Worldweavers: Cybermage

by Alma Alexander

  “Who? Kristin? She overheard us talking about spellspam. First time I heard how she came by those teeth.”

  “Fascinating,” Magpie said, and now she was laughing openly. “You heard the other news?”

  “What’s up?”

  “Humphrey’s here,” Magpie said. “I think there’s trouble.”

  “What else is new,” Thea muttered. “I bet it’s the cube.”

  “What cube?”

  Thea blinked at her friend. “Oh yeah, you never did see it. Terry and Tess were there when we retrieved it last summer, when we took Corey the Trickster back to the First World to be smacked down for interfering too much with our own world. That’s when we found Beltran de los Reyes, the professor’s missing younger son—remember? I wrote you all about it. Beltran had this bag full of weird stuff with him, ancient computer tapes and that cube. Humphrey called it an Elemental cube. Whatever that is.”

  “Back in your Element, are you?” Magpie said.

  She was teasing, but her curiosity was only surface gloss—she sounded glib, almost dismissive. Thea remembered the expression on Magpie’s face when she had called the sacrificial Whale in the ancient way of her people and helped vanquish the doom of the Nothing that had threatened the future of their world. Thea felt a stab of loss; it was as though she and Magpie were sundered into two separate worlds with a glass wall between them—as though Magpie herself had forgotten, had chosen to forget, the incredible thing that she had been a part of.

  “We might all…” Thea began, but Magpie shook her head, her earrings clinking like tiny wind chimes.

  “Tell me all the news later,” she said, lifting her arm to wave at someone farther down the corridor. “Gotta go. I’ll see you back at the room after you and Humphrey have had a chance to talk.”

  “What makes you think he’s here for me?”

  “Oh, please, of course he is,” Magpie said. “You yourself said it. And you are squarely in the middle of every single thing that seems to bring Humphrey May out of the FBM cocoon. Well, gotta run. See you later!”

  “Wait—don’t you want to know what’s going on?”

  “Of course I do. But you’ll fill me in after you’ve talked to Humphrey. Later!”

  She gave an airy wave and turned away, hair bouncing on her back.

  Thea stared after Magpie for a moment, chewing on her nail and scowling. Then she spun on her heel to hurry to her next class—and all but ran down Terry as he reached out a hand to tap her on the shoulder. It turned into a more defensive gesture even as Thea stepped back, lifting her head a fraction to stare at him.

  “Where have you been? Haven’t run into you a lot lately,” she said.

  “You just did,” Terry retorted with a grin, and then glanced over Thea’s shoulder at Magpie’s retreating back. “What’s up with you two? You having a row?”

  “That obvious, is it?”

  “Let’s put it this way,” Terry said. “I sincerely hope that expression you’re wearing isn’t meant for me.”

  Thea couldn’t help a quick grin at that, and then shrugged her shoulders. “Don’t mind me. I’m having a bad day. Or maybe a bad week. Or month. I don’t know.”

  “You should come by, later,” Terry said, dropping his voice a little. He did not specify a destination, but with him these days, it could only be the Nexus room. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  “Is everything all right?” Thea asked, not knowing whether she was afraid or irrationally excited at the prospect of something bad, like more spellspam, crawling out of cyberspace.

  “More than all right,” Terry said, grinning. He glanced around, and lowered his voice another notch. “I fixed the hologram,” he said.

  “Holy cow,” Thea said. “You fixed Twitterpat? Really? Is that why Humphrey is here?”

  “Humphrey May is here? News to me—who told you?”

  “Magpie just said…” She glanced at her wrist, straightened up with a wince. “I’m late. Gotta get to class, Terry.”

  “Come see later. It’s pretty awesome, actually.”

  “I can’t just…” Thea began, but Terry had nodded at her in a conspiratorial fashion and slipped away into the now rapidly thinning crowd.

  Thea sighed and dragged her feet in less-than-enthusiastic fashion to her next class.

  It happened to be English, and the current area of study was poetry, a subject Thea had been exposed to from her earliest childhood because her grandfather—Ysabeau’s father—had published seven volumes of the stuff. Thea had always loved poetry, even when most of her brothers, with the possible exception of her bookish second-oldest brother, Ben, declared it to be boring. But perhaps because of the very familiarity of it, she found herself tuning the class out completely, instead mulling over the new developments since the beginning of the new school year.

  Kristin Wallers, the buck-toothed pariah often referred to as Kristin Walrus by her classmates behind her back, turned out to have an interesting past.

  Magpie had transformed into an alien thing with an active social life that didn’t seem to include Thea.

  Tess was caught up in her studies, and in some boy.

  Ben seemed introspective and moody.

  Terry, when not working on early graduation, was apparently bent on resurrecting Twitterpat, their late computer science teacher who had been one of the casualties of the battle with the Nothing last year. Or at the very least, he was trying to resurrect the hologram program that Twitterpat had left embedded in the Nexus computer.

  And now Humphrey May was back.

  2.

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for Humphrey May to show himself. Thea slowed as she approached the library on her way across the Academy’s main quad, and then came to a complete halt as she saw a familiar lanky figure leaning against one of the pillars of the library portico.

  Magpie’s parting words echoed in her mind: You are squarely in the middle of every single thing that seems to bring Humphrey May out of his FBM cocoon.

  “Hi,” he said conversationally, as though there was nothing at all out of the ordinary about a high-powered Washington mage from the FBM being at the Academy.

  “What are you doing here?” Thea asked warily.

  Humphrey pulled one hand out of his pocket, and from his long fingers dangled something that looked like a large wristwatch, or more accurately, a wrist calculator, as it appeared to have a sort of tiny keypad on its face. “I’m here bearing gifts. This is for you.”

  Thea stepped closer, curiosity getting the better of her. “What is it?”

  “It’s a prototype,” said Humphrey, “a sort of remote computer station. You can key in something on this keyboard and access a real computer somewhere else entirely. Like, for instance, the Nexus.”

  “To do what?” Thea asked.

  Humphrey laughed. “Oh, don’t be disingenuous. You of all people know how useful this can be.”

  “But my parents won’t even let me lug around a laptop of my own,” Thea said. “Does my dad know about this? Really?”

  “Actually, there’s only two of them in existence. This one, and one locked away in the safe back at headquarters. Nobody knows about them except the guy who developed it, the head of the FBM, and me. And now you. Thea, it’s a bribe.” The smile left his face, and he was suddenly very serious, even grave. “We need you. Again. Want to go for a walk?”

  He sounded as though he stood in a springtime meadow in bright sunshine, not in the throes of a damp Pacific Northwest nightfall. But the invitation made perfect sense. Nobody else would be wandering about at this time, so there would be no danger of being overheard.

  “Sure,” Thea said, falling into step beside him as they walked away from the library and out under the trees of the central green. They walked for a few minutes in silence, with Humphrey apparently deep in thought. She finally reached up to tug her hood tighter around her face, and took a deep breath. “So, what’s up?” she said. “Is it the cube?”

  Humphre
y turned his head slightly to give her a smile. “I guess we should have let you know what happened,” he said. “Or at least I should have. When you brought that little puzzle back to us last summer, from wherever it had been all those years, things changed. I have a confession to make.”

  Thea waited, with a patience which would have made Cheveyo, her Anasazi teacher, proud of her.

  “Remember when I told you that you were not the only…one out there like yourself?” Humphrey said.

  “That I was just the first of those who will come. Yes, I remember.”

  “That wasn’t quite true. Well, it depends on the way you look at things. You see, there was more than one reason I made the arrangements for you to go to Professor de los Reyes last summer. The professor was one of the few people who could figure out—” Humphrey broke off. “Let me put it this way: As far as the Bureau of Magic knows, there are four certified poly-Element mages living on the North American continent today. Three and a half, if you consider that one of them is extremely old, and is more of a liability than an asset because he has to be restrained from having embarrassing and often dangerous outbursts of Elemental magic. One of the others, as I am sure you must have already put together, is the professor. He has mastery of two Elements, Earth and Water, with the occasional lucky stab at Air, and yet he’s the best Elemental we have. And I…had a hunch about you.”

  “If you’re trying to tell me that I’m an Elemental, wouldn’t it have come up before?” Thea said, astonished. “I was tested for everything when I was a kid.”

  “Not necessarily. These are the most temperamental of our gifts. Elemental magic can manifest at any age—at least one infant Fire mage in history was lucky that he didn’t immolate himself before he was two years old. And it sometimes doesn’t kick in for those who wield it until they are well into puberty. It would not be unheard of, anyway. Elemental magic is so rare, so vanishingly rare, that it would not have been the first thing they thought of. Not even in a Double Seventh.”

  “So I’m an Elemental?”

  “I suspected,” Humphrey said. “And the professor’s house, the Elemental house, confirmed it for me, once I heard how you interacted with it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It unpacked for you, didn’t it?”

  “It does that for everyone, it’s supposed to tidy up after people.”

  “Tidy up, yes. If Terry had kicked off his shoes in the middle of the room, the house would have tidied them away for him. But that’s just part of the House-tidy spell; he had to unpack his own suitcase.”

  Thea blinked. “So the Gardentidy spell…”

  “Yes, that was part of the professor’s gift. He used the Earth Elemental magic to create that.”

  “So what am I?” Thea said, suddenly feeling a little breathless.

  “I’d say Fire…and Air,” Humphrey said slowly, coming to a sudden halt. “For certain. I am not sure…there isn’t more.”

  “I’m a poly?”

  “It seems that way. That’s what I said in my report, anyway. The FBM people will have to confirm things to their own satisfaction, though—and perhaps we can help each other there.”

  “The cube,” said Thea.

  “The cube,” Humphrey confirmed. “That pretty little white thing, with its Elemental symbols that come and go if someone with the right ability to trigger them so much as breathes on it, and remain stubbornly out of reach to everyone else. So far, we’re not even sure what it’s made of, let alone what’s really inside it. Luana’s tried everything short of a crowbar, but that thing isn’t cooperating at all. We know it’s Elemental, but we don’t know anything more about it. I’ve questioned Beltran, the professor’s younger son, closely, because the cube came back when he did, in a bag apparently associated with him, but he doesn’t know any more than we do, or doesn’t remember. And he shows no Elemental gift. None. I am not even sure how he and the cube came to show up together in the first place; the only connection I can think of is the connivance of the Faele, and perhaps your Trickster avatar. But I can’t prove any of that, not while the cube is still keeping its secrets.”

  “But I don’t know either,” Thea said. “The first I saw of it was when it tumbled onto the professor’s desk.”

  “I know, but if I’m right and you’re a poly-Elemental, then it’s possible that you can figure out how to unlock it.”

  Thea hesitated for a long moment. “But you said there were four other poly-Elementals…and there must be even more uni-Element mages.”

  “If this thing was made by a poly-Elemental, then no single Element will be enough to crack it. As for the four mages that I mentioned earlier, as I said, one of them is feebleminded with age. Two of the others have been approached, and have both failed.”

  “And the fourth?”

  “We can’t ask the fourth,” Humphrey said. “The professor is in the hospital. He’s been in a sort of half coma for over a month now.”

  Thea had flinched just a little when Humphrey had named Beltran de los Reyes. Now the guilt she had carried around since the previous summer surfaced once more. Diego de los Reyes, Beltran’s shadow-twin, had inherited the professor’s Elemental gifts…and had used them to unleash the spellspam storm. Thea had walled Diego up in a mirrored world of his own illusions, from which he could never escape.

  “Is it…because…of Diego…because of me?” Thea whispered, stricken.

  “If it was because of Diego, it certainly wasn’t your doing,” Humphrey said gently. “Don’t take that guilt on yourself. That isn’t why I came here.”

  “What about the tapes?” Thea asked after a moment. “The tapes that came with the cube? Is there anything there that might help?”

  Humphrey shook his head. “That’s the other reason I’m here,” he said. “Terry. The tapes are badly damaged. We haven’t been able to read much from them, and what remains legible is fragmented and confusing. It’s like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the picture is and without any edge pieces at all. But there’s a strong hint at something…that shouldn’t be possible.”

  “I haven’t seen much of Terry lately. He’s been either studying or locked away in the N-room,” Thea said. It was not likely they were being spied on, but she was still reluctant to utter the word Nexus out loud in public.

  Humphrey pulled out the wrist-gadget that he had shown Thea on the library steps. “That’s why I brought this,” he said. “You can weave us into the N-room. Using the N itself, remotely. Watch.”

  He toggled something on the side of the keyboard panel, and the panel slid down with a click, revealing a tiny screen behind it. He pressed three keys apparently at random, and the screen lit with a dull green radiance, a tiny cursor blinking in the upper left-hand corner. Humphrey typed in something, the screen blipped, and a new line of text appeared, demanding a password. Humphrey typed one in, and the screen changed color, becoming a deep blue.

  He passed the gadget to Thea. “Go ahead,” he said. “Type in whatever you need, then hit ENTER. It will be as though you’re doing it on the N keyboard.”

  Thea took the keypad gingerly. “Wow,” she said, staring at it. “This is awesome.”

  “It’s safer, too,” Humphrey said. “You know how you leave your shadow self behind at a computer when you do this? Well, with that, you don’t—you’re carrying it with you, the computer on which you typed in the commands. Your shadow self is never left behind to be vulnerable or exposed. Nifty, eh?”

  Thea lifted her eyes to stare at him. “They’ll never let me keep this,” she said. “You did say you’d brought it for me, didn’t you?”

  “If I make you a secret agent of the FBM, it’s legitimate equipment,” Humphrey said, “and trust me, in order to work on that cube, you’re going to need clearance. Pretty high clearance. High enough for that.”

  “Hang on,” Thea said. “Let me try this.”

  She pecked out a series of letters with her right index finger, and
then hesitated, poised above the tiny button marked ENTER. Humphrey nodded encouragingly. Thea closed her eyes and stabbed the button.

  “Where did you come from?”

  At the sound of Terry’s astonished voice Thea opened her eyes and looked around. She and Humphrey were right beside the desk in the secret Nexus room below Principal Harris’s office. Humphrey wore a proud grin; Terry’s face was a mask of bewildered confusion.

  “New toy,” Thea said, brandishing her keypad. “Humphrey brought it.”

  “Nice to see you again, Terry,” Humphrey said, sticking out a hand.

  Terry reached out and shook it reflexively, still blinking at the two of them. “I don’t get it—which computer—?”

  “Yours,” Thea said, enjoying herself enormously. “The Nexus. Remotely.”

  Terry let his breath out with an explosive sigh of denial. “That isn’t possible,” he said, spinning his chair back to stare at the monitors. “I would have known. And you’d need the password to get—”

  “Terry,” Thea said, “it’s Humphrey May. From the Federal Bureau of Magic. He has the password.”

  “But I would have noticed,” Terry said obstinately.

  “It would have been a blip, if anything,” Humphrey said.

  Terry turned around to face him again, his eyes huge. He had actually gone white. “If I can’t even tell when the Nexus security has been breached…How many of those things are there?”

  “Only two: the one that Thea’s holding and another, locked in a safe somewhere back in Washington,” Humphrey said. “Relax, Terry. I have a special password; you would have known if anyone else had tried to actually hack in there.”

  Terry was still shaking his head. “But the security risk…”

  “My responsibility,” Humphrey said. “And I honestly don’t think Thea is about to go showing this thing off.”

  “You’re leaving it with Thea?” Terry squawked.

  “Are you?” Thea said, glancing up.

  “As I said,” Humphrey said, nodding. “We need you for the cube. I will have your word that you will be responsible with this thing. It doesn’t leave your side, and nobody knows what it does, outside of this room.”