Zero Sum (8 page)

“Can I help?” she asked him.

“No, Ms. Nelson.”

She pinned her hands behind her back and leaned forward.
 

“Come now, give a girl a chance.”

She batted her eyes.
 

“Pleeease?”

“No,” the medic replied firmly. I would have said yes. The “Magically Delicious” label on her t-shirt was getting stretched for all it was worth.

Jules stomped her foot. “Oh, bloody hell. Come on!”
 

The medic sighed. “Fine, Ms. Nelson, but you only get to observe. I don’t want you ossifying any muscle.”

Jules gave me thumbs up and skipped off behind him.

I looked around the room. Sheila and Fukimura were lying in cots, their heads bandaged. Dante and Roster were comatose. Monique was sitting at the edge of the training space, her legs dangling off the cement, with a big fat “Leave Me Alone” sign stapled to the back of her head. Jules’ adventures in the field of medicine aside, there was bad humor to be had all around. At least Maria was off grabbing us some food…

My jaw was throbbing again, so I grabbed a bottle of water and popped another round of pain pills. Then I went over to watch as Jules and the medics wrote a series of strange markings all over Dante’s left shoulder. (Apparently, she’d already overcome the “only observe” rule.)

“Hey Jules, where’s Sadie?”

“Obstacle course,” she said, not looking up from the procedure.

I wasn’t doing any good here, so I carefully hung my robe over the monstrous ice pack and hobbled over to the other side of the room. The obstacle course was a collection of modular false walls, foam pits, springboard floors, and rope courses designed to put the magic in motion. The park occupied almost half of the cavern’s space, and right now, flashes and sparks were rising from its center.

Curious, I climbed up onto the metal observation deck welded into the wall and hung my legs off the gangway. I had watched Roster run the course a few months back blasting cardboard cutouts to smithereens. The design was simple, a standard sweep-and-clear. The objective was to move room-to-room pinging bad guys while trying to avoid innocent babies and the like. I spotted Sadie right away. She must have just finished a round and was walking back to the start point. Sweat coursing off her brow, she looked like she was in her own world. I took the moment to open up my Sight. (I hadn’t quite decided if it was rude to use my Sight like this. The Committee on Dieter Ethics had run for the hills around the time I deployed napalm on the enemy.) I was surprised with what I found. A bubbling caldron of black gunk was sloshing around inside her. It was a nasty mix of anger, fear, regret, and wrath.
 

I shuddered. For Talmax’s sake, I really hoped that Sadie’s parents were still alive.

Sadie slammed the reset button, and a random assortment of targets popped up across the course. Some doors opened. Others shut. Sadie knelt down and drew up mana from the leyline. Then she sucked in some more. The seconds ticked by, and growing uneasy, I grasped the safety railing. Sadie was drawing in
way
too much mana. My volume control issues had made me an expert on the subject. I knew full well that taking in excess mana was a reckless thing to do. Sucking up too much mana could white you out and leave an un-moderated bolus of magic free to do as it pleased.

I nearly cried out—but Sadie finished her draw. The absurd bundle of energy still enveloping her, she steadied herself and stood. Her was breathing heavy. Her hold on it, tenuous. I leaned forward against the metal railing. She was focusing on compressing the oversized bundle of energy into a tighter and tighter circle. This style was way different than my own. Sure, Sadie was self-conduiting like I did, but she hadn’t set up a transmutation first. If I used myself as a conduit, I found it much easier to establish my transmutation
before
taking in the mana. That was mostly because I couldn’t store mana effectively, but also because having a bunch of free mana bouncing around inside you can prove to be incredibly distracting.
 

Sadie slowly extended her right arm and used her left hand to lock her elbow. The air in front of her palm began to swirl. I squinted. The air was compressing into a tight red ball. What was the point of that? Why focus air?

As the seconds ticked by, Sadie’s circle continued to shrink. The bundle of air inside was squeezed tighter and tighter. The space around Sadie’s hand blurred like a mirage. But what was the—my jaw dropped to the ground. Sadie was superheating the air. Superheating it to the point where the electrons were shorn free of their nuclei. She was creating the hottest, most volatile form of matter known to man.

Sadie Thompson was forming plasma in her palm.
 

I gripped the metal rail. What the hell was she thinking? To achieve plasma fusion at one atmosphere you needed a temperature of around, oh, one hundred million degrees. (Hey, some people memorize baseball stats, I memorize physics facts.) How the hell was she holding something that hot so close to her hand? Her skin should have melted off by now—check that—the ten meters
around
Sadie should have melted to slag by now. But Sadie wasn’t melting, she was charging straight forward…

Her arm still locked into place, Sadie burst through the first door, rolled to her right, aimed, and fired. A paper-thin stream of superheated particles spat across the room with imperceptible speed. It struck the first target clean, and the entire model burst into flames. Then, like sweeping a laser pointer, Sadie swung her arm across the room.
 

Every remaining target was sliced in two.
 

As Sadie collapsed panting onto one knee, I finally figured out the trick. Like Jules, Sadie was a circle worker, but unlike Jules, Sadie favored circles that trapped or deflected forces. Sadie was a containment specialist. It wasn’t her forte to transmute mana into plasma. That left only one viable explanation: Sadie had just built herself an ion drive.
 

I wasn’t familiar with all of the details, but the concept of an ion drive is simple. You build yourself a circular magnetic field and increase the charge of that field to insane proportions by running an equally insane amount of electric current through the metal coils wrapped around it. The gas inside the field will compress, compress to the point that atoms shed their electrons. When that happens you get something called plasma. (You know, the stuff stars are made of.) The plasma can’t escape, either. The magnetic field that created it also keeps it confined…that is until you poke the tiniest of holes in its perimeter. Then all that pent up energy surges out of the containment field like a shaken up can of soda pop. Only you don’t get bubbles of cola bursting out, you get a beam of superheated ionized particles ready to tear through anything in their path.
 

I had to hand it to her. The scheme was freakin’ brilliant. The yield was insane, but the spell was mana-cheap. You see, creating new matter takes more mana than anything, but Sadie had discovered a workaround. She simply superheated the air around her—and that air was free. A cast like that would use only a fraction of the mana required to make plasma from scratch, and by keeping her circle small, she further increase the cast’s efficiency. The only mystery was how she managed to breach the sphere’s containment at only one tiny pinhole. I thought back to how I’d crossed the threshold of Sadie’s other circle to save us from the grape juice. My understanding of magic circles was that breaches were always catastrophic. Once a circle is penetrated, the entire thing should collapse. Then again, my understanding of circles was rather limited.

I only saw one problem with Sadie’s new weapon—it cut everything, civilians and all. The attack sprayed like a hose. It required a sweeping motion to hit all the targets, and anything caught in its path was toast.
 

Sadie replaced the targets and left the room to repeat the drill. Leaning against the gangway post, I watched her run the course again.
 

“Who put the fangs in that one?” a silky voice asked me from behind.

I jumped with a start and nearly fell off the gangplank.
 

Rei snatched the hood of my robe and pulled me back up.

“Stars above, would you
please
stop doing that?” I pleaded.

“My most bloated blood bag, I fail to see the fun in that.”

“Okay, missy, ixnay on the snarky alliterations. I am wounded, not bloated. And
you
were the one doing the wounding.”

“It was medicinal.” Rei grabbed the handrail and slid down to dangle her legs beside me. We watched Sadie finish lopping the heads off three men with AK’s, a mother, her small child, and a puppy. Rei huffed at the sight. “Perhaps the young boy was concealing an Uzi, but I fail to see what threat the puppy posed.”

“Rabies. Didn’t you notice the crazed glint in his adorable little eyes?”

Rei frowned. “Not humorous, pin-cushion.”

I raised an eyebrow. Rabies, not funny? Since when?

“Anywho, Sadie’s been having a rough day. Her parents went missing during Talmax’s raid on Portland. Let’s permit her a few cardboard puppies.”

“Raid? There was a raid on Portland?”

I had forgotten. Rei hadn’t been at the meeting (daylight and all). I brought her up to speed.

“So Albright desires us to obtain a sample of this material? That is all?”

I frowned. “Yea, we just have to waltz into Vegas, poke around until we find the enemy’s lair, order up some ACT from the drive-thru window, and make a run for it. Yea, that’s all, Rei.”

“Perhaps I can just ask around. I can be quite persuasive.”

“Stars above, Rei,” I said, rubbing the shiners on both ends of my face, “your glamour isn’t what I’d call subtle.”

“Dieter, you are rather unique, persuasion is usually much less difficult.”

I scratched my head. That reminded me. “Rei, I have a question. I think it’s related, but if you don’t want to answer it, no problem. Just don’t get all ‘grrr’ on me, okay?”

Rei’s easy posture stiffened, but she acquiesced with a nod.

“There’s one thing I don’t get about this whole brouhaha. When we were briefed, the DEA guys showed us a map of North America. The East Coast belonged to us. Talmax was contesting us for the West Coast. But the Midwest didn’t make any sense. All the states on the Mississippi were blacked out. The bottom of Florida was blacked out too.”

“Blacked out, you say? How ominous.” Rei swept the errant strands of hair from her face and turned to me with a smile. “Really, Dieter, despite the many blatant falsehoods, you should consider taking
History of World Magic
. You are like an empty jar.”

“An empty jar that can do partial differential equations,” I said with a dash of the bitters.

“And you assume I cannot?” Rei asked with an easy smile.
 

“My bad. The Laplace equation’s applications in the field of fluid drainage would be of interest to you, wouldn’t they.”

Rei’s smile cooled. “Blood flow cannot be predicted by Laplace alone. Blood’s viscosity is three to four times that of water, and both the pressure applied on the system and its volume are variable. Even the emotional state of the container must be considered.”

My jaw dropped. “Okay. Wow. You just gave me a nerd boner.”

“Whatever that is, I hope it is quite painful.” She sighed. “But your initial query was about the nature of the Fiefs, yes?”

“No, my question was about the Mississippi River States. Why were they all painted black?”

“Black demarks the North American Fiefdoms.” Rei frowned. “The homogeneity is quite frustrating, really. As if a Bathory could be confused with a low Dartan, or a Drekker mistaken for a de Rais, but the Magi seem incapable of seeing anything beyond our fangs.”

I cocked my head so far sideways it nearly snapped off.

“Be patient, my empty jar, and I shall explain. I am what you recognize as a vampire, yes?”

I nodded vigorously. Rei definitely had fangs.

“Vampire is a term for the Imperiti, Dieter. It is nonspecific. Imprecise. My kind is more properly called the Nostophoros.”

I scratched my head. “That would be Phoros, meaning to carry, and Noso, meaning disease. Noso-phoros. The carriers of the disease.” I was impressed I actually remembered that. I was patting myself on my back, when I noticed Rei bristle. The steel guardrail squealed under her hand. Rage flashed behind her eyes, and I cringed as my Sight filled with a full-on ice storm.

“What’s wrong?”

“Dieter…” Rei closed her eyes and forced herself to calm down. I could tell it wasn’t easy. “If you ever meet another member of the Nostophoros, do not utter that word. It is Nosto-phoros, not Noso-phoros.”

I frowned. “Nostos? I remember that from somewhere…”

“Of course you do, you dolt. What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?”

“Oh, duh!” I near smacked myself in the forehead. “Joyce called the last two chapters of
Ulysses
‘the Nostos.’ That’s the Greek word for a homecoming. But, Rei, that doesn’t make any—”
 

An explosion shook the entire cavern. Sadie yelped in pain, and her right arm burst into scarlet flames.

“Sadie!” I shouted. I struggle to extricate myself from underneath the guardrail.
 

“Fasz kivan,” Rei grumbled. She slid off the gangplank and took the two-story fall feet first. By the time she’d kicked down the first false wall, she’d already removed her robe. Using the fire-retarding garment as a shield, she tackled Sadie to the ground and smothered the burn. I sprinted down the stairs to find Sadie’s smoldering body lying limp on the ground. Rei was kneeling over her.

“Dieter, these are third-degree burns. Fetch the medical team.”

I turned to go but paused. “Rei…can’t you, um…” I made a cutting action with my hand.

Rei’s eyes turned fearful. “That would be most unwise.”
 

I nodded. I didn’t understand, but I figured Rei knew best. Still, as I ran off to get help, I found myself rubbing at the scars on my palms. There was another reason I didn’t want to push the issue. I really didn’t want to know.