Worldweavers: Cybermage

by Alma Alexander

  “That’s half a lifetime’s work destroyed,” Tesla said, his voice quiet. Quenched. “I have no means of rebuilding most of the things that were in that laboratory. It was irreplaceable.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Thea said.

  Tesla glanced down at her. “Have we met?”

  “Not yet,” Thea said, without thinking.

  Tesla frowned delicately. “Not…yet?”

  “It’s complicated,” Thea said helplessly.

  “Indeed,” Tesla murmured. “Most things are. However, your face is very familiar—as though I remember it from a long time ago.”

  “I’m fifteen,” Thea said.

  “Quite,” Tesla said after a moment. “That would make it…unlikely.”

  He stared at her for a moment longer, his brow furrowed as though he was astonished or puzzled. Thea instinctively glanced down, belatedly realizing that she might have been standing in the middle of the New York street wearing just the T-shirt she had worn to bed, but her subconscious or some aspect of her gift that she had not yet figured out had taken care of that detail. Partly, anyway. She was not dressed in period clothes, but in something nondescript and dark that resembled a tracksuit.

  Or at least that’s what she saw herself as wearing. Her companion might have been seeing precisely what he expected to see.

  “What will you do now?” she said, rather abruptly.

  “I am not certain. I will have to consider my options carefully.” He sighed, contemplating the façade that concealed his personal tragedy. “There should have been a plan. I should have done something…something exceptional, to protect what was worth protecting. I should have remembered Kaschei’s needle.”

  “What’s a Kaschei needle?” Thea asked.

  “Not a Kaschei needle. The Kaschei needle. There was only one,” Tesla said, correcting her. “Kaschei is the evil sorcerer from the Russian fairy tales. You have never heard of him?”

  Thea shook her head, every instinct aquiver. This was somehow very important, though she could not for the life of her figure out why.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  Tesla cast another long, mournful look at the building. “It isn’t as though I have anything else to do right now,” he said. “Kaschei…was immortal, or was reputed to be. Until Prince Ivan found out that he could be killed, if a certain needle was pressed into his forehead between his eyes.”

  “He’d hardly let someone just walk up and do that,” Thea said. “If he were really an evil sorcerer—”

  “Oh, that would not have been the problem,” Tesla said, frowning up at the brightening sky as though the imminent presence of sunlight spilling down the streets of New York City left him distinctly uneasy. “The problem, you see, was finding the needle. Because the needle was inside an egg. The egg was inside a duck. The duck was inside a rabbit. The rabbit was inside a wooden chest. The wooden chest was buried at the foot of an oak tree. And the oak tree was on an island that was impossible to get to. In order to get Kaschei’s needle, you would have had to find the island, find a way to go there, dig up the chest, catch the rabbit, which would escape when you opened the chest, catch the duck, which would escape if you caught and killed the rabbit, and catch the egg that would roll out of the duck and away from you if you managed to catch and kill the duck—and only then could you get the needle. Then you could find Kaschei as he slept, and push the needle home between his eyes. But you had to get the needle first. And it was in a safe place—a place where no harm could come to it.”

  “But your lab isn’t a needle,” Thea said, glancing up at the smoke still wafting out of the window. “You could hardly hide all that inside an egg on an island.”

  “Ah, you don’t understand, child,” Tesla murmured, and then shook himself. “I must go. It will soon be full day, and I have always found the sun intolerable if I am out in it unprotected for long. Good day to you.”

  “Good luck,” Thea said, but she already spoke to his retreating back.

  Kaschei’s needle.

  The idea hung in front of her eyes, tantalizing her; she knew it was essential that she understand precisely how the concept was linked to the rest of the things she had seen in the cube-world, but she couldn’t connect the dots into a picture that made sense to her.

  She glanced down at the keypad on her wrist, frowning.

  “I wonder what would happen…” she murmured, and tapped something new into the gadget. Nonspecific place and time; somewhere/when where Kaschei becomes important enough for me to understand significance.

  It was risky, but then again, it was no more risky than some of the things she had already done while walking the Barefoot Road of the ancient Anasazi, the Road that led anywhere and everywhere if you knew how to use it. Cheveyo had taught her that it was possible to reach a destination on that Road with just an absence in her mind, shaped like the thing she sought. By weaving a world that filled the absence, and then letting the universes realign themselves so that she could step from one world into another, she could find herself in the same place as the thing she was seeking. She had done it before—she had found Signe Lovransdottir that way, back in the early days of the spellspam epidemic when Signe had been lost to the Alphiri. The only difference was that now, with Tesla’s words and images vivid in her mind, she was chasing an idea, not a person or a place. There was no reason that it shouldn’t work the same way.

  Her finger hovered above the keypad for a moment, and then she pressed her lips together and jabbed ENTER with rather more force than she intended.

  The change was immediate, and disconcerting.

  Instead of the brownstone-lined New York streets, she stood beside a small stream. She wore the same loose dark clothes that she had worn back in the city, but this time her feet were bare. She wiggled her toes luxuriously and felt the cool grass brushing her ankles. Slightly upstream from her was a jury-rigged mill wheel, turning with remarkable evenness, and beside it crouched a boy.

  The boy from Thea’s dream. The boy that Nikola Tesla had once been.

  He might have been about seven or eight years old, but the promise of his height was already there in the two long, lanky legs folded up about his ears. He stared despondently at his wheel and at the water, poking at both every so often with a long stick. There was a sense of tragedy about him, much as there had been in the city street on a different continent and many years in his future, but this felt like a deeper, more personal grief.

  “Hey,” Thea said helplessly. And then thought, This is silly. I am talking to him in English. He’s seven—he doesn’t even speak it yet.

  But apparently language was not a barrier here, because the boy looked up at the sound of her voice.

  “Hey,” he said. “Who are you?”

  “You’re Nikola Tesla, aren’t you?”

  “Niko,” the boy said laconically.

  “What are you doing?” Thea asked, coming closer and squatting a few steps away from him to peer at the mill wheel. “Did you make that?”

  “Yeah. But it isn’t right. It’s sticking.”

  Thea stared at the perfect smoothness of the wheel’s motion in perplexity. “How? I can’t see it sticking.”

  The boy gave her a shriveling look. “I can tell,” he said. “It isn’t good enough. I’m just not good enough to make it work right. Dane would know.”

  “Dah-ney?” Thea said awkwardly, trying to mimic his pronunciation.

  “My brother.”

  “Does he help you with these projects?”

  “He used to. He’s dead.”

  The bluntness of that statement took Thea’s breath away. She sat cross-legged in the grass without taking her eyes off Niko.

  “I’m sorry,” she said slowly.

  Niko’s eyes flicked up to meet hers, very briefly, and then he resumed staring at the wheel. “Two years ago, come next month,” he said.

  “How…how did he…”

  “The big black got him,” Niko said, without changing the teno
r of his voice at all. “The horse. He was twelve. The horse threw him, and then stomped him.” He paused. “I saw.”

  “You watched your brother die?” Thea said, appalled.

  “Yeah,” Niko said, and tossed the stick he still held into the stream. It was there, in that small motion—all the violence of the pent-up guilt and sorrow that he would not allow to bubble to the surface of his demeanor, his expression, his attitude, his voice. “It should have been me,” he said, and each word fell into the water like a stone, and sank beneath the surface.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Thea said.

  Niko glanced at her again, swiftly, and then away. “Maybe not,” he said. “Makes no difference. I should have…He should never have died. There should have been a way to keep his life somewhere…safe….”

  He was blindly feeling his way toward something, something that he could not name, that he did not even realize he was searching for. But in Thea’s mind something suddenly came together, like two magnets clicking.

  “Kaschei’s needle,” she murmured.

  Niko turned his head. “What?”

  “You think you could have hidden your brother’s own equivalent of Kaschei’s needle so that death didn’t find him?” Thea said gently.

  “How do you know about that?” Niko asked. His voice had changed at last, a tinge of wonder mixed with fear creeping into his tone. “How do you know about Kaschei?”

  “You told me,” Thea said, tears in her eyes. “Far, far away and many years from now.”

  A girl’s voice came drifting over to the creek; apparently the cross-language communication applied only between Niko and Thea, because all she could make out in the girl’s call was the name Niko. The boy turned to look, lifted his hand in a half wave, uncoiled from his crouch.

  “That’s my sister,” he said. “I have to go.”

  “So do I,” Thea said. “It was nice to meet you.”

  “Are you going to come back?”

  “Someday,” Thea said. “Sure.”

  “Good. I might have fixed the wheel by then. Maybe. So that you can see when it runs properly.”

  “Okay. I’ll look forward to that.”

  He turned without another word and loped away across the grass. Thea watched him run up to his sister, and then they both turned around to look at her and Niko lifted his hand in a self-conscious little wave. His sister merely stared warily in Thea’s direction. Then they both turned their backs and trotted off.

  Thea sighed, looked down at her wrist, typed Home, and then hurriedly erased that before she turned up at her real home and freaked out her parents. My bedroom, Elemental house, San Francisco, she typed instead, and pressed ENTER.

  Niko’s mill and the creek it was on melted away into the familiar bedroom in Professor de los Reyes’s house. Thea threw back her covers and realized that the Tiffany lamp beside her bed was bathing the room in radiance and a small council of war appeared to be going on.

  Magpie sat on her bed, kicking her heels against the side. Ben stood by the door with his arms crossed, looking mutinous. Terry was hovering by Thea’s own bed, and Tess perched precariously just on the edge of it. They all turned to stare.

  “Kaschei,” Thea gasped.

  “Gesundheit,” said Tess. “Where have you been?”

  “You haven’t run off to tattle on me, have you?”

  “Just about to,” Ben muttered.

  “Don’t tell Humphrey just yet. He’ll take this thing away from me,” Thea said, lifting her key-padded wrist.

  “Not a bad idea,” Ben said. “Tess crashed into our room about ten minutes ago, after Magpie realized that you’d somehow gone, and here we all are. Lucky for you that you came back of your own free will just now. We were about to call in the cavalry.”

  “What happened?” Magpie wailed.

  “I figured…we had to talk to the Tesla who was in that cube…”

  “Which one?” Magpie said. “We saw at least three of them. I would like to ask him about the pigeons.”

  “I didn’t get to the pigeons,” Thea said. “Not directly. But I think I may have an inkling as to what happened.”

  “Did you talk to him?” Terry asked, leaning forward.

  “How?” Ben demanded. “I thought we all had to go into the cube before it would allow us access to any of it.”

  “But she’s an Elemental,” Tess said slowly.

  “All the same, Ben has a point,” Magpie said. “How come we all needed to pitch in the first time and now all of a sudden you can sail in by yourself?”

  “Because it was sealed, before,” Thea said. “What the five of us did was break the seal. We needed to do that together—there needed to be more than one sense, more than one Element, in there, because Tesla was a quad-Element mage and he would have used all of his skill to lock that thing down tight. If it is what I now think it might be. But it’s open now—to us. Perhaps only to us.”

  “To you, anyway,” Ben said. “How did you get back in without going through the cube?”

  Thea lifted her wrist. “I wrote myself in. I wove it.”

  “Back up,” Terry said. “You sound as though you went in looking for something pretty specific.”

  “Well, yeah,” Magpie said with a grin. “She was after Tesla. Did you get him?”

  “Twice,” Thea said. “But it was the dream that pointed me to—”

  “What dream?” Magpie said, suddenly serious.

  Thea turned, narrowing her eyes. “Tesla. First young, then a child, then an old man…”

  “And there was snow,” Tess said, nodding slowly.

  “And there was a pigeon,” Magpie said. “A white one. On the windowsill.”

  “Trust you to notice that,” Thea said with a quick grin, and then stared at her friends. “Are you telling me we all had the same dream?”

  “Uh…” said Ben, and his arms had unfolded, his hands hanging by his side. “Yeah, actually. I remember the old man.”

  “Me too. And the snow,” Terry said. “Weird. But what suddenly lit a fire under you to start chasing it down? You did that way before we knew that we’d dreamed the same thing.”

  They stared at one another, wide-eyed.

  “Could it be…the house?” Magpie finally ventured, sounding spooked. “Could it have made us dream that?”

  Terry and Tess exchanged a look. “It’s happened to us before,” Tess said. “But that’s different—it’s the twin thing. Not five completely unrelated people having exactly the same dream.”

  “Was it the same, really the same, or are we all just bouncing off details that sound familiar?” Ben asked.

  Terry shook his head. “Sounds like the same thing to me. Down to that pigeon that Magpie remembers. I saw it too.”

  “I think I’m starting to figure it out,” Thea said. “Humphrey keeps calling that thing ‘Tesla’s cube,’ but I don’t think it’s so much Tesla’s work as it is Tesla. Himself.”

  “What, like Twitterpat? Back in the other Nexus?” Terry said.

  Thea shook her head. “That’s just a hologram, a piece of software. I think this is much bigger than that. I think he somehow…preserved himself in that cube. Kaschei’s needle.”

  “There you go again,” Tess said. “Who or what is this Chai fellow?”

  “It’s a Russian fairy tale…” Thea began, and then the door of the bedroom opened. Ben jumped two feet into the air; the others whirled, startled, and Thea’s face and neck were suffused in a sudden vivid blush.

  “What is a Russian fairy tale?” Humphrey May said, pleasantly enough, from the doorway. But he wasn’t smiling, and his usually limpid blue eyes were hard. “Can we all play, or is it a closed Midnight Snack party? Don’t look so trapped, Thea—the house told me you were all awake. I told it to alert me to anything out of the ordinary in these bedrooms.” He tied the sash of his robe more securely around his waist, and came all the way into the room. “Well. Now that we’re awake, and seeing as I’m personally responsib
le for all of you while you’re out here, perhaps someone could fill me in?”

  6.

  IT TOOK THE BETTER part of an hour to explain everything to Humphrey, and then quite a while longer to mollify him, once he realized just how the keypad had been used without his knowledge or sanction. He postponed the rest of the confrontation until after they had all had a chance to sleep on it, having threatened Thea with dire consequences if she attempted to use the keypad again. He ordered everybody back to their rooms, and the rest of the night passed uneventfully, with no further shared dreams.

  But they slept fitfully, and woke earlier than they thought they ought to have. They drifted down to breakfast in self-conscious isolation instead of as a group. Magpie beat Thea to the bathroom by a split second, and then hogged it for what seemed like hours, finally emerging and flicking her blond streak back with a dramatic sweep as she descended the spiral staircase; Thea, growling, skimped on her own ablutions in her haste to get some breakfast.

  The prevailing mood was one of wary anticipation, but the house had its own ways of defusing tensions. By the time Thea finally made it down to breakfast, the others were in the midst of a raucous game of stump-the-house.

  “Wild berry jelly,” Magpie was saying as Thea entered the breakfast room. Magpie’s eyes were closed, her expression a mask of rapt remembrance. “Wild berries gathered by hand in the woods behind my grandmother’s house, and the spread she made from them—no extra sugar, just the berry sweetness, dark red, almost purple…”

  “Something’s there,” Tess said. “A jar on the table, look. Is that it?”

  Magpie opened her eyes and stared at a small cut-glass jar with a silver lid.

  “Looks about right, but let’s put it to the test,” she said, reaching for the mysterious jar with her right hand and grabbing a spoonful with her left. She took a spoonful of the dark red jelly, and a slow, satisfied smile spread across her face. She licked her berry-stained lips and dug her spoon in for a second helping. “Oh, yes! Oh, I haven’t tasted this for years.”