The feeling of protective strangeness grew until it was overpowering, now decorated with a faint male chorus singing a single dissonant chord and a smell that was a cross between fresh cut grass and lemon. Through each transition, Kim began to glimpse the edges of a sparkling construct so far beyond the realms as to be without form.
It was Mike, the real one, as he actually was. He wasn’t a scary, naïve idiot. And he wasn’t some sort of reanimated monster. He was a force of nature completely hidden from the humans he surrounded. The thought should’ve scared her out of her shoes, and maybe a week ago it would have, but now she had to fight to breathe.
He was beautiful.
“So.” Levine closed his eyes.
They both grabbed the bench as they transitioned through a zero-G realm that was nothing but sky and incredibly long, floating trees that were green on both ends.
“A wanted cybercriminal has uncovered evidence of a global conspiracy led by a former White House chief of staff?”
“Well, it sounds crazy when you put it that way.”
“Okay, put it to me a different way.”
“If you’ll just take the packet.”
He waved her off as they thumped softly on to a cool loam surface. “I can’t take anything from you like this. If you have evidence, bring it to the office. If it turns out to be legit, I’m sure the prosecutors will take it into consideration.”
It was her turn to wave him off, and then they both ducked as a giant pteranodon buzzed them. “You know I can’t do that.”
“Mike, are you okay?” Tonya asked.
“They’re not too shabby,” he said, the strain obvious in his voice, “and they’re getting better. Kim, finishing soon is good. I’m close to spinning a record number of plates in the air. I’m handling it, but only because I’ve run them out of resources.”
“Agent Levine. We have no time. You don’t know Matthew Watchtell like I do. This is all supposed to happen next week, but he knows I’m here now. He’ll move faster, and you have to stop him.”
“Is that why you recruited Adelmo Quispe?”
It took her a few seconds to even parse the question. He wasn’t talking about what had happened five years ago, he meant right now.
“What the hell does Adelmo have to do with anything?”
She could tell he was just as surprised. “So you mean to tell me you had no idea he was in Virginia? That you have no knowledge of the attack at the marina?”
It was like he’d started speaking Portuguese. No, it was worse. She could speak Portuguese.
“What marina attack? Agent Levine I’m here because I need your help. We have to stop—”
Mike shouted, “Shit! Spencer!” And then he was gone. Just gone. All the swirling power vanished, and their bench fell on to Wunderland’s dirt with a thump. Kim had never felt more exposed in her life.
Agent Levine beamed in triumph as fork traps locked her avatar onto the bench. It would take minutes Kim knew she didn’t have to get free. A familiar pressure drained away in her head as the last of her screens fell away.
They had the address. The cars were already rolling.
Levine grabbed her arm. “We don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
She didn’t, either, but there was no other choice. She had one card left, and no matter how much it sucked, she had to play it.
When Donald Trump found them sneaking out of his house he scrammed the entire household network. The only way to get free was to blow it up, but the servers were buried beneath fifteen feet of dirt under a basement far below their feet.
She’d solved the problem with power. Her power.
With a shuddering gulp of air, Kim let that power completely explode into freedom for only the second time in her life. Levine would be safe, of that much she was certain. Wherever he was in realspace, though, was in for a rough time.
There were lines of potential and she couldn’t remember how to breathe. Power build power unlock power free.
There was a price, though. There was always a price. She fought madness and agony every time someone touched her, but now the pain was amplified beyond any endurance. A human being couldn’t possibly survive it, and so for reasons she didn’t understand she simply stopped being one.
The trap constructs on her wrists shattered, and the remnants burned away into bitmapped dust.
“Nobody’s getting hurt,” she said as her voice rastered under the building pressure, “but there is no time.”
Speaking was the last of her luxuries as the rest of her humanity dissolved under the assault she’d unleashed. Kim gently grasped his wrist so as not to crush it, and moved him away. But she had to send him the message.
Send fail resend fail resend fail resend success! Building power building power reach and find the pain raise the wave lower the wave build searing horror.
The madness ripped through her as she sent power blasting down the lines they’d used to find her. Talons tore across her soul as channels did and did not form, and with a reach, pull and push, release, she grabbed deep and shallow into the quantum fabric. She briefly glimpsed him in realspace, sitting in a dentist’s chair as three other people worked frantically, the address of Kim’s hotel emblazoned on a screen beside him.
Then her vision departed. It wasn’t an actual loss of sight, but of force melded, and she no longer saw things as they were. She saw them as they could be and were not and were always and never were and through eternity as she gathered the power in her fist.
Levine stumbled to the ground while strange, dark lightning blew furrows around him, shrieking out of her fingertips. She concentrated the last shred of her sanity.
“Goodbye, Agent Levine.” She gripped the fabric surrounding the lab and released her gathered madness.
Collapse and now…
Chapter 59: Aaron
“She’s here,” Aaron said. Less than a week ago he was a newbie interning with an agent who was tilting at windmills. It seemed funny, back then. Now that the windmill had walked out of the bushes and said hi to him? Not so much.
She was taller than he was expecting, and much younger. She was probably his age. It shouldn’t have been surprising, but it was. When he was trying not to fail high school algebra, she was on the run from the whole of the FBI.
“Kimberly Trayne, you are under arrest.”
She turned, and walked away.
“Wait!” He stumbled forward, trying to keep up. “Anything you say can and will, damn it, hold up!”
In the lab, JoBeth asked, “What? How? Nothing’s registering!”
Aaron threw a window above him so they could all see. “That just proves it’s her,” he said as lock constructs shot through her like she didn’t even exist.
“She’s completely cloaked.”
The way Trayne dismissed him made him feel like he’d flunked out of the academy; it got worse when she casually sat down on a bench next to a side path. He might be green, but he was a damned FBI agent.
“Agent Levine, I’m not here to turn myself in.”
The beeping in Emilio’s corner got insistent. “That’s it. Come on, baby, lock. Give me a lock, come on! Yes! Shit! What the hell?”
Aaron reflexively opened his eyes in realspace when the room erupted in chaos. He quickly closed them to keep the protocols of his phone from kicking him out of the realm. Sand and dry air dominated a completely new one, based in a deep desert. Trayne blinked at the sky like she owned the place.
“My God,” Deng said, “every single one of the contracts reset at once.”
“How is that even possible?” JoBeth asked.
“Damn it, JoBeth,” Emilio said. “The differential manifold will buckle if you don’t move faster.”
And that’s how the encounter went. Trayne would come forward with some new piece of information, and then the lab would erupt as it all spun sideways, and they landed somewhere else. There was something else in here with them, making it happen, his instincts insisted on it, but h
e couldn’t understand what it might be.
Then she made a mistake.
“Oh,” Trayne said with a smile as she opened her hands. “I’m not doing anything but talking to you.”
“She’s not alone,” he said to the room.
The mere thought brought them all to a standstill.
“What the hell?” Emilio said. “That’s not possible, either. We can see you two. There’d be signatures.”
“Not if they’re split,” JoBeth said. “Not if they’re split. Right there. Emilio, modulate frequency six. Deng? Do you see that?”
“On it.”
They bounced from one realm to another, and it was all Aaron could do to keep his breakfast down in realspace. Keila would be disappointed if he tossed her shakshuka all over his chest.
Emilio shouted, “Got you!”
JoBeth gasped. “Oh my God, guys!”
“What’s going on?” Aaron asked from the chair, eyes tightly shut. A clanging chorus and the reek of old grass and rotted fruit assaulted him in realmspace.
“She doesn’t have just one person helping,” JoBeth said. “She’s got at least a thousand. No, two.”
“You’re wrong,” Donny said. “She must have ten thousand people helping her.”
“Oh, fuck that,” Emilio said, “there’s no way she can have that many people working with her. We’d see other signs.”
“Well, how the hell do you explain these readings?”
Aaron tried to concentrate on what Trayne was saying. He asked, “A wanted cybercriminal has uncovered evidence of a global conspiracy led by a former White House chief of staff?”
It felt like the Loch Ness monster swam around him. Trayne was still talking, but he couldn’t make it out. As they flopped on to what had to be the back yard of Endor, Aaron tried a different angle.
“Is that why you recruited Adelmo Quispe?”
It was like he’d hit her in the face with a box. Trayne had no idea what he was talking about.
“What the hell does Adelmo have to do with anything?”
“So you mean to tell me you had no idea he was in Virginia? That you have no knowledge of the attack at the marina?”
“What marina attack? Agent Levine, I’m here because I need your help. We have to stop—”
A voice thundered out around them.
“Shit! Spencer!”
All the confusing static that’d surrounded the entire encounter vanished in an instant. In the lab, Emilio let out a whoop of triumph.
“We’ve got her! Goddamn it we’ve got her!” He called out an address. JoBeth talked to a judge while Lonny reached out to the Herndon police department.
Aaron smiled as they thumped onto the loam of the out-of-scale jungle of Wunderland. The restraints latched on to her avatar.
The end of the chase hit him so hard he had trouble controlling his hands. Aaron Levine hadn’t just seen the elephant; he’d bagged the damned thing.
He grabbed her arm. “We don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
Her hand was cold granite in motion as it grabbed his wrist.
“Nobody’s getting hurt,” she said as her voice went coarse and electronic, “but there is no time.”
In the lab, Emilio’s voice changed from triumph to terrified squeak. “What the shit is that?”
Claxons rang out from the racks of equipment that filled the room. “No! That’s not possible!”
Aaron’s ears popped as a nimbus of power swirled to life around Trayne’s avatar. His mind folded sideways as the reek of fiberglass resin flooded around him. Then she raised her head.
Her eye sockets were openings into something unspeakably bright and distant, like she’d somehow torn holes in the realm’s fabric. He stumbled to the ground backing away from her. Strange, dark patterns flew over her skin, and black lightning ripped trenches into the ground around him.
In the lab, a slap rang out. JoBeth said, “It doesn’t matter, Emilio, it is happening. It is real. How do we stop it?”
“Goodbye, Agent Levine.” Trayne’s voice crackled, and the power she controlled caused static flashes across and between her teeth. The smell of ozone and resin was overpowering.
EMERGENCY DISCONNECT. The blue block letters drew themselves onto his vision as Wunderland shattered around him in a trillion sparkling fragments. He opened his eyes and fought against the nausea and vertigo that was trying to take him.
The whine that’d been growing in pitch and volume came from the quantum stack in the corner. It reached an electric scream just as he rolled his head over. It was smoking.
Then it exploded.
Chapter 60: Kim
The madness was a crystalline agony. Using her power to destroy a quantum network segment always left her like this. Mike tore out a ragged gasp beside her as he exited realmspace, but she couldn’t look at him. Flashbulbs filled with white-hot thorns went off in her mind when she tried.
“Kim,” he said, “are you—”
“No!” They had to leave; they had to leave right now. Mike and Tonya were like hissing columns of barbed wire, and Kim couldn’t get past them. They wouldn’t follow her if she couldn’t get past them, and every time she tried, it was like walking through spinning towers of razorblades.
“No! You can’t, not now, please, both of you, I’m so much more sensitive after I do that. Please…”
“What did you do?” Tonya asked.
Even their voices were distorted and ugly, ramming sound down into her ears.
“God, there’s no time!” She levered herself off the couch, trying to find a place as far away from them as she could. Just the beating of their hearts hit her like sledgehammers. They were too slow and had to listen.
“We have to run. We have to run right now!” She fluttered back and forth, trying to get past them to the door.
Tonya nodded as she stood. “Okay, that’s fine. Mike, You go get the guns.”
“No!” They weren’t listening, there was no time. “No! Turn around now, and run out that door. Run!”
Mike started to do just that when the power in their room went out.
He said, “Oh no,” then bounced off a wall and into an end table. The lamp sitting on it shattered when it hit the floor.
“Mike!” God, no, please, not this. Kim wanted nothing more than to fall on him, but even the thought made things under her skin scrabble and wrap spider’s legs around her.
“It’s okay, Kim,” Tonya said as she rolled his body over. “He’s still breathing.”
Tonya tapped his cheeks, and he came to with a snort.
Tonya asked Kim, “Can you open the door?”
A helicopter thumped over their hotel. Kim scrambled across the walls opposite them, yanked the door open, and with a shriek, ran outside. They were too close!
Tonya bellowed, her legs straining as she dragged Mike out the door. They stumbled along together.
“Mike,” Tonya said at the end of the walkway, “you’re too heavy! I need you to walk!”
“I’m trying! Oh great. Steps. Where’s Kim?”
“I’m here!”
There was nothing she could do. They had to run, and she couldn’t help them. Kim could not stand closer than ten feet to them. She followed behind them as best she could. Sirens echoed in the distance.
“Please! Please just go!”
“Mike, grab the rail! Do you have it? Are you sure?” Tonya stumbled with Mike down the concrete steps, but she managed to make it to the middle landing. Tonya turned, and Kim couldn’t face her through the pain. Kim couldn’t be like this, there was no time. She kept testing how close she could get to them, but the reaction wasn’t receding fast enough.
Tonya shouted out, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”
She somehow managed to get Mike to the bottom of the steps just as the prayer ended.
“Kim! Come on!”
Kim took three deep breaths and then rushed past. Sirens wailed nearly on top of them. She got to th
e car, then hit the key.
Nothing happened, and in an instant, she knew why.
When it really mattered, she’d failed them again. She’d forgotten to disconnect the car from the grid. The cops had locked it down.
Tonya asked, “What’s wrong?”
Tears streamed down her cheeks, and the pain exploded when Tonya got too close. She threw herself away with a scream and fell face-down on the grass in front of the parking lot.
“I’m so sorry, I forgot, I’m so sorry!”
“Kim!” Tonya cried out. “What’s wrong? What’s happen—”
Police cars blasted into the parking lot from all directions.
She heard the scuffling and shouts but was helpless to do anything about it. She had failed them all in a stupid gamble, and now would pay the price. The police didn’t know about her, and nobody ever got arrested without being touched. Pain boiled with the footsteps on the grass. When one of them got within five feet, she couldn’t stand it anymore and jumped off the ground with a shriek.
Their weapons were drawn. Kim took a single step, the barrels flashed, and then darkness ended her pain.
Chapter 61: Adelmo
He shook his head in disbelief as the news report played again.
“Local police, in cooperation with the FBI, have apprehended the fugitive cybercriminal known as Angel Rage.”
He never could get over how fast the US media got to a crime scene. At least she gave up somewhere soft. The cops even had the latest version of their stun darts on hand. The too-wide barrels coughed them into her chest as the video ratcheted down into another slow motion replay. They could knock her out with those as many times as it took to understand her problem, and she’d be no worse for wear.
Rage’s misfortune was, however, to his benefit. The alert pulled every police unit in the region away. In the confusion, Adelmo’s men had helped him evade the units tailing them ever since they’d left the courthouse.
On the screen, police gently put Rage’s unconscious form into the back of a squad car. He motioned for one of his men to turn the shared feed off.
Another of his men slowly asked, “I guess this means we don’t need a new van?”
Gemini Gambit Page 34
