Sunshine (43 page)

What I didn't want was to get sucked in again and maybe somehow this time pop out on top of
Bo
. As things I couldn't bear to think about went, this was very high on the list.

My sunshine-self, my tree-self, my deer-self. Didn't we outnumber the dark self?

What I had to figure out, fast, was if there was going to be a way I could make a mark, leave a clue, carry some bad-void token away with me that Con and I could follow or interpret better or faster than SOF could. There'd been kind of a lot going on and I hadn't sorted what I had found—or half found, or begun to find—in Aimil's living room. If sorting was a possibility. Aimil had been afraid I'd died …

No. I'd figure it out. I had to.

Did the tickers do anything but register activity, could they define it?

They'd pick up Con and me too, when we started going somewhere—wouldn't they? If. Supposing our rough human-world guesses were right, and what we all wanted was in No Town. But … if SOF was now going to start keeping a closer watch on me, were they going to plant a ticker near Yolande's house? Oh, gods. Could she disable a SOF ticker?

Aimil, looking subdued, was waiting in Pat's office, with Jesse and Theo. She got up from her chair and put her arms around me. I hugged her back and we stared at each other a moment. “I guess these guys worked you over so the bruises don't show,” I said.

“Which is more than can be said for you,” said Aimil, touching my jaw gently.

“I got that doing chin-ups on the top oven,” I said. “Let's get on with this, can we? I want to go home and go to bed. Four in the morning is already soon.”

Pat's combox was on, and the saved cosmail winked at us as soon as he touched the screen. Even before plugging in to the live connection it looked evil to me; the flickering print seemed to have a kind of
bulgy
red edge, so that it looked like tiny scarlet mouths howling behind every letter of every word. “Ready?” said Pat.

I sat down and put my hands on the keyboard, like I was going to do some perfectly ordinary com thing, tap a few keys, see what the headlines were on the Darkline. “Ready,” I said. He pressed the globenet button and the mail went live.

I was almost sucked in after all. Hey, I didn't know what I was doing. Was there an apprenticeship for this? The globenet hasn't been around all that long, but magic handlers adapt pretty fast—they have to. If I'd been apprenticed, could I have learned how to trace a cosmail? No. If this was something magic handlers now routinely did, SOF would have a division of magic handlers that did it. And they wouldn't be all over me like a cheap suit. I was going where no one had gone before. And I wasn't having a good time.

It was my talismans that held me together, and in this world. I felt them heat up,
wow
, like zero to a hundred in nothing flat with the throttle all the way open, like a cold inert vampire being brought back to undeadness by a surprise drop-in guest. I guessed there was a red hoop around my neck and over my breast now, and a red oval on each thigh. I hoped they wouldn't set my clothes on fire, which might be hard to explain as well as embarrassing.

It was pretty excruciating. It was like being dragged forward and hauled backward simultaneously: as if I was living the moment when my divided loyalties ripped me apart and took off with their riven halves. Other-space yawned, and while last night, with Con at the far end of the back-country-lane version, it had merely been remote and unearthly and nowhere I had any business being, tonight it was the bad one again, the shrieking maelstrom. If I went headfirst into this one I wouldn't come out, except in small messy pieces.

But I was frisking on the boundary of dangerous territory for a purpose. Dimly through the inaudible din, I thought, perhaps this is Bo's defense system. Okay, if I can find where the defense system is, presumably I can find where what it's defending is. Or is that too human a logic? I tried to orient myself, carefully, carefully, staying firmly seated on the chair in Pat's office, feeling my talismans burning their variously shaped holes into my flesh. I wasn't the compass needle myself this time—that would have been too far in—I was trying to angle for a view so I could see where the compass needle pointed.…

There
.

And I was flung over backward, with the chair, and landed on the floor so hard the breath was knocked out of me. This was just as well, because Pat's combox exploded; droplets of superheated flying goo rained down on me as well as tiny fragments of gods-know-what, and larger pieces of plastic housing. There were a few half-muffled shouts of surprise and pain, and then there were a lot of alarm bells ringing. I was still struggling to get some breath back in my lungs when people started arriving. I had thought those were real alarm bells. They were.

What looked like everybody at SOF headquarters poured into Pat's room, and there were more of them than you'd think for ten-thirty at night. Once I could breathe again I could tell the medic I wasn't hurt. (There are medics on duty twenty-four-seven at SOF HQ: our tax blinks at work. Well, okay, lots of big corps have medics on duty, but few of them have combat patches. This one did.) My shirt had got a little torn, somehow, and the chain and the mark it made were visible; he gave me some burn cream for the latter, while he muttered something about the weird effects of a combox blowout. Fortunately it didn't seem to occur to him to suggest that there was something funny about my necklace and I shouldn't wear it. I didn't mention the hot spots I could feel on my thighs. I was glad still to have thighs.

Pat had fared the worst; he needed stitches in one shoulder where he was hit by the biggest single chunk of flying combox, and had several inelegant burn marks on his face and one hand, although none of them serious. “Hey, I was an ugly bastard before,” he said. “It's not gonna ruin my social life.” Even Pat had been rattled, however, because the two guys who rushed in and sat down at the other combox in the room—one of them with a headset he kept muttering into—had been tapping away intently for several minutes before Pat noticed. I had been watching them as I lay on the floor, but I was pretty hazed out myself and hadn't managed to think about what they might be doing. I had half-noticed Jesse doing an ordinary startled-human stillness thing when those two came in, but I hadn't registered it. I did register Pat snapping into awareness and then exchanging a hard look with Jesse.

And then the woman came in and the tension level in the room went off the scale. I felt like we were in one of those old-fashioned movie rockets where the Gs of escape velocity crush you into the upholstery. Okay, so my metaphors had taken a wrong turn, but when I first looked at her there were no shadows on her at all: it was as if she was
glowing
, in great sick-making waves, like a walking nuclear reactor or something, if I had ever seen a nuclear reactor, which I have not. Instant headache. Instant wanting-to-be-out-of-here, wherever here was; hereness seemed to fade under the onslaught of her mere presence.

This had to be the goddess of pain. And I had thought that name was just a joke. Uh-oh.

She snapped a few undertone orders to one of the fellows with the headset; he was obviously not happy, and he shook his head. His partner in crime shrugged and spread his hands. “Your little stunt has just bombed HQ's entire com system,” she said in a cold clear voice that was worse than any shouting. “What the
hell
are you doing?”

Pat, almost visibly pulling himself together, said, “I had clearance. Ask Sanchez.”

“You didn't have clearance to close the regional HQ down, and you obviously didn't do your homework about safeguards,” said the woman, not a split atom's worth mollified. “You still haven't told me what you were trying to do, and Sanchez isn't here.”

One of the headset guys on the other combox barked something, and she listened to them briefly. When she turned to glare at Pat again he was a little more ready for her. “We were trying to trace an Other cosmail to a land source. We have been working with Aimil, here,” nodding to her, “for some months. This is Rae Seddon, whom we had reason to believe might be able to help us. This is the second time she's tried to make a connection. As for safeguards, I …” and he ran off into a lot of technical jargon I didn't understand a syllable of, and didn't want to. I tuned out.

By this time I was breathing again, although my lungs felt sore. Not nearly as sore as my head, however. My eyeballs felt like they were embedded in glass splinters and my entire skull throbbed. I was now seeing a fat glaring red edge to everything, an erratic fat glaring red edge, sometimes as wide as a pocketknife, sometimes as narrow as an opalescent chain. It didn't need shadows. It looked like cracks in reality, opening into the chaos I'd seen protecting the way to Bo through nowheresville. I clung to the arms of the re-righted chair I'd been helped into once the medic was done with me.

“Hold
still
,” he said. He was trying to put stitches in Pat's shoulder. I didn't want to look at the goddess of pain again; I knew it was my eyes, but there was something really
wrong
about her, and whatever it was, it made my headache worse.

I watched a couple of people gathering up pieces of combox. Another person appeared bearing a big bottle of some kind of, presumably, solvent, and was wiping up the littler gel blobs. Somebody else was flipping the bigger blobs into a bucket. I noticed that some of them left marks behind them. Jesse had minor burns on one forearm; Theo and Aimil hadn't been touched. It could have been a lot worse.

It was a lot worse. It just wasn't about being burned by combox gel.

My red edges were, I thought, narrowing. Not fast enough.

I didn't notice the pause in the conversation till I heard my name being repeated. “Rae Seddon,” the goddess was saying. I jerked my eyes up—and flinched: neither my eyes nor my head was ready for sudden movements—and equally unequal to meeting the goddess' eyes. “I heard about the incident a few weeks ago,” she said, “with the vampire in Old Town.”

I didn't say anything.

“I'd quite like to have a chat with you myself sometime,” she said.

I still didn't say anything. I glanced at Pat. He was so poker-faced I knew he was worried. There was a big red halo around his head, and the shadows across his face were so blue I was surprised they weren't obvious to everyone. I hoped they weren't.

“I doubt I can help you,” I said, not looking at her. “I think it was an accident.”

“Some power residue from your experience at the lake?” she said. I didn't like having her so up on my history. I wondered what else she knew. “Yes, I agree that that is the most likely. But it is the first such incident I'm aware of in any of our records”—did this mean she was interested enough to have had research done on it?—“and I would like to know as much about it as possible. SOF is always interested in unusual and unique cases. We have to be.” She smiled. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. It wasn't that she didn't mean it, exactly. It was that it was an official lubricant-on-the-sticky-gears-of-community smile. It suited her aura of poisonous gases. A toxic oil slick on the sea of society. I didn't like the smile. I found Pat's single-minded commitment to the total annihilation of vampires a little inopportune but I believed he was one of the good guys. I didn't believe she was.

I didn't smile back. I tried to look too beat up from what had happened to be able to smile. I wasn't. What I was was too beat up to make myself smile when I didn't want to.

“I assume that tonight's misguided attempt at a
connection
was also based on some faulty reading of that same residue?”

The tone of her voice could have made cinnamon rolls unroll, cakes fall, and Bitter Chocolate Death melt. I hoped cravenly that she was talking to Pat.

Pat said, “There's a precedent. Milenkovic—”

“You'll have to do better than that, Agent Velasquez,” interrupted the goddess. “Milenkovic was a senile old woman.”

Pat took a deep breath. “Ma'am, Milenkovic's field notes clearly record—”

Jesse was arguing with the guys at the backup combox. I wanted to hear what was going on there but I didn't want to appear interested in anything while the goddess was still staring at me. I didn't think she was listening to Pat's dogged description of poor Milenkovic's misfortunes. I concentrated on looking stunned and blank. And maybe stupid. I was a marginal high school grad who baked bread for a living. Intellect was not a big feature. Hold that thought. Behind the blank look I was testing the memory of what had happened while I was plugged in. Had I found anything, or had I been repelled before I could make a fix? I wasn't going to stand up and make a directional cast as I had done the last time in this office, not with the goddess watching. But it felt a little … directional. And I was afraid if I didn't try it soon I might lose it, if there was anything to lose.

Aimil moved into my line of vision. She was looking at me too, but her look said,
Can I help
?

I stood up slowly. I felt shaky anyway, but I made myself look shakier yet. Aimil rushed to take my elbow. As I moved, I felt it.…

Yes. I'd found something. And I hadn't lost it yet.

I think Aimil felt the shiver run through me, and she probably guessed why. “Rae's pretty knocked around,” Aimil said, and I recognized her placate-the-inquisitor voice: one of the area library bosses got that voice, and when she was in residence at Aimil's branch library Aimil found special projects across town to attend to. “May I take her home?”

“Tell me, Rae,” said the goddess. “Do you think you discovered anything useful this evening?”

“I don't know,” I said carefully. “It was over pretty suddenly, and now I have a terrific headache.”

“Usually,” said the goddess, “the sooner the interview after the experience, the more information is obtained.”