Nemesis (23 page)

Stop being ridiculous, Kay.
If I hadn’t killed with magic, then I’d be the one dead. I should know better.
You strike first, or you die. There are no other options.
You could call a dagger an ornament, but you’d be a damn fool not to use it if someone was about to cut your throat.

I watched the crowds passing by from the side street with a vague sense of detachment. Nobody could see me. In fact… I could sneak into places I’d never been able to get at before.

Including the Campbells’ main base, only a short walk away from here.

A prickling sensation crawled between my shoulder blades as I slipped underneath the tape sealing the entrance to the wide-open concrete space. The twin warehouses were still there. The place I’d killed for the first–and not last–time. The place Ada had been trapped, tormented.

The sudden, searing urge to set the place ablaze rose within me.
Get on with it, Kay.

I headed for the spiralling office block which had once been the seat of the Campbells’ power. A powerful family based their empire here. A family who turned their children into killers. Whether brainwashing had been involved, I didn’t know, nor did I particularly care. It all came down to the same thing: choice. They didn’t have to obey without question even when asked to kidnap a girl and turn her into a weapon against Central.

Ada’s panic-stricken face flashed before my eyes, and my hands clenched into fists. I wished they’d all fucking died.

Rage blacked out my vision and I slammed a fist into the metal wall. The sharp pain brought me back to reality, breathing heavily, shoving the memories behind a wall. The glass cuts across my knuckles were bleeding again.

I skirted the building, which twisted like a double helix pattern with windows curving around the sides. Doors all closed, as I expected. I checked no one was around, then found a likely window on the floor above. And I tried to
push
on magic, like I’d tried in Aglaia. The subtlest movement barely disturbed the air with a faint ripple. Magic was stable here.

The window opened with a quiet click, and I jumped, pulling myself into the room. A meeting-room, by the look of things. This place was seventy-odd floors high. But there’d be a floor plan somewhere.

It didn’t take me long to find it, in the corridor outside. I memorised the locations of the likely rooms I’d need to check out, and headed for the stairs. Three floors up.

The Campbells’ tech labs covered this particular floor. I didn’t hold out much hope for finding anything useful. Their specialty was offworld communications, but that had been a front for their illegal smuggling operations. They’d pretended to help Enzar for altruistic reasons when they were really looking for power. They had the links to get hold of illegal substances like bloodrock, but what they’d been planning to do with it, I couldn’t say. They’d been intending to use Ada to attack Central because they wanted revenge on the council for limiting their offworld trade…

Something didn’t add up. They’d been involved in illegal operations for years. They could have attacked the council at any time. Why now? The offworld trade laws had only been updated a few months ago, which must have been the trigger to put their plan into action.

Most of the rooms had been cleared out. I guessed it had been naive to assume I’d run into a blueprint for their plans or something. How many people had worked here? Had they even known? I’d asked a few questions in offworld district and at the Alliance base the one time I’d been, but after the Campbells were jailed, no one had wanted to associate with the place. I imagined a lot of them would probably have been imprisoned.
Tough shit.
Ignorance was no excuse. But there had been a
lot
of employees, and they’d had connections with other offworld tech suppliers. Neo Greyle’s Enforcement Squads had been occupied with chasing down those ravegens the past few days, so they clearly weren’t guarding this place efficiently. And hidden cameras didn’t mean a thing when bloodrock solution was involved.

I searched the rest of the labs, finding nothing, and then headed for a particular boardroom I’d made a note of, three floors above. Still nothing. Someone had done a thorough job stripping this place of anything useful. Even the furniture was stacked against the walls. I backed out of the room, cursing the place. For all I knew, it was empty, but I had to be sure. My options now were to leave it alone, stay here all day and search every goddamned room…

Or find a way to draw out anyone who might be hiding in here.

I was setting records for law-breaking already. But if anyone was here,
they
were breaking the law, and then some.

I headed downstairs, leaving via the window I’d come in by. At a safe distance, I gathered magic in the palm of my hand, aimed for the roof, and fired.

The first level shot rippled down the building. It wasn’t strong enough to break a window, of course. That hadn’t been my intention. But the magical aftershock sent a second ripple through the building’s foundation. Anyone inside the place would be able to feel it.

They’d think they were being attacked.

At first, I thought my paranoia had been for nothing. The building quieted, the magical backlash fading.

And then, finally, two figures came out the front door.

I went very still. Two men, I couldn’t see their faces, but they were arguing, looking wildly around, but I was safe. Magic beat beneath my skin like a second pulse. I pulled out my communicator. I’d never used the face-scanner before, but it was soundless and had no flash. I took an image of their faces.

Gavin Conner. Albert Conner.

I drew back in shock, staring. Those were
Conners.

Aric’s family.

***

ADA

Paperwork was incredibly dull after the excitement of yesterday, but Ms Weston was in council meetings all day. Probably for the best. She’d been seriously pissed off.

So had Kay. And he hadn’t materialised either. I smiled at my mind’s choice of word. He could turn
invisible.
Without a Chameleon. I wouldn’t lie, I was kind of envious.

It wasn’t a dangerous, world-destroying power. And yet the whole time we’d been on Aglaia, I hadn’t felt magic trying to tempt me. Kay had said it was part of their lives there. Incredible. I’d read the files. A million mages, all with the power to kill in their hands, and yet there’d been peace for a hundred years. They didn’t kill each other or enslave one another. The conflict with the centaurs was over resources, and how centaurs hated magic and technology while humans embraced it. Yet the last recorded magic-related death was a
century
ago.

Until now. Someone wanted to stir up conflict.

But for the first time in over a month, I wanted to use magic again.
I think.
Yesterday, even when invisible, on enemy territory, climbing for my life, I hadn’t panicked. So it didn’t happen all the time. Just when I was vulnerable, like when I was sleeping. Maybe I should take Kay’s advice.

If I survived my next patrol.

***

“You doing okay, Ada?” asked Carl, as our group assembled in the entrance hall.

I nodded, but inwardly cringed. The last thing I wanted was what Ms Weston would have called
preferential treatment.

“Yeah, I’m good.”

“Shouldn’t be any trouble this time,” he said. “We’re heading through the main Passage and then back the same way. Pretty straightforward.”

“Really?” I hadn’t been there before, because I’d only ever used the between-world illegally. But Central was built practically on top of Earth’s main connection to offworld, where people crossed in both directions to pass between London and the various equivalent entry points on the other worlds on the first level. I supposed Kay, as Ambassador, must use that Passage a lot now, as it offered the quickest route between places within the same time zone as the UK.

I didn’t expect it to be quite so
loud.
For me, the Passages had always been quiet, almost spookily so, because I’d sneaked around back roads, or the equivalent, to help refugees onto Earth. But the background-noise of a crowd grew louder until we reached the busiest stretch of Passage I’d ever seen. It was like a high street, only lined with doors instead of shops, and each was guarded by at least two Alliance people. I stared, drinking in the brief glimpses of other worlds. A smoke-shrouded city. A desert guarded by two women with claws in place of hands. A group of blue-skinned security guards besides a door which appeared to be the only thing holding back an entire ocean, arguing with a group of damp-looking people carrying old-fashioned Earth cameras.

“The Alliance had better pay for damages!” one of them yelled loudly. “This is a hoax! We didn’t see so much as a scale.”

“What was that about?” I asked Carl.

“Unauthorised tourists trying to get a glimpse of Zanthar’s infamous sea monster,” he said, shaking his head. “With Earth technology, no less.”

“They’re the fourth this week,” said a passing blue-skinned woman with sea-green hair. “I showed the first lot what happens when you take Earth tech into a high-magic world. Now they’re threatening to sue the Alliance.”

“Figures,” said Carl, elbowing through a contingent of people with hair dyed in eye-watering neon shades I was pretty sure were impossible on Earth, who were demanding access to Alvienne to collect their family’s griffin (“I’ve learned not to ask,” said Carl).

Carl led us down a side-tunnel between a door opening onto a mountain with winged creatures soaring across the sky and another which looked like a seaside town, and turned to make sure the rest of us were keeping up.

I’m here. I’m offworld.
That was why I’d joined the Alliance in the first place.

“What d’you think?” asked Carl. “A little different to what you’re used to?”

I grinned. “Just a little. No monsters?”

“They wouldn’t dare. There are a hundred or so Alliance guards from different worlds in that corridor alone.”

Holy wow.
I shook my head. Even here, I couldn’t fully grasp the extent of the Multiverse. Maybe it really was as infinite as the stars in the sky.

Carl led our group down corridors which were at first unfamiliar to me, but gradually, I started to recognise parts from when Kay and I had met with Simon from the New York branch. Including the staircase to the second floor. No longer off-limits entirely.

People could get out of Enzar. Start new lives on other, safer worlds. Just like I had.

Shouts echoed from up ahead, and Carl indicated us to slow down. My heart rate kicked up. I knew the sounds of a fight from a mile away.

And this sounded like a big one. Snarling noises were interspersed with the clash of something striking the Passage walls.

Crap. A shiver ran through me as I took my stunner in hand, like the others.

“Those aren’t dreyverns,” said Carl. “Sounds like something feral. Be careful, everyone.”

Right. Of course we were going to walk
towards
the scary noises. Not that I used to pass up an opportunity to fight monsters… but that was before.

Blurred, indistinct shapes moved in and out of the shadows, striking at several people in the dark. Carl swore and took the lead to join them, firing a warning shot with the stunner. It struck the nearest shadow–what the hell
was
that? Electric sparks filled the air and the shape became even more indistinct.

“Daggers won’t work!” Carl’s shout rang out. “Use the stunners!”

I barely had time to tighten my grip on mine before one of the shadow-things came at me.

It was more smoke than shadow, reddish smoke sparking and howling. A blurred, clawed hand lashed out, and I struck with the stunner, slamming my hand on the switch. The recoil sizzled through my veins and I fought back a wince as I remembered just how much getting zapped by one of those things hurt. Shaking the feeling off, I aimed a shot at another monster bearing down on several other guards, which caused the shadow to break apart, becoming smoke, and then nothing.

One last zap from Carl’s stunner took care of the final monster. When it died, it kind of… faded. Like
magic.
They were the same colour as high-level magic.

“What in the Multiverse were those things?” I asked, joining the others.

“Bad news,” said Carl grimly. “Nice shot back there, by the way.”

“Uh. Thanks.” I looked around at the others. There’d been at least two other patrols caught up in the fighting. No one appeared seriously injured.
Thank God.

Except one of the others was Kay’s freaking
ex-girlfriend.

Oh. Crap. And she was looking at me again. Not unfriendly this time, more curiously. I turned away. I didn’t want to get into another fight. She worked at West Office. We were bound to run into each other at some point.

“Let’s head back. We need to report this,” said Carl.

Apparently, the Multiverse was on a mission to turn my life into a series of severely awkward situations. And I wanted to know what those creatures were. But Carl refused to say, and no one else knew.