“Lovely.” Victor’s jaw clenched so hard he felt his teeth starting to crack; he eased off and healed the enamel.
“You haven’t heard the best part. We’ll all be upgraded in the process, more advanced in every way, mentally, physically, emotionally. So much so that no one will want to escape her embrace.”
Victor’s eyes went wide until he found the light switch in back of his head and flicked it on. “Makes sense. If you want to imprison someone forever, make a room for them they don’t ever want to leave. If we’re working smart, the alien queen is working smarter. And what are we doing to close the gap?” Victor was huffing out his words like dragon snorts.
Ry and An joined the huddle, trying to talk in a voice low enough to respect the savant’s time with her family, and not disturb whatever vigil she was engaged in; it was more consideration than Victor was prepared to grant.
“We have an idea,” Ry said.
An continued for him in that way they had of finishing one another’s sentences that Victor found quite annoying. It was bad enough their switching sexes constantly. They were so keyed to one another that the instant one had a mood shift, the other one shifted sex to balance the energy. “The master race’s language hinges on words of power that summon life into being, raising it out of the void; or in undoing the material world and dispatching their enemies back to the void.”
Victor whistled, like a teapot reaching the point of boiling on a stove. “The language of the gods.” Victor took another deep breath with the realization, pulled his crossed arms even closer together as he hugged himself hard enough to hear the vertebrae in his back crack.
“Soren and the beast are attempting to gain ground using the same tactics against her and their understanding of the savant’s warding magic,” Ry continued.
“They want to seduce her into some goal beside planetary conquest?” Victor scoffed. “Good luck with that.”
“All the same, we expect them to make inroads into the queen’s psyche beyond what the supercomputers can do even interlinked. But we believe there is a way for you to overtake the Soren and beast dyad,” An explained.
Victor’s ears pricked. He loved to compete with Soren in all things, and the thought of besting him brought him no end of joy. “How?”
“Your mandala magic, of course,” Ry said. “We believe if we can mate the savant’s warding magic with your mandalas, use them to incubate ideas, test theorems, run experiments—on not just individual words of power, but on entire phrases and passages suggested by breakthroughs already made by the savant….”
Victor was nodding to the point of giving himself a stiff neck. He didn’t need Ry to fill in the rest. This was definitely something he could do.
“Best of all,” An said, “those experiments, conducted in other space-time continuums….”
“Means I might just provoke other celestial gods, who might come here to shut me down, only to find their real enemy is the alien queen. Already two steps ahead of you,” Victor said. “Excellent. Once again, you’ve proven yourself to be only slightly less than useless, which buys you more time in my employ.”
Ry and An and Aeros smiled at his expense, all too familiar with his backhanded way of giving out compliments, lest he feel anyone at any time was more important to the war effort than Victor himself. The war effort being, of course, his plans to reign supreme in all the heavens—after working his way past every celestial wizard of note who’d care to put Victor under their thumb; the alien queen included.
Though they didn’t doubt for a second his seriousness, they still felt less threatened by him, perhaps because he couldn’t do what he wanted to do without them, for all his bluster. He might well kill them one day, but it would be after securing the assistance of far more powerful players, players like the savant. But from what she’d shown of herself so far, her engagement in this enterprise would be fleeting at best. Victor couldn’t read her mind the way he could his sidekicks, but if he had to guess, she wanted to return to repose for all eternity with her loved ones. Why? Was she able to serve as an even more effective beacon that way and protector of the cosmos from the alien queen and her kind? Her mind better able to search out disturbances in “the force” to put it in Star Wars terms, wherever they were happening?
Victor’s body armor lit up with the sacred geometries that interlaced it. It would store whatever downloads from the savant it could accommodate while Victor ran the tests suggested by those algorithms written in cabbalistic patterns inside his own person.
He stepped up to the savant. Without forgoing his typically testy manner, he said, “Well, I’m sure you’ve been listening and processing everything we’ve been saying, even if you’re acting as if you can’t be bothered. Hit me with your best shot; just don’t overwhelm the suit’s capacity.”
She turned toward him. He found himself levitating off the ground and his suit acting as if it was short-circuiting and hemorrhaging at the same time. She was updating its technology on the fly. “Shiiit!” he thought. He refused to verbalize as much lest his underlings think he was less in control of this situation than he actually was.
She released him from the tractor beam when she was done and when the suit was loaded up with as much homework as he could handle at once.
He gasped as his feet hit the ground.
He once again stepped up to her as if her size and her powers meant nothing to him, refusing to be intimidated. “Why is it you’re taking a sabbatical when we need you doing what you do, twenty-four seven?”
Her response was thought-projected to the supercomputers in the room that then translated for her, doing their best to match her voice, as it would sound in English. “I haven’t stopped. I’ve simply switched gears. I have to incubate entirely new forms of consciousness, new personalities, from which to conduct the next phase of my science, or risk subjecting myself to blind spots in my reasoning that the queen can capitalize upon. Even my methods of stepping outside of my own head must be subject to experimentation, lest they too become overly predictable.”
Victor snorted. “Smart. Very well.” He opened a portal, nearly stepped through it onto the next world to start his experiments, when it occurred to him to ask, “Will your warding magic truly be enough to help us win the day?”
He should have known better than to ask; he didn’t do defeatism; he preferred to lie to himself when all else failed.
“No. It can just buy us time. But I’m bolstered by the possible synergies I see taking shape among the other players on your teams. A chain of events is taking place that might well create the domino effect that does her in.”
“The odds?” he asked, his voice squeakier than he’d have liked.
“Less than three percent. But I held her off before with less than one percent. So things have never looked better for our side.”
“If that’s alien humor, I can’t say it agrees with me.” He really didn’t want to know any more. He stepped through the portal and sealed the door behind him like putting an alternate reality out of his head he was only too happy to treat like a nightmare, and nothing more.
THIRTEEN
“Him. He’s the dragon morph,” Stealy said, trying to keep her voice under control so his ears wouldn’t burn at the mention of what he was. She was already crouched on her motorbike, its engine idling, preparing to dart after him, and to scoop his secrets out of his mind with a swipe of her hand—if any part of her touched him, it would be enough.
Ramon, her confederate, standing by her side, holding the poncho overhead for both of them, protecting them from the rain that splattered like relentless machine gun fire, said, “Hold on.”
“It’s now or never, dude.”
“Hold on, I said. There’s a disturbance in the space-time continuum. I’m a mandala magician, remember? I can sense these things.”
“The earth can’t stop shaking with the volcano in Yellowstone set to go off. It’s one disturbance after another in the space-time continuum, you idi
ot. Doesn’t mean anything.”
He held her by the arm firmly enough that she got the message. He got hers, as well, when she seethed at him, those eyes threatening to steal his brain out of his head for the worthless treasure it was, and donate it to science to see if they could explain how he could live so long on his own.
It was Naomi.
She was the disturbance in the time space continuum.
Or rather, the entity possessing her.
She materialized in front of the dragon morph, who looked at her alarmed. It was the Chinatown district, and he’d just picked up his catch of the day from the fish peddler, after having it wrapped in newspaper, and was strolling away with it under arm. “Sorry,” he said, trying to step around her.
She held out her hand with fingers tensed in tiger’s claws the way she had with the alien queen, firing squiggly lightning bolts out of each finger at the innocuous man, dressed to appear like every other Chinese commoner at Fisherman’s Wharf in Chinatown.
The bald man with the round face and the caramel complexion, his goatee thick and strong and white, extending beneath his chin a couple inches, cried out against the onslaught for as long as he could take it—mere seconds—before morphing into a dragon to dispense his fury Naomi’s way. The fish under his arm had long since fallen to the ground and was flipping about—even in death—from the charge of electricity it had received.
But the dragon morph’s blasts of fire and his fury were wasted on her. The squiggly lines of lightning became like the bars of a cage he couldn’t fly out of even as the cage morphed to accommodate his taking flight. He tried to swoop down when his boluses of fire proved ineffective to claw at her with his talons, but he just couldn’t get near enough.
The street, instead of clearing, was filling with spectators; no one had seen a dragon morph in ages and word was spreading. Rumor had it that no one had magic more powerful than theirs; so the locals were no doubt as fascinated by this petite-framed young lady as Ramon and Stealy were.
“What’s she up to?” Ramon whispered. He could have shouted his question. Between the pelting rain, the dragon’s squawks, the rev of Stealy’s motorbike, and the swoons of the crowd, an atomic blast would have gone unnoticed.
“She’s tying up loose ends, of course. Eliminating the weak links before the alien queen can get to them,” Stealy informed him. Though, really, the only thing Stealy had to go on was that fiendishly clever criminal minds think alike.
“The dragon morphs? Since when did they become the weak links? They’re our most powerful wizards.”
“Anyone wielding cabbalistic magic who doesn’t understand it fully is a weak link. So after the dragon morphs are eliminated….”
“That leaves us. The alien queen won’t have the dragon morphs to lure her away from our scent.” Ramon gulped. “I really hope that guy lives to fight another day.”
The dragon pressed its wings together, all the way back behind it, then clapped them together hard. It wasn’t looking to force more air out beneath it; it made a sonic boom that split the planet in two.
Naomi snorted, impressed, as she watched the dragon flapping its wings in the atmosphere-free void between the two halves of the world.
In the next second, Naomi healed the cleaved planet, and smashed the dragon between the two halves, like cracking a pecan in a nutcracker.
The air had barely had time to grow thin on their end. And she’d done it all without cabbalistic magic, without drawing the attention of the queen. If the queen had registered her presence at all, it was doubtful she’d come after her; not without bolstering her cabbalistic magic first, and that meant securing the secrets to the warding magic.
“This is the Betty Bashful Soren’s been dating?” Ramon said, staring at Naomi in disbelief.
“I believe this falls under don’t judge a book by its cover. Jump on, Romeo,” Stealy commanded. “We better get to the next dragon morph before she does. She might not need them for anything, but we sure as hell do.”
Ramon climbed behind Stealy onto the back of the motorcycle. He felt her sweep her hand through his head to steal a piece of his mandala magic, a piece she might understand. Then she opened a portal and drove the bike through it—straight to where she wanted to go, to where her stealy magic was telling her there was another dragon morph. She wouldn’t be able to get into his head to repeat that stunt; he’d already set up the necessary workarounds to keep even her out. And he’d made sure that the mandala magic would self-dissolve in her mind like a mirage the instant it was used.
Behind them, on the other side of the portal, it was raining fish out of the sky, perhaps from the disturbed stalls in Chinatown following the planet being ripped apart then put back together. But there was another possible explanation; whatever countdown sequence the savant had set in motion was proceeding along. Perhaps now, in addition to Yellowstone’s volcano showing signs of agitation, the planet was coughing up cyclones and water spouts as well—some carrying fish from far out to sea, inland. Either way, the fish peddlers weren’t wasting any opportunity and were already gathering up the spoils. No one was making eye contact with Naomi, letting her walk among them as if nothing had happened. No one wanted to be the one who remembered her face in case she took offense.
Finally, Ramon let go of the image behind them, about the time the one in front of them grew even more alarming.
“Okay, I’m not looking over my shoulder anymore,” Ramon said, “I’m looking over your shoulder. And I got to say, your boobs are no longer the most impressive sight on the horizon. No offense.”
“None taken.” From the tremor in her voice, she wasn’t sure what to make of what was in front of them either.
***
Naomi was being treated with all the kind regard of a backseat driver. She’d been shouting her decrees from inside the mind of her possessor to no avail. This past life version of herself went by the name of Cosmos—unless she was lying to Naomi, and it was just another clue. Cosmos meant “the universe seen as a well-ordered whole.” Naomi had to admit, it sounded like more clue than name. But she was in no mood to play at riddles with a mind thief.
She wanted her body back and now. Her protestations to that end hadn’t meant anything to Cosmos, however. She felt entirely at home in her new role frustrating the hell out of the alien queen. Naomi got a sneaking suspicion that was what she did for a living. Counter-espionage or counter-terrorism perhaps, conducted at a cosmic level? It was certainly one way of interpreting the clue of “cosmos.” Cosmos felt like a special agent, like a killing machine, like a gun for hire. She extracted great pleasure for doing a job exceedingly well; at doing what she did better than anybody else; but beyond that, she didn’t put a hell of a lot of thought into it.
Had she been engineered with nothing else in mind? That would explain the one-mindedness. Most people who felt a calling in life, something they’d been born to—even they had qualms, misgivings over how they could have done things better, how taking another path in life might have…. There were no such second thoughts percolating through the mind of Cosmos.
Naomi kind of liked this chick. She was like a bona fide alter ego; everything Naomi wasn’t. Perhaps that’s why Naomi had reincarnated as she had, as a chance to undo a past, to redress the wrongs of a prior life, or at least to restore balance to her nature.
But admiring Cosmos wasn’t going to get her out from under her thumb. It was just going to empower her further, encourage her to stay where she wasn’t welcome. Naomi had to figure out how to fight off this alien queen for herself, if she was going to come into her power. But even she didn’t believe she could do that. And she didn’t need Cosmos’ display of miraculous abilities to remind her. The idea of setting the universe right, working on the scale of Cosmos; it was intoxicating. She understood what the blind huntresses felt, why they’d become seduced by the alien queen. Naomi had opened a psychic link to Soren and the beast before allowing herself to be taken over by her more powerful past-
life self; a sort of lifeline. She was glad she had. But she would get no help from either Soren or the beast when it came to throwing off her oppressor; they seemed to realize that was her struggle and her struggle alone; they needed her to shed her mousier disposition if she was going to follow with them where they were going; graduating into the realm of cosmic wizardry. It wasn’t a path they were spearheading; Victor was spearheading it, but as it turned out, to secure a future for humanity they’d had no choice but to follow along, and now it was a path they were all headed down. Lo and behold, of all of them, Naomi was already a cosmic wizard; how cool was that?
The question was, could the lion tamer tame the lion? If secret agent chic, plying her trade at a cosmic level, was so keen to follow orders handed down to her by her superiors, maybe it was just a matter of giving her orders she felt inclined to follow. If so, Naomi might just excel in the role of the lion tamer.
But it was too early to make a move like that. First she had to discover the true nature of the genius of this past life alter ego; learn where she was gifted and how, and thus make the most of her. Like it or not, Naomi really was stuck in the backseat driver position for now, with not much to do but scream and carry on with protests of “Keep your eyes on the road!” The more she learned of Cosmos’ psychology, moreover, not just her talents, but what really pushed her buttons, the better Naomi’s chance of getting the lion to jump up on the chair when she wanted.
As to her other self’s serial killer tendencies—put in the service of the greater good…. Naomi got the sense this was just the first of a large bottle of bitter pills she’d better get used to swallowing.
FOURTEEN
The dragon morph before Stealy and Ramon was standing, with its wings raised high, singing its dragon’s song, a tune and a melody that sounded vaguely Cantonese, save for the creature’s larynx which could only do so well at emulating the verses meant to be sung in that language.
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