My visitor wasn’t appeased, but was also too busy to hang around. I was glad to see his back; the director of business operations from the Field department wasn’t a man I wanted angry with me, and definitely not someone I wanted talking to Giselle. Friday had come and gone and Don had defied me and the people angry with him were finally coming straight to my office instead of trusting that their emails and phone calls would reach me.
Candace was waiting for me outside.
“Do I even want to know?” I asked.
“I hope so,” she said. “Jin, I’m mana-less, and so is everyone else.”
“I’m hoping this is a joke,” I said.
She handed me her employee ID card, the one you swipe to get through security checks. I turned it in my fingers. It didn’t fizzle, it didn’t jump and it certainly didn’t sing. When I shook it, there wasn’t even enough left over in it to rattle. “What the hell?”
“All of us are empty,” she said. “There’s not a drop left between the group of us to cool a can of Coke. And that’s not all. It didn’t just drain away—it was taken.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Don has something to do with it.”
“Come look,” Candace said.
I followed her, wondering what horrors I would find. I didn’t have to finish the walk to see. The door of thorns had become a tower of thorns. I stood at the base of this monstrosity and said, “Is your cube in there?”
“I assume,” Candace said. “I rescued my computer and set up in the conference room, along with Luis and Marcy.”
Don’s fortress of thorns spanned a four-cube block and met the lowered ceiling. He’d been artistic, I had to give him that—the fabric panels typically used for cube walls were still part of his cube-fortress, they were just connected by dense meshes of vine and leaf. Philodendron leaves, of course, since nothing else grew this far from a window. Ivy maybe.
There was no door into this domain. I wondered how he got in.
“Well then,” I said. I sighed. “Let’s meet in the conference room.”
“I’ll round up the rest,” Candace said.
“WE WANT TO HELP,” Prandesh said. A row of grim faces trained gazes on me from around the conference room table. Three computers were scattered on the sideboard, so poorly fueled they needed wall cables to pull data from the network. The muffins I’d hastily procured from the cafeteria in the main building had barely been touched: never a good sign.
“I appreciate that,” I said, hands flat on the table. “But you have work to do.”
“Yeah, and we can’t do it,” Candace said. “Don’s stolen all our power! Have you ever tried to work the old-fashioned way? You can’t get anything done.”
“It can’t be that bad to work without magic,” I said. “The computers can still get on the network.”
“The only reason we found those cables is because Don isn’t managing his excess inventory project,” Luis said. “I remember what it was like to work without magic, Jin. It’s not pretty and it’s not productive. You want us to move forward, our best bet is to help you take care of the Don situation.”
“Don’s not a situation anymore,” Candace said. “He’s a challenge.”
“Definitely a challenge,” Marcy said.
I sighed. “All right. I was planning to infiltrate his cubicle fortress alone, but if you feel that strongly about backing me up you can come. We’ll make a quest of it.”
“All right!”
“We’re behind you all the way!”
“Let’s meet at the fortress around four forty-five,” I said. “That should give him time to clear out, assuming he’s cutting out early.”
“I’d be shocked if he’s even showing up at all,” Candace muttered.
Me too. In fact, I was counting on it.
FIFTEEN MINUTES BEFORE CLOSE-OF-BUSINESS I arrived at the door to Don’s fortress to find my group awaiting me, each armed and armored. The weapons were eclectic. Luis had a T-square half his size that he claimed had been with him since his student days in engineering, and from the nicks and scuffs on the thing I believed it. Candace’s laser pointer was probably the deadliest of the bunch; it was CFO Manning’s preferred weapon in arcane duels and I’d seen him cut most of the top officers’ shields into ribbons with it. But the assortment was good, from Marcy’s telephone cord whip to the variety of cable-crimpers and punch-down tools on Mike’s belt.
I’d brought an old standby.
“Is that a magic wand?” Marcy asked.
I grinned and turned the transparent wand upside down so she could watch the colored glitter in it flow to the opposite end. A child’s toy, properly enchanted, served just as well as a more obvious object as long as you believed. I was good at believing, and better at enchantment. My pockets were always filled with small and seemingly innocuous objects.
“Now to pick the lock,” I said, turning to the seething mass of vines. “Watch my back.”
“On it, Boss.”
I approached the vines with my wand outstretched, side-stepping so as to give them as little of me to attack head-on as possible. The wand’s repulsion spell gave the tentacles in front of me pause, but my back prickled when I realized just how deep the layer of plant protection went. I wasn’t more than two steps in when I heard the hiss of the laser pointer searing off a vine, then the thwack-whack of Luis’s T-square going into action.
Finding the “door” to the cubicle took me a nerve-wracking few minutes as the vines bounced off my shields. I could fortify them with the extra mana Giselle had passed me but I didn’t want to use it so soon. Who knew what Don had set up inside the fortress? I hunkered down to examine the lock, then whipped out my case of computer tools. As leaves and thorns rained down around me beneath the furious blows of my group, I tried screwdriver after screwdriver in search of the proper length and size and magical resonance. None of my normal tools worked.
But that’s why I carried my “special.” I hadn’t needed to use the long T-15 Torx screwdriver since I’d ditched my ancient SE/30, but that lovingly maintained tool had so often appeared on the scene whenever someone finally gave up on getting to the impossibly distant case screws that it had acquired some of the power of miracles. When I slotted it into Don’s lock, the door gave and the tentacles withdrew to a safe distance.
“Wow,” Candace said, her voice shaken. Plant ichor stained her company polo sap green. “Is it safe to go in?”
“No,” I said, putting my set of picks away. “But we’re going in anyway. Be on your toes, people.”
We filed into Don’s fortress, weapons at the ready. The rustling I thought I heard resolved into a slow ticking.
“Watch out!” I said, and we threw ourselves to the ground as a volley of mechanical pencils thunked into the opposite wall.
“Hey, those could have hurt us!” Marcy said, indignant.
Prandesh rose to his feet and tiptoed to the opposite wall. He pushed his glasses down his nose and squinted. “They’re mana suckers,” he said, pulling one free. “Looks like the standard spell. Trigger, action, fuel source, and fuel shunt.”
“Give me that,” I said, suddenly suspicious. Prandesh handed it to me and I started taking the spell apart. What I wanted to know I found out soon enough. “The fuel shunt leads to the fortress,” I said. “He’s got lines into the thing.”
“I can’t imagine him doing it any other way,” Candace said. “You’d need a constant mana stream to keep this thing operational.”
“I mean direct lines,” I said. “No firewalls.”
Silence. Then, “That’s stupid,” Mike said. “Who’d allow unprotected mana streams into a continuous enchantment?”
“Someone sloppy,” I said. “Someone who makes mistakes.” I looked around for the first time: the four-cubicle space was now a vine-encircled courtyard leading to an antechamber for a stairwell, a black, unlit stairwell. I sighed and pushed myself up. “Let’s hope he keeps making mistakes.”
“He can’t possi
bly work up there,” Candace said.
“Like a kid with a treehouse,” Luis said.
I shook my wand until it started glowing, then headed up the stairs. They were sticky.
“Enchantment?” Prandesh wondered. “Or did he just not clean up after a spill?”
“This isn’t a single spill,” Marcy said. “Yuck.”
“Stop!” I said. Beneath the arcane light of my plastic wand glowed a trip-wire. “He’s got a trap set up here. Anyone good with fiber optics?”
“Let me up,” Marcy said. “I did a stint managing the new fiber ring installs beneath the campus.”
We pressed ourselves flat to the walls so she could advance and study the light. After a moment, she said, “If we interrupt it, it will definitely go off. But I also get the feeling that if we cancel it, it’ll still trigger.”
“So what do you suggest?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Back up.” We shuffled backward. She stood a few steps down and whipped it with her spiral phone cord.
“Protect Jin!” Candace shouted. She knocked me down, and several more bodies piled on me before I could even assess the result of Marcy’s act. I should have seen it coming, really—Marcy had an impulsive streak. A real go-getter, Marcy, but nothing scares her and she sometimes overestimates her abilities. I wondered wryly if I should mention this in her performance review.
Crushed beneath three people, two of whom stunk of plant ichor, I reflected that this was not how I’d planned to spend my Tuesday evening. Then again, anything was better than rush hour traffic.
One by one, my people slid off me. “Everyone intact?” Candace asked.
“Yeah. Damn, though! I’m almost sucked dry!” Mike said. “That was actually pretty clever.”
I sat up. The stairs were covered in a river of gleaming paper clips. As I watched, the mana they’d drawn off my group sank into the stairs.
“That must have taken him forever,” Prandesh said, picking up one of the discharged ones. “Enchanting that many paper clips? Do you have to do them one by one?”
“With enough brute force you could do it by the box,” I said, checking myself for bruises. I’d probably have a few mothers blooming on me soon enough. “Just be glad they weren’t binder clips.”
“Those would have hurt coming down,” Candace said. “Marcy—”
“I found out what it did, didn’t I?” Marcy said, testily.
“Let’s just keep going,” I said, squeezing between them.
It only felt like an eternity getting to the top of Don’s plant-and-fabric fortress, but soon enough I found myself on the threshold to his sanctuary.
“Did anyone bring test equipment?” I asked.
“I’ve got a kit,” Mike replied.
“Come on up, then.”
Mike wormed his way forward and pulled a test kit from his belt. He hunted for a place to stick the leads, then shrugged and dug them into the fabric wall. He flipped a few switches, then said, “I don’t have enough juice left to make it go, but it’s ready.”
“Here, I’ll do it,” Candace said, leaning past me to tap the kit. It glowed blue in the corner-of-the-eye vision of arcane sight.
“You’re not using personal energy, are you?” I asked, startled.
“We all are, Boss,” Mike said. “Don made off with the company stuff… Well, how about that. No traps.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Did he honestly believe we’d be stopped by a handful of mechanical pencils and a case of paper clips?”
“I bet he wasn’t expecting all of us at once,” Mike said, packing up the kit. “Why would he?”
“The vines would have kept most people out anyway, except possibly a VP,” Candace said.
My people spread out behind me as I walked into Don’s second-story cube and sat at his computer. Now, at last, I could use a few judicious bits of Giselle’s offering, if not the way she would have expected. Power that flows from higher up always has the signature of the person who handled it last until attached. Usually I got my mana with my direct deposit slip, glowing on the paper and already keyed to me for easy use… but in borrowing extra, I’d forced my management to use a temporary vessel for it. Those vessels, bland, frequently cleansed and often interchanged, maintained the charge from the person who touched it last.
A director’s signature was a handy way of convincing a computer to authorize a remote computer management request.
“Would you look at this?” Prandesh said. “He’s got cable flags. A whole stack of them.”
“This looks like a cannon,” Luis said.
“What, was he planning to pepper people with ‘Buried Cable’ flags from above?” Candace said. “This is so completely out of hand!”
“I’ll say,” I said, as I found what I sought. “Don’s moonlighting for Nemesis.”
Utter silence. I took out my Jumpdrive and plugged it in.
Then Candance: “He’s working nights for the competition? That’s—”
“—in violation of his employee contract, yes,” I said. “Which means I get to challenge him to a duel.”
“Oh, wow,” Marcy said, in a low voice.
“I haven’t seen a duel in years,” Luis said.
“I haven’t seen one ever!” Marcy said.
And no wonder. HR required its management to ascend a ladder of increasingly rigorous action to reprimand and eventually fire an unruly employee. But violation of the competition clause—that was grounds for an immediate duel. If I won, Don was out of the company. If Don won, I’d get a reprimand and additional management training… but Don would still get fired. This was the end of the line for him.
“Hack me a hole in the foliage,” I said. “I’m transmitting this data to HR.”
“Without a ritual?” Candace asked.
“The competition clause violation goes through emergency channels,” I said.
“Right,” she said, and started burning a hole for me.
“What happens after they get it?” Marcy asked.
“I leave Don my calling card,” I said.
AS THE CHALLENGED PARTY, Don got to choose the dueling place and I got to choose the time. I sent him email before leaving: eight tomorrow morning, when I’d be at my sharpest and almost everyone else would be half-asleep.
He’d responded curtly, and chosen exactly as I’d hoped: we would meet at his fortress.
I sat at my desk in my workroom at home, rolling the wand between my palms. I’d seen my share of corporate duels, both on the lower rungs of the ladder where it was exclusively a matter of firing someone, and on the corporate officer level, where it involved the distribution of resources or the direction of high-level company initiatives. I’d long admired the CFO’s touch with those laser pointers, and of course the Chief of Operations’s command of golf clubs left a man in awe.
But the CEO impressed me the most. The man never appeared on the field of honor with the same weapon twice. He seemed to choose his approach based on who’d called him there… and given that his rightful opponents included a stream of indignant investors and company shareholders, the fact that he could fight with almost any approach… well, I wanted to be that man someday. He was full of surprises.
I had a surprise or two of my own. The corporation gifted management personnel with a new magical shield with each level they ascended. As a manager, I had a nice flexible sheath to augment my personal protections, and it had stood me in good stead when deflecting attacks, curses, and the normal tectonic activity of a division crammed with departments struggling for the same resources. It also helped me push off attacks from my own direct reports; they all knew I had it.
What they didn’t know was that a glitch in the promotion process had netted me not one, but two management shields: the one I’d earned by moving into the process management department as its new lead, and an extra I’d earned while still in Operations as night shift supervisor. A supervisor’s thin shield could become astonishingly tough under repeate
d customer attack, and I’d spent a good year fielding the most unhappy people, calling in at 3 A.M. in a panic over a frame failure.
Don had done half my work for me by choosing the place. Time for me to do the other half. I settled down to craft a few new spells and put the finishing touches on my strategy.
“I’M SO SORRY IT HAD to come to this,” Don said.
“That’s my line,” I said, casually.
We stood inside his thorn-lined courtyard. The vines had been forced into abeyance so that the rest of the group and a good part of the floor could crowd around and watch. A duel is splendid entertainment for a monotonous week.
“Is that your weapon of choice?” he said, eyeing the fire axe I’d removed from the wall.
“Yes,” I said. “What’s yours?”
“I prefer missile weapons,” he said, lifting a rubber band ball seething with energy.
For a moment I reconsidered my plan. He could make fast work of my defenses with enough of those bands. But no, it was a good strategy. The company hadn’t hired me for my stolid work ethic alone. If I wanted to make it all the way up the ladder I had to show off my brains.
“I’m ready,” I said to the woman garbed in black. Not just a black pantsuit, understand, but black heels, black hose, black gloves. She wore a black hood, drawn so low over her face I could only see her lips—no lipstick, just these pale coral things that faded into her face. Even the card-holder with its pulley and drawstring, clipped to her lapel, was made of black plastic.
HR folks were creepy.
“I’m ready too,” Don said to her.
She nodded, a slow, considered movement. A shimmer rose around the courtyard and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Part of the procedure in duels involved cutting off the dueling area from external sources of energy. I grinned at Don’s sudden frown, and fingered the handle of the axe. He’d forgotten about that, or never read about it.
“Begin!”
I sprang, not at Don but at the walls. A sweep of my axe cut four tendrils of vines. They regenerated on my upswing.
“Hey, over here!” Don said, and a rain of rubber bands bounced off my manager’s shield. I ignored him and kept chopping at the greenery. The crowd couldn’t decide whether to cheer or boo, but I kept at the task. I’d done too many stints in corporate magic theory to be wrong. How many certificates had I hung in my cubicle as a young call center tech? I’d gone to the most ridiculous classes just for a change in routine.
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