by T. A. Pratt
“Years,” Marla said. “I see. What makes you think you’ll be able to catch Mutex anytime soon?”
“My mirror-selves are out in force, Ms. Mason. Every half hour, I get an update on their status. On my last ping, which happened shortly after you arrived, I learned that Mutex is only a dozen or so blocks from here, being pursued by my mirrors. They coordinated on that ping, and now they’re closing in on him en masse. He’s just meat, and his little poison frogs can’t do anything to help him. My mirror-selves don’t get poisoned. They’re in meatspace, but not of it. You can knock them down, maybe, but you can’t do any real damage to them.” He thumped his chest—a rather grotesque gesture, Marla thought, given the greater context of heart-stealing—and said, “As long as I’m still operational, so are they.”
“You’re bringing him here?” Marla said. “Are you sure that’s wise?”
Dalton smirked. “Don’t worry. He won’t be conscious when he arrives. And my mirror-selves will make sure no biological contagions make it into the office.”
Was Dalton exhibiting stupid overconfidence, or merely a healthy sense of his own capabilities? Time would tell. Probably a very short time.
Something on Dalton’s desk buzzed. He frowned, leaned forward, and tapped a key. “Odd,” he said finally. “That was the door alarm, but it’s closed, and I don’t see anyone on the monitors.”
“Shit,” Marla said. “Could it be someone invisible?”
Dalton rolled his eyes. “I’ve got up-to-date decryption applications running all over this place, so unless they’re using an all-new spell, I don’t think that’s likely. I’ve got infrared sensors, too, of course. More likely it’s just a false positive on the system. Let me run back the video…. Nope. The door didn’t even open. See?”
He turned the monitor, which showed a startlingly high-resolution view of the front door. Marla was used to grainy low-res security camera footage, so this was a surprise, but it made sense that Dalton would have better tech than the average person. The door didn’t open, but there was something—a brief flicker, almost too fast for the eye to see, but Marla caught it. “What’s that—”
Blood welled up out of Dalton’s mouth, then fountained, spattering the desk and computers. Marla leapt backward, putting distance between herself and whatever had attacked Dalton—but what had attacked him? There was nobody else in the room, unless there was someone invisible. “B, Rondeau, get out!” she shouted, and they complied with alacrity, Rondeau dragging B by the hand. Dalton’s mirror-selves came forward and flanked her, but they seemed at an utter loss as to how to proceed.
Then Marla saw a hummingbird fluttering high in the corner of the room, and knew this was Mutex’s doing. Something invisible flung Dalton’s body—he was quite obviously no longer among the living—on the desk, knocking over the monitors, which crashed and sparked on the floor. Something tore Dalton’s shirt open, shreds of cloth flying, and then bright red arterial heart’s blood gushed as his rib cage was ripped open. Something flickered behind the desk, like the ruby flutter of hummingbird wings, moving faster than the eye could see.
“This is bullshit,” Marla said. The time had come when nothing else would work, so Marla reversed her cloak.
The benevolent, healing qualities of the white side disappeared as the inner lining—the deep purple of a bruise—became the cloak’s exterior, clothing Marla in a veil of imperial shadow. When the cloak reversed, Marla’s rational mind receded to a distant corner of her consciousness. She could move with superhuman speed in this form, perform feats of strength that would normally break her bones, but it wasn’t much good for planning, or even for following a plan. While clothed in the purple, Marla could only assess and dispose of threats.
With her heightened senses, she could just barely see Mutex. He was moving incredibly quickly, his body a blur of faintly red-tinged motion, wielding an obsidian knife to cut out Dalton’s heart. He’d accelerated himself somehow, far beyond the normal human time-scale, so that relative to himself, everything else probably seemed to be standing completely still. That’s what the flicker of motion on the video had been—the brief opening and closing of the front door as Mutex had entered. He’d either somehow cloaked his body heat, or else he was moving so quickly that Dalton’s sensors hadn’t been able to pick it up. Distantly, Marla wondered how he achieved this effect without destroying himself—most experiments in physical acceleration this extreme ended with the researchers dead. Marla could only accelerate herself to this extent because of her cloak, which was a magical artifact whose origins and mechanisms were unknown and highly resistant to analysis.
In the microseconds it took Marla to identify Mutex and bunch her muscles to leap at him, he finished taking Dalton’s heart and ran from the room, holding it, dripping, in his hand. On his way out he looked at Marla—a stare long enough for her to notice, which must have been quite a long look from his perspective—and she jumped for him anyway, but missed by yards. He was out of the building before she hit the ground, landing in a crouch by the door.
With an effort, she reversed her cloak, and the healing qualities of the white side began to immediately soothe her strained muscles—though she didn’t hurt as much as she usually did after using the cloak, since she hadn’t actually done anything this time. Normally, when she reversed the cloak, she tore people apart. The purplish shadow-tendrils withdrew into the lining now, leaving her with the taste of pomegranate seeds in her mouth.
The mirror-Daltons stared at her. “That was amazing,” one of them said. “You looked like…like a panther made of smoke, or…or…”
“I looked like a goddess,” Marla said. She felt marvelous, crystal-sharp and filled with piercing white light, able to do anything. All her problems were suddenly in focus, and the solutions were obvious. Why not abdicate control of Felport to Susan Wellstone? Then Marla could sit back here as Mutex killed off all the other sorcerers in San Francisco. When he was done, Marla could kill him, and take over this city. It was bigger and more important than Felport, and once Marla established herself out here, she could send her warriors to kill Susan as punishment for her insolence. It all made sense, now that she was wearing the cloak again. Why had she ever taken it off? The cloak made the imposition of her will as simple as—
“Shit,” Marla said, clutching her head in her hands, grinding her teeth, and squeezing her eyes shut. The alien intelligence that possessed her in the aftermath of using the cloak receded a little, and she mentally pushed until it withdrew completely. Her hope that the cloak’s power over her had faded was unfounded—it still had its hooks deep in her. “Damn. Yeah, I was like a goddess, I know. Not that it did me much good. Mutex got away, and Dalton one-point-oh is dead.”
The mirror-Daltons looked at the body of their originator. “Oh, we’re fucked,” one said.
“Oh?” Marla said. Rondeau and B came back into the room. B’s face was milk-white, and he was shaking. Real life was nastier than any of his visions had led him to expect, Marla supposed.
The Daltons nodded. One said, “We’ve got…shit, ten minutes until the next ping. When the computer checks his—our—the original’s current status, and finds him offline…we’ll just disappear.”
“There’s no way you can, I don’t know, break the connection?” Rondeau said. “Make it so the computer doesn’t check, or thinks the original is still alive, or something?”
The Daltons looked at each other. “Sure there is,” one said.
“But not in ten minutes,” said the other. “It’s a very secure system, designed to be impervious to tampering. This is a problem we didn’t expect. When we refresh in nine minutes…ah, fuck, I don’t want to die.” The Dalton sat on the floor and held his head in his hands.
Marla turned her attention to the one still standing. “I need a list of the names and addresses of all the other sorcerers in town.” The Dalton didn’t react. Marla snapped her fingers in front of his face, and he blinked. She repeated herself.
&nb
sp; “What?” he said. “I can’t tell you that. You’re an outsider.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Marla said. “Mutex has killed three of you so far. Finch, Umbaldo, and now you. He’s targeting sorcerers, at least all the ones who dismissed or laughed at him. Apparently he doesn’t have any problem locating you—the Cornerstone probably makes his divination spells infallibly accurate. That’s three dead in, what, six hours? At this rate, there aren’t going to be any sorcerers left in San Francisco, except for me, the outsider. But if you give me the names and addresses of the remaining sorcerers, I can give them a little warning, maybe manage to save some of them. How does that sound?”
“It makes sense,” the Dalton said.
“Then you’d better get a move on, because you’ve only got about seven minutes to live.”
“I’d rather spend my last moments jerking off,” the Dalton said, but he went to a desk in the corner and opened a sleek, thin laptop. He tapped at the keys for a few moments, entered several passwords in succession, and finally opened a file. A printer on the blood-spattered desk began to hum and spit out pages.
“That’s just names and addresses,” the Dalton said. “The detailed dossiers aren’t on the network, they’re on a local drive deep underground.”
“Guess I’ll have to be surprised by their sparkling personalities,” Marla said. “It looks like Mutex is hitting you in order of succession. Who’s next in line to be chief-of-chiefs?”
The Dalton tapped the first page of the printout.
Marla picked it up, read, and nodded. She turned to B. “We’re going to the Tenderloin. Which Rondeau tells me is not the meatpacking district. We’re going to meet somebody named Bethany. No last name. How very pop-star of her.”
“Bethany,” the Dalton said. “Fuck. I like her. Liked her. I hope she doesn’t wind up the way I did. But she’s good, so maybe she won’t.”
“Yeah? Is she good enough to avoid what just happened to your original?”
The Dalton shrugged. “I would’ve thought I was good enough to avoid that, but I wasn’t. She’ll put up a fight, though.”
“Good. I’m going to help her out. I’m not sure what I can do to Mutex, but I’ll do my best. We’d better get moving, though. Mutex hasn’t been taking frequent rest breaks.” She glanced back at the Daltons, one of whom was still crying, while the other sat at the desk in the corner, staring blankly across the room at his sire’s heartless corpse. They were staring imminent nonexistence in the face, and Marla’s heart softened toward them. “Or do you want us to stay?” she said. “Until…it’s over?”
The Dalton at the desk looked at her for a moment, then shook his head. “No. No need. We might as well go alone. You’ve got more important things to do than watch us refresh out of existence.”
“Okay,” Marla said. She paused before heading toward the door. “But, hey. Good luck outside the simulation. I’m sure it’s amazing on the other side.”
The Dalton at the desk nodded and gave them a wave. Marla left, with B and Rondeau following.
11
B hung back with Rondeau as they followed Marla out onto Market Street, his mind still well and truly reeling from the events in Dalton’s office. Despite all the outlandish things he’d seen, the oddest thing—in a way—was the look of human feeling on Marla’s face when she wished the Daltons a pleasant afterlife. “That was almost sweet of her,” B said. “What she just said to them.”
“Yeah,” Rondeau said. “It was.”
“If I hadn’t just seen her transform into a vicious, golden-eyed monster draped in purple shadows, I’d almost call it tenderness.”
“The thing about Marla is, you’ve got to embrace the contradictions,” Rondeau said. “The job she has to do, you have to be tough. I’m not saying she’s got a soft squishy center or anything, but there’s more to her than ass-whipping and blunt-force trauma. If there wasn’t, I wouldn’t be working for her.”
B nodded. In his dream, the first dream about Marla, he’d felt a sense of connection, a depth of feeling, even a degree of enchantment with her. Reality hadn’t done much to reflect the dream, however. B had the definite sense that Marla was trying him out to see if he was the kind of tool she could use. And if he turned out to be useless, she’d toss him aside. He had to make sure that didn’t happen. If he didn’t stay with her, the city would be destroyed. She probably needed him in ways that hadn’t even occurred to her yet. Unfortunately, they hadn’t occurred to him yet, either. He didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to do. “So we’re going to the Tenderloin now?” he said, looking at Marla’s back, her steady stride down Market Street.
Rondeau nodded.
“Ah,” B said. “The fun just doesn’t stop. Does she even know how to get there?”
Rondeau shrugged. “She’s got a bus schedule. We’re probably heading for a bus stop.”
“I thought time was of the essence here? Shouldn’t we take a cab?”
Rondeau waved his hand in a be-my-guest gesture. “Go. Convince her. She doesn’t like taxis. Because the drivers could be taking you anywhere.”
“Like bus drivers can’t steer you wrong?”
“I do not claim to endorse her logic,” Rondeau said. “I am merely reporting it. She mostly travels on foot back home. We could have a limo driving us around here, but Marla likes to keep her feet on the ground.”
B sighed, steeled himself, and lengthened his stride. He fell into step beside Marla and said, “Would you like me to flag down a cab? They’re not too hard to get on Market.”
“We can get a bus, can’t we?” she said.
“It’ll take longer,” B said.
She frowned, then nodded. “Yeah, all right. But only since we’re in a hurry.”
B raised his hand to the next passing cab, which was, fortunately, dented, battered, and in need of a wash. He could tell Marla approved. B and Rondeau got in the backseat, and Marla rode in front. She told the driver the address, reading from the piece of paper.
He grunted and drove on without comment.
The three of them stood on a corner in front of a liquor store with barred windows, dirty newspaper pages and discarded ice-cream wrappers blowing around their feet, the sidewalk permanently mottled and discolored with spit, vomit, ground-out cigarette butts, and ancient blobs of chewing gum. Marla inhaled, deeply, taking in the scent of piss and spilled beer, and, yes, she could have been in Felport, in the darkest part of the urban core, where she lived alone in an apartment building that would have been condemned if not for her influence. This was the neighborhood of easily gratified baser appetites, where sex and booze and drugs were just a quick cash transaction away, where the distance between want and have and have-not could be cut down to nothing in a moment. Every city had places like this, though some cities took pains to hide them. Marla liked it here. She understood its logic and its brutal grace. This was a place of simple motivations. Marla suspected she would get along with the sorcerer who had taken this neighborhood as her own.
“Now, this is almost like home,” Rondeau said, looking up at a sign advertising “Live Nude Girls.”
“Except around here, some of the strip clubs are employee-owned co-ops,” B said, slouching against a light pole. His eyes were shadowed, and Marla wondered if he’d slept at all the night before, or if he always looked this much on the edge of being used-up. She suspected he did. It must be difficult, being half ordinary, half magical. Chimeras had short life spans. The strain of being more than one thing at once could tear anyone apart.
“So where to now?” B asked. “Into the darkest, cankerous, pee-smelling heart of the Tenderloin, where the damned and the poor college students dwell?”
Marla pulled the printout she’d gotten from Dalton’s mirror-self out of her pocket. “Looks like this sorceress, Bethany, lives in the Tenderloin Station.”
“The what?” B said.
“Tenderloin Station,” Marla repeated. “It says it’s underground.”
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�Somebody’s fucking with you,” B said. “There’s no such thing as the Tenderloin Station. No trains run here. There might be a bus station….”
“I’ve got an address,” Marla said. “A corner, at least, so we’ll find out.” She took a step toward the intersection, paused, pivoted on her heel, paused again, and huffed an annoyed exhalation.
“Oh, right,” Rondeau said, and began unfolding a map. “Marla doesn’t like not having a map in her head,” he said, in an aside to B, which was, of course, perfectly audible to Marla. “And I’m not always as psychic as I should be when it comes to providing some external directional guidance.”
Marla leaned over the map Rondeau held, muttering, tracing streets with her fingertip.
“Why didn’t you just ask the cabdriver to drop you off at the appropriate corner?” B said.
“Because discretion is an impulse in me that extends beyond habit into irresistible force,” she said. “In my city, every cabdriver reports to someone, often without even being conscious of it. I can’t imagine things are so different here. It probably doesn’t matter if my movements are being tracked right now, but I find it’s best to always act as if things are as bad as they could possibly get. That way, you can only be pleasantly surprised. So I gave the cabdriver a random address on one of the streets mentioned in the directions. Now I’m just trying to figure out which direction I should be walking in. And it’s…this.” She pointed, and set off, B following along with Rondeau, who was trying to fold the map back into some semblance of pocket-sized convenience.
