Jane, Dan, or Mr. Browning would also know what to do there, but she knew that she really needed to get to Shanghai, so then she tried Mr. Sullivan’s next, and hadn’t been able to raise him either… Maybe he was preoccupied. He was, after all, leading a dangerous mission deep into Imperium territory. Then she tried Lance, and that link was completely dead too. It wasn’t just that she didn’t get a response from his ring, but like there was nothing to get a response from. Now she was really starting to worry… Hours passed as she kept trying to get the communications spells to take, and she cursed her clumsy hands. Heinrich’s connected, briefly, but then his was gone too, like he was too busy to stop and make a spell.
This frightened Faye. Something bad was happening to her friends in Shanghai. She was preparing another spell, intending this one for Mr. Browning, when someone contacted her. Before, when the magic would activate her Grimnoir ring, she’d just felt it as a terrible burning sensation. Now, her much finer head map clearly recognized the magic as coming from Mr. Sullivan’s ring before the connection had even built up enough energy to make her ring finger tingle. Sullivan’s ring still felt like Black Jack Pershing, since he’d worn it for so many years before Mr. Sullivan. Everybody left a little stamp of themselves on everything they touched. Regular folks couldn’t hardly see it, but Faye could now.
It took a couple of tries, but Faye got the spell to take, nice and clear. That was good, since she intended to hop right through it and go all the way to Shanghai, just like she’d once gone from Tennessee to Virginia in a single Travel. Only it wasn’t Mr. Sullivan on the other side, it was the weathered old face of Captain Bob Southunder, and his brow knit in confusion.
“Where’s Mr. Sullivan?” Faye demanded before the Captain could even speak.
“Indisposed… I sensed the summons coming through his ring. Is that… Faye?” The nice old pirate was a smart man, but like everybody around her, his brain seemed to work infuriatingly slow.
“Of course it’s me.”
“I’d been told you’d died.”
“It’s either me, my ghost, or a really clever Imperium trick.” She focused her head map down through the spell, like shining a powerful spotlight through a pin hole. This was only the second time she’d tried this trick, but she figured at worst she had like a one percent chance of dying badly. “Hang on. I’ll be right there.” Clear.
Traveling wasn’t about distance. When you took two bits of far-apart space and smooshed them together, it really didn’t matter how far apart they were on the flat, since the distance you actually Travelled was the same every single time, just the space between the smooshing. It was just like how she’d solved Jacques’ tricky mazes. He’d thought of it as cheating, but to Faye, that was just how the universe really was. It wasn’t her fault if nobody else could wrap their slow brains around the truth. She didn’t know if she had the technical terms right, especially since smooshing didn’t sound particularly scientific, but that was pretty much how it really worked. The hard part about Traveling was being able to see in your head map far enough to not get yourself stuck into something when you got there. Most Travelers never even figured out how to work their head maps at all, so they could only go as far as they could see. Not Faye, and right now she could see right into the insides of the airship Traveler.
She appeared directly behind Pirate Bob. He jumped in surprise. His communication spell was shining back on an empty cabin. She was in a pretty big room for an airship, with lots of crates and boxes and a gigantic weird-looking magical machine with lots of spinning balls and cones on it, so it had to be the cargo hold, and there were eight other people in the cargo hold, mostly working on the big machine or getting guns ready for some manner of excitement.
“Hey, everybody.”
She must’ve surprised them, because a whole lot of guns got pulled out at one time and pointed at her. To be fair, it wasn’t like strangers suddenly popping into existence in the middle of your secret pirate ship was very often a good thing.
“Stop!” Pirate Bob shouted. He wasn’t the type of leader who raised his voice a lot, but when he did, it certainly got everybody’s attention. “Lower those weapons.”
Faye felt a nervous, hot tingling building on her skin. Magic was gathering, hesitating on the border of igniting. She recognized the feeling right away. “Hey, pirate Torch lady. I forgave you for setting me on fire last time because that was all a big misunderstanding and you thought I was a ninja, but if you set me on fire again, I’m likely to get real mad.”
The Japanese woman stepped out from behind the big machine. She hadn’t so much as lifted her hands, but she’d been ready to make Faye combust. Apparently this Torch wasn’t as flashy with her magic as Whisper had been, with all the hand waving, but then again, Whisper had always been the dramatic sort.
“It’s fine, Ori,” Pirate Bob said.
The tingling magic on Faye’s skin drifted away. “Thank you. So where’s Mr. Sullivan?”
“Recovering,” the captain answered. “Now hold on just a second.”
“I need to go—”
“I said hold on,” he said, and the way he did it showed that even though he looked like a kindly old grandpa, he was actually a pirate captain and that she’d better remember it. “You’re on my ship—”
“Francis’ ship,” she corrected.
“He’s the financier. I’m the captain. So it’s my ship, so you’ll explain what’s going on to me, missy. Is that clear?” Captain Southunder knew darn good and well that she’d killed the Chairman, and a small army of Imperium Marines, and he maybe even knew about her blowing up the God of Demons, but he wasn’t about to take any guff off anybody on his boat, super powers be darned. “Because otherwise you can get the hell off my ship.”
“Ooh, will you make me walk the plank?”
He sighed. “We’re not that kind of pirates.”
Lance was dead.
Faye couldn’t believe it. She just couldn’t believe it. Pirate Bob had broke the news nice as he could, but he might as well have stabbed her right in the heart.
Lance Talon was one of her best friends. He’d taught her, helped her, treated her like an equal, saved her life, even given her the Grimnoir oath. It was Lance who had taught her how to drive a car, how to shoot a gun better, how to make spells. The first time they’d met, she’d thought he was a profane squirrel. Lance was family.
She’d wanted to disbelieve. Lance was tough. He’d been everywhere and done everything. He was a thrillseeker and he was too smart to die. But she remembered the feeling when she reached out for his ring, and now she knew it was because that ring had been burned and melted and buried under tons of charred wood and ash.
There was no escaping the truth, and Faye simply cried her eyes out.
Lance’s death hadn’t been in any of Zachary’s pictures, and that made Faye question everything. Were the possibilities spiraling out past what even the Fortune Teller could have seen? What did that mean for everything else?
The Traveler had been parked near a little Chinese village on the coast. The whole ship had been covered in ropes with leaves tied to it to make it look like more forest to anybody flying overhead or any ships on the ocean. The fact that the villagers had big camouflage nets ready to go told Faye that this was a village was often visited by smugglers and pirates like the Marauders. There were a bunch of little boats in the cove. Most of the UBF folks and some of the pirates from the Traveler were down there, loading their personal belongings. They’d be taken to one of the other Free Cities, which were just a bit freer, and boarding cargo vessels heading to America. Captain Southunder was sending them home so that they wouldn’t get killed along with everybody else. That was noble of him.