Recursion

by Marion G. Harmon

  Shell waited until the elevator doors closed before popping in.

  “Veritas is dating Erica Free?”

  I busted up laughing, wincing at a couple of stretched cuts. “That’s your takeaway from all this? Really? That Veritas is dating?”

  “You don’t know— You don’t?” She held up her hands. “Okay, so Erica Free is, like, a legend. She shows up in a few of the Future Files, mostly Explorers’ Club stories. Supposedly she’s a Merlin-Type breakthrough who disappeared into the deeper magic realities when she was maybe fourteen and spent a decade of subjective time getting home. The story goes that she made a deal with Iudal, the decan of transitions and crossings to do it.”

  “Yudal?”

  “Close. It looks like that’s true, anyway. And now she’s supposed to be an Ultra Class. Supposedly she made some extrarealities flat-out off limits to unwelcome travelers, no way in unless you ask nicely and go in through her Castle of Doors.”

  I whistled. She sounded halfway to being a limited-omniscience being like Quan Yin or Kabukicho the god-fish. “And Veritas is dating her?”

  “Now you get how weird that is.”

  I pulled out the keycard she’d given me, turned it over in my hand. “I think you broke my brain, a little.”

  “So . . .” Shell lost a bit of her manic edge. “Are you going to go?”

  I carefully put the card back in my pocket before opening my own door.

  “I’m not from here, Shell.” Which still made no sense at all.

  “She could be wrong.”

  “Do you think she is?”

  “ . . . maybe. If she’s right, we’ll figure it out. Anyway, Andrew already sent over the first spare costume he worked up when you accepted the new design.”

  That made me smile, despite everything. I really didn’t want to switch back to one of my older outfits. It felt like a step backwards. “Shower, then we talk. Okay?”

  She nodded glumly.

  That bought me fifteen minutes. Fresh outfit pulled on, I sat at my desk and looked at Shell where she sat watching me from my bed, and didn’t know what to say.

  I put my head in my hands.

  “What?” Shell asked.

  “Jacky’s right—I do want to save everybody, everywhere.”

  I’d just been told by someone (a pretty god-like someone, according to Shell) that I didn’t belong here. And that someone had given me a ticket home. If this wasn’t my place, then there were people missing me. I needed to be in my place. Right? But if I left—if I used the keycard and walked out of here into the Castle of Doors, would I leave a me behind? A me who just stepped out into the hallway and wondered how she’d got there and why she was all cut up? Or would I just leave a Hope-shaped hole in this reality? If I left a me that only remembered our life up till now, would she survive a bunch of threats I’d never had to deal with less than six weeks after Whittier Base?

  If I’d faced the qlippoth today, with no Dr. Cornelius to banish it and not knowing how we could beat it, I might be dead now. I would be dead now.

  Would the future-knowledge I could share before I left be enough? If that was the point, then a couple more intense days of debriefing with the experts could pass on the value of my being here. I could go back to where my Jacky and Ozma and Grendel and the Shellys and the rest waited for me.

  “I thought I was done traveling. I really, really did.” I wasn’t whining, not really. But how many times could I fall down the trans-reality rabbit hole before I stopped trusting that I was in my reality? The look on Shell’s face made me lift my head. I laughed ruefully. “I’m not having a breakdown, just a mini pity-party. What’s going on, upstairs?”

  “Cleanup,” she said promptly. “And cover-up. Not forever, but there’s no way Blackstone is letting news of the attack get out in public until he and Quin decide how to spin it. He can’t keep a lid on it forever, but for now it was a ‘scheduled drill.” She grinned. “Gotta say, I think they should release it. With all the cameras in Dispatch, we got awesome video of your fight. Seriously, you look amazing. It would send your approval numbers through the roof.”

  “Well I’m not going anywhere, yet. And I’ve got homework to do. Can we talk about everything else later? Please?”

  She nodded glumly and vanished, and I turned to my desk computer with a sigh.

  After-action report. Dictation of everything I knew about Hecate. Review of all the notes Shell had helped me make about Villains Inc. and the Ascendancy. Godzillas, the Green Man, the near-annihilation of Tokyo (someone needed to know about that One-Lander plot in advance). Listing all the good stuff that just didn’t seem likely to happen now, like Jacky’s “resurrection,” just made me more depressed.

  Jacky—just thinking about her made me want to call her in New Orleans and pour out my situation. But she really was doing important stuff down there now—she’d filled me in on the whole “master-vampire” thing eventually, and her stopping that and saving Acacia was more important than what was happening with me now.

  Hours later I rubbed my eyes and smelled dinner. Getting up, I found that sometime in the middle of it all Willis had dropped by and left a plate on the counter in my entertainment room. Under the lid I found baconized macaroni and cheese with reheating instructions.

  God bless Willis, even if he was a sneaky Bob playing English Butler.

  And I really needed to talk Shell into letting Vulcan make her a body and about getting back with her mom.

  My punctures ached.

  And I was just so tired.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Verne-Types are breakthroughs who we’d call “mad scientists” in pre-Event fiction. They discover scientific “breakthroughs” that allow them to advance cutting-edge technology into the realms of superscience—but only for them. Their creations have sometimes been called “techno-magic” because they work according to principles that don’t exist beyond the Verne-Type’s lab. Labels like quantum, nano, virtual, and sub-[fill in the blank] are often invoked but Clark’s Law definitely applies; any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  Barlow’s Guide to Superhumans

  * * *

  Even on the High Plane of Heaven nights didn’t last forever. Sunrise bathed us in our bed, shining through the open panels of the shrine. The lazy murmur of waves on the shore and the songs of birds were the gentlest of alarms. Opening my eyes, I stretched beside my new husband. He’d fallen asleep in his Yoshi form and stayed that way, and Yoshi snored. I was going to tease him about that.

  Running fingers through his hair—a compulsion I found irresistible—I dropped my head to his shoulder and laughed quietly. Quan Yin’s blessing, that I could set my strength aside and be careless and passionate in our marriage bed, had been a gift beyond price and we had played with each other through the night.

  The soft snoring stopped, and pulling our silk covering higher I raised my head to look into dark eyes. “Good morning.”

  He answered with a kiss. “Good morning.”

  “We need to go back now, don’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will I remember?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You? My clever fox, with your sneaky, sneaky plans, you don’t know?” Real sadness couldn’t darken the High Plane of Heaven, but a shadow of it made me shiver. I kissed his shoulder, warm and golden in the morning light. “One more game to remember before we go?”

  “As my lady commands.” He tugged our cover away and I remembered too late how much he liked tickling.

  “Yoshi! Ha! Please!”

  I woke with a gasping laugh.

  * * *

  “Astra? Are you with me?”

  I blinked and focused on Veritas. “Sorry, not really?” Why lie?

  His lips quirked. We were in hour five of my “debriefing” of future memories as he went over my notes. I’d been able to identify all the future Wreckers, and he’d confirmed that the teleporter I’d know as Drop had
introduced Eric to the Foundation of Awakened Theosophy right after his return from Los Angeles. Veritas had taken my informing him of my inside knowledge of Littleton and the Ouroboros Group without batting an eye, but I was pretty sure that I—or any Astra I left behind here—was going to be on a secret watchlist forever.

  So, was it wrong that my current biggest worry was that Kitsune was a tickler? Ticklers are evil, evil people.

  And what was the plan? Why had I thought I might forget my wedding night? Was it related to why I was here, or was it completely something else? If it was part of all this, then why hadn’t I remembered it—and my wedding—when I remembered everything else?

  Also, Kitsune could do a lot more than tickle. I flushed at the memory of a particularly breath-stealing trick. Oh, my gosh.

  “I think,” Veritas said, rubbing his forehead, “we need to call it a day. I’m sure your friend Shelly would agree.”

  I sighed. “She just did.” Virtual Shell was nodding madly and trying not to laugh at my full-body flush. Veritas couldn’t see it, but she could—darn full-sensory telemetry.

  “You’re remaining in the Dome?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “Then take Black Powder.”

  “And anyone else I need to.” And that meant I needed to go change Blackstone’s mind. It wouldn’t be fun.

  “Then we can pick up when you get back.” He sounded unconcerned at letting me out of his sight before he’d wrung me dry, but I was pretty sure that was because he had a burning desire to see what I would do if let out on my own.

  I liked Veritas a lot more than I had the first time I’d met him, but he was still a government spook.

  And he didn’t know everything about Kitsune’s role in my Littleton adventure. Which Shell pointed out the moment we left, leaving Black Powder with Blackstone, and headed upstairs. “So, why not full disclosure?”

  “Because I like to lie by omission? Because there might be a plan. And where’s Blackstone?” I didn’t know what Veritas would do if I told him that Kitsune was a Japanese super-spy, and if the Kitsune here was my Kitsune, working a plan . . .

  And nobody had seen him, nobody knew where he was, and I couldn’t ask. After all, why would I have an interest in him? Her?

  “Flying blind sucks,” Shell echoed my frustration. “Blackstone’s with Quin. I might be able to, you know, reach out?”

  That got my attention. “How?” I asked, checking the turn in the hall to make sure nobody coming the other way would hear my half of the conversation. “Kitsune’s not reporting in.”

  “No, but I did some digging and Kitsune left a couple of secure message-drops. I could drop something, hide it from this end.” She wiggled her fingers.

  “Okay . . .” I thought hard, decided I wasn’t going to even try and talk myself out of it. “Tell her I know about Tenkawa and we need to talk. And no, however it turns out I’m not going to tell Blackstone or Veritas I’m married to Secret Agent Man.”

  Then we were in the lobby and couldn’t talk privately anymore. I waved to Bob and took the elevator to Dispatch—which looked a lot better than it had yesterday. And there was Eric, of all people, moving the heavy new station desks as technicians connected the wiring. Three stations had been completely destroyed in the fight, including the senior dayshift supervisor’s station. David had wasted no time. He’d lost a lot of his good-luck Sentinels and Guardians bobbleheads in the wreck, and a bunch of unopened boxes from the Dome giftshop sat lined up and waiting.

  “Astra!” Eric almost dropped the desk he held at shoulder-height, which would have been bad for the technician under it.

  “Keeping busy?”

  “It’s good for—you know.” I did; from our future Detroit Supermax talks I knew his three coping mechanisms for staying sober were reading, video games, and work.

  “Then don’t stop. Speaking of work, do you think you might be up for a spot of bodyguarding?” He’d done some of that too, before his drunk-and-disorderly misdemeanor. Ajax-Type veterans pulled down good money, but now he couldn’t get bonded.

  Eric checked to make sure of the space and put the desk down. “Shit, yes. Who?”

  “Me. Off the books and out of town. No chance of anybody watching you finding you in two places at the same time.” Though we were probably being paranoid; Agent G’s observer team had reported nothing interesting at the Crew’s work-site.

  “I’m in. Where are we going?”

  “Back to school! Give me a minute.” I headed up the stairs to Quin’s office.

  Dispatch had the priority, so Blackstone and Quin sat opposite each other over a temporary desk and they looked up when I knocked on the open door. “Got a minute?” When Blackstone moved to stand, I waved him down. “Both of you?”

  He exchanged a look with Quin. “Of course, my dear. What would you like to discuss?”

  “I need for you to reinstate my trip to Hillwood.”

  “I see. The risk—”

  “Is minimal. Veritas confirmed that the Lady of Doors’ ‘summoning ban’ is focused on Hecate, not Chicago—I’m not going to have a qlippoth come after me the second I set figurative foot out of town. We’ll be taking a flight directly, and I can meet the plane in-flight instead of at the airport—”

  Blackstone held up his hand. “All that is true, but why take a risk at all? What is the reward?”

  I took a breath. “Information. Sir, I’m flying blind. I need to talk to Ozma.”

  “Ozma?” Quin asked. The only thing she knew about Ozma was her first appearance in the Lucas Oil Stadium Massacre. The whole world knew about the psychotropic gas-attack that had killed hundreds and created two dozen breakthroughs—mostly psychotic, twisted breakthroughs. It had created Grendel. And Ozma, possibly. Nobody knew.

  Blackstone considered me for a long moment. “I still don’t like this idea. Will you have sufficient leverage with her? She’s not your Ozma. Not yet.” His skeptical look said “And look how well that approach worked with Eric.”

  “I’m not going to try to convince Ozma to do anything she isn’t doing already, and I have information she’ll be very happy to get. She’s a head of state—she understands returning favors, quid pro quo. Sir, I’ll have Black Powder and Eric with me, and I’ll be gone just two days. I’ll be in a place where half the adults are veteran capes.”

  He raised an eyebrow at Eric, but let it lie. “Quin?”

  She shrugged. “It was a good idea for her to go, and if we don’t announce the trip in advance then who’s to know she’s gone? At least until her pics start popping up on social media.”

  Blackstone sat back, at that, and I held my breath.

  “Who, indeed? And if they decide to take advantage?” He smiled. “That’s an interesting possibility, too.” Quin shared the smile.

  “Right, and they’re not weirding me out at all,” Shell quipped. I didn’t laugh. Quin had told me about a few of her hair-raising adventures in Southeast Asia with Heroes Without Borders. HWB hadn’t known half of what Blackstone had helped her do before recruiting her to the Sentinels.

  “Alright, Astra,” Blackstone said. “Go to Hillwood, and by all means take Mr. Ludlow with you—quietly. He and Black Powder can wear matching shades.”

  “Thank you, sir.” I resolutely ignored Shell’s “Woohoo! They can be Mr. Smith for a day.”

  * * *

  Two hours later I slung my go-bag over my shoulder and flew out the Dome’s flight bay to climb up into the night sky. The day had cleared and now the stars shone bright.

  “So, why bring Eric?” Shell asked as I hovered, turning away from the lake to look towards the Magnificent Mile. “Sure he’s tougher now, but he’s not likely to be able to move faster than anything that’s gonna come after you.”

  Eric was the last thought on my mind as I scanned the sky. “Because a job is better than books or games. And he was almost done with the Dispatch job and can’t go back to work yet.”

  “So, you’re dr
agging him along to keep him busy. Huh.”

  “That and it helped Blackstone say yes. Also, if someone does take a shot at me, Eric is someone I don’t need to worry about standing next to me. What’s the huh about?”

  “Is this really you in three years? It didn’t take long for you to develop chronic hero syndrome, did it?”

  “Wait, what? I have a pathological need for public adulation?”

  “That’s a hero complex. No, it’s what you said—you really do need to save everybody, everywhere. I read what the Big Book of Contingent Prophecy says about those guys you chose to make a team out of. Grendel? Tsuris? Ozma? Really? And now you get in a punch-fight with Eric Ludlow and then hire him? You never could resist a stray.”

  “They’re not stray cats, Shell! They’re people. Where’s our ride?” It was nice that no missiles had risen to shoot me out of the sky (and the way the past couple of days had gone, I’d half-expected one), but I needed to talk to Ozma yesterday.

  Shell marked a blinking light passing south of us with a bright green icon. “Right on time! And don’t think I’m forgetting about this.”

  I curved my flight to match the little private jet and put on the speed. I easily ignored the minor turbulence the small plane cut in the air, matching vectors with it to pull up by the aft hatch tucked behind the wings. The forward hatch opened out with the usual lowered stairs, but the aft hatch opened in a recessed slide, without disturbing the plane’s airstream. A parachuter’s hatch, really, but not for parachuters. SaFire stood waiting, closing it up as I slipped by her and announcing “All closed up!” when the hatch light turned green. The jet started to climb as we stepped into the main cabin and I stored my go-bag behind a free seat.

  I’d stuffed Erica Free’s magic keycard in my costume shorts on the way out, and now I idly wondered if it would work if I used it on an airplane hatch. If someone hit the plane, could I evacuate all the fragile people into the Castle of Doors?