Dark Oracle (5 page)

“I’d worked on this project with him for six months.”

“Tell me about him.”

DiRosa blew out her breath, fogging her visor. But not before Tara could see her blinking back tears. “He’s. . . brilliant. And entirely aware of that fact.” She tried to rub her nose through the radiation visor, succeeding only in smearing a string of snot around.

“He was your mentor?” Tara drew the conclusion based on their ages.

DiRosa nodded. “It’s like trying to run after a racehorse. You know you’ll never catch him. . . but you surprise yourself by how fast you can run, trying to keep up.” Tara noted her unconscious use of the present tense. DiRosa didn’t believe Magnusson was gone. It was too early to tell if it was denial.

“Had Magnusson changed his behavior lately? Any changes in his hours or habits?”

“He’d seemed preoccupied. I thought. . . I thought maybe he’d finally climbed out of his shell and found himself another. . .” She stopped herself, corrected. “A girlfriend. Or discovered the internet.”

“How long has he been out here?”

“Six months.”

“Any friends or associates you know of?”

“He kept his personal life separate from work.”

“Introverted?”

“You could say that. The word I would use is
intense.
”

“
Intense
. . . Did he make any enemies?”

DiRosa paused. “Magnusson had some issues with working within the chain of command. He was more. . . accustomed to working as he had in academia, without such close supervision.”

“He didn’t play well with others?”

“Not really. He could be pretty damn abrasive. He could be. . . impatient with people who couldn’t keep up and see his vision. I think. . . I think he wanted more freedom in his work, and I would have been surprised to see him stay much longer.”

“Why did he come, then? I can’t see an academic playing nicely with guys like Gabriel.”

“The government has the deepest pockets for the best toys. Ours are shinier, faster, and more expensive than the ones even Cornell can buy. He wanted to get his hands on them, pursue some of his own interests.”

“I can’t imagine you’re too amenable to that, here.”

“We’re not.” DiRosa’s voice tightened.

Tara listened to Li work on DiRosa while she rummaged through the desk drawers. She hoped the activity masked her shivering; the sweat had begun to dry, and she could hear her suit rattle if she held still. Her fingers riffled through blank notepads, unused pens, sets of screwdrivers still in their blister packaging. If not for the destroyed computer, the scene looked like an advertisement for an office supply store. None of the lead in the pencils had been worn down to an angle. All the erasers were perfect. She thumbed through a yellow legal pad, one after another. All the perforations were still intact.

She ran her fingers over the keyboard. There were no crumbs, no worn letters on the keys, no residue of spilled coffee. It looked new.

Whatever Magnusson wanted others to think, he did no work in this office. . . if it was truly his, and not a set piece provided for their benefit.

She knelt down in the debris of the computer, felt the USB ports. They were loose with wear. Bringing them out from under the desk, even in the weak lighting she could see scratches on the terminals.

She smiled. Magnusson
had
worked here. He’d just taken his work home with him, probably on a portable drive. He wanted no traces of himself, or his work, to linger here. No photographs, no decorated coffee mugs. No substantial part of himself.

She and Magnusson had something in common. Magnusson didn’t want to be here. The realization of it suddenly lit her brain like a struck match. It meant he’d hidden his knowledge someplace else.

I
T WAS DUSK BY THE TIME THE ALIEN JELLYFISH SPAT
T
ARA
and Li out of its plastic gullet. Late-winter sun shone coldly over the brittle grasses as they trudged across the caldera to the access road and the distant line forming at the decontamination center. The low gray clouds had reeled back, spitting a few flakes that drifted through the field. Dust and ash motes glistened in orange light, suspended in the air like dandelion fluff. Tara wished she could feel the saffron sun on her face directly. The plastic visor seemed to warp everything she saw in a circular pattern of fine, rainbow scratches.

Once they were out of earshot of the jellyfish, Li grabbed Tara’s arm, turning her to face him. “Let’s clarify a few things.” Through the glare of his mask, she could see the anger shining in his expression.

“This is the part where you tell me this is your investigation, and not to cut you down in front of the enemy?” Tara tried to cross her arms, but Li gripped her elbow too tightly. She narrowed her eyes, gulped in air. Her hands were balled into fists. She couldn’t take any more of feeling
trapped.

“Yeah. This is that part.” Li’s breath fogged his mask. “Don’t you
ever
undercut me like that again.”

“Look. I’ll be brutally honest. I don’t particularly care about your ego, your feelings, or your rules. I’ll do whatever it takes to get the job done. If that means eating some crow or petting Gabriel like a purse dog, then that’s what I’ll do.” She snarled the last sentence at him.

She shook off his arm, hearing a rip in the shoulder of her suit. She stalked away. She’d gotten sick of this kind of ego-driven territory surfing long ago. She didn’t realize how incensed she was until the cool air crawled up her neck and into her face, bracing her.

Breathe.

“Oh,” she exhaled. It was the most glorious feeling. She could smell the sunlit ash purely, now. The chill air wrapped its hands around her neck, caressing her face and freezing the sweat on her skin.

In the corner of her eye, she glimpsed something shining on the ground, a spark of violet and chrome. She bent to look, but the glare from the setting sun obliterated everything in her vision through the damned mask.

She opened the collar of her suit, pulled off the hood. Cold air washed over her, flash-freezing the sweat glossing her face. Her hair was drenched, and she shivered as the wind tore through it. She breathed deeply, slowly, of the ash and sun. A snowflake brushed out of the molten light and landed on her cheek, dissolving instantly. She felt like she was an incredible heat, meeting cold, pure air. Vapor steamed from the face, as if she’d just stepped out of a hot bath. She reached down for the glint in the grasses. Her gloves felt clumsy, and she was unable to feel anything through the thick plastic. She stripped off her glove, let her fingers comb the grasses, searching. . .

She could hear Li running up behind her, yelling at her, his voice muffled by the filter. He grabbed her shoulder as her hand grasped the shining thing on the ground. She gasped when her hand closed around it and metal and static electricity bristled through her bare hand.

She opened her steaming hand to show it to him, as her breath frosted the face of the stainless steel watch, its hands frozen behind the glass.

T
HROUGHOUT TIME, ORACLES HAD ALWAYS GATHERED AROUND
the four elements. Whether it was the original brazier in the Temple of Apollo burning over the sea, or bonfires before caves through which shamans tossed sparkling powders and cast shadow figures of animals with their hands, the elements always tugged at invisible lines drawing them together. The Daughters of Delphi were no different.

Her sandals tied together and slung over her shoulder, Sophia walked into the darkness of the dunes. Sand squished between her toes and swirled around the rolled-up cuffs of her jeans. Arthritis creaked in her right knee, but she ignored it. She’d parked her car a mile back on the road, coming to this inaccessible place by foot, climbing dunes and wending her way around the sharp roots of sea oats.

Sophia breathed deeply of the coastal air. The salt seemed to settle deep in her lungs. She could smell the sea long before she climbed down the last rise of dune to the black ocean. Wind drove the smoke from a bonfire over the sea. Around the fire, she could see the other Daughters of Delphi gathered. . . at least, those able to travel to this hemisphere on short notice. It seemed to her, over the time she’d been in the order, their numbers had shrunk. When she was a child, she remembered dozens of women ranging around fires in groves. Today, there were less than thirty. And most of those women were nearing her age.

They needed fresh blood. More priestesses. But there were so few willing to undertake the discipline to cultivate the powers of an oracle. Power had a price, and fewer women were willing to pay it.

As she neared, the fire burned so bright it obscured the stars in the sky. Fire was the current Pythia’s element. Each of Delphi’s Daughters possessed her own unique divinatory talent. This Pythia’s talent was pyromancy. Fire loved her, and it showed.

The Pythia stood barefoot before the fire, seemingly impervious to the chill. Dressed in orange silks, she was a short, rounded Arabic woman with glossy black hair blowing loose over her shoulders. Gray hair streamed from her temples. Her almond eyes were rimmed with kohl, and golden earrings shivered behind her jaw. Her rounded figure moved with the sinuous grace of a dancer.

Sophia bowed her head, feeling the heat on her face and shoulders. “Pythia.” Once, Sophia had known her true name. But now she was simply the Pythia.

“You spoke with her. With Juliane’s daughter.” Her contralto voice was low, melodious, but it was a melody wrapped around steel.

“Yes.”

Obsidian eyes took Sophia in, and Sophia knew they absorbed the sum total of truth of her experience. There was no use lying to the Oracle of Apollo.

The Pythia frowned, arms crossed. “You did this on your own, without my blessing.”

“We need her.”

The Pythia’s eyes narrowed, and Sophia could see the shadows of the other women shifting uncomfortably in her peripheral vision.

Sophia stood her ground. She was an old woman, and there was little the Pythia’s wrath could do to her. She lifted her chin. She would take whatever punishment the Pythia would mete out.

One of the other women in the circle stepped forward. Sophia’s eyes narrowed. It was Adrienne, the youngest Daughter. Dressed in motorcycle leathers, carrying a helmet under her arm, Adrienne stalked into the firelight. Straight blonde hair spilled over eyes the color of frost on flint. “We don’t need her. We don’t need an interloper.”

Sophia glared at her. But Adrienne was young. Impetuous. And she’d made no secret of the fact she wanted the title of Pythia. Rumor had it Adrienne was engaging in some shady work outside of Delphi’s Daughters, and some of that darkness seemed to cling to her. “Tara is not an interloper. Her mother was the successor to the Pythia. Tara is her mother’s daughter. She is strong.”

“Juliane is dead. Her weak daughter will do no better. An outsider should not be chosen.” Adrienne paced around the fire, glossy leather gleaming like the skin of some reptilian chimera that had not bothered to completely take human shape. “Surely the great Pythia, the Oracle of Apollo, can see what I can: the terrible future even an old woman could read in her morning tea leaves. Magnusson’s technology could revolutionize the world, bring limitless energy. Or someone—some madman or religious fanatic—could use Magnusson’s new technology to commit a terrorist act. It’s too powerful, and too easily hidden. And the reaction by an aggrieved state would lead to war, perhaps even global conflict.” Adrienne snarled, “A successor to the Pythia must be chosen who can fight. Not a used-up relic.”

A whisper rattled like dry leaves around the circle. Sophia put her hands behind her back so the Pythia could not see them shake in fury.

The Pythia stared, and the fire before her roiled. When she spoke, it was with the voice of a queen, strong and commanding. “You forget your place, Adrienne. You are one of Delphi’s Daughters. Not the Pythia.”

“I’m not the Pythia. I’m only a geomancer.” Adrienne’s hand sketched around the other women in the circle. “But I see your time is short. I see the sight is leaving you, that you are fading. All the glamour in the world cannot hide it.”

The Pythia’s chin lifted, and her Cleopatra eyes narrowed. Sophia’s breath clotted in her throat. They all knew this to be true, but none had spoken of it. None of them would dare.

The Pythia’s ruby lips curved upward. A fracture of light blistered through the apple of her cheek, as if her skin was a paper-thin vessel holding a great and terrible light. The light cast shadows of her eyelashes below her brow, giving the illusion that a spidery creature clawed through her eye socket, trying to escape that burning within.

The fire blazed out and stung Adrienne. With a crackle, it licked and bubbled the skin of her jacket. The smell of scorched flesh filled the air; Sophia couldn’t tell whether it was all leather or partly living skin. Adrienne snarled and fled to the waves to quench the burn.

“Very good, Sophia.” The Pythia smiled serenely, as the fire subsided. “You did exactly as I expected you would, as I foresaw. You are bringing Juliane’s daughter back to me.”

Sophia’s eyes slid to the waves, where Adrianne held her arm, hissing, in the whitecaps. Such hatred in the girl’s glare. . . Sophia knew Adrianne would not give up the role of Pythia without a fight.

And she feared what that meant for Tara.

Chapter Four

T
ARA RUBBED
her wet hair with a thin motel towel. Her hair felt dry as straw, and her skin was scrubbed beet-red. The army had decontaminated her within an inch of her life before she’d been cleared to leave the site. She felt raw all over from the humiliating experience of being scrubbed with a cold car wash brush in the decon tent. She’d emerged smelling like lemon dish soap. Though it hurt, her first impulse when she’d gotten to the motel was to scrub that artificial smell from her body with a warm shower.

Through the steam in the mirror, she could see the scars traveling up over her collarbone like lightning, across her chest, where they puckered beneath her left breast. They crossed over her hipbone like a vine, clawed up her right arm. One thigh was dotted in a rippling white scar, as if a stone had been cast on a still pond, disturbing the surface. The scars went deep; Tara had been told she would never have children. Though that had never been in her life plans, she still hated the Gardener for taking that right away from her.

Tara never really looked closely at the scars. Looking brought too many feelings: helplessness, anger, fear. The wounds were long past the point of hurting. They simply felt stiff, as if there were laces wound around her ribs she couldn’t take off.

The decontamination officers had looked at her with pity when they asked her to strip out of the white Tyvek suit and get into the shower. Tara did as she was told. There was a moment of silence as she stepped into the orange tent, teeth chattering from the cold. The decon officers surrounded her like plastic-swathed ghosts, but one of them worked up the nerve to ask.

“What on earth happened to you, hon?” The woman tried to be gentle as she ran the plastic brush over her back.

Tara had stared forward, had considered refusing to respond. But she did answer, shivering, teeth clattering as the hose blasted her, summoning all the false bravado she could. “You should see the other guy.”

They took her camera away from her, but not before she’d had time on the walk back from the field to tuck the sliver of a memory card inside her cheek. The decon officers (the “doffers,” they called themselves) didn’t even suspect her of chewing gum.

She did have to put up a fight about the watch. Tara had slipped Magnusson’s watch on her wrist, insisting it was hers. Her father’s watch. An heirloom. The doffers took it away from her, but the woman who had asked her about her scars slipped it back to her on the way out. Pity did have its currency.

They kept the rest of her clothes and sent her out in a blue paper suit that zipped up the front. In her peripheral vision she thought she spied Corvus, but he walked away too quickly, probably imagining synchrotron radiation crawling up his pant leg and burrowing into his well-sunscreened flesh. Corvus hadn’t changed much since her time with him.

Li had been waiting for her at the other side of the decon tent. They’d given him back his clothes, but he looked deflated, much less in control of things than he had when she’d first met him early in the day.

“You okay?”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

But they both knew the decon procedure, for all its official aura, didn’t do much other than make people feel better. It was to make the military appear useful. Whenever you were doing
something
, you were solving the problem, and the decon made the subject of its gentle ministrations feel as if something was being done. It was a flurry of action intended to give some blanket of security.

Tara knew she should be worried about whatever radiation she had been exposed to, what damage it may have done to her cells as it silently worked throughout her body. Yet, she couldn’t summon any fear. Instead, she felt numb to the possibility of further harm to her body, indifferent. Maybe it was because a few unseen synchrotron particles bouncing under her skin seemed so much less hazardous than the scars crisscrossing it. She’d survived the reality of those; the invisible force of radiation didn’t seem real in comparison.

Involuntarily, she thought of her mother, of the radiation she’d been bombarded with to stop the spread of cancer. It seemed difficult to fear anything that couldn’t be seen, and even harder to expect that something so invisible could cure cancer.

Tara shrugged into sweats and tucked her feet under the bedspread. It smelled vaguely like mothballs, but anything was better than freezing and smelling like dish soap. A portable printer whirred on the nightstand, connected to her laptop computer. She’d worried spit had damaged the camera’s memory card, but the card reader had managed to pull all the images she’d captured from the scene. She pulled a sheaf of papers out of the printer and began to page through them.

They weren’t her best work. Taken from bad angles, with the camera covered in a plastic bag, some details were indistinct. The seams of the bag sometimes got in the way, creating glare and blur. But she had managed to get several decent shots of the caldera, the ruined accelerator, and Magnusson’s office, though the lighting was very poor. She scanned them from margin to margin, looking for details she’d missed in her distracted state of claustrophobia.

She drew one from the pile, a decent shot of the caldera, spreading from end to end of the shot. A white-garbed figure was walking away from the camera. Something about the landscape, the ebb and flow of the jagged edges of it, seemed familiar. Her intuition prickled, and she climbed out of bed to open her luggage.

Her Tarot cards, still tied carefully in her mother’s scarf, were tucked in the lining of her bag. Her Tarot journal and pen were safely wrapped beside it. She took them to the bed, the cards still cold from being in the back of Li’s car all day. They warmed as she flipped through them, faceup, searching for the image that seemed familiar. She wiped her mind clean of thoughts, fanning the intuitive flash that had begun to take root. Some bit of information was lodged in her subconscious, and perhaps the cards could shake it free for her.

There. She pulled out the Eight of Cups, placed it beside the photograph of the caldera. The card depicted a cloaked man, his shoulders slumped in despair, leaving behind eight stacked chalices. He fled into the night across a desolate landscape, leaving those golden treasures behind. The jagged edges of the gray landscape appeared very similar to the edge of the caldera, and the man walking away from the camera had much the same set to the shoulders as the man in the card.

She contemplated the card, jotted it down in her notebook:

Eight of Cups. . . disillusionment, abandonment of unfulfilling efforts.

She thought about Magnusson, about his careful abandonment of his office. He had taken everything with him. Perhaps Magnusson had chosen to disappear. Perhaps, as DiRosa had suggested, his goals were at cross-purposes with those of the government lab, and he had chosen to destroy his work and vanish.

Frowning, she flipped back through her journal. The card she’d originally chosen for Magnusson was the Magician. The Magician was a creator, not a destroyer. It would take extraordinary pressure for him to destroy his own work. What had happened to cause him to take such steps? What had he been asked to do?

A soft knock at her door startled her. She jerked her head up, that involuntary reaction from years of being summoned out of sleep. Tara blew out her breath in frustration. She was too jumpy, and furious with herself for letting her anxieties get the best of her today. She wrapped up her cards and notebook, stowing them back in her travel bag.

Padding to the door, she peered into the peephole. It was Li, dressed in a leather jacket and jeans, holding a pizza box.

Hmm. Pizza.

She opened the door partway, smelling pepperoni.

He lifted the lid of the box, gave a guarded half smile. It was a nice smile, sheepish and open. “I come in peace?”

Her stomach gurgled loudly, and Tara’s cheeks flamed at the sound. “Peace offering accepted.”

“L
OOK
, I’
M SORRY ABOUT THE RADIATION THING
.”

Li and Tara sat cross-legged on the floor, the pizza open box between them and photos spread out on the green carpet. They’d been scribbling out their interview notes from the day on yellow legal pads.

Tara looked up from her slice, pen still. “It’s okay, really. It wasn’t your fault, Agent Li.”

“Well, it was.” Li looked down, and Tara could see he was deeply embarrassed. “I don’t make a habit of tearing colleagues’ radiation suits and exposing them to renegade quarks.”

Tara shook her head. “I was not on my best behavior today. I’m pretty claustrophobic,” she confessed, “and I let that get in the way.”

Li stared down at his hands. Dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, he seemed much younger than he did in a suit and tie. She liked this version of him better: he seemed more natural, at ease. “I know I can get overly, um, inflexible in my thinking.”

“Forgive and forget?”

“Okay. Forgive and forget.” Li reached for one of the photographs she’d taken. “I still can’t believe you got these out of there. You’re much sneakier than I gave you credit for.”

“Thanks, Agent Li. I think.”

“I think we can be on a first-name basis, since I tore up your radiation suit. It’s Harry.”

Tara inclined her head. “Harry,” she repeated. It was a nice name. Practical and gentle. It didn’t seem like the name of a federal agent.

“What do you think of this?” She reached up on the dresser and handed him the watch she’d found at the scene.

“Correction. . . you’re beyond sneaky. I’m not sure I want to know how you got this out of there.”

Tara made a face. “I wore it on my wrist.”

“Very persuasive of you, then.” He cocked an eyebrow.

She watched him closely as he turned it over in his hands. The crystal was unmarred, which seemed unusual under a high-impact situation. But the hands and case had warped, twisted, stretched to a shape that was a bit off-center. The hands suggested some time after two o’clock, but the distortions made that a guess. It looked like a watch designed by Dali.

“It’s not melted,” he observed, running his fingers over the crisp edges of the case. On the back, it had been engraved with the number eight or the symbol for infinity, depending on one’s vantage point. Tara was reminded of the echo of that shape in the loop of the particle accelerator. The engraving was sharp and untouched. The links were stretched out a bit, and it seemed the metal was softer in some places than in others.

“I have no idea what to make of this,” he said at last, handing it back to her.

She turned it over in her hands a few times before she returned it to the dresser. Perhaps some bits of radiation still clung to it, but it felt odd. Warmer in some places, cooler in others, and it buzzed when she touched it.

Harry picked up the same photograph Tara had been contemplating earlier, the one she’d intuitively linked to the Eight of Cups. “Hey, look at this.” He pointed to a glimmer of light on the horizon.

Tara squinted at the glimmer he’d pointed out. “I don’t know what that is.”

“A light artifact from the camera being in the plastic bag?”

“Maybe.”

She grabbed her laptop and called up the digital photograph. Under magnification, she could see it looked much like a star, as seen by a telescope. To the naked eye, it appeared to be one point of light. Resolved by enlargement, it split into two white lights.

“Headlights,” Harry said. He riffled through his papers, spread out a county map. “There isn’t supposed to be a road there.”

Tara summoned up an internet satellite map and zoomed in to the area in moments. To her disappointment, no road appeared on the map. But the installation they had just visited in the caldera didn’t appear, either. She double-checked her coordinates against Harry’s map. It was the right place, wiped blank by the order of someone in power and shaded into digital obscurity by an artist.

“Maybe someone saw something,” Harry mused. “I want to check that out tomorrow to see where it leads.”

“Agreed.” Tara hunched over the laptop on the floor. She realized her sweatshirt had slipped a bit over her shoulder, and the white weal of a scar was visible over her clavicle. She noticed Harry’s eyes had followed the line of it. She sat back, embarrassed, and pulled the neck of the sweatshirt up.

Mercifully, he did not ask. Harry leaned back against the dresser, stretching his legs out before him. “The way I see it, there are several possible answers to Magnusson’s disappearance.”

“Which are?”

“It was a pure accident, and he was killed in the explosion. That seems to be what Corvus is thinking.”

Tara kept her face neutral. “And that also seems to be what Gabriel is thinking.”

“It could have been sabotage, by himself or another person, and he was killed.”

“Possibly. I don’t believe he was happy working on the project. He could have come into conflict with someone with a different agenda.”

“Or he could have destroyed his work himself.”

Tara’s lip twisted. “I don’t think he destroyed all of it.” She told him about the scrapes on the USB ports.

“Where would he have hidden it?”

“At home, with former colleagues, with friends or relatives. We should start with them.”

“Sounds good. But we also have to address the last possibility: Magnusson is alive.”

Tara wrapped her arms around her knees. “Then two possibilities branch from there: he disappeared of his own accord, or someone has taken him.”

T
HE FIRST RULE IN TRACKING IS TO KNOW ONE’S ENEMY
.

A tangled skein of property records led Adrienne to Tara’s cabin. She’d purchased the property through an attorney, and it had taken some digging to correlate this with the attorney who had handled Juliane’s estate. Backtracking through public records with the name had given her a location.

Adrienne left her motorcycle not far from the road. She was forced to pick her way down the overgrown path on foot. Bleached tassels of grasses poked up through a thick layer of snow. Chunks of gravel and ice crackled underfoot as Adrienne walked down what once might have been a driveway, but had been allowed to return to the earth.