Spell Robbers

by Matthew J. Kirby

  Poole turned to his men. “On my mark.” They shifted on their feet, a firing squad. This was an execution.

  Ronin shook his head. “Poole, wait —”

  Poole took a breath. “Three, two —”

  “STOP!” Ben shouted.

  Poole, the Dread Cloaks, Ronin, all turned toward him.

  How had Mr. Weathersky done it? Actuations began with thoughts, consciousness reaching out, creating reality. What if Ben’s consciousness could reach out to affect another?

  “You do not want to do that,” Ben said.

  Fear. They needed to feel fear.

  “Why not?” Poole asked.

  “Trust me.” Ben thought of heart rates rising. He thought of cold palms and trembling hands. He thought of chills along the spine, the hollow of dread in the chest. Ben gripped his Locus and pushed fear outward, imagining waves of it crashing over the minds of Poole and the others. “You kill Ronin, and you’ll regret it.”

  One of Poole’s blue eyes twitched. “How?”

  “You’re going to need him when the League raids you next week. He knows their tactics. He knows the agents by name. He knows their strengths and weaknesses. Without him, it doesn’t matter if I’m your inside man or not. The League will still take you down.”

  Poole swallowed. Ben couldn’t believe it. It seemed to be working. He held the Locus tighter.

  Fear.

  “Perhaps,” Poole said, “I am being rash. Perhaps you both might be of use to me.”

  “There’s no perhaps,” Ben said. “Now, call off your men.”

  Poole stared at Ben for a long time. Ben stared back, radiating the way Mr. Weathersky had, and it was Poole who looked away first.

  He turned to the Dread Cloaks. “Power down.”

  THEY rode in silence, surrounded by Dread Cloaks. The van coasted down empty, sleeping streets, reminding Ben of the night drive he’d taken with the League to catch Ronin in the first place. It almost felt like that had been a different him than the Ben in this van now. Since that night, he’d faced down criminals and a gang lord. He’d been a member of a heist crew, and now he was officially undercover in the Dread Cloaks.

  Each of those steps had brought him closer to the goal. Get Dr. Hughes and the augmenter gun for the League, then get his life back.

  He wondered where the van was going. Probably not anywhere near Dr. Hughes. Poole would have her locked up tight somewhere. Ben hoped she was all right.

  Eventually, they left downtown and headed out on the highway (or interstate?) toward an industrial part of the city.

  “Where are we going?” Ronin asked.

  No one answered him.

  They took a freeway exit near a sprawling refinery. Bright lights traced the outlines of its buildings, catwalks, and pipes, and the smell of rotten eggs clung to the air around it. At the far end, two identical brick smokestacks rose from a windowless fortress, belching twin flames into the night.

  After the refinery, the van turned onto a road that carried them into a derelict suburb. Nearly every house looked abandoned, with dead lawns, broken or boarded-up windows, graffiti, and sagging roofs.

  Soon, the streets turned from residential to business. They passed strips of empty and anonymous storefronts and offices, the ghosts of their former logos peeking out from behind FOR SALE banners. After a few blocks of this, the van turned onto a wide, paved entrance, and they passed under an arched sign.

  Ben read it and leaned in close to Ronin. “Mercer Beach? Where’s the ocean?”

  “It’s an amusement park,” Ronin said. “Or was. They shut it down years ago.”

  What are we doing at an amusement park?

  The van cut straight across a vast parking lot, avoiding a few fallen lampposts. Those still standing were dark and lifeless, weeds shooting up through cracks in the asphalt at their feet. The van swung past the main gate, the ticket booths with their red-and-white-striped canopies, and continued alongside the park’s chain-link fence to a rear entrance. A sign hanging on it still read DELIVERY VEHICLES ONLY.

  The driver of their van honked.

  Two Dread Cloaks swung the gate inward, and the van pulled through, then took a winding road around the backside of the park. The silhouettes of a Ferris wheel and a carousel rose up against the night sky over the backs of smaller booths and buildings. Beyond those, the refinery smokestacks burned, not too far away. No wonder they’d shut this place down.

  The van eventually stopped at a loading dock, and everyone piled out behind a building that had been made to look like a giant circus tent. Poole led the way up a flight of cement steps and through the building’s rear entrance. Inside, they seemed to be behind some kind of stage, and from there they followed Poole down a hallway where the doors all had glittery stars on them, with nameplates like MADAME CHANDELIER, PIPSQUEAK THE CLOWN, and SIMON NIGHTSPELL.

  Poole opened a door labeled KARL TITAN. “Inside, both of you.”

  Ben and Ronin entered the room, and the door shut behind them. They heard a key in the lock, and footsteps leading away. But two swinging blades of shadow coming in under the door said Poole had left guards just outside.

  The room was empty, except for a couple of chairs, and a vanity with a large mirror bordered by lightbulbs. Ronin ushered them away from the door, into a corner.

  “What now?” Ben whispered.

  “We wait for Poole to decide what he wants to do with us. My guess, he’ll want to get you back to the League soon to find out about this raid. How come you didn’t tell me about that before?”

  “Because there is no raid. I made it up.”

  Ronin gave his head a quick shake. “What? Why would you make that up?”

  “I was improvising, okay? And don’t forget that my improvising saved your life.”

  “Yes, it did,” Ronin said. “But you also put us on a pretty tight timetable. One week, you said?”

  Ben nodded.

  “So we have one week to find Dr. Hughes and the portable augmenter. And then the League is supposedly staging a raid on the Dread Cloaks?”

  Ben nodded again.

  “Then your job just got a lot tougher, kid.”

  “How?”

  “You might have to convince the Quantum League to stage an actual raid.”

  They stayed in the dressing room for what felt like a couple of hours, and then a Dread Cloak came for them. They followed him back down the hallway, to the backstage area. From there, they climbed a staircase attached to the wall, till they were up high among the lights and the rigging, and Ben could look down on the other side of the backdrop.

  The building was an arena, part-circus, part-theater, with a sawdust performance ring in front of the raised stage. It was the kind of place his mom probably would have brought him for his birthday when he was younger.

  They reached the top of the stairs, where a network of catwalks crisscrossed away from them out over the whole arena.

  “This way,” the Dread Cloak said, and he led them along a walkway to what looked like some kind of control room.

  “Poole’s office, I take it?” Ronin asked.

  “Yes,” the Dread Cloak said.

  They reached the door, the Dread Cloak knocked, and a voice said to enter.

  Inside, Poole sat at a desk before a wall of windows that offered a view of the entire audience and stage far below. Behind him, a vast and complicated panel bore hundreds of switches and dials, Ben assumed for all the lights and sounds in the building.

  Two armchairs sat in front of Poole’s desk, facing him, and behind those chairs stood three more Dread Cloaks. One of them, a guy with red hair, stared hard at Ben.

  “Gentlemen.” Poole gestured to the chairs. “Make yourselves comfortable.”

  And the chairs were comfortable, even though Ben could feel the redhead still glaring at the back of his neck.

  “Nice place you got here,” Ronin said. “Gives new meaning to high and mighty.”

  “It suits my need for privacy
,” Poole said. “Speaking of which, the rest of you are dismissed.”

  The Dread Cloaks filed from the room, and the redhead shot Ben one last look before he shut the door behind them. Ben could feel and hear their footsteps on the stairs going back down. Ronin kept one ear cocked to the sound until it faded.

  And then he said, “Okay, Poole. Now tell me what you’re doing all the way out here.”

  “What do you mean?” Poole asked.

  “How can you run the Dread Cloaks so far from your turf?”

  “I don’t need to be there in person to run the show.”

  “Yes, you do. I couldn’t run a crew from here, let alone a street gang.” Ronin spread his arms and looked around the room. “I don’t mean to be rude, but this is weird.”

  Poole’s sunken eyes turned hard.

  “You have gotten paranoid, haven’t you?” Ronin said. “There’s something going on here. Something’s got you spooked.”

  Ben remembered Ronin saying the same thing to Mr. Weathersky. Getting spooked seemed to be going around.

  “Yes,” Poole said quietly.

  “Pardon?” Ronin leaned forward in the armchair. “Yes, what?”

  “Yes.” Poole spoke louder. “Something has me … on edge.”

  “What?”

  Poole stood. He clasped his hands behind his back and turned away from them, facing the windows. “You know most Dread Cloaks are only Class One Actuators, don’t you?”

  Ronin shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Thugs. Petty, simple, blunt instruments. When I took over, it was easy for a while. They feared me. I’d shown them what I could do, and that was enough to keep them in line. But inevitably, rivals started coming up through the ranks, and I put a few of them down. Dramatically. Terribly. Examples had to be made to stem the tide.”

  “But there’s somebody new, isn’t there?” Ronin asked. “Somebody who’s got you running scared. That’s why you’re out here. Are you still in control?”

  Poole pivoted to look at them. “Yes.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I haven’t been able to identify him.” He sat back down at his desk. “But rumors reach my ears. They say he can actuate Class Threes. More and more Dread Cloaks throw in with him every day. I’m hemorrhaging.”

  “So what do you want from us?” Ronin asked.

  Poole looked at Ben. “This raid. If I stop it, if I defeat the League, me, the show of force will staunch the bleeding. The Dread Cloaks will see that I” — he pounded his chest — “am in charge. I’ll starve out this pretender to my throne.”

  Ben tried to look and sound like the kid he’d become in the Paracelsus crew safe house. The one capable of anything. “I can do something about that.”

  “I need you to get me everything you can on this raid,” Poole said. “When. Where. How many agents. Which agents. Their strategy. All of it. You have two days.”

  “Done,” Ben said. “But I’ll need Ronin and his crew to help me.”

  “Yes, fine.” Poole slipped a phone out of his vest pocket. “We’re done here. I’ll have someone drive you back into the city now. Go.”

  Ben and Ronin rose to leave, but as they reached the door, Poole called after them.

  “If you fail me, boy, or try any more of your devilish tricks, I’ll kill you. You’ve been on borrowed time since I had you in my sights in that laboratory.”

  Ronin had the Dread Cloak driver drop them off several blocks from the safe house, and they walked the rest of the way. The sun was just coming up. Shops opened up as they passed by, and the sidewalks filled with people carrying coffee cups, on their way to work.

  “It’s there,” Ronin said as they walked. “The augmenter gun is out there somewhere in the park. So is Dr. Hughes.”

  “How do you know?” Ben asked.

  “Class Threes. Poole’s enemy can actuate Class Threes. Poole can’t. He needs the augmenter gun because he’s expecting a showdown. And as paranoid as he is, there’s no way he’d leave that gun in the city when his control over the gang is slipping. He’ll have it somewhere close by.”

  Ben thought back to the park. It was big. Buildings everywhere. Probably Dread Cloaks everywhere, too. “So how do we find her?”

  Ronin jammed his hands into his pockets. “Not sure yet. Let’s get back to the crew and fill them in. We’ll go from there. But there was some good news in all of that.”

  “What?”

  “Poole doesn’t think the gun is working yet. If he did, he wouldn’t need us.”

  They made it back to the safe house, and Ronin let them in like he’d done the first time. But now Ben knew the way. Downstairs, the crew greeted them with relief and congratulations.

  “You did good, kid!” Lykos held an ice pack to his jaw where Polly had punched him. “You’re a natural.”

  “We were wrong to doubt you,” Meg said.

  Polly came up and put one cement pipe of an arm around Ben’s shoulders. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Ben said.

  Polly nodded.

  Ronin cleared his throat. “I’m fine, too, by the way.”

  Argus waved him off. “You’re always fine, Ronin. More lives than Schrodinger’s cat.”

  They didn’t know how close it had been. They’d left before Ronin got back. They hadn’t seen him almost get executed by Poole and his men. Ben wanted to say something about it, but Ronin nodded his head and spoke first.

  “I told you,” he said. “The plan was good. I know Poole.”

  But that wasn’t true. Ronin had miscalculated Poole. Ben guessed he didn’t want the crew to know that. Maybe he was afraid they’d lose confidence in the job.

  “So.” Ronin clapped his hands. “Coffee. Then on to the next phase.”

  Ben and Ronin spent the next few minutes filling the crew in on what they’d learned. Ronin went to the large table, pulled a map of the city from the stack of papers, and stuck it to the whiteboard with magnets.

  “This is Mercer Beach.” Ronin drew a circle on the map. “The augmenter gun is here, somewhere.”

  “I remember that place,” Argus said. “Used to go there as a kid.”

  “Yeah, well. The clowns and magicians are gone now.” Ronin stopped. He looked at the crew, and they all chuckled. “Like I was saying, the clowns are gone now. It’s crawling with Dread Cloaks. The gun could be anywhere.”

  “So how do we find it?” Lykos asked.

  “Our inside man,” Argus said. “Ben just has to find the building that’s most heavily guarded. That’s where they’ll be. Pretty straightforward.”

  “This isn’t business as usual,” Ronin said. “This isn’t just another job. We’ll have two packages we need to get out of there in one piece. The augmenter and the professor.”

  “Why the professor?” Argus asked. “Can’t we leave her?”

  Ben felt his shoulders tensing. For the crew, the only prize was the augmenter gun.

  “The professor is part of the job,” Ronin said.

  “That makes no sense,” Lykos said. “Wouldn’t it be a lot simpler if we didn’t bother with her?”

  They could not leave Dr. Hughes behind. But Ronin would have a hard time explaining why to his crew. This was up to Ben.

  “She’s important to me,” Ben said. “She taught me how to actuate. If you want me to be your inside man, she’s part of the job.”

  The crew frowned and shook their heads. But that seemed to settle it.

  “Will Poole have the professor and the gun together?” Meg asked.

  “High probability,” Ronin said. “He’ll have her working on it.”

  “Then smash and grab.” Argus punched his palm. “Ben finds out where they’ve got them, then we bust in and get them out.”

  “No,” Ronin said. “They’re too dug in out there, guarded by Poole’s best. Too many.” He studied the map. “We need to flush them out somehow. We stand the best chance if we can catch them on the move.”

  But what would make Poo
le move Dr. Hughes to a new location? He’d have to think it wasn’t safe to keep her where she was anymore. He’d have to feel compromised or threatened.

  “The raid,” Ben said. “We use the raid to force Poole to move her.”

  “What raid?” Meg asked.

  Ronin pointed his marker at Ben. “That’s perfect, kid.”

  “What raid?” Meg asked again.

  “The League raid,” Ronin said.

  “There’s going to be a League raid?” Lykos asked.

  “Not yet,” Ben said. “But I’m going to make one.”

  THE next day, Ronin drove Ben back to the Quantum League headquarters. The thought of it made Ben uncomfortable. Nervous. Sasha and Peter may have been comfortable there, but the League wasn’t Ben’s home any more than the Paracelsus crew safe house had been. Still, he was looking forward to seeing his friends again.

  “Good luck in there,” Ronin said.

  “Thanks.” It came out sounding more sarcastic than Ben had meant it.

  “Hey, don’t worry. The plan is good.”

  Ben rolled his eyes. “That’s what you said about the last one.”

  “This plan is good,” Ronin said. “Stick to the plan, and when you can’t, you’re pretty good at improvising.”

  Only this time, a made-up League raid wouldn’t save him. Ben saw the building’s steeple up ahead, and the butterflies in his stomach grew teeth.

  “But another thing occurred to me this morning,” Ronin said. “If you can get ahold of one, I’d like to see the schematics for the League’s prison cells.”

  “Why?”

  “Well …” Ronin adjusted his rearview mirror. “Look, I don’t want you to worry about this, okay? But Poole is powerful. If things go south, we might need a place to put him. Can you do that? They’ll have hard copies somewhere.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Good. And remember. This will only work if we keep it quiet. If Weathersky figures out what we’re doing, he’s gonna want in on it. He’ll send agents, and the whole thing will blow up in our faces. Your Dr. Hughes will be as good as dead.”

  They pulled into the parking lot behind the church. “Got it,” Ben said. He climbed out of the car.