by Kal Aaron
She’d not done anything else yet because of a message from Samuel informing her he’d be stopping by at “some point” in the morning to discuss the contract, though there was technically only one hour left in the morning. With her luck, he’d show up at 11:59. It was annoying because she could have slept in and been spared the smell for a few more hours.
Thanks to her quick work, Samuel had received a preliminary report on her efforts the night before. She’d grown efficient and professional over the years at relating the most important pieces of information using her mirror shard. Hating bureaucracy didn’t mean not understanding the necessity of the occasional report.
“It would have been hilarious if he had to go in there, white suit and all,” Lyssa muttered. “I can see him coming out, dripping with goo and frowning like he always does. Even more annoying, he’d be the damned picture-perfect Sorcerer of dignity, goo-covered or not.”
“I presume you’re speaking of Elder Samuel?” Jofi asked, his voice as clear as ever despite being safely locked up. At least he’d been easy to clean. Sometimes the small miracles got a woman through the day.
“Yeah,” Lyssa replied. “He was never a Torch or Eclipse back in the day, so I don’t know how much he had to get his hands dirty with things like killing rogues or monster hunts. Also, hiring us out to the Shadows is a new thing.” She sat up. “Though I suppose everyone had to spend a lot more time back in the day trying to keep everything quiet, so the Shadows could live out their days not worried about giant monsters or not-so-giant monsters. It’s not like they could just show up afterward with some fake taxidermy and say it was a huge wolf.”
She went back and forth on whether she thought rogues were more active post-M-Day. With less concern about unusual events immediately drawing attention to the Society, there was a good argument to be made that things had become more dangerous.
A light knock came on the door. Lyssa hopped up and checked her peephole, convinced it was Samuel in disguise because of the sheer blandness of the gray-suited man on the other side who radiated faint sorcery. She’d gotten better at distinguishing other people’s sorcery from the background feeling of the spells protecting her home, and it was easier to sense subtle spells.
Lyssa opened the door and gestured inside. “A specific meeting time wouldn’t kill you. Sometimes a girl might want to make plans.”
The man waited until she closed the door to blur into the white-suited, white-haired Samuel.
He sniffed the air. “I’d hope for the sake of anyone around you that you’d avoid any activity until as such time as that unfortunate odor is better-handled.”
Lyssa grimaced. Getting dumped on by Samuel for her smell was a new low.
“When such incidents occur,” he continued, “even though you’re the one on the frontlines, there are many complicated things I’m required to handle behind the scenes. This means that I can’t always be prompt on my responses, let alone personal appearances.”
“Fair enough.” Lyssa dropped onto her couch. “By the way, don’t think I’m not still annoyed about you benching me for so long. This job shows I could have been kicking butt a long time ago. I blew away a whole swarm yesterday.”
“Benching you?” Samuel raised an eyebrow. “Regional Torch assignments were rerouted for a short period after a major success on your part that ended with you seriously injured. I did what I did out of consideration for you.”
“You saw me in decent shape shortly after.” Lyssa frowned. “And you knew I wanted work to get to Last Remnant. I’ve been sitting around doing nothing. Meanwhile, other Torches have been getting hurt.”
“I appreciate your concern for the others, but keep in mind for your situation that not every injury is physical in nature.” Samuel gave her a cool look. “I give your petulant attitude some latitude because of your tremendous talent and skill, but you’re still a young woman who exhibits excessive paranoia even by our standards. I thought it best to give you time to calm down after everything that happened. I didn’t want you overreacting to any other incident.”
Lyssa smirked. “That backfired in a big way.”
“Did it?” Samuel walked toward the couch and stared down at her. “The anniversary of your brother’s death complicated things unnecessarily. I suspect it complicated things far more than I realize, but I stand by my decision. Besides, it doesn’t matter now.”
“Why doesn’t it?” Lyssa asked.
Samuel’s gaze became cold and calculating. “You wanted to go to Last Remnant to disprove your brother’s death. You wanted evidence, and now you have it, even if it isn’t what you wished for. Thus, you no longer have a reason to go to Last Remnant.”
Lyssa gritted her teeth. Her pulse thundered in her ears. She stood and glared at him.
“Oh, you know about that?” Lyssa asked, her tone sharp. “So much for my privacy.”
Samuel looked disappointed. “Don’t be a child, Miss Corti. I wasn’t privy to your message, but I’m the Elder who controls this area, and anything potentially relevant to the Torches in my area of responsibility is passed along to me in one form or another. Your privacy, as such, is limited.”
“And you don’t think the timing is suspiciously convenient?” Lyssa snarled. “Everyone tells me Chris has to be dead. I point out his regalia’s not in the vault, and they offer excuses. Then suddenly, poof, his regalia appears when I get close to earning enough favors to check for myself.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “That’s very coincidental, don’t you think?”
Samuel shook his head, pity in his eyes. That look pissed her off almost as much as what he was saying. She would have preferred irritation to pity since the pity fueled her lingering fears that Chris was no longer alive and the reappearing regalia proved what everyone had said.
“Just because there are conspiracies, it doesn’t mean everything’s a grand conspiracy. Sometimes there are unpleasant confluences of events.” Samuel motioned toward her. “You need to find actual proof before you accuse people of serious crimes. Don’t invent proof to fit your accusations, or even worse, invent proof to fit your desires. It’s unbecoming in an adult and a Torch of the Illuminated Society.”
“I can’t get proof if you won’t help me get to Last Remnant. And I am potentially willing to accept he’s dead, but I’m going to need to see the regalia with my own eyes.” Lyssa threw up her hands. “And to do that, I need to go to the island. The only way I can do that is to get permission, and we both know the only way I’m going to get that is by working jobs. And you need me to work jobs anyway.” Her voice grew louder. “I’m a Torch. I’m not supposed to spend my days watching TV and eating ice cream. I’m supposed to burn all that’s impure from the world and protect the Illuminated Society.”
She sucked in a breath, trying to calm her pounding heart. The monster hunt had let her push Chris out of her mind for a short while, but now all the concerns, doubts, and twisted hopes crisscrossed in her mind.
Samuel nodded. “Yes, you’re right. You are a Torch, and you did do good work. So perhaps we should spend less time talking about the future and focus on the aforementioned jobs, specifically your current assignment and the reason I came here today. If you want to travel to Last Remnant so badly, you’ll need to convince people other than me that you deserve it. I won’t be able to advocate for you without more recent success.”
Verbal sparring would get her nowhere. Her instincts told her Samuel was an ally she should cultivate, not someone she should push away for petty personal reasons. For all her complaining, he had given her the job. He also wasn’t saying no about Last Remnant. Innocent people’s lives might still be on the line.
She sighed. “You’re right. Sorry.”
“Apology accepted,” Samuel replied, only a mild amount of smugness in his tone.
“I’m assuming you came up with something about the mine?” Lyssa asked. “The scale of the operation points to an active rogue. If we don’t find the Sorcerer responsible, it’s only a ma
tter of time before he digs another hole of doom and starts over. This time we only had one death, but if he gets smarter about how he sets things up, we’re screwed. I think whoever he is, he’s been setting up things for a while. Weeks, maybe months. I’m not a life Sorceress, but I have a hard time thinking that queen could have popped out that many little ones in so short a time.”
Samuel frowned and waved a hand. “Let’s not get hasty and jump to conclusions. We need to be cautious about acting on assumptions rather than definitive facts.”
“That was a recent setup.” Lyssa punctuated her sentence with her downward-pointed finger. “I’m sure of it. Nothing makes sense otherwise. Yes, it might have been there for months, but not years or decades, let alone an ancient holdover from thousands of years ago.”
“I understand recent rogue activity is the most likely scenario, but we should be cautious about spreading rumors about the Illuminated and monsters,” Samuel replied. “This is already a sensitive matter because of the explicit link between sorcery and the creation of the threat. Rapid closure on the incident will be helpful, but in the meantime, we need to keep the implied threat contained from the media.”
“You’re the one who told me the best PR for us when it comes to rogues is to prove to the Shadows that we’ll quickly and brutally handle them.” Lyssa narrowed her eyes. “So let me do that. I was worried about an Eclipse being sent, but after what you said, I thought to myself, ‘Yeah, the Tribunal will do that about the time I turn sixty. By then, the rogue will be screwing with people living in a moon colony.’”
Samuel scoffed. “Eclipses are used when necessary. Fortunately, our kind is mostly sensible. If we needed them more often, the Society would fall apart.”
“I think it’s more about it being hard to get away with crap when there’s only a small group of people who need to be investigated,” Lyssa said. “But if you’ve got anything about the mine that’ll help, please give it to me. The quicker I solve this, the better it is for me, for you, everybody in Cochise County, and the Society. A quadruple win. Those are rare. The only people losing here are the monsters and the possible rogue, and the monsters aren’t people.”
Samuel stood silently, a thoughtful expression on his face as he stroked his beard. “There’s no relevant Society history or information suggesting that location was ever used for creature experiments in any historical period.”
“That’s not a big surprise, considering they are mostly illegal.”
Samuel shook his head. “It goes beyond that. There is no information about any rogues operating in this general region who specialize in the kind of sorcery necessary for the creation of such creatures. Shards could explain some of it if their numbers were more limited.”
Lyssa stared at Samuel. He rarely lied, but he did love to leave things out and hope she didn’t notice. Her killing skills might be better than her observation and interrogation skills, but she’d picked up a trick or two over the years.
“You were very specific in your wording there,” she said.
“Was I?” Samuel looked perplexed. “Aren’t I always? Specificity leads to more efficient communication.”
Lyssa grinned. “You said there was no information about rogues operating in this general region who specialized in the kind of sorcery necessary. The way you said it implies there have been rogues who have operated in the area, but what area do you mean? The SW US? Arizona? Southern Arizona or Cochise County? Help me out here with the complete truth.”
Samuel replied, “There were some unpleasant rogues who afflicted the area in the nineteenth century. They were mostly petty men who specialized in murdering Shadows for entertainment rather than anyone with grand visions of creature-breeding and the necessary accompanying skills. All their recorded efforts involved straightforward applications of their abilities in their murders.”
“And are any of these lovable guys still around?” Lyssa asked.
“No.” Samuel’s expression turned stern. “An Eclipse eliminated them using a gunfight as a cover. There was concern that if the rogues continued, their actions would expose the Society. There was no one seriously arguing for going public at that time.”
Pieces of information flowed together in Lyssa’s mind, making connections. A gunfight. Arizona. The nineteenth century.
Lyssa narrowed her eyes. “Wait a second. There were rogue Sorcerers killing people in Cochise County who were eliminated using a gunfight?” Her breath caught. “You mean the OK Corral, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Samuel replied in a clipped tone. His nostrils flared.
She smiled. It wasn’t often that she got one over on him in a conversation.
“How the hell did I not know that involved Sorcerers?” Lyssa asked. “Shouldn’t that be something you’re passing along to Illuminated in the US, especially those of us operating in this part of the country?”
She didn’t claim a grand knowledge of every incident in the Society’s history, but it was rare she heard something that was genuinely shocking. Despite what the Shadows thought, Sorcerers didn’t loom behind every incident in the past.
Samuel frowned. “The Earps were useful tools to cover our mistakes at the time, but thanks to Wyatt, what should have disappeared into history as a minor footnote ended up becoming a cultural touchstone. Our involvement on both sides was something kept quiet until recently even among the Illuminated because of the politics involved.”
“What politics?”
Although Lyssa didn’t care about Society politics, she didn’t like not knowing things. She was doubtful the current incident had anything to do with the shootout, but she needed to make sure there was no hidden connection to the mine.
“It’s not important,” Samuel said. “The dead Sorcerers had connections to certain others with political clout. That led to consternation over the Eclipse.”
Lyssa snorted. “Corruption is evergreen.”
“With M-Day leading to more revelations, we’re having to carefully manage how we reveal certain incidents,” Samuel said. “For now, I’d prefer if you didn’t share that information with anyone else. It’s not relevant to this case. The people involved are all long since dead, including the Eclipse who killed the rogues. If I had any reason to believe it was connected to this case, I would have told you.”
Lyssa leaned back on the couch. She doubted a Sorcerer playing cowboy had stuck eggs in the mine a hundred years before. Samuel could be annoying, but she believed him. He cared more about the Society’s current image than the distant past.
“Okay.” Lyssa nodded. “So it’s not a leftover problem, and you don’t have any info about anyone traveling the area recently who might be a suspect. I’m not going to shoot someone just because they’re suspicious, but we can’t just waste a few monsters, throw up our hands, and say we’re done. What about people with related essences who might have traveled through the area?”
Samuel shook his head. “Few of our kind have a reason to go to such a place. There are numerous Illuminated with relevant essences who could have created the creatures, but we’re not about to harass them without evidence of wrongdoing. It’s possible, albeit unlikely, that a shard is behind this incident, which makes it even more difficult to pinpoint a likely individual suspect.”
“There’s a trail here,” Lyssa replied. “We just have to follow it. I’m hoping if we find the rogue, that will make it easier to ensure the mine is safe. Otherwise, I can go through there four more times and not be a hundred percent sure. There can always be another hidden chamber waiting to spew out more monsters. And I don’t think we want to send the military down there if we can avoid it.”
Samuel nodded. “We agree on that, but how do you propose to find the rogue?”
“By following up on the most obvious question.” Lyssa pulled her phone out of her pocket. “I’m guessing you don’t watch a lot of internet videos, do you?”
“Of course not.” Samuel scoffed. “I don’t have time for pointless diversions,
and I dislike the internet. Phones and television were bad enough. The Shadows invent newer and more sophisticated ways for pointless diversion.”
“While cleaning all the nastiness from the monsters off me last night, I did some preliminary research by watching the videos made by the victims on their channel. I thought it might provide insight.”
Samuel’s eyes glazed over like Lyssa was speaking an ancient lost dialect. Sometimes he was such a fossil.
“Here’s the deal.” Lyssa tossed her phone on the couch. “Lots of people, especially young people, star in do-it-yourself shows. They might be educational, or funny, or stupid. These two guys specialized in the stupid variety.”
“Stupid?” Samuel’s mouth tightened. “They specialized in producing foolish programming?”
“Yeah, stupid and foolish. That’s a good description.” Lyssa shrugged. “I don’t know how else to describe it. They walked around doing idiotic, annoying, childish pranks, but they had tens of thousands of subscribers who loved them. Mostly kids and teens, but a lot of people were interested in what they were doing.”
“They were attempting some sort of prank at the mine?” Samuel asked. “I fail to see how you can make an abandoned mine amusing.”
“Now you’re getting me.” Lyssa shook her head. “But I don’t know. That’s what’s bothering me. I didn’t have time to watch every last video, but I watched several and skimmed the titles of most. There’s nothing in there about them going to haunted or spooky places.” She frowned. “This trip was an out-of-nowhere departure from their usual style. We’re talking about going from them putting on a dinosaur costume and tricking an old woman at a grocery store to them heading into an abandoned mine that just happens to have real deadly monsters inside. That’s a big jump.”
Samuel nodded, a knowing look in his eyes. “You’re saying they were murdered? That someone deliberately sent them to that mine?”
“Or they were test subjects,” Lyssa said. “Why? Who knows? Maybe a Sorcerer was clicking through their videos, found them annoying, and decided to take them out, but it’s enough to make me wonder. At a minimum, it’s enough for additional follow-up.”