by D M Gilmore
Before Rita had a chance to ask, Asher pulled up a screen of his own and passed her a copy of his resume. He had checked it over a dozen times, making sure everything made him look as much like a good candidate as possible
“U of T? Impressive,” she muttered, scrolling through the document. “Hobbies include… magic and coding? Aren’t they the same thing?”
“Not exactly,” Asher shrugged. “Coding can refer to programming, or the development of magical applications, colloquially known as spells. Magic is exclusively the manipulation of mana outputs through code,” he said, rather excitedly, “and while coding is a necessary skill when developing one’s own spells, it’s technically not a requirement for the practice.”
“My, my, you weren’t kidding,” she smirked, raising her eyebrows at the response, “they really are your hobbies.”
Asher’s eyes fell to the floor, and he could feel a red blush pushing its way through his grey cheeks. The female shook her head and dismissed the holoscreens around her, before folding her hands carefully in her lap. “That’s quite alright, dear.” She continued, in a gentler tone than before, “What you do outside these walls is honestly none of my concern. The only thing that concerns me is what you’re good at, because I need you to be good at maintaining spell networks. From what your brother has told me, and from what I’ve gathered by talking with you, you have the skills necessary to do the job.” She made a sound that seemed to be halfway between a laugh and a whimper, before sighing sadly. “Well, follow me. Why don’t I give you a quick look around the facility, and then maybe you can show me what you’re capable of?”
The tour was a lot less detailed than Asher had been hoping for. In his mind, when he had played out the scenario, his interviewer would take him into each room, explain what happened in there, why it was necessary for the operation of the facility, and how it would be his job to make sure everything would be well maintained. Of course, in his mind he had imagined the facility would be a lot better maintained in the first place, given the majority of the people who worked there seemed to either be maintenance or custodial workers.
Instead of a detailed overview, the female drake took him through a quick path, pointing out important individuals and glossing briefly over what they did to keep the station operational. They went around the first floor, took a set of stairs up to the second, said hello to some accountants, then returned to the first floor where they stopped in what appeared to be the security office. A quick mental check against the map in his head confirmed it, too.
On one wall was a collection of lockers, each labelled with a name, while directly opposite to it was a console beneath an array of monitors. Seated in a reinforced chair was a chubby male drake with greyish-green scales, snacking on a box of cookies and sipping from a large mug of coffee.
“Asher, this is Dale, our chief of security,” Rita growled, knocking cookie crumbs off the console with a subtle flick of her tail.
“Sup, scaler,” Dale grumbled, taking a quick chug of coffee. He blinked in surprise as Rita cleared her throat angrily, and he sat up in his seat and brushed the crumbs off his filthy beige uniform. “I mean, uh, hey, uh, sir,” he said, quickly holding out a hand to shake, which was quickly pulled away when it was clear that Asher was not in the business of shaking more hands. “Er, right.”
“Dale,” Rita hissed, narrowing his eyes in disgust, “don’t you have somewhere to be?”
“Erm, no, I’m supposed to be watching the monitors,” Dale mumbled, as he made a grimace, his wide snout twisting as he tried to figure out what she meant. “Oh, uh, I suppose I should go do a patrol or something.”
“Mm, yes,” Rita grumbled, “do that.”
Dale scurried out of the room, his talons clacking against the concrete floor and the box of cookies under his arm bouncing to and fro. Rita shook her head in frustration, muttered something about good-for-nothing kids, and offered the seat at the security console to Asher. He reluctantly took it, at her insistence, and yelped in surprise as she called a holoscreen up for him.
“One of the spells in the network has been buggy lately, I want you to identify which one,” she explained, as she pulled up a detailed list of all the spells in the network. “You don’t have to fix it, just identify it.”
“That all? Here I was, worried you were going to challenge me,” Asher grinned, winked up at Rita, and called up his own holodisplay into the air around him. He took a few seconds to reorganize his collection of displays, including the one that Rita had provided, into something a bit more manageable.
Spell networks were a collection of different spells working in tandem in order to fulfill specific purposes. The most rudimentary form of spell network was a ward array, where multiple wards were used for defence and security, but more complex networks existed, such as the ones that kept mana stations operational. While he didn’t have any information on what exactly this network would entail, as he had never studied the specifics of mana station maintenance, he was doing a very poor job of hiding his excitement at the prospect of finding out. He couldn’t stop himself from beaming in delight as he danced his fingers through screens and over keyboards, effortlessly working his way through the interface.
This was his natural element. Working with magic, making new spells, updating and improving existing software, even something as rudimentary as performing a system diagnostics. This was what he did best, and Lovecraft had had him on tech support. He scoffed at the idea and, for the first time, was glad to be rid of his old job.
With a quick flick of his eyes, he glanced at both the scanner spell he had running in the background and the battery life left in his phone, as both numbers blinked into existence for a split second when he glanced at the pocket in which his phone sat warmly against his leg. Both were hovering around seventy percent completion and full respectively.
“See anything interesting?” Rita asked, looking over his shoulder to get a better view of his personal displays.
“Not yet,” Asher mumbled, as he fired up a diagnostic spell and it began to churn through the network, identifying problems and reporting back to him. “You have some minor damage to a lot of subsystems, but as far as I can tell there’s nothing seriously harmful.”
“Nothing?” Rita asked, raising an eyebrow suspiciously. “Are you sure of that?”
Asher eyed the diagnostics output and frowned. “I see a ward desynchronized from the array, I see some laggy cameras, but nothing,” he suddenly cut himself off and blinked in surprise as an entire line of junk characters suddenly appeared in the output. “Hello…” he purred, pausing his spell to trace the line.
What he found nearly blew him out of his seat in surprise. “Your entire modulation matrix is corrupted,” he said, dropping his voice to a hush. “The spell responsible for controlling the flow and intensity of your mana output is garbage!” He looked up at Rita with wide eyes and blinked. “I know manaflux does weird things to spells but this is beyond anything I’ve ever heard of. How are you keeping the mana from flooding out into the city and blasting a whole new manaflux into Toronto?!”
Rita winced and nodded. “Yup, that’s the one,” she said, looking away to hide her shame. “Our main modulator has been offline ever since our former technician disappeared a few weeks back. Thank God for the backup modulators,” she chuckled.
“Disappeared?” Asher asked, cocking his head.
Rita shook her head slowly, and Asher immediately understood what she was leaving unsaid. Drakes disappeared all the time. No cop would waste their time looking for one, and if you couldn’t shell out the money to a private investigator, a missing drake might as well be a dead drake.
“Gimme about fifteen minutes, maybe I can restore it to a previous version,” Asher said changing the subject, and turning back to his screens. A gentle hand from Rita was enough to stop him in his tracks.
“You don’t work here just yet,” Rita muttered, quickly shutting down the holoscreens, “but I think you’ve m
ore than proven you’re capable of what we need. Congratulations, Asher, we’d be happy to have you.”
Asher blinked and stared up at the larger drake in shock. “Wait, what?”
“I’m offering you a job, dear. Salary starts at eight thousand a month, and after a few months we’ll see about getting you on benefits,” Rita smiled down at him, looking over the horn on her snout. “How soon can you start?”
“I could start tonight,” Asher admitted, scratching his neck nervously. It hadn’t fully hit him what she was saying. He hadn’t come for a job, despite the pretense, he came to get access to information about the system so he can steal an orb. He’d gotten his information, but it seemed he’d also succeeded in getting something a bit more.
“Good. Be here at 11pm when your brother’s night shift starts,” Rita said, clapping her hands eagerly. “You’ll have all night to familiarize yourself with the network and do what you can to fix it.”
“And Asher,” she added, as he pulled himself out of the chair and back to his feet, “welcome aboard.”
Chapter 8
Ruth grinned as he stepped out of the mana station’s entryway, pushing the rusty door open with a creak, and immediately saw his brother’s car sitting in the parking lot. That was a good sign, that Asher hadn’t run away with his tail between his legs, he had stuck around. He hadn’t been able to see them during the interview process or during the tour, he’d been stuck mopping some back hallways and cleaning a bathroom, but he had caught up with Dale after he had gotten kicked out of his office to talk about the likelihood of Rita hiring him.
“She’s desperate,” Dale had told him after they had retreated to the break room just opposite the security office. “She put the ad out weeks ago and she hasn’t gotten any applicants with a bit of skill.”
This gave Ruth the hope he needed. His plan to get Asher into an interview was working out better than he could have hoped. Asher would get a job and wouldn’t need to steal an orb for Smog. It was a win/win, as far as Ruth was concerned.
He quickly jogged over, peeling off the upper half of his custodial jumpsuit, revealing the plain white t-shirt he’d been wearing for the last few days, and tying the sleeves around his waist, just above his tail. As he got close, he noticed that Asher’s snout was buried in holoscreens, probably going over his notes again. Ruth tapped on the passenger side window, snapping his brother out of his reverie long enough to unlock the door and let him in.
“How’d it go?” Ruth asked, although he didn’t need to hear him say it to know. Word had gotten around the station that Rita had finally found a suitable replacement for their last technician, and it hadn’t taken a genius to guess who she’d picked. He grinned from cheek to cheek as, one by one, Asher dismissed his holoscreens, before finally sighing. Ruth blinked in surprise at the dour expression on his brother’s face, and dropped his own smile almost immediately. “It didn’t go well?”
“It went great,” Asher mumbled, “just... “ He paused for a moment as he tried to find the words to put his feelings into a sentence. “I’ve just been trying to figure out how I should break the news to Smog? That I won’t be needing to do his job anymore? How do I tell him that?”
Ruth squeezed his mouth shut and widened his eyes. He hadn’t thought of that. All the hoops he had jumped through to get Asher into the building, into a room alone with Rita Patel, would amount to nothing if Smog still expected them to follow through on the heist. “Oy vey,” he muttered, slumping backwards in the heavily reclined seat. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“No,” Asher agreed, with another sigh, “you really didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, bro, I appreciate what you did. In the long run this’ll help us a lot, but Smog isn’t going to take this lightly...”
“What’s he gonna do?” Ruth growled, crossing his arms. “Not like he could kill you, you’re the best damn spellcrafter in the whole city!”
Asher slammed his hands against the dashboard, which made Ruth jump in surprise at the sound. Something inside the dash clanged loudly, and Asher didn’t speak until the echo had faded. “Dammit Ruth, don’t think even for a second that we’re not disposable!” He hissed, flashing his glowing eyes at his brother. “He doesn’t need to kill us, he could do so much worse! What if he takes you hostage and uses you as leverage to force me to pull off the heist, did you even think of that?”
Ruth’s eyes narrowed for a moment, and he found himself shrinking into his car seat, trying to make himself as small as possible. “Dammit, bro,” he mumbled, “I can take care of myself, you don’t need to worry about me.”
“Yes I fucking do need to worry about you!” Asher shouted, giving up on suppressing the growl. The words came from deep within his throat now, accentuated by a rumbling in his chest. “Dammit, Ruth!” He pounded the dashboard again, eliciting yet another clang from loose inner components, before holding his fists to his eyes.
“Mom’s dead, Ash,” Ruth said, in a hushed tone, putting a reassuring hand on his older brother’s shoulder, “and Dad’s locked up tight. Whatever promise you made to them when we were kids doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It’s just us, Ruth. It’s always been us. You’re all I have. That’s why I have to make sure you’re okay,” Asher mumbled, dropping his snout to his chest and looking down at his seat with a whole new level of shame, “I won’t be able to live with myself if anything happens to you.”
Ruth sighed and nodded knowingly, and patted his brother’s shoulder a bit, feeling a bit awkward at his brother’s display of emotion. “Alright, fine. Back to the issue at hand, how do we get out of Smog’s job without him killing either of us?”
Almost as if on cue, Asher’s holodisplay lit up with a single line of text, which floated just above the dashboard of the car. Incoming call from: DUNCAN SMOG.
“Shit,” Asher growled, wiping his eyes and tearing the tie off his neck, which he quickly tossed into the back seat of the vehicle. “Shit shit shit.” He quickly pressed the receive call button, and the windshield of his car filled with the semi-transparent image of Smog’s office, complete with Smog himself standing in the middle of their view.
“Gentlemen,” Smog greeted with a deceptively friendly smile, his cheeks pulled back to reveal his razor-sharp teeth, “I’m so glad I was able to get you both at the same time.”
“Smog, what a pleasant surprise!” Asher said with a mock cheery tone, doing his best not to get completely tongue tied at the sudden presence of the very man they were discussing. “We were actually just about to call you!”
Smog’s grin almost seemed to deepen for a moment, his eyes casting a dark glare in Asher’s direction. “Oh, really? That’s interesting, because I was just checking in to see how preparation for the heist was going. Three days left on the clock and all that.”
“See it’s funny you should say that,” Asher said, his voice dropping in volume as he held his breath for a moment. Smog’s eyes snapped to his and narrowed in suspicion. “Listen, Duncan,” Asher paused to take a breath, carefully considering his words. Smog wasn’t necessarily what he would call a friend, but he was also far from being unreasonable. It was quite possible that, if they talked things through, he would agree to let them out without trouble. Still, it paid to take it carefully. “What would you say if somebody in my position, somebody who had agreed to take a job for you I mean, wanted to...” he paused for a moment, as Smog cocked an eyebrow curiously, “I know it sounds crazy, but what if they wanted to back out of the job?”
Smog’s other eyebrow raised, and he pursed his lips, nodding in thought. “Interesting proposition, any particular reason why somebody who had already agreed to do a very time-sensitive job would choose to back down from it?” he asked, stalking around the glass table in his office, turning away from the brothers as he made his way over to his desk. The field of view followed him, zooming in just a bit so that he never seemed too far away for polite conversation.
“Hypothetically, you mean?” Asher added,
meeting Duncan’s gaze with his own arched eyebrows as soon as the crimson drake turned around again.
“Of course, of course,” Smog nodded, reaching into a wooden box on his desk and pulling out a fresh cigar and cutting off the tip. Without wasting a breath, he lit the cigar with a match, before sitting on the desk’s wooden surface and staring down at Asher with curious eyes, his legs crossed. “If, hypothetically, somebody were to go back on an agreement, why would they choose to do so?”
“I mean there could be any number of reasons,” Asher began, “maybe they found something new they could sell and don’t need the money? Or maybe they found a job that would occupy the time they would, erm, otherwise need to devote to stealing the product you have requested. Honestly there’s just so many possibilities that I can’t really begin to describe them all.”
“Hypothetically, you mean?” Smog added, his expression dropping for a moment, becoming neutral.
“Hypothetically,” Asher agreed, swallowing nervously. This was the breaking point in the conversation. So far the banter had been playful, nothing to imply that Asher was truly backing out of the deal, simply implying that he wanted out. Maybe if he played this well, Smog would let them go, and there wouldn’t need to be any bad blood between him and his best client.
Smog took a long drag off his cigar as he pondered the conversation, meeting the eyes of one brother, and then the other. He was looking directly at Ruth when he pulled the cigar from his mouth and breathed a heavy cloud of rich tobacco smoke. “Well, Asher, I don’t really know. This is a rather unique circumstance we’re in, you see. If, hypothetically, somebody else were in your position and wanted to back out of the job, I’d have to have them killed.” Smog didn’t take his eyes off of Ruth as he flicked some ashes off his cigar and into a tray on his desk. “Nothing personal of course, it would just be business; couldn’t have them compromising the operation, or let people get the idea they can just back out of my deals. I’m sure you understand?”
