Geekomancy (27 page)

•   •   •

Ree thanked the fates that the Burger Bin was open late even on Sundays. She managed to sneak through waves of tipsy folk indulging their munchies and grabbed two Garbage Shakes, arriving at Drake’s apartment-of-safety-code-violations at 11:43.

Drake opened the door, his goggles down and his face covered in soot. He smiled, wiped his face on his jacket, and said, “Good evening. You’re just in time.”

“Hey. I brought you a shake. It’s super-fatty and made of delicious.”

Drake raised an eyebrow at the cups, then stood aside to let her in. Ree handed the full shake over, and Drake regarded it for a moment. “What is in here?” he asked.

“Just about everything, which is why they call it the Garbage Shake. Like a garbage burger, but liquidier. Banana, chocolate, peanut butter, vanilla ice cream, almond and walnut shavings, caramel, and some secret stuff they won’t tell anyone. I suspect blood of the innocent.”

“That last part is a jest!”

Ree smiled. “He can be taught! Give it a try.”

Drake sipped at the straw, failed to get any shake, then tried again. He considered, then said, “That is very rich. Far more robust a flavor than we had in Avalon. But quite delicious. My thanks”—he started to say “Ms.,” then corrected himself—“Ree. But we haven’t much time if we’re to cross in the vicinity of midnight. Please feel free to take something from the armory.”

Ree began to speak, but Drake quickly followed up. “My apologies. The armory is the second left, past the water closet.”

She turned right and walked down a dimly lit hallway, finding the doorknob and twisting it open. As the door opened, the lights came on, revealing a small room completely filled with weapons and armor.

“Holy Frank Castle’s Wet Dream, Batman!” she exclaimed, overwhelmed. She scanned the sword section and found a
jian
with a rippled green pattern in the steel. It wasn’t rust, was more like . . . jade?

She stood on tiptoes and pulled down the sword, feeling it move easy in her hands.
Damn, that’s a nice balance.

Ree wandered over to a closet that held a half-dozen types of armor inside. She picked out a buff jacket that looked like it belonged on the set of a wuxia movie and tried it on. It was too big at first, leaving big gaps at her armpits, but a few seconds later, she heard the sound of fabric on fabric, and it tightened to fit her perfectly.

Satisfied, Ree returned to the living room, saying, “Who is your armorer? I want to marry them and have their baby hauberks.”

“It was not inexpensive to find someone so talented in this era, but it turns out that there is quite the demand for what you call ‘Steampunk technology.’ All thanks to the wonders of the Internet. If only Babbage and Lovelace had known what their efforts would lead to.”

Ree held up a hand for a high five. Drake looked at her hand, then nodded and slapped it.

“Are you sufficiently appointed?”

“Yeah, but how does this armor work?”

Drake walked around the living room, where he’d set up six small engines in a circle. He walked the circle, tweaking a knob on each machine. “It was constructed by one of the locals in the Underground. I will be sure to introduce you if we manage to survive this odyssey.”

“Sounds great. I could use some more friends in the know, especially friends who can make armor this awesome.”

Drake continued as Ree talked. At the fifth machine, the knob stuck, so he produced a wrench from his jacket and gave it a tweak. Then he squinted at the machine and kicked it once.

Ree shrugged. “So . . . what do I do?”

Drake knelt at the sixth device, slightly larger than the others, and looked at meters on a panel. “Stand in the center of the circle. I need to calibrate the device to your spiritual signature. Mine is of course already on record.”

Ree stepped into the circle and held the sword at her side. “Like this?”

Drake looked up, then nodded. “That will be sufficient. Now if you would be so kind as to hold your breath for a moment.”

“What?” Ree tried to hold her breath, but thinking about holding her breath made her very aware of the fact that she was holding her breath, which made it even harder. She tried to imagine she was swimming, back when she’d been on the junior high swim team for an entire six weeks. That is, until Janice Egan had to go and recover from her twisted ankle instead of being out for the whole season. Rather than going back to JV, Ree quit and spent more time at the dojang.

“That will be sufficient—” Drake paused again, finishing with “Ree.”

Ree exhaled, her shoulders collapsing forward.
Nothing like a trip on the way-back machine to pass the time.
“So what exactly does this do?” she asked.

Drake stood and crossed to take up his rifle from its resting place in the corner. “This device, the Aetheric Breakthrough Actuator, once calibrated to an individual’s bioaetheric signature, creates an electrical current that will momentarily unify our world and Spirit. This will allow you to exist in both dimensions concurrently for a moment and step through into Spirit, bypassing the Veil. Since the machine has your individual signature, it maintains a tether while you are on the other side, not unlike the string Ariadne gifted young Theseus in his journey into the Labyrinth.”

Returning to the larger box at the head of the circle, he held up a box that looked like a remote control made by Nikola Tesla. It reminded Ree of the Farnsworth communicator from
Warehouse 13
. “This will allow me to pull us back along that tether to return, but it is more dangerous to use, the farther away we are from our point of entry.”

Ree shifted back and forth in the circle, holding her borrowed weapon over her shoulder. “All right, I don’t need to know any more. Just push the big red button, and let’s get this show on the road.”

“Very well. We go!” Drake called like a battle cry. He raised his finger, waved it in the air, and then slammed it down on the red button.

Chapter Fifteen

Aetheric Boogie

The world lit up, and for a moment Ree thought the passing-through would be like the cauldron-induced vision at the Dorkcave. Instead of an overload of images and sensations, it was like one huge static-electricity shock.

When she opened her eyes, she was still in Drake’s apartment, but it was like someone had put the whole world through the graphics-filter love child of
Tron
and
The Matrix
. Lines of light coursed through the walls and the various gadgets in the room. She looked down and saw that she looked normal, except for a faint veinlike light skeleton.

Are you what a bioaetheric signature looks like when it’s at home?
Her borrowed sword glowed with a faint green light, the tip and edges crackling with little licks of electricity.
Cool.

Ree took a couple of steps toward the entrance hall, then saw crackling in the air, the six connected engines lighting up like a techno-magic Christmas tree. With a crack, the air popped and Drake appeared, goggles down and holding the remote in one hand, rifle resting on the other shoulder. He looked back, saw Ree, and smiled. “Excellent. No transference errors.”

Ree enacted a classic double take. “What? You didn’t say anything about transference errors.”

Drake shrugged. “You said you did not need to know any more. There was only a small chance of an error, and it is irrelevant now. Let us endeavor to ascertain if we can catch a Muse!”

Ree laughed, working the nerves out. “You are one crazy bastard. Let’s go.”

She stepped out onto the street to take in the view. The sky was purple, with streams of aurora borealis–esque lights streaking across the sky. They combined and broke off like a giant river system, with streams feeding into buildings and through the street. The pavement below shimmered like water, and as she stepped onto the street, she saw a ripple form from her step, bounce into other ripples, and fade ten feet out.

All around her, clusters of light whipped around—not the streams but larger chunks that flickered between several shapes. One moment they were a circuit board of lights, the next a rolling cloud, and then a half-human outline with the same electrical skeleton.

Awesome!
Ree thought.
This place may be dangerous, but it’s wicked-cool-looking, at least.

Drake stepped beside her and gestured up to the watercolor sky. “Those aetheric streams are known to some as ley lines. Our best chance of tracking the Aberrent Muse is to follow the ley lines to the places where they cluster. The intersections form large pools of spiritual energy, where spirits congregate to rest and recover.”

“Magic watering hole?”

“Something along those lines.”

“How far down the rabbit hole are we here? Can I fly if I want to, imagine where I want to go and step right there, or is this more a straight-up shadow world, where a ten-minute walk in real life is ten minutes here?”

“Time passes in a 1:1 ratio, but there can be some perceptual differences in chronal flow. Fortunately, my chronometer keeps perfect time even in this domain. However, flight and point-to-point apparation are not possible, to my knowledge.”

“You’re just an endless utility belt of oddly named gizmos, aren’t you?”

Drake gave a bow. “As charged.”

Ree scanned the horizon, trying to make sense of the flows. “All right. Lead on, Friday.”

Smiling, Drake said, “You have found a cultural reference that I actually know. Brava.” He adjusted a dial on his goggles, then turned a 360. “We head north-northwest. Keep your blade at the ready. There’s a hint of doom in the air.”

“Awesome. Just what my evening needs.”

•   •   •

A half hour later, Ree and Drake stood in a park on the edge of Pearson’s shipping and warehouse district while Drake recalibrated his goggles. They were in a clearing around a small pond that was also the nexus for dozens of streams of aether, which Ree couldn’t help but think of as mana.

Thank you,
Magic: The Gathering.

Standing watch, Ree tried not to jump at the incongruous sounds and lights.
Though you can’t blame me for getting twitchy when trees pulse with light or pop out fruit-energy bulbs every thirty seconds. What crazy-ass kind of logic does this spirit world follow, anyway?

Drake grumbled incoherently, and Ree took another cycle around the pond, still trying to sort out the literalization of the metaphors and all the other stuff that reading Jung made more confusing instead of less. Was it all first-level symbolism, or would she have to dig for weird metaphors? Or was it all in her head? She had to filter the sensory inputs, so maybe this was her brain’s way of rendering things and she should trust her first interpretations. Or not.

Pushing aside the headache, she leaned over to check behind a tree.

From the other side of the clearing, she heard a crash. In the ten minutes they’d spent at the pool, she’d heard plops, thuds, chirps, whirrings, whispering willowings, but no crashes. She spun on her heels and squinted, scanning for the source of the noise.

Oh, that’d probably be the gigantic snake that just dropped out of the tree and is coming right for me. Awesome.

Ree charged back toward Drake, calling “Snake!”

“What?”

Pointing with the sword, she repeated, “Snake!”

The serpent was at least twenty feet long, with yellow-green scales, a head as broad as a linebacker’s, and teeth the length of her forearm. Drake grabbed his rifle off the ground and took a potshot at the snake, which coiled out of the way and kept coming for Ree.

“Why did it have to be snakes?” she asked, waiting for the moment to move. The snake lunged forward to bite, and Ree pivoted on her right foot, reaching out to stab while she pushed off to her right. Her blow glanced off the snake’s scales, but likewise, its bite missed her. What didn’t miss was its head slamming her back into a tree. The impact knocked the wind out of her faster than freshmen left a college party that had run out of food.

Drake fired again, his next shot going low to hit the snake along its trunk. The blast sizzled into the scales, leaving a melted-metal texture. The snake hissed and coiled itself up to protect the wound.

A moment later, it lashed out for Ree, a strike that she dodged by hopping back as she cut at the snake’s face. But its strike was a feint; the snake turned and slithered by Ree, diving for Drake. The gadgeteer rolled to the side, and the snake curled around to chase him. Ree spun her blade into a reverse grip and plunged it down with both hands into the center of the snake’s length.

A hiss of pain hit her eardrums like a jackhammer, and she pulled her hands up to her ears to blunt the sound. As the snake rolled away, she grabbed at the sword, trying to twist it free. The snake flipped over itself to snap at her, and she jumped over its trunk into a perfect shoulder roll.

Thank you, Ms. Young, she thought,
thinking of the founder of the Taekwondo dojang who had made her practice shoulder rolls until she could do them without thinking, without notice, and without failure. She came up with the sword in hand and drew the snake’s attention, seeing Drake recover and draw a bead on the thing’s head.