by Jenn Stark
When the bombs connected high above us, a second explosion, this one far louder, boomed over the space. I went flying headlong into Chichiro’s house, skidding across the smooth, polished floor as I clapped my hands over my ears.
I crashed against the wall, then heard nothing but the pounding of my head for several long moments.
Slowly, carefully, I flipped around, then took in the scene in the living room.
The woman lay on the floor, her face jammed against the wood, trembling. Her hands were zip-tied behind her, and so were her feet, but she wasn’t gagged. Probably more than she deserved, frankly.
Nigel half knelt, half crouched beside her, his phone out, his fingers racing over the keys. Chichiro moved through the house, picking up shattered pottery and pushing chairs back into place.
“What…” I managed. “What just happened?”
“Grenade,” Nigel said. “Which makes no sense—”
“No, no, no!” the woman gasped. “Not a bomb—not a bomb, not live, he promised. He promised!”
“She’s been saying a variation on that theme since we pinned her,” Nigel said derisively. “You know her?”
I turned my attention to the woman collapsed on the floor, and quickly brought Nigel up to speed. “When I was a kid, I worked with the police. Used my abilities to find missing children.”
He nodded. “Right. That’s where you met Brody.”
Brody. I grimaced, feeling the tug of memory. “Yeah. Only on my last job, there were six kids that had gone missing. We were close to finding them—really close. Closer than we knew, actually, considering we interviewed the guy who’d snatched the kids. Only we didn’t realize that, then. The trail was going cold, and that’s when all hell broke loose. My mom died, I went on the run, the perp disappeared. Brody kept looking for the kids but never got a hit. I tried to forget them, couldn’t.”
On the floor, the woman had turned her attention to me, staring with huge, frightened eyes.
“But you found them,” Nigel finished for me. So he did know the story. “The Emp—” He glanced at the prone woman, redirected. “You brought them back.”
“I got them home. They’re safe now,” I said, and the woman flinched, looking once more on the verge of tears. The vaguely sick feeling I’d been enduring in my stomach turned into a full gut-churning roil. Viktor Dal, the Emperor, had to be behind this woman being here. I’d thought him safely tucked away in his tower above Paris Casino, content to be left alone while the world burned around him, but I’d been wrong. Of course he’d want to be one of the people doing the burning.
I gestured to Nigel to pull the woman into a sitting position—awkward due to her hand restraints, but Nigel made no move to loosen her bonds.
“Who are you? Why did you bring a bomb here?” I asked sharply, and the woman’s eyes flew open wide, her entire body jerking at the sound of my voice.
“I didn’t! I swear, I didn’t. That was—it was a brick, only a brick! He said it was a test, that he needed you to know, to know what you were capable of doing, of being. That it was important.” Her gaze skittered to Chichiro, then Nigel. “My name is Ginny Campbell, I’m Hayley’s aunt, and I left Arizona to go to Las Vegas to find her, but I swear I…that was never supposed to be a live bomb!”
“What in the…” Nigel muttered.
I took a different tack. “What happened to Hayley? Why are you looking for her?” I snapped, and her head jerked back to me. “The last I saw of her, she was being taken into medical care. Care that was to be overseen by her parents.” I couldn’t remember whether Hayley had had her father there that day; I could only remember her mom.
“Her dad—my brother-in-law—he was never really much in the picture after Hayley was…taken,” the woman said. Chichiro appeared at her side, a teacup in hand. She glared at Nigel until he snapped the woman’s zip tie, transferring the gun to his other hand.
Chichiro helped the woman take a drink of tea, which seemed to steady her. She appeared much smaller now, and she hadn’t seemed a big woman to begin with. But now all the energy that had brought her to our door seemed to have bled out of her.
“Doug was the one who got the email asking for Hayley’s assistance on some…some project, and he agreed. He agreed they could contact Hayley and then…then…” She hesitated again, and Chichiro laid a hand on her knee. The woman visibly relaxed, color returning to her face, and she kept speaking. “Then Hayley was gone. We found all this out after the fact, of course. Her mom was working again, doing well, and Hayley seemed happy. She had her friends, even if most of them were online. She was going to college.”
“College.” I frowned. “Wasn’t she only seventeen?” How had Hayley Adams learned anything during her ten-year captivity that would have allowed her to attend college so quickly? The demons who’d been watching over her hadn’t exactly seemed the type to homeschool. I endured a twinge of remorse for not following up more closely on what happened to all six kids after I released them to their parents. But there’d been too many other kids to save, in too many other places. When the weeks had gone by without follow-up on the children, they’d faded into the endless background of determined smiles and frightened eyes. So many children I still needed to help. When would that ever end?
“She was, but—she was so special,” the aunt said, her face lighting up with animation as she spoke of her niece. “She tested out of everything right away, wanted to go to the local community college, and we were willing to pay…only another university offered her a scholarship, still local but a much better school. They’d seen the news and pulled together the money.”
“The news.” Nigel and I exchanged glances. Someone had been paying attention to the fate of these children. Just not me.
“And she was doing so well! Her mother was so proud, and she seemed happy. Hayley, that is. Full of energy, willing to do anything. Even when she got wrapped up in that stupid video game testing job, she would still make the time to see her mother, do her chores, all of it.” Ginny sighed. “She was just a girl doing what girls do. She seemed happy.”
Video game testing job. Viktor must have learned about Simon’s hobby, used it as a cover for his own twisted plan. My stomach twisted, but I pressed on. “So what changed?” I asked. “Did she start acting strange? Did she disappear more and more?”
“Not at all, and that’s why we were so surprised when Doug—that’s her dad—contacted us, losing his mind with remorse. We’d just had dinner two nights before, my sister and Hayley and me, and Hayley had seemed happy, excited, eager. She wouldn’t tell us what she was working on, but it lit up her entire face. Then the next day…she was gone, and even then, we didn’t think that much about it until her dad showed up wailing that he’d done a terrible thing.”
“Which was?” Nigel prompted.
But Ginny seemed lost in her own thoughts for a moment. “That’s Doug for you,” she said bitterly. “Never actually thinks about anything until after the damage is done. He’s not a bad guy; he just always was looking for the quick and easy buck.” She bit her lip. “And now she’s gone. Doug signed over parental permission for Hayley to work on-site at the video game place.”
“What video game place?” I demanded, imagining Viktor’s hulking black tower. But this woman would never have seen that. No ordinary mortals could.
“In Las Vegas!” The woman flapped her hand as if I was the one not making any sense. “The way he set it all up made it seem it wasn’t a bad thing, right? He called it an internship. But it wasn’t any internship. She just went poof.”
“And Doug was the one who gave you the bomb?” Nigel interjected, his voice terse.
“Oh! Oh no.” Ginny began wringing her hands again. “That came after. I…I went to Las Vegas. Saw the man myself.”
I grimaced, knowing how this had to end, seeing it all in my mind’s eye. I’d let the Emperor go too long without demanding answers, demanding his confession, the truth of what he’d done all those years ago.
I’d thought myself too weak, and he’d struck at the heart of that weakness. I’d waited too long!
“Viktor,” I said, hearing the defeat in my own voice. “You went to see Viktor Dal.”
She sniffled. “I never knew his name. He told me to come here, said all I had to do was go to you and I could find Hayley. He told me where you’d be; he told me where to get a car.” She swallowed. “He said that in the car, there’d be a small device shaped like a hockey puck, and that…that it’d look like a bomb, but it wasn’t. It seriously wasn’t. That I shouldn’t be afraid. It needed to happen this way, you needed to be tested, to see the truth of what you were—and then you would help me.”
“Tested?” Nigel rumbled, and I looked to the screens.
“But why would Viktor…” I shook my head, fixing again on Ginny. “The man you spoke with was tall, blonde, distinguished looking, right? Older, Aryan, that sort of thing?”
Ginny shook her head. “Old? No way, that wasn’t him. This guy was young, way younger than I expected—video games, though, I should have known. I mainly thought he was a drug dealer. He was skinny, pale, kind of goofy looking.”
I stared at her. “Skinny?” I repeated. “Young?”
“Pretty young. Maybe late twenties? He seemed…I don’t know, nice. Like not at all the kind of kid I’d think was involved with something like this.” Ginny sighed. “When I asked why he’d taken Hayley from us, he smiled sort of awkwardly and just said he was a fool.”
Chapter Sixteen
I stared out the window at Chichiro and Ginny Campbell as they wandered across Chichiro’s lawn, picking up hockey-puck sized hunks of metal…hunks that were not explosives. The sensei was speaking to the distraught woman in what looked like slow, soothing tones, but Ginny didn’t seem comforted. She winced at every device she picked up, for all that they were inert.
The copies were inert, anyway. The original, however…hadn’t been. It hadn’t.
“That was a real bomb,” I said, for the fifteenth time. “It blew up. In my hands. If I hadn’t caught it in time, it would have blown up Chichiro’s house. And the others I sent up originally—those had been real too. There were explosions. I felt them.”
“A real bomb detonated in your hands. Additional ones detonated overhead immediately afterwards,” Nigel agreed from the computer console. “The rest are all inert.”
“Inert,” I muttered bitterly. “What the hell is Simon doing?”
That was the crux of it too. Simon had been my comrade—my ally—since I’d first shown up at the Magician’s door as a brand-new mercenary recruit, ready to take on some completely unreasonable artifact-hunting assignment. He’d gotten drunk with me, he’d risked certain electrocution for me, he’d taken in a bunch of stray Mongolian bodyguards and given them a home when they’d had nowhere else to go. Of all the Council members, he was one of the good guys—not Viktor, who I could vent my rage on until he was nothing more than a cinder, but Simon. Simon! He was my friend!
And forget about me for a second, how could he do this to Ginny Campbell, whose only crime was that she was desperate to find her niece?
Nigel had turned his attention back to the monitor. “This computer has been hijacked, by the way. The security cameras are being patched through to a remote location via satellite feed. I can’t track its end point.”
“We don’t need to track it. We know who’s watching, Simon is. Simon, who sent a woman with a bomb to Sensei Chichiro’s house in the mountains of Japan, telling her that was the only way she’d get her niece back.”
“His payoff here is difficult to understand, I’ll grant you,” Nigel said. “The system doesn’t have interior cameras, so he knows only that the bomb didn’t destroy Chichiro’s house, and that you replicated the original one hundreds of times over. But that’s it. He doesn’t know that the copies are inert. Most of them, anyway.”
“But why?” I groaned. “Why blow anything up? The woman alone would have gotten my attention. Why put her through all this?—traveling around the world, renting a car in a foreign country, saddling her with a bomb—a bomb.” I wasn’t going to get past that anytime soon, clearly.
“She said it was a test,” Nigel said thoughtfully.
“Not a test.” I rejected the question in his voice. “It exploded.”
“Yet it passed through highly sophisticated tracking systems—systems that Simon hadn’t created,” Nigel said, his gaze still fixed on the screen, though I didn’t think he could see it anymore. “If Ginny Campbell had been carrying a fake bomb, as she insists, then the checkpoint wouldn’t have picked it up, would have only recorded her vehicle passing by. Which it did.”
A headache pounded behind my eyes. “Except that—”
“Except that you believed it was a bomb, incontrovertibly, without question,” Nigel said, swiveling around to look at me. “And it became one, just like that.”
“I…” I broke off, staring at him. “It became one, and several others, and then I created more—but those were hunks of plastic.”
“Not exactly.” Nigel lifted a plastic puck and waved it at me. “This was in Ginny’s car—there were others too. Simon had said to take as many as she felt comfortable up to Chichiro’s door, which was one. They are all plastic.” He knocked it on the wood table, and I flinched.
“Your point?”
“This inert bomb that you created…isn’t a chunk of plastic.” He lifted another identical puck, waving it at me. “It’s heavier, sheathed in aluminum, and has circuitry inside it. It was a bomb—if only for a split second. And then you rendered it inert. But it wasn’t a mere piece of plastic, ever. You brought it into being fully formed, for the purpose you’d assigned to it. Then you rendered it useless before it fell to the ground—likely after you heard the secondary explosions go off, and realized what you’d done.”
“That…” I scowled at him. “That’s even creepier, frankly.”
“Indeed,” he agreed cheerfully.
I’d had some experience already with manifestation, but this was the first time I’d created a working mechanism…a mechanism I could never have built on my own. Yet my mind had done it. Done it and then, somehow, changed my own creation. Evolved it in midair.
The ramifications of that…
I shook my head, pushing the thought away. I’d already returned the wands to their cases, skulking away from the artifacts like some kind of addict after I’d reset the latches on the jade and amber tubes. What had possessed me to grab them? And, more to the point…how much of what I’d just done was me, and how much was due to their influence?
I straightened my shoulders. “Let’s say you’re right, and I willed weapons of limited destruction into being, all to prove to Simon that I could,” I said slowly. “Where does that leave us with Hayley? What are we supposed to tell her aunt?”
“I don’t—bollocks.” Nigel jolted back from the screen, then turned the laptop so I could see it as well. The lines of code he’d been surveying were gradually being erased, as if the plug was being pulled from a remote location. But as the cursor finally reached the top left of the screen, it reversed and flowed forward again. An address spooled out over the screen.
“What the…”
No sooner had it appeared than the line erased itself again, and the screen went blank. It glowed a faint blue hue in the serene dimness of the living room, the cursor blinking.
Nigel pulled out his phone and immediately keyed in the address. “It’s in Tokyo,” he confirmed. “The Shibuya district. Sort of a tech mecca, huge draw for kids and young adults. If Hayley is in the city, and if she’s some sort of gamer, she could well be there.”
“But Simon’s the one giving us this information. Him—or someone working with him, and he’s the one who sent Ginny in the first place. This has trap written all over it.”
Nigel smiled. “I think that’s supposed to be my line. You’re the one who then says, ‘But we have to find her.’”
“We do have
to find her,” I confirmed. “But we have to understand what kind of game Simon is playing too. Because he’s sending us into the city for a reason, and he’s choosing the weirdest possible way to make that happen.”
“We could contact him,” Nigel said, reasonably enough. I opened my mouth to protest the idiocy of that plan, then shut it.
“We could,” I allowed, but something deep and visceral within me rejected that idea. Simon was the Fool, the jester of the Arcana court. Maybe he’d staged this elaborate production for a reason…maybe he wasn’t merely Viktor’s tool. I held on to that idea with both hands, desperate for it to be true. “Or we could play his game. Go to this district and see what it is he wants us to see. He’s gotten our attention, after all. Maybe we should see what he plans on doing with it.”
“And her?” he asked, gesturing to Ginny.
“We gotta bring her with us,” I said. “One, I don’t want her running around loose. Two, she could provide us with information we need, based on whatever we find. Once that happens, she’s on a Swords plane back to the States. Then she goes off the grid, Hayley’s mom too, until we fix whatever it is the Council broke with Hayley.” I glanced at Nigel, my mind running all the angles. “Get Ma-Singh working on the other kids Dal stole. We need to find out if any of the rest of them are missing, or if it’s just her.”
“Already on it,” Nigel said, waving his phone. “We’re communicating with encrypted messaging on new devices. There’s at least a chance that Simon hasn’t bugged these. Ma-Singh is going to track down the remaining survivors and not only make sure that they’re where they’re supposed to be, but find out if any of them have received additional income or help from the Council. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, depending on where it’s coming from.”
“And depending on what strings were attached to that aid,” I agreed. “Restitution is one thing. But if Viktor or Simon or anyone on the Council is using these kids…” I didn’t want to finish the sentence, didn’t want to think about what the ramifications of that statement was. The Council had been there supporting me every step of the way, or so I’d thought. But now everything was upside-down. Sure, they’d paid me for artifacts—but then they’d buried those same artifacts, keeping them forever out of Connected hands. They’d given me every opportunity to advance my own abilities…but that advancement had come at a cost—sometimes physical, sometimes mental, sometimes emotional. Finally, there was Armaeus…
