility that you were under no circumstances entitled to,” Humphrey said. “You do realize that you actually broke the law, that we could actually prosecute for breaking and entering?”
“Except that you couldn’t possibly prove anything, because there was no evidence,” Thea said. “And anyway…”
Tesla’s cube, nothing more now than an interesting curiosity, was sitting in plain sight not too far from Thea; she strode over to it and lifted it up, turning it in her hands.
“A star,” Thea said thoughtfully. “The symbol for that last Elemental face was a star. It’s as though he knew.” She held out the cube to Humphrey. “Here, you can take that back to them,” she said. “I returned it to the person to whom it properly belonged, but Tesla doesn’t have a use for it anymore. The FBM was merely the keeper of this thing. It took the five of us to even crack the thing because the Feds couldn’t do it alone. So
technically, I never stole it—it wasn’t yours in the first place.”
“You make the FBM sound like the Alphiri,” Humphrey said sharply.
Thea winced. “No,” she said. “But you do…seem a little high-handed.”
“As if what you did was less so. Have you thought about what I offered?”
“A berth at the FBM? No. Tesla was right on that count; it wouldn’t be for me.”
“I’ll have to take that keypad back,” Humphrey said. “We can’t have you wandering into our offices whenever the whim takes you. There are some sensitive things that are kept protected for a…”
Thea was unfastening the strap around her wrist as he spoke, shaking her head slightly. “You can’t keep me from a computer,” she said, “and whenever I am at one, it’s as though I still have this. It’s a good idea, and it’s very useful, but I can do without it. It’ll take you back to the office. I can walk out of here on the Barefoot Road if need be.”
“I have the laptop,” Terry said quietly.
Thea could not help a quick grin. “Even out here,” she said, “you can’t keep me from a computer.”
“Thea,” Humphrey said, “I am not your enemy. Really, I am not.”
Thea shook her head slowly. “No. You wouldn’t wish me harm. But you are not my friend, either. Not quite in the way that matters.” She looked at Humphrey, dangling the strap of the keypad from her fingers. “I’ve always liked you, Mr. May, and I respect you and what you can do. I have no doubt that our paths will cross again, whether I need you or you need me. But I don’t know if I’ll ever completely trust the Bureau again.”
Humphrey sighed, looking down. “You say you can take me back to the office…? Say…this morning?”
Thea typed a line of text into the keypad and handed it to Humphrey. “Press ENTER and it will take you there,” she said. “Good-bye, Mr. May.”
“Thea, I…” He looked up, searched her eyes for an instant, and then tightened his fingers around the strap of the keypad and took it from her hand with rather more force than necessary. “You sure you can get home without this?” he asked brusquely. “I hardly want to leave you stranded.”
She nodded.
“Well, then,” he said. “I’ll see you, I guess.”
He hit the ENTER key and winked out.
Thea stood looking at the spot where he had been standing, unconsciously rubbing the wrist where the keypad had been, for long enough that Ben finally waved a hand before her face.
“Earth to Thea,” he said. “Hello, we’re still here. Are you sure you’re okay? There’s still stuff left from supper—you hungry?”
Thea shook her head, hugging her elbows with both hands, but turned back toward the fire.
“Er…how do you plan on getting us back?” Ben asked, hesitating. “I mean, school’s still on break, so we have all the time in the world, but if you have a plan maybe you ought to be thinking about—”
“Where did you go?” Terry asked suddenly. “When you left me—when you ran away from the Queen after she said her piece just before she left…What’s really wrong, Thea? Are you breaking up with me?”
Thea looked at him, startled. “Breaking up with you?”
“Oh?” Tess said, swiveling her head from one to the other. “So since when have you two been sneaking around?”
“Crashing the FBM must have been one hell of a first date,” muttered Ben.
Terry flushed a little. “Well, the way you ran away, when the Alphiri Queen…”
“She as much as promised she’d be back,” Thea said, a little desperately.
“You knew that,” Terry said, frowning.
“Yes, but…not for me, not at me directly,” Thea said, her own cheeks coloring. “She looked at all of you as though you were…pawns in a chess game. She looked at you…”
Terry began to nod slowly. “You think she will get at you through someone you care about,” he said. “Hey, protect the rest, by all means, if you feel you need to, but as I recall Cat had Tesla himself promise her that he’d be standing up for her if anything should threaten her, and I think he’d manage to do that even from whatever other world he’s gone to. Ben and Kristin can watch each other’s backs, they’ve already had practice, back in New York. As for me and Tess, my uncle has no kids; all he’s got is the two of us. He runs the FBM as a family business, and even if I had never laid a hand on the Nexus, I would have been groomed as the crown prince of that place in some capacity sooner or later. You don’t have to worry about the Alphiri coming after me. I’m too well protected.”
“How could you possibly be a crown prince of a place where you couldn’t open your mouth without choking on something you said?” Thea said, but she let him take her hand, and she was smiling.
“Well, you fixed that,” Terry said. “Cybermage.”
“Tesla thought you were pretty good at Cybermagic yourself,” Thea said. “And you proved it with what you did back there with Tesla’s pigeons. You might or might not be shaping into another Elemental, but you’re at the very least a journeyman Cybermage yourself.”
Terry actually blushed. “Tesla said that?” he asked.
Not an Elemental, perhaps, but he would be a bright light in the new branch of magic, the perfect way into magic for a boy who could not speak its name out loud.
“You’re right,” Tess said. “We’re probably safe from the Alphiri under the wing of the FBM—but are we safe from them?” She turned to Thea. “I don’t think you realize it yet, Thea, but you haven’t exactly made friends in the Bureau by what you did tonight. Humphrey wasn’t happy.”
“They won’t damage their Elemental,” Terry said.
“That’s just it. She isn’t their Elemental. And I don’t think they’d give up on her any easier than the Alphiri would.”
“But you can’t be responsible for everyone else’s well-being,” Cat said to Thea. “Leaving the FBM out of it for now, the Queen looked at you. All of the rest of us, in the end, are expendable—it’s you she really wants.”
“You’re the most vulnerable one of all of us,” Tess said.
“Who’s going to watch your back?” said Kristin. “It’s well enough back at the school, where we can all keep an eye on one another, but…”
“I’ll get you guys back to the school,” Thea said. “But I’m not going back.”
Terry’s fingers tightened on hers, but he said nothing. Everyone else seemed to be struck dumb, too, because Thea could feel the weight of their eyes on her.
“You think Humphrey will spill it, back in Washington?” Tess said.
“If he doesn’t, Luana will, or someone else will connect the dots. And once the media get ahold of it…” Ben’s face fell into a black scowl.
“‘Double Seventh at Last.’ ‘A New Elemental,’” Kristin said, sounding genuinely appalled. “I can just see the tabloids.”
“At least it will give my mother something to stick into that wretched scrapbook she started for me when I was born,” Thea said. “God knows there hasn’t been much to put in it so far. But as for school, I’d better leave, before I am pushed. They won’t take me back this time—not after the principal figures out what happened. And why should they? I don’t belong there, not anymore, no more than I’ve ever really belonged anywhere at all.”
The Last Ditch School for the Incurably Incompetent.
It had been so many things to Thea. At first just an odious place where she had once believed, if only for a brief while, her disappointed father was planning to wash his hands of her; then a sanctuary where she had found friends and space to grow; then a shelter from the rising dangers of her world, at a time when she had needed to stay safely concealed until she was strong enough to defend herself against them. But all of that was in the past. There were some things that simply could not be hidden anymore.
“What will you do?” Terry said, stepping closer without letting go of her hand.
She turned her head and lifted her chin to look at him,
managing a smile. “Do? I have no idea. I’ll have to talk about it with my folks; maybe they’ll come up with something. I know they’ve been thinking about Amford ever since I kind of blossomed into something my father could pitch to them, but now…”
“Amford has precollege courses; you could finish high school with an accelerated program and then start college in the fall, or the following year,” Ben said. “I know a cousin of mine did that.”
“What,” Kristin said succinctly, “could they possibly teach her at Amford?”
“Can you actually do Ars Magica now? In our world?” Cat asked, curious. “What if they handed you something to Transform?”
“So long as I had a computer…” Thea said, with a crooked grin.
“It isn’t the teaching of something. Anything they’ve got on Elemental magic at Amford will probably be a restricted course anyway, and taught by someone who knows less about it than Thea does,” Terry said. “It’ll be about learning to survive as a mage in a world where you have the FBM peeved at you and just itching to have an opportunity to grab you for themselves—and this time probably without the kid gloves—and the Alphiri lurking in the wings, waiting for the next chance. But we’ll miss you.”
“You are always only a step away on the Barefoot Road,” Cheveyo said unexpectedly, breaking into the conversation. “Your friends are always going to be with you, or within reach. These five will no doubt be watching out for you, back in your world, but do not forget that you also have me. Grandmother Spider. Tawaha. Your friend, the other Elemental wizard, Tesla, for whom you have done and risked so much.”
Thea sighed, and allowed her head to rest for a moment on Terry’s shoulder; then she looked around, meeting everyone’s gaze—first Cheveyo’s, then Cat’s, Ben’s, Kristin’s, Tess’s. Terry’s.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I get scared just thinking about the future.”
“We’ll be there if you need us,” Terry said, speaking for all of them.
Thea managed a smile. “I’ll need you,” she said. “Come on, I’ll take you guys back.”
Worldweavers: Cybermage Page 25