“So is Luna coming?” Sonder asked.
Of course, his social skills could use some work. “No.”
“Is she meeting us there?”
“She’s not coming.”
“Why not?”
I resisted the urge to tell Sonder to stop asking. It wasn’t fair to take it out on him and he was Luna’s friend too. “She’s gotten involved with some idiot who’s taken up the monkey’s paw.” I sketched out the story in a few short sentences.
“That’s … really bad,” Sonder said. His eyebrows had climbed up beneath his hair.
“Yeah.”
“But she knows the thing’s dangerous, right? You’ve told her?”
“Yes, Sonder, I told her.”
Sonder fell silent. I could tell from his expression that he was worried. “Don’t focus on it for now,” I said. “I don’t think there’ll be anything dangerous waiting for us, but let’s not get distracted.”
Unfortunately, now that Sonder had made me start thinking about it again, I couldn’t stop. The worst part was that even though I hated it, I could kind of see Luna’s point. This was what she’d always wanted: a way to deal with her curse. My training was slow, hard, and boring. The monkey’s paw was fast, simple, and easy. It wasn’t hard to see why she’d want it.
And there was the nagging worry underneath it all. What if I was wrong? What if the monkey’s paw really was Luna’s best chance of a normal life? I didn’t like Martin, and when it came to magic he had the common sense of a gerbil, but the uncomfortable truth was that so far it was working. Maybe by luck or cleverness, he really could manage to get the monkey’s paw to do what he wanted. It didn’t make any sense that the monkey’s paw should be a meal ticket … but life doesn’t always make sense. Sometimes stuff happens that you couldn’t have expected and you just have to deal with it.
And following up on that was an even nastier thought. Luna had come to me in the first place because she needed help with her curse. If Martin and the monkey’s paw could cure that … then maybe she didn’t have any reason to stay.
The factory didn’t look any better by day. The sunlight did a little to reduce the general aura of creepiness but it also enhanced the view of the rubbish scattered around the yard and the rust on the barbed wire. The street outside was emptier than any healthy neighbourhood should be, and the couple of people I could see seemed to be trying to avoid being noticed. “There’s nobody inside, right?” Sonder asked.
I did a scan, taking my time to do it thoroughly. In the futures before me, Sonder and I explored every room of the factory, branching at every turn. All that greeted us was empty darkness. “We’re clear.”
The Council search team hadn’t bothered to lock the place behind them, which made it much simpler to get in this time. The midday sunlight faded into gloom before we’d gone five steps and the sounds from outside died almost as quickly. The walls seemed soundproof. “This place is really creepy,” Sonder said under his breath, clicking on a torch.
I nodded. There really is such a thing as a good or bad aura when it comes to places, and the factory had a bad one—dark, rotting, and cold. It wouldn’t do any harm on a visit but you wouldn’t want to live here.
The journey into the factory was uneventful, beyond Sonder tripping a few times. “This is it,” I told Sonder as the corridor opened out into the factory floor. There was still a space where the barghest’s body had been, but not much else.
Sonder nodded. His eyes had that abstracted look that I knew meant he was concentrating. He pushed his glasses up as he looked around. “What am I looking for?”
“The battle,” I said. “It—”
“Found it. Eighty-four hours ago … no, eighty-five. Thursday midnight.”
Sonder’s a time mage. It’s one of the most difficult of all types of magic to learn; while elemental mages learn their craft in months or years, mastering time magic takes decades. Sonder doesn’t know many tricks yet, but what he does, he does very well. “I need to know what happened here,” I said. “Details of the battle, lead-up, conversations—anything you can find.”
Sonder nodded. He still had that absent look and I knew he was seeing the past, not the present. He took a notebook from his pocket and began circling the room, pencil in hand, while I watched out of curiosity. I always find it interesting to see the way Sonder does things; the types of magic we use are so similar and yet so different. Then I shook it off and got back to work. Sonder was pretty much oblivious while he was doing this, which meant it was my job to watch out for him. Scanning ahead, I saw that nothing much was going to happen while we were in the room. Sonder would finish, we’d head out, and—
Fire, pain, darkness. My reflexes took over and I forced the vision away and I was back in the present again, staring at the blackened walls. What the hell? We’d been walking down the corridor by which we’d come in, then …
I looked again and understood. A bomb. Someone had booby-trapped our way out. In fact, they were doing it right now. There was another assassin, here in the factory, fewer than eighty feet away, and he was trying to kill us.
I snapped.
“Hey, Sonder,” I said, not taking my eyes off the corridor. “Need to take care of something. Back in five.”
Sonder didn’t answer. I snapped off my torch and walked into the darkness.
The man was dressed in dark clothes and he was crouched halfway up the corridor. He’d placed his torch on a nearby box where it illuminated a splash of the hallway. In the white light, I could see a backpack leaning against the wall and a gun resting on the floor where it could be quickly snatched up. He wore a knitted cap.
The land mine was already almost hidden. The man had tucked it behind a heating pipe and he was busy covering it with pieces of rubbish. It looked like a metal cylinder about the size and shape of a coffee can. Looking into the future, I could see that when it was tripped, it would hurl a bomb into the air to burst at about waist height. The explosion would throw a spray of metal balls in all directions, ricocheting off the walls and turning the corridor into a death zone.
I stood quietly in the shadows at the end of the corridor, watching as the man finished setting the mine. He’d already placed the trigger mechanism. I didn’t know whether it was a trip wire or some sort of beam but I knew that once he armed the mine, anything going down the corridor at a certain height would set it off.
I’m not all that proud of what I did next. All I have to say in my defence is that I had had enough. It was the fourth attack in two days and I was sick of it.
The man twisted the switch to arm the mine and there was a click. I picked up a length of wood, then stepped out and threw it down the corridor.
It took the stick just over one second to complete its flight. It took the man a quarter second to catch the movement, a half second more to snatch up his gun and see what was happening. And by the time he realised that the stick was on course to fly through the trigger area of the mine—the same mine he was next to—it was far too late.
Sonder was looking in my direction as I walked back into the room. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“I thought I heard a bang.”
“Rats.”
“And something that sounded like a scream?”
“Big rats.”
Sonder looked at me. “Sonder, trust me,” I said. “You don’t want to know.” Violent death is a long way outside Sonder’s comfort zone. The same does not apply to me, which is not really a good thing. “We should go.”