Geekomancy (29 page)

Ree sighed, looking down. She saw a faint glint of silver, and scooped up the lifeline that had followed her since they entered Spirit. It was far fainter than when they’d first arrived in the otherworld. “Or could we just tug real hard on our escape threads?” Ree scooped up her silver cord and held it. Given that she couldn’t see Drake’s, she imagined they were an Only You Can See Yours thing.

“That, sadly, is not an option. We are far too distant to pull the rip cord.” Drake picked up an icon, examined it, then clucked his tongue and set it down again, the slight downturn in his lips deepening.

“What are you looking for?” she asked, staying close so she could whisper.

Drake held up two icons. “We need one that has this sigil next to that one, but with three lines above them at a forty-five-degree downward slope.”

Ree looked at the icons, then started scanning the other line of shelves for a match. She held the image in her head and was thankful for countless hours of puzzle games.

After several more abortive hopeful sounds from Drake that ended in grumbling, Ree found what she thought was the one. Pulling it down, she took the thing to Drake, its semisolid goopiness cold in her hands.

Drake looked it over, and his eyes lit up. “This will transport us to the park just south of the university campus. Brilliant.” He pocketed the icon and walked for the door. “It’s time to get out of the closet.”

Ree covered her mouth to keep from snickering. “It’s ‘come out of the closet,’ my dear,” she said with a huge grin.

“I do believe you are having a laugh at my expense. What have I said?”

“ ‘Come out of the closet’ is a euphemism for telling people you’re gay.”

“But I am usually quite gay— Oh. Not in the contemporary parlance. Though I did get to meet Oscar Wilde once. Quite a witty fellow. He asked if I wanted to see his scripts, which I rather imagine now was an invitation to examine his briefs.”

Ree reached for the wall as she tried to keep the laughter in. She put her other hand on Drake’s face to shut him up—
Damn, his skin is soft. No, focus! No time for mushy thoughts!

She gathered herself as she let go of Drake’s surprised mug.
All right, once more with feeling.
She played the Harry Potter short for herself. Feeling the same energy build in her mind, she pushed it into the magic, using her pen as a makeshift wand.

The obfuscation back in place, Ree opened the door.

Chapter Sixteen

Blue Stone Express

Up a flight of stairs, they found the waiting room, filled with hundreds of seats of varying sizes and shapes. There was something for all of Spirit’s creatures. There were seats for spirits whose lower halves kind of faded out, seats for spirits who had octopi for tails, for those that were ten feet tall, and for many more configurations of bodies. At the center was a terminal with a team of busy spirits that checked the travelers’ shimmering-energy boarding passes and calibrated their machines accordingly, switching out the various icons and repeating rituals that activated a portal a few feet away.

The portal itself looked like a cross between a Stargate and Stonehenge, covered in runes that didn’t match any language Ree recognized, real or imaginary, and with a large empty circle that stretched to the roof of the room.

Ree was sure the runes weren’t any normal-people-known language, since she killed at fictional-language Trivial Pursuit. She ought to, since she made up the fifty questions for Fictional Languages back in college when she and the folks of the SF Club made a Far-from-Trivial Pursuit for their year-end party.
All that work, and I still didn’t make president senior year.

Ree continued to puzzle out how spirit-world travel worked. It seemed that a spirit would step into the center of the circle, and as the adminstrators’ rituals finished, a blue cloud of energy would wrap itself around the spirit, then collapse in on itself, leaving an empty space and a
pop!
sound. She was disappointed that it sounded nothing like
BAMF.

That’s just not right.

Drake pulled on the belt, and she felt him put a hand on her shoulder. “On three,” he said in a whisper.

He tapped once, twice, three times.

The room turned into an action movie. Drake appeared in front of her, dropping to one knee and firing into the crowd. He’d done something to make his rifle shoot on full automatic. Instead of bursts of energy, his rifle hurled dozens of crackling blue blobs across the room. When they hit, each blob wrapped itself around the spirit like they had done in the ritual and pulled its target through makeshift vorteci, almost seeming to wink them out of existence entirely. The pops from Drake’s gun came fast enough that Ree had flashbacks to the Chinese New Year when she and her dad had lived in Oakland and spent the night on the roof wrapped in blankets.

As the field narrowed out, Ree saw the Muse, all jagged edges and gaping maw. It stood out more on this side, like someone had run it through Photoshop and scaled up the contrast to distinguish its shades of gray and black. Ree closed on the Muse, large steps chewing up the space between them, and dropped the veil so that Drake didn’t accidentally port her to Botswana or wherever all those things were headed. She circled toward its flank, and the spirit surged forward to meet her.

“Hey there, fucker. Remember me?” She rolled left, taking a swipe at the Muse with the sword. Her slash missed, but she avoided the thing’s charge.

“When I’m done with you, you’re never going to hurt a single person ever again.” She came up to a kneeling position, blade out in front of her. All around, the room was in chaos, screams and shouts of stampeding spirits rapidly getting swallowed up by Drake’s machine-gun relocation program.

She pulled the pen out of her coat, the wizardy fu faint at the edges of her mind. She leveled the pen at the Muse as it advanced, dug in her feet, and loudly proclaimed, “This is my boom stick!”

She willed out as big a bitch-slap as she could, pouring into it her anger, her fear, and the memory of the pain it had heaped on her. She imagined the Muse getting ripped to shreds by pure energy, obliterated by her blast.

The spell lashed out as a semitransparent wave with an orange tint. It hit the Muse and knocked it back into the side of the ritual circle. But as she moved forward and took a breath to shoot another blast, her grasp on the Potter energy dissipated and her pen was just a pen again.

No time for a video break now. Just me and ol’ stabby.

“Yo, Drake, wanna give me a hand here?” Ree asked as she chased the Muse. It float-limped away from the circle, trying to put distance between itself and Ree.
I’ve got you now, fucker.

“I’m rather indisposed, sadly,” Drake shouted back. “Security has arrived.”

Ree glanced over her shoulder and saw a dozen of the all-armor guards storming up the spiral stairs. Drake laid down fire to cover the stairs, but the brutes had taken to climbing across the walls and flying around.

“Then you’re all mine,” Ree said to the Muse as she dashed across the room. The Muse scaled up the wall to the ceiling, and Ree slowed, staring up to the corner.
Well, crap. I didn’t think about that. Screw you, high ceilings.

Ree shouted at the Muse, “You’ve got to come down sometime, you predatory piece of slime. I’ve got all day, and this sword is itching to rip you to shreds.” She stalked below the spirit, trying to keep it as close as she could manage while it probed the walls and ceiling like a frustrated fly.

“Can’t just fade away here, can you?” She checked over her shoulder again and saw Drake run-and-gunning from cover to cover.
Shit, no time for taunting. How can I get to you?

Under the ceiling was a lattice of rafters, a honeycomb dome. Ree imagined it had something to do with the portal, but what it really meant was that if she could get up to the ceiling, she could swing around and chase the Muse monkey-style.

Ree plotted jumping paths from kiosks and chairs, but the only way for her to get to the ceiling was the transport circle. She ran for the standing circle, jumped onto a chair, bounded up to a kiosk, and finally hurled herself up and at the structure. Wrapping her arms and legs around the cool granite-esque surface, she held strong to it. Reaching up with her sword hand, she tried to pull her body high enough to loop a foot over the lattice. Her first effort failed, so she sliced upward and got her sword stuck in the ceiling.

Well, that works.
She hauled herself up by the sword and grabbed hold of the narrow stone bars. She wrenched the sword free as she plotted a path across the ceiling toward the Muse. She swung back and forth several times, then looped one foot up into the lattice. She rested her other foot beside it and reached out with her sword arm to get another handhold.

She got the hang of the process, thankful for her countless hours on jungle gyms and for her finger strength from video games and martial arts.

“I’m coming for you now, bucko.” She crawled toward the Muse, which bounced around a corner. She heard a louder commotion where she imagined Drake to be.

“I am afraid time is running short, my sarcastic friend!” came his call. There was urgency in his voice, cracking through the normal bombasticity.

“Working on it!” She sped up the swinging, but two rungs later, she flubbed the grab, her hand slipping off the loop. She tucked one foot in and splayed the other one out, stopping herself in a not-cool upside-down position. The pressure on her leg and foot was insane, and she hoped she hadn’t sprained anything.

Wishing she’d kept up with her crunches, she hauled herself back up with her core, reaching for the lattice. Her lungs ran dry and her stomach clenched, but her fingers reached the stone, and she was upright again. In the meantime, the Muse had switched corners, so she had to move faster.

“Get your ass over here, you low-rent nightmare machine. I’ve seen scarier shit on old reruns of
Goosebumps,
you grayscale leftover boggart. What does it say that all I wanted after our last fight was a warm mug of milk and more weapons? Maybe you were scary back in the BCEs, but these days, you’re about as terrifying as day-old espresso grinds, you spindly sack of shit. I bet you get frightened by Ugly Dolls!”

Okay, that last part probably went over his head. Hey, wait!

In an instant, the Muse was charging her, jaw opening to reveal a darker-than-black maw.

Bring it.
She unlooped her sword arm from the lattice and prepared to swing.

Don’t screw up, don’t screw up, don’t screw up.

The mantra ran on repeat, and as the Muse flew within distance, Ree swung the sword with as much of her body strength as she could muster, twisting in the air. Seeing it cut through the Muse’s jaw, she let go with her left arm and reached for another handhold. She dropped her feet out of the lattice and swung with all her strength, biting a cut into her lip as she hauled herself over to grab on again.

Ree leaned back and saw the Muse looping around, bleeding ink-black somethingplasm as it swiped for her.

Come on, one more pass.

Hoping she had the thing properly enraged, she swung again, so forcefully that she let go with her arm. She dropped, hanging by her feet, but she kept on swinging.
Die, already!
The Muse’s claw tore at her arm, and it took a big bite of her shoulder.

Ree rammed the sword into the creature’s chest with a scream of pain and rage, and she felt the thrust pierce deep. As the cold closed around her, squeezing on her heart, she twisted the blade and kicked out of the lattice, somersaulting in the air.

She hit the ground hard, the impact knocking the wind out of her like a cartoon anvil.

Above her, the Muse, cracked from the cuts, poured out somethingplasm and lit up with dark-dark-blue light. With a scream that poured fire on the cold burn around Ree’s heart, the beast exploded.

Ree tried to shout in victory, but no breath came. Every bit of her ached or burned or stung, and blackness knocked on the door to her mind. It was so inviting. She could just let go, close her eyes, and be done.

The Muse was gone, and what were the chances there’d be another suicide that fit the bill before midnight tomorrow? She’d saved at least one life, maybe another soul, and had done some awesome hero shit. Wasn’t that enough?

The air wasn’t coming, only the black and the burning cold. The cold ate up her pain, the ache, and the sting in her lungs. It wouldn’t be that bad after all. All she had to do was let go . . .

The black closed in on her, offering the easy way out. But Ree pulled herself up, gritting her teeth. She had no air, no voice, so she took the pommel of the sword and slammed it into her solar plexus.

The rest of the air in her lungs came out with a
puh,
then she inhaled one sharp breath. It hurt like hell, but after the first breath came the second, then another. She looked around, the edges of her vision blurry. Drake stood by the gate, firing the rifle one-handed while his hands played over some kind of panel.