Contractor (49 page)

contractors could be a good thing. Now that

the world was aware of the threat, and of

magic, Daniel couldn’t stay hidden forever.

Or rather, she knew he couldn’t bear to

keep himself hidden and let people get hurt

—no matter how much he pretended he

disliked people. It was only a matter of time

until he broke his promise to stay out of the

fight.

In a way, she loved him for that, too.

****

Classes were canceled indefinitely. The

streets would have been jam-packed with

Boston’s student population, but there was a

city-wide curfew strictly enforced by the

military. Half the dorm maintained a constant

vigil of televisions and news websites. The

other half partied like it was the end of the

world. It was a good thing Daniel didn’t

need much sleep, because he wouldn’t have

gotten any with all the noise in the dorm.

He kept in touch with his dad and Felix.

They’d made it to Cleveland and were living

in a temporary housing camp. Conditions

were rustic, but livable; they had electricity

and running water. They and their neighbors

passed the Vorid checkpoint without

problems.

The story was the same all over the

world. Governments were corralling their

populations and consolidating vital

resources. The earth was under siege, and,

like villagers retreating within the walls of

medieval castles, people poured into the

urban zones around major cities. Within

three days, Boston’s population leapt by

several million as western Massachusetts

dumped toward the seacoast.

Images were appearing all over the

internet. Apparently a magician somewhere

had a camera, because pictures of Vorid

spawn, extractors, and even an overseer

were posted on every forum and blog he

visited. The misshapen house of facts

constructed by the government’s partial

release of information led to wild

speculation. People were reinventing the

world with magical inserts. The Ivory Dawn

released a statement saying that magical

history was classified and would remain as

such for the foreseeable future, which only

added fuel to the fires of conspiracy.

The prevailing popular opinion of

magical folk was a good one. It was obvious

enough—the magicians had forgone their

solitude and stepped forward to protect

humanity, when it would have been easy to

hang back and save their own. That, and the

threat posed by the black pillars, had earned

them enough flexibility to be accepted

without much qualm.

Economic collapse hadn’t happened yet.

The market was frozen, whether from fear,

surprise, or government intervention, Daniel

didn’t know. The total-war state of mind was

probably helping. Everyone was trying to

conduct business as usual, do their part, keep

calm and carry on. It was refreshingly

patriotic. It was easy to band together when

everyone had a single goal, one common

enemy.

If the Vorid made any strong inroads,

that sense of camaraderie might be

endangered. The fact was that millions of

people were already gone—and not just

gone, but erased, forgotten, sliced out of

history as if they’d never existed, sucked out

of the fabric of the universe. He wondered

how the Ivory Dawn had explained that to

people in the government when they couldn’t

even tell the difference.

On the morning of the fourth day, Daniel

told Mark and Jensen that he’d gotten

permission to drive to Cleveland to be with

his family. There were a few hugs of

farewell. He withdrew a few hundred

dollars from his bank account, all the

spending money that was supposed to last

him the rest of the year. He wasn’t sure if it

would be useful, but you never knew. He

stuffed his backpack up with the cash, some

water, and his armor, then left the dorm and

found a quiet alley.

Killing the overseer had given him

power, and a lot of it.

Daniel created a physical sigil under his

feet. He crouched, then shoved power into

his legs and leapt. He flew up, up, nearly

five stories above the ground. His clothes

lifted off his body as he reached the apex of

his jump. He hung there for an instant, dozens

of feet above the streets.

He pressed a sigil below him, a plate of

glowing white lines, and jumped off of it. He

did that again, and again, soaring straight up

into the air. After he thought he was high

enough to be mistaken for a bird, he started

leaping forward, bounding from platform to

platform in midair, his legs pumping in time.

He felt like some kind of flying kangaroo.

Daniel settled into a rhythm, leaping

huge distances with each stride. Bounding

along as fast as he could go, the ground

cruised beneath him. At one point he saw a

convoy of buses headed north up to the city,

guarded by army trucks, but other than that,

the roads were empty. The forests of the

northeast were tense with the calm before a

storm.

It was four hours to New York City by

car. Daniel made it in forty minutes. He did

the math in his head. It was hard to tell from

so high up, but he’d traveled at over two

hundred miles per hour. He wasn’t sure how

practical that top speed would be in a fight,

but his reaction time was keeping up with his

movements.

He’d never been to the financial capital

of the world, but it was as advertised. From

his aerial view, it looked as though a spiked

blanket of steel and concrete had laid itself

over a river delta. Manhattan was a jagged

bulwark of skyscrapers. A small green

rectangle dotted its center, which Daniel

assumed was Central Park. It looked like it

might make a good landing strip, but he

didn’t want to set down right in the middle of

who-knew-what.

He jumped over to the outskirts of the

city and skipped down into the streets of an

endless suburbia, lowering himself a few

dozen feet at a time. He hit the ground

running, then jogged to a halt up on a

sidewalk. Around him was a collection of

bland houses and preened lawns that

reminded him of Aplington. He started

walking in the direction of a refugee camp

he’d spotted from the air.

He heard voices, banging sounds, a

diesel engine. He turned a corner. A troop of

the national guard was beating on the doors

of houses. A covered truck rolled up the

street as they went along. Someone spotted

Daniel and called out to him. He waved back

and jogged up to the back of the truck.

Sitting on steel benches under the canvas

was an elderly couple, a young woman, a

boy that was probably the woman’s son, and

a few soldiers. The boy had a Vorid spawn

pulsing on his back. Daniel had to force

himself not to react.

An older soldier with salt-and-pepper

hair grabbed his hand and pulled him up.

"Hey bud. What you doing out here?"

"Overslept," Daniel said. "Missed the

bus."

The old man spat out the back of the

truck. "The one thing you don’t want to be

late for, and you’re late. Kids these days."

"What are you doing out here?" Daniel

asked. "I figured I was walking all the way

to the city."

"Knocking on doors to wake people like

you up."

Daniel smiled sheepishly. "Right."

The man looked out the truck. The sky

was grey and cloudy. "This isn’t a

hurricane," he said, "it’s a war. Can’t afford to sit at home and ride it out."

Daniel couldn’t have agreed more.

A few hours and a few more people

later, their contingent pulled up to the

relocation camp on the edge of the city.

Worried he might need an identity, Daniel

took to his cell phone while he waited to be

checked in. It was easy enough to pull up an

address and invent a fake name from a

random suburb near where he’d been picked

up.

The camp itself was huge, sprawling off

in each direction as far as the eye could see.

There were a few buildings, but most of it

was tents. It looked like they’d appropriated

Wal-Mart stock—the tents came in every

shape, size, and orientation, arranged in

haphazard rows.

The camp’s normal fencing must not

have been large enough, because they’d

substituted police tape and orange cones to

form a makeshift barrier. They probably

didn’t have to try too hard—Daniel figured

that it was only to keep track of who had

been inspected by mages and who hadn’t, but

worst case scenario, a wizard could just

walk around and scry here and there.

Patrols of soldiers were wandering

along the major lanes and around the edges

of the temporary housing. Smoke rose up into

the air from a thousand fires. Competing

stereo sets and radios blared music and talk

channels over the air. He saw a group of

people crowded around what looked like a

bank of power outlets under a tall solar

panel, all recharging cell phones, portable

TVs, and laptops.

They were dropped at a sort of

gatehouse near the buildings and ushered in

by guards. A man stepped out from the office

shack. He wore a military uniform, but a

white tabard was draped around his

shoulders. A gold sun was emblazoned on its

front.

The man looked them over, then asked

the woman for her son. She got a little

hysterical when that happened, but he

reassured her that it would only take a

moment. The mage shot a stream of fire from

his fingers, roasting the Vorid on a burning

stake.

It fell to the ground, squirming, but not

quite dead. The enchantment that kept it

invisible faded as it died. Everyone recoiled

from the sight of the wriggling leech. Another

thin spear of fire finished it off, and it

disappeared.

All the soldiers wore faces that looked

like they’d seen it a hundred times. Daniel

was careful to look amazed. The woman was

in tears as she gathered her son back in her

arms, thanking the man over and over. The

magician gave her an awkward pat and

retreated into the gatehouse.

They passed the tape-fence and arrived

at a desk with some computer equipment

hooked into a rumbling generator. A man

asked Daniel for any form of school or

government ID. Daniel explained that away

by saying he’d packed only necessary items,

then gave him his fake information. The man

entered it into his screen and waved him

through after assigning him a tent and a

sleeping bag.

He wandered through the camp. Wood

posts with tent numbers were staked into the

ground at intervals. People were

everywhere. Some groups were families,

children and teenagers huddled with their

parents. Others were like miniature parties,

all card games and drinking with people his

own age or older. It was like some kind of

massive arts festival, albeit with the world’s

best security force keeping a watchful eye on

everything. He wondered how long it would

last.

He found his spot. It was the tiniest of

one-man tents wedged between two other

octagonal 8-man beasts. He briefly toyed

with the idea of trying to find a hotel, then,

realizing there probably hadn’t been any

hotel vacancies since the first day—or they

were all closed—he let his pack fall to the

ground.

Daniel’s neighbors turned out to be

friendly enough. On the one side was a young

couple, hardly older than he was, with an

infant daughter; on the other, a large family

of nine, including two grandparents and an

uncle. The only lie Daniel needed was that

he was going to school at New York

University instead of Northeastern.

He spent the days teaching the kids

poker, using pieces of candy for bets. When

night fell, he sat around the radio with the

adults. The military handed out rations and

water canisters three times a day, and

collected trash and empty bottles for

refilling. Daniel started thinking that Henry

had probably been developing this sort of

emergency plan for some time. It was too

organized to be something thrown together at

the last moment.

Henry. That was the man he needed on

his side. But if he was the leader of the Ivory

Dawn, and their policy on contractors was

shoot first, ask questions never, it would take

a lot to convince him otherwise. Daniel

turned it over in his head while he lay in his

tent, trying to figure out some way to appeal

to the magicians. He didn’t have any brilliant

ideas.

Talk radio wasn’t very informative. It