Worldweavers: Cybermage (12 page)

Thea squared her shoulders. “Humphrey May knows what he knows,” she said. “Let me go and find out just how much.”

“How do you know where he is?” Ben asked.

“He wants to be found,” Terry said. “He’ll put himself in your way.”

“He went toward the admin building,” Kristin said helpfully, pointing.

“I noticed,” Thea said. “Thanks. I’ll get back to you guys.” She caught Terry’s eye once again, hesitating just a little. “Terry, about Humphrey…Are you sure…?”

“We are,” Tess said.

It had started to rain more heavily, and now Thea
flipped the collar of her light jacket up about her ears and dashed out onto the wet grounds, racing through puddles as she ran. It took her only a few minutes to get to the administration building, but her hair was plastered across her face by the time she got there, and she paused for a moment to push it out of her eyes.

“Oh dear,” said a contrite but humorous voice behind her. “You didn’t have to get
soaked
.”

Thea pushed the wet hair behind her ears, shrugged down her damp collar, and turned around. “It’s only water,” she said. “Were you waiting for me?”

“I guess I was,” Humphrey said.

Thea drew a deep breath. She was about to call his bluff, to throw down the gauntlet to a fully fledged, trained mage of the Federal Bureau of Magic, all on the word of a friend. But Terry had trusted
her
when it mattered. It was time to return the favor.

“If we aren’t certain that those birds of yours can be…rejoined, then we can just sit back and watch the Alphiri chasing pigeons in the park, and laugh about it,” Thea said. “The only person likely to have any kind of certain knowledge about this would be Tesla himself. Why don’t you let me, or
us
, go back and ask him?”

For a moment she thought she had overplayed her hand, because his expression darkened into a thunderous scowl—and then the scowl vanished, and what was left was exactly what Terry had predicted would be there. Helplessness. A sense of vulnerability that bordered on outright fear.

“We…can’t. The cube…I didn’t quite tell you the whole story. The truth is,
they
might already have it.”

It took Thea a moment to parse this, and when she did it was with genuine surprise. “You think the
Alphiri
have the cube?”

He really hadn’t come to the Academy to ream Thea out for breaking into the FBM headquarters. Part of her was simply relieved; another part was slowly coming to realize that the foray into the FBM, and the theft of Tesla’s cube, had been something quite different from anything she had done before. It had been a conscious, planned defiance of all the accepted rules. And she had done this under the very noses of the Federal Bureau of Magic, the highest authority in the land, and had done it without being detected.

“We don’t know where the actual artifact is, right now,” Humphrey said, the words all but wrung out of him.

Thea stared at him for a long moment.

“I can get your pigeons,” she said at last.

Humphrey shot her a startled look. “But we don’t know, not for certain, that the birds are even—”

“We do.
You
do. And if the Alphiri are out there looking, then
they
know it too. If the pigeons are out there, we can get them.”

She had spoken with confidence. Something had shifted; they had suddenly been transformed from mentor and trainee into something approaching equals.

Thea could see Humphrey become aware of this; he looked surprised by it, and not entirely in a pleasant way.

“What makes you so sure?” Humphrey said after a moment, his voice suddenly darker and lower.

Thea looked at him steadily. “Because,” she said, “I have a Finder.”

“A Finder?” Humphrey echoed. “One of you five is a Finder?”

“No. Another.”

“Someone…
else?
Here, at the school? We’d agreed that this whole thing would stay within the circle, that as few people as possible would know about any of it.”

“Rafe told somebody,” Thea pointed out. “On the whole, my Finder is probably a lot more trustworthy. If you want those pigeons, use what you’ve got.”

A memory of Humphrey’s own words came back to Thea, overheard on a damp night in a cedar wood.
I use what tools are given to me, and Thea Winthrop is the sharpest sword I have right now.

“One of those pigeons has been hurt,” she continued. “Or even killed. We know that, from what the five of us originally saw when we entered the cube. Between Magpie’s connection to things that are sick or wounded and need healing, and Kristin’s ability to find the others, we can do this.”

“Who’s this Kristin? Your Finder? How do you know that she is to be trusted with any of this? How did she get to be involved?”

“Things happen for a reason,” Thea said.

“I’m not sure I like this. I need to meet this Finder of yours.”

“You said time is of the essence,” Thea said.

Almost unwillingly, he nodded. “This needs to be done quickly and quietly, before the Alphiri get it all together.”

“We can do it,” Thea repeated.

Cheveyo’s voice suddenly came floating back to her—
You cannot hide forever
. If she did this—if she showed her hand at last—there would be no more hiding, in this world or in any other. And if the Alphiri failed in their quest to gather the Human Polity’s greatest wizard and make him do their bidding, they would know, in no uncertain terms, that there was an alternative—Thea herself, coming into her own place of power at last. Once she cast aside the concealment that had kept her safe, she would be exactly the thing that the Alphiri had wanted in the first place, a mage who could give their race the magic that they craved, who could give them a legacy, could make their race immortal. And it would be she, Thea, who would be on the front lines next time.

“Are you all right?” Humphrey said. “You look very strange, all of a sudden.”

“I’m fine,” Thea said, coming back to herself with a snap.

“Are you sure you need to involve someone new in this?”

“She’s necessary,” Thea said. “Without a Finder, we would be doing exactly what Rafe found so amusing—blundering around New York catching
pigeons on a hit-or-miss basis. Which is probably what the Alphiri are doing. But with a Finder who is focused on a certain thing or a certain idea, we can do it.”

“Do you have a plan?” Humphrey asked, and there it was again—that change, the difference in his tone. He was frowning a little, but he had accepted her as a partner rather than an apprentice.

“Not yet,” Thea said. “But Christmas break is coming up. I can pull all of us together, with no schoolwork to distract us from this.”

“You can always reach me, through
that
,” Humphrey said, nodding at her keypad device, answering Terry’s question beyond any further doubt. “Let me know what logistics support you need. I’ll do whatever I can to help. Go find Tesla, Thea. Thanks for doing this for us.”

I use what tools are given to me.

Thea Winthrop is the sharpest sword I have right now.

Humphrey May had just shown his hand; the sword had been unsheathed. He had offered assistance, but he had also stepped back from the front line, leaving the battle itself to Thea. It was at once a gesture of trust, and a cold willingness to gamble Thea herself
to win a game with much higher stakes.

Protect. That’s what I am sworn to do
.

Humphrey’s words, again, but this time they resonated for Thea, too.

“I’m not doing it for you,” Thea said. “I’m doing it for Tesla.”

“O
KAY, ONE MORE TIME,”
said Ben, ticking his points off on the fingers of his right hand. “These so-called Elemental pigeons were somehow detached from Nikola Tesla; they’re little magical Elements, and they are still potentially alive and flitting around New York City decades after any ordinary pigeon would have kicked the bucket. The Alphiri buy this idea and send a pigeon-hunting team to New York. Humphrey May, the highest authority on this subject right now in
our
polity, speaking straight from the heights of the FBM and all of its vast and all-powerful knowledge, buys this idea—to the extent of okaying a pigeon hunt of our own, before, quote, ‘the Alphiri get them.’ But not even Humphrey May is sure whether said pigeons, assuming they exist, and can be caught, can even be…what did you call it, Thea?…
rejoined
to the original Tesla entity.
And if they can, nobody has any idea what would happen next. How am I doing so far?”

“Pretty much covers it,” Thea said.

They had gathered together, all six of them, in what Kristin called Thea’s pseudo-classroom—a bubble-universe classroom emptied of its student population, shielded, warded, and made safe for Terry to speak his mind in. Thea had called them in to report on the outcome of her conversation with Humphrey May, and, with a twinge of guilty misgivings, to inform them that she had volunteered them all for the pigeon-hunting project.

And Ben, judging from the sharper-than-usual edge of sarcasm in his words and the tone of his voice, wasn’t taking to the idea very well.

“And you agreed to help him find these…these…” Ben waved his hand in front of his face, helplessly searching for the right adjective. “It’s a wild goose chase!”

“Wild
pigeon
,” Kristin said, grinning.

Ben growled at her.

“Terry…it might come down to you, in the end,” Thea said, turning away from Ben.

“You’re thinking that anything remotely like a rejoining would somehow have to happen inside a
cyber-environment,” Terry said. “It makes sense; that’s the only place where all the pieces can actually exist together without violating all kinds of real-world rules. But what do you want me to do about it?”

“You’d need to write something. Some kind of code that unifies the pieces that were scattered and makes it all whole again.”

“That’s quite a job,” Terry said, a strange expression on his face.

“Well, you’ve had practice,” Tess said. “The Twitterpat thing in the Nexus. You’ve worked with it for quite a while now.”

“Yes, but Twitterpat wrote that. All I did was tinker.”

“Yeah, right, and you’re so bad at tinkering that they handed you the Nexus on a silver platter,” Ben said.

“I thought you were against this whole idea,” Magpie said, turning to him.

“I
am
!” Ben said. “I think the whole thing is getting weirder and more out of control. I’d like to see a
shred
of concrete evidence.”

“Your father is a scientist, isn’t he?” Kristin murmured.

“So?”

“Sometimes,” Kristin said, “you have to have faith first and evidence later.”

“Oohhhh,” Ben said, turning away. “You started all this, you know. You and your bright idea of stealing the cube.”

“Well, there
is
that,” Thea said.

“What?”

“You wanted evidence. We can get evidence, of sorts. From the cube. From Tesla himself. He was the one that did the split in the first place; he, if anyone, will know if anything can be done to reverse it.”

“And you’re telling me that you can go back in there and actually talk to this Tesla spirit or whatever’s trapped in there? If
he
tells you it’s all a wild goose chase, will you go back to Humphrey May and tell him it’s all off?” Ben said.

“Would that be satisfactory?” Thea said, and this time she couldn’t quite hide the grin.

“You’re just making fun of me now,” Ben said, narrowing his eyes.

“Some,” Thea said. “Ben, I don’t blame you. I don’t quite believe any of it myself. Still, we all saw what we saw. And then there’s the Alphiri.
Something about all this made
them
believe that there’s a bargain to be had. Whatever else I might think of them, I trust their instincts on that score. They must think there’s something in this for them or else they’d be quite happy to let us do our own pigeon-chasing.”

“Humphrey said that the
Alphiri
were seen chasing pigeons,” Tess said slowly.

“Yes, and?” Ben said, turning on her.

“There’s varying levels to this,” Tess said. “If they didn’t think it was worth their time, they would be doing nothing at all. If they were marginally interested, they might have contracted somebody to do this particular hunt for them, and just present them with the pigeons, if found. But no—they
themselves
were seen in New York chasing birds. This is important enough for it not to be trusted to underlings.”

“Important enough to break cover,” Magpie said.

“All right, so someone believes there’s really something in it,” Ben said, conceding that point at least, however unwillingly. “What possible use can
we
—”

“And how much attention would you give to a
kid
prancing around trying to catch a pigeon?” Tess said thoughtfully.

“We won’t have to resort to random netting,” Thea said. “Kristin is a Finder. If she can turn her talents to Finding particular birds…”

Kristin sat up. “You want
me
to…”

“I thought we were going to talk to Tesla first,” Ben said.

Thea sighed. “All right,” she said. “I need to go—”

“We might as well all go,” Ben said. “It took all of us last time, and we would
all
be there to hear whatever he had to say.”

“Skeptic,” Thea grumbled, pushing up her sleeve and staring thoughtfully at her wrist keypad for a second. “Fine. Hold on to your hats.”

The sudden appearance of open sky and flat-topped mesas around her made Kristin’s breath whistle through her teeth as she gasped in astonishment.

Cheveyo stepped out from behind a stone outcrop, his staff in one hand, the Tesla cube held in the palm of the other.

“Catori,” he said, acknowledging Thea. And then, with a brief nod at the others, “And to all of you: welcome back. I told you that it would only be a short while before you would return for this, Catori.
I did not realize myself just how short a span of days it would be.”

“You may still need to guard it for me a while longer,” Thea said. “But we need to contact the man who lives inside it. We need…a few answers.”

“Your wizard. Tesla.” The words were nothing less than the truth, but coming from Cheveyo, who had no way of knowing what the cube contained, they froze his visitors in their tracks.

“How do you know that?” Thea said, recovering first. “Were you able to reach him yourself?”

“I, no,” Cheveyo said. “But Grandmother Spider knows. And after you left the cube with me, she came to tell me something of it, to make sure I knew how to protect it.” He held out the cube to Thea. “This is your kind of power, your gift, not mine.”

Thea took the cube, bowing her head in a gesture of respect.

“I will leave you,” Cheveyo said. “If you have need of me later, you know how to call me.”

“He’s scary,” Kristin said in a small voice, staring at the place Cheveyo had been standing a moment before.

“Only if you have reason to fear him,” Thea said. She stared at the cube, frowning slightly. “I’m trying
to figure out just how to go at this. The last time we all piled on was when we unlocked this thing, but we didn’t get to talk to Tesla then. It was like we were watching a movie.”

“But that’s when we saw the pigeons,” Magpie pointed out. “The whole thing started then.”

“But when I got to
talk
to him, I time-wove myself a place in his own time and space, a somewhere and somewhen that he was real, touchable, able to have a conversation with me. But I was looking for fairly specific times, then, and I was able to choose…” She looked at the others, perplexed. “The problem is that we need to speak to him directly, or else it’s all going to be hints and fancies again. But we need to speak to him at different times in his life. We probably need to speak to him in the immediate aftermath of what happened in Colorado.”

“Are you sure about that?” Ben murmured. “He looked pretty strung out over that. Would he even be able to tell you anything coherent?”

“Well, as soon as possible after that event, then, when it was still fresh in his mind and he could offer ideas.”

“It would probably be constructive to speak to him
before
he did what he did,” Magpie said. “It
would tell us far more about his motives, and if he even thought about the possibility of getting any of his Elemental abilities back, if he thought he could control them, outside himself. If he even
wanted
any of it back.”

“And much later, to see if we succeeded in finding the pigeons,” Tess said.

Thea turned to her. “How do you figure that?”

“He might know,” Tess said. “It might be linked to
his time
, somehow. It might be our only clue as to whether we should go on with any of this.”

“But we know that he didn’t have the Elemental gifts back when his body died,” Ben said. “Or he certainly took some pains over making people believe that at the time.”

“But the cube,” Kristin said, frowning at the smooth white cube Thea held cradled in her hands. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t get how anyone could do that, transfer himself into that and let his body die…not without
some
magic. I don’t think there are many people out there capable of making themselves immortal. Just like that, on a whim. And living on inside an artifact.”

“But is he living on in there?” Magpie asked abruptly. “Or is it all just his dreams and memories
and the things in his life he thought to be important?”

Thea sighed. “I think,” she said, “that we should go as far forward as we can. Seek him when he is old, and perhaps wise, or at any rate wiser than the young wizard who thought that releasing Elemental magic into wild birds was a good idea. And then we can ask Tesla himself where to go from there.”

“Sounds good to me,” Terry said. “But that still leaves the method in your hands. Do you have to do this on your own, or can you take any of us with you?”

“That would be pretty awesome,” Kristin said, her broad grin showing her preposterous teeth.

“Thea, wait,” Terry said. “Perhaps at least one of us
should
stay behind. Just in case something happens here. Someone should keep an eye on things.”

“He has a point,” Magpie said. “I’ll stay. You all go; you can fill me in when you get back. But you might need someone physically here in a hurry, and I’ll stick around.”

“You’ll miss all the fun,” Kristin said. “You sure?”

“Oh, please, can’t
she
stay?” Ben said, staring at Kristin.

Thea, who had been typing on her keypad, looked up and skewered Ben with a glare. “Cut it
out
,” she said. “Okay, Magpie. I’ve set things up so I can ‘talk’ to you. I have no idea if any of this will work the way I think it will, but…here goes.”

The red sands blinked out, and all of them except Magpie found themselves in a hotel room furnished in a sparingly elegant and yet utilitarian manner. Three or four pigeons balanced precariously on the ledge outside a closed window, glimpsed through half-drawn drapes. A faint sound of their cooing came drifting through the glass, mingled with a murmur of distant street traffic—tinny honking of car horns, a deep rumble of heavy buses, and the occasional staccato counterpoint of horses’ hooves and wooden carriage or cart wheels on hard tarmac.

“What—?” Ben began, his voice hushed, but Thea closed the fingers of one hand around his wrist to silence him and pointed. They were not alone in the room. A man sat in a boxy-looking leather armchair by the window, apparently lost in thought.

He was a striking figure—tall and gaunt, clean-shaven, his graying hair middle-parted in an old-fashioned style, his blue eyes distant and unfocused. He was dressed in a suit and a clean white
shirt with a blue tie knotted under his collar. One long-fingered hand lay perfectly still on the leather armrest; the other held a half-full cut-glass tumbler containing an amber liquid. His index finger tapped against the side, gently, rhythmically, almost in perfect time to the pigeons’ coos.

“Is that him?” Kristin whispered.

She had spoken very softly, but at the sound of her voice the man in the armchair turned and looked straight at them.

“I remember you,” he said after a moment, staring at Thea. A slight frown creased his forehead. “Why do I remember you?”

“We first met…many years ago, for you. And then again, many years before that.”

“That makes no sense,” Tesla said. “And yet, it does. Give me a moment, I will find the moment.”

Even as Thea drew breath to speak, Tesla sat up in his chair, his fingers curling tighter around his glass.

“Oh yes,” he said. “When I was a boy.”

“That was…the second time,” Thea said carefully. “The first time was many years after that. Here, in the city.”

“You are speaking of time shifts. I have never had
occasion to try them, myself, but I know they exist. The Alphiri portals needed to be configured for those, too. The theory is familiar to me.”

“The Alphiri portals?”
Ben said, staring at Tesla. “What do you have to do with…”

Tesla gave him a long, stern look. “They came to me with a basic idea,” Tesla said, “and struck a bargain with me to improve it. I did so. They planned to use them to improve transportation of entities across space and time, much like the human ’ports that I later developed for our own use, but far more complex.”

Kristin was slack-jawed, Ben’s expression was one of both astonishment and outrage, and Terry looked chagrined, as though something very obvious had just been pointed out to him. But it was Thea, her instincts roused as usual at the mention of the Alphiri, who responded to his words.