Laura Anne Gilman

by Heart of Briar

  “And they discovered a new tool. Great.”

  Jan sighed. All that, and they still didn’t have an answer.

  “We have time to find out how Jan—or Tyler—created the portal, though,” Martin said. “AJ, when Jan won her challenge, she pushed the consort, made him extend terms. We have time before they’ll try to come back here.”

  “We can trust him?” Jan asked, still dubious.

  “You got very specific terms,” Martin sad. “He has to abide by those, to the letter and number.”

  “You arranged a truce?” For the first time, AJ actually looked impressed.

  “Yes. I think. For ten weeks, or something like that.”

  “Good. No, better than good. You did amazingly well, Jan, thank you. And the queen is still here?”

  “We think so,” she said. “Yes. Unless there’s a third world you guys forgot to mention?”

  “Bite your tongue and swallow the thought,” Martin said. “She’s here, AJ. And I’m betting she’s relatively close, if they’ve been focusing their efforts on this part of the world. Does that change anything?”

  “It means if we can find her, we have a potential hostage.”

  Jan hadn’t thought of it that way. From the look on Martin’s face, neither had he.

  “And you’ll find her...how? Set every super in the country to sniffing?” She used his own words back on him, but the lupin just grinned.

  “If I could, I would have, already. Too much world, not enough of us willing to play. But the fact that we haven’t gotten reports of escalating disappearances outside this continent means that we can, like Martin said, focus our efforts here. And she may give herself away, may already have given herself away. She’s cut off from her own home, as weak as you two were over there, but alone. She’s going to need to rebuild her own Court. She might take a few humans, but she’s going to reach out for the supers, too; we’re more familiar, built of the same stuff, to her mind.”

  “The gnomes?” AJ had said he thought someone sent them to the warehouse...she had thought he meant the preters on the other side, but...

  “Gnomes, and others.” He stood. “I need to pass word along. I’ll be right back.”

  * * *

  The door closed behind him, and Jan put her coffee down on the table. “Are you okay?” she asked Martin, echoing her earlier words to AJ.

  “I will be.” He wouldn’t look at her, though.

  “Martin.” He looked up, but his gaze was averted. “Thank you.”

  “You did the hard work,” he said. “I was...”

  “You got me there. Kept me alive. Kept me strong.” She exhaled, feeling weirdly guilty, as if she was about to give someone the brush-off. But that wasn’t what she wanted to do. Glamour, she reminded herself, the food and coffee letting her think more clearly again. Seduction and fog. As much as Tyler had been befogged, hadn’t she, too? With Martin’s touches, his voice, his smell...

  She wanted to cry.

  “And you got Tyler back,” he said.

  “Yeah.” For all the good that did. They had warned her, over and over, and she hadn’t understood. Whoever Tyler had been before, he wasn’t that person now.

  Then again, neither was she.

  They sat there in an oddly awkward silence, until AJ came back through the door, a look of satisfaction on his face.

  “Word’s going out. Even the ones who wouldn’t come to us...they’ll pay attention to this. There are communities with a long grudge against the preter Court....”

  “Not all of them known for using best judgment,” Martin said.

  “True. But they know what’s at stake; they’ll keep her intact, if they find her.”

  Jan had a momentary flash of sympathy for the queen, and then decided that, if she was anything at all like the preters Jan had already met, sympathy was wasted.

  “Still, we can’t focus all of our attention on her. We need to find a weakness. The preters of old were restricted by what they could do. These...we can’t shut them down, we can’t stop them from picking off gullible humans. Once your term of truce is over...” AJ sat down, his body language finally showing exhaustion. Had he slept at all, while they’d been gone?

  “Short of shutting down the internet, we’re probably hosed,” Jan said. “And your earlier plan of finding them sucked. You may not like tech but they... Hey.”

  She stopped, things clicking into place the way they did when she finally saw how to redesign something, to fix a problem. Shift and drop, pull and push, and things became so obvious, it was embarrassing.

  “What?”

  Obvious, but impossible. “It’s probably nothing, but...”

  “Nothing is nothing, not right now,” AJ said. “What?”

  “The truce the consort gave me. Ten weeks.”

  “Yes?” AJ waited, as patiently as he could.

  “Ten weeks, ten days, ten hours. Very specific. Ten, ten, and ten.”

  AJ looked at Martin, who shook his head. Neither of them got it.

  “Wasn’t the traditional magic number for elves seven? Seven years of captivity, that kind of thing?”

  “Traditionally, yes,” AJ agreed.

  And they’re creatures of tradition and habit, right? They don’t like change, they don’t break patterns. So why ten, suddenly? And three sets of ten? Or, if you look at it another way, one and zero, one and zero, one and zero. It was as though he was constrained to binary.”

  She’d lost the lupin totally, she could tell. “What?”

  “Code. Computer code, at its most basic level, is binary. Ones and zeroes.”

  “Ten, and ten, and ten...” Martin was trying to parse it, then shook his head, too.

  “It’s how computers speak to each other,” she said. “And now preters’re using it, too, replacing the numbers that had traditionally been important? I mean, like I said, it might not mean anything....” She started to dismiss her thought as foolish, but AJ held up a hand to stop her.

  “No. Any pattern around the preters is useful, and probably significant. The world is chaotic: we have learned to ride that—”

  Martin snorted, and AJ talked right over him.

  “—but the preters find their comfort in order and pattern, you’re absolutely right. That is why they are so tied to their word: a vow imposes order. They are uncomfortable breaking it, because it sweeps them back into chaos.”

  “We tend to be more comfortable with chaos,” Martin said to Jan.

  “I would never have guessed that,” she muttered back.

  “Children... But change comes to everyone. We change—we take jobs that blend with the human population, we interact and are influenced. Dryads work with environmental groups, half the centaurs I know have gone back into politics,”

  Jan raised her eyebrows but didn’t follow up on that.

  “The point is, we change in order to survive. All of us. If this particular change is tied in to how the preters are suddenly able to control the portals—”

  “Computers—code—is the most basic order. That would appeal to them— Oh. You don’t do magic, you are magic. Binary magic?” Jan’s eyes got wide, and her brain ached.

  “I don’t know,” AJ said. “I don’t know what that means, if it makes sense, and if it is true, if there’s anything we can do to counter or stop it. But everything we learn helps.”

  Before Jan could ask any questions—before she could even think of any questions to ask, there was a knock on the door.

  A stick-slender, rough-skinned supernatural poked his head in at AJ’s “enter.”

  “Boss? We need you two. Kinda now.”

  He pointedly had not included Jan.

  She had been hurt, for a minute, then practicality come to the fore: if they were coordinating with other supers, she would be less than useless, especially if they were dealing with the ones that didn’t like humans.

  “Go,” she told them. “I may just curl up and take another nap.”

  Martin hesi
tated, as if he wasn’t sure he believed her, but followed AJ.

  Left alone in the small study, Jan finished her coffee, contemplated the inviting sheen of the sofa, and then went in search of where they were keeping Tyler.

  Chapter 18

  The farmhouse had been renovated at some point, Jan noted, walking through the rooms—the open space had clearly once been several smaller rooms. Unlike when they’d first come in, nobody seemed to be just hanging around or doing chores; in fact, the house was oddly empty. The first two supers she ran into shrugged when she asked them about the human male, giving her an odd look, as though they weren’t sure they were even supposed to be talking to her. Disheartened, Jan wandered into the kitchen.

  The woman standing at the table, stirring something in a massive metal bow, looked as if she had been carved out of a massive oak, down to the bark-like texture of her skin. She was wearing a chef’s jacket and loose white pants, and had the expression of someone who tolerated no foolishness in her domain. Jan hesitated in the doorway, almost afraid to speak up.

  She gave herself a mental kick: someone who’d stood up to the preter Court shouldn’t be afraid of a single supernatural! Especially one who’s an ally.

  Cook looked up when Jan came in, gave her a once-over, and then, before Jan could even ask, pointed out the window to a small shed behind the house.

  “The other human?” Jan asked. Cook just nodded.

  “Thank you.” Somehow that didn’t seem enough to say. “Those meatballs, those were yours? They were very good.”

  The cook just turned back to her bowl, but Jan was pretty sure she heard a satisfied “hrmp-hpmph” escape the creature’s lips.

  There was a knot of supers clustered around a table in the main room when Jan went out again. They ignored her, and she returned the favor, going out the back door, down two steps, and crossing the yard to the shed.

  Shed was a misnomer, really. It was the size of a one-car garage, with no windows and only one door set into the side. Jan stepped up to that door and hesitated. Should she knock? Just go inside? Turn around and walk away?

  She has half a breath from doing the last, when the door opened.

  “Oh, good,” the being standing there said. “I was thinking we’d have to go find you. Come in, come in.”

  She went in.

  Contrary to the expectations from the outside, the shed was actually clean and well-furnished, with carpeting underneath and a kitchenette against the back wall. There was a beat-up sofa and a couple of chairs and, oh, god, a beanbag chair. It lacked only a wide-screen television to pass for any suburban rec room from when she was a kid.

  But the expressions on the faces of those in the room were anything but recreational. The man who had opened the door looked almost human, except that he had no ears alongside the narrow bones of his face, and his skin had a faint blue-green cast to it. Behind the sofa stood a figure that could never have passed for human: thick-chested, with the battered face of a pugilist and the body of a huge cat. He turned when she came in and then looked away, and she was struck by the similarity to pictures she had seen of the great sphinx, after its nose was broken off.

  “Come in, please,” a woman’s voice said. She was sitting on the sofa, and at first glance she reminded Jan slightly of Martin—not physically, exactly, but the same comfortable quality. Her face was narrow, her cheekbones high, but she was homely rather than pretty, the birthmark on her forehead like a smudge of soot. Jan only gave her a brief glance, drawn to the figure sitting next to her, an arm’s length of space between them.

  Tyler.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” he said, his voice a little uncertain.

  She wanted to ask him if he remembered her, but she was afraid of what his answer might be. “How’re you feeling?”

  “I...foggy.”

  His eyes were glazed, and his expression sagged a little still; she recognized the signs from her college years: whatever they had given him to “calm him down” had left him high as a kite. But he was calm; no panic at being surrounded by supers, no stress or trembling. So that was good, right?

  “You see?” the woman said, her voice a low, sweet noise. “Here’s Jan, safe and well.”

  He looked at her again, as though he’d already forgotten she’d just come in. “You’re okay?”

  “Yeah.” She wondered how much he remembered, how much they were letting him remember. She got the feeling that now wasn’t a good time to ask. “I just wanted to make sure everything... That you...” She ran out of words. What had she wanted? To see if he was suddenly, miraculously, returned to normal?

  He looked at her, then his gaze fell, looking at something else, and flinched. She looked down to see what had upset him, but it was just her, just—she moved her hand, and the silver at her wrist flashed, still bright despite everything it—and she—had been through.

  “I want a pizza,” Tyler said. “Do you think we could have pizza?”

  Jan looked helplessly at the woman next to him.

  “I think we could manage that, yes,” she said soothingly. She didn’t touch him, didn’t even look at him, but some of the tension left his body, unmistakably.

  “All right.” Apparently, that was all he could focus on, because he looked down at his hands, folded in his lap, and didn’t look up again.

  “Right now, we’re trying to resensitize him to this world,” the blue guy said softly. “The sounds and smells and taste of things that are real, familiar, so he doesn’t react to them like an attack. Then we can ease him off the sophum, and start to recall his memory of what happened.”

  “Do you have to? Can’t he just...forget?” Forget, and have it be the way it was last month, when her world made sense, was content.

  “We need to know what he saw, what he learned. It’s—”

  “I know. It’s important.” More important than the status of her love life. And unless they made her forget, too...nothing was ever going to be the same. She looked at him now and saw Tyler...and she saw the way he had looked at Stjerne. “Tyler?”

  He looked up, and the expression on his face was so open—glazed, uncomprehending, but hopeful—that Jan felt something inside her, something that had held on until then, break.

  “I gotta go. There are things I need to do. But I’ll...I’ll be here. Okay?”

  He stared at her and then nodded, but she had the feeling that he wasn’t really listening anymore.

  “His attention...it fades. But he knows you came to see him. That’s good, that’s helpful. Thank you.”

  Jan found herself outside the shed again without any memory of having moved, the door shut firmly behind her.

  She licked her lips, feeling how they’d dried and cracked, and felt a sudden intense urge for a hot shower, and the long nap she’d told the others she was going to take. And a drink. God, a beer right now...

  Instead, she went looking for AJ.

  * * *

  She found the lupin the main room, a map of North America spread out in front of him, other supers gathered around. There were pins and markers in the map, and others layered underneath, although she couldn’t tell what land masses they covered.

  AJ looked up when she came in, and lifted a hand, some signal to tell the others to clear out. They did, except for Martin.

  “Operation Queen Hunt’s underway, huh?” She meant it to sound snarky, but it came out shaky.

  “A good name for it. Yes.” He watched her, solemn.

  “So, what now?”

  “For you? Now...you go home.”

  “What?” Jan blinked, not having expected that.

  “Go home,” AJ repeated patiently. “Reassure your friends and family, your employer, that everything’s under control, let them know that you’re okay. The world isn’t going to end tomorrow—not even next week. You need to pick up the pieces and go on.”

  That was exactly what she’d wanted. So why did she feel as if she’d just gotten dumped?

/>   “Martin?” She looked at him, noticing how the skin on his hands and face had healed, only a faint scar showing any damage had ever been done. Either they had an amazing doctor, who hadn’t been to see her, or—he’d shifted form, that must have been it. Once he was away from her, he could shift and the magic would fix him.

  In contrast, she was still ragged and bloody and probably smelled like hell.

  “You’ve done everything you can,” AJ said, not letting Martin respond. “You’ve done more than anyone could have asked. We cleaned up your apartment—you’ve only been gone a few days, and part of that was the weekend, so you can catch up. You can recover.”

  Jan looked at him in disbelief, and then looked at Martin. “You think that’s what I should do?”

  The kelpie looked down at his hands, the same way Tyler had, but he looked up again. “Jan, you were never meant to be part of this. Humans...humans aren’t... You did what was needed, now you can go home, be safe. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  Yes. Yes it was. Tyler home and safe—or at least being helped, and she could go back to her life, pick up the pieces and...

  And do what? Stop by every now and again, be part of Tyler’s therapy, while they took him apart for what he remembered? Wait by the phone, like a good girl, for updates? Or worse—for news that they’d failed, sorry, and wait for your new preternatural overlord?

  “No. Oh, hell, no.” She shook her head. “You need me, still. You need what I know. This isn’t over. I’m not going anywhere.” Stubborn, AJ had called her? He didn’t know half of it.

  “Human...”

  “AJ.” Martin stood up. “Give us a minute.”

  AJ looked from Martin to Jan and nodded. “Right. I’m going to take a walk. Get some fresh air.”

  The two of them stood there, frozen, until he left the room, the sound of the back door closing behind him. Then Martin rounded on her. “Are you insane? We’re trying to keep you safe!”

  His anger, perversely, made her feel better. “What am I supposed to do, go home and pretend none of this exists?”