Author: Wildbow

Let Slip – 20.b | Pale

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It was all twisted around.

He wasn’t meant for this.  To be in nature, focused on spirit.  He was someone who camped out in a dark room with a glowing screen and made magic happen.

The region was becoming a wasteland.  There was activity all up and down the highway, post-Christmas, people from the rural areas traveling into the city, people returning home after visiting relatives or doing shopping.  Evergreen trees were healthy, wildlife was abundant… but it was a wasteland all the same.

Spiritually, if he used his Sight to view it from another angle, it was a Carpocalypse Max desert, unforgiving, deceptively empty.  The world devolved into artifacts, pixelated and blurry, clearer where he needed it to be clear.  As he fixed his eyes on things, targeting reticules formed- squares framing them, then flickering as they adjusted zoom, clarity, and supplementary information.

One truck on the highway, driving forward, was pushing those blurry images around it.  It was like a finger dragged hard against a tablecloth, the wrinkles forming, piling up against one another, streaking along either side.  Alarms, traps, and spirits on alert were activating, catching on the vehicle.

Soon, just as in the movies, the Others came.  Vicious, tricked out for battle, emerging from hiding places.

He wasn’t the strongest practitioner, and fighting wasn’t where his strengths were.  He was using a setup to help feed his Sight and provide the extra functions.  Even with that setup, it took nearly a minute for things to clarify and for him to get a better sense of the people in the truck.  They didn’t seem to care or waver when the Others began to appear at their flanks.  Because they weren’t human.

The truck was unoccupied, driven by practice.  It looked elemental, at a glance, but he’d need to spend more power to get a better picture.

Alarms, alert spirits, and what he could refer to as spiritual tripwires all caught on the truck, pushed against the front of it, bunched together, and extended threads outward.  There were Others who were canny enough to sense the slightest change in a connection, reel themselves along it.  There were others who were tied to the alarm by practice, existing nowhere in particular until the excuse.  The Bloody Mary type bogeyman, who didn’t truly exist until summoned.

He could have stepped in, but he was curious.

He stood off to one side, beneath a set of power lines, his apprentice beside him.  On this lesser highway, east of Winnipeg, the first Other big enough to act against the truck reached it.  Invisible to other drivers on the highway, a blur of visual artifacts to Freeman, it reached the truck, breaking headlights, side mirror, and half of the windshield- specifically those glass surfaces.

The truck swerved off the road, hit the snowbank, and went up, crashing down at an awkward angle that sent it rolling, the pickup truck’s horn blaring.

Cars slowed on the highway, but the truck was armed with practice.  Connection blocks went up, transparent, shimmering in the air around it – white against near-white background.  People drove on, bystander effect enforced.  Someone else will stop and check on them.  With so many people seeing, someone else will call for an ambulance.

“Did anyone get hurt?” Adrian asked.

“What do you think?  Tell me.”

“That was an Other, right?  That attacked?”

“You have more power than I ever did, more resources, more tools.  Tell me.”

“I don’t know how to- How do I find out?”

“You could use your Sight.  You have tools.  You could also venture closer.”

“I-” Adrian hesitated.  He shook his head.

He and Freeman were astrally projected here.  They were ghostly forms, and Freeman, decked out in items with at least some magical potential, tempering, or things he’d worn enough they were part of his Self, was mostly clothed, and floated with arms crossed, wearing his long jacket with calligraphy on it, sunglasses, ripped jeans, and mag boots, hair combed back to a ponytail that was exaggerated in length here, spiraling around his body.  Adrian was a teenager that became a genderless, unclothed, television static silhouette from the neck down, hands and feet wispy and blurry.  His short, straight blond hair stood out away from his head like he was underwater, and his glasses were opaque, reflecting the television static of his Sight.  A tadpole in spirit and Sight.

“If you had to, how would you figure this out?” Freeman asked.

“I don’t know.”

Freeman’s patience was being tested here.

“Why not approach, then?”

“Because it feels dangerous?”

“Why does it feel dangerous?  You’re right, it’s a good feeling, it’s incredibly dangerous, and I would have stopped you if you’d started to approach the scene, but why?  Instincts, even if you don’t always know why, have their root in something.”

“I don’t know,” Adrian replied, too quickly.

Freeman wanted to say something to that, but he needed to maintain a working relationship with the kid more.

The Others who’d responded to the alarm converged on the truck.

The connection blocker was empowered, and with the empowerment of that connection block, Freeman could see the expanding ripples in that digital artifacting – cars that reacted, drivers who busied themselves with changing lanes instead of looking, or reacted within the cars.

All timed to be distracted when the elementary runework expanded out, kicking off.  It came with little warning, and provoked an explosion, fed by diagrams within the empty truck, directing shrapnel heated to a red-white consistency, fire, and other loaded projectiles into the surrounding Others.

He could see spirits rearranging themselves around some of those Others.  Bits of wood, metal, or other substances included in the payload, that were inscribed with things for binding.

For all intents and purposes, the explosion hadn’t just blown most of the Others to pieces, or set them on fire.  It had looped and stabbed through them with metaphorical barbed wire, wires with fishhooks, and caught them with shackles.

“Come.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure enough to tell you to come,” Freeman said, having to fight past strained patience to get the words out.  He flew out.

The arrangement that was astrally projecting them was drawing on the power in the power lines.  Arcs of electricity danced between them and the wires, getting more sporadic and weaker as they got further away.

The car battery, at least, had something.  He dropped down, feet touching snow, spirits stirring around him, reacting to his presence.  He gave one typhlotic Other a wide berth, circling around toward the car.

There was a second payload.  Something buried within the car- the back seat had been removed to make room for it, and the diagram work was throbbing outward, building up in intensity.

“Um,” Adrian said.  “Do we want to be this close?”

“We belong to a group, we have responsibilities as part of it.  So long as we’re loyal, they won’t twist our arms too much,” Freeman explained.  “We can skip some, if we need to, if they’re uncomfortable, if we feel it’s too dangerous-”

“This feels too dangerous.”

“-But if we skip them all, the people handing us power may start pulling their hand back some.  They might start making us take another metaphorical step forward every time we want some.”

“If we’re dead we can’t take any steps, forward or backward.  Kind of?  I guess if we’re echoes.”

“You’re right,” Freeman replied.  This was a hell of a lot better than another helpless, quick, ‘I don’t know’.  “But come anyway.”

He floated around the burning debris.  With his Sight, he could See the signals pulsing out – people were calling emergency services.

The heat of the flaming wreckage began to warm the battery, lowering its efficacy.  He weakened, and his ability to See got worse.

He worked quickly.  He would have liked to explain better for Adrian, but he didn’t want to get so weak he couldn’t do what he needed to do here.  Severing connections, grouping them into loose categories.  Some were Other, the alarm or trigger attached to the Other, who followed, operating that way by default.  Some were attached to the practitioner, who’d had the Other on hand, ready to go.  Some were more automatic, more like diagrams managing the spirits, bringing things to pass.

He only had two hands, so he told Adrian, “Hold this.  Carefully.”

“That whole setup looks like a bomb,” Adrian said.  “I mean, another bomb.  I know one went off.”

He considered.  “Good simile.  You’re right.”

“We’re disarming a bomb?”

“Repurposing,” Freeman said.  “Would you hold this?  Don’t put power into it or manipulate it.”

He gave the practitioner least dangerous elements over to Adrian, freeing him to deal with the remainder.

His power flagged further.  The battery was toast, the power lines were too far away, and the cars on the road were too far to be of any use either.

“OK, phone,” he said.

A phone about twenty kilometers away trilled, lighting up near his and Adrian’s unconscious bodies.

“Call in the Unknown Number.  I need power.”

The sound of the phone echoed over spirit and Ruin.

“Doesn’t that mean our enemies can find us?” Adrian asked.

“We won’t be long,” Freeman replied.  “But yes, it could.”

The surge of power came.  Adrian had gone dim, and now he glowed too bright to look at, his glasses akin to floodlights, his television static body white except in the most shadowy parts.

Freeman, too, had become more exaggerated, power flowing into his astrally projected body, until he felt hot and almost feverish.

He worked with that heat.  White hot fingertips worked with the swelling runes, burning away the outermost rim of the diagram that hovered in the air.  That kept it from delivering that second payload directly into their faces.  But power was still swelling, spirits were flowing inward, and elementals within the container that had been placed in the back of the car were waking up.

“This is, as threats go, a good sort of one to handle.  Remember the cursed items I showed you?”

“Yeah.”

“I’d rather deal with one of those, or something like this, than even a lesser goblin.  Because a lesser goblin has a history, has the ability to figure things out, has will, Self, and more.  It’s a waste of an existence, crude, weak, but for all you know, the entirety of that foot-tall goblin’s history has been a lead-up to it meeting you.  As you try to bind it, maybe it’s the third time that goblin has faced that binding, and it knows what to do to fight back.  Maybe it has a weapon.  Maybe… something.”

“Unpredictable.”

Freeman continued to work as he talked, satisfied he was making some ground.  Wouldn’t do to explain, though, when he’d be talking about the beginning part while he worked on the middle part.  He’d confuse himself.  “This looks scary, it is scary, but it’s like a computer program.  The code’s right here and there’s a lot of it, but it’s simple.”

“No surprises?”

“There could be some.  Hidden traps.  I won’t rule it out.  But if we fail to see those traps, that’s on us.  It’s in our power to handle it or not handle it.  That’s way better than any situation that puts the power in the hands of your enemies.  Those situations are the ones to be afraid of.”

“Huh.”

It was a good lesson.  It wasn’t really his lesson.  After certain issues with a certain Bugge in Kennet, he’d gone looking for help in breaking the Bugge’s grip on some of his things and that had been imparted on him by one of his fellow teachers.

He tied things back.  Loops, connections, interruptions…

“See a clear path?” he asked.  “Your Sight is clearer than mine.  And faster.”

“I- path to what?”

“Return to sender.”

“The… I see a phone number.”

“Highlight it.”

Adrian reached up and out, pulling a phone number out of the blur of pixelated, artifact-laden spirits.

“It’s karma-rich.  Doing this.  Taking someone else’s workings and turning them back at them.  The universe likes it because it keeps things simple.  Tells the world, the spirits, and the powers that be that we’re self-regulating.”

“Catching the criminals so the police don’t have to bother?”

“More or less.  Someone wanted a status update.  They got their hands on a working truck they were willing to let go of, loaded it up with a charge, and sent it out into the world, unmanned and driven by elemental forces.  Lure in all the Others who were prepared to respond to obvious practice, blow them up, and then a secondary payload waits, to see who responds…”

He tied things to the phone number.

“I think they expected a dumber, more powerful response.  A Lord, not a practitioner.  Either way, this isn’t the only trap like this that they’ve sent out there.  They’re testing the waters, but cars, even used ones, are expensive, they paid, they loaded it with practice, that’s not cheap or easy.  They wanted feedback, to know if it was worth doing again.  Let’s give them that feedback.”

He took what Adrian had been holding, then tied that in.

Then, hand at Adrian’s chest, he pushed the boy back and away.

The two of them backed away from the new, altered diagram, as it glowed, intense, all those elemental forces waking up.

The numbers lit up one by one, the illumination pulsing out.

Something responded, and the elementals went tearing along that connection, flowing out as a stream.  The wreck of the car sputtered, spitting out hot oil.  What would have been a local explosion was deflected, sent racing off to the horizon.

“What happened?” Adrian asked.  “What did you do?  Return to sender?”

“The elementals will get weaker as they travel.  The same sort of way we were, further from the power lines.”

Adrian nodded.

“Should still be enough to blow up their phone.  A surge of elementals rushing into a little packet of plastic, computer chips, and a combustible battery pack?  Might wound, slim chance of killing, at a guess.”

He studied Adrian, to see what the reaction was.

Adrian turned to study him, then stopped short, seeing Freeman’s inquisitive stare.

“Cool?” Adrian asked, as if he was unsure.

“More importantly, it’s just.  They sent that out there, ready for it to blow up in our faces.  It blows up in their hand and-or ear instead.  We’ll reap some karma, we get goodwill from the people we’re working for.  That’s valuable.”

“Could be someone you were allies with a little while ago,” Adrian said, his voice faintly haunting, his halogen-bright eyeglasses, buoyant hair, and radio static body turning to Freeman, emotionless in tone but unintentionally accusatory in words.

“Could be,” Freeman said, then quickly added, “But things are twisted around right now.”

“Yeah.”

He freed the Others that had been bound by the fragments of the explosion, severing connections.  Except the typhlotic ones.  The eyeless.

“Free that one when we’re out of sight,” he told one of the bogeymen.

No response.  He didn’t bother pushing it.

“Was it luck, that we were here, for that truck?” Adrian asked.

He was glad there was some curiosity about things.  “No.  Or if it was, it wasn’t any special kind of luck.  It’s like this all over.  They’re sending out lots of trucks.  Probing, pushing.  There’s an establishment, there’re forces that push back against it.  Used to be things were flipped around.  Musser was the establishment.  Then they got lazy.”

“You were one of them.”

“I wasn’t lazy.  I paid enough attention, made deals.”

“Huh.”

Speaking of… he wasn’t sure if a certain Bugge would turn up, or if they’d have other attention.  He turned to Adrian.  “We should move.  Can you wake up?  Find your way back to your body and disconnect from the setup?”

“Oh.  Right now?”

It was hard to not be sarcastic.  “Like you said, reaching out to the phone Lord for power may have alerted people.  And also as you said, this may be personal.  So yes, I think right now.”

He wished Adrian would focus more, connecting the thoughts together.

He watched as Adrian worked to follow the thread back to his body, while also staying closer to power lines.  He floated alongside, guarding Adrian-

Who may have felt rushed.  Adrian broke away from the power lines, and tried to head straight for the motel room where they’d set up.

Too long a distance.  The way was dark and lacked power.

He would have steered Adrian in a better direction, but he remembered the indecision from before, the questions, the insecurity.

Maybe this could be a teaching moment.

Adrian, Self separated from flesh, was an astrally projected body in the places where things without visceral bodies lived.  Technomancy armed and armored him, and kept him afloat, so to speak.  Without that, the light began to fade, and he began to sink.

Tethering himself to Adrian, aware he was also losing power, Freeman followed, as the world got darker.  Not only in the sense of there being sun out, the gray winter afternoon sky being at least a light gray.

In the same way a person could be traumatized and have the light go out in their eyes, the light went out in, well, everything.  In tree, in landscape, in isolated shacks, in road.  Things got worn down, decrepit, eroded, natural beauty washed away.

Freezing rain began to fall.  It made it harder to fly through this space.

This stirred up memories.

“Adrian.”

The boy didn’t respond.

“Adrian,” he said, raising his voice.

The boy turned.  He looked nervous.  He was pushing himself hard to get to the motel room.

“Listen when I tell you things.  Our survival may depend on it.”

Not responding, Adrian floated through the trees, his eyes set on the motel in the distance.  Tree branches caught on his astral self, raking him along one arm.

He screamed, and it was a muffled, bottom-of-the-well scream.  The boy’s astral body tumbled, hitting snow.

Freeman spent some power, reeled himself in closer to Adrian, and then thrust the two of them to one side, hurling Adrian an additional distance further, while he used his coat to shield himself, his hand gripping the end of his sleeve as he moved his arm to one side-

In the motel room, his unconscious body moved, arm moving to one side.

He was blind, deaf, numb, and his body was a quarter-kilometer away from him.  But he knew from practice that he always put a keyboard to his right, in arm’s reach.

Unable to see what he was doing or feel the keys beneath fingertips, he typed.

An error beep echoed in his ear, and everything flashed red around him.

Shit.  Got it wrong.

The typhlotic Other came out of the woods.  Eyeless, it was the equivalent of a deep sea fish, dwelling in places that light didn’t meaningfully reach, a narrow head the size of a house, flat, with what seemed like twice the number of bones something should have, skin stretched so tight over the arrangement there wasn’t any room for orifices.  And teeth.  And hooks.

The hooks were attached to threads.  And Adrian had hooks caught in him, the threads connecting back to the flat crab-fish-head-fisherman thing.  The tree branches had been rigged.

Freeman began cutting the threads, as it reeled Adrian in.  Shadows moved beneath Adrian.  Each cut took effort- sometimes two swings.

“Go up, but don’t go above the tops of the trees,” he told Adrian.

Adrian, flailing, fought to get back, moving the wrong direction, directly against the threads and hooks that had caught in his arm when the branches had brushed against him.  It only made hooks catch in deeper.

“Up!” Freeman urged.

The boy was panicking too much, now.

Scowling, sure it was enough of a scowl that his unconscious body was also moving, he grabbed the threads and pulled, hauling Adrian skyward with a half-dozen angular fishhooks caught in his Self and spirit.  Wounding Adrian in the process.

The snow was fragile- a thin crust.  And that fragile crust shattered, a half-dozen black groping hands with skin stretched too tight over them reaching up for Adrian.

Freeman cut one more thread, then reached over, typing again.  Blind, numb, but very, very focused.

The spell circle expanded around his spirit Self, getting thinner as it got further out.  But it was enough to rebuke the snapping face, driving it back into trees, and to push those reaching hands down.

Way weaker than it should be.

They were still sinking, he realized.  The lights were getting dimmer.

Adrian yelped, floating away from other trees.  A pack of dark, eyeless things was creeping toward him, moving in fits and starts, camouflaging themselves in the dark spots, hugging the fraying wood.

“Don’t move, don’t make noise,” Freeman ordered, making noise by speaking, moving to cut more threads.  “And stop going up!  You’re going up!”

Adrian continued to rise, because any other direction he moved drew movements from nearby creatures.

Freeman desperately wanted this kid to clue in.  To pull it together.  To find it in him to fight.

“The best direction to move is not moving at all!” Freeman shouted.

His shouts served two purposes.  Trying to get this kid to listen, and to draw more attention to him.

“Stop going up!  That is not how you surface, here!”

His attention was divided five ways.  There were nearby typhlotic Others, the eyeless Ruins-dwellers, and there were ones near Adrian.  The threads and hooks meant Adrian wouldn’t be able to easily pull away, so he had to cut them.  He had to keep tabs on his material body, because if he lost track of how he was positioned, then everything would get harder.

And there was a more dangerous typhlotic lurking nearby.  It looked like a human, with arms like a bat’s, the glossy black ‘wing’ skin loose and pinned to its body at various points.  It trudged out of the shadows of the trees, its head beaked, with a weight to skull and beak that seemed to have broken its own neck.

Freeman identified it as a scavenger by the way it was built.  A very strong scavenger.  How did it get good enough meals to eat reliably and stand that upright?  A kind of cooperation with something bigger?

They all trudged, or crawled, or remained anchored in place, letting the environment hide them.  They lived in a place where meals were scarce, so their metabolisms were glacial, in effect- not that they had actual metabolisms.  Movement stirred them awake, so did light, life, Self, and patterns.  They were more reactive than active, but that was in no way suggestive of the idea that they were less dangerous than the average Other.

They lurked here, in the darkest corners of the darkest layers of the world.  Or, in the rarer instances, in the brightest spots of bright places, bleached forms hidden in the glare.  And they went after loose spirit, echo, fading incarnation, animus, scraps of Soul or Self.  Anything without hard form that couldn’t sustain its own metaphorical metabolism, anything slow, or mired in the darkness.  Anything weak enough.

And Adrian was weak.  There was no better way to say it.

Capable, when everything was going right, but capability didn’t mean someone wasn’t weak.

“Stop rising, or I’ll have to tell Harri how her cousin died!” Freeman bellowed.

Adrian snapped to- at least a little.

Except the shout stirred the bat-winged figure into action.  It tore one of its wings free of the piercings that attached them to its body.  In the process, it unleashed its payload.  Echoes, partially eaten, crudely fashioned, that had been trapped between wing and body.  They were released as a loose storm, and for a moment, it was like it had just fired off a thousand fireworks.

Except these fireworks dimmed the lights.  These fireworks drew other typhlotic things in, making them surge in strength and motivation.  These fireworks were an emotional payload, blinding in the same sense that someone could see red, or be too startled to see what was right in front of them.  Numbing in the same way that grief could let someone go days without eating.  Deafening in-

Deafening like Adrian’s panic had deafened him.

It screeched, and the screech only added to the chaos- echoing, signaling more typhlotic.

Not cooperation with something bigger.  It finds juicy prey, debilitates them while signaling literally everything in the area, and then eats the scraps.

That screech could even be a kind of communication, a pledge to the big things.

Freeman typed out another barrier order.  Then, seeing Adrian thrashing, making frantic sounds, bitten in the leg in two places by the smaller things from the trees, seeing Adrian rising-

Just above the treeline, the lightless sky was swirling with black clouds.  Wet, oily cloud slithered against cloud, shifting, moving, and parted.  Mouths with black tongues and black teeth opened above Adrian.

Freeman grabbed for the remaining threads, and hauled down.

The force he’d pulled with tore hooks out of Adrian’s Self, along with symbolic pounds of Self.  But it also tugged the floating astral body of the boy away from the snapping mouths.

He caught Adrian in his arms, hugging him against his front.  “Be still!”

Adrian was still, but that might’ve only been because he was really hurt.

The bat-winged Other unleashed its second volley.

He turned his body to absorb the worst of it, hugging Adrian close, eyes open, forcing himself to see past the sparks of blinding rage, the wavers of delirious joy, past numbing terror-

He lifted them away from some of the grasping hands, minimizing movements.

“OK phone,” Freeman said, quiet.

He felt the phone activate.

“Call in the Unknown Number.  Need help.  Or one of the kids is liable to die.”

He waited.

“You can’t go above the trees, okay?” he said, keeping his voice calm and level, because the cost of making noise was smaller than the cost of Adrian’s fear.  Fear that sharp would lure them in like nothing else.  “These things live in darkness, and the sky, it’s got no sun, no moon, no stars.  It’s all darkness up there, you don’t want to bump into that ceiling… and it’s a much lower ceiling than you’d think.”

It might not have helped, talking about their situation.  But he wasn’t exactly in the best shape himself, and he struggled to reach far enough away to talk about anything else.

“We have powerful friends, so we’re probably okay now.  It won’t be long,” he said.  “We just did them a favor.  That helps.  Part of the reason we do this, helping without needing to be told to help, is that one day, in wartime like this, they’ll need to send people in to go over the breach, or they’ll have too many things to do, too many of their people in danger at the same time, maybe they can only save some, and they’ll need to decide who to cut loose.  Your survival instincts- you’re cautious.”

Too cautious.  Enough it puts you in more danger, not less.

“Yeah,” Adrian replied, whisper-quiet.

Their rescuers included the Typhlotic Other that he’d left bound, freed by the bogeyman, apparently, and some wraiths, sweeping in to bait the typhlotic predators and scavengers away.

“Being useful, pushing yourself, stepping in to disarm a metaphorical bomb because it’s far more manageable than stepping into a cage with a tiger, that’s a better sort of cautious.  Recognizing when you need to get out and how is a better sort of cautious.”

Freeman wished the kid would say the words.  Leaving all of this.

He wished that this kid, Self wounded, would have enough scraped away that the message could be impressed into him.

The typhlotic predators and scavengers were driven off.  Freeman carried the boy through to the motel room, to where their bodies lay, unconscious, surrounded by chalk lines and arrangements of computers and devices, which themselves were worked into the diagrams.

He deposited Adrian’s Self into his body.  Adrian’s flesh greedily gulped in the matching Self, and he convulsed.

Freeman stepped into his own body, and the process, more practiced, was far easier.  No convulsion.

He sighed heavily, shifting to an upright, cross-legged position, studying the room, reacquainting himself with reality.

His heart, starting at a slow, easy resting heartrate, slowly picked up as it absorbed what his Self had to tell it.  It was almost the opposite of waking up from a nightmare.  Stirring awake, and the body coming to terms with the fact that things were much worse than it had thought.

“Can’t-” Adrian groaned.

“Can’t what?” Freeman asked.

“Move.”

He looked.  Adrian lay there, bent and awkward.  A puddle of urine expanded around his pelvis.  A smell of shit touched Freeman’s nostrils.

Adrian turned his face away, ashamed.

There goes the deposit, he thought, quickly moving some of the more delicate electronics and things out of the way of the expanding puddle.  He picked Adrian up, arms under shoulder and knees, grunting with the exertion, because Adrian was fourteen- not exactly small, and quickly carried the boy over to the bathroom.

He set the fourteen year old down in the tub, fully clothed, and lifted down the shower head, aiming it into the drain while he got the temperature right, kinking the hose to cut of the water long enough to move it back to the tub, and set it so it sprayed down at Adrian.

“Too hot,” Adrian managed.

He checked the water, then touched Adrian’s forehead.  Icy.

“No.  You’re cold.  We need to raise your temperature.  Running water will help keep any spirits or other things from setting up shop in your body.  I’m going to pull the shower curtain around-”

Then he sat down, back to the wall of the tub.

“See if you can’t get those pants down.  Let the water wash away what it can,” Freeman said, and he had to get the words out- not through strained patience this time, but through spent, exhausted patience.  “Your Self is too weak for your body to function at a baseline level.  Can’t keep the shit and piss in.  Same thing can happen if you use blood for power and spend too much on a practice.”

He wasn’t sure why he was rattling on about this, but… he wasn’t sure what else to say.

“A lot of the time, when things get this bad, things can move in and take over your fleshly vessel.  Echoes stepping in to try and pick up where they left off, wraiths with an agenda, spirits- usually that manifests as madness, leaf spirit, obsession with getting away, wandering nature.  You know?”

“Mmm,” Adrian grunted.  “Water’s still too hot.”

He kept the shower curtain in the way and cranked the tap to be a little cooler.

“If you’re on your own, stay in any circle you’ve drawn.  If you’ve got friends?  You need them to secure you.  Because when something moves into your body, worst case?  You’ve got an Other with access to the memories and abilities of a practitioner, and no love for what that practitioner loved.”

“Can we talk about something else?” Adrian asked.

“Did you manage to get those pants down?”

“Want help?”

“I’ll go shopping later, buy you a replacement, then.”

There was a pause.

“Thanks.”

Freeman nodded, his back to the tub, looking through the open door at the mess.

The steam carried the horrendous smell of waste throughout the bathroom.  He got up, got wads of toilet paper, and began getting what he could out of the carpet in the other room.

He washed his hands, returned to the tub, and sat back down, his back to Adrian.  “Talk to me.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Adrian replied.

“I just need to know you’re still you.  Any thoughts on the day?”

“I- it’s a pretty shi- awful holiday.”

“Yeah,” Freeman replied.  “Listen better next time, it won’t be as bad.”

He’d wanted this to be a better lesson.  Something to shake this kid out of what felt like a half-sleep.  It was starting to feel like even this wasn’t that wake-up call.

It frustrated, and he tried to think of why or how it frustrated- what he could say or do, if there was anything that he could articulate…

“I- you know how I started out?” he asked.

“No,” Adrian replied.

“I was hunted.  Same way those things back there hunted us, but it was a person.  I was a shitty kid on shitty sites.  Watching shitty porn.  Downloaded the wrong thing, as part of that.”

When he was Adrian’s age, he’d looked at voyeur sites, had gotten it into his head that he could put something on the computer of a girl he knew, to secretly tap into her laptop, watch through her camera, record, trade recordings for more good stuff on the forums.  He’d downloaded the covert programs onto a thumb drive.

He left that part out.

“Shitty kid, shitty choice of something to download.  Karmically bad, I guess.  Made it easier for the practitioner who made the program to use it.  I ran it on my own computer first.  Diagram came up, couldn’t take my eyes off it,” Freeman explained, slumping further back against the tub.  “Froze me there.  He left me like that for a good couple hours while he got things ready.  Then he came at me.  Pushed me out of my own body.”

“Like you were just talking about?”

“Kind of,” Freeman replied, voice soft, almost lost in the hiss of the shower.  “Body snatching.”

As far as he’d figured, the practitioner who’d laid that trap had it worked out so if someone like Freeman tried it out, he’d take their body, as a way of existing in perpetuity.  If they targeted a woman, then the practitioner would take her body, walk it to a place he could confine it, then swap back.

“An astral body looking for a vessel is going to move like electricity does.  It wants to ground itself.  And the clearest, closest connection was the same one he’d used to get into my body and push me out.  So I went along that digital corridor, through the screen, across the internet, and into his body.  Which was three times as old as my original body, naked, chained to the wall of a prison cell with a bed, television, toilet, food, and water, collar and every means of escape secured with combination locks he knew the combination to, I didn’t.”

“How’d you…?”

“Sprinklers went off.  I saw this big magic circle on the wall.  Like the diagram I’d spent hours staring at.  Because- stood to reason, right?  If he wanted to wash it off the wall, I wanted to keep it.  Something primal- some fundamental understanding, you know?  Had to keep it.  Had to keep it.”

“Makes sense.”

“He was careful.  Everything about the setup was double-checked.  The chain length, didn’t let me reach that wall.  But I pulled the mattress off the bed, held it up, end pushed up against the wall and ceiling.  I preserved most of it.”

“Huh.”

“Any practice we use, it cuts both ways.  What’s sent can be sent back.  Augur looks, you can stab their eye through the peephole.  Someone snatches your body?”

“Snatch back,” Adrian replied.

“Well, in a way.  When the wall was dry, I tried to fix what the water had managed to rinse away, smudging chalk to fill in gaps.  Didn’t work.  I spent a week there, imprisoned, trying to make sense of the diagram, knowing I only had so much chalk.  In the end, I used a food container, folded it up until it was rigid, and scraped the concrete until I got white marks there.  Wiped away the part that pointed to my computer’s address.  Sent it to my phone number instead.  Figured I could send it to email, but he might ignore it.  But my phone automatically opens images…”

He wished Adrian had just a tenth of what he’d found in himself, then.

“I didn’t do the diagram well enough.  It was still tied to him, drew on his personal power to pull him through, but the doorway- I did it wrong.  It was broken.  He came crashing into his body, and his Self was so torn up, it bent and broke his form.  Broke other parts of his Self.  It’s called a horror.  Fitting name.  You’ve talked to Harri and Helen about that stuff?”

“Yeah,” Adrian replied.  “Spooky stuff.”

“I managed to keep from going through that corridor, seeing what happened, and there wasn’t much power to draw on after he crashed into his body.  I made my way back the hard way.  Same way we went from the power poles to this motel room.  Dark and terrible.  From the outskirts of Chicago to Morden Manitoba.  No practice.”

“How?”

“You find it in yourself because you have to find it in yourself.  I figured out pretty fast they respond to movement and weakness, so I limped a short distance, slowly, gathered my strength, kept to solid ground, took months, fought hard when something came directly for me,” he told Adrian.  “And if you don’t want to try making that hard journey, there’s worse things than taking an easier, quieter road.  Might’ve even been better, if I decided I could accept the nearest human-shaped vessel and used that to get home instead.  Might be better if you…”

He’d been told not to nag Adrian to bail out.

He needed a better excuse than ‘the kid sucks at all of this’ to pull Adrian’s ripcord and take away the kid’s practice for good.

Especially because he was the cousin of someone else in the group.

“How’d you learn practice, then?” Adrian asked.

“After a couple months, picked up my courage, made the trip back there.  Room was the same as I’d left it.  Including the man chained to the wall, too many limbs, mouth in his side that reached from his bellybutton to his asshole, with hunger inside him to match the size of that mouth.  Death wouldn’t touch him.  Nature wouldn’t wither him for not eating.  Fate had no plans for him.  Time wouldn’t change him, for better or for worse… not that there was much worse.  His War was entirely internal.  Tearing him up inside, fighting with his own body, struggling.  Bad luck.”

“Damn.  So he’s… still like that?”

He’d begged Freeman for mercy.  Freeman had bartered for combinations to safes and side rooms, collected practice stuff, ignoring the body snatching things, then he’d refused the mercy in the end.  Because he hadn’t yet awakened.  He’d been able to lie.

Shut the door to that underground bunker.  Covered it with leaves.  Innocence’s protections probably meant that gross body-stealing fuck was still down there, in the dark, hungry and broken.

“Who knows?” Freeman replied.

Adrian was silent.  Until he said, teeth chattering, “the water’s getting colder.”

Freeman leaned over, cranking the water off.  Then he got up, getting towels.  He threw them at Adrian.  “Strong enough to move?”

“Use those to get warm and dry, then I’ll turn the water on again once the water heater’s had a bit.  I’ll get you some food in the meantime.  Fuel the fire in your belly, warm up your Self from the inside.”

“Okay.”

It would be better if they left.  He returned to the room, collected money for the vending machine, and brought things over.  Lots of sugar, chocolate, and carbohydrates.

Then he checked his setup.

A golden alert box suggested a system was under attack and had been for a bit- probably since he’d first called on the Lords.  The Turtle Queen.

Like a dog with a bone it really didn’t want to give up on.  Maybe she couldn’t.

He adjusted the systems that were connected to other systems, resentment swelling deep in his chest.  He’d leave a few connected systems attached to that node.  Let her have them.  Leave the others as traps.  Maybe that would slow her down.  Maybe there was a slim chance that the built-in trapdoors could close as she went into one node- like her chasing a prize into a room, only for a prison door to slam shut behind her, locking her in.

Of course, in that metaphor, she had the ability to bribe the guards, to call in an interior decorator to paint the walls black, gold, and green, and once they got underway doing that, it was a simple matter for the door to be left open.

He’d kept this as a backup option.  Now he was having to expend it.

He was going through them faster than he was able to take the time to set them up.  Maybe if he wasn’t teaching the boy, but…

Fuck, the room stank.

This was the price.  He’d worked under Musser.  He’d dealt with the city spirit, he’d been invited into this.  The price was that he take one of the students.  Teach technomancy.

Technomancy’s strength was its reach.  It could connect, transport, operate remotely, it made distance something effortless.  He’d experienced that when his body had been snatched by someone one thousand, three hundred and fifty kilometers away.

Reach happened with the horror.  That gross man in that bunker, reaching out to him, desperate.  Reach… it was how he’d survived, after.  Reaching out, making contacts.  Hand out and up, supplicating.

He just wished he knew how to reach this kid who was stinking up the hotel room.

The Turtle Queen took another node.  He hit a few keystrokes.

Couldn’t do anything about that.  If he could at least get on the move, he could put some distance between himself and her.  As it was, she was creeping closer, figuring her way through the labyrinth he’d set up.  Some of that setup included resources.  Computers he’d otherwise be able to keep and use for technomancy.

He’d tried to shake things up and instill a lesson and he was the one learning it instead.  This wasn’t the way to get Adrian ready.

He’d have to figure it out.

“Technomancy is… it’s like cheating.  You can use it at the start, using computers instead of chalk.  You can use it in the middle, uh, like you open with standard practice, end with standard practice, but the stuff in the middle that you’re working with is computers.  You can also use it at the end.  Uh, like you capture an Other and you put it in a computer, and a lot of the time Others don’t know how to deal with that, so it makes a good prison.  So long as the power stays on.”

Adrian looked over his shoulder at Freeman, as if checking he got it right.

Freeman nodded.

A group of the younger students were gathered in the living room.  Nomi got along okay with Harri, and more importantly, Nomi’s teacher Yiyun got along with Harri’s teacher Helen, so they spent time together.  Then, because Adrian was Harri’s cousin, they liked to study together.  So Freeman, as Adrian’s teacher, was brought in.

There were a few things linking them together like that.  Adrian was friends with Travis and Dony.  Sometimes it was the girls, with Kira-Lynn and, very rarely, Cameron included.  Sometimes it was by age.

But this was a regular configuration.  One he, frankly, was quite okay with.  The students had apparently bickered a lot over who would get Yiyun, and he could understand why.  Their instincts were good.  She had an aura around her.  Reassuring, capable.  She was pretty, too, but he’d decided in advance that the other teachers and students were off limits.

Helen was… almost the opposite, but somehow not in a bad way.  There were combat practitioners who were extreme and aggressive in personality, and the Kims were that but in the academic, practitioner politics field.  Cutthroat, no holds barred, seizing on opportunities for study and partnership.

All well and good until one of their kids, invited to the Blue Heron, broke an oath to another student for a power grab, then tried to use the school rules to evade punishment.  As he understood it, it hadn’t worked.

She was exciting to be around, alluring and offputting in equal measure, messy, young, and he had no idea how she was going to pull off pretending to be a teacher at the Kennet Catholic school, or survive in small towns.  She dressed in ways that would make teacher and student alike make scandalized faces that would get stuck in permanent ‘o’s… except as much as that was meant as a joke, it wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility with her practice.

Since escaping her forswearing, she’d partied and shopped relentlessly, taking breaks only to check in with Harri, imparting lessons.  She was twenty, with features that made it look like she’d gotten comprehensive plastic surgery and had taken things a quarter-step too far each time.  He hadn’t been sure if that was just her family, if it was actual plastic surgery, or if it was the result of some kind of ritual the Kims did to to protect themselves against the family practice.

Then he’d seen pictures of her young, scratched ‘plastic surgery’ off the list of possibilities, and was still unsure if it was genetics or some kind of biological tempering.  Sharp nose, sharp chin, sculpted lips, narrow face, high cheekbones- a sweater dress with a scoop neck that scooped low, and hair that was still short- she’d gone nearly bald to lose the matted hair she’d had after being forsworn, and it was still shorter than Freeman’s.

“How’s your boy?” Helen asked, leaning over the kitchen table.

From the way she’d been when he’d arrived, he was pretty sure she’d been out for drinks last night and she still had alcohol in her system this morning.

“My boy?  I dunno.”

“He’s doing alright,” Helen said.

“They say teaching is the best way to learn,” Yiyun murmured.  She poured herself some coffee.

“I don’t know.  What happens in the new year?” Freeman asked.

“Kennet wars with Carmine,” Helen replied, getting up to pour herself more of a horrendous looking smoothie.  “We see what happens.”

“That’s leaving a lot up in the air,” he said.

“You survived the transition from Musser’s camp to the Carmine’s,” Helen said, in an airy voice, gesturing dramatically.  “Are you really worried now?”

“They’re gentler than some enemies we could have,” Yiyun said.

“Some are gentler than enemies we could have.  Some are Dogs of War.  Friends of the Dog that shot Alexander in the head.”

Yiyun nodded.

“I’d consider a hole in my head if it could shut off the incessant ringing in my ears,” Helen said.  “The music last night…”

“It would probably shut off everything else, too,” Yiyun said.

She shook her head, then winced.  Her mood seemed to go from a complaining one to a dismissive one to a sullen one in the span of the time it took her to finish her statement and bring her smoothie to the table in the center of the kitchen.

She sat on a chair and pulled her knees to her chest, sweater dress pulled down to her ankles.

They were such an odd trio.

“He’s good when it’s on paper,” Freeman explained.  He lowered his voice.  “But the moment there’s a hint of danger, he- he effectively collapses.  I want to do right by him.  I want to- I consider it vital that I do right by him.”

“Expand on that,” Helen told him.

“What?”

“Why is it vital?”

“The issue I’m trying to diagnose is the boy.”

“Why is it vital?” Yiyun asked.

They were an odd group, but the weird thing was… as different as Yiyun and Helen were, they got along.  They had found a wavelength, and he had no idea what that wavelength was.

He shook his head.  He poured himself more water from the pitcher.

“Whatever it is, you’re nervous about it,” Helen told him, leaning forward some.  The alcohol, the bitterness of the kale smoothie, and the lack of sleep made her vaguely goblin-like.  She somehow found it in her to identify a weak point in him and call it out.

“I came by the practice on my own.  Fell into a body snatcher’s trap, turned the tables on him, I was young, fucked up, family thought I was screwed in the head, and it was easier to let ’em, because it gave me some slack.  I was doing reckless shit, until the local practitioner council found me and told me to shape up and ship out.  That they didn’t want the trouble I’d bring.  I… shaped up.”

“Good,” Yiyun said.

“Bumpy road getting there.  I figured out how important it was to do stuff without being asked.  Stay just above average.  Take initiative.  I’m where I am because I fought.  I basically crawled on my belly through shallow ruins for months to get back to my body.  Found it occupied.  Had to evict the tenant.  Thankfully, only an echo.  Thankfully, I had more claim, I just needed one victory, while she had to fend me off every time.  But I had hope, I felt like there was a light at the horizon.”

“And now?” Yiyun asked.

Freeman looked at Adrian as he replied, “I don’t want to sound like I’m- I don’t think I’m a bad teacher.  But he has no motivation, no goals.  Apparently when his cousin was kidnapped, he didn’t seem to care much.  There’s no fight in him.  He collapses.  He doesn’t take orders, he doesn’t take initiative…”

Yiyun frowned.

“Fuck, he waded into a tar pit of Typhlotic Others and then more or less laid down to die.”

“Too deep, too fast?” Helen asked.

“Don’t know.  He shut down, he didn’t elaborate.  He studies on his own, at least.  He listens when it’s quiet.”

“So then stick to the quiet?”

“And what happens in the new year?” Freeman asked, frowning.  “What’s the plan with these kids?  How do we cover the ground between where we’re at now, and where we’re going?  Because…”

He looked across the house to the couch where the three kids sat, comparing notes.  Adrian with a laptop in front of him, finger tapping a page.

“He’s a good guy, Freeman,” Yiyun told him.

“I- yeah,” he replied.  Frustration warred with worry.  “It’s too important to be valuable.  Value is survival.”

“Value got my daughter killed,” Yiyun replied, her voice soft.

He wasn’t sure what to say to that.  He felt like if it wasn’t such a heavy subject, he’d argue the point, but how did you argue a dead daughter?

“Got me forsworn,” Helen told him.

“Value’s the wrong word.”

“What’s the right word then?” Helen asked.

“I- I don’t want to be expendable, when this world is so unforgiving of the expendable.”

“You were never forsworn, but sometimes you get it,” Helen said.

“Charles let him in,” Yiyun said.

“But it’s not about me.  Or if it is, if I’m going to be treated as expendable, then it’s going to be because I couldn’t figure that kid out.  Or this whole… every move feels wrong.”

“One thing I’ve talked to Helen about, is the value of a belief.  A mission.”

“That kid doesn’t have one,” he said, quiet, glancing at Adrian.

“I know.  I understand.  But about what you’re worried about.  My family had a mission, and it put aside a lot of things.  Family, kindness, mercy.  It wanted what it wanted.  Helen’s family is very different from mine, except they have that conviction.  That mission.  So they pushed her to break an oath, testing the limits of what the Blue Heron would take or accept.”

“I was expendable enough they could lose me, but positioned enough to get in and reap the rewards if it worked,” Helen said, resting her upper body on the counter.

Freeman nodded.

“It’s a struggle to convince a man that what he’s doing is wrong when it’s how he makes his wage,” Yiyun said.  “A belief set is more than a wage.  Harder to change.  You can whittle it down, you can test it, you might even find a weak spot at a weak moment.  But it’s too close to the heart.”

“Gut more than heart,” Helen said.  She went to take a drink of her smoothie, looked disgusted, and set it down.  “Spiritually, it’s rooted in the solar plexus, mostly.  Learned that at the Blue Heron.”

“Point taken,” Yiyun said, smiling faintly.  “The Carmine Exile has a mission, driven by belief.  Situated firmly in that solar plexus, he believes in justice.  He believes in us, freeing the forsworn.  I think it comes from and feeds his Self and that’s why it’s less expensive for him than it would be for any other judge.  Like the fact he was once a summoner.”

Freeman rubbed his chin.

“You’re part of that belief set, Freeman.  It’s not just the forsworn.  It’s what makes a man.  I don’t think he’ll act against you or destroy you for a minor failing.  Because that would mean admitting he’s wrong.  You’re safer than you think.”

“And the boy?  The other kids?  I know he’s not the only one struggling to find himself,” he said, glancing at Adrian.  “There’s a truce, we’re meant to train, we need to train, but how do we do that without practical experience?  The Carmine wants to invert the natural order?  Fine.  But he’s flipped too many things around.”

“How so?”

“To train and do practical exercises without revealing ourselves to Kennet, we need to leave Kennet.  But I’m a technomancer.  There aren’t many places a convenient distance away that let me show him what a technomancer can really do.  If we travel to the city, we can barely spend any time there before we return.

“I’ve got a Bugge nipping at my heels and eating up my resources.  I have to call in expensive favors to deal with her, and she retreats.  I’ve- I’ve got to teach this kid, and I don’t know.  What happens in the new year?  What are we doing with them?  What are they doing with them?  I have no idea what skills or practice to equip him with, and whatever the answer is, all I know is I’m failing at it.”

“Teach him like you were taught?” Yiyun suggested.

“I taught myself.  From random, incomplete collections of books.  Bartering.  Each bit of knowledge something I worked for.  And he gets handed it all and…”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

“The Blood Goddess Maricica,” Helen said, “Naked and glorious and covered in blood, she said the kids have hidden depths.  Skills, things they can bring out.”

Yiyun nodded.  “I overheard her talking to Nomi.”

“I may not be the one to uncover it.  Because I’ve been looking,” Freeman said.

“You’ve been looking, you’ve been working at it, you’ve been testing him, trying to figure out how he operates best,” Yiyun said.  “You mentioned goals, motivation.  You haven’t been able to find his.  He does his homework, but he doesn’t excel.”

“Yeah.  That about sums it up.  All fruitless.”

“What if we… just accept he’s not a fighter?” Helen asked.

He turned, looking at the boy.

Yiyun’s phone rang, and she reached for her handbag, lifting it to her lap to get it out.  While she was in the process, Freeman’s phone started ringing again as well.

“It’s Josef.  Teddy’s mentor.  They’re with some of the others.  Lenard, Josh, Cameron and Seth,” Yiyun said, before she even answered.  She hit the button and put her phone to her ear.

Helen’s phone rang.

Seth Belanger had been the one to call Freeman.  He answered.

“Freeman.”

“Seth.”

“We were having a conversation.”

“So were we,” Freeman said, stepping away from the others, so overlapping conversations weren’t a problem.  The kids had gotten up and were looking over.

“Strategy?” Seth asked.  “No.”

“Mentorships.  What to do with different students.”

“Okay.  We were talking strategy,” Seth said.  “Practical exercises for the kids.  You in?”

Freeman nodded to himself, betraying his initial thoughts, while considering the option.

Practical exercise.  Figuring out what to do with Adrian.  Who wasn’t a fighter, to a degree far, far more exaggerated than Freeman.  Freeman, at least, would fight if he had to, would push back, would do what he had to to survive.  Adrian was far more passive.

How to even make that work?

“What kind of exercise?” he asked.

All the kids had been called in.  They had the element of surprise, supposedly.

The property was massive.  When Musser’s forces had retreated, people had gathered at certain points.  They’d organized, shared resources and staff, and this was one of the nicer locations- a stone manor with tertiary buildings, including a series of greenhouses, a stable, and a back field.

Musser’s people had left, going elsewhere.  Some others were still here, drawing on favors.  They’d have to leave eventually, but for the time being, they were taking their time, getting their feet back under them.

“We were wondering what the plan might be,” Seth said.

So was I, Freeman thought.

Would it have been better if he was with Seth and that other group today?  Helping the hopeless was frustrating.

Adrian hung back, tense.

“Patrol of Others is coming our way soon, by the way.  We can try to hide ourselves with practice or retreat, but the best thing to do would be to attack,” Seth explained.

Freeman nodded.  “The strategy?”

“Considering the pieces on the board… what move is Kennet going to make?”

“There’s no telling, not really,” Freeman replied.

“Too many variables.”

“Unless your augury can narrow it down to one?”

“It could try, but common sense helps to cut down the list of possibilities before power’s spent considering useless elements.  What are they going to do?  They’re going to try to stop the Carmine Exile.  They’re up against someone stronger, better informed, quicker, and more versatile.  So… asking the question again, what are they going to do?”

“Stop the Carmine Exile?” Adrian asked.

“How?  Who, where, when, why?” Seth asked.  He put up a hand.  “That patrol is getting close, so I’ll give you the answer.  They’ll seek help from allies.  They’ll seek sanctuary with those allies.  That means going where the Carmine Exile hasn’t claimed everything.”

“Like this property?”

“Technically, this doesn’t break the truce any more than them continuing to make deals on their end,” Seth said.  “And if they tried to argue it did break the truce?  I guess the question goes to the judges.  I think those judges side with us.”

Freeman nodded.

“Let’s dismantle their allies.  It’s training, a chance to get information, we can get troves of money, magic items, resources to spend.”

“By attacking a guarded property.”

“I saw your talk with Adrian,” Seth said.  “I heard what you had to say.  How you got at that elementalist car bomb, meant to burn along connections to go after whoever the car pulled up alongside.”

Freeman nodded, eyebrows knit together.

“You got away with it because it was designed with Lords in mind.  Avery Kelly managed to drop in here for the same reason.  Our patrons are so big, complex, and terrifying that our enemies are forgetting they need to be terrified of us too.”

Seth really sounded like a supervillain, striking that tone and choosing those words.  Cameron leaned into his arm.

“Practitioners come from different places,” Seth said.  “Ones with family.  Ones with patron Others.  Ones who discover it.  I think our Carmine Exile is trying to knit the three together.  Mesh us together, into a group, a family.  The patron Others.  Being found by the practice, with the opportunity to discover more.  The best qualities of each.  Supposedly.”

“Makes some sense,” Freeman replied.

Seth snorted, and cold air coming out of his nostrils fogged.  He turned his eyes skyward.  “Am I right, Carmine Exile?  If I am speaking a crucial Truth, I wouldn’t mind a bit of good karma.”

The clouds moved over the sun, and the edges of the cloud refracted light – one hue of light.

The wintery landscape around the property took on a faint red tint.

“They probably know we’re coming now,” Griffin said.

“You’d be right if they saw.  They didn’t.  That was just for us,” Seth said, confident.

It was the kind of confidence that Freeman tended to shy away from.  But in this moment, the uneasy feelings piled up on one another in a cascading way, like wrinkled tablecloth causing more and more wrinkles, finger dragged hard across the surface?  He didn’t mind it.

“Students only,” Griffin said.  All the kids were present and gathered.  Some sat on the hood of a car because it was warmer.  “Unless things go bad.  Teachers go in, but don’t do anything.  Group of you students against a house full of low to mid-tier practitioners who’ve let their guards down.  They’re wealthy, they just celebrated Christmas, so if you can pull this off, you get to raid the presents, the spellbooks, everything else.  And these guys?  The house isn’t theirs, but they’ve been doing okay for themselves.”

Some eyes had widened at Griffin’s explanation.

“The Kennet practitioners might lose an ally, but Musser loses a key asset and sanctuary,” Seth added.

“Security’s weak, the Mussers are putting focus elsewhere,” Griffin said.  “If we keep Others and weapons put away, then for all they know, we’re allies of Musser looking for asylum.”

“There’s bad karma in that,” Yiyun told him.

“Somehow, I think the judge overseeing conflict will let it slide,” Seth said.  He turned, moving casually, easily, with a bit of focus on presentation.  He faced the group.  His student Cameron to his right.  Griffin to his left.  He gestured toward the distant house.  “What do you think?”

“It should be up to the kids,” Freeman said, watching Adrian out of the corner of his eye.

And the kids jumped in, talking about possibilities, plans, approaches.

Adrian didn’t join in.  He nodded along, showed interest, but he wasn’t offering much.

No, even in strategy, this wasn’t his skillset.

Was he only here because he was Harri’s cousin and she’d nominated him?  Or had the Carmine and his pet Blood Goddess seen something in him that eluded Freeman?

Everyone got organized.

Freeman walked over to Josef.  “I brought up something a few days ago.”

“You did.  The homunculi?”

Freeman nodded.

Josef, alchemist, went to his vehicle.  He popped the back.

Inside were cages.  Creatures that looked like humanoid toads, bellies like water balloons, bright red, were gathered inside.  Each about six to nine inches across, eyes bugged out and bloodshot.

“What do you want for it?” Freeman asked.

“Nothing for now.  We’re in this together.”

They’re trying to give us the best qualities of patron, family, and independent discovery.

Freeman nodded.  He clapped a hand on Josef’s shoulder, then lifted some of the wire cages out.  He handed one to Adrian, then held two more.  He had a bag at his back, and more stuff in his coat.

“Joshua can meet the people who answer the door.  That’ll be big,” Teddy was saying.  “Then after everything gets chaotic, we can send someone around.”

“I have horrors,” Harri said.  “And transformations.  I can get up to the top floors.  If they’re going down to see what’s going on, I can slip in, come at them from behind.”

“Capture, not kill?” Stefan asked.  One of the younger boys, hair curling at the brow.  He looked back at the various teachers.

Freeman didn’t volunteer anything.  Nobody else did, for that matter.

“Kill if necessary, but let’s keep it from being necessary,” Teddy said.

They were hashing things out.  It was clear they’d worked together to talk over how they’d do stuff, and they at least had general knowledge of what one another were learning.

Cameron seemed to be partially out of the loop – maybe because she’d been spending more time with Seth.

Adrian didn’t have that excuse.  Adrian didn’t have an excuse either, for not listening to Freeman and taking his advice on things.  He didn’t seem to understand just how much his silence and lack of contribution here would end up weighing against him.

For Freeman, it had almost meant his execution, or his practice being taken away.  It had almost meant being served up to Witch Hunters, in that time between his learning the practice and the local council laying into him.

“They’ll call for help.  So this should be a hit and run.  Do damage, take some out, maybe even take some hostage,” Cameron said.  She turned to Seth.  “They’re the bad guys, right?”

“They have family branches that make love potions, or dose people to screw up their prospects in court.  They have slaves.  They’re-”

“The Whitts?” Yiyun asked.

“Yeah, why?”

“Chase Whitt was your colleague, wasn’t he?  He might be here?”

“Nah.  I know he’s working.  I even heard it was an issue, little family drama when he didn’t show for the holidays.  Fuck it, he left me.  He abandoned me,” Seth said.  “He barely talked to me after I was forsworn.  Like he was embarrassed I existed.  Nicolette Belanger helped me more than my entire family did.  Fuck ’em.”

“Is this why you chose this target?” Freeman asked.

“Didn’t make the decision harder,” Seth replied.  “Is it a problem?”

Freeman shook his head.  “I think we all have enemies.”

Twelve year old Harri, pale, blond, wearing a white winter coat, pulled what looked like a fistful of black chopsticks out of her pocket- maybe ten.  She held them one-handed, carefully and somewhat clumsily manipulating one, like she had a pen she wanted to twirl around her finger, while she was holding a bunch more.

Helen approached her, bent down, and showed her the proper adjustments and hand movements.

All of them were getting sorted.  Adrian hung back.

“We good to go?” Teddy asked Josef.

“That’s up to you all.  This is a test run.  Training.  So long as you don’t die, we should be able to fix anything that goes wrong.  So don’t die,” Josef replied.

“Then let’s go,” Teddy said.

Adrian glanced back over his shoulder at Freeman, who kept his face frozen, giving nothing away.

Figure this out, Adrian, he willed his student.

Joshua was handing out earplugs, special made, with inscriptions on the ends that faced away from the ear.  Lenard supplied them to everyone who wasn’t in Josh’s group.

“You like me that much?” Cameron asked.

The kids had a plan, and they’d split into groups.  There was the one group in front- Teddy, Stefan, Joshua, and Nomi carrying heavy luggage with two hands on a handle that would’ve been easier to carry with the one.  Harri, Travis, and Dony went to the side, crouching at the base of the window, Dony peering in.

And both Cameron and Adrian hung back.  Cameron because she was the augur, Adrian because…

Freeman didn’t know.

Adrian flushed.  “No, I mean-”

“What are you doing here?”

He looked skewered by the question.

Because he was being a coward, here.

Which, Freeman had to admit, wasn’t the worst theoretical response to being involved in something like this.  It was good to back off if something felt wrong, but Adrian was ready to back off before anything had happened.  After his friends were already involved.

There were looks aimed backward at Adrian.  Even his cousin seemed impatient with him.

Maybe he was finally getting it.

“I’m kidding, by the way,” Cameron said.

“Huh?”

“About you being here because you like me?”

“Oh.  Yeah.”

Then the groups split up the rest of the way.  Cameron, Adrian, Freeman and Seth hung back in the trees.  Harri’s group snuck around.  The rest approached the front door.

Cameron sat with her back to a tree, sitting on the end of her long coat, before rolling some bones from her hand into the diamond formed by her bent legs, above the black coat fabric.

She put her phone on her knee, and texted one-handed, rolling the bones again.

“Talk to us,” Seth said.

“Patrol… east.  Harri’s group,” Cameron recited.

“Good.”

Adrian was the one who was out of place.  He looked at Freeman.  Freeman shot him a look that was almost a glare, accompanied with a shrug.  What do you want from me?

“Could I- can I intercept the calls?” Adrian asked.  “If they’re calling for help?”

“What do you think?” Freeman asked.  “This is you, Adrian.  This is a test run for things that may be expected of you down the line.  I can’t hold your hand every step of the way.”

His impatience was leaking out.

“They are calling, or they will.  I Saw it,” Cameron said.

“Can I?” Adrian asked Freeman.  “I don’t want to get caught in the Ruins again.”

“You shouldn’t.  Stay close to power,” Freeman said, annoyed he even had to say it.  Your kid cousin is doing better here.

Adrian found a patch of dirt beneath a copse of trees, and started drawing the diagram for digital-astral projection.  He laid out his tools.

He was quick about it.  He did learn things fast enough.  He just had no confidence in what he learned.

Left alone like this, he did alright.

Freeman drew out his own version of the diagram, so he could follow Adrian in and through.  He waited-

And he heard Joshua scream.  A terrible, awful sound that was muffled to near-nothingness by the earplugs that blocked the scream and little else.

Adjusting his visual resolution, he could See Joshua explode into abyss-tainted spirits.  He could See Joshua crumple, hands at his head.

As a Bedlamite Abyssal practitioner, Joshua and Lenard inflicted and suffered insanity in roughly equal measure.  A detachment from reality, hallucinations of all kinds, emotional turmoil and darker things.

Joshua crumpled, weak and vulnerable, and Kira-Lynn, having already tossed some vials in after Joshua had started, dropped to her knees at Joshua’s side, holding his arms as he twitched and punched out at nothing.

Joshua was debilitated, but so were the… he couldn’t get a clear image with his Sight.

At least ten Whitts near the front of the house.

Adrian left his body behind, stretching out.  He’d taken the advice to temper some things, and he wasn’t a complete astral tadpole, now.  He had a watch and necklace, and a blur of discoloration that suggested a favorite pair of jeans were becoming part of his Self identity.

A step forward.

Freeman followed Adrian as he approached the house, floating toward the roof, positioning himself over those glowing heads inside.

“Ward,” he warned, hating that he had to bring it up.

Adrian stopped a few feet short of the roof’s edge.

If Adrian floated into that ward, depending on the power the people in the house had been putting into it, it could be a light push away, and it could be weeks of Adrian being so wounded in Self that he needed a change of clothes and a bedpan.  Or worse.

Adrian paused, took a few seconds to find the ward, and dipped deeper into the Digital Aether, this time, effectively swimming under it to get where he needed to be.  Lightning flickered between the wire-ridden ground and the storming sky, and twisted shapes like technology melting into itself like wax stabbed skyward.  A few scattered shapes glowed within the house- head-dominant, eyes wide.

The first call went out.

Adrian caught it, deflecting it.  He paused to study it.

Another.  Adrian looked up and out, saw it, and then flew over, a touch late, to intercept.  He managed to swat it down and away.

Good.  Good.

“Trying to see who they’re messaging, it’s not the police…”

“Of course not.  It’s a magical mansion filled with contraband.  Drugs included, I’m sure.”

Adrian looked at his master, saw Freeman’s eyes widen, and turned.  Too late this time.

The call went out.  It was up and connected, speaker and listener, for nearly ten seconds as Adrian flew over to catch it.

“The alert got out.  No use.  Now what?” Freeman asked.

“That’s- what was I supposed to do?  To stop it?”

“We’ll review it later.  What are you meant to do now?” Freeman pressed.

“I- I don’t know.”

And again, the shutdown.

“The call went out, you could’ve suppressed what we were doing, you couldn’t.  Fine.  What’s your next step?  Where are you needed?  Where are you not needed?”

Adrian shook his head.  “But-”

“But?”

“But… I know where to go for that answer.”

Adrian flew back to his body.  From digital aether to ruin to spirit world and then to body, because that way was clearest.

Freeman took his own body back.

Adrian stood, shaky and uncoordinated.  He stared in the direction of the house.

“Talk me through it.”

“I- I- Cameron?” Adrian asked the older girl.

“What is it?” she asked, rolling the bones once more.

“What do we need?  What can I do?”

“It looks like people are coming.  You couldn’t stop the calls getting out?  It was that fast?”

“There were a few, close together.”

“Damn it.  That’s less looting we can do.  We’ll have to run for it.  They’ll chase.”

Adrian started forward.

“Finish that thought.”

“But-” Adrian replied.

“But?”

“It’s… I’m not sure it’s helping.  It’s not participating.”

“You’re barely participating as is.  What were you thinking about?”

“I… thought it would be cool to do more of this without you guys.  So instead of climbing into our teacher’s cars… there were a bunch in the lot.”

“Okay.  Show me,” Freeman said, carrying the cages, two under one arm, one in one hand.

Adrian went to the parking lot.

He keyed the door by the lock, scrawling in the right rune.

The door unlocked.

“What are you thinking?”

“We can steal their cars.  And if we saw a self-driving car yesterday… maybe we could get car-assist?  Is that okay?  I know we don’t have licenses, but with the right practice…”

“It’s okay,” Freeman said, glad Adrian was thinking now.

Freeman put the cages down, put his bag down on top of the stack, and withdrew a laptop.  He held it with one hand on the bottom, typing with the other.

He showed Adrian some diagram work that would help with the spirit-directed cars.

Harri, near the top floor, had crawled in through a window.  Now she wrestled someone larger than her, chopstick arrangement in one hand.

Adrian saw and paused what he was doing, looking at his cousin in action.

Chopsticks fanned out, held in a precise arrangement.  Harri’s body twisted, producing extra limbs that rippled out of her coat sleeve, chasing one another in a crab-bucket way.

Freeman thought of the failed body thief, still in the bunker.

They anchored Harri, grabbed the man, and gave her leverage to start forcing him out of the window.

He fell three stories into bushes and snow.

Harri began to withdraw the arms, because moving around with them was hard, and then the first gunshot sounded.

She leaned backwards against the windowsill, head lolling back, a chunk of her scalp and skull missing.

Adrian stared, silent.

Freeman watched, too.  He’d talked to Helen enough to know how she practiced, and what she taught.

Chaotic and messy, but capable of surviving that chaos and mess.  Harri’s hand was still gripping the chopsticks, holding them in a careful arrangement, like a triangle over a square, her fingers bent at disconcerting angles to make that possible.

Her collarbone bulged out, then shattered.  A lump pushed its way up, forward, and then back, as her head lolled back, losing its grip on the rest of her.

Hair slicked to her head with her own blood and bodily fluids, eyes wide, Harri adjusted the arrangement of black, marked chopsticks, hand reaching out-

There were more bullets, but they seemed to disappear into the flurry of reaching arms.

The discarded, injured head fell to the snow, boneless and very wet, landing not far from the guy she’d chucked out the window.

Adrian rigged four cars to be ready to go.  Keys bypassed, they just needed a word.  There was some guidance, spirits to keep the car straight and on the road, avoiding collisions, and keeping things moving smoothly.  And there was some connection blocking.  Presumably for police.

Freeman would have done that last bit in a different way, but he didn’t want to micromanage Adrian.  This would have to do.

This, technically, was technomancy.  There were more nuanced ways to do it, but this got them moving.  This was encouraging if-

“That won’t be enough.”

Adrian turned.  Freeman, annoyed, turned as well.

Cameron had approached, Seth behind her.

Cameron explained herself, “It won’t be fast enough.  When they come, they’ll come hard.  There’ll be Others.  Like this, they catch up, they get at least one of us off the road.”

“We’ll have Others for backup once we’re far enough away from this property, back in the next Lordship,” Adrian said.

“We will,” Cameron replied.  “But we won’t get that far as is.”

Adrian paused, hesitating.

“Tell us your idea, and we’ll see if we can make it work,” Freeman said.

“We can use practice to manipulate the cars, right?”

“We can.”

“Reshape it?  Can we change the engine?  Or the car?  Make it more sleek?”

Freeman put the cages down on the hood.

He heard another gunshot.

“That’s Nomi’s undead,” Seth said.  “We’re fine.”

A wraith Lord was called on, and rushed through a whole section of the building, passing through walls in a selective way, tips of claws reaching out and carving through surfaces that let the hands and the rest of it thorugh.  A whole sub-building teetered, half the roof collapsing down onto the fourth and third floors.

The White Rot was invoked by someone else.  Probably Teddy.

“There are ways.  But you don’t know how or have the fundamentals to know,” he told Adrian.  “By all rights, I should make you figure out another way-”

He could see Adrian shrinking back.

“But for now, I’ll walk you through it.  If you promise to learn with enthusiasm when the time comes.”

Cameron rolled the bones.

“It’ll be pretty cool,” Cameron said.  “Underage driving.  Getaway chase, with spirits helping keep things okay.”

Adrian nodded.  Then, with a bit of enthusiasm, now, encouraged, he set about following the steps as Freeman outlined them.

Drawing on the hood, cages put beneath the hood- and then the hood slammed down.

Blood homunculi with power stored inside them bled into the engine.  The diagram was manipulated, touch and drag here, double tap there… adjusting its configuration.

The metal beneath the closed, bleeding car hood squealed and groaned as it changed to match.

“You can do this with computer setups as well.  If you don’t mind the, ah…”

Freeman opened the hood.  Cameron and Adrian recoiled.

The engine had been twisted into a new shape, barely recognizable as an engine.  And in that twisted shape, helping to insulate things here, or stretched out there, were the bits of wire cage and blood homunculus.  A bloodshot blinking eye stared up from a twist of wires and pipe near the battery.  An arm and attached twitching claw was wrapped around a tube like an arm caught in a lathe.

He shut it.

“You going to tell me you don’t want to do this anymore?” Freeman asked.

Adrian shook his head.

“Because you liked the big video game monster alright, but you stopped wanting to make ’em when-”

“It went wrong.  Escaped.”

“That can be managed.”

“I- I don’t want to.  If it had bounced back at me?”

“Yeah.  But you want to do this?  You want to enable the others?  Equip them?”

Adrian nodded.

And maybe that was his role.  Not a fighter, in the slightest.  A coward at heart, but he’d arm, equip, and armor his friends.

Teddy had more homunculus- he’d deployed something that spawned them.  Now they were leaving the house, laden with books and goods.

Adrian and Freeman worked together, preparing the cars.  The kids would get a thrill ride to finish off this venture.

And the Whitts-

“What do we do with the house and the remaining Whitts?” Griffin asked, as he stepped outside, carrying a box.

Lenard, with his bulging eyes and thin, twisty smile, born unattractive and made ugly by the association with the Abyss, a dazed and hurting Joshua at his side, using his help to walk, gave Griffin his answer.

“We told them to get lost.  They stuck around.  Burn it, let ’em figure out where they’re going.”

There were some who looked uncomfortable at the idea.  Yiyun didn’t participate in that part, or let Nomi participate.  But nobody said no.

So, with the a good share of the Whitt family inside, the buildings at the Musser property the Whitts were staying at were set ablaze.

And they drove off, some of the kids doubled up in technomancy modified vehicles, Freeman and the other teachers in their regular cars.

They hadn’t even reached their first rest stop to regroup before the text messages came out.

The kids wanted to keep going.  To hit other targets.  Weaken their future opposition by disabling allies, while gathering resources, knowledge and power.  They’d been cooped up for months, and now they had their outlet, and they were eager.

Adrian, Freeman was pleased to see, was among those voices.

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