Geekomancy

by Michael R. Underwood

  “Did you treat any of the filters on the scope to track the Muse?”

  “I’m terribly sorry, but I did not. I’m on the trail, however, and we’re not far behind the fiend.”

  She lowered the rifle to rest on the lip of the copilot seat and started scanning, deliberately keeping herself from looking down. You’re going to have to look down to shoot this thing, Ree. Think FPS, think FPS. But even the best first-person shooter or flight sim didn’t give you the wind cutting at your face, the chill of the air, the lurch of a make-believe airship, or your own personal issues with heights.

  They continued to climb, then banked right to take a wide arc around an office building. She let her gaze dip down, a death grip on the polished wooden stock of the rifle.

  Drake brought them around and started heading north. “Getting close now. It’ll be somewhere above us, most like.”

  “Do they usually travel this far off the ground?”

  “Not to my knowledge, but I do believe this one has caught our scent.”

  “Wait—what—”

  It knows we’re coming, Ree realized, more than a little concerned. Sweet. She brought up the rifle again, looking over the scope. To brace herself in the aerothopter, she pushed her feet against a pair of pipes that might have been the landing gear. She saw a scrap of shadow in the corner of her eye, scanned to track it, rifle crossing to the left. No, just a cloud.

  “The trail is crossing over itself, Ms. Ree. We are in the vicinity, so I will loop around to give you a chance to spot.”

  They banked left, and Ree pushed into the pipes again. But the turn was sharp enough that she had to drop a hand from the rifle to the ship and steady herself.

  “Next time, seat belts!” she said over the wind.

  “Understood, Ms. Ree.”

  “Drake—I think we’re probably at the point where you can call me Ree, okay? Just keep her steady!”

  “Affirmative,” Drake said, fighting the chop.

  She leveled the rifle again, tracking another shadow. This one raced up and to the left, dodging behind a building.

  “Nine o’clock, bearing to our left and climbing!” she said, recalling jargon from the last time she’d played a multiplayer flight game. Crimson Skies, a few years ago, one of her failed attempts to get Sandra into video games other than Guitar Hero.

  Drake started to climb, banking left once more. She picked up the shadow, which was growing larger, its spindly form taking shape. She put her right goggled eye to the scope and sighted the creature. Magnified, she saw its jagged limbs and diamond-shaped head. Below the waist, it faded off into a whispy Casper-esque trail, no legs to speak of.

  “Here goes nothing!” Ree shouted over the wind, and pulled the trigger. A burst of light shot out from the rifle in brilliant emerald.

  Awesome.

  However, the shadow faded to the side, and the burst flew past. The Muse banked and crossed from Ree’s left to her right. She had to pull the rifle up and rebrace on her right. By the time she was set up, the Muse was bearing down on them, no more than a hundred feet out.

  “Incoming!” Drake said, sending the aerothopter into a dive.

  “Will the blades stop it?” she said as she aimed another shot. It went wide, the Muse just twenty feet away.

  “That is a capital question, Ms. Ree,” Drake said, his voice strained.

  “I said, call me Ree!” she shouted over the wind. The nervousness and Drake’s insistence on formality made her crack up as she tried to sight the Muse again, spoiling her aim.

  “Apologies . . . Ree. Look out!”

  The Muse passed over the aerothopter and through the blades without effect and took a swipe at Drake. He ducked, pushing the machine into a deeper bank. Ree leaned against the turn, her shoulder landing hard on the metallic frame. Shitfuckow. She aimed the rifle again, taking a parting shot as they pulled away.

  “Bastard is fast.”

  “Coming around. I will do my best to give you a dead-on shot.”

  “Let me cross the T, and we’ll be in business.”

  Drake laughed a full-bellied laugh, the kind you almost never heard in real life. “Now that, my dear, is a colloquialism with which I am familiar. Brace yourself.”

  Wondering which part of the flight she hadn’t needed to brace herself for, she reset her straddled position and tracked the Muse across the sky. They were into downtown, with tall buildings forming a metal maze around them.

  “How’s your maneuverability?” she asked.

  “Not good, I’m afraid.”

  Damn. If they could use the skyscrapers as terrain, it’d narrow the lanes of attack. Instead, the Muse came screaming up from below and to the left. Ree caught it early enough to squeeze off two shots in quick succession before it got close enough that the machine or Drake would block her shot. The Muse dodged the first, but she’d guessed the dodge and tracked left, clipping the thing’s left arm with the second shot.

  “Take it!” she shouted.

  The Muse spun, dove, and regrouped for another run. Drake banked to the right, and she pushed hard into the pipe below, turning as far as she could in the seat to get the Muse in her sights. She led the shot and fired, trying to get in as many as she could before it crashed into them.

  The Muse dodged the first shot, and she overcorrected for the second. The third blast clipped the Muse’s right arm. Spinning as it came in, it swiped an arm through her chest. Heat and cold hit her with a double whammy, like she’d been in a sauna for two hours and then decided to go for a bout of Polar Bear diving in the Arctic Circle.

  A hundred images crashed in on her at once: Jay as he explained that he was dumping her; Dad, telling her that Mom wasn’t coming back; Tomas’s body on the floor; every rejection letter, unreturned phone call, and lonely night mixed together into a 151-proof angst cocktail and forced down her throat.

  Her heart stopped for a moment, and she had to gasp to find her breath. The rifle dropped half out of the aerothopter, hanging only by the finger loop.

  Mother. Fucker! I am not going down like this, you hear me?

  Ree latched on to the sensation of the rifle amid the emotional hurricane. Pushing the pain out with an angry scream, she held tight to the rifle and pulled it back up as her lungs remembered how to work.

  “Are you all right?” Drake shouted over the din.

  Ree took another gasping breath, then said, “Hell no! I don’t think I could take another one of those!”

  “It’s far more maneuverable than we are. I can either follow it or dodge it.”

  “If we let it go, can we track it again?”

  “Not in time to prevent its next attack.”

  Fucksticks. The Muse climbed toward them, its right arm fuzzy, out of focus. Ree fired and the Muse dodged left, looping around to come at them head-on. Drake banked right, turning tightly to avoid a radio tower. She lost the Muse behind the tower only to pick it up again as it soared down at them. She waited, hoping to draw it in for a clearer shot, keep it from dodging.

  Just a little closer. Stay on target . . .

  The Muse grew large in her vision, a shifting mass of jagged angles made of shadow, and still Ree waited. When she couldn’t see anything but the Muse, she fired. The world flashed in green and she ducked, hoping to miss the Muse’s swipe. She gritted her teeth, anticipating the hit, but none came. She poked her head up and saw the Muse, which looked like the T2 after Schwarzenegger had taken a shotgun to it, a big chunk missing out of the middle and right side. She felt more than heard its scream, and saw it retreat, fading through a building.

  “Drake, Drake—turn here! We have to finish it off!”

  Drake sighed. “That will not avail us this time. It has phased out of our world to recover. I’m coming down for a landing, please hold on.”

  The aerothopter’s tip dipped as Drake guided them down to the top of the Western Bank Tower.

  “When will it come back?”

  “Difficult to say. I suspect i
t will spend at least a day recuperating before it tries to strike again.”

  “That means Eastwood will be cutting it damned close.”

  “And we may yet have time to discern a solution.” Ree thanked the gods of Steampunk that Drake’s whacky invention wasn’t a biplane, since rooftop landing strips weren’t terribly common, even in a techie town like Pearson.

  They coasted down toward the open roof, then dropped the last two feet and landed with a crunch. Ree tucked her neck, but the impact was hard on her butt. “Ow!”

  “My apologies. The landings are always the trickiest bit. The aerothopter’s dorsal sensor is sometimes off by a few feet.”

  Ree took a long breath, trying to slow her machine-gun heartbeat. “Hey, any dogfight with an immortal spirit of depression you walk away from, right?”

  Drake pushed forward a lever and climbed out of the aerothopter. “You best evacuate quickly.”

  “Why’s that?” she asked as she swung a foot over the side. The seat beneath her shrank in a spurt, and the bars that had framed her seat started to fold in on themselves. She jumped and crumbled onto the roof with an “Eep.”

  Real graceful, Ree.

  The aerothopter continued to fold in upon itself until it returned to its pocket-ready size. Drake picked up the cube, tossed it up, and caught it with a grin, then slipped it back into his duster.

  “Did you pick a building where the roof door is unlocked?” Ree asked, crossing to check.

  “Sorry?”

  Panic drove up Ree’s pulse, and it spiked when she tried unsuccessfully to turn the handle. Ree rolled her eyes and groaned. “Can you pick locks, or do I have to do it?”

  “If you return my rifle, I could blow the door off.”

  “I’ll take that as a no.” Ree knelt down in front of the door and pulled a hairpin out of her hair, thankful she’d decided to wear it up. Now we see if the lock-picking kit Dad gave me for my twentieth birthday will pay off. She felt around in the lock, trying to figure out what type it was. Anything too sophisticated, and she’d be SOL without the professional tools.

  “Could we just turn the aerothopter back on and land on the street?”

  “It won’t function for at least six hours, I’m afraid.”

  “Then why didn’t we land on the street?” Ree said, trying not to let too much annoyance show in her voice.

  “The charm that assisted the Doubt in keeping us from notice has expired. This was the only way to land without causing a scene,” Drake said, apologetic.

  Her day just kept getting better. At this rate, she’d get home and discover that Anya and Jay had hooked up and had secretly been in love and were now super-happy together. “Do you have a pin, a needle, or something like that?”

  “That, I can supply.” Drake walked up, took the rifle, and half-disassembled it, handing her a pin.

  She could pull up a video and use genre mojo, but Ree wanted to see if she could to it herself. For once, they weren’t in a mortal-danger level of rush.

  Ree hunkered back down and played with the lock for another minute before it clicked. When the door opened, she played the Final Fantasy victory music in her brain.

  • • •

  Having skittered down and escaped the Western Bank Building without notice, Ree and Drake returned to Drake’s apartment for more planning. And pizza. Drake put on some water for tea.

  “I have an herbal tisane that does wonders for the spirit. It should be most beneficial,” Drake said. “I first learned of this mixture when my Mistress led us through the hills of the Worry-Wargs.”

  Ree half-listened to Drake retelling the tale, the other half of her attention put to the task of devouring a piece of pizza. She could officially add “Dogfight with a malevolent spirit” to her rapidly growing list entitled:

  Shit I Never Thought I’d Have to Do But Somehow Have Anyway.

  1) Justify my video game habit to a boyfriend.

  2) Listen to a drunken idiot talk about all the places he wants to grope me just for the tip so I can make rent and not get thrown out of my apartment.

  3) Write a response to a letter suggesting I rewrite my Lovecraft Roller Derby short film into a children’s cartoon.

  4) Dodge the wild swipes of a troll.

  5) Seriously consider the various superpowers I could gain by mimicking different narrative genres.

  6) Aerothopter dogfight with a malevolent spirit through downtown Pearson.

  “How would you like to proceed?” Drake asked as he pulled ingredients from his jars and bottles.

  “The hell if I know. When we tracked it, we were always a step behind.” She arced her back and twisted left and right to pop a couple of vertebrae. “You said it goes somewhere to recover? Where is that? Can we follow it there and take it out?”

  Drake’s eyes went wide. “That would be highly inadvisable. When spirits are wounded, they retreat beyond the Veil to recover their strength in the aether.”

  “So, how bad of an idea is it to go there? On a scale of cooking-without-a-shirt to being-an-evil-priest-in-an-Alexandre-Dumas-book?”

  Drake raised an eyebrow, pausing in his apothecary-ing to consider. “I imagine it is rather the equivalent of attending a Victorian grand ball wearing nothing but your unmentionables and trying to woo the stuffy archduke so you can cement a marriage that will save your country from certain destruction.”

  Ree smiled. “Great, when do we start?”

  Drake had apparently ignored her last comment, going back to mixing ingredients. The teakettle whistled, and he deftly snatched it from the burner and poured hot water into the bowl. With calm efficiency, he produced a wooden spoon from a drawer and stirred.

  “Piercing the Veil is difficult enough to do on its own, but what lies beyond is far worse. In my journeys, I was accompanied by a being of incredible power, and even I nearly lost my way a number of times. It may be far easier to pierce the Veil now, given the imminence of All Hallows’ Eve, but that will mean the denizens of Spirit will be all the more agitated.”

  Ree took another bite and chewed thoughtfully. “Do you have a better idea? I’d be happy to not go anywhere near uppity spirits if I can avoid it.” An echo of the Muses’ emotional gut punch rippled through her like a shudder mixed with a cold burn.

  Drake poured part of the concoction into a mug and offered it to Ree. “This should help.”

  It looked terrible. This will probably taste nasty as hell, so I might as well go for it. “Bottoms up,” she said, and took a big swig.

  Guh. It tasted like crusty socks, sunflower seeds, and spoiled milk. She set the mug down and tried to scrape the sensation off her tongue with her teeth and rolled her shoulders in distaste. But after a few seconds, the aftertaste mellowed, and her whole body felt warmer, like she had been basking in the sun.

  “Wow. That’s good stuff. Tastes horrible.”

  “So it goes. Pastries are marvelous yet terrible for you. However, your people make them so sweet these days. And salty. I nearly retched the first time I had a donut.”

  Ree narrowed her eyes at Drake. “We’re in a fight now. Donuts are amazing.”

  Drake held up his hands, yielding. “Only the first time. I’ve become rather fond of their decadence since then. I once subsisted on nothing more than donuts and root beer for a week. It ended rather poorly.”

  Ree quirked a half-smile and nodded. “You’d have to at least throw in some cheeseburgers to make that diet work.” She took another sip of the tisane, grimaced, and relaxed as a second wave of warmth ran through her body. She took a deep breath, then chugged the rest of the mug.

  “Eaucch.” Ree stamped her feet in a flamenco-esque burst, then exhaled slowly. The immediacy and closeness of the pain brought on by the Muse’s touch receded, like it had happened a month ago instead of an hour. “That’s good stuff. Needs honey.”

  Drake shook his head. “Sadly, the taste is part of the effect. If you were to change the taste, the tisane would become just a foul dr
ink with a touch of honey.”

  “So, can we get into spirit-land or not?”

  Drake sighed. “Yes. But I cannot stress enough how dangerous it would be.”

  “I get it. But I’m already neck-deep in ridiculous danger, and if I sit by, someone else dies, and then Eastwood will get eaten by demons or start an eternal rain of fire or something. If there’s no better way to stop it than by going through the Veil, I have to try.”

  Drake crossed the room and took a slice of the pizza. “I can show you how to pierce the Veil. I can even go with you. But once we cross the threshold, I cannot guarantee anything.”

  Uncertain doom versus almost total failure? Fantastic choice. Maybe he has a time machine and can go back to change things so I never meet Eastwood in the first place.

  Not like it would help.

  Wishing herself back into ignorance wouldn’t matter. The suicides would still be dead, and Eastwood would still be on a collision course with damnation or whatever it was that happened when someone Fausted themselves out in the real world. He’d said that people could become not-people, but she didn’t know what that really meant. Maybe he was just being melodramatic.

  “If it’s that dangerous, why would you go with me?”

  Drake’s face hardened. “No one should face Spirit alone, and your mission is righteous.” His smile returned. “Also, I have on several occasions been rightly accused of possessing a lack of common sense. I am an adventurer, after all.”

  “When can we leave?”

  “It will take some time to make the preparations. Midnight, at the earliest, barely before dawn if things go poorly. You should get some rest, one way or another.”

  “I could help.”

  Drake took a step toward her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Help me by getting some sleep. You’ll need to be well rested. Make your spirit as healthy as you can before testing it again. Spend time with friends, loved ones. Stoke the fires of your heart as best you can, because they will be cooled to embers by the trials of the Otherworld.”

  Ree smiled up at the man from another time. “You’re a little much sometimes. But you know that, right?”