Shadowrun

by Dylan Birtolo

  Back inside, Frostburn tried her best to be a good party guest, but she was fuming. She hadn’t gotten a chance to get her work done, she was already late getting back home, her cousin was acting like a crazy asshole... Her welcome-home party had finally begun to wane; more than half the crowd had gone home already. The childless adults lingered, though. Probably wondering who they could get to take them home afterward. Gross. Better hope beer goggles didn’t keep you from recognizing your relative before you let things get out of control.

  Frostburn was all socialized out and bone-weary. She didn’t perform well on the social front when in the best of spirits—that catastrophe with little Ida attested to that—but on not enough sleep, with a torched safe-house, fear for her friends’s and family’s lives, and after a fight with her childhood best friend? All things considered, Frostburn thought she was doing pretty well on the social front. She hadn’t even hit anyone yet.

  She leaned against the kitchen counter, distracted by her thoughts, and noticed she had taken her commlink out without thinking about it. She also found she had dialed all but the last two digits of Emilia’s commcode. She paused and scowled, unsure of what she was going to say if she answered.

  After a beat, Frostburn decided to plow ahead and finished the code. She waited, listening for Emilia to pick up, but the call went to voicemail. Emilia was probably still ticked off. Or maybe she’d passed out. Frostburn wondered whether Emilia was with friends and whether they were on the up-and-up. Once upon a time, she may have allowed herself a cozy daydream of Emilia’s friends exchanging amused glances over their sleeping friend, and of one of them lovingly tucking an afghan over her. But experience and adrenaline shouted that down as nothing but naïve, and etched an altogether different and far less sweet pathway of thought.

  She hit redial. No answer.

  She yanked open the fridge door. Glass receptacles in the door clanged together noisily.

  She dialed again.

  Voicemail.

  Clusters of her relatives approached to say goodbye. Frostburn suppressed an enormous sigh, smiled dutifully, and passed out hugs, but soon found herself pacing and gnawing on her thumbnail. She had to get back to work, regardless of whether she could work things out with her cousin. Smoothing things over would just have to wait.

  She went back to the refrigerator for the bottle she’d been after before the last batch of goodbyes. She set the cold soda onto the chipped, laminate countertop and yanked open the silverware drawer. Rummaging through four types of tongs, five types of spatula, and six types of spoon, she retrieved the bottle opener. With a grunt, she picked up the bottle and ripped the cap off.

  She set the bottle opener down and, with her thumb, she redialed Emilia one last time.

  Voicemail.

  Frostburn slammed the opened bottle to the counter, sending up a shower of foam.

  She cursed under her breath and went to the bathroom to grab a dry towel big enough to handle the mess. The window of the bathroom looked right out onto the driveway, where she now noticed that her car was no longer parked in the driveway. She did a double-take and peered in every direction she could see from the window. Her car was nowhere to be seen.

  She marched out of the bathroom.

  One of her uncles was in the living-room in mid-stoop, placing Aunt Gloria’s bread bag rug back on the carpet.

  “Where the hell is my car?” she asked.

  “Emilia borrowed it,” he said. When he rose to his feet again and saw the look on her face, he hastily added, “She told me you said it was okay.”

  Frostburn made a guttural growl of frustration and whirled back into the kitchen.

  Dial. Voicemail. Dial. Voicemail. Frostburn’s blood ran hot when she was frustrated, and she couldn’t help but leave a message. “You get drunk, shoot off a gun in front of the kids, and now you steal my car? What the hell, girl?! You’d better have that car back to me in one piece—and soon, or I’m gonna—”

  The recording time ended with a click.

  “Why the hell can’t I leave an hour-long freaking message, huh?” she yelled at her commlink. “It’s not like we use tape anymore! For crying out loud!”

  Her uncle looked in from the living room, with a chagrined expression. Frostburn felt herself flush a little. “I’m sorry, it’s not your fault. I’m just...” she hunted for words.

  “I’d be ticked if someone took my car, too,” he said with a smile.

  Frostburn nodded, flushed even harder, and offered her own wan smile in return. “Sorry,” she muttered, and then retreated to the bathroom again. She paced, clawed at her hair, and gnashed her teeth in silent fury. Then with a sharp sigh, she threw her hands down and centered herself, calming her brain.

  She took a few deep breaths, closed her eyes, and began the process of summoning a spirit. In her mind’s eye, she plunged her hands across the border between the physical and the meta planes. She conjured and pulled forth an assemblage, the threads of raw energy from the plane of kin and brought them into the physical plane beside her. There, she willed and shaped the energies into a magical construct―a spirit―that would obey her orders. Once its services to her were up, the energies would return to their native plane of existence. It wasn’t really how it worked—rather, no one really knew exactly how it worked—magical scholars said it worked in any number of ways, and each way was often slightly different for each summoner. But at least she was confident in the structure of the thing. Other traditions insisted the things had minds of their own, which Frostburn felt was patently ridiculous.

  The spirit of kin construct took shape in astral space. So closely related to the metahumanity on the physical plane were they that spirits of kin showed up resembling metahumans. This spirit had taken the appearance of a farmer. Farming had been big in Snohomish for a long time, but this looked like none she’d seen before. Modern farmers wore corporate uniforms and weren’t typically more than drone operators, but this one wore bib overalls and appeared—but thankfully didn’t smell—like he’d been rolling in muck. Spirit constructs could be strange.

  “Find Emilia, and let me know when you have found her. When you do, I will have you guide me to her.”

  The spirit telepathically assented to its assigned tasks and disappeared. The task could take hours, if the spirit could find her at all, and Frostburn let out a heavy sigh. Maybe she could get some sleep and call a cab in the morning if she couldn’t get her car back before then. But she’d be sending that bill to her cousin, damn it!

  In the wee hours of the morning, Frostburn slumped in her aunt’s chair in front of the trid. Her head drooped and woke her up with a start for the fifth time in a row. If anything, she wanted to be awake if Emilia returned to the house so she could rip her a new one. She considered getting up and pacing to stay awake, but it seemed like far too much work.

  An impression arrived to her consciousness and snapped her fully into wakefulness. Her spirit of kin had returned. Its telepathic missive to Frostburn was simply that it had located a sign of Emilia. Frostburn hoisted herself out of the recliner, arched her back in a stretch, and groaned. The on-again-off-again napping had worn her out more than if she’d stayed fully awake, but the fight she had with Emilia bubbled back up to the surface. Adrenaline worked better than caffeine.

  Hell, she could have just asked to use the car. As long as her cousin had said where she was going and when she’d be back, Frostburn probably would have agreed. But instead, Emilia had stolen the car, and now Frostburn was pissed. She couldn’t imagine what had prompted Emilia to do it. She probably wanted to drive her friends around town and deface property or something. The most dangerous part of getting her car back was going to be losing her voice from yelling at Emilia so much once she found her.

  Frostburn snuck out of the house, easing the door closed until the latch engaged with a soft click. She took one last glance around the quiet cul-de-sac to insure no one was looking her way, then headed into the empty garage. Although she w
asn’t doing anything illegal, the less often she had to test the resiliency of her fake magical practitioner’s license, the better. Sure, she had a real license to practice magic, but things would become much harder for her if the cops pinged the real license; at least a fake one could be replaced if burned. And there were still some people around who, if they spotted someone summoning spirits, might decide to call the cops. Magic was widely known, but more than a few folks still got jumpy about it. Or maybe it was just that they got jumpy watching an ork practice magic. Either way, she preferred to remain unseen.

  Mostly hidden in the garage, she summoned a spirit of air. It gave off the odor of burned wood as it materialized, and resembled nothing more substantial than a plume of smoke, but this was a stronger-than-average spirit she had summoned. It had a particular job to do. She gave the air spirit orders to transport her via air and to conceal both her and itself while they traveled. Using her spirit of kin’s guidance, she would direct the spirit of air where to go. The air spirit should be able to carry her, and indeed, upon receiving its orders, the spirit took on a shape resembling a large bird of prey, hooked its talons painfully around her upper arms, and hoisted her up into the air. The spirit appeared to struggle to lift her, and she tried to help by kicking off the ground. Eventually, they were airborne, but the spirit kept dipping down every so often, forcing Frostburn to pull her feet up several times to avoid catching them in treetops or on rooftops.

  In a strange sort of telepathic game of Hot and Cold, the spirit of kin led Frostburn and the flying air spirit to the location where it had found Emilia. The path took them over the residential neighborhoods near her aunt’s house, making the houses, yards, and garages look more like a city-building simulation game as they grew ever smaller; over the big agriculture operations that took up much of the district’s east side―a patchwork of genetically-engineered crops; and then they approached a small patch of crumbling commercial development attached like a tick to the side of a block of low-income housing. The typical sorts of businesses―a payday loan office, two liquor stores, and a pharmacy—all eager to feast on the low-income residents.

  The spirit of air descended swiftly and unceremoniously dumped Frostburn about a meter up from the pavement. She yelped and barely caught herself from smashing her face on the asphalt, skinning her palms instead. With a glare at the air spirit, she stood, brushed herself off, and ordered it to await further instructions. If she didn’t know better, she would have said the magical construction was pissed at her. Her midsection ached from all the abdominal work on the ride over, pulling her feet up over and over again.

  A gate—no more than a rusting bar with chipped paint—crossed one open end of the driveway that arced in, past, and back out away from the strip mall. The other side of the driveway sat wide open, The gate on that side lay on the pavement, rusting, bent out of shape, and forgotten.

  “All right,” she said to her spirit of kin, though it was unnecessary for her to speak aloud to communicate with it. “Show me what you found.”

  She followed the spirit’s guidance—hot, cold—past the stores, past patches of grass gone to seed that grew through the broken pavement out in front. She shifted to astral perception.

  The world shifted and filled with color. Magic and life were the wheat of the astral realm and technology was the chaff. Anything that lacked that spark of life—things like buildings, parking lots, cars, commlinks—were a dull grey in astral space. Magic and life, however, glowed with brilliant color. Skilled magicians could learn to read the auras and colors to determine all sorts of things: health, age, mood, magical ability, the presence of cyber- or bioware, which, like the buildings, cars, and ’links, appeared as dull, gaping holes in the otherwise colorful aura of life. She didn’t like to examine those with ’ware if she could prevent it; she found their lack disturbing. But she had the skill to look deeper, even if it was not one of her strongest skills.

  A faint glimmer of something out of place caught Frostburn’s eye, and she noticed a magical signature hovering in astral space near the corner of the liquor store. Magical signatures were created when someone used magic, and they bore qualities that made them resemble the aura of the person doing the casting. But signatures and auras were two completely different things. Frostburn did a double-take: this magical signature bore all the traces of Emilia’s aura.

  Frostburn shook her head, astounded. Her little cousin was Awakened. As far as she knew, no one else in the family was Awakened. Frostburn’s heart ached for her cousin. To have to go through Awakening alone?

  She studied the signature with curiosity. Her experience working with the astral, plus her time earning a degree, granted her quite a bit of knowledge. She could tell that Emilia had been feeling happy and not a little bit cocky when she cast what left this signature. The signature was created when she used a Health spell, though she couldn’t pin down which one it was. Frostburn could tell that Emilia was as strong magically as she was, and shook her head in amazement again. How the hell did I miss that?

  A couple more steps put her around the corner where she found her car parked. She approached cautiously and laid her palm on the hood; the engine was still warm.

  Birds had begun to call. A little thrill in her gut at the sound of their songs told her it was probably nearing dawn. Checking her commlink verified that it was close to four in the morning. A weak wind gusted her way, carrying the sound of not-too-far-away voices to her ear.

  Frostburn stealthily headed toward the direction the voices came from. She maintained a habit while on the job of shifting back and forth between astral and physical perception. There were just some things you could see better using one or the other, even if your ability to notice...well, everything other than what you can see better takes a big hit. When you’re looking at the world in astral space, you can’t see things in the physical realm as well. Just as when you’re looking at the world in physical space, you can’t see the astral. She had tried to explain it to Emilia once. She used words like “glow” and “sparkle,” and soon lost the girl’s interest as quickly as she disgusted herself.

  Frostburn found it all difficult to explain. She just groked it; knew how to harness the winds, so to speak, and sail her ship in the direction she needed. And when she looked over the world using astral perception, and when she sifted that information through her studies and mother-fragging degree from UW, she could tell quite a lot, actually.

  She stepped off the parking lot and into the weeds, searching using her physical perception, and was quickly rewarded when she spotted a recent shoe print. Switching to astral perception, she spotted another of Emilia’s magical signatures a short distance from the print. Then she heard another snippet of talking: it sounded like one of those talking heads on the trid. At least she knew she was going in the right direction.

  Butting up against the property in the back was the backside of an old gas station. Maybe they were trying to diversify as a junk yard, too, because numerous cars and trucks littered the area. Most appeared inoperable in some way, and one or two were verifiable hunks of junk.

  She used the cars as cover as she closed the distance. The voices grew louder, and she knew they must be coming from inside. Sure enough, once she got close enough to get a better look, she noticed the back door hung ajar. She flattened against the wall a short distance from the open door, scooched forward, and listened.

  The voice she had thought sounded like someone on the trid definitely sounded from here as though the speaker were just inside and not on the trid. “—And that’s because they underestimate you. You’re strong, and they’re afraid of you. They’ll do anything, everything to get a leg up, even if that means killing everyone who doesn’t look like or behave like they do.”

  Murmurs of agreement rose to meet Frostburn’s ears. There didn’t sound like there were all that many people inside.

  “It’s up to us to put the balance right again,” the speaker continued. “We need to be the ones to s
tand up and say, ‘No More!’”

  “Yeah!” A different voice. A young woman’s voice, but not Emilia’s.

  Frostburn moved toward the opposite side of the station, hoping to find another way inside. She didn’t want to astrally project out here alone, with nowhere to stash herself and no one to watch over her body. She spotted a broken window next to the front entrance and approached with caution, listening intently. The man inside continued his speech. She caught a word or two: he talked about justice and injustice. From the vocal agreement during his pauses, he seemed to be riling up his audience.

  Frostburn reached the window and leaned in to get a better look inside. A blue glow shone on either side of the window frame. Frostburn frowned for a moment before it dawned on her that the glow was a reflection and it originated behind her. She readied herself to counter spellcasting, and turned to face an enormous, blue, glowing manifestation of a wolf. A spirit of beasts of strong-to-moderate force, its muzzle wrinkled and teeth bared, issued a deep, low growl from the back of its throat.

  Stay with Emilia. She sent the silent order to her spirit of kin just as the wolf lunged at her.

  Frostburn dodged its leap and instinctively brought her hands up to throw an Ice Spear spell at the spirit, even if she knew she didn’t need her hands to cast. However, she second-guessed herself at the last moment and released of the threads of magic she had gathered: she didn’t want to alert the group inside to her presence, and magic could be quite noisy. Instead, she switched to astral perception, and barely dodged as the spirit jumped toward her again. Her astral-self grabbed the beast spirit’s astral form, and the two grappled in close combat, silent to everything in the physical.

  The beast struck at her with its teeth—or the astral impression of teeth, anyway. It got a snap in on her forearm, which wouldn’t result in a bleeding wound, but instead battered her will. Physical damage could be seen; stun damage couldn’t always be seen, and that’s the kind of damage dealt to the astral form. But stun would knock you down just as quickly as physical damage. Sometimes it could do you in faster, particularly if no one could see what’s wrong with you and couldn’t know to put forth any effort to help. A silent fight resulting in silent, invisible wounds.