Owl and the Japanese Circus

by Kristi Charish

  I closed the text box as I made the Byzantine Thief down the health boost before I cast the spell. Another text box piped up in its place.

  I mean it. You really don’t want to fire that missile, Carpe wrote.

  Why the hell not?

  It won’t work. Even if it manages to break through the stone wall, and that’s still a big but, the explosion will kill you.

  I took another sip of my Corona, then typed back, I say it won’t.

  Owl—will you just put your headset on? Please?

  No, I wrote, and tried to close the dialogue box. When it wouldn’t close, I minimized it and locked my screen. Carpe didn’t stop though. My screen shook like it was having an epileptic seizure. I frowned and tried to click the Cast button, but I couldn’t lock onto it with my mouse. It kept shaking out of reach.

  “Goddamn it.” I threw my headset on and flipped the mic open. “See, now this is exactly why I hate hackers. Just because you can bypass my security doesn’t mean you’re invited.”

  “What is with the cold shoulder?”

  “You’re my World Quest partner, yet you keep interjecting yourself into my real life—you’re not even trying to keep our agreement,” I yelled.

  “Seriously? You’re mad about our agreement? Geez, how about ‘Hey Carpe, thanks for saving me from the skin walker’? I might appreciate it, you know.”

  “Yeah, about that. How the hell did you know that was going to happen?”

  “I’m the Sojourn Hacker,” he said, a little too full of himself for my liking. “You realize these kinds of hit jobs are posted online? Besides, the Japanese Circus only has an OK security system. Took me fifteen minutes to access the cameras.”

  “Great. So now you’re spying on me remotely too? Has anyone ever told you you might be a cyber stalker?”

  “Only once. But she fundamentally misunderstood what I was doing—”

  “Jesus, as soon as this job is done I’m diving right back off the grid. And for the record, you didn’t save me—you warned me. Completely different. A warning just means I had a heads-up someone is trying to kill me. Now, my friend who showed up and kicked the skin walker’s ass ‘saved me,’ if you care for distinctions.”

  Carpe laughed. “Who do you think called your boyfriend?”

  I clenched my jaw. This was exactly why I hadn’t wanted to talk to Carpe right now. All he was doing was pissing me off. “Why does everyone think he’s my boyfriend?” I paused. “And how did you get Rynn’s number?”

  “Easy. When you didn’t answer my message, I hacked into your phone and went through your texts,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “I don’t believe you. It’s bad enough you take over my computer, now you hack into my cell too?”

  “Ummm, it was an emergency? If I hadn’t, you’d be dead. And for the record, as a friend, I really think there’s a lot left to be desired in that guy, I mean, if you knew half the things—”

  “Get the hell out of my game screen. And stay out of my love life!”

  “So you admit he’s your boyfriend?”

  I sighed. “Carpe, I’m warning you—I’m not in the mood for this.”

  “I’m not leaving you alone until you listen to me. I don’t care if he’s your friend, there are a few things you should know about that guy.”

  I swore. “Look, I don’t want to hear it. All I want is to spend a few hours playing World Quest. By myself. And to do that, I need out of this goddamned hole. Which brings me back to my first point. Go away.”

  “Owl, he’s an incubus.”

  I leaned back in my chair and ran my hand through my hair. “Yeah, I know.”

  There was a pause. “You do?”

  “Yeah—and why is that so surprising?”

  There was another pause. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you aren’t exactly known for spotting supernaturals. More like blindly crashing into them.”

  “Good-bye, Carpe—and I mean it this time.” I turned off my mic and pulled up a firewall that blocked out everything short of essential World Quest transmissions. Hopefully Carpe got the message.

  I went back to the game and pulled up my equipped items. Funny, I could have sworn I’d equipped the scroll. Next, I checked my inventory. The scroll was gone. “Son of a bitch,” I said, and started to write a nasty letter to Carpe telling him to return my scroll or I’d put up a Wanted poster in the Dead Orc and have every first-level World Questing treasure whore hounding him. Before I could hit Send, there was a hard knock at the door. I didn’t move. Maybe if I was quiet, they’d go away.

  The banging got louder. “Owl. Open this door now,” Nadya said. I got up and peered through the eyehole. Sure enough, there was Nadya. I was about to open the door when a gut-wrenching thought struck me.

  “How do I know it’s really you and not another skin walker?” I said.

  Nadya tsked and shook her head. “You don’t.”

  I ran her answer over in my head. If it really was a skin walker, it’d be more concerned with convincing me to let it in, not validating my fears . . . then again, if it had all Nadya’s thoughts . . . I shook my head. Overanalyzing is not a virtue.

  Captain was sitting at my feet, in front of the door. “What do you think?” I asked him. “Do we let her in?”

  He mewed, stood on his hind legs, and started scratching the door.

  I swung the door open. Pissed, Nadya stood with her arms crossed and laptop bag slung over her shoulder.

  She pushed past me and dropped her bag and purse on my coffee table. “Why the hell haven’t you been answering your phone? I’ve been texting and calling you for the last twenty minutes.”

  I winced. “Sorry, I turned it off. I wanted to avoid, well, everyone.”

  “Spill.”

  “No. I don’t want to talk about it yet.”

  “Alix. Now.”

  I took a deep breath. I could tell from her tone this wasn’t open to negotiation. “Remember when I asked if you were human?”

  “Yes. And why would you ask me such a stupid question? Of course I’m human. I think the skin walker hit your head too hard—”

  It probably had . . . “Well, it’s not that stupid of a question, because Rynn sure as hell isn’t,” I said.

  Her eyes widened, and she sat back into the hotel couch. “There has to be some kind of mistake—”

  “No. No mistake,” I said, and filled her in.

  “I can’t believe it never occurred to me—” She shook her head. “I mean, it makes sense. The Tokyo club, knowing Oricho, familiarity with supernaturals . . . Alix, I have a better eye than you, and I never even thought . . .” She looked up at me. “What are you going to do?”

  I laughed. “Well, let’s see. I can’t sleep with him anymore, so that’s done. Other than that,” I shrugged, “I don’t know. I’m still cooling off.”

  Nadya pursed her lips. “Why do you need to stop seeing him?”

  “Were you not listening? Rynn is an incubus. By definition, sleeping with him could, and probably would, kill me.”

  Nadya crossed her arms. “I agree it would be stupid to chase after an incubus if we were talking about a stranger. Rynn is my friend and yours. The only thing that has changed in the last twenty-four hours is that you now know he’s an incubus. And you said he was confident he wouldn’t hurt you.”

  “Those weren’t my exact words,” I said. “And you believe everything a supernatural tells you? I have a lovely bridge for sale, you could put in a nice tollbooth and everything.”

  Nadya tsked. “I’ve known him for two years now and I still trust him with you, even if he is an incubus. I know you’re upset about him not telling you, but how many times has he pulled you out of trouble in the last week since this mess began?”

  I sat up. “Are you not listening? He’s not human . . .”

  Her frown deepened. “All the humans you know, except for me, have tried to sell you to the vampires.”

  She had a point. One that wasn’t lost on m
e . . . But still, this was way outside my realm of comfort.

  “Rynn is your friend, and he cares about you. Otherwise he wouldn’t keep pulling you out of fires. What if it turned out I was a nymph?”

  “Or a vampire?” I added.

  She frowned. “Not a fair comparison. Vampires are different. They secrete a narcotic, even if they can’t help it. Hanging out with a vampire is an addiction sentence, but it isn’t their fault. This is different. Not all supernaturals have that kind of an effect on humans.”

  “Incubi feed off humans—or did you miss that class?”

  “No, but you did. Otherwise you’d know they feed off energy, not humans specifically—”

  “But they can.”

  Nadya made an exasperated noise. “So what? If it turned out I was a succubus, you’d be convinced it was only a matter of time until I killed you? That would be the end of our friendship?”

  I slumped back into my chair. “Can’t you just let me be angry for a few more hours? He lied to me—”

  “You’ve already had hours to be angry. Now what are you going to do?”

  I ran my hand through my hair. “I don’t know. I said I was going to stay away from supernaturals; you said I needed to stay away from supernaturals. You now changing your mind is not helping me.”

  “Yes, and I still think you need to stay away from the supernaturals that are trying to kill you—and let’s face it, with your mouth, that’s almost all of them. Rynn is the one who seems hell-bent on keeping you alive—” She shrugged. “Do what you want, but if you want an excuse to keep running, don’t look at me, I’m not going to give it to you.”

  I glanced at my cell, still lying facedown on the coffee table. Goddamn it, why did I always get left with these kinds of decisions? Why didn’t I ever get to make easy decisions, like what color to wear?

  “Nadya, it’s not that simple. I mean, I have trust issues.”

  She snorted. “I am well aware of your trust issues. And it is that simple, but go ahead and keep telling yourself that if it lets you sleep at night.” She shook her head and headed over to the fridge. “But if this is how you treat your friends . . .” She swore in Russian when she opened it. “No beer? You are losing your touch.”

  “I was beaten up by a skin walker,” I said.

  “Yes, the one Rynn saved you from,” she said as she slid back onto the couch.

  “Nadya, friend of supernaturals everywhere.”

  “Just the ones willing to put up with you. Keeping you alive is turning into a full-time job. I make more money and get shot at less working the bar. Besides, I think he’s good for you. He cares about you, and God knows how, but he’s patient with you too.” Nadya opened my laptop and made a derisive noise at World Quest on the screen. “Working hard on the translation, I see?” She shot me a dirty look.

  “You know it helps me think,” I said. Nadya had never really understood the symbiotic bond I had with the game. It helped me problem solve, and I was one of the necessary millions of players needed to fill its code with witty adventure.

  She snorted and pulled up one of the files I’d been working on before we’d left for Berkeley.

  “Look here,” she said, and pointed to one of the rings we’d found in the dragon temple—the one written in blood and set with magic, the one I’d thought had been the translation key.

  “I’ve been playing with this,” she said, and rotated the first ring. “It looks like one kind of inscription from the top, but when you turn it on its side, see how some of the symbols change?” She highlighted a symbol that reminded me of a sword. Sure enough, as she rotated the ring, the sword took on a different configuration until it looked more like a heart symbol.

  “It’s like an optical illusion,” I said, not bothering to hide my excitement. “How many more are like that?”

  “From what I’ve seen so far, they all carry these kinds of hidden symbols.”

  I took a closer look at the rotated ring. As I scanned through the symbols, every one showed a second form, and I recognized at least one from the scroll. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

  She shook her head. “I’m trying it with the other rings to see what I get. I’ve got a program running through them all and isolating every symbol that has two orientations.” She shrugged. “We still have to figure out the arrangement and correlate them with the scroll. It might be something, it might be nothing.”

  I rocked back on the couch and looked up at shadows cast on the ceiling by the hotel chandelier. I’d cracked a lot of ancient codes over the years—they were my thing. When people hide things, whichever millennium or century they were from, they try to make it as hard as possible for people like me to find them. In the circle of archaeology—or grave robbing, depending what perspective you’re coming at it from—I was a first-rate decoder, but even I’d missed the symbol rotation. And the level of complexity the layer of rotation suggested . . .

  I’d worry about that though when we had something more. Like an actual key or concrete pattern to go on. At this point we were pulling at straws, even if it was a hell of a lot more than I’d found in the last twenty-four hours. We either solved it or would spend the next few months dodging Marie and Mr. Kurosawa’s attempts to kill us. Considering how well that had gone so far . . .

  I nodded and opened the scroll file on my laptop. “Send me the symbols as you find them and I’ll start pulling them out of the scroll. We’ll know in a few hours if we’re actually making headway or playing our own special version of tic-tac-toe.”

  Nadya started to pack up her own laptop.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Back to my room, where, unlike you, I have a bottle of champagne. Call me when you restock your fridge.” She stopped to grab my empty Corona bottles, including the one in my hand. “And I think I should take these, just so you’re not tempted to weaponize them again.”

  “Nadya?” I said as she was reaching for the door.

  She turned and raised an eyebrow.

  “Thanks.”

  She nodded and gave me a wry smile. “Anytime. It’s really self-preservation. If it wasn’t for me, you’d have made many more stupid decisions by now and would probably be living off my couch.”

  I went back to my laptop and the new set of symbols.

  “Owl?”

  I looked back up at Nadya.

  “Whatever you decide to do with Rynn, make up your mind soon, or at least hear him out. I don’t care if he’s an incubus—you’re being cruel,” she said, and closed the door behind her.

  I sighed. She was right. I was still pissed, but I was assuming the worst, and I was starting to feel guilty about it. Rynn hadn’t done anything except be my friend.

  Every time I ran into someone from the archaeology grad school circuit, without fail they assumed the worst, even after they called me to save their asses. Like Benji. Granted, the university archaeology heads hadn’t helped with the rumors they’d spread about my dismissal, and I do in fact take things they would rather I didn’t from their dig sites. But I’d never hurt anyone. And until the last week at the temple in Bali, I’d never damaged anything either, and that had been the guards’ and naga’s fault. Even Benji, whose career and life I’d gone out of my way to save, had had no problem going back on our deal just because it was me and I was Owl, the bad thief. I knew what it felt like to have people judge you by a name. I turned my cell phone over and opened Rynn’s message.

  Train wreck was all he’d written.

  I typed in Whore and pressed Send. Then I went back to the scroll and started highlighting the two new symbols Nadya had found.

  I don’t know if it was the right or wrong call, but I owed it to Rynn to hear him out.

  I logged out of World Quest. It’s not like the Byzantine Thief was going anywhere. I’d hit a stalemate with the Oubliette wall now that Carpe had stolen my missile scroll. Might as well puzzle through the other, real scroll. “Let’s see just what you�
�re hiding in there,” I said and got back to work.

  An hour later Nadya and I had five more symbols to add to the heart and sword: a cross with a loop, a sun (or moon, depending on how you looked at it), a river, what I was convinced was a tree of life, and a skull, which Nadya kept calling a doubloon. Apparently “skull” was too ominous for her. I pointed out this entire job was ominous, but there you have it. We settled on “doubloon.”

  In the first line of the scroll, I’d found the heart, sword, and doubloon, overlaid with individual words in the script, like an ancient version of 3-D, but in no specific pattern or order. In the following scroll lines, I’d managed to find all the other symbols as well. The sword and heart were the most common; I’d found ten of each, with the sun, cross, and river following a distant second, at four, three, and five respectively. There was only one tree of life and one doubloon. The tree of life I’d found in the beginning of the second line, and the doubloon was on the last word of the last line. Though what that meant was beyond me.

  If I wasn’t looking at the codex to activate the damn thing, it was time to retire. Reading it, however, was an entirely different matter. I tried isolating the words, then the letters the symbols were overlaid with. When that didn’t give me anything, I tried isolating the individual letters. Then I tried removing the words and letters from the script, to see if that made a difference. Last, I tried changing the order based on the symbols and still came up with nothing.

  My phone rang. It was Nadya.

  “I found all the symbols in the scroll and I still have no idea how to read it. Any luck on your end?” I said.

  “No more than you. I’ve checked all the rings. There are only the seven symbols hidden in it. I’ve been isolating the words—”