Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) Read online

“People in jail can’t leave when they want to.”

  “That is true, but—”

  “Well, they won’t let me leave when I want to. The man who brought me here the first time told me that criminals are supposed to be in jail. But I am the one who has to stay inside, and all the criminals are outside.”

  “Miss Grayborn,” he said. “It doesn’t work that way. I can see how you—”

  She cut him off again, because she didn’t want to listen to any more grown-up lies. “No,” she shouted at him. “Everyone wants me inside. But they don’t keep the criminals away.” She pointed at the lieutenant accusingly. “That’s why all the criminals are outside. You should make him go get the bad men and leave me alone.”

  She felt tears burning in her eyes, though. They were going to send her back home. They were. She just knew it. They were grown-ups, and grown-ups always did whatever they wanted to, even when they were wrong. And so she’d go back to Prosperion and she wouldn’t know anything. She’d know how electricity worked and how to fix a wall. And that was all. Nothing else. Master Altin would think she was stupid, and he’d just be married to Orli Pewter forever, and Pernie wouldn’t even be Sava’an’Lansom, because she didn’t do like Djoveeve and Seawind said. She hadn’t even been here for three weeks, and they were sending her back. She even kept all her promises.

  She put her head down in her arms upon the desk. She didn’t want the Earth men to see her cry and know that she was weak like a little girl. She tried not to cry, but it all just kept coming out.

  The man from Fort Reno tried to touch her shoulder, but she turned on him and growled and made her most terrible face. He recoiled from her as if she were a viper. She was glad to see it in his eyes. He was afraid of her.

  She set her head back in her arms and stared at the darkness inside. Enough light came through that she could see a pool of tears and spit on the table. After a time she wished she hadn’t cried like that.

  She blinked her eyes dry and tried not to make too much noise sniffling up all the snot that was running in her nose. She wiped her face on the shoulder of her blouse as best she could, then finally looked up again.

  “I’m not going home,” she said.

  “Well, we’ll see about that,” he said. “But for now, you’re going to have to come with me.” He glanced up, and nodded out the window at someone standing outside the room. The door opened, and in came another man in an NTA uniform much like his. The new officer handed the major a square, flat box made of metal, dully reflective in the bright lights of the small room, then moved around to stand behind Pernie.

  The major opened it, and Pernie saw a large metal object, round like a collar or a tiara, though held closed with a small, locking clasp. At even intervals around it were small metal boxes, hardly bigger than one joint of her finger, three of them in all. Each had two lights on it, one a dull green and the other flashing yellow.

  “I’m going to need you to wear this,” the major said. “Just for now.”

  “What is it?” Pernie asked. She glanced over her shoulder at the man behind her, then back at the object. She didn’t know why, but she hated it on instinct.

  “It’s just to help us … keep you from doing anything we’ll all regret.”

  Pernie glanced to the cut she had made on her arm, where the police medic had stitched it up with tiny black things he’d called staples. He’d told her they would dissolve and the “new skin” he’d painted on her would help it all regrow. He’d put another chip in her arm too. Pernie thought the metal ring in the box was going to be worse than the chip.

  “I don’t want to wear it,” she said.

  “It’s just for now. Until we can, well, until we know what to do.”

  “I won’t wear it,” she said.

  “But you don’t even know what it is. You might like it.”

  “If I was going to like it, you would have said what it is.”

  He turned to the police lieutenant, who nodded and raised his eyebrows in a way that seemed to say, “You see?”

  “Well, you have to wear it. That’s just how it goes.”

  “I won’t.” She pushed out her lips and crossed her arms again. She was watching him, though. She’d been in enough fights in her life to recognize how those things go.

  “Vincent,” said the major, meant for the uniformed man behind her.

  The man in uniform behind Pernie stepped up and grabbed her arms, pinning them to her sides. Pernie started to jump up from the chair, intent on flipping backward, over his head, but in the same motion as he was snatching her arms, he shoved her chair forward and pinned her to the table’s edge. He was extremely fast, like he was a trained fighter too.

  The major took the collar out of the box and unlocked it with the pass of a plastic key. “It doesn’t hurt,” he said, “as long as you do as you are told. So please, let’s just all stay calm. It’s just a precaution. That is all.”

  Pernie thrashed in the man called Vincent’s grip. He was very strong, and the edge of the table was jammed up under her ribs. She flung her head back, trying to head butt him, but she only thudded against his chest, which was muscular and strong.

  The collar opened up like a set of jaws. The lights were all blinking red now. The major stooped and approached her, reaching it for her throat. The throat was the most vulnerable part, Djoveeve had said. Never let them at your throat.

  She tried to kick the table over, but it was attached to the floor. Her knee clanked against the metal painfully. She thrashed even more violently in Vincent’s grip. He was too strong.

  “Come on, Miss Grayborn, please.” The collar was only inches away.

  She wanted to do magic. She wanted to teleport.

  The tip of the collar latch brushed against her neck. She batted his arm away with the side of her face.

  “Miss Grayborn, stop it now.” That was absolute command.

  Pernie batted it away again. She smashed it hard with the side of her head, and when he tried to shove it back, she bit him as hard as she could. He shouted, and when he tried to jerk his wrist out of her mouth, his skin tore. She shook her head like a dog as he tried to pull away, biting harder. His blood tasted much different than Seawind’s had when Pernie bit the elf. The major’s blood tasted like Earth.

  “Lieutenant,” ordered the major, finally pulling his arm free, “for Chrissakes, come help. Hold her head.”

  The lieutenant moved to comply.

  Pernie thrashed. She really wanted to teleport away. She hated her stupid promise.

  The lieutenant grabbed her head, crowding Vincent behind her to get position. He mashed his hands against her forehead, covering one eye, and squeezed her skull front and back.

  “Watch her teeth,” the major said. He came at her with the collar again. She felt its leading edges scrape against her throat.

  She should teleport.

  “Move your hand, I can’t get it locked,” he said.

  The metal was cold as it slid around her neck.

  “Hurry up, before she casts something. Move your damn thumb.”

  Promises were stupid.

  The collar clicked shut as Pernie finished the second word of the spell. She felt something bite her on the neck, electricity perhaps, but when she reached for the collar, it wasn’t there. She turned and looked at the three men through the window. They were still in the room. She wasn’t.

  She ran down the hallway in the direction she’d seen Don and Sophia Hayworth go. She remembered the way the police people had brought her in. She didn’t want to go that way. She ran left and right, running through corridors. All the doors had little windows in them, so even the locked ones were easy to get through.

  She teleported past one lock after another.

  She ran past a wall of monitors and saw herself on them. The Reno PD people had cameras everywhere.

  She ran through another series of corridors. There had to be a door that would take her outside. She found a door that was opening all by
itself. A man was coming down another hall. He shouted at her.

  She jumped through the opening door but found herself boxed in. It was a very tiny room. The doors were closing behind her. She turned to leave, but more men were running down the hallway where she had come.

  The doors closed on them. She looked for a lock to keep them out. They were heavy-looking metal doors; perhaps they would buy her time to think.

  There were so many buttons. All of them numbered. None looked like locks.

  She pushed them all.

  The little room started to move, upward, by the feel of it. She wondered where it was taking her. The men were taking her somewhere.

  The doors opened again right away, and she was in another set of corridors. She looked out, and there were people passing by, but not the men chasing her. These people weren’t looking at her at all. She ducked back. The doors were closing again.

  The little room went up again. The next floor was the same as the floor before. People were out there in corridors. She ducked back again. Three more floors went by before she found a corridor where there wasn’t anyone right outside. She ran down the nearest hallway, then left and right and left again. Still there were no doors leading outside. She kept running.

  Finally she saw a big window that looked out into darkness at the end of a hallway. She ran to it. The night sky beckoned from between buildings that were tall like the ones downtown. There was no way to open the window. Just glass in a wall. Thick glass.

  She was at least a hundred spans off the ground.

  Shouting came from behind her. The lieutenant and the two NTA officers were running after her. Someone came through a door at the opposite end of the hallway, and there were footsteps coming from another corridor halfway in between.

  Pernie looked out the window again. She spoke the words of her teleport spell and broke her promise again. She appeared outside the window. She looked back in time to see the major’s mouth shape the word “no” as she began to fall.

  She fell toward the street, faster and faster all the way down. Just before she hit, she cast the teleport again, reappearing on the sidewalk on the opposite side of a police car. She ran around the corner, once more heading for the broken buildings in the distant part of downtown. She couldn’t go back to Sophia Hayworth’s house, that was sure. At least downtown she sort of knew.

  She ran in a series of sprints and teleports. She’d already ruined her promise now, anyway. She had to get far away. Quickly. She had to get the chip out of her arm again.

  In only a few short minutes, she found a vacant lot, where a smaller building had been demolished and left to the weeds. There were amber streetlights all around. Light glinted off broken glass. Sirens wailed in the distance now.

  She snatched up the neck of a brown bottle and went right to work on her arm again. She cut through the “staples” and back to the bone. It hurt a lot more with a piece of glass than it had with Jeremy’s laser knife, but she didn’t care. She cut in with one long, neat slice and stuffed her finger in, searching for the bump that marked the ant-sized chip was there. She found it right away. She slid the jagged point of the bottle up against it, and with a sideways swing of her arm, she struck the mouth of the bottle against a streetlight pole. The chip gave way from the bone.

  Tossing the bottle aside, she fished out the chip again. She dropped it and mashed it flat with a chunk of concrete.

  The sound of sirens surrounded her, echoing between the buildings from all directions. She couldn’t tell where they were really coming from. Or else they were coming from everywhere.

  She picked up the broken bottleneck again. It was a decent knife for now. There was blood all around her feet, running down her forearm and dripping off her elbow. She glanced up and down the street. No time to heal it now. She ran toward the one place remotely familiar to her down here, the big, broken building that looked like a spear. She teleported in fifty-span leaps as she ran, blinking in and out of the pools of amber light cast by the streetlamps, in and out of the darkness. Light and dark. Light and dark.

  The siren sounds got fainter as she fled. She paused long enough to sing the daffodil healing song. Her arm closed up by the second time she sang it through. The wound was still angry and red, but it wasn’t bleeding anymore.

  By the time she got to the big spear-shaped building, she’d sung even the red away.

  Chapter 41

  The fatigue and frustration bent Orli for a time, but they did not break her. When the sobs had passed a few minutes later, she lifted her head and glared up through the grate of the deck above her. The alien had taken Altin away, it was true. But it was also true that she had found him once despite thinking him lost to her. She would do it again.

  She wiped her hands as best she could on her underwear, then examined the damage to them. It wasn’t too bad. They hurt, and they were going to be a mess tomorrow, if she lived that long, but today, she could still make them work.

  She set the Higgs prism to zero and jumped once more into the wind. She’d had enough practice that angling herself up to the next level was easy enough. She crawled through the grating, checked for oncoming billowed-alien traffic, then thrust herself into the wind that had taken Altin and his captor away.

  Without her spacesuit as a sail, she couldn’t direct her flight as effectively as before, but she made her way along at a good clip and managed not to hit any more goddamn alien machines. One of the billowed creatures flew by to her left, overtaking her and passing her by at a seemingly leisurely pace, but it paid no heed to her. She angled herself just a little higher up, closer to the deck above her, just in case. She didn’t want to be seen, and she certainly didn’t want to be mashed into the pillowy lampshades of their parachute sails if another one or two came by—not too close, though, for this was tricky business. If she skimmed along the bottom of the next level too finely, a wayward wind gust might push her up into a gap, and, well, she thought she might be running out of ribs to break.

  The wind carried her over what seemed like endless fields of alien machinery, the patchwork squares of the grating like vast pastureland, the quilted fields of an alien landscape seen from high above as if viewed from a spaceship high in the atmosphere.

  Eventually she flew across one of the wide, empty spaces, then over the grate on the far side of it. She had to veer left to dodge a huge steam stack that rose from another bulky machine, and then for a full five minutes she flew over nothing but bulbous brown tanks like those she’d seen nesting in the strange brown piping.

  Eventually the stretch of tanks and the platform itself came to an end, and once more she was flying over an abyss. She looked up and saw a violet ring, oval shaped, high above, but on the same line as her flight path. She knew immediately it had to represent another upward column of air. She shifted the direction of her flight so that she would fly by it rather than into it, not wanting to be driven back up to the uppermost reaches of the ship.

  As she neared the next stack of levels, she saw the telltale orange lights in the distance, marking where the dead-air column must be. Either she was back where she had been before, or more likely, the aliens definitely lined those lights up with consistency. Predictability was one thing Orli desperately needed in this place.

  But there was still no sign of Altin.

  She flew over the next level, another long platform, an endless-seeming grate stretching for mile after mile. It was astonishing how massive the ship was. As she neared the end of this one, she found herself flying between what looked like a forest of steam stacks on either side. There were hundreds of them, all climbing through the grate from down below, and through the one below that as far as she could see. They rose up through the grate above her, and above that one as well. Beyond that they were lost in the dark. The puffs of steam that she flew through grew more frequent.

  Shortly after encountering the dense assemblage of steam stacks, she shot out over another wide black abyss. Again she found the violet ring above
her, though not in a line with her course, and shortly after, the orange lights, one above the next, marking the edge of yet another level.

  She flew over platform after platform, in what seemed an endless stretch, the vastness of the ship becoming increasingly staggering, experienced in slow, desperate reality. Each was in some ways different from the previous, but all were essentially the same to her untrained eye. The only thing she recognized for certain was that there was no sign of Altin anywhere.

  She flew over another large cluster of machines, where six aliens were at work on something. She hoped it might be Altin at the same time she feared it would be. They clustered around one another in a huddle, looking to her like a ring of mucous gray dumbbells, their long bodies and uneven bulbs bent toward each other as they blinked down at something unseen between them. Orli stared down through the wisps of steam, into the shadowy place between them, hoping that the flashes of color one or another of them emitted would illuminate her missing husband there.

  Just as she was nearly too far to see, she saw a flash of something long and metallic. Not Altin, at least. At least she hoped it wasn’t him, stuffed into some new kind of alien thing. But she was already flying out over the edge of the grate again.

  This could go on forever, damn it.

  Three more sections of platform came and went, and then, finally, there was something different and new, something very loud ahead. There were no lights beyond the abyss over which she flew, and what little ambient light there was, coming from behind, kept lighting up puffs of steam around her rather than revealing anything.

  As she began to curse the steam for its puffy obstruction, a blast of it hit her full force. In the blinking and sputtering that followed, something smashed her left hand so hard that she felt the bones breaking. The sound changed in that same instant, growing louder, and whatever hit her had her spinning around. She struck something hard with her back and then her head. She bounced and slid along, tumbling down some kind of tunnel. A giant duct, like the one she’d discovered within the violet ring. Except this time she’d blown right through the vent into the ductwork itself.