Mostly to prevent myself from punching the defenseless bastards I said, “Dachelle, I’ll give you and your friends each fifty bucks if you get us to Wirdilling in five minutes.”
“Hang on, mates!” Dachelle called. “I’ve had my eye on a pair of shoes at Mathers for the past three weeks and now I’ve finally got the chance to snatch ’em!” She floored it, sending Lance and Cole sliding into the window frames. Cole caught himself but Lance banged his head, which turned out to be the last straw. He passed out with his forehead against the window, which meant every time Dachelle took a sharp curve we could hear his skull bang against the side of the car.
Twelve minutes later we crawled out of the Hyundai and waved goodbye to Dachelle and friends. Lance kept rubbing his head and grimacing, but the rest grinned happily as they sped away since I’d decided to pay them for getting us there in one piece. Even though the timing sucked, I was sure nobody could’ve pulled us in faster.
While Jack strained to reach a fire hydrant at the street corner and Astral rolled around on the asphalt like a kitten, Cole, Kyphas, and I stood in the middle of Wirdilling Drive, staring at the dusty storefronts and empty alleyways, trying to figure out where the flying nose could’ve landed.
“Maybe he couldn’t reverse the sky car,” said Kyphas. “Maybe it stopped near the Space Complex and right now they’re all—”
“They’re here,” I said flatly.
“How can you be sure?” she asked. “What if it was never here to start with? What if they stored it miles away in some deserted canyon? That’s what I would do.”
“It’s here.” I sounded a lot more confident than I felt. Because if Vayl had been close, I should’ve been able to sense him. I couldn’t. But he’d told us to meet him here, so this was where we were going to be.
“Why isn’t Vayl talking to us?” asked Cole.
Because he’s miles and miles away? “Because they’ll overhear him if he says anything. Which reminds me. Bergman? We’re standing in front of Crindertab’s. It’s about to get pretty hot downtown. Now that you’re done with all the lab work, we could use your help here.”
“Oh. Sure. I’ll be right there.” He coughed to hide how his last word tried to climb right out of his throat.
I said, “Let’s find that sky car.”
“How?” asked Kyphas. “The cables are practically invisible.”
“So were their doors at first, but now we’ve discovered three of them.” I didn’t tell her my sudden surge of confidence was probably based on the rush I still felt that began at the clotting bite on my lip and ended at my tingling toes.
“Are you sure the drop is even in town?” asked Bergman, sounding slightly out of breath.
“Yeah, I think it’s here,” I said. “They’d want easy access to it, and the car was coming from this direction. I know our analysts never picked up on it, but maybe the Ufranites only use it at night. Much less chance of being seen at three a.m. Especially if your shaman has thrown a camo spell on it.” Cassandra spoke up. “Jasmine, can you hear me?”
I crouched down and touched the road like she was standing right underneath me. “Is everything okay?
You sound [tearful] different.”
“I’m fine. You can’t even imagine… Jasmine, the most wonderful thing has happened! I heard—no, let me tell you to your face. It’ll be soon because I’m nearly done here. Remember I said we were sneaking into the shaman’s quarters? You’ll never guess what I found there.”
“Tell me.”
“Tabitha’s dress.”
“Ruvin’s Tabitha?”
“She’s the shaman.”
I wanted to ask Cassandra if she was sure, but she was a freaking Seer. Of course she knew! Now Ruvin’s sacrifice to the larvae made perfect sense. Wives killed off their husbands, and vice versa, all the time. But why? Did Tabitha-Shaman really believe Ufran needed his privacy? Or did she have ulterior motives even her people, from whom she’d hidden her real identity, didn’t understand?
“That’s… you’ve gone above and beyond,” I told her. “Now do something even more important and get yourself out safe. If anything happened to you, Dave would never forgive me. And I kinda like it that he’s finally speaking to me again.”
“In that case I’ll be seeing you very soon,” said Cassandra. I could hear the smile in her voice. “In the meantime, why don’t you ask Astral about the sky-car dilemma? Or rather, her Enkyklios ?” I turned to the cat, who was currently dragging her hindquarters through the dirt between the sidewalk and the road and singing, “Oh, get down, turn around, go to town, boot scootin’ boogie.”
“Astral, you whacked robot, you are not Brooks or Dunn! Get over here!”
“What happened to her?” asked our psychic.
“You know what? I’m just gonna let you touch her and See the whole moment in surround Sight. You bringing reinforcements?”
“As many as I can manage.” Which would probably be, what, seven?
“Cool, I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Be safe.”
“Probably safer than you.”
She chuckled as Astral trotted to my side and said, “Hello!”
“What do you know about the Ufranites’ sky cars?” I asked her.
After the usual I’m-searching ear wobble, a deeper voice came from her moving mouth, one more suited to a broad-shouldered, potbellied history professor. “The vehicles in question were built during the early twentieth century and improved upon after the devastating nose-to-nose crash of 1945. Though somewhat ponderous and slow-moving, they are built to move twelve to fifteen gnomes from one to another of ten points in the ACT.”
“Yadda, yadda, yadda,” I griped. “Where’s the station?”
“The main access point is inside the old water tower,” Astral said, like I should’ve figured that out hours ago.
Holy crap! That’s right beside the damn post office!
“Bergman, you know where that is?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Meet us there.”
“Hey! You’ll never guess who I just saw dancing around in the playground of the old primary school.”
“Miles, this is no time for—”
“Tabitha!”
I paused for a beat to trade a significant look with Cole and make sure Jack was still trotting at the end of his leash. “Bring her.”
Small yelp. “Who, me?”
“Time to prove yourself. If you want to be my future partner, she’d better be dangling off the end of your fist the next time I see you.”
CHAPTERTHIRTY-ONE
In Australia, land of fire and drought, sharks and surfers, water is damn near worshipped. If nobody’s built a shrine anywhere they probably should, because I’m pretty sure people would come and kneel, take a drink and then, like humans all over the globe, make a wish and throw coins in to seal the deal. If somebody did decide to erect a monument, maybe it would resemble the old wooden tower that had once provided sustenance to Wirdilling. Though a new metal one had been erected within sight of the original, it seemed almost sacrilegious that true Aussies had let the old girl go to waste. Which might’ve been why the gnomes had latched on to her.
Outside she looked like your typical nineteenth-century above- ground town well. Except the section created to hold the juice was square, built on a platform that jutted out slightly farther than the container to give maintenance workers room to walk the perimeter. Nine sturdy posts held the tower a good thirty feet aboveground, their crosspieces stained an even darker brown than the rest of the structure, as if to emphasize the fact that they provided stability and helped ensure that the pressure stayed nice and high.
We knew the place hid something marvelous simply from the fact that it was humming like a power station when we approached it.
“What now?” asked Cole.