Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games (4 page)

She arrived in the bay with Nix on her shoulder and wearing her art-deco robes and silver wire coronet, Grendel following with her “luggage,” and I was surprised to see Riptide flanking him.

“
Think she’s trying to impress someone?
” Shell whispered in my ear. I kept the grin off my face (with Ozma’s robes, Grendel’s preppy vest and tie, and Riptide’s street-hood leather duster they made a colorful and mismatched sight), but I couldn’t resist bowing her majesty through the hatch at the rear of the pod. Her smile recognized my brief amusement and her nod played along, something I really needed.

“Buckle up,” was all I said, giving grumpy Grendel a pat on the arm as he squeezed inside behind her. When Shell told me they were ready, I flew to the top of the pod and buckled into my own external lift harness. Shell opened the bay doors, and I maneuvered the arrowhead-shaped pod up and out with the ease of hours of practice.

“
Safe flight, Astra
,” Blackstone said in my earbug as I cleared the doors—as formal as always, but knowing he’d been watching my departure helped.

“We’ll be back for dinner, sir. Unless the Hollywood Knights have a good table tonight.”

“
See that you are
.”

Orb is one of the strangest breakthroughs I know. She’s blind and deaf from birth, and her floating silver sphere sees and hears for her. But she’s told me her “sight” spans the full electromagnetic spectrum, plus her sphere’s fine-grained pressure sensitivity lets her map three dimensionally with
sound waves
. Add to that her total control of the sphere’s location, motion, and topography—she can form it into a nearly indestructible shield, or a floating blade with a monomolecular edge that can cut
me
with little effort. So my question is, what kind of weird breakthrough produced that thing? And what does the world look like to her?

From the journal of Hope Corrigan

Lunette’s looked just as downscale and seedy in the daylight as it had the last time Shell and I had visited the superhuman nightclub. Papers blew across the empty walk outside its industrial-steel doors, and without darkness to cover them the squat building’s white stucco walls were gray and dingy.

The fenced-in and nearly empty parking lot gave me plenty of room for the pod and Orb met us at the doors, standing below the crescent moon that was Lunette’s sign. Her crisp white pantsuit was a perfect contrast to Ozma’s jade robes. Her golden hair, done up in its signature hard-set and eye masking conch shell doo, gave Ozma’s golden locks serious competition. As always, she looked too classy for the club she owned.

She ignored Ozma and her party. “Astra. It’s good to see you.” The silver orb hovering above her shoulder rippled in micro-patterns as it projected her voice.

“You, too.” I smiled, uncertain if she “saw” it. “How’ve you been?”

“Busy.”

I certainly knew that; Orb Investigations had become the premier superhuman investigations agency in California since Orb and Rafael Jones “adventured” with us in the Villains Inc. case. Her orb’s sensory powers let her detect and analyze anything physical, while Rafael—now Doctor Cornelius—could do the same for anything metaphysical with his Agrippan magic. They consulted across the country, and I was lucky they were available to see me.

Finally nodding at Ozma and the boys, she pulled the door open and led us through the empty club. Shell popped in beside me, looked around as we crossed the open dance floor. “You’d think they would have upgraded to a better office.”

“Hush,” I whispered automatically; of course Orb didn’t notice—Shell’s body was virtual, after all.

Orb led us to a door at the back of the club, drawing a red curtain aside to usher us into a private room where Doctor Cornelius waited for us beside an ominous and intricately drawn magic circle.

“Astra.” He nodded, smiling. “Good to see you and Shelly again.”
He
always saw her just fine. “And Ozma, good to finally meet you.”

I tore my eyes from the circle. “The same. You’re looking good.”

He did look good. The first time I’d seen him I’d recognized a strung out meth-head; the last time I’d seen him hadn’t been long after he’d spoken one of the three Deccanic “Words of God” in his head to spontaneously heal Orb’s fatal injury. That spoken Word had also raised Jacky from an undead vampire into a fully alive one and cured my PTSD as a
side-effect
. The effect had extended to him, and he’d looked a lot better then; now any lingering evidence of his hard years were gone and his eyes sparkled in his darkly handsome patrician face.

Ozma just gave him a regal nod and stepped over to a prepared side table; accepting a box from Grendel—the magic box that looked like an empty ornamental box of made of gem-dusted gold wire filigree—she opened. Riptide watched Doctor Cornelius and Ozma with arms folded and an
I’ve seen weirder shit
eye.

“Did you ever speak the last Word?” I blurted without thinking as Orb closed the door behind us and Ozma pulled stuff out of her empty box.

His smile turned into a deep laugh. “Have you read about the Everglades Deadzone? All the Words are gone from my head. I am only myself, now.”

Shell started. “Really? What did you kill?” The final Word had been the word for
Death
.

“Besides many square miles of glades? Something that badly needed to be dead. Shall we get started?” He nodded to the circle.

He had drawn the circle on a single piece of polished black granite that floored the center of the workroom, at least fifteen feet on a side. Russet-red banners had been hung around the circle on eight freestanding frames to give the room an octagonal shape. The room’s walls were purest white.

I swallowed. “What do I do?”

“Change into this. Leave everything else.” He held out a small white bundle. “Then stand inside the circle.”

When I reached out he dropped it into my hand, carefully not touching me. Unfolding it, I found myself holding a plain white cotton shift.

“You can change in any corner,” he said. He was right; there was plenty of room behind the banners.

“What’s this for?”

“I spoke with both Chakra and Ozma after Blackstone called.” He nodded to Ozma. “Since both of them are sensitive, in themselves or in the tools they can use, and neither found traces of psychic or supernatural influences, we’re going to look deeper. This—” he waved at the bewilderingly complex white circle again “—is specifically tuned to you and only to you. Everything you’re wearing brings its own signature and nature with it, and taking any of it into the circle with you will interfere with what we are trying to do.”

“So, you need a clean testing environment?”

“Exactly.”

I took a breath. Okay, I could do this.

I picked a corner and stripped out of the uniform, setting my earbug on top of it, and slipped on the sleeveless tunic. It covered everything important, but it was so light it barely felt like it was there. Which was the point, I supposed; barely there, it wouldn’t get in the way. At least it wasn’t as bad as an ass-flashing hospital gown.

Leaving everything piled in the corner and coming back out, I started to carefully step into the circle when Doctor Cornelius cleared his throat. He looked at Shell.

“I’m going to have to ask you to remove yourself as well, young lady.”

I cringed as Shell started to protest loudly—then shut up. She could work it through, too; if she was present virtually, it was through our quantum-link and that brought her into the circle with me.

“Fine,” she huffed. “But I’m turning her earbug
way
up.”

“Understood. Astra? The lines are painted, so you don’t need to worry about scuffing them.”

Painted? Now I could smell it, under the aroma of musk and some kind of fragrant dried plant (not a controlled substance or something otherwise psychosomatic; I could recognize those from my training with Fisher’s team). He must have spent the entire morning carefully tracing and then painting the circle with fast-drying acrylic—it was
complex
.

The circle’s circumference was two thick and close-spaced concentric rings, then a ring of Latin and mystic symbols, then a thinner inner ring, then a hexagon. A nest of crisscrossing inside lines touched all the hexagon’s corners, three of the lines thicker to form a triangle framing three touching circles enclosing more symbols that I assumed described me somehow and an empty double-lined and word-ringed circle at the center. All of it was meticulously drawn, laid with a drafter’s precision that had to require special tools.

Doctor Cornelius directed me to stand in the center. I’d never seen anything this elaborate before—even the wards he made for the Dome last year didn’t look like this—but I recognized the russet bundle he pulled out of his black coat. Seeing it made my palms go damp and my heart beat fast; the last time he’d used that stuff, a
thing
from somewhere worse than Hell had showed up and tried to kill everyone. It had “temporarily” killed Orb and Jacky, and had nearly killed me.

Orb made a noise and Doctor Cornelius looked up. He gave me a reassuring smile.

“Don’t worry. This time there’s no tether to the lower regions left behind to trip, so no qlippoths today I promise you. This is
my
workplace.” Standing beside Ozma, Riptide folded his arms and nodded and I suddenly realized why he’d tagged along with Grendel: he’d heard what happened the first time Dr. Cornelius had done a favor for me, and had come
just in case
.

My heart was still beating fast, but I jerked a nod and tucked my hands down by my sides. Tugging on the tunic’s hem, I tried to be still, to pretend it was just a bizarre medical checkup. Ozma slipped on a pair of narrow gold-rimmed glasses, and gave me her own reassuring smile.

I tried to return it. I could do this.

Doctor Cornelius began, reciting in Latin as he unwound the russet stole from the sticks, draping it over his shoulders and connecting the bundle of sticks into his surveyor’s rod. And just like last time, the world changed as he spoke, my ears telling me the words of his recitation were going out from us, no longer trapped and reflected by walls. The words grew heavier than the tone and strength in them could convey, and as seconds passed everything outside the circle grew less present, less
real
, though nothing had gone away.

I tried not to breathe, then realized that was silly. The atonal Greek chorus was back, somewhere out of sight but echoing under his words as he went on.

Minutes ticked by, until I wondered how long he could keep going without a pause—the last time we’d been interrupted by the qlippoth, so I had no idea how long it was supposed to take—and then I wondered just how much I could move without messing him up. Was it like lying still for a CAT scan? I really should have asked. At least nothing too hideously ugly to think about arrived, which was a good sign.

I couldn’t see Ozma or the boys—only Doctor Cornelius, and Orb who stood beside him holding a silver bell in her hand.

Then I felt the breeze, air moving on my skin. My first panicked thought was for my too-brief shield of modesty, but the gossamer cotton didn’t stir. The air in the room didn’t stir, but I felt it anyway.

And I smelled it, too. As Doctor Cornelius’ voice rose and fell, I smelled wildgrass and cherry blossoms. The air got wetter and then my tree was there, along with a landscape clearer than I’d ever seen it before. The stream I’d followed last night bubbled up from a spring at the base of my hill, winding through lower dips and hills to a shore. My tree stood on the highest hill of a small island, one of many islands off of a circling coastline, part of an inland sea or great lake. The scent of saltwater said sea.

I could barely see the magic circle, and Doctor Cornelius stood in the grass watching me as I turned about. Time was only my heartbeat until I saw him raise his hand and heard Orb’s bell ring, bright and pure. With each clear strike of her musician’s hammer on the bell, the tree, the hill, and the sea faded until I stood inside the circle again.

Along with a light dusting of cherry blossoms.

He bent down and carefully picked one up to examine it. “Well, that is interesting.”

Back in uniform and at a club table in the main room, I wrapped my hands around the warm cup Orb brought me. The coffee was mud compared to Jacky’s or even Willis’s, but it was real.

“What was that?” Shell asked.

She’d come back and now she sat beside me. I could tell she was worked up—her black athletic shirt, read
What the Freak?
All she’d heard through my earbug in the corner was minutes of Doctor Cornelius’ reciting and then the bell. She’d actually turned her gain and filters up enough to hear my heartbeat speed up and then drop off, but even checking my sense-memory through our neural link after the fact hadn’t told her anything; I hadn’t
seen
any of it, not through my optic nerve anyway.

On my other side, Ozma was pulling little bottles and dishes out of her empty box. As freaked as I was, watching her pull stuff out of a box you could
see right through
didn’t get to me at all. Or maybe I’d just gotten used to Ozma.

“That was nothing,” she told Shell, who must have been relaying through Ozma’s own earbug. “There was nothing in the circle with Hope. She went somewhere else.”

“But she didn’t
go
anywhere!” Shell protested. Grendel rumbled his agreement and Riptide nodded.

“You can go somewhere else and not leave,” Ozma said like it made perfect sense. “But it might be more correct to say that another place came to her. Doctor Cornelius?”