by Lisa Smedman
It was embarrassing, really. And a little hard to believe. Pita would be a celebrity once this was over. Assuming it worked. The corporations were taking a big gamble. What if she couldn’t do it? She licked dry lips and tried to calm the fluttering in her stomach as technicians attached bio monitors to her temples, upper left chest, and wrists. Additional sensors were attached to her arm beside the burn mark, and then all was ready.
Three of the mages positioned themselves at the center of the circle. They sat cross-legged, holding hands in a ring around Pita. One was a young Asian elf with a crew cut and a suit that hung sloppily on his lank frame, as if he had dressed up in his father’s clothes. The other two were a blond human woman in a white lab coat with a bright red Mitsuhama logo over the pocket, and a Native Amedcan in a beaded leather jacket with the words “Renraku: Interface With the Best” emblazoned across the back.
The Amerind smiled at Pita reassuringly. “Null perspiration, kid,” he whispered. “Nothing to worry about.” Then he, like the other two mages, snuggled welder’s goggles over his eyes.
Pita glanced at Anwar, who was using a remote to lower his auto-adjust tripod. The round glass eye of the lens seemed to be staring at Pita, boring into her thoughts. She closed her eyes, shutting it out and concentrating. The three mages had spent the afternoon with her, running over the steps of the spell, discussing the wording of the command Pita would give the spirit when it arrived. She toyed with the idea of probing their thoughts, to make sure they hadn’t left anything out. But she was afraid that she would find that they were as nervous as she was.
As the mages began their chant, something soft and warm settled on Pita’s lap. She opened her eyes, startled, and saw that her lap was empty. Yet if she reached down, brushed lightly with her fingertips against the air, she could feel the soft fur of a cat. Closing her eyes again, she stroked the air-and was rewarded with a vibration that set her fingertips tingling. In her mind’s eye she saw a rainbow-colored cat sitting in her lap, gazing up at her with glittering eyes of gold.
Pita concentrated on the feel of the radiant fur beneath her fingers, and focused on Cat’s, throbbing purr. It flowed up from her fingertips and along her arm, then into her chest. From there it radiated outward until her entire body was softly vibrating.
“I’m ready,” she said.
“Begin,” a voice beside her urged.
Pita raised her arm, concentrating on the patch of red where the spirit had burned its true name. She felt the hairs there rise, and the skin begin to warm. She pictured her arm as a cyberdeck screen, flashing a single word over and over again: “Come. Come. Come.” At the same time, her lips parted. A word was on her tongue-a word she could neither pronounce nor understand. A name.
Slowly, the room began to brighten, and Pita felt a warmth on her head and arms. She turned her closed eyes toward it, savoring the spirit’s presence like summer sunlight. Even Anwar’s whispered. “Oh my God!” didn’t faze her.
Now she could feel the heat intensifying, could see a bright whirl of light through her closed eyelids. The welder’s goggles they’d given her hung about her neck. untouched. She didn’t need to wear them, didn’t need to open her eyes to see the spirit. Not when she and it were…
One.
This time, she felt no fear. Cat was close by, a warm presence in her lap. And the spirit was a familiar echo in her sluggish mortal mind. Play? it whispered in a voice as quick as a flash of sunlight on metal, It tugged at her, seeking direction.
Pita looked around her, saw only a vortex of spinning fragments of light. They spread in an infinitely wide rainbow, shading from a deep violet that she felt more as a hum than a color, to an intense crimson that blazed with heat. Individual photons spun crazy spirals around her, cutting the air like brilliant dervishes. She was captivated by their beauty, swept up in their dance. The spirit seemed to be trying to tell her something, trying to communicate. Its words rushed past at a frantic pace that no mortal mind could comprehend. If only she could understand its message, Pita knew that she would be conveyed to the source of all light, the source of all…
Her brain sluggishly sent out a signal that-had nanoseconds not been crawling along like seconds-would have caused her to shake her head.
She struggled to form a word-thought. Not the convoluted command that the mages had instructed her to give, but a single message: Go.
The spirit paused for a nanosecond, then blazed brightly with anger. No. Stay. Play.
Pita felt a wash of horror as she realized what she’d done. When she’d controlled the spirit before, she’d been responding to the call of her totem. Like a cat playing with its prey, she’d directed the spirit to use its destructive energies against the cops. It had enjoyed the experience, and now wanted to repeat it. And it didn’t care who the target was. Pita had unleashed a monster-one that would strike out at the innocent, as well as the guilty.
She tried again. Leave.
The burn on her arm began to throb in time with the light that strobed overhead. The sensation drew Pita back toward her body, back toward herself. The spirit flared with laughter, tilted and spun…
The purring. Concentrate on the purring. Centering herself, wrapping her will around the calm place that Cat had created for her. Pita lashed out. She raked the spirit with claws, tore at it with her teeth. Her hair was on end, was on fire, but she didn’t care. She used the throbbing in her arm, blending anger with calm, blending hot fire with icy determination. Summoning every ounce of her will, she screamed at the thing one last time: GO HOME!
Something snapped.
Pita fell into her body from an impossible height. Down, down into darkness. When she opened her eyes, the laboratory was in utter darkness, except for a tiny red eye that stared at her. Then the portacam’s auto-light came on. washing Pita with a beam of light. She threw up her arm to shield her eyes-and saw that her skin was whole. Healed. The pale pink scar of the spirit’s burn had utterly vanished.
The room’s lights came on then, and everyone started talking at once. Dimly. Pita was aware of the three mages leaping to their feet, of executives rushing into the room and congratulating them with slaps on the back and hearty handshakes. Anwar was standing somewhere beside her, talking excitedly into his microphone and helping Pita to her feet.
“It’s too soon to tell yet, folks, if the spellcasting was successful,” he touched the audio pickup in his ear, listening to it. “The reports are only just starting to come in from the deckers who are monitoring the Matrix. But you saw what happened here today, live on Orks First! trideo. The spirit is under control. And it took an ork to do it.”
Pita murmured something in response to Anwar’s questions, then staggered. She was bone weary; wrestling with the spirit had utterly drained her. When someone else reached out to steady her, she clasped the proffered arm. And looked up into the face of John Chang.
“Well?” he whispered, pulling her off to the side and out of camera range. “We saw you control the spirit. It responded beautifully. How did it react to the new commands?”
“I didn’t give it those commands,” Pita whispered back.
“What?’ Donald Acres had also crowded close, and now was sputtering with rage.
“What do you mean you didn’t-” He broke off as Anwar homed in, thrusting his microphone up to Pita’s mouth.
“I banished it,” Pita answered. “I sent the spirit home-wherever that might be. It’s never coming back.”
Chang’s face went pale. “But that was the only… We weren’t able to bind any of the other…” His hand clenched Pita’s shirt. “You were supposed to-”
“Yes?” Anwar asked, shifting the microphone. “Is there anything you’d like to add, Mr. Chang?”
The executive shook his head, hid his discomfort with a smooth smile, then abruptly turned away.
The pirate broadcaster wrapped a heavy arm around Pita’s shoulders and walked her toward the camera. Technicians scurried along after Pita, peeling off t
he sensors that had been attached to her skin.
“And now we’ll take you to the Street Savers shelter,” Anwar announced as he lifted the camera from its tripod and held it at arm’s length. “I’ll be broadcasting live all the way there as Patti tells us the story of how she came to learn the magical skills that enabled her to banish rogue spirits.” He turned. “Mr. Acres? Mr. Chang? This way please.”
He walked Pita toward the exit, Chang and Acres fumed as they followed the two orks out of the lab and into the Street, occasionally turning their grimaces into a smile for the camera that Anwar was carrying. Surrounded by bodyguards, they climbed into sleek corporate vehicles.
Anwar helped Pita into the taxi that was waiting outside the research lab’s door.
“Your friends have told me, Patti, that your talents are entirely self-taught. I understand that you’re a cat shaman?”
Pita nibbed her throbbing temples, then noticed the driver of the taxi. It was the ork woman who had chatted with her-when? only this morning?-about the Meta Madness concert. The woman turned around and gave Pita a toothy grin.
“Hoi kid,” she said. “I found your cat.”
A white bundle of fur launched itself over the seat and into Pita’s arms. Purring loudly, the cat nuzzled against Pita’s chin, then sniffed at the shirt pocket where the Chickstix had been. One yellow and one blue eye peered up at her as the cat let out a questioning mrrow?
Pita stroked the animal, dumbfounded by the turn of events. What a coincidence that the taxi that had come to take her to Street Savers just happened to be driven by the woman she had met this morning! But then she started to mull it through. Even if the cabbie had found Aziz’s cat, she wouldn't have driven around all day with the animal in her car. She’d have returned it to Masaki’s address, and he would have contacted Carla, who would have.
She smiled at Anwar, who confirmed her suspicions with a wink. The lens of the portacam whirred as he shifted the camera to take in both Pita and the cat. “So,” he said into the microphone. “Tell us about your cat. Do you use it to work your magic?”
Pita laughed. She was starting to understand how the news business worked.
31
Carla watched as Wayne put the finishing touches on the Lone Star story. Despite the fact that everyone she’d interviewed had been busy covering their own asses, the story drove one point home. Pita wasn’t just some street-trash ork kid any more-she was the brilliant young shaman who had single-handedly driven the spirit from the Matrix. It didn’t take a genius to realize that, had the cops gunned her down with the rest of her friends that night, the Crash of 2029 would have repeated itself, with devastating results to the world economy.
As a result of Pita’s fame, offers were pouring in from Seattle ork families who wanted to offer her a home. There was even a handful of telecom messages from handsome young orks who saw Pita as their means of escaping the Underground, either as her personal bodyguard-or as her spouse. For now, however, Pita was still living at Masaki’s. She said she liked it there-that she especially enjoyed talking with Blake, Masaki’s burly oak partner. Carla snorted. She wouldn’t be surprised if the two adopted Pita. It would do Masaki good-give him someone else to fuss and worry over.
Carla leaned over Wayne’s shoulder and drew an imaginary box with her finger on the monitor. “Put the image of Pita describing what happened to her that night into a crop box here, and superimpose it over a slow pan of the street where the shootings occurred,” she instructed. “Then we’ll dissolve to the leaked ballistics report that matches of caliber of the slugs found in the bodies with the weapons inside the patrol car. Superimpose the graphics of the squad car’s weaponry over it, and roll the lethality stats beside it.”
Wayne nodded and went to work, cutting and pasting images with a digital stylus and manual commands entered via keyboard and palette-paste mouse. Carla watched as he cut to her interview with the two cops: Corporal Larry Torno, and Private Renny “Reno” Mellor. They looked pathetic, lying in hospital beds with their faces and hands bandaged and intravenous tubes feeding liquids into their arms. Their burns were officially caused by the crash of their patrol car, and the resulting fire. But that didn’t explain the regular pattern of burn marks across their faces and hands, or how the burns had gone to third degree even though the vehicle’s automatic extinguishing system had cut in immediately after the vehicle caught fire.
Carla didn’t for one moment believe their claim that the accident had been caused by extremely bright headlights shining at point-blank range in through the squad car’s tinted and glare-proof windshield. She knew what the real cause had been. But she hadn’t used it in her story.
Both cops claimed to have been nowhere near the spot where the ork kids were gunned down, despite the fact that their on-board computer nav-log for that evening showed clear signs of tampering. Chief of Lone Star Police William Louden was denying any sort of Lone Star coverup, and was claiming that Torno and Mellor were the only “bad apples” on the force. When Carla asked whether any other Lone Star officers were involved in the murders of street kids he shut the interview down entirely. She had hoped that her story would prompt a full-scale investigation into racist elements within the, police corporation. But that had obviously been a pipe dream.
Carla instructed Wayne to cut the officers denials short with a dissolve to the gruesome file pictures of the kids who had been murdered that night. They deserved the air time. Not those lying Lone Star fraggers.
She followed the file footage with the interview she had done with the leader of Seattle’s Humanis Policlub. At least she’d gotten him to admit that the cops were former members of the organization. But then he insisted that they had been tossed out of the group months ago for being “too radical,’ and that they had been acting on their own initiative. More ass covering.
Carla sighed. “Wrap the story with the comment by the Ork Rights Committee member who lost an eye in Friday’s confrontation in front of Metroplex Hall,” she instructed. “That should give Chief Louden something to answer for, at least.”
As Wayne finished the piece by tagging on Carla’s sign-off, Pita entered the editing booth. She hopped up on a table and watched as the completed story was replayed, swinging her feet. The white cat poked its head out of her jacket, where it had been hiding. The kid seemed to take the mangy little creature with her everywhere these days. The cat stared at the screen as if assessing the story, its mismatched eyes darting back and forth as images moved across the monitor.
“Well?” Carla asked, turning to the girl. “What do you think?’
The ork girl tilted her head to rub a cheek across the top of the cat’s head. A contented purring filled the editing booth. Carla couldn’t tell if it was coming from the cat-or the girl.
“We like it,” Pita said softly. “It won’t bring Chen and the others back, but maybe it’ll stop some other kid from getting geeked.”
Carla forced a smile. In the larger scheme of things, it seemed as if nothing had changed. Lone Star still had its quota of had cops, the corporations were denying all responsibility for the spirit and instead reaping the rewards for having saved the Matrix from a repeat of the Crash of 2029, and Carla was stuck under Mitsuhama’s thumb for the rest of her career.
But at least Pita had come out of this all right. One day, the kid would realize that the world was still just as tarnished as it ever had been. But for now-for today at the very least-the future looked shiny and new.
“Yeah, kid,” Carla answered. “I hope so.”
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