World Divided: Book Two of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC
Page 44
“Get up!”
Red shook with a start, struggling to come to his feet.
“Time to move!” Vickie urged him, her voice sounding hoarse. “There’s still gas in there, enough to keep everyone knocked out! The stim shots won’t do the others any good till it’s cleared out, and it’s just building in the hallway now too! You don’t see a fan in there, do you?”
“Gimme a time, Appie,” he growled, shaking his head. “We’re on the clock here.”
“Ten minutes until the new guard shift, less for the current crew to rush your location. Can you drag the desk out into the hall so I can hack it?”
Red took a deep breath and ran into the Vault. He skidded to a halt by the desk, and shoved at it. He might as well have been shoving the Suntrust Building. “No can do.”
“Blow it apart?”
“This isn’t a door. We’ll wreck your MacGuffin.”
“Hack it apart?”
“With what?”
“Your claws!”
“It’s solid steel, woman! Damn it, we need a mage, here, now! Get someone!”
“Who?” she shouted back. “Name me one! I don’t know anybody nearer than Savannah!”
“Then get your ass in here. Wiggle your nose, teleport, whatever it is you do, but I—we—need you here, now!”
“And without the mystical landing pad I become a thin smear of pink goo on the floor. Good one, great solution.” She’d try it anyway, she would, if she didn’t already know what always happened. Send Herb? He’d never dig there in time.
“Okay…” Red panted, sinking to his knees, placing his face close to the ground, where the air was clearer. “Okay. Think…think…we need to get into this desk, and we need to clear this area of gas…and we need to do it ten minutes ago.…”
Vickie cursed and lurched to her feet, too frantic to simply sit still in her chair. “Okay! You were right! I should be there! If I was in that room, I could clear it! And I could hack that damn desk!” She sobbed a little. “If I was only there!”
“If you…what?”
“If I was there! You were right! I was wrong! You moron! I—I—I—” The last words came out as a sad little squeak “I’m just so damn scared.…”
“I heard you,” Red grunted, and he began to crawl towards the door. “What if you had no reason to be? What if you…” He paused as he rolled out in the hallway.
“No reason to be—what? Scared?” Gee, that would be nice…maybe when pigs flew. “No reason to be there?”
“—had nothing to lose?”
“What are you talking about?” Vickie demanded. It had to be the gas. It was making him babble.
“No risk…well, to you anyway.” Djinni coughed, and startled, he felt something wet splat against the inside of his hood. He pulled it up and felt about his mouth. Sticky. He drew his hand up, and saw the blood. So much for nonlethal. It looked like Verd had gotten in here. Easiest way to turn non into lethal? Pump up the dosage, no other change required. “Not a lot of time here, Appie, so tell it to me straight. Can you take me over?”
She felt as if she’d been sucker-punched. “You mean body-surf? Uh—that’s really unethical—” Except with consent. “Uh—yes? But—”
“It’s easy enough,” she lied. Well, it wasn’t exactly a lie. The enchantment was easy. It was the fallout that was hard. “The spell is easy, fast. It’s dangerous, though. Really dangerous.”
No shit, Red thought. Remember the last time? Remember…No. Don’t think about it, don’t…just…just…
His head was spinning. He slapped himself hard, just enough for one more moment of clarity. There wasn’t a choice. To hell with the consequences! He needed to let her do this, or they were dead. He swung his head to the side, and caught a blurred picture of his team lying there, helpless, and again, his eyes locked on the still form of Bella. She was dying. Bella was dying…
“Do it!” Red screamed.
***
The next thirty seconds or so went past in a blur. The spell required willpower, magic energy, and something physical from both parties, and the ability to twist your mind through the complex mathemagical calculations that flung one soul into another body.
Then came the spinning, disorientation of the thing taking hold. She already had the second spell to clear the gas out of him queued up; it fired as she took possession.
Then she was there, and with it her first clear thought…
Footsteps. Many of them. And moving fast.
She was up, riding a wave of adrenaline as she flung herself against the corner. There were people she needed to take out without killing them, and she acted on instinct and training, but with a body that responded instantly and didn’t fight her or seize up without warning.
The first came around a corner and gaped at her. She got his baton off his belt before he even started to move.
Holy crap, Red’s fast.…
Proper application of force to the right point on his head and he was down and she was on to the next, who didn’t even know she was there when she hit him. The third did, but he was only human, no way he could counter her in time. Then the fourth who got a shot off that ricocheted off the wall behind her before she knocked him cold and then—
It was over. Twenty seconds, from start to finish.
That was when she doubled over, suddenly overwhelmed with sensory overload. It hurt, and she was struck by a wave of panic. No! It wasn’t fair! Even now, even out of her scarred and broken body, she felt her skin flare up and bombard her with jagged needles…twisting mercilessly…
But it wasn’t all pain, some of it was…
…my god…my god…it was like having skin radar, she was aware of everything…
It all piled on top of her and she almost passed out. I’m…in his skin…why does it hurt?
…can’t pass out now…
She fought it. Sorted through it, just the same as when she had to sort through spellweaving or computer hacking or the combination of the two. Unraveled it. This was the radar and it could go over there and this was the heat sense and this…
This was the pain. His pain. Not unlike hers. Really the only difference was…
Was that his body still worked. Hers didn’t. That was the only difference.
Jeebus, Red, she thought, with the force and direction that she needed to “talk” to the person whose body she was riding, I had no idea. She waited for his response.
There was no response.
The hell?
***
He had let the fog come, as he knew it would, as he had trained himself to so long ago. Granted, it was easier this time, what with the Urmayan doing its thing. But before, there had been another Red, a foolish, reckless boy who sought to peer behind the curtain of all of life’s mysteries. Damn the torpedoes, pedal to the metal, it was about speed and near misses and the brass ring. Once upon a time, Red Djinni could give a shit about consequences.
He had gotten tired of the constant defeats at the hands of local heroes, even Amethist, and had decided that he needed to stop running solo. He began trying to recruit other young metas and individuals gifted with paranormal abilities; tried, but that wasn’t what he got. A few of his recruits had…other talents.
To his astonishment, Red found himself surrounded by young men and women who practiced something he hadn’t believed in at first. Magic. One had a feeble but growing ability to summon creatures, another could channel and control elements, and a third had the unnerving ability to project her consciousness into other bodies—animal at first, but then as she got better at it, human. Together, they experimented and came to an odd synergy, at times a real unity, defying the usual boundaries that delineated the realms of summoning, conjuration, elemental control and outright witchcraft. And Red, fascinated by the new world they showed him, became
an enthusiastic participant. He was never actually good at it; he simply did not have the patience or aptitude for any of their disciplines. Though he was, they had to agree, the most remarkable medium they had ever come across.
It began simply enough. Why do the jobs themselves, when they could control others? They took risks, crossed some lines they probably shouldn’t have, and defied the odds. And soon, they grew bored with petty larceny. They delved deeper, expanding the breadth of their experiments, heady with the excitement brought by power, by knowledge, until there was only hunger for more. It stopped being about the job. It turned into an addiction for experience, and each one had to be bigger, more risky than the last.
For Red, his rush came as a willing participant. He became all too familiar with the surge of power as he accepted another consciousness into himself, at the drive and burn of two distinct minds working in perfect unison. He fed from it, adored the synergy.
Right up until the day everything went horribly wrong.
Caught up in the fog of transition, he couldn’t block the memory out. Though silent, he screamed as he felt her die, her own screams ringing out through the furthest recesses of his mind, falling away, as his will smothered hers. He had loved her and he had killed her. Even now, so many years later, he could still feel her final moments.
He wept as he opened his eyes, his hand moving instinctively to wipe away the tears.
The hell?
His hand hurt. Sharper, yet more diffuse, different—no, it wasn’t just his hand, it was everywhere, there was nothing that didn’t hurt.
So what? You’re used to that…
No, this was different. Victrix was the rider, he was the submerged conciousness. He shouldn’t be able to move at all, to breathe, to smell, or to control anything! And the pain, it overwhelmed him. There was nothing to temper it, no radial senses, nothing from his skin except pain. It was like being partly deaf, yet partly bludgeoned with sound until you bled out of every orifice.
He sat up in shock and quickly scanned the room. He was half-reclining, in some kind of chair, in the dark, a wall of flickering monitors in front of him. And the biggest cat he had ever seen was glaring down at him from a perch on a desk beside him.
Cat…monitors…
He looked down, and tore the glove off his hand. He hissed through clenched teeth, horrified by what he saw.
Victrix…what have you done?
***
Shitshitshitshit. She knew what had happened. Her team, in the Goldman Catacombs, her watching Red hurtle deftly over obstacles, and that one unguarded moment, that one instant of stupid, unthinking loss of control. That one phrase.
“I wish I was you.”
Magicians could not, could not lose control like that. Especially dared not use the fatal words “I wish.” Words were power in the mouth of a mage. Words became spells when you said them with as much longing as she had. She had set in motion something that had only been waiting to pounce.
Moron. Idiot. Stupid bitch. Guilt hammered her.
She let it drive her. Guilt was a good substitute for strength and could put a needle-sharp point on will. First things first, a transmutation spell, Urmayan gas into its antidote. Fortunately she didn’t need to know the chemical composition to make an antidote; she just had to “tell” the gas to become its opposite, using the laws of similarity, opposites, and contagion. Quickly, before the stuff could start to make Red’s body dizzy again, she concocted the right set of calculations, set her will at the beginning, and blazed through them to the end, as focused and controlled as her ill-considered phrase had been vague and reckless.
“Fiat mutacio,” she whispered, and there was a faint flash of light and a little release of heat as the molecules of gas transmuted.
She braced herself as Red’s knees buckled. That took…a chunk out of both of them. Nothing comes out of nothing, everything has a price. Transmutation costs in energy. Just a good thing this was a gas; not a lot of mass to transmute.
When she thought she could move, she stumbled over to Bella, and rooted in her medical kit for the stimulator shots in their preloaded syringes, then went from one to another of the team, giving them hits into the jugular. Bella first. The clock was ticking.
***
Red stared in morbid fascination at the corded, scarred thing that had been under Victrix’s glove. It actually looked a lot more like the hand of something that had died and mummified in the desert than a human hand. It worked all right, but, hell, it hurt. In fact, his—her—whole body hurt like that. And everything was…damaged, damage that interfered with each movement. There was delay, there was hesitation, but more than anything else, there was a hitch when he tried to move, exactly like rusted machinery, catching and lurching instead of working smoothly, and each lurch causing more pain.
No wonder she couldn’t run the Le Parkour course.
“The hell—” he muttered. “What does something like this?”
The cat stared down coldly at him from the desk.
Red stared at the cat. “Family feud?” he ventured. Third- and fourth-degree burns? How do you survive that?
The cat snorted.
The cat hesitated.
“Why’s that?” Red croaked.
***
The clock was ticking. When she was as sure as she could be that the rest of the team was going to be all right, Vickie went back to the desk. She toggled Red’s private freq back to the Overwatch suite as she stared at the desk, drawing little arcane diagrams on it with her finger to see what answers came up. Talk to me, my friend. Tell me what I need to know. Who can make you give up what I need, and what does he need to tell you to do it? “Grey. Grey, damn it, grow some fingers and take over the comm freqs,” she muttered, feeling the mic hidden under the skin of his throat vibrate. “We both know you can. Use the damn vocoder app and the keyboard.”
“Keep your fur on, I was doing it,” said the Stephen Hawking-like voice in her earpiece. “You inflicted me with an unwelcome interloper in here.”
“I know, it was an accident, put me on speaker, please. Badger? I am sorry, sorry, this is all my fault, I’ll…I’ll explain later.” She drew a few more diagrams and read the crude answers. Law of Contagion: the desk “knew” exactly what it needed to release the unit. She just had to ask the right qu
estions. “I’ll reverse it, but I need to be with you to do it. If you can figure out the comms, go ahead and take over. I swear to you, I will recompense you whatever you demand for doing this to you. Aha.”
The last was because she saw it; saw how to convince the desk to make the unit come out. She needed to give the desk power in a form it could use, the DNA of the next in succession, and code phrases. Fortunately she had the next in succession right here.
Pride was just beginning to stand up and move. She got him and dragged him back to the desk, taking his right hand and and slapping it down onto the invisible—to everyone but her—DNA sampling and recognition scanner. She drew him closer and whispered in his ear. “Get your face close to your hand, whisper your name, Echo serial number, then say ‘Protocol Open Sesame,’” she hissed in his ear, as she fed the desk broadcast energy from the portable unit Mel had in her pack to run their tools.
Pride looked at her blankly, but finally nodded and did as he was told.
The desk considered these things for a moment, then there was a little pop of locking mechanisms springing open, and as Pride took his hand away, a panel in the middle of the desk slid back, and something rose up.
It wasn’t obviously the bizarre communication device Vickie had seen before—but she recognized parts of it, folded down flat, the whole of it making a transportable object about the size of the Oxford English Dictionary. The code words that the desk had revealed to her had made the desk prepare the communicator for transportation.
She hefted it; it didn’t weigh too much. Ramona could pack it out. She stowed it in the backpack they’d brought for that purpose and dropped it next to the detective, then scooped up a second pack—because they were going to have to make this look like they’d come after something else. She made a dash into the shelves, scooping up small things that looked valuable or dangerous. And then she saw something that made her heart race.
She knew what they were; little self-contained camera units in spheres about the size of a golf ball. But they were in a box marked “Antigrav self-propelled camera/sensor units, Verdigris Dynamics” with a sticker slapped next to the label that said not yet working as designed. Of course they weren’t. Only the Thulians had antigrav at the moment. But she had levitation.