Running Wilde

by Jenn Stark

  As quickly as his name crossed my mind, I shut any thought of the Magician down. I needed to focus on Simon now. Nothing but Simon.

  Why would Simon go after one of the Dal survivors without the Emperor putting him up to it? The idea of Viktor and Simon working together made me sick.

  “What about Nikki?” I asked, rubbing a hand over my face. Nikki had an in of sorts with the guardians of the children, the djinn I’d inadvertently brought back with me when I’d rescued the kids. Those six displaced demons were now living in Dal’s black tower as well. “Can she find anything out?”

  Nigel hesitated, his face going a touch too neutral. “She could, but we have her working the angle on Dixie right now. You want to pull her off that?”

  “No.” If anything, his pushback made me feel worse. Dixie Quinn. Proof positive that it wasn’t only members of the Council I had to watch out for. Some of the first psychics I’d met in the city weren’t actually friends any longer, but apparent enemies. “You got any updates on that front?”

  “Dixie’s still playing the role of drug kingpin. Brody’s still trying to figure out how much of it is an act. In other words, nothing new.”

  “You hear any indication that the drug Life has made it to Vegas? Or is she still pushing this Charisma thing?”

  “Charisma, and it’s gaining more traction. We’ve pulled several teens off the streets with it in their system—doesn’t show up on any traditional tox screen, so they’re not under the influence of anything illegal, exactly.” He grimaced. “Until someone else dies, we’re at an impasse.”

  “Great,” I muttered.

  Nigel glanced out the window. “We can’t do anything more this afternoon, and we need another day to prepare anyway. The Shibuya district will start kicking into gear in a few hours, and we don’t want to be there when the bars begin to hop. It’ll be wall-to-wall people.”

  I hesitated a long moment, recognizing my sense of relief for the copout it was. I didn’t want to leave Chichiro’s, I realized. Not yet. After all the time I’d resisted coming here, it was the height of irony that now I didn’t want to leave. I’d learned all I could at Chichiro’s, however, at least for the moment. Now I had to put it to use.

  I scowled, thinking of the wands of life and darkness and the bombs I’d built with barely a thought. Was that the wands’ true value? If so…could anyone be safe with them?

  “Go let Chichiro know we’ll have an overnight guest,” I told Nigel. “I’ll continue cleanup in here.”

  As Nigel left the house, I went to find the leather pack. I carefully replaced the wands and the empty golden scroll case inside it, then returned everything to Chichiro’s safe. They would be protected here…and I wouldn’t be tempted to use them. Until I understood their purpose a bit more, that was the safest course all around.

  ***

  The rest of our stay at Chichiro’s was uneventful, our conversations with Ginny following the same circular pattern throughout the evening and morning and even now, as we drove into the city. No matter how many ways we phrased the question, Ginny didn’t know anything more about Simon and definitely nothing about the Emperor. She didn’t know anything about the address in the Shibuya district, didn’t recognize the Google images when we pulled up the street view. Hayley didn’t know any foreign languages, she thought, but…there was a lot that Hayley did know that had surprised both Ginny and her sister. So it was totally possible that Hayley could speak Japanese as well. Ginny had a picture of Hayley—a snapshot of a tall, gray-eyed, and slender young woman, with finely cut features and a shock of dyed white-blonde hair—but the girl didn’t look at all like your typical sullen teen.

  “She seemed so—happy,” Ginny murmured again without prompting from the back of our car. I knew without looking that she was staring out the window, her eyes not seeing the landscape. Though we’d gone over Ginny’s rental vehicle ourselves, Chichiro would have the car searched as well in case there were any actual bombs lurking inside it, beyond the plastic toys. No one thought there were. No one thought there’d ever been a bomb in that vehicle. There’d only been one in my mind and…

  And then I’d brought it to life. I’d manifested guns before and even an elevator full of pointy-toed high heels. But bombs? Bombs that detonated in my hand? What kind of fool made a bomb and then blew it up?

  A straight-up fool who’d been fooled by the Fool, clearly.

  Dammit, Simon…

  “Hayley liked being part of the video game testing team,” Ginny continued, oblivious to my dark thoughts. “Part of something so challenging. It made her feel important, I think. Like she belonged.” She started crying again. “My poor sister.”

  “Have you been in contact with her?” I asked. “Your sister?”

  “Not since I got here. Doug’s with her—yeah.” She laughed ruefully, her voice shaky. “The sack of shit came back, and now we can’t get rid of him. But my sister loves his sorry ass. And he didn’t…he didn’t mean to put Hayley in any danger, I guess.”

  I nodded, but my mind couldn’t rest on the image of Doug and his wife or even Ginny, struggling to help the young Hayley heal—especially when they didn’t understand what had happened to her. Hayley herself wasn’t supposed to know what had happened to her, but the Council-assigned amnesia was probably not being helped by the fact that she was now apparently working for one of the Council members.

  Why Hayley? I asked myself for the millionth time. Why had Simon hired her, why had he assigned her to this video game project, and why had he sent her aunt here to find her?

  There had to be a reason, I just wasn’t seeing it.

  The road stretched before us, the car slipping silently through the mists as we made our way down the mountain. Ginny fell silent, and I found my thoughts slipping back toward Armaeus like a river flowing to the sea. The pain I’d felt at Chichiro’s hands was gone—and Armaeus had healed me, body and soul, but there was something new, now, something unexpected. A tiny ember that had flared to life in my solar plexus and now burned brightly, warming me from within. Absently, I lifted my hand to the spot just below my heart, pressing against my rib cage, as if I could hold the memory of Armaeus’s touch close to me, never letting it go.

  I smiled softly, my gaze unseeing as we descended through the thready clouds, the pull of obligation taking us inexorably toward Tokyo. If only it was that easy.

  We arrived in the Shibuya district just before 1:00 p.m., and as we cruised slowly through the streets, I squinted and peered through the window. The place was lit up with the crazy candy colors of video billboards and Day-Glo shop signage, but it was practically a ghost town…or as much of a ghost town as anywhere in a city of nearly ten million people could be. The few people out on the street were mainly municipal workers cleaning up the trash of the night before, their movements quick and efficient in a way I recognized from the Vegas Strip. With so many people thronging into this neighborhood from mid-evening to noon the next day, making the most of cleanup time was critical.

  I scowled. It also meant there would be nothing outside for us to use as a way to track Hayley, if she was still here—or had ever been here.

  “This is…it,” Nigel said, but the question in his voice was well earned. We’d cruised beyond the strip of disco-techs, karaoke bars, and gaming dens into what looked like nameless, faceless office complexes. There were very few signs here, nothing in English, and the address where Nigel rolled to a stop was discernible as such only through the powers of his GPS system.

  “You’re sure?” I asked dubiously, peering out at the flat gray building. “How do you even get in there?”

  It wasn’t an idle question. The building we were stopped in front of had no door—at least none that opened onto this street. The windows started at about the ten-foot mark and went up the fifteen or so floors of the building, and the building’s concrete base was smooth and featureless.

  As we watched, a delivery truck lumbered by us, angling into the parking lane, t
hen taking a hard left into an alley a half block down the street.

  “Back entrance?” Nigel suggested, and I nodded.

  “Would make for better security, I guess. I don’t want to take the car back there, though. We either walk in, or I’ll do this the hard way.” I didn’t need to spell out to him what that meant, and I certainly didn’t want to explain astral traveling to Ginny. The poor woman had already seen enough crazy for one lifetime.

  We exited the limo and walked quickly down the sidewalk, taking the access alley the way the truck had. The walls on either side of the alley quickly gave way to entries for parking garages, but the alley itself ended abruptly in a box canyon of truck bays. There was one human-sized doorway, appearing locked tight, but the truck was parked in front of a loading bay—and not quite flush to the opening. The driver was nowhere to be seen, presumably in search of an attendant.

  Nigel looked at me, shrugged. “We’re Americans. We can say we’re lost.”

  “Wait!” Ginny’s voice was urgent, and she stared at the delivery truck. “That logo—I know that logo. That’s the game that Hayley was doing the beta testing work for. Mongol Horde, right? I always thought that was the dumbest name for a game.” She shook her head. “She’d just laugh. But that is their logo, right? After all the Japanese lettering?”

  It was, of course—two scimitars framing a pair of mischievous eyes, the letters MH sandwiched between the hilts of the blades. “What could they be delivering here today?” Nigel wondered aloud. “Consoles?”

  “They’re not dropping off, they’re picking up.” I pointed as the truck driver reappeared, clambering into his truck to pull a ramp between the vehicle and the loading bay. Only the furniture that appeared in the doorway wasn’t from the truck but the building. Tables, shelving, pallets.

  Nigel jogged forward.

  “Oh no!” he said with his characteristic British charm. “We’re too late, aren’t we?”

  The Japanese driver grinned broadly at him. “Too late!” he echoed, in strongly accented English. “This cell shut down two days ago. No one here. The game’s moved on.”

  “Moved where?” Nigel asked hopefully, but the driver shook his head.

  “They give me no information, I’m sorry.” Then he brightened. “But you can look around inside, yes?”

  “You’d let me do that?”

  “Oh yes, Mongol Horde tells us all the time—let the people see, let them learn what they can, answer their questions if you have answers. Sadly, I’ve got no answers this time. And there’s not much left inside, but the maps are still there. They always want us to take down maps last.”

  “Maps?” I muttered. We moved into the building, and I glanced at Ginny. “Hayley mention any of this?”

  “She talked about something like it once, a real-world community counterpoint to the game, but I didn’t really understand how it worked. She could totally have been here, though. She would’ve loved this,” Ginny said, her eyes wide as we moved into the giant space. It wasn’t an office at all, but a large industrial warehouse, dozens of tables crisscrossing the space. A forest of stacked chairs clustered near the door, and at the far end of the concrete space, there was an enormous whiteboard, still littered with scrawled writing and pages taped to it.

  I strode into the open room, and felt it immediately. Electricity—the kind generated not by batteries and power cells but by the Connecteds of this earth. The room practically sang with it. I slowed, turning, my hands going out as Nigel continued into the heart of the room.

  Whispers, whispers. I could almost hear them still. The whirr of computers, the rushed clatter of fingers over keyboards, the scatter of excited voices. Why was this place calling out to me? According to Nigel, Mongol Horde was a game of acquisition of treasure and amassing of armies and building of fortresses. There wasn’t even a magic component to it. So, why…

  “Sara,” Nigel barked from the far end of the room. “You’re going to want to see this. Now.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “I don’t think this is right, but I only played the game, like, once. And Hayley was with me, so it was more me watching her,” Ginny was saying as I reached them. She stared at the maps, patently confused. “What is that, India? I thought the Mongols were… I guess India is sort of near Mongolia, kinda,” she muttered. “Maybe this is a splinter of a game, a mod. Hayley said people came up with those all the time.”

  “Nepal is highlighted,” Nigel nodded. “But that’s not the primary issue.”

  He pointed to several sketched drawings—little more than girl and boy stick figures with their hands outstretched and big circles or bubbles at the ends of their stick arms.

  I furrowed my brow. “I don’t see…”

  “Look.” Nigel pointed. The figures in the next cluster of images still had the bubbles, but they were doing more with them. Throwing them at buildings, other people, several of them pushing together, their arms aloft, their many little bubble hands becoming one big bubble, smiles on all their flat, round faces. And one girl figure stood out taller than the others in this set.

  “Oh,” I said. “Huh.”

  The stick woman’s arms were flung wide, enormous blue circles emerging out from each hand. The figure was caught midtwirl, and in addition to the balls in her hands, a far-flung arc of fireballs also extended away from her, and these had jagged, trailing flames as well. This…was definitely me. But while I hadn’t deliberately tried to evade detection over the past few months, I also hadn’t been advertising my newfound pyrotechnic abilities. Why was this depiction of me drawn in a room filled with the detritus of a game that Simon had almost certainly designed?

  “There’s more doodling here,” Nigel said, pointing to a corner. “The woman figure there is at the side of a battle, her hand outstretched over the combatants. Almost like she’s manipulating them—”

  “Look, I don’t want to interrupt the art critique, but how does this help us find Hayley?” I cut in, my skin feeling unusually clammy. Manipulating…yeah. I’d done more than my share of that already. “She was a game tester, great, but she was—is—a kid. A very traumatized kid who shouldn’t have left Arizona by herself, let alone be halfway around the world in a warehouse with a bunch of other tech geeks. And this…” I jabbed my thumb at the room behind us. “Doesn’t look like a legit operation. It looks illegal is what…”

  I paused, sudden realization gripping me, but Nigel already had his phone out.

  “We haven’t been spotted in the city. Ma-Singh has been monitoring all frequencies,” he said tightly.

  “Yeah, well, someone knew I was coming the last time I entered the city, even if the police didn’t. And chances are those someones aren’t going to be advertising my return on regular channels.”

  “True, but they wouldn’t have let us see all this without acting,” Nigel said. “If there was a net closing in, we’d know it already.”

  “A net? What net?” Ginny asked hurriedly. “You mean because of the bomb? But I told you, I had to do that!”

  Nigel turned away, talking in low, sharp tones to Ma-Singh, presumably, while I steered Ginny in the opposite direction. “You played this Mongol Horde game once, you said?”

  “Sort of, but I wasn’t very good at it.” She pointed to a flyer taped to the board, this one mostly in English. I pulled it down and studied it as she continued. “It was kind of a mashup of a couple of different games, sandbox and MMORPG, mostly.” At my exasperated look, she flapped her hand impatiently. “Sandbox means you build things—like cities or strongholds. MMO is massive multiplayer online, RPG is role player game. So that means it’s a community building game. You go to centralized locations in the game and create teams or add to your team. Everyone talks to everyone.”

  “Like talk-talk? Over headphones?”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes. Sometimes with chat scripts.”

  “Chat scripts we can probably get—or Simon could.” I thought about that. It was seriously beginning to
suck having the one guy who could get into any tech system in the world possibly be the one working to take you down. But why?

  “Simon definitely could.” To my surprise, Ginny smiled.

  I scowled at her. “Yeah, Simon. The guy who sent you to Tokyo and told you to carry a fake bomb into a private residence. Which you then did, and it blew up. I’m not sure that’s a good reason to smile.”

  “But he didn’t want anything bad to happen, you could tell,” Ginny insisted, with all the logic of a six-year-old. “He seemed, well, almost desperate. Like you know how you get when you have sixty-seven things going at once, and then one falls, and you can tell that if you don’t take care of that one thing, everything else will fall apart as well? That’s the impression I got from Simon. That he was close to some major breakthrough, but then Hayley went off the reservation, was doing something he didn’t expect her to do. He seemed genuinely remorseful that she’d disappeared, and then he said I couldn’t just show up and ask you about her, I had to do this other thing…but that you’d then help me. Which you have.”

  “And you’re sticking by your story that Simon wasn’t the one who sent Hayley to Tokyo.” We’d been over this multiple times, and it still didn’t add up. “But somehow, magically, he knew where she’d gone?”

  “She’d told me about the gamers they had in Tokyo, how excited they were—how advanced in the game. And she knew they were doing special work for Simon to find this door or portal or something…she wouldn’t tell me about it, other than to say it was a door, and he acted like he knew nothing about it. But he said kind of evasively that if she had been talking about all that, then well, she could have come here, could have wanted to take part in the search but…he couldn’t tell me that for sure. However, if I wanted to try to find Hayley, he could send me.” She gave a small wave of her hand. “You know the rest. You know everything I do.”