Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (33 page)

“Did they give you any shots before you came? You know, with the long needles?”

“Yes. They said it was so I wouldn’t get Earth disease.”

“Well, then you got chipped.” He put down his tools and reached across the table, tapping her on the forearm right above her wrist. “Did you get a shot right there?”

She nodded.

“Then that’s your chip. That’s where they put them. That way when you reach for the screen on kiosks or public consoles, they can track where you are without even having to activate the city scans. Those they’re supposed to have a warrant for, but Gabby says they scan for people all the time anyway. The NTA doesn’t care too much about warrants and stuff.”

Pernie didn’t know anything about warrants or scans. But she didn’t like having something in her arm. “So now I can’t go anywhere without Sophia seeing me?” she asked.

“Oh, no, she wouldn’t have access to that. She’ll just know if your chip gets out of range of the monitor in your house. She’ll get notified.”

“How do I get it out?”

“You can’t get it out without cutting it out, and it’s in deep. But you can just cover it with tinfoil. It’s the oldest trick in the book. Technically it’s illegal to knowingly blind your chip, but it’s not like anyone is watching if you do. Not unless you are a known criminal.”

Pernie harrumphed. People who used their magic wrong could blind their mythothalamus, the organ of magic. Then they could never cast spells again. She thought it was interesting that someone could do the same to technology. “What is tinfoil?”

“It’s like paper made out of metal. Shiny paper. There’s some in the second drawer over there by the other workbench.”

Pernie got up and went to it. She opened the drawer and right away found a long roll of shiny, thin “tinfoil.” It looked just like the stuff the
pet-on-file
had tried to wrap around her arms that night in the van. She wondered if that was what he was trying to do, to blind her chip. The Reno PD people had certainly said that he was a criminal, so it seemed fitting that he would try to blind chips to hide from them.

Pernie closed the drawer and went back to Jeremy. She would cut hers out instead. She didn’t want to be a criminal.

“I think we should go look for Hostile guts after school,” she said.

“But how? You have to go home on the bus.”

“I don’t have to. I can walk home from downtown. I know the way now. We can just leave from here.”

“The bus driver will know if you don’t get on. He’ll call Sophia. They’ll come look for you right away.”

Pernie shrugged. “Can you go or not?”

“Gabby won’t mind. I just have to tell him is all. But you’re still going to get caught.”

“Nope,” she said, taking up a laser cutter from his tool kit. “I won’t.” She cut right into her arm, right where she remembered the needle went. She opened it up wider than she needed to, and gave herself room to fish around with her fingers. It took a few seconds for the blood to flow.

“Whoa,” muttered Jeremy. He leaned forward and stared into the hole. “Is that your bone?”

“Yes,” she said. Her grimace was partly from pain, but mostly for concentrating on feeling around for the chip. “How big is it? I can’t feel anything, and I don’t really know what I’m looking for.”

“Pretty small,” he said. “But I’ve never actually seen one, so I don’t know either.”

She felt something then, right against the bone. Something hard. She tried to pinch it, but the blood was running freely now and her fingers were slick. She had to keep pinching at it, trying to grasp it. “It’s stuck on there,” she said, grimacing in frustration now.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Jeremy said, looking up at her, then down at the blood that was beginning to pool on the tabletop.

“Not really,” she said. “Maybe a little, but I’ve had worse. I had a sargosagantis horn right through my guts. It was as big around as your whole leg, bigger even. Getting stabbed through the guts hurts really bad.” She used her fingernail to scratch at the thing. She was squishing more and more blood out over her arm, which ran over her wrist and off the back of her hand, droplets spotting the metal tabletop like rain, which in turn began to pool together as she worked.

“Wow, that’s a lot of blood,” Jeremy said. “I’ve never seen that much before.”

Pernie glanced briefly to the puddle forming there. She shrugged. “It’s not that much.” She pointed toward a pair of slender, needle-nosed pliers near the robot arm. “Can I have that?”

He handed it to her reverently. She took it and pushed the nose in, smearing the handles with blood. She rubbed the tip of it across the chip stuck to her bone. She could feel the bump as the tool slid over it. But it wouldn’t scrape off.

“Can you hit it?” Pernie asked. “Tap the back of the pliers. Just a little bit. I don’t have enough hands.”

His eyes widened, as if she’d just asked him to shoot her in the face.

“Hurry,” she said. “The bell is going to ring.”

Hands trembling, he looked about for something to use. There was a wrench closest to him, so he took that from the toolbox. “You’re serious?”

“Yes. Just do it. Not too hard, though. I don’t want to break it.”

He leaned over her and placed the wrench across the grip ends of the pliers. He gave a gentle tap.

“Harder,” she said. “Just a little bit more than that.” He struck again.

She felt the chip break free. She set the pliers aside and fished around in the cut some more. She found the chip right away and pulled it out, holding it up to the light. It looked like a little black ant.

“That’s it?” she said.

Jeremy was staring at all the blood. Pernie saw him and looked at the table. It was something of a mess.

Pernie went to the drawer where they kept the shop towels. She wiped away most of the blood, then bound up the wound. She really wanted to use her daffodil healing spell, but Djoveeve’s stupid promise made that impossible. Keeping promises made making them seem dumb. She was definitely going to be more careful about making them in the future.

Jeremy came over and grabbed a bunch of shop towels and went to work cleaning up the table. Pernie took a few more and worked on the floor. They needed to hurry before the science teacher came in from lunch. He would be mad and make Pernie go see the nurse, who would in turn call Sophia Hayworth, and Pernie would once more be in trouble, she just knew.

Soon enough, however, they had it all clean. The table, the floor and the tools. Pernie got the bleeding stopped. She swapped out the first towel for a strip of a clean one, which she wrapped tightly enough to close the wound. Djoveeve had shown her how to do it right.

She went to where she’d hung her backpack and her sweater upon entering the room. Even though the weather was pretty warm, she pulled the sweater on. The long sleeves would cover up the binding on her wound. She pulled her ponytail out from beneath the collar and gave it a flick before turning to Jeremy. She lifted her arms out to her sides. “How do I look? Can you tell?”

He shook his head, but he was looking at her in a funny way.

“What?” she said. “Do I have blood on me?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“Kyle was right. You are pretty.”

Chapter 33

A
ltin stared out over the edge of the examining table for a long time after the alien threw Orli away. He yelled himself hoarse. He wept himself dry. Still he stared. He didn’t know what he was expecting. Some miracle. Some reappearance somehow. He waited and watched, and she was just gone.

He spent quite a while in cursing the alien, using every threat and epithet he knew in the languages of two worlds. He was helpless. All alone. Orli was lying somewhere below, dead, or if not dead, horribly broken and dying. In agony.

He realized as he thought it how many times he’d thought it before. He was trapped in a loop of stupidity, a moronic cycling repetitiousness in which he was incapable of learning a most singular and essential thing, dating all the way back to a dead mouse, so very long ago. His curiosity the death of fragile things. And here he was again, so many deaths later, once more responsible … and this time it was Orli. Again. He’d actually thought it was a good idea to approach the ship. How could he possibly have thought that was a good idea?

Orli had tried, over and over and over, to talk him out of it. But, as always, some insipid and inescapable part of him just had to prove it could be done. Always. He just couldn’t stop trying to push just a little more. One more step. One more planet. One more star.

He’d challenged the gods that day upon his tower, not so long ago, a few years really, him all alone, barely off Prosperion’s moon, Luria. He challenged them, defied them, dared them to be real.

And what had they done? They gave him the gift of Orli. They gave him love. They brought love all the way across the damned galaxy. And what did he do with it? He killed it. He killed her.

He wept until his eyes were dry and then begged the gods to forgive him. He begged them not to take it out on her. Why should she suffer for his arrogance? For his stupidity? He begged and pleaded that somehow she be kept safe, that she was safe. That somehow, someway, something had happened, something she deserved.

Maybe some of the aliens were like her. Maybe these aliens here with him now—there were two of them—maybe they were like him: stupid, selfish, and cruel. Curiosity burning in their guts like poison fire. Maybe they waded into worlds like this one and cut out beating hearts and threw away the shells. Maybe these two aliens were like he was, inquisitive tools of hateful, destructive gods. But maybe, just maybe, there were aliens like Orli here too, somewhere on the ship. Maybe there were kind and gentle ones. Compassionate creatures who would find her and nurse her to health, scoop her up, and carry her back to safety as he’d seen Orli do so many times herself. Every cricket, spider, and moth … they all were treated so gently at Orli’s hand. She’d gasp this little gasp when she saw one. “Oh, look,” she’d say. “There’s a fuzzy spider there. Look how cute he is. Look at his eyes.” She’d taken one onto her hand once, a little colorful thing, and smiled so happily as she showed it to him. “Look, he’s staring right at you,” she’d said of it. “He looks like a little clown.”

It was a tufted little invader in Altin’s eyes, more like the demons they’d fought along the Palace walls than some “cute little clown.” But she’d cooed and sighed at it, told stories about how hard it must have worked to get all the way to the table in the dining hall. Even Kettle, whose heart was as big as they come, couldn’t be made to feel sympathy for the thing. She’d have smashed it just as Altin would have. But not Orli. Orli took the damned thing all the way outside Calico Castle’s gates, setting it free in the grass of the meadow beyond. “Go make baby spiders,” she’d said to it.

Tears burned again as he thought about it. Babies. That’s what she wanted. A family. A life. Not this. Not this. Never this. It had to be the hundred billionth time he’d had these exact same thoughts. Again. It was hard to imagine a universe could contain selfishness the size of his.

He wanted her to be safe somehow. But he knew it couldn’t be. He’d seen her flung away. She was in the arms of Mercy now. Or perhaps some version of Mercy that looked over the very best of planet Earth. She would be fine. The gods would see to that. But him, no, him they were going to leave alive. Long enough to drag himself through the hell of a Seven’s lifetime, century upon century knowing what he had done.

Better that he had been a Six. They only killed themselves.

Motion drew his attention, and he saw that one of the aliens was dragging itself away, drawing itself away from the machine and upwind. It passed over him, out of direct line of sight, but he was able to watch its departure reflected in the black glass dome of the inspection machine until he lost it in the distance.

Then there was only one alien nearby.

It was the one that had thrown Orli out over the edge of the tabletop. It was the one being in all the universe he hated most. He reached for the mana, wanting to melt the monster with fire drawn from the very center of a star. He couldn’t hate hot enough to burn it as it should be burned. There was nothing that could cause it enough pain.

Movement caught his eye again. He thought perhaps the alien, as it looked into the eye-shaped viewing screen of the bulky machine and pressed its controls, had set the prong with the glass dome in motion again. But it had not. Something was moving in the reflection.

He strained to see it, but the damned machine was too far away to make out fine detail. The surface of the glass too dark and too curved for clarity.

Whatever it was, it was small, like him, and creeping up behind him. He thought for a moment it might be Orli. He prayed it was. But then it vanished in the darkness, lost behind the warped image of himself—the image of a stupid mage trapped in ochre jelly while his brand-new wife was dead or dying.

He thought absently that it might be Roberto come to get him. It had been man sized. But it was all warped and bent and shadowy in the reflection. It could have been anything. It was probably nothing. He was delirious. Racked with grief and self-loathing. He needed to get it together. He needed to think. There was still a possibility. There really might be nice aliens. Maybe he hadn’t been totally wrong in that. He and Roberto both had felt that there were at least some odds that such might be true. He and Orli had worked out rather famously from opposite ends of the galaxy, after all; surely there was some evidence in that.