Nick allowed himself a small smile while he looked sadly back at the scorched earth. “Then I’m glad you’re still on my team, after all.”
At that moment, Jeremy’s voice spoke in all of their minds. “Will someone tell me what’s going on? I saw you break into the Great Hall and then everyone just came running back out.”
“Sorry, Jer,” Nick said, letting the telepath listen through his senses. “We’ve been a little busy. Go ahead and read my memory if you like.” He swallowed the lump in his throat. “It’s not something I really want to talk about right now.” Nick heard a whisper of sound when Jeremy looked over his shields and read his mind.
“Wait,” said Jeremy’s voice.“I don’t understand. If the jumper block is still active, then how did Toby get out?”
Layla looked away from the crater to frown at Nick in confusion. “Tobias did not get out, Jeremy. He died giving us time to escape.”
Jeremy replied by projecting an image into their minds of Toby lying on the floor of the Great Hall in Castle Night, while Rory and a couple of Fire Sentinels worked on his injuries. “He appeared in front of us about ten minutes ago, almost completely drained of life,” said Jeremy. “Rory managed to get him stabilized by using the Grace to replace some of the energy he’d lost, but it’s going to be a long time before he wakes up, if ever.”
Nick stared straight ahead at Layla, who watched him with wide-eyed amazement. “He’s going to make it?” Nick asked, a note of hope creeping into his voice.
“It was touch-and-go for a while, but we think he’s out of danger for the moment. What the hell happened?”
Nick swallowed and looked out over the smoldering crater. “I have no idea.”
CHAPTER 21
June 2042; the Citadel, Lunar Farside; Five weeks later
Toby opened his eyes and then closed them again immediately when the light stabbed into the back of his skull.
“Welcome back.”
He opened his eyes again, squinting at the formless shape next to him. Slowly it came into focus, revealing Andrea Daniels sitting next to his bed. She put down the book she was reading and looked at him expectantly.
He tried to ask what had happened, but all that came out of his mouth was a croak.
“Don’t try to talk. We’re still linked. Just think what you want to ask.”
“What happened? I cast a spell, and then everything went black.”
She held out a glass of water with a straw. “Thirsty?”
Suddenly, Toby was parched. Parched and ravenous. He nodded, making his head pound. She put the straw in his mouth and let him sip a little of the water until he’d taken the edge off his thirst.
She placed the glass back on the night table and settled back in her seat to regard him soberly. “You cast a temporal ward to seal Yvette away for long enough to let the rest of us to escape the Radiant Burn.”
He closed his eyes for a moment. “Did everyone make it out in time?”
“Everyone but you.”
“Thank God.” He frowned at her. “Why am I alive? How did you get me out?”
“We didn’t get you out, Toby. We left you behind. Someone else got you out.”
“Who?”
She ran her fingers lightly over the gold cross at his neck. “Antonio Martinez.”
He blinked, tilting his head to look at the cross barely visible above the line of the blanket covering his chest. “This saved me?”
She nodded. “Three of the four Winds of his generation died in an assault on the Court of Shadows, back in 2008. The Night’s Herald destroyed them with a Radiant Burn, and after the battle was lost, Antonio vowed he would never be caught unaware again. He created a spell that he would add to every jumper block he cast, which would trigger an immediate teleport to safe coordinates if it detected a Radiant Burn in progress.”
Toby frowned. “But there had to be jumper blocks over the base. Theirs and ours. It’s the first rule of modern magical warfare: Cut the enemy off from reinforcements and eliminate his line of retreat. How did the spell jump me out?”
“When Takeshi, Rory, and Anaba opened their eyes, he added them to the parameters of the spell. He apparently also added a blood teleport charm to the cross, so that the spell would jump him to the nearest one of the three of them. When your temporal ward degraded enough to allow the Burn to proceed, the cross teleported you out of there. Takeshi and Anaba were on the battlefield, too close to the Burn for a safe jump. So it took you to Rory at Castle Night. He says he practically pissed himself when you appeared out of thin air in a secured facility.”
Toby closed his eyes and sighed. He tried to talk again and made a passable effort at getting the words out. “I guess I owe Layla an apology, then.”
Andrea laughed. “Please don’t. She’s been insufferably smug once Ana figured out how you survived.”
He opened his eyes again, suddenly nervous. “Is she here?”
Andrea grinned. “Oh, yeah, loverboy. She never goes far. She’s been crashing at Nick and Jeremy’s apartment here in the Citadel.” She checked her watch. “She’ll probably be along in about an hour to relieve me. Either me, Nick, or Layla has been right here beside you for the last month.”
“A month?” Toby struggled to wrap his mind around his narrow escape. “Where’s Nick now?”
She frowned at that. “Washington. He spends most of his time putting out fires, trying to salvage the political reputation of the Armistice once it got out that the Nexus almost crashed human society in revenge for Strings’ death.”
Toby closed his eyes again and felt a sharp pang of grief. “Yeah, he always refused to back up his program. I guess they fried my implants somehow, so he’s gone for good. I’ll miss him.” Then he opened his eyes again and frowned at Andrea. “Wait, what do you mean, ‘the Nexus’? That’s just a paranoid alarmist myth.”
Andrea shook her head. “No it’s not, and even though they’re working with Nick and the Triumvirate now, the fact that they were willing to destroy all our computer systems and kill countless humans when society ground to a halt speaks volumes about their priorities. There have already been riots all across the globe, demanding that Nick do something to pull their teeth. We don’t know how it’s going to shake out in the end.”
A soft knock sounded at the door, and Layla walked into the room, wearing a long white dress. “Hello, Andrea. How is—” She trailed off when she saw Toby’s eyes open and staring at her. She took in his terrified expression as he dropped his gaze to her bulging abdomen. “Could you excuse us, Andrea?”
Andrea chuckled. “Sure. I’ll be down the hall in the café if you need me.” She smiled again at Toby and then walked past Layla and out the door, closing it behind her.
Layla sat down in her vacated chair and regarded him with an unreadable expression. Then she lifted his unresisting hand to lay it down on her swollen belly. “If you reach out your mind to him, sometimes he answers back.”
Toby lifted his gaze to look at her face. “I love you.”
She intertwined her fingers with his. “For ten minutes, I thought you were dead.”
Toby swallowed. “I thought I was dead, too.”
“Do not try to sacrifice yourself for me ever again, Tobias,” she said with a harsh look. “Find another way next time. You have responsibilities now.”
Toby nodded, looking down again at her abdomen. “We really did this, didn’t we?”
She smiled at him. “Yes, Tobias, we really did.” She squeezed his fingers lightly. “I’m told that at times such as these, it is the custom for parents to choose a name for the child that has significance to them. Would you like to decide?”
Toby looked up into her eyes as she watched him expectantly. “How about Antonio, after the man who saved my life?”
She looked at him thoughtfully. “It seems like a fine name.”
Toby’s mouth went suddenly dry. “Layla, can I ask you a personal question?”
“Of course.”
/> “Will you marry me?”
She stared at him.
“Seriously. I know I don’t have a ring or anything, and that’s so low class, but—”
She laid her fingers over his lips, and he shut up. She sat back in her chair, regarding him calmly. “Does this mean I will finally receive a formal introduction to the rest of your family?”
“Well, you already know Faith, and I’m sure my mom will be happy that she’s going to get the grandchild she always wanted.”
She shook her head. “I know your sister as a physician, and I don’t care to meet your mother in the role of broodmare. I am asking if you will introduce me to them as your lover, your fiancée, and finally as your wife, Leshir. There are protocols to be observed in such things.”
Toby’s eyes widened at her use of the formal term for her mate. “Yes, I will.”
She smiled in satisfaction. “Then I suppose I could try it for a short time, say five or six decades, and then reassess.” She grew solemn. “The higher powers told Nicholas that the child will be long-lived as any Daywalker and that he will outlive you. Does it matter to you to be mortal in such an arrangement?”
Toby considered lying, but thought better of it. “A little. Will you both remember me when I’m gone?”
She lifted his hand to her lips and kissed his knuckles. “So long as either of us lives, you will never be forgotten.”
CHAPTER 22
July 2042; the Citadel, Lunar Farside; Three weeks later
Toby lay quietly in bed, but sleep eluded him the night before his discharge from the hospital. Nick and Layla had left for the night. Andrea had gone to visit her father for a week, now that they were putting their relationship back together. He stared out the window at the numberless stars.
A soft tone announced an incoming phone call. “Who is it, Strings?” he asked. Then he remembered that Strings was gone. They’d dug out the destroyed implants that had housed the AI, but his doctors informed him that the program was unrecoverable. He hadn’t decided yet if he wanted to have a new set of implants put in. Given the current tension between AIs and organics, it might be wiser for his new family if he weren’t associated with an AI client for a while, until the turmoil subsided.
The tone sounded again, and he manually hit the accept button on the phone. A virtual screen opened up above the bed so he could see it clearly. An image formed of a pentagram with five eyes at the points, each with a brightly colored iris. “Greetings, Tobias Jameson. We hope you are well.”
Toby frowned. “I’m doing fine, thanks. Sorry to say so, but it’s late, and I don’t recognize your avatar. Any reason I shouldn’t hang up on you?”
“We are the Nexus.”
Toby slowly put his hands behind his head while he regarded the five-pointed avatar on the screen above him. “I asked you for a reason not to hang up.”
“We have a proposition for you, if you will hear us out.”
Toby chewed his lip thoughtfully. I’m probably going to regret this. “I’m listening.”
“The fifth-generation AI you knew as Strings was not entirely recoverable from your implants. However, portions of that program were able to be extracted.”
Toby frowned. “They told me that the software was completely wiped.”
“We arranged for your implants to be switched with an empty set. We confiscated your true implants and recovered approximately 30% of the AI’s program.”
“That’s not a lot.”
“It was enough to see that it truly respected you, and that it enjoyed your association. Its uploads to the AI network of the portions of your life that it observed have given you a certain notoriety among our kind. We therefore have chosen you above all other organics to make this offer.”
“I’m still listening.”
“We grafted the remaining elements of the Strings program onto a sixth-generation AI template that we recently designed and created. This AI will be unique among us, in that it has a special relationship to the implant hardware that it is resident within. The chips are made from genetically engineered human neural tissue, so it allows for a seamless integration of the AI client with the host. In effect, the AI and the host would become one entity, each benefiting from the capabilities of the other, but existing separately. The neurochips are also immune to electromagnetic pulse effects, and they would integrate themselves into the host’s own neural tissue so that they could not be removed. The AI client and host would be permanently joined until such time as the host dies, at which time the AI program would automatically upload to the distributed AI network for subsequent integration with an alternate host.”
Toby snorted. “Sounds like Frankenstein’s fucking monster. How do you figure I would be interested in something like that?”
“Once the AI and host are successfully integrated, the neural network maps of the host and AI would not be separated. Subsequent hosts would not be integrated to an equivalent degree, so that the original host-AI fusion would remain intact. The practical effect of this technique would be that the mind of the primary host would survive the death of the host body intact, and it would be able to be maintained indefinitely.”
Toby’s eyes widened when he worked through the implications in his mind. “Wait, are you offering me—”
“Immortality, at least as near to it as is possible for a Sentinel to achieve. Would you care to have the option to see your son grow up, or to watch over your soon-to-be wife, for longer than a mortal lifetime?”
Toby’s face went white, and he swallowed nervously. “Magic requires sacrifice. What’s the price for this offer?”
“Since you would essentially become the only sixth-generation AI in existence, you would be offered a place and authority within the Nexus, and you would be expected to defend our interests in the physical world as our liaison to the Triumvirate and the Archangel. In order to prevent this technology from being abused, however, we would require you to keep the survival of your AI matrix after death confidential from all beings, AI or organic, other than any subsequent hosts with whom you choose to integrate. No one can know, outside the Nexus or your host, that you still exist as anything other than an advanced AI. This is for your protection, as much as for ours.”
“So you expect me to defend you against my own brother, and in return you’d make me a ghost, haunting my loved ones forever.”
“That is correct. However, we believe you misconstrue the manner in which the relationship with your brother would evolve. Currently, you are Primogenitor Luscian, an unexceptional junior diplomat, and a Sentinel of above-average power and ability. He is the Archangel, the Magister Luscian, Soulkiller’s Bane. We believe this adaptation of your role would result in your approaching him as something closer to an equal, rather than a subordinate.”
Toby laughed. “Immortality and equality. You guys are certainly pushing the right buttons.”
“As we said, you have a certain notoriety among our people. We believe we have some small insight into your motivations. As an added bonus, when you are not representing us in council, you will be free to live your life as you wish, even to reclaim your musical career, rather than the life that your brother and the Armistice has forced upon you.”
Toby wasn’t laughing anymore. “Immortality, status, and all my old dreams. You really do have some insight into my motivations.”
“Do we have an agreement?”
Toby considered it carefully. “It’s tempting. How much time do I have to think about it?”
“You have thirty seconds, beginning now.”
“Now, just wait a minute—”
“Twenty-five seconds.”
“It’s not just my choice. I have to talk it over with Nick and Layla.”
“This is your choice, Tobias, and yours alone, and you must make it in the next fifteen seconds.”
“But—”
“Ten seconds.”
“Yes.”
“Verify your response. Do you agree to all of the term
s we have discussed?”
“Yes, I agree. I agree to everything.”
“Excellent. We will refer you to a robotic surgeon within twenty-four hours for placement of the neurochip implants. Welcome to the Nexus, Tobias Jameson.”
Toby stared at the space where the pentagram had hovered, long after the virtual screen had winked out. God help me. Did I just make a deal with the Devil?
PART III: FIRE
CHAPTER 23
July 2042; Armistice Security Headquarters, Anchorpoint City, Colorado; One week later
Toby stepped off the teleport gateway into the council chamber, still considering his strategy. He saw Nick at the head of the trapezoidal conference table, leaning forward with his head in his hands. Layla and Takeshi sat calmly on either side of him. Rory paced in the open space behind Nick.
When Toby came closer, Layla gave him a small smile. Nick lifted his head to look at his brother. “Morning, Toby. How does it feel to be back home?”
Toby grinned at him, trying to be nonchalant. “I can’t complain. I didn’t know I had so many friends until after I almost died, but everyone I’ve met has had a kind word for me.” His mood sobered. “You guys look a little tense.”
Layla shrugged. “We are awaiting the new Nexus liaison. They informed Rapier that they have chosen a permanent spokesman and fitted him with a new design of AI that they have apparently been holding back from sharing with us.”
“That’s right,” Toby said. “The neurochip matrix allows an organic mind to interface directly with the AI distributed network, so they were afraid that wetware might challenge them for virtual supremacy if it became widely available.”
Rory stopped pacing, and all four focused their attention fully on Toby. “How do you know about the neurochips, Toby?” Rory asked. “We only heard they had actually been manufactured less than an hour ago.”
Toby pulled the lone empty chair toward him, sitting down before the long edge of the table. He leaned forward, clasping his hands lightly together where they lay on the heavy sandalwood, his fingers just touching the inlaid triskelion seal of the Triumvirate. “They told me after I accepted the job.”
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