Ruthless and elegant in its simplicity.
“Not yet.” Roark glanced at his wristwatch, plain stainless steel. I recognized it from the photograph. His brother wore an identical one. With his manual watch and lack of neural link, Roark must’ve appeared oddly old-fashioned to the world.
But he didn’t evoke the sense of someone lost amidst technology. Simply that he’d chosen the tools best suited to completing his task. Streamlined focus, without distractions.
In a land smothered in flashing lights and ads, that was admirable.
Even if his motivations fought in the area between darkness and light.
I followed him to the trunk. We loaded up what we could take—shells, the leather jacket, an extra rifle for Roark—and then we headed into the impending dawn.
“Got a couple things to take care of before we stick our noses in the hornets’ nest.”
“Things such as?” I loaded a few shells into the gun and racked the slide.
“We need to make this process more efficient,” Roark said. We were flanked by steel-and-glass monoliths hundreds of stories high. “How many times have I died?”
“Twenty-four that I know of.”
His eyes flickered. “You’d think I’d get better with practice.”
“You can’t remember,” I said, almost apologetically.
“I know.” Roark let out a resigned sigh. “Which is why I need you to make me.”
“I don’t think that’s—”
“I meant sooner. As soon as we meet.”
I waited, wondering what other dark secrets would pour out.
But he said, “The dog is drunk and Mom doesn’t care.”
I said, “What?”
“It’s something me and Sam used to say to one another,” Roark said. “Kids, you know?”
“I don’t get it.”
“I came home from school one day and found the dog passed out in the corner of our apartment. She’d chewed into a box of wine and drank a bunch of it. I thought she was dead, so I brought Mom in, and she just laughed and told me the dog was drunk. I ran into Sam’s room, crying, not understanding what that meant, and said, The dog is drunk and Mom doesn’t care.”
“And?”
“He thought it was hilarious.” Roark shrugged. “Became a sort of secret handshake, I guess.”
“And if that doesn’t work?”
“It’ll work.”
“We’re bound together, and you still barely trust me.” The memory of him drawing down on me outside Alice Conway’s house was still fresh in my mind.
No one said I let go of grudges easy.
“It’ll work.” The surprising force in his voice told me to drop it. “You really ready to chase this as far as it goes?”
The wisps coalesced around his head, almost blending into the reflective windows.
“I don’t have a choice.”
He gave me a grim smile, like that was a better answer than yes. “First thing we need to do is disable this chip.” Roark grimaced, like the thought sickened him. “Because I don’t want that son of a bitch Marshall to see it when I put a bullet through his good eye.”
I watched as the wisps winked out.
Or maybe they just turned completely black, disappearing into the hazy night.
27
Finding someone capable of removing the tracking chip was a relatively simple matter—if you wanted to call in the Feds. But reopening the time loop and Solomon Marshall ball of wax with law enforcement seemed like a bad call after what had happened on the third floor of the command center.
MagiTekk’s tentacles went deep. How deep would take a lot of legwork to discover.
Until then, traditional channels couldn’t be trusted, which meant we’d have to consort with a criminal element. Also not a problem for an FBI agent with a slew of CI contacts, except for two small concerns.
Marshall was systematically killing them all. So we needed someone who Roark hadn’t visited in a while. Obviously there was no way of telling who he’d gone to see during all the past loops. But he could play a game of probabilities: which contacts had collected mothballs due to unreliability or other complications.
Roark dug into his pocket and pulled out the data cube. “We need someplace to read this.”
“Plenty of magical tables lurking around.”
He smiled at my lack of worldly knowledge. “The tables have circuitry running through them. Dozens of silicon processing chips.”
“So they’re expensive.”
“They definitely ain’t free,” Roark said, looking around at the mud-slapped neighborhood. “Government tech.”
“Thought we agreed—”
“We’re not going to the FBI,” Roark said. “Certain people have them.”
The implication being that they shouldn’t have had them.
I glanced at the shimmering lights hovering over the skyscraper jungle, ads still trying to sell me coffee and beer even in the early morning. How dangerous was MagiTekk?
The flickering holograms offered me no answers.
Apparently the place Roark had in mind was within the riot zone in downtown Phoenix. We approached a large yellow police barricade. My muscles tensed, as I fully expected to be shoved face-first to the ground and sent back to jail.
Do not pass go, do not collect your cash, and so forth.
But Roark flashed his credentials without a word and was waved through. I shuffled along behind without anyone batting an eye. The FBI held clout in this world, far more than it had ever before. Shades of J. Edgar Hoover power.
I wondered if, maybe, they—like MagiTekk—were the type of dangerous adversary that only a time loop could defeat. Good and bad were usually just a matter of which side of the fence you happened to sit on.
Trash can fires and broken glass littered the sidewalk and road, a hazy smog obscuring the ads above the street. Firefighters and police officers—peacekeepers, I guess they were called now—rushed around, talking to their hands and each other.
This neural link business took a little getting used to.
“Mild?” I said in a low voice as we passed by the burnt-out remnants of a pastry shop. A squat, spidery robot clicked on thin legs through the rubble, breaking down large debris chunks with destabilization waves.
“You should listen to the news,” Roark said with a grim smile.
“What do they say?”
“They don’t report it at all.” He cut down a corner, this block looking much like the last. “The safest place in the world.”
“Magic?” I couldn’t sense the aura of a spell, but it was possible the first responders had set up some sort of dampening tech.
“Or sympathizers,” Roark said.
“Guess all those bombs didn’t work.”
“They never do.” It was difficult to tell where Roark stood on the matter.
The skyscrapers began declining in height as we walked, resembling their old world counterparts. By the time we got out of the center of the riot zone—which stretched for a good four blocks—the buildings were a miniscule twenty or thirty stories. To my eye, this looked modern.
But after seeing the towering structures reaching subspace, they must’ve been quaint to the rest of the populace.
Their architecture was less uniform, too, their windows different heights and their entrances delineated by more than the glowing corporate logos plastered above the door frame. I began to notice cracks in the sidewalks, signs of rust and decay.
“Midtown,” Roark said by way of explanation. “Another part of the old downtown that didn’t fall.” The landscape became more colorful and vibrant, even in the comparative absence of the neon holograms encouraging me to purchase new dresses and condos. There was subtlety, it seemed, in shades of gray, that I had never noticed walking through cities before.
“I’m surprised they let it stand.”
“That makes two of us,” Roark said, and I followed him into a bar with an honest-to-goodness wooden door
at the base of a stumpy seven-story structure. The door creaked and groaned as we walked inside the dim interior.
It smelled of hops and looked like it’d been well-drank-in, neither of which I had a problem with. Whatever suits existed on the other side of town, they must’ve been freaking out about all kinds of problems with a place like this.
Health codes, height codes, safety violations.
Truth be told, it was nothing but a bar. But corporatism always had a way of making the old seem dangerous and unsafe. Like adding guardrails to everything would suddenly cure people of stupidity.
I followed Roark to the long wooden counter, looking at the bottles of liquor lining the shelf.
An old man tottered over, either drunk or limping. My money was on both. An unkempt mountain of snow-white hair graced his ruddy forehead.
With a great laugh, he said, “’Ey, it’s Colton!”
There was the minor clinking of glasses from the few other bar patrons remaining. It took me a moment to remember that the start of my day was the end of theirs, right around last call. An old clock in the corner announced the time as 3:47 AM.
“Still breaking the law, I see, Kendrick.”
“If a man can’t drink after midnight, he ain’t free.”
“Words you live by.”
“Since when did you care so much about rules, boy?” Kendrick grabbed a bottle off the shelf, hair flopping as he set it down. “Drink. It’ll do you good.”
“I need something else.”
“Free drinks isn’t enough, is it?” The old man’s eyes narrowed, swerving toward me. “Oh, she’s a pretty one, Colton. Didn’t think you had it in ya, did we, fellas?”
There was snickering from the other end of the bar.
Roark’s jaw tightened slightly as he said, “Ruby, meet Kendrick.”
“And here we thought you might be a queer,” Kendrick said. “Always showin’ up alone, never looking at the ladies.”
“We’re not together.”
“Then my bet’s still good,” Kendrick said. He brought one of the shots up to his lips. “Well, raise your glass, boy.”
“I’m on the clock.” Roark pushed the glass away, his gaze focused intensely on the old man’s ruddy face. No time for fun with the necromancer still loose.
“I’ll do it.” I stepped forward and picked up the whiskey shot. Without hesitation, I downed it, the liquid burning my throat.
“She’s a winner, this one.” Kendrick slammed his glass against the wooden counter heartily. “If you ain’t queer, then you best be working on that.”
Roark flushed slightly at the ears, suddenly flustered by the good-natured barbs. “She’s a coworker.”
“Ooh.” Kendrick gave me a fake salute. “Sorry, miss. Wouldn’t want you to close me down for breakin’ the law.”
He didn’t seem too worried that either of us were here to do that.
“I came here to use your table.”
“Pool’s in the back. A buck a rack.”
“You know what I’m talking about,” Roark said in a low voice. He reached into his boot and plucked out a hidden stash of bills I hadn’t seen before. Lots of them. “Ten minutes.”
Kendrick eyed the money with suspicion. “This business have to do with that gray-haired son of a bitch you been chasing?”
“Yeah.”
The old man pushed the money back. “Money’s no good here. You do what you got to for Sammy.”
Kendrick nodded toward the kitchen. I followed Roark back through the empty fluorescent space.
“You told me I was the only one who knew.”
“I guess even when I’m dying I can lie.”
“That’s reassuring.” I watched Roark press his fingers on a yellowing tile next to the refrigerator. There was a slight click, and then the stainless-steel appliance disappeared, revealing a small back room. “You know a lot about this place.”
Answering the implicit question, Roark said, “Kendrick just likes busting my balls.”
“I’m surprised you have friends.”
“Wouldn’t call him that.”
“What would you call him?”
Roark didn’t answer as the fridge slid back into place. Lights sprung on around us, illuminating a comfortable interior with faded red cushions. The table sat in the center, lying dormant.
“So who is Kendrick, anyway?” I asked, approaching the issue from a slightly different angle as Roark placed the data cube on the clear surface.
“That’s a difficult question to answer.” Roark swiped his hand through the air, answered the voiceprint login instructions, and stood back as a flood of information spiderwebbed through the room.
Turns out he wasn’t only obsessed with me. In fact, he wasn’t obsessed with me at all. Roark was obsessed with his job, having no other hobbies but data collection and casework. Endless reams of files—photos, videos, reports, newspaper clippings—streamed through the ether as he deftly whipped through it all.
“How do you remember it all?”
“Memory palace,” Roark said. Another tool necessary to drive him forward, to his goal.
In a way, he was just like Marshall: the kind of guy who would build his own time loop to hunt his enemy. Block out the world and everything else in pursuit of a single target. What would happen after that target vanished?
It wasn’t my problem. But I felt some modicum of concern, beyond my own selfish motives. That Roark, without his dark lighthouse leading the way, would become unmoored and unhinged.
With rapt concentration, he smoothly made his way through the files. Candidates for removing our chips streamed through the ether.
“Alpha wolf who was excommunicated from his pack,” Roark said, opening the floor up for discussion. “Hiding as a janitor at a coffee shop.”
“Couldn’t we just ask Kendrick if he knows someone?”
“I don’t want to ask him.” The implication being that he already owed the bar owner too much to repay in this lifetime.
“Uh, fine,” I said, examining the alpha wolf’s history. “Too volatile.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Look, you want someone who can do the job and keep their mouth shut, right?” I crossed my arms and circled the table. “That means tech skills, access to a scanner, and the rarest virtue of all.”
I waited until Roark said, “What virtue?”
“Silence.”
“It’s a loop,” Roark said.
“But say it gets back to Marshall.” I saw Roark pick up my line of thinking. “He hears it through the grapevine, then he changes the game, right?”
Like hell was I going to rebuild this timeline from scratch. I’d just gotten used to the routine. Wake up, share niceties with Stevens, stop Roark from walking into a trap.
Resetting was not an option.
“Okay,” Roark said, relegating the alpha to the trash bin, “cloaked Fae, running a bridal shop a few blocks from here.”
“Convenient,” I said, staring at the gleaming smile. “And pretty.”
“Kendrick, you jackass,” Roark muttered to himself.
“But Fae are some of the worst gossips I’ve ever encountered.”
“They’re faeries.” Roark crossed his arms, muscles tensing. Even with this deluge of intel at his fingertips, he remained a little green when it came to the supernatural. Brilliant in comparison to his colleagues, but I got the impression that they didn’t do a lot of field study.
You know, actually interacting with us.
Then again, the way a creature of essence acted around a mortal was generally different, anyway. So his blind spots could simply be a matter of distrust. That polo wasn’t helping. He looked ready to throw everyone in jail, following all the rules.
Bottom line was this: the stories you heard about faeries weren’t true. Them being nice, benevolent, all that nonsense—no, no. Creatures of light essence could be nasty bastards, and those of dark could be shockingly pleasant. There was no correlati
on whatsoever between the two.
“Look, you want my expertise or not?” Our eyes caught for a moment. “I’ve been doing this a while. Which you know.”
“Fine.” With a grunt, Roark swept the Fae away onto the digital scrap heap and pulled up the next option.
I stared at the image hovering in the small room, finding it hard to believe. “She’s a CI?”
“You know her.” Not a question. Roark could read me like a damn book.
If he was green, he wouldn’t stay that way for long.
Good for me, since we were bound together.
“What the hell did she do?”
Roark flicked through the air. “Stole medical supplies from a government facility.”
I looked at Serenity Cole’s mug shot and breathed a sigh of relief. At least one thing was right in the world. “Good.”
“That’s a Class A Felony,” Roark said, like I gave a shit. “She’s lucky she wasn’t put down.”
“You’re lucky, too,” I said, staring at the elf on screen. “Because this felon’s gonna help us both get off the grid.”
Roark picked up the data cube, the bits of color dissolving into the air. I felt pleased with myself for all of two minutes, until we exited Kendrick’s bar.
And it looked like Rome itself was burning.
Or MagiTekk.
But in this world, what really was the difference?
28
Every spare frame of glass or circuitry capable of displaying an image displayed the breaking news. I’d thought Midtown was quaint, but the glowing pixels reminded me that progress was everywhere.
I stared at the converted hospital—now an apartment building—across the street. Its entire front played the video on repeat, making it seem like this building, instead of one far downtown, was burning.
The flames flickered across the windows, grainy and larger than life, a text scroll reading Explosion in the MagiTekk District.
“Guess we know what Marshall was planning,” I said, watching the video play over and over. The media had a curious penchant for understatement, given the mayhem on display. Explosion wasn’t the word for this—demolition was. Because, even from the brief clip—no doubt carefully chosen to hide the full extent of the damage—it was clear that this structure was no longer standing.
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