Collision: Book Four in the Secret World Chronicle - eARC Read online

  Mercurye grabbed her around the waist and hugged her. None in the Assembly applauded or offered congratulations. Ramona had enough sense of mind to smile up at Tesla; he gave her a crisp nod and the wireframe of his body faded in a thoroughly Cheshire manner. She thought she caught a wink as his head disappeared, but she couldn’t be sure.

  Outside of the Assembly, Trina pulled the doors shut, her cheeks flushed pink with excitement. She hugged each of them in turn before racing down the hallway. Mercurye caught Ramona in a tight hug and moved as if to kiss her, but Ramona held up a finger to his lips. “Overwatch, get me Parker,” she murmured, her eyes locked on the speedster. “And tell them to send in those icebergs.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Penny For Your Thoughts

  Mercedes Lackey and Dennis Lee

  “Miss. Miss. Miss,” Penny repeated, wearily. They’d been at this, before breakfast and before supper, for days now. Three at least, maybe more. Penny had lost count. Poor Lacey-who-wasn’t never came out of the drug fog. In a lot of ways, Penny envied her. She wouldn’t have minded being able to sleep all day and all night too. It would be a sort of escape from here.

  She hadn’t expected any response this time, either, but her stomach was growling, and she thought that the Dark Man might be late, today. The Devil had gotten some kids from one of the other cells; several, this time, she’d thought. Maybe that was why the Dark Man was late. And maybe that was why the shot on Lacey started to wear off.

  All Penny knew for certain was that the woman’s shoulder began to move under her gentle shaking, and for the first time, she raised her head to look, blearily, at Penny.

  “Wha—” she said, mushily. “Wha—”

  Penny still had her hand on Lacey’s shoulder, and the woman didn’t scream, or lunge at her, or start acting crazy as she tried to focus on Penny. But in the rest of the room, Penny could feel the other kids holding their breath, waiting to see what would happen.

  “She’s awake!” the ghost said, and ran a few steps to sit on his heels at her side, staring eagerly at Lacey’s face. “She’s awake! Now you can—”

  But the moment the ghost dropped down beside Penny—everything changed.

  Instead of looking at Penny, the woman’s gaze snapped instantly to the ghost. Her face went dead white and she stared at the spirit in mixed horror and disbelief.

  “You…died!” she rasped, going tense all over, her voice rising with every word. “I sent you off—if I hadn’t sent you off, you’d still be alive, but I did and you died!”

  The ghost nodded, eagerly, but his face fell as Lacey started trying to back away from him.

  “You died!” she shrilled, hysteria building. “I sent you, and you died!”

  “Wait!” the ghost said, reaching out to her. “You don’t understand! It’s okay! I forgave you! I forgive you! I—”

  But by now, Lacey was in full-throated hysterics, and any sense that had been in her eyes was gone. She was shrieking wordlessly at the top of her lungs, and had plastered herself tightly against the wall behind her, still scrabbling backwards to get away.

  And that was when the door to the cell slammed open, and the Dark Man stormed it. “What is going on here?” he roared, his eyes fixed on Penny for a moment. But Lacey, who had fallen into shocked silence at his entrance, began screaming again and his gaze snapped to her.

  He muttered something angrily, something Penny couldn’t understand, and strode towards Lacey, shoving Penny aside to get at her, and stabbing her viciously with the hypodermic. Moments later, Lacey was unconscious again, head lolling, as the Dark Man unshackled her, and threw her over his shoulder.

  “Time to put you in your own kennel, Hündin,” he growled, as Penny scuttled back to her bed. He moved heavily towards the door, only once pausing, as he began to close it, to rake the room with his glare.

  But then, he stopped for a moment, and stared at Penny, his gaze sharpening as his brows furrowed in concentration.

  “Eh…” he said, licking his lips in a way that made her skin crawl. “Fresh. So fresh…”

  And then he was gone, taking Lacey with him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Hurricane: Storm Surge

  Mercedes Lackey and Dennis Lee

  “Well Red, I was wondering when you were going to get around to visiting me.”

  Harmony rose up from her cot, and crossed her arms as the Djinni closed the door behind him. He turned, leaned back against the door, and faced her through the layers of her reinforced glass cell.

  “Heard you were finally talking to people, darlin’,” he said. “Figured I might have a go.”

  “Well, one does get dreadfully bored when ECHO locks them up. I’m sure you remember.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t so bad,” the Djinni said with a shrug. “Especially with what was happening on the outside. In here, all safe and tucked away, all I needed was some tele and it would have been a vacation.”

  “Television,” Harmony scoffed. “I can’t say I was ever a fan. Two dimensional lands inhabited by characters of similar depth. Yet another modern marvel that serves to feed the imagination but only bleeds it dry. No, even in here I’m witness to things much more entertaining, much more satisfying.”

  “You’re behind the times then,” Red said. “Seriously, you never watched Lost?”

  Harmony cocked her head, and strolled forward to the limit of her space, pressing her hands to the glass. Her eyes bore into Red.

  “You play him well,” she said, finally. “But you’re not the Djinni.”

  Red sighed, and came to attention. Harmony watched as he removed his scarf, revealing a horribly scarred neck thick with knotted flesh. The bottom half of his face hung in tattered ropes of skin, obscene against the pristine nature of his flawless lips.

  “You sure about that?” the Djinni asked.

  “Oh, I know you’ve come in contact with him,” Harmony said. “Enough to get a full lay of the land, but it’s not the look you need to worry about. The Djinni has a certain swagger to him, and it’s subtle enough to hide the little, little boy he’s got trapped inside. What you’re doing is passable, I suppose, but not to me. My senses go a little deeper. But you knew that, didn’t you? I suppose that’s why you’re here. Either to test how good your impersonation is, or to see what I know, to get into his head even further. How am I doing?”

  “You were always a tricky one, Else, and far too clever for your own good.” The voice was still the Djinni’s but the accent…very, very faintly Germanic.

  She snickered, and made a little faux-curtsey. “Thank you, but I go by Harm now.”

  “Harm,” Doppelgaenger laughed. “How appropriate.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Harmony said. “Repeatedly, in fact. It’s getting a bit old, I think. So to what do I owe the pleasure? I can’t remember the last time you actually sought me out. If memory serves, we’ve done our best to avoid one another.”

  “Yes,” Doppelgaenger said. “Ever since that unfortunate misunderstanding in Riga. I believe you referred to it as professional courtesy.”

  “Well, no,” Harmony disagreed. “My exact words were ‘cross me again and I’ll hoist your shapeshifting head on a poleax.’ Is that why you’re here? Old transgressions? You’re not really thinking to address past wrongs while I’m caged and helpless, are you?”

  “Of course not, my dear,” he said. “Even in that cell, I know better than to underestimate you. And you, me, I suppose. We both know where our true gifts lie, and not in anything as obvious as our powers.”

  “Information then,” Harmony smiled. “I take it we’re free to talk?”

  “I’ve found that conversations with you are seldom without a price, but if you’re referring to the security feeds, then yes. For all their bluster about advanced technology, ECHO is still vulnerable to rather archaic countermeasures.”

  Doppelgaenger stepped forward. His face seemed to collapse on itself, then settled in place. He smiled at her, his fea
tures now handsome, with blue eyes twinkling under a shock of well-coiffed blond hair.

  “There, proof,” he said. “You know I would not expose this face unless I was certain of privacy. I’ve heard what you have been doing here with your time. It seems a little out of place for you, but I’m sure you wear benevolence well. Is it everything you wish it to be?”

  “You know? Why I am not surprised?” Harmony said. “Still up to your old ways, Rune, with your fingers in too many pies. Who is it, I wonder, that you’re wearing as you wander freely around the ECHO campus? I haven’t sensed anything of you at all. Surely not one of my immediate captors then.”

  “Don’t be so sure, Harm,” Doppelgaenger smirked. “I have gotten so much better since we last met.”

  “Your self-confidence was always a weakness, Rune. I felt your sadistic heart beating beneath Red Djinni’s within moments of… ah, I understand. The Djinni is a complicated sort of fellow, isn’t he? Not the sort you would easily hide beneath, as you have so many others.”

  “And you know the Djinni so well?” Doppelgaenger raised an eyebrow. “I should like to put that to the test. And yes, I know the rules. Information for information. I’ll even go first. Someone was in The Vault doing a job when our forces hit Atlanta. Bulwark’s wife Amythist was killed there, trying to stop whomever it was, I assume. You might feed this to Jensen, who will get it back to Bulwark. I strongly suspect that at least some of the security camera footage survived the explosion; the footage was stored in hardened, EMP-proof canisters of flash memory at a distance from the cameras themselves. You should be able to barter that information for something.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Harmony said dryly. “All right. I’ll give you a memory. Something to show you a side of the Djinni I doubt you’ve seen.”

  * * *

  Scope was still under orders not to use her eyes, which left Harmony without her gunnery instructor. Not that Harmony actually needed the instruction, of course, but the ruse needed to be kept up, and the poor, traumatized, guilty creature that Harmony should be after her failure in the Catacombs would be trying to make up for her panic by obsessive target practice.

  Harmony was mostly there just for show, and mainly hoped to register her presence with Bulwark, but it was the Djinni who turned up. Well, he would do. He was wearing a face she vaguely recognized from entertainment news, although she couldn’t have said who it was. Harmony didn’t pay much attention to movies and television.

  She was deliberately doing badly, and had schooled her face into an expression of despair, but otherwise was not overtly attempting to draw attention to herself and her failure. This was a delicate balancing act—she had to look guilty, she had to look as if she was trying to the best of her ability, she had to look as if she was not fishing for sympathy. So she pretended to concentrate on her targets to the extent that she “didn’t notice” the Djinni in the next stall, until all her magazines were empty and she pulled off her ear protection to reload.

  “Darlin’,” the Djinni drawled. “I hate to point this out, but you’re more of a danger to me than you are to your target.”

  She allowed a couple of tears to well up. “I know,” she replied, with frustration and despair in her voice. “I…I don’t know what I’m doing wrong!”

  “You’re choking up,” the Djinni replied, immediately. “Tensing when you fire, instead of relaxing. I can show you—”

  “Please!” she begged, and of course, given the chance to put his arms around an attractive woman to show her how to properly hold her weapon, he seized it, as she knew he would. And she was grateful, but not too grateful, since the Djinni was the black sheep of the group, and Harmony should know to be careful around him. And she allowed herself to “improve,” but not so much he might get suspicious. A careful, skillful dance.

  “You know, this might be why you choked in the Catacombs,” Djinni continued, stepping back to let her fire the next set of rounds unassisted. “You’re thinking too much, you’re letting your imagination paint everything that can go wrong, and then you tense up instead of letting go. Once you’ve got all the information you’re going to get, act on your first impulse. And if you fail, don’t let failure tie you in knots. Keep moving. Keep trying something else. Throw enough out there, something is going to stick, and as long as you keep moving, you’re harder to hit.”

  “Like Acrobat?” she hazarded.

  He rolled his eyes, but agreed. “Boy’s constantly off-balance, but he stays loose, and as long as he keeps moving, he never faceplants.”

  They worked without speaking for a good long while, she allowing herself to continue to improve, he coming in to make tiny corrections to her grip, aim and stance. And finally, he called a halt. “That’s enough for the day,” he said, and she returned the weapons to the armory and picked up her Overwatch headset, cam and mic from her locker. And he made a face.

  “Nannycam,” he scoffed. “Don’t you go anywhere without it?”

  “What if we get a call?” she responded. “It’s better to have it on me.” Since he was still making a sour face, she put out a little probe of her own, to see if some information could be pried out of him. “Why are you so down on Victrix? She’s useful. We would never have survived that trip to the Catacombs without her!”

  “Or we might have gotten through them without incident,” he countered, immediately, harshly. Then he held up a hand. “It was her magic that triggered that trap—”

  “And it was her magic that got us out,” Harmony pointed out, delighted to have gotten an emotional response out of him. “Her magic that got us past other traps.…”

  “Magic,” he muttered in disgust. By this time they were out in the open, with no one to overhear. He looked as if he was considering something. She kept her expression encouraging. “Let me tell you about magic,” he said, after a moment. “It’s dangerous. It’s unpredictable. It killed someone I…cared about. And I’m not talking out of inexperience here, the opposite. I was stupid enough to play around with magic, and it bit me and everyone else in the ass.” She could sense something she hadn’t expected from him. Fear! He truly was afraid of magic! “Victrix will give you all kinds of blather about probability and math, but I know. You can’t predict what the outcome is going to be when you mess with it. When we first started working with it, I thought we could. I thought we had a handle on everything. I’m susceptible to the stuff, and the way it worked through me was I stabilized and strengthened it. And then…the rules changed, for no reason that any of us could see, and suddenly I destabilized what was going through me. And…somebody died. Died in the most horrible, painful way you could possibly imagine.” His voice faltered a moment, then hardened. “So no matter what Victrix tells you, don’t believe her. It’s crazy and unpredictable, you can’t depend on it, and anyone who does is an idiot.”

  The emotions seething in him delighted her. This had really struck a nerve! Fear, doubt, guilt…strong, strong enough to crack his famous facade for a moment.

  “I’ll accept the nanny-cam,” he said, after a long moment, as she sensed him getting himself back under tight control. “You’re right, it’s useful. But damn if I am ever going to depend on magic. And you’d be smart to do the same.”

  * * *

  Harmony cut off the memory, and watched as Doppelgaenger came back into the present time. He was…grinning. And when he was fully back, he gave her an ironic little bow.

  “As ever, you live up to your reputation, fraulein,” he said, without a trace of mockery. “This is exceedingly useful to me. So, nice to see the Djinni in a vulnerable state, at last. I can use that.”

  “You’re playing with fire,” Harmony warned him, knowing he wouldn’t listen, or believe her. And he didn’t. He just rearranged his features into the Djinni’s again without another word, donned the scarf, and sauntered out again.

  Leaving her to wonder if she had given him…too much.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Collision<
br />
  Cody Martin, Dennis Lee, and Mercedes Lackey

  Victoria Victrix: Overwatch Suite

  Vickie was beginning to feel as if she hadn’t left the chair in her Overwatch suite for a year. She’d certainly been sleeping in it the last couple of days, waking up to whoever was pinging her, stumbling into the bathroom for showers, the kitchen for whatever passed for food, and for coffee. Her eyes were sore, her back hurt despite her special chair, and her mouth was always dry. She couldn’t keep this up forever…but there was no one else that could do what she was doing. If there had been, she would have gladly handed it off. Or would she? The old Vickie would have packed her bags and gone somewhere no one would ever find her. There were plenty of places she knew where the Thulians (or anyone else for that matter) were unlikely to look for decades. Well, the monastery for one. It had been there for hundreds of years, and the Thulians had no idea they had built their super-city on its doorstep.

  But she couldn’t do that anymore. And she couldn’t hand off a job she knew she was uniquely qualified to handle. She couldn’t ignore what was at stake.

  And she could not abandon her friends. People she loved.

  It had been—how long? Longer than a week, but not more than two, since she’d coordinated pulling the team out of the Himalayas. If it hadn’t been for the implants and the headsets, she didn’t think she could have done it without scattering their molecules across half the world, and even then, she’d had the distinct and frighteningly powerful jolt of something else lending a helping hand at the last minute. I’m going to be owing favors for the next three lifetimes, if I have them, she thought ruefully, as she made contact with the Indian Army yet again, assuring them that everything was on schedule. They were nervous to the point of hysteria, and she didn’t blame them. It couldn’t have been easy, finding out what was on your proverbial front lawn.