Aimil, looking subdued, was waiting in Pat’s office, with Jesse and Theo. She got up from her chair and put her arms around me. I hugged her back and we stared at each other a moment. “I guess these guys worked you over so the bruises don’t show,” I said.
“Which is more than can be said for you,” said Aimil, touching my jaw gently.
“I got that doing chin-ups on the top oven,” I said. “Let’s get on with this, can we? I want to go home and go to bed. Four in the morning is already soon.”
Pat’s combox was on, and the saved cosmail winked at us as soon as he touched the screen. Even before plugging in to the live connection it looked evil to me; the flickering print seemed to have a kind of bulgy red edge, so that it looked like tiny scarlet mouths howling behind every letter of every word. “Ready?” said Pat.
I sat down and put my hands on the keyboard, like I was going to do some perfectly ordinary com thing, tap a few keys, see what the headlines were on the Darkline. “Ready,” I said. He pressed the globenet button and the mail went live.
I was almost sucked in after all. Hey, I didn’t know what I was doing. Was there an apprenticeship for this? The globenet hasn’t been around all that long, but magic handlers adapt pretty fast—they have to. If I’d been apprenticed, could I have learned how to trace a cosmail? No. If this was something magic handlers now routinely did, SOF would have a division of magic handlers that did it. And they wouldn’t be all over me like a cheap suit. I was going where no one had gone before. And I wasn’t having a good time.
It was my talismans that held me together, and in this world. I felt them heat up, wow, like zero to a hundred in nothing flat with the throttle all the way open, like a cold inert vampire being brought back to undeadness by a surprise drop-in guest. I guessed there was a red hoop around my neck and over my breast now, and a red oval on each thigh. I hoped they wouldn’t set my clothes on fire, which might be hard to explain as well as embarrassing.
It was pretty excruciating. It was like being dragged forward and hauled backward simultaneously: as if I was living the moment when my divided loyalties ripped me apart and took off with their riven halves. Other-space yawned, and while last night, with Con at the far end of the back-country-lane version, it had merely been remote and unearthly and nowhere I had any business being, tonight it was the bad one again, the shrieking maelstrom. If I went headfirst into this one I wouldn’t come out, except in small messy pieces.
But I was frisking on the boundary of dangerous territory for a purpose. Dimly through the inaudible din, I thought, perhaps this is Bo’s defense system. Okay, if I can find where the defense system is, presumably I can find where what it’s defending is. Or is that too human a logic? I tried to orient myself, carefully, carefully, staying firmly seated on the chair in Pat’s office, feeling my talismans burning their variously shaped holes into my flesh. I wasn’t the compass needle myself this time—that would have been too far in—I was trying to angle for a view so I could see where the compass needle pointed…
There.
And I was flung over backward, with the chair, and landed on the floor so hard the breath was knocked out of me. This was just as well, because Pat’s combox exploded; droplets of superheated flying goo rained down on me as well as tiny fragments of gods-know-what, and larger pieces of plastic housing. There were a few half-muffled shouts of surprise and pain, and then there were a lot of alarm bells ringing. I was still struggling to get some breath back in my lungs when people started arriving. I had thought those were real alarm bells. They were.
What looked like everybody at SOF headquarters poured into Pat’s room, and there were more of them than you’d think for ten-thirty at night. Once I could breathe again I could tell the medic I wasn’t hurt. (There are medics on duty twenty-four-seven at SOF HQ: our tax blinks at work. Well, okay, lots of big corps have medics on duty, but few of them have combat patches. This one did.) My shirt had got a little torn, somehow, and the chain and the mark it made were visible; he gave me some burn cream for the latter, while he muttered something about the weird effects of a combox blowout. Fortunately it didn’t seem to occur to him to suggest that there was something funny about my necklace and I shouldn’t wear it. I didn’t mention the hot spots I could feel on my thighs. I was glad still to have thighs.
Pat had fared the worst; he needed stitches in one shoulder where he was hit by the biggest single chunk of flying combox, and had several inelegant burn marks on his face and one hand, although none of them serious. “Hey, I was an ugly bastard before,” he said. “It’s not gonna ruin my social life.” Even Pat had been rattled, however, because the two guys who rushed in and sat down at the other combox in the room—one of them with a headset he kept muttering into— had been tapping away intently for several minutes before Pat noticed. I had been watching them as I lay on the floor, but I was pretty hazed out myself and hadn’t managed to think about what they might be doing. I had half-noticed Jesse doing an ordinary startled-human stillness thing when those two came in, but I hadn’t registered it. I did register Pat snapping into awareness and then exchanging a hard look with Jesse.
And then the woman came in and the tension level in the room went off the scale. I felt like we were in one of those old-fashioned movie rockets where the Gs of escape velocity crush you into the upholstery. Okay, so my metaphors had taken a wrong turn, but when I first looked at her there were no shadows on her at alclass="underline" it was as if she was glowing, in great sick-making waves, like a walking nuclear reactor or something, if I had ever seen a nuclear reactor, which I have not. Instant headache. Instant wanting-to-be-out-of-here, wherever here was; hereness seemed to fade under the onslaught of her mere presence.
This had to be the goddess of pain. And I had thought that name was just a joke. Uh-oh.
She snapped a few undertone orders to one of the fellows with the headset; he was obviously not happy, and he shook his head. His partner in crime shrugged and spread his hands. “Your little stunt has just bombed HQ’s entire com system,” she said in a cold clear voice that was worse than any shouting. “What the hell are you doing?”
Pat, almost visibly pulling himself together, said, “I had clearance. Ask Sanchez.”
“You didn’t have clearance to close the regional HQ down, and you obviously didn’t do your homework about safeguards,” said the woman, not a split atom’s worth mollified. “You still haven’t told me what you were trying to do, and Sanchez isn’t here.”
One of the headset guys on the other combox barked something, and she listened to them briefly. When she turned to glare at Pat again he was a little more ready for her. “We were trying to trace an Other cosmail to a land source. We have been working with Aimil, here,” nodding to her, “for some months. This is Rae Seddon, whom we had reason to believe might be able to help us. This is the second time she’s tried to make a connection. As for safeguards, I…” and he ran off into a lot of technical jargon I didn’t understand a syllable of, and didn’t want to. I tuned out.
By this time I was breathing again, although my lungs felt sore. Not nearly as sore as my head, however. My eyeballs felt like they were embedded in glass splinters and my entire skull throbbed. I was now seeing a fat glaring red edge to everything, an erratic fat glaring red edge, sometimes as wide as a pocketknife, sometimes as narrow as an opalescent chain. It didn’t need shadows. It looked like cracks in reality, opening into the chaos I’d seen protecting the way to Bo through nowheresville. I clung to the arms of the re-righted chair I’d been helped into once the medic was done with me.