Hexomancy (21 page)

The room was silent, save for their footfalls.

Two chairs stood facing the screens, each holding a body.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Ree said, running.

She stopped a step past the chairs, turning to see Eastwood and Eriko, keyboards on their laps, heads lolled back.

“Wake up!” she shouted, loud enough to wake the dead.

No response.

She checked Eriko’s pulse, which was low, but steady.

Eastwood’s was the same.

She tapped Eriko on the shoulders, light, then harder. She punched Eastwood in the shoulder, the walls of the room growing closer as her own heartbeat started racing.

“Are they . . . ?” Drake asked.

“They still have pulses; they’re breathing, but they’re totally unresponsive. If they were jacked in when the EMP went off, what would that do to them?”

Drake stood still, his eyes moving from the pair to the screens, then back. “I . . . I don’t know. We should contact Shade, and Grognard. Get Dr. Wells here to tend to them.”

“You call Dr. Wells?” she asked, her phone out and dialing Shade before she was done speaking.

The hacker-maker picked up on the first ring. He answered in an affected Max Headroom glitch cadence. “H-h-h-howdy.”

“Shade, it’s Ree. I’m at Eastwood’s, and someone’s set off an EMP. He and Eriko . . . I think they were jacked in. They’re alive, but totally zoned out. I don’t know what to do for them.”

Shade said, the cheer dropping straight out of his voice, “Oh, hells. Make sure they keep breathing. Eastwood should have an oxygen kit. I’ve got a life-support kit for cut-cord victims. I’ll be right over. You called Dr. Wells?”

Ree looked to Drake, who was on the phone, other hand plugging his opposite ear. “Yeah, think so. I’m going to call Grognard next.”

“Good. I’ll be there in twenty-five minutes, traffic permitting. Someone’s going to have to go in after them. Their bodies won’t last very long without their spirits unless we get them into full-body life support.”

“How long is long?”

“A few hours, at most.”

“Shit,” Ree said. “If this is the third Strega, what would she do next?”

“Try to destroy their bodies, or trap them in Spirit long enough that they fade away. With the connection to their bodies severed, their spirits will have nowhere to return to, and they’ll be easy prey. My bet is you’ve got company coming, maybe before I can get there.”

“Got it,” Ree said, pulling her lightsaber out of her jacket.

“Keep cool,” Shade answered, then hung up.

Ree dialed Grognard, explained the situation. The brewmaster announced he’d be over in twenty minutes, and he’d have Talon show up as well. That was a lot of firepower all of a sudden, though Shade wasn’t much for up-close and personal.

“Dr. Wells impressed upon me the fact that she does not make house calls, but that given the situation, she would make an exception. She expects to arrive within the hour.”

“An hour?”

Drake shrugged. “She noted that negotiating the sewers with the sort of equipment she’d need takes, and I quote, ‘More than a little doing, so hold your horses.’ ”

“Got it. We need to get eyes on outside. I don’t want someone to just blow the building.”

“Do you think the Strega would go to those lengths? That would be a rather conspicuous amount of collateral damage.”

Ree found that she was pacing. “I don’t even know what to expect. I mean, how much firepower do you need to set off an EMP that kills eight square blocks?”

Drake’s trigger finger tapped along the stock of his rifle. “It would be quite an undertaking. Especially to do so without an accompanying burst of sound. I am imagining it was an elaborate working of Hexomancy, specifically directed.”

“Bet you’re right. But that’s some big fucking Hexing. To kill everything, not just shut it off but keep it off? That’s a whole order of magnitude above and beyond what Lucretia did with Grognard’s.”

“Right you are.”

Ree and Drake did their best to get ready for a siege, pulling down artifacts and props, arraying an arsenal divided into categories such as “Stuff only Geekomancers can use,” “Anyone can use this,” and “For sanity’s sake, don’t touch.”

All that remained was the waiting.

It didn’t last long. The door creaked and then swung open, revealing a wide silhouette.

Grognard stomped down the stairs into the Dorkcave, his leather coat on fire.

Chapter Twenty-One

16-bit Soul

“What happened?!” Ree shouted as Grognard stripped off his jacket and stamped out the flames.

“Fireball trap, I think. Frakking thing hit me dead-on.”

“Shit!” Ree said. “Warded?”

Grognard picked the smoking jacket up from the floor and shook it out as she approached. “Damned right. This thing’s been with me nearly as long as you’ve been alive.”

Ree whipped out her phone, setting up a mass text to Talon, Shade, and Dr. Wells.

The area around the Dorkcave is trapped. Keep on your toes.

Shade’s response came almost instantly, thanks to his smart-shades, no doubt.
Way ahead of you. Also, I’m glad Dr. Wells is coming.

Talon was followed by a trio of bat-demons and Shade walked in with a bloodied arm. Later, Dr. Wells rang, prompting Ree to open the freight door Drake had installed to handle large deliveries. She rolled in a cart loaded down with gear, a caduceus wand held in her teeth, glowing white and green.

“You okay?”

“Eastwood’s not going to like this invoice, I can tell you that much.”

As Ree pulled the chain to lower the freight door, it started hailing.

It hadn’t been raining or snowing before, nor did Ree remember any clouds in the sky.

“This is bad,” Talon said, looping her gladius in slow arcs, a nervous tic that made folks keep their distance. Talon was loaded down in complete Hoplite kit, shield, spear, and all.

Dr. Wells took control, shooing Drake from Eriko and Eastwood’s side.

“How long since the EMP?”

Ree double-checked her phone. “Forty-five minutes.”

Dr. Wells pulled out a generator and started connecting cables to ports, turning her mobile kit from pile of stuff to Aesclepiomancer’s best friend. “Okay. Help me get this set up.”

They had Eastwood and Eriko on life support within minutes. In the meantime, the hail got even louder, pounding the freight door and the windows.

“We should get someone outside to make sure Mega-Strega doesn’t just drive a bomb into the building or whatever else.”

“You volunteering to go out in that?” Grognard said. He pointed to a side window, where golf-ball-size hail stacked up against the glass.

“What you need to do is get someone into Spirit and retrieve these two’s souls. Then we can all get out of here,” Shade said.

“We could use my Breakthrough Actuator, but it is at my apartment, and I would not be excited to try our luck passing through that gauntlet twice, once with delicate equipment.”

“No need. I’ve got a deck right here.” Shade pulled a two-foot-square piece of tech out of his coat. Shade’s gear was all over-sized and clunky, but its ’80s sheen belied its power. “I can get you jacked in, but it only works for two.”

Ree looked to Drake. He nodded. They’d been working together long enough to be on the same page about these things, even before the smooching. “Drake and me. We’ve handled Spirit before, and we can track Eastwood.”

“They will be in the web rather than the regular Spirit realm. My device will take you straight to the web, but I don’t have a way of tracking these two’s spiritual IP addresses. Once you’re in, you’re on your own to find them.”

“If they’re together, I bet I know where they went,” Ree said, thinking of the saloon Eriko had mentioned the night before.

“Indeed. The Gulch is our best waypoint,” Drake said. “We mustn’t tarry.”

“And when the bad things come knocking, Talon and I will keep them out,” Grognard said.

The swordswoman nodded. “I haven’t had a good fight in kit in a while. It’ll be good to put the new blade through its paces.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Ree said. “Will you need to pull us out if we have to bug out of the Dorkcave?” she asked Shade.

“Too many bodies to move. We’d need you back here.”

“Any way of communicating with us while we’re there?”

“Of course. I’ll be your shoulder angel the whole way through. Just where I like to be.”

Ree dragged over two fold-out metal chairs that Eastwood used for his movie nights. “Sweet. Let’s make it happen.”

Five minutes later,
Shade threw the switch, and Ree’s world folded in on itself. The Dorkcave was replaced by a shining green-and-gray landscape, pixelated moons overhead. Everything was rendered in 16 bits, accompanied by a rustling midi wind. Drake included. It was both cool and incredibly disconcerting, a pair of feelings that had become all too common in her weird-ass urban fantasy life. Ree stood up and saw herself in the same 16-bit graphics.

Now, that’s weird
. She turned her hands back and forth, taking it all in.

They were sitting in an outdoor café, hacker types of every race and denomination sitting and chatting, from ’80s neon-clad Cyberpunks like Shade through Matrix-esque folks in PVC to mustachioed hipsters with half of their heads shaved, revealing what she imagined might be “ironic” data ports.

“Shade?” she asked, checking the connection.

“Right here,” Shade answered, patented newscaster cheer back in place.

“Why are we in a Mode Seven universe?”

“This is my home port. Renraku Café. Ask for Molly; she’ll get you oriented. If you had the time, I’d say you should try out the CPU hot chocolate. It’s in-vi-vi-vigorating,” he said, sounding like he was about to launch into an infomercial.

“Molly?” Ree asked, thinking of the Sprawl trilogy’s heroine.

“The manager and I go way back. We’re old-school.”

“Got it. You let me know the second we need to move, okay?” Ree said, standing and making her way to the door, trying to keep from freaking out that she had a limited range of motion and a total lack of head control; it bobbed up and down as she walked.

She spotted the server with the mirror shades and tried to hail her. Her coloration placed her as likely a fellow Latina. The woman skated around on rubber wheels whose axles were her feet. She braked to say, “You’re new.” The woman’s accent was odd. She’d need to hear more to place it.

“Yeah, we’re friends of Shade. He said you could point us to The Gulch?”

“The Gulch? That’s clear on the other side of the city,” the woman said, the accent pinging Ree’s ears as South African. “You’ll need to go through Neo Tokyo and Xian Cubed. Best bet would be to contract a cab. Mel’s just finishing up his lunch; I’ll see if he can take you.”

Ree flashed her best “I love helpful waitstaff!” smile and stood by while the woman skated off, snatching empties from tables in mid-stride.

“How helpful,” Drake said.

“I know, right? I wonder how long it’ll take us to get across the city, if we’ve got hounds at the gates.”

Ree turned and looked out from the foyer of the café into the city outside. The street had glowing circuitry in the streets and throughout the buildings like veins, all in older green-scale like the computers of her youth. Her dad had sat Ree on his lap with their Commodore Amiga and his older TRS-80, both hand-me-downs from marine buddies.

“This is all rather disconcerting. I have spent time in strange realms, even places where one’s form was expressed in a different visual schema, but never have I been whatever this is.”

“It’s 16-bit graphics; ’90s-era video game look.”

“That gives me information, but not understanding.”

“It means that if we go out to a world map, we may get a bit queasy as things move around.”

“Oh, lovely,” Drake said.

The server came rolling back, leading a short man with bright green skin, his color intense in contrast to the muted palette around them.

“I’m Mel. Molly says you need to get to The Gulch?”

“That’s us. I’m Ree; this is Drake. Can you take us?”

“Yeah, but it’ll cost you. Contrast is throttling packets, and traffic’s especially bad this time of day.”

“As fast as you can get us there is great. And you can bill Shade; we’re here on his rig.”

The man nodded, moving to the street. They approached a silver car with bright blue accents and no visible wheels. He waved his hand and the doors opened vertically, Delorean-style. “Get in, and buckle up, okay?”

Drake slid into the backseat, leaving Ree to ride shotgun.

Mel slapped on a cabbie hat and started revving up the cab. The car’s startup checklist was extensive, and looked all the more complicated for the limited resolution of their world. But the car did start, and then took off. Straight up. Mel pulled into a lane of flying traffic, the car weaving between flying shipping containers being dragged forward by flying tugs and spirits themselves, in every color, their tails condensing to wispy points in classic Casper fashion.

“So what brings you to the neighborhood? Don’t think Shade’s mentioned you folks before.”

“We’re here to check in on some friends,” Ree said, not eager to spill the beans about the whole situation to a cabbie they’d only just met. Not that she knew the guy from Adam, but in the TV Tropes universe, cabbies were notorious gossips, and she didn’t need word getting out any more than it already would.

Gods only knew how much influence Cosmic Pictures had in the Spirit realms, and they were doubtless still sore about the black eye Ree and the gang had given them in the last days of
Awakenings
’s production, Jane’s throw down with Rachel McKenzie, and acing their apparently-a-monster-the-whole-time knee-breaker Alex Walters.

Mel didn’t push after that, seeming to pick up Ree’s desire to play things close to the chest. Between watching the wondrously weird landscape and worrying about the rogues’ gallery worth of entities that might be after her at any given moment, she didn’t really have the time or temperament for small talk, though there were a hundred questions she wanted to ask about this area.

Fortunately, Drake had her covered.

“How large is this city, in all?”

“We’re just one of the clusters, there’re another five around the globe. We feed in from the Pacific Northwest and Nor-Cal, so you’ve got Google, Apple, and Facebook all set up across town.” Mel pointed out the window to a mini-skyline with a half-dozen spires shooting up into the clouds.

They passed out of 16-bit land into a higher-res area, and everything changed. Ree looked down to see herself in mid-2000s graphics, as well as the car and the world around them. She felt fuller, less flattened out. And sadly, a bit nauseated.

“That’s a hell of a thing,” she said.

“Yeah, sorry. It’s a bit disorienting the first few times, I hear.”

“You hear?” Drake asked. “As to indicate it was never disconcerting to you?”

Mel shrugged. “I’m a Spirit original, coded and patched. Woke up in the late ’80s as the first outposts started staking their claim in the area. As parts of the city got upgraded, I adapted.”

“Fascinating.” Drake was lapping it all up. “What percentage of the city’s occupants are mortals, as compared to spirits such as yourself?”

“We’re about seventy–thirty, even with the shift workers coming in for the big corps. Everyone’s been all about automation and crap. The Amazon Pyramid is more like ninety–ten, the spiders and bots keeping everything going while the bigwigs just pull the big levers at the top.”

Mel zigged and zagged the car through traffic, but ahead, the sky grew crowded, a three-dimensional traffic jam. Ree was reminded of the
Doctor Who
episode “Gridlock.”

“Nope. Like I said. Contrast is throttling traffic.” Far above, a layer of traffic moved smoothly. “Folks who can pay for the fast lane are doing fine.”

“How much does that cost?” Ree asked.

“More than you or I could afford, unless you’re secretly an employee of a Fortune 500 company.”

“Not so much,” Ree said. She turned to Drake. “You haven’t been holding out on me, have you? You’re not secretly a deep-cover Amazon market research agent?”

“I do not even know of what you speak,” Drake said, looking a mix of confounded and amused.

“Yeah, that doesn’t really exist. Or does it? No, it doesn’t.” She turned back to Mel. “Any other ways of getting across town?”

“Well, if you want to go back to the street and hoof it, you might make it across town in four hours. Or I could try something really stupid.”

Shade’s voice crackled in, filling Ree’s ear. “We’ve got company, Ree. You better hurry. Talon and Grognard went out to meet it. I think it’s a giant robot.”

“Got it,” Ree said, slightly sad she was missing the giant-robot fight. But when she saw a different giant robot flipping off someone that cut it off in the flying traffic lane, she felt less left out.

Ree sighed, returning to the conversation in the cab. “Tell me about the stupid plan.”

The stupid plan
involved flying around back alleys through Neo Tokyo. Which, given the fact that street-level griefers had spiritual rocket launchers, turned out to be worse than stupid.

“Shit!” Mel said, hauling hard on the wheel and sending the car sideways, driver’s side down, passenger side up, and Ree’s lunch about to make a reappearance.

A rocket streaked past them, flying through where Ree’s seat had been.

“Like I said, this is the stupid plan,” Mel said.

Drake asked, “Why, pray tell, did you suggest it, then?”

“I get blown up, I just pop up in my garage. And you kids are on tethers, so you’ll just head home. I get that you need to see your friends, so I decide to throw out the stupid idea. And now, here we are.”

The car turned back to right-side up, Ree’s stomach dropping like an anvil hitting a Jell-O cake. “Get us to The Gulch in good health, and I’ll make sure that Shade pays you handsomely.”

“Of course he’ll pay me handsomely. He’s a slick guy if there ever was one. He don’t do nothing he don’t do handsomely.”

“Great. You go on being complimentary, and I’m going to try to not hurl, ’kay?” Ree said, clutching the dash and the door handle for anything resembling a stable hold.

They raced past and over two- and three-story buildings, under spiritual overpasses, through localized rainstorms, and past a hundred different neon signs in Chinese. If they had been going slower and Ree had been feeling less like she needed to vomit, she was sure she’d have been impressed by how beautiful everything was.