Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (25 page)

She looked around behind the desk and the dresser for some kind of access. She thought there would be a panel of some kind that she could pull off somewhere like there were in the cars she’d crawled inside. But there wasn’t.

She thought about the printers she’d seen pouring out all the new houses along the street her bus drove on. All that stuff was printed right into the walls.

She stood up on her bed and looked along the edge of the ceiling. Sure enough, there was a narrow seam, sealed with something soft. She could just reach it if she stood on her tippy toes.

She pushed a fingernail into it. It gave way a little bit, like the bark of the sacred trees in the cove. Like rubber and some plastics here on Earth. She needed something to cut it with.

She looked through her drawers, Angela Hayworth’s drawers, but there wasn’t anything she could use.

She went out of her room, intent on sneaking into the kitchen for a laser knife. Sophia was coming down the hall and spotted her. The woman started to say something, but Pernie pointed to the bathroom door nearby and went in.

She hated being under guard.

She rummaged through the drawers and found a small pair of scissors in one drawer and in another a small box that read
Light of Luxury—Laser Depilatory Kit
. The front of the box showed a lady wrapped in a towel, sitting on the side of a bathtub, rubbing something oblong down her leg just below the knee. The lady looked very happy doing it and had a great big smile on her face.

Pernie opened it and found an oblong object just like the one on the cover of the box. She turned it over. There were three dark lines, barely two millimeters wide, running opposite the object’s length. That was it. There was a button on the side. Of course Pernie pushed it.

All three lines lit up, bright blue, glaringly bright. Pernie reflexively jerked it away so it wouldn’t hit her in the eyes. Jeremy had warned her about laser light. She wasn’t sure the object was really emitting lasers, since the lady on the box was smiling and all, but that’s what it said, so it must be.

She wondered if she could use it to cut through the soft stuff on her wall.

She took the object and the scissors and hid them under her blouse, tucked into the waistband of her skirt. She took the precaution of flushing the toilet before she exited and went back to her room. Sure enough, Sophia Hayworth was standing there waiting when she came out, and watched her until her door was closed.

Pernie dragged the dresser to the window, first tipping each end up and tucking a blanket under it to reduce friction and noise and also to make the work easier. She jumped up onto it and looked at the joint along the ceiling and the wall. She pulled out the scissors, opened them, and, using one sharp edge, cut through the seam.

The soft material sealing the seam where the wall covering and the windowsill met gave way easily enough, and in short order, Pernie had cut a line the length of the window plus a foot and a half on either side. She carved out as much of the soft stuff as she could along a three-inch stretch of the cut, making a gap into which she could get her fingers, albeit little more than her fingernails. She pulled down on it, bending her knees and giving a few trial yanks as she tried to peel the wall covering away from the wall beneath. She knew there was concrete behind it if she could just get the outer layer off.

The material buckled a little, bending and warping as she tugged on it. That proved that it was as thin as she suspected, but it wasn’t as flimsy as she’d hoped. It didn’t peel away at all, which meant she’d have to cut into it as well. That was going to be harder than cutting the soft sealer in the seam.

She tried with the scissors, even though she knew it likely wouldn’t work. She dragged the tip of the scissor blade in a long line, several times in rapid succession, each stroke on top of the path of the last, all halfway down the length of the windowsill. No luck, barely a scratch.

She set the scissors down and retrieved the Light of Luxury. She placed it against the paneling, laying it so that its length was parallel to the ceiling. She pushed the button. Filaments of blue light, thread-thin, radiated a short way out from the edges of the device, marking where the three bars of laser light were. Or at least that’s what Pernie hoped was happening.

She didn’t know how long she ought to wait, but since the lady on the box was shooting herself in the leg and not screaming, Pernie left it there for quite a while. After a period of time had passed to challenge patience, she pulled it away, hoping to see the panel burned right through.

There were three faint brown marks. They were more like smoke stains than incisions cut with a laser knife.

“Hmmph,” Pernie grunted.

She jumped down from her perch and took the scissors and the Light of Luxury to her bed. She’d seen Jeremy take enough stuff apart in the lab to know how it went, so she used the scissors to pry the top and the bottom of the Light of Luxury apart. Soon she was looking at its insides. She didn’t know what much of that was.

But she was getting pretty good about using the global net.

By midnight, she had swapped out the power source for the one in her tablet and routed all of it through one of the three lenses on the Light of Luxury. The new contraption was rather a mess of wires, and it all hung apart, but Pernie didn’t care. Her first trial with it melted a two-inch gash into the plastic surface of her desk. Victory!

Cutting the paneling away from the window was the work of less than a half hour, and when she finally pulled the veneer back, all the pipes and conduit were exposed exactly as she had known they would be. It didn’t take her long to figure out which wires went to the window alarm after that, and jumping the connection was the work of only a minute and a half.

Moments after, Pernie was headed back downtown. She was going to see a dead Hostile today, and no attempts by Sophia Hayworth to be her “guardian” were going to keep her from it. No way.

Chapter 25

“T
hey’re still alive,” Tytamon called to Roberto as the ship’s captain came down the
Glistening Lady
’s ramp. “I know that much for certain.” The ancient magician’s relief was evident as he reported the findings of his divination spell. “I can hardly tell you more than that, but it’s something. I saw them both in a fog of yellow. They stared back at me, unblinking, motionless, but I sensed no fear. I tried to discern the nature of the fog. I thought it might have something to do with the Liquefying Stone. I cast another version of the divination spell with the stone as the center of the inquiry, but that didn’t seem to resonate, so perhaps not. I want to say the fog is heat. It feels like heat, as if the color of the heat or the fog is hot and yellow, or something of that sort. I know little, but I am encouraged. So much so, I’ve invited Doctor Leopold to come for dinner tomorrow night that he might help me try again. These damned divination spells are fraught with vagaries in the worst ways, but the man is brilliant. I cannot do it alone. The gods throw our wisdom and our ignorance back at us together, all in a knot. But I think between the doctor and me, we can figure it out. Or perhaps at least get you something you can use.”

Roberto nodded. “Well, I know you said the more you know the better, and I might have some information that can help. But you have to keep it quiet for now.” He looked around, out of reflex more than need. There were no spies at Calico Castle, nor any this close to the walls. Prosperion’s only Eight had seen to that after the orc invasion, and he’d added more since his return. He was adding even more beyond that, as it seemed the more frequently he visited Crown City, the more Tytamon sensed the tensions growing in the Palace. The Queen was in nearly constant absence, and the TGS councilmen were becoming increasingly arrogant.

“Then come inside, young man.” Normally the nearly eight-hundred-year-old sorcerer would have repeated his standing offer that the crew of the
Glistening Lady
should avail themselves of Calico Castle’s kitchens and other amenities, but such was his apparent worry that he skipped all such courtesies.

He led Roberto and Deeqa up the winding stairs to his study in the castle’s tall centermost tower, and soon the three of them were shut inside with the door locked tight. “I don’t trust anyone anymore,” he said. “You aren’t wrong to fear for it. There are more counter spells and magic blocks upon the Palace now than there ever were, more than any time in history. And here we are at peace, with no real enemies in sight.”

“Well, I guess we’re going to find out about that soon enough,” Roberto said. “Because here’s what I just heard. Lord Vorvington thinks the Queen has raided Blue Fire for Liquefying Stones. If he’s right, then we could be seeing Hostiles swooping in any day now. Blue Fire knows where both Earth and Prosperion are. And we don’t have her heart chamber wired up to blow like we do Yellow Fire’s. And worse, even if we did, how jacked up would it be for us to blow her away just because she’s trying to fight the Queen and her raiding parties off?”

Tytamon started to say something, a little black hole opening within the gray bramble of his beard, but he stopped. The hole lingered a moment, then closed. His eyebrows, like drapes to match the bearded carpet below, lowered as he thought behind closed windows for a time. Finally he did speak again. “No,” he said. “I think not.”

Roberto and Deeqa both regarded him, sure that more would come. It did not.

The ancient wizard stared into the distance for a moment after, but pressed on. “Whatever the truth of it is, what I need first is to discover what we can do about my apprentice and his new bride. Does the yellow color or heat mean anything to you?”

“Not a damn thing,” Roberto said.

“Yellows and reds are the colors of warmth in a heat scan,” Deeqa said. “It’s how they show up on our sensors when we look for heat sources, be they geological or life-forms. Although it’s relative by degree and scale.”

Tytamon’s cracked lips pushed through the tangle of gray hair, and he let out a hum. “Perhaps that is it. Although I’m not sure why a divining spell I cast would incorporate such a thing.”

“Have you been to Little Earth and looked at the feed General Pewter has from our satellite? He’s got the codes for the entanglement array below. Has he shown you the ships down there? We’ve got a camera on the surface, too.” Deeqa looked to Roberto, who nodded, agreeing it was a good idea. “You can’t see much through the storm, but it’s got to be better than nothing.”

“I may have seen it on the monitor when last I was there,” Tytamon said, “but I’m not sure I knew what it meant.”

“Would it be helpful to go look now?” Roberto said. “I can take you over there, or, you know, we can just teleport.” He wiggled his fingers in the air.

“Well, I have a system for reading your messages here now,” Tytamon said. “Out by the platform we’re working on for your ship.”

“Is that what was in that little shack we saw when we came in? I was wondering what that was. Why do you need computers here other than what’s in the basement of Altin’s tower … when he gets back? Won’t your magic screw it all up most of the time, all your traps and whatever you got going on?”

“It will,” Tytamon said, “which is why we put it so far from the walls. Angela says it works fine out there most of the time.”

“Angela?” both Roberto and Deeqa asked.

“Yes, Angela Hayworth. I am her sponsor here for a student exchange. You may not have heard, but they’ve arranged for students to—”

Roberto waved him off. “Yeah, yeah, we heard. But how’d you end up with one of them?”

“It’s complicated. But you were with me the day Her Majesty’s man brought it up to the emissary from the elves. Pernie was there. Miss Hayworth is part of the exchange, and, as the elves aren’t on the charter, they needed a guardian to sponsor her. There were some … special circumstances involved, and, well, rather than bore you with a lot of Prosperion history and the interweaving of treaties across time, I thought it best to take it on. Angela is actually a delightful girl. If you come for dinner tomorrow, you can meet her, as she’ll be back from school. But for now, yes, I would like to go look and see if we can see the yellow heat you are talking about. I’m sure she won’t mind the invasion of her private space in this circumstance.”

Roberto was looking at Deeqa to see if she recognized the name, but Deeqa had nothing like recognition on her face. Then the name rang familiar in his own memory. “Is she the same Angela Hayworth that was Orli’s lawyer back on Earth, back when the NTA railroaded her and ran her ass straight to the execution chamber?”

“Yes, actually, she is.” Tytamon looked grim. “That is precisely why she is here. She owes four years’ service to the NTA, and they won’t let her out of the agreement. This was as close as she could get to ‘escape,’ as she puts it. She is preparing herself for a diplomatic post—but just between you and me: she is resigning her commission the moment her contract is up. I think she actually hates the NTA more than Orli does, if that’s at all possible. But she is very young, and very idealistic, so I suppose it’s not a surprise.” He studied Roberto long enough to see if his question had been satisfied, which it had. “So, let us go look to her computer for that heat reading you mentioned.”

“You’re not going to get it on hers. Or mine on the
Lady
. It’s locked. Fleet property. The entanglement trigger in the belly of Yellow Fire is theirs. They don’t want anyone tampering with it, which makes perfect sense. If that’s the only way to blow up an enemy like Red Fire—at least like he was before he died—well, I wouldn’t grant public access either.”