Worldweavers: Cybermage (9 page)

The names were big and black and unmistakable on the envelope. Terry stared at it, and then at the inbox he had disturbed.

“Yes?” he said, squinting at the envelope and then looking back at Thea with a blank expression. “I think I remember Rafe mention a Kay back at the
professor’s office. Humphrey said something about Kay being his other assistant. What are you—”

“No,” Thea said, pointing to the second name. “
Look
.”

Terry squinted at the name Thea’s finger rested on. “
Kay Otis
. Okay.”

“Rafe said ‘Kay.’ Just Kay. Just the first name.”

“I don’t…” Terry began again, perplexed.

Thea sighed. “Say it fast three times.”

“Kay Otis, Kay Otis, Kay Otis,” Terry said, giving her a strange look.

“Kayotis,” Thea said. “
Kayotis.
Coyote.”

“Your Trickster Coyote? In this place? Come on, that’s stretching! They do background checks, you know.”

“When he was Cary Wiley he didn’t have any problems getting the tutor’s job with Professor de los Reyes,” Thea said.

“But that doesn’t mean—wait, where are you going?”

Thea had gotten to her feet again, and was tapping at her wrist pad. “Terry, I was right. This settles it. Now I know I must go in and get that cube.”

“Thea, wait!
Wait!
This is nuts. You can’t possibly be sure—it’s just a name.”

“And maybe I’m wrong. And it’s just a name. And nothing is lost.” Thea whipped around to face him. “But if I’m not wrong. And there’s a great gaping hole right here in the midst of the most secure place in the world. And the Alphiri get what they wanted to have—access to magic. And this time it would be seriously heavyweight magic. If I let it happen, then not only do I have to live with the idea of Tesla being owned by the Alphiri, but
everything I have done to Diego will have been wasted
. I’m sorry, Terry. I may be wrong, but I can’t risk being right and doing nothing.”

“You don’t think that anyone would have noticed that name?”

“Why would they? It’s just a name, like you said.” She paused, lifting her head as though she was trying to catch a scent. “And if Larry de los Reyes was here, he’d probably tell you that he could smell him.”

“Can you?”

Thea shook her head. “I don’t work that way. But I’ve always been able to recognize him—now
her
—and I can sense that he’s been here.”

“Because you’ve told yourself that Kay Otis is Coyote,” Terry said.

“Fine, don’t believe me,” Thea snapped. “I’m still going.”

She looked down at her wrist, tapped something on her keypad, and then stepped up to the office door and laid her hand on the handle.

“Where are we going?” Terry said.

She managed a small smile. “To rescue a wizard. Come on.”

The door squeaked a little as Thea drew back the deadbolt from the inside and eased it open. She stuck her head out into the well-lit corridor with a degree of carelessness that made Terry suck in his breath.

“Will you be careful?” he hissed.

“I’ve specified empty corridors,” Thea said, lifting her keypad-braceletted arm. “There’s nobody out there. It’s okay.”

“Don’t take that for granted,” Terry said. “I told you, this place—”

“Yes, I got it, I got it. I didn’t vaporize everyone in this building so that we can stroll down the corridor. But at the very least, even if we do meet someone, we won’t be seen. We’ll probably be able to notice anyone who’s coming long before they get wind of us.”

“Don’t get cocky,” Terry said. “That’s all I’m saying. You have no idea what you’re up against.”

“You keep saying that. Do you see anyone about?”

He followed her into the corridor, looking both ways. The place was plush—polished wooden doors with gleaming brass handles opened off a wide passage painted a serene shade of forest green and floored with deep-pile carpet. There were no overhead lights, but frequent wall sconces left no place for shadows to linger. The eerily empty corridor curved into a gentle arc on their left, and stretched out straight to their right until it reached what looked like an elevator bank at the far end.

“Which way?” Terry said.

“Down,” said Thea, after the slightest of hesitations.

Terry heard it, and instantly latched on to it. “You sure? And you aren’t thinking of climbing into an elevator, are you? The first rule of breaking and entering is never to get into an elevator.”

“‘In case of fire, use the stairs,’” Thea said.

“There may not be stairs leading to where you want to—”

“Then we’ll jump into that chasm when we get to it,” Thea said impatiently. “Come on, already.”

She was a couple of steps down the corridor before she realized that he was not following; turning, she saw
him still hesitating by the door of the office they had just left, staring at it with an expression of dismay.

“Now what?” She followed the direction of his gaze and finally realized that he was looking at the shiny brass doorknob of the door to Humphrey’s office, which was still ajar. Thea realized, belatedly, what he had just thought of.

“This,” Terry said, “is fingerprint heaven. And if you get what you came for, this place will raise an unholy hue and cry. They will start with the obvious—and we left a trail in that office, Thea, as blatant as we could short of sticking around and confessing.”

“Shh,” Thea said. “Let me think for a sec.”

After a moment she stuck her right hand into her pocket and pushed the door open a little farther so that she had an unimpeded view into the room. Then she shrugged her sleeve off the keypad, and typed a few words.

All traces of us
.
Weave.

Terry, craning his neck from behind her, was trying to read over her shoulder. “What’s
that
supposed to…”

Thea glanced at him briefly, indicating the office with a jerk of her chin. “Watch.”

He turned back to the office, and sucked in his breath. In the dark room, still only barely lighted by the trace of outside lights, a glimmering golden trail had appeared—two sets of footprints on the carpet, a scrape of gold-glint on the side of the desk where Thea had brushed against it, gold on the handle of the Venetian blinds she had turned to let in whatever light she could, spatters of gold on papers in the inbox. Thea waited a few breaths to make sure that everything had showed, and then
reached
into the office with her hand.

The gold streamed toward her fingers in ribbons, spooling off whatever surface it had managed to settle on. Thea wrapped her right hand around the ribbons of light, braiding them into a thin golden strand and coiling the strand in her palm as she wove, reaching for every speck of it that showed, from desktop, window, floor, doorknob. When she was done, she glanced at the supple length of bright gold braid in her hand and then closed her fingers around it and held it out to Terry.

“No fingerprints,” she said. “Here. You take this.”

“That was
cool
.”

“That was the first thing I really figured out I
could do,” Thea said. “Back with Cheveyo.”

“Yeah, but…are you going to be sweeping up each footstep as we make it? That would be a royal pain.” He was staring past the gold thread in his palm at the traces of gold footsteps that had also glimmered into existence just outside the office door, on the deep plush carpet of the corridor.

Thea rubbed her temples. “We’d need to walk on air for that not to show,” she said morosely. And then her head lifted sharply, as though something wholly unexpected had suddenly occurred to her.

“What?” Terry said, stuffing the gold braid into his pocket.

“What size shoes do you wear?” Thea asked.

“Eh? Ten, but what…?”

“Lift up your foot,” she instructed.

Mystified, he obeyed, lifting his right foot off the ground. A gold size-ten footprint glowed where it had just been.

Thea hesitated before she typed the next thing into her keypad, then reached out with her hand, gathering the stuff she needed into her fingers.

Size ten air cushion under right shoe.

“Other foot. Be careful when you put your weight on the right.”

He had wobbled a little even as she said that. “Weird,” he said. “What are you doing?”

Size ten air cushion under left shoe.

“Try walking.”

Terry took a couple of wobbly steps. “Feels like gel soles, actually,” he said. “What did you—Hey.
Hey!
I’m not leaving tracks anymore!”

Thea looked at him, her expression equal parts astonishment and exultation. “I just wove air,” she said. “You’re wearing air overshoes—you’re literally walking on air.
Their
air, the air that was already here. Nothing that we brought in. We’ll be touching nothing now—leaving no trail. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“He was right,” Terry said slowly. “Humphrey.”

Thea had turned to close the door of the office, hand muffled in her pocket again. “Right about what?”

“You,” Terry said, and then hesitated. “Is it safe to talk?”

Thea, in the process of creating her own air-shoes, paused in her typing, glanced up at him, and typed in a few extra words. “Is now,” she said. “I probably should have done that first, before I did anything else at all.”

“You
are
an Elemental,” Terry said, with a grin so wide that it threatened to split his face in half. “For real.
You just wove air.
Not light. Not color. Air. You change the world around you. No wonder you ‘know’ that nobody will see us, even if we do run into an entire company of security—you’re hiding behind air. This is
wild
. You know, I’m beginning to think you can actually do this crazy thing—come right into the FBM headquarters and walk out again with nobody knowing you were here.”

“
Beginning
to?” Thea said, grinning.

“I still think you’re overreacting. Sometimes a Miss Otis is just a Miss Otis.”

Thea’s grin disappeared. “Nuh-uh,” she said. “I’m not wrong about that. Come on, let’s go.”

Careful now, they pushed open the doorway to the stairwell with a cushion of air between Thea’s hand and the surface of anything she reached out to touch. They started down what seemed to be an unremarkable flight of stairs, bare concrete with institutional metal railings on the side. At first glance, Thea saw nothing strange about the middle of the stairwell except that it seemed to go down an awfully long way, but she kept glancing over the railing, frowning.

“Something’s not right,” she muttered. “It feels as though it’s…backdrop. Scenery. Something we’d expect to see.”

“What were you expecting?”

Her own words of only a few minutes before flashed back into Thea’s mind just as she stepped off a level step and found…nothing.

We’ll jump into that chasm when we get to it.

She caught herself on the railing by the crook of her elbow, did a graceful swing around, and scrambled back up the solid stairs where she had just stood, narrowly missing Terry, who was only a step behind her. They both teetered for a moment, then they steadied each other, and Terry turned to stare at her.

“What on earth…?” he said, sounding aggrieved.

“There’s nothing there. Nothing underfoot. I told you it looked wrong. It’s just illusion.”

“So what
is
there?”

Thea stared at the stair she had just tried to stand on. “It looks solid enough,” she said, uncertain.

“It’s in the way you look at it. It’s a common trick. They just…find what’s in your head, and continue it.
Stop thinking about stairs
.”

That was about as easy as being told not to think about elephants while standing at the elephant enclosure at the zoo. Stairs were all around them; they were in the stairwell of an office building. Thea could suddenly find nothing else
except
stairs in her mind. But she resolutely focused on something else—something completely unexpected.

The Walrus’s teeth.

She couldn’t help a small chuckle. When she looked again, what lay at her feet was no longer the FBM back stairs—it was a large, cavernlike space, with stairs coming in and out of it at crazy angles, some in a plane that was sideways to the one she was on, some frankly upside down.

“Whoa,” Terry said. “What are we supposed to do? Pick a direction, any direction? It’s like that Escher drawing they use in Ars Magica to teach improbability spells.”

“I feel dizzy,” said Thea, staring at the puzzle space before her. “It feels like I’m standing sideways.”

“
That’s
sideways. We’re straight. We just came straight down.”

“No,” Thea said, with dawning comprehension. “We’re
sideways
. And if we can figure out which way is really down, that’s the way the safe is.”

The stairs on which they had been descending now appeared to end only a couple of treads behind them, giving them no clues. Doorways opened off other stairs at crazy angles, leaving Thea’s head swimming every time she tried to orient herself.

“There
is
no up or down,” Terry muttered. “It’s
all
sideways.”

“What’s that?” Thea said suddenly, pointing to a dark object lying in the middle of one of the landings at right angles to them, apparently held on by Velcro.

Terry squinted at where she pointed.

“I have no clue,” he said. “It might be a feather. But then again, I have absolutely no idea how far that thing is from us. It might be a locomotive.”

“A black feather,” Thea said thoughtfully.

“I said it
might
be,” Terry said. “What’s the matter?”

“Raven feathers,” Thea said. “Corey and I have a history with raven feathers.”

Terry transferred his attention back to the object on the landing. “You think that way’s down?” And then he hesitated. “But this is your Trickster spirit, no? So he might think that you wouldn’t trust a hint,
and that you’d go in the opposite direction, and go the wrong way. Or he might think that you might think that, and that feather’s the right way after all. Or—”