56. Bloody Tiles

Fourteen hours. That’s how long Winnie had been a tortoise. She knew because it had been near one o’clock when she and Helena had broken into that stupid terrarium, and the clock in her dorm room read three in the afternoon now. She could have checked any clock in the world, yet her mind kept going back there. Despite being so close to where the tower fell, it was empty and clean. If she were there, it would almost be as if this nightmare wasn’t happening, except for the sirens in the distance.

Instead, she was in a maintenance room. At least, she thought it was. It was a small, tiled room lit by buzzing fluorescent lights, and its walls were lined with equipment racks. A lone door led into a landing hangar, where the soldiers had arrived after detaining Christof and Alexander. She’d hoped when she saw the soldiers arresting them, that the end had finally come, but then Alex started telling all those lies. How did they buy that? Didn’t they see how intently he was looking in their eyes before each word he said?

Winnie had squawked and hissed and climbed the edge of her box, but no one had even looked at her. When the soldiers had gotten back to base, they’d taken Alex straight to their general so Alex could spread even more lies, while they stashed Winnie, Helena, and the other tortoise in this room. Cold and tired, Winnie drifted in and out of sleep. After hours, hunger had set in that not even deep seated misery could hide. The most attention anyone gave them was the occasional private who came in, glanced at the box, and asked anyone nearby, “what are these doing here?” or, “should someone do something about these animals?” But the soldiers were too preoccupied watching television in the other room to bother; the news showed the world coming apart.

Dozens had died in the collapse. Rescue workers were being admitted to hospitals for radiation poisoning. Parts of the city were evacuating. The empire was in a state of emergency. Territories on the other side of the world saw this as the end of the Lakiran empire and were already talking about succession. Less stables countries were seeing wide scale riots. The death and destruction grew worse with every hour.

She wondered if it was easier for Helena, who was curled up in her shell at the other end of the box. Without the benefit of Winnie’s power, she couldn’t know about the hell she and Winnie had forced on the world. All she knew was cold and hunger. Time was meaningless for her.

Winnie, meanwhile, soared about with her flair, but nothing she saw made her feel better. The television in the other room had announced Victoria’s death hours ago. Winnie had already known. Her mind had been there when they’d dug her ruined body out of the twisted wreckage of her ship, just as she’d been there when Sakhr had killed General Soto, and the poor exemplar who came to scan the sick, and the doctor who’d treated Quentin. She was there every step of the way to see the ruination her actions had brought. She didn’t know why she bothered watching. What was the point? The one woman who could have fixed all this was dead.

Winnie wished so much she could take it all back that her regret seemed tangible, as though she could exert her will back to that single moment. Just a push perhaps. She could nudge herself so she fell against the birdcage instead of the terrarium, or maybe the cabinet on the other side. Maybe she could force a thought into her past self’s head. Don’t do it. Stop Helena. Stand up to her. You have no idea what hell awaits you, and how many people you’ll hurt. The tiniest change could derail all of this.

The pit in her stomach gnawed at her, but there was no food, and no one around. With nothing left to do, Winnie pulled into her shell. She just needed to shut out the world and try for a moment to forget this living nightmare.

Just for a while.

“I must say. None y’all look very happy this morning.”

The words awoke Winnie. Natural light shone just outside her shell. Using a trick she’d used many mornings while nestled in her bedsheets, she used her power to look around instead of peaking her head out.

She and Helena were still in the shipping crate in a maintenance room. It was morning, and a elderly man with a gentle smile knelt over her crate. The gray, curly fuzz on his head matched the beard outlining his white toothed smile. His limbs were thin and gnarled, like someone who’d spent his long life doing honest work under the sun.

All Winnie knew was that he wasn’t a soldier. He wore a simple pair of khakis and a faded shirt. Given that no one else was around, she wondered whether he’d just walked into the base, completely overlooked. Surely not.

“Don’t worry now,” he said. “I’m here. I haven’t forgot about you. Looks like we lost a few of our brothers and sisters, but you made it out. Y’all lucky devils.” After studying Helena, his brow furrowed. “Never seen you before.”

Helena emerged from her shell and looked back. When he picked her up, she thrashed in alarm.

“Calm down now,” the man said. “Just giving you the once over. Looks like you’re a uh… Hermann’s Tortoise? Male, hmm?” He grabbed Helena’s tail between two fingers and looked underneath. “Yep, male.”

Startling. Until now, Winnie had never considered the gender of these tortoise bodies. Everything felt foreign. Even thinking about it, she couldn’t tell what equipment she had. She concentrated, wiggled around a little, visualized her rear side. She was a… girl? Alex was a male though, right? It was his tortoise body she’d inherited. Had Victoria not bothered to match gender when putting people inside tortoises?

“You must be the upstairs tortoise,” the man said to Helena. “You’re lucky someone saved you. I heard you were kept under lock and key. Don’t matter to me. I’ll take you in. You can call me Gilles.”

He set Helena down, then examined Winnie and the other tortoise, talking soothingly all the while. “Don’t know what’s goin to happen to you two. In all this commotion, I think everybody done forgot about you lot. But here I am. Not sure what’s going to happen tomorrow, but you’re okay today.”

At first, Winnie paid attention to what he said, but there wasn’t much content. Soon she let the words wash over her. It almost made her forget about her hell. The man’s touch was soothing. Given his expertise, she guessed he was one of the tower caretakers. He was lucky not to have been in the tower last night.

Gilles took up the crate and carried them to another building, into a lobby where a private was at attendance behind a desk.

“Ah, you found them,” the soldier said.

“Mmhmm,” said Gilles. “Are these all they saved? There musta been fifty animals in that tower at least.”

“These were all that were in the shuttle last night. If anymore animals survived, I don’t know about it. No offense to those things, but I’m kind of surprised anyone bothered saving them with everything that’s going on.”

“These tortoises meant a lot to the queen.”

The soldier nodded vaguely. “I talked with Major Husher. He doesn’t want them on the base. Are you able to take care of them. W could find a zoo…”

“Nah, I got em.”

“I can’t promise you’ll be reimbursed for your expense.”

Gilles waved him off. “I’ll take them. I’ll take them. Fellas need a proper home, don’t they? We can’t be sending them off to any old zoo. ”

This satisfied the soldier.

Outside in the landing lot, Gilles loaded the crate into a personal shuttle. Before closing the door, he fetched a handful of collard greens from a bag and set them in the box.

Gilles’s home was an apartment on the outskirts of Porto Maná. It only had a kitchen, living room, and a bedroom, each just large enough to serve their function. Decorations included sculptures carved of wood or the remains of animals—mementos one might bring home from a visit to the Amazon or the African homeland back when forests and indigenous tribes existed. The kitchen reeked of powerful spices. His bedroom showed the most living. Laundry littered the floor. Books and magazines buried the bedside table. He clearly lived alone, but the many pictures showing a younger Gilles with a comely woman which implied that had not always been the case.

Currently, the coffee table in his living room had been pushed to one side to make room for a packing crate which had once held a military glider missile. The army had let him take it home to use as a makeshift terrarium.

It was the tortoise’s new home. Gilles spent the afternoon preparing it. That involved reassembling the crate, lining it with a plastic tarp, then filling it with mulch and water. Winnie and Helena were inside now, camped in one corner. The other tortoise was opposite to them, exactly where Gilles first placed him. Only once had Winnie seen him move, and that was for the collard greens earlier. After eating his fill, he’d remained right where he was, too apathetic to return to his corner. How many years would it take until Winnie was like that too?

She had recovered from her emotional slump. Or rather she found she didn’t think about her predicament as much if she spent her time focusing elsewhere. Sometimes she watched the television back on the military base.

Information came out irritatingly slow. Whenever the news learned a tidbit, they would repeat it every thirty minutes while replaying their most relevant footage. They constantly recapped what had been happening, as though someone might actually tuning in now who didn’t already know that the head of the empire had been severed. When they weren’t recapping, they brought on experts to share thoughts and predictions. It was all so vacuous.

So Winnie started searching the military base instead. With the queen dead and no sign of Winnie ever being rescued, she had forgone Victoria’s golden rule of never spying on the empire. It’s not like she’d get in worse trouble.

She started first by drifting high above the base and looking down. The sun was setting, but the base was still on high alert. Soldiers drilled. Shuttles drifted along identical trajectories. Shuttles landed in lots outside offices. Larger crafts floated into hangars.

One building was a barracks. Beds neatly lined the long walls. All were empty at this hour. In a civilian office, people in business casual attire worked in cubicles. The only military were the soldiers at guard on the ground floor. Her targets weren’t here; she moved on. It was jarring to refocus her projection instead of flying from building to building, but this was what Victoria had taught her to do. Flying was inefficient. Refocusing was faster. Winnie wasn’t sure why she kept up the practice, but somehow it felt wrong to forgo the lessons the queen had left with her.

Then Winnie found them. Sakhr was in a hangar along with Alexander and Sibyl. Soldiers were unloading crates from a shuttle while they watched. Each crate was filled with twisted, charred items from the ruins of the Capital Tower. A forensics team would take each one and pour through the contents, scanning everything with clicking radiation sensors and bagging them for later study.

Sakhr seemed interested in particular boxes. As the forensics team cleared their contents, Sakhr motioned to a supervising Major, who then directed the boxes to be taken to a private room. It was here, away from the forensics team, that Sakhr examined the contents.

The sole fact that he wanted to look at these privately was reason enough for Winnie to keep watching. Perhaps she would spend the rest of her life spying on him. As painful as it was to watch her own body masquerading around causing mayhem, she might learn crucial information she could somehow use to her advantage. She didn’t know how yet. Maybe such an opportunity would never arise, but if it did, she would be ready.

And so she watched…

“Is this all there was?” Sakhr asked.

“Everything we found near her,” said the major.

Three crates. Each item inside had their own plastic bag. Sakhr examined a few: a phone with a shattered screen, a tablet bent in the middle, and a pair of women’s dress shoes. Each item had blood on them.

“These are your mother’s possessions, aren’t they?” the major asked.

Alexander responded. “Yes. These are the queen’s affects.”

“She wearing a cream-colored dress?”

Sakhr had no idea.

“Yes, she was,” Alex answered. “We were all dressed to go to a charity auction the other day… before everything happened.”

For all Sakhr knew, the story about the charity was just another in the endless stream of lies Alexander had been telling, but the bastard certainly knew what he was doing. He was in people’s minds. He knew what they needed to hear.

At the bottom of a crate, in a bag of its own, was a bloody necklace made of small ivory tiles. Sakhr recognized it. Each little tablet had its own power inscribed upon it. Over seventeen years ago, Victoria had fingered those little tablets while telling of her collection of powers. Sakhr had dreamed of it ever since.

He snatched the bag and removed the necklace. Though blood covered many tiles, he fastened it about his neck. The major shuffled uncomfortably. Sakhr searched his mind for any change. Years ago, he’d had aura sensing. He didn’t recall much, but he remembered that it was easy to identify the sensation when he expected it, but now he felt nothing. He motioned for Sibyl to look him in the eyes. She did so. He sensed… nothing.

Sakhr studied the necklace. There were seven glyphs—one for each member of the coven, and three more. Since only two were damaged, wouldn’t that mean the other five should work?

He tried wiping away the blood and wearing it again. Nothing.

He dug through the other crates.

“Your Highness?” the major asked.

“Are you sure that these are all of her possessions?”

“Is something missing?”

“They aren’t working.”

“Ma’am?”

“The glyphs. They’re not doing anything.”

“Ah.” Alexander interjected. “It’s exemplar tech. He doesn’t know.”

“Know what?” the major asked.

“Never you mind,” Alexander said. “This is an exemplar affair.”

So glyphs were still a secret then. Exemplar-only tech. The longer Sakhr was outside of his tortoise prison, the more he realized Victoria never told people anything. She coveted secrets. It meant no one knew who Sakhr was, which played to his advantage, but it also meant Victoria probably never revealed her true power, which was to learn powers. She didn’t actually need glyphs.

Which meant the necklace was a misdirection. The tiles were fakes. Of course that damn woman wouldn’t keep real glyphs around her neck. Why would she? The only person who’d make use of them was somebody who’d stolen them from her. The fake was only to maintain the lie that she was the glyph writer.

But why keep it up?

Sakhr, Alex, Christof, and Sibyl were the only people in the world who knew she was once Katherine, or what her power actually was, and all four of them had been under her lock and key. No one else even knew who Katherine was. So why divorce Victoria and Katherine? Why pretend to be someone else for all these years?

It could have been to hide the true identity of the real glyph maker, but then he was also her prisoner. Or perhaps there was someone else who knew Katherine.

That couldn’t be it, right? Sakhr would obviously know them.

He cast the necklace aside and dug through the other boxes, but he didn’t expect to find anything of value. Another bag contained Victoria’s tattered dress. It was more red than white. Another contained a flight helmet, and a flight suit—items probably found near her body.

The third box contained a piece of twisted metal made of small metal bars. It took him a moment to identify it. “Is this a birdcage?”

“We believe so, ma’am.”

“This was in the wreckage?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ah, what?” Alex perked up. He looked the major in the eyes. “Oh right… The queen had a pet hawk. Everyone knows that.”

A look passed between Alex and Sakhr. Alex grinned sardonically, clearly coming to the same realization Sakhr was. That birdcage had been in the shuttle with Victoria. She’d had that hawk with her.

Sakhr turned to the major. “Was the hawk found?”

“Ma’am?”

“Was the hawk found dead? Did the rescuers find it’s body?”

Of course the major hesitated. It would be too easy for him to say something like, yes, dead as dead can be. It was a bit of a mess, so we left the body there. No. There had to be uncertainty.

“Not that I know of,” the major said.

Sakhr looked around. This hangar’s side room had a roof far above with plenty of beams to perch upon. And there were skylights, though they were sealed. He glanced at Sibyl. She too was looking around, but not frantically. Good. The idea occurred to her too, and she sensed nothing near.

“If you’d like,” the major said, “I can send someone to look.”

“No. Don’t bother. If it wasn’t there, it wasn’t there.” He pushed the crates away. There were no glyphs for him to use. It seemed even in her death, Victoria would continue to hound him. “Thank you for your help, major. You may leave.”

The brusqueness startled the major. “I… Yes, Your Highness.” He left quickly. Sakhr, Alex, and Sibyl were alone.

Sibyl spoke. “Do you think she actually survived?”

Sakhr let out a long sigh. Why should he answer her question when he obviously had no more information than she did? What kind of idiot would even ask?

“I don’t think so,” Alex answered. “She would have acted by now.”

“Not necessarily,” Sakir said. There could be a hundred reasons why she hadn’t struck yet. Her death was only one—a big one, and God how he hoped she was dead, but it was still only one of many reasons. He faced Sibyl. “Can you sense her coming?”

“No…” she replied. “I haven’t been able to sense her ever since she got her shield, but maybe I could know she’s coming because she won’t have an aura.”

“Not good enough,” Alex said. “Katherine could just fly in as a hawk and collide with Sakhr. She’d be in Sakhr’s body before anyone could do anything. What we need are shields of our own.”

“I know,” Sakhr growled. “That’s what this damn necklace was supposed to solve.”

Alex frowned. “Why should the necklace do anything if Katherine could use all the powers by herself?”

“I know this.”

“What you need is a safer place to stay…” Alex trailed off.

“You obviously have a place in mind.”

He grinned. “Do you remember General Soto mentioning the citadels?”

As soldiers continued to test and bag more debris, Sakhr, Alex, and Sibyl headed back to the building Sakhr had commandeered for his imperial work. They spoke little, but Winnie watched anyway.

She had heard their conversation. It wasn’t hard for her to figure out who “Katherine” was.

Victoria.

They believed Victoria might still be alive.

Winnie was almost afraid to hope. Even if Victoria was, a world of things could happen between that shuttle crash and Victoria saving the day.

But Winnie already knew she could never put that thought out of her mind. Ten years from now, she’d still be hoping for Victoria’s return. Hope is all she could do. That, and watch.

Sakhr and the others split off to talk with ministers and officials. Winnie would learn no secrets from public interaction like that, but she watched anyway. Twenty years from now she’d still be spying.

One day she might get the chance to use her knowledge against them.

54. Sedatives

“Quentin.”

Nudge.

“Quentin.”

Quentin opened his eyes. The effort drained him. He tried lifting his head, but pain lanced through his skull. He could only roll his head along his pillow to look about.

It was the same place as all the other times he’d drifted into consciousness—a spartan infirmary. Beds lined the long room on either side. All were made except for the one directly across from Quentin, where one other patient lay. Sunlight streamed in several windows. Birds chirped distantly. Farther away was occasional yelling, or echoed bangs of what might be construction.

He tried moving, but handcuffs secured him to the bed. Looking down, he saw his hands wrapped in bandages. Angry blisters peaked out where the bandages ended near his elbows. They throbbed with each heartbeat.

Quentin didn’t know how long he’d been suffering this fever-ridden nightmare of endless sweat and vomit. It seemed like eternity, but it couldn’t be. By his estimate, he had twenty-four hours to live. For the first time, his fever was less. His mind could hold a coherent thought. Someone ignorant of the progression of radiation sickness might think they were recovering. Quentin knew better.

He finally noticed his two guests. One was an exemplar woman. She stood back near the corner of the room. The other was a young woman standing by his bed. She was sneering at the stench Quentin’s senses had long since adapted to. Her platinum blonde hair was neatly done up in a bun. Designs were embroidered on her formal sleeveless dress. It was as though she stopped here on her way to a banquet.

“Can you hear me, Quentin?” she asked.

“Sakhr?” he muttered.

“Yes.”

“…You got away?”

“Yes, amazingly.”

“Did you… sneak in here?” Talking was taking a lot out of him. With every word, his urge to vomit grew.

“No.”

“There was a guard… by the door.”

“I ordered him away.”

Quentin stared at Sakhr with the most discerning look he could muster. “You ordered?”

“Yes. I ordered. Much has happened in the few hours you’ve been asleep. Perhaps no one has explained. It seems a raving lunatic detonated a low-grade nuclear bomb inside the Capital Tower. Even now responders clamber over the ruins searching for survivors, but they doubt they’ll find any. The queen was in the building at the time. She will soon be confirmed dead.”

“Victoria? So you’re in charge?”

“Yes. I’ll be addressing the public soon, where I’ll be explaining that much of the city is being evacuated due to fallout risk. There are already over four dozen confirmed cases of radiation poisoning, but no one has a case as bad as you and the other man who was brought in with you. The military wants to know about your involvement with the explosion. They’ve brought in an exemplar to scan your mind.”

At Sakhr’s prompting, the exemplar in the corner came forward to stand at the other side of the bed. She looked down at Quentin. He avoided her gaze.

“A scanning?” Quentin asked. “Are you serious? But… they can’t, right? Sakhr?” He said the name, as though to point out the secrets he knew.

“I am serious. Exemplar Serrao was able to pull herself away from the rescue effort. We’ve just concluded her scan of the other man.” Sakhr indicated the other bedridden patient in the room who was hooked up to an IV and a monitor just the same as Quentin was. It was the body occupied by the flair named Sibyl. They were sleeping soundly.

“Unfortunately,” Sakhr continued, “they knew nothing of value, and we have since had to sedate him when his pain caused him to become unruly. Just like you, he has a severe case of radiation poisoning. It is unlikely he will wake again.”

“Ah… I get it.” Quentin craned to look at the exemplar by the bed. “Sibyl? Right?” An exemplar coming to inspect her mind was a prime opportunity for Sibyl to get that female body she’d asked for. It probably came as a hell of a shock to the exemplar.

“Did Alex survive?” Quentin asked.

“He did. Apparently, all ships will autopilot to a nearby default location if they detect they’re not safely landed. They’ll do this even if they’re locked. Was that part of your plan?”

Quentin nodded.

“Clever. I suppose that’s more sane than flying away on a makeshift plane.”

“But did… you talk to him?”

“I have.”

“Then he told you… the promise.”

“Promise?”

“The promise he made… on your behalf. You’re supposed to get me a new body because I knew I’d get radiation poisoning.”

“You and Alex came to this agreement.”

Quentin’s hoarse voice picked up. “Alex said you’d honor it.”

“I honor the promises I make. I have no obligation to unspoken exchanges between other people.”

“I couldn’t ask you because I couldn’t say it out loud. Victoria would have known what I was up to.”

“And what was it you were up to? Setting up a nuclear explosion to detonate a few hundred feet from us?”

“Nuclear fizzle.”

“A what?”

“A nuclear fizzle. If I had used that much uranium in a properly constructed bomb… there wouldn’t be a city.”

“Oh. And that makes it better?”

“I killed the queen. I made you ruler. Without me, you would be nowhere.”

Sakhr shrugged. “Perhaps so. Your plan could just as easily have killed us all too.”

“It didn’t.”

“No, but I still don’t like your methods. In fact, there’s hardly anything about you that I do like. You’re arrogant. You’re rude. You show no appreciation when I risked my life to free you. And your actions were damn near suicidal.”

“I was not going back into a tortoise.”

“Of course not. None of us are.”

“Thanks to me.”

“Sure.”

“Then help me.”

Sakhr weighed the option. “No. I think not. You took control from me during our escape. You made your own plan without me and executed it without my permission. I don’t appreciate it when others forget their place around me.”

“It was the only way.” Quentin growled. The strain gave him a coughing fit.

“Perhaps. You’ve served your purpose. From here on, you’re more apt to be a liability to us than an asset, just as you were to Victoria, or so I gather.”

“You have to help me. I know who you are. I could tell people.” Though even as the words left his mouth, he realized how wrong he was. He could tattle no better than the drugged-up exemplar across the room could. This conversation would be the last thing he would ever experienced. “You can’t… you can’t fucking do that. I freed you. I got you the fuck out of there. Are you going to kill me? What are you going to do?”

“What we came here to do, Quentin,” Sakhr replied. “We’re here to scan you. Are you ready?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

Sakhr held out his hand toward Sibyl. She touched it. A shudder passed between them. Now it was the body of the exemplar who peered at Quentin. Her dark amber eyes held the same severity Helena’s body had moments ago, while the body of Helena stood mutely by.

“Look me in the eyes,” Sakhr said from the body of the exemplar. He held the exemplar plaque in both hands.

Quentin turned his head toward the window.

“Look at me, Quentin.”

Nothing.

“Look at me if you have any desire to live.”

Begrudgingly, Quentin turned and met Sakhr’s eyes.

“Let me make things perfectly clear,” Sakhr said. “I am unfamiliar with this new world. After seventeen years in captivity I have a lot to learn. But I will. The brain I have is young. So never delude yourself into thinking I still need you. I am the ruler now. Any plans or ideas you have, you will clear with me. You will show me respect. You will cease your insults and jibes. And if I ever, ever detect a hint of insurrection from you, I will not even give you a chance to explain yourself. I don’t care for you. I don’t care for your attitude, but I am choosing to tolerate you because of your gift. Push my tolerance, and I will lock you away just as Victoria had. Am I clear?”

Quentin said nothing. No matter how much he hated this, the alternative was death.

“Say it,” Sakhr said. “I want to hear it from you.”

“I agree.”

Sakhr eyed him a while longer, then held his hand out to Sibyl. Again they switched bodies.

“Go get the doctor,” Sakhr said.

Sibyl left and returned a minute later with a bespectacled doctor.

“Your Highness?”

“We’re done with the patient. Please administer something to help him sleep.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The doctor already had a zipped up pouch with him containing a vial and a hypodermic needle. They had known these patients were terminally ill. This mercy had been prearranged.

The doctor filled a measured sample into a needle. He came so close to injecting it that Quentin wondered whether Sakhr were going to let the doctor go through with it.

But then, “Stop.”

The doctor looked at Sakhr. “Yes?”

“Put the syringe down.”

Confused, the doctor placed it on the table. The moment his hand moved away, Sakhr’s hand lashed out. The doctor yelped. Sakhr pulled his hand onto Quentin, and then came the switch.

Quentin had braced for it, and yet it still nearly floored him. The sudden relief of being in a healthy body was unbelievable, like finally taking a breath of air after minutes of suffocation.

Meanwhile, the dying man on the bed gasped as though splashed with cold water. “What? What is this?” he stammered.

Sakhr turned to Quentin. “You may finish administering the medication, doctor.”

Quentin gladly did so.

49. Glow

Victoria catapulted from her chair. “Everyone evacuate the building now!” She snatched her bird’s cage and ran to the door.

“Your Majesty?” said Captain Gandara.

“Now! There’s a bomb in the building. Get moving.”

Everyone startled, but Victoria did not stick around to see who followed. If they didn’t obey her order, then too bad for them. She was out the door and headed toward the stairs. Two floors down. The military shuttle would be right there.

The very second Quentin said those words, she knew exactly what his plan was. She’d been an idiot for not seeing it earlier. Fuser assemblers. They can produce any element under the sun. Metals. Rare elements…

Fissile materials.

That was half the reason she had confiscated those machines in the first place.

She reached the stairwell and leapt from landing to landing. In her mind, she checked where Quentin was. He was on the fifty-eight floor with the second machine, already prying open the doors.

What had he made? An alloy of Thorium? Uranium? Maybe even plutonium for all she knew. No doubt Quentin’s flair told him exactly which one—or what alloy of materials—to use. Whatever fissile material he had was no doubt subcritical when distributed across three separate floors, but when they all came together at the bottom of that elevator shaft…

The notches along the poles and the conversations about gliders had just been a feint to distract her, and it had worked. Goddamn that man.

She ascended to the eighth floor and charged into the hall. The guards at the security checkpoint had already been evacuated. Good. If someone were here, they’d slow her down. She visualized upstairs as she ran. The marines were racing through her personal floor toward the service lobby. Quentin and Sibyl tossed another set of bars down the shaft. At the bottom, the fissile bars were starting to glow.

It was a race to see who reached that last assembler first. She hoped it was the marines, because she would still be in the tower when that moment came.

Quentin burst into the lobby on the sixtieth floor.

“They’re here.” Sibyl said. “They’re coming.”

“Just do the last one, damnit.” Quentin flipped the latch for the elevator and pulled the door open. Sibyl grabbed the bundled rods. These ones had the reflexors wrapped about them. As she moved toward the elevator, marines charged in.

They fired. Sibyl screamed and collapsed. The bundle rolled toward Quentin. In a mad hope, he let go of the door and dove for the rods. As the door slid closed, he tossed them. A dart struck his side, and he went down.

The bundle glided horizontally through the closing door. The reflexors caught the door and its frame as it passed, causing it to launch through like a squeezed grape. It struck the far side of the shaft, twirled, descended like a snowflake, and then caught on a steel beam.

It lingered. The reflexors kept it from sliding off immediately, but eventually it did. From there it continued its lazy decent.

The marines saw none of this as they lugged Sibyl and Quentin toward the stairs.

Victoria saw the transport shuttle ahead. A soldier stood at attention outside the door.

“Get this moving,” she yelled as she ran towards them. “We need to evacuate now.”

The soldier hopped into action, yanking open the passenger door and running around to the pilot side.

Victoria climbed in and set her bird’s cage on the seat. Others were coming, though they were far behind. No one understood the urgency. They couldn’t see the bundle of rods slowly drifting down the shaft toward the eighth floor—the very floor she was on.

She slammed the hatch closed. The other evacuees could take other ships if they had time, but they didn’t.

Victoria looked in the cockpit with her mind. The pilot was powering up the system. Was this security’s idea of “standing by”?

“Move faster,” she ordered.

“Yes, ma’am.” The system booted up. He switched into manual and put his hands on the controls. On the comm he spoke. “This is the transport in tower bay four alpha. I have the queen on board. We require immediate clearance to evacuate.”

At least the pilot did not wait to hear back. They were lifting. The craft was turning. The bundle of rods drifted closer. The ones already at the bottom glowed hot. They were scattered like a pile of matches.

There was no way Quentin could have known how they’d fall. Meaning he had no idea what the explosion’s payload would ultimately be. It might destroy this floor. It might destroy the city. There were too many variables, the largest being how desperate Quentin was.

Her shuttle moved forward. The wide open exit neared. The bundled rods began glowing like the rods beneath them.

Then, whether because of heat or radiation, the reflexors around the bundle failed. It plummeted the remaining few feet.

For a fraction of a second, all the rods merely brightened, as though their approach toward super-critical might take time.

They exploded before the new rods hit the ground.

The ship lurched. Victoria tumbled from her seat. Her head stuck something. Pain lanced through her mind. Another crash. Already on the ground, she rolled into the transport’s stern.

The cockpit was making incessant beeps. Did she smell smoke?

No.

It was dust.

She coughed, put a hand to her scalp. Her fingers came away with blood. She focused her mind on the tower. From the eighth floor and up, the building was a mess. Multiple floors were wrecked. Chunks were missing, choking black smoke billowed out. Flaming debris rained over the campus. Every window in the tower’s bottom half had shattered.

Her own ears heard a screech echoing through the shuttle bay. Metal was tearing. To her horror, the upper half of the tower was sagging like melting wax. The movement was imperceptible, but the slant was unmistakable.

The tower was collapsing.

Victoria crawled to the cockpit. The pilot sat limp, his chin against his chest. His hand was delicately touching a gushing wound where his skull struck the side window.

“Get us moving now!” she yelled.

Dazed, the pilot took seconds to respond. He grabbed the control stick. His eyes skirted the dashboard warning lights. Flipping several switches, he attempted to move the vessel. It swerved. Victoria nearly fell again.

She visualized the transporter. Chunks of concrete had fallen from the bay ceiling and struck the craft. It’s right wing had buckled. The repulse engine was running, but it was askew.

Could the ship fly? Maybe. Land? Probably not, but if this pilot could stop wasting time and just get out of the bay, the reflex grid should catch them.

And then she realized the significants of debris raining on the campus. It was falling freely. The campus grid must be down.

The city grid though. That might still catch them.

The pilot finally got the craft airborne. It drifted toward the far bay wall. He adjusted, and the ship teetered the other direction.

The pilot spoke into the comm as he steered. “This is transport in Bay area four.”

No response.

He repeated himself.

Again nothing.

The pilot gave up and focused on steering.

“Just get us out of the bay,” Victoria shouted.

“I’m trying, ma’am” he said. “The ship is damaged.”

He got the craft to drift toward the lip of the bay. The wing scraped the floor.

Victoria checked the tower again. Debris rained more freely. Floors below twenty were collapsing. The tower was descending.

“Move faster,” she shouted.

The pilot hunched over the control stick. His eyes darted from viewport to viewport. Victoria’s eyes were fixed on the wide, night sky before them.

Finally, the transport cleared the bay. The vessel dropped several feet as the right wing no longer had a floor to drag upon, but the pilot stabilized the craft, and they drifted sideways away from the tower.

They were clear.

Victoria visualized the tower again. It was fully collapsing now. Floor after floor crumbled. The top leaned more as it plummeted. The damage to the campus would be severe. She wondered vaguely whether Gandara had evacuated the campus as well.

Then she saw one particular piece of debris. By the time she acknowledged it, it was too late. She hadn’t time even to open her mouth and warn the pilot.

It slammed into the shuttle, tearing the hull open like paper. The jolt threw her into the cabin. The pilot struggled with the controls as the craft spun wildly. In seconds it would crash. It would be fatal, and Victoria could not prevent it.

With her head spinning, and with blood matted to her face, she pulled herself into the cabin. The roof was torn open. The stars in the sky spun by. There, wedged under a seat was what she needed.

She lunged, grabbed Willow’s cage, and tore open the small door. Her fingers cut open against the warping metal bars. Willow flapped wildly inside, bumping against the cage wall with each swerve the transport took.

She grabbed her bird with a bloody fist.

Moments later, transport crashed into the campus grounds. Everyone aboard died instantly.

Winnie felt like a basketball on the floor of a boat. When Christof had tossed the box onto the shuttle, the tortoises had spilled out. The others had landed upright. Winnie had not been so lucky. Once she’d stopped spinning, she tried moving her limbs, but got nowhere. So she closed her eyes, pulled into her shell, and concentrated on her flair.

She watched the marines dragged Sakhr away. After he was gone, many had charged down the stairs, leaving only a few to cover the shuttle. Winnie kept her eyes on the ones traveling down.

They had raced through Victoria’s private floor to where Quentin and Sibyl were tossing more bars into the elevator. The marines stunned them and dragged them back, but just as the marines returned to the roof, an explosion rocked the tower.

Winnie’s shuttle shook, causing her to spin and slide. The cockpit beeped. Alexander clutched the pilot seat as the dashboard took on a life of its own.

The tower seemed to drift away from them, yet the hopper remained floating in the air. The marines on the roof scrabbled for their deployment pods. Despite the quaking ground, the pods remained upright.

Alarmed, Winnie focused on the tower as a whole and saw what a ruined wreck it had become.

What had caused this? Was this part of Quentin’s plan? How many people had he just killed?

The world would suffer for this, and it was all because of her—her and Helena.

Back home, Winnie’s mother would hear about this on the radio. She’d turn on the news and see the smoldering tower, and she’d try to call Winnie. She would never get through—not to the real Winnie anyway.

The hopper began flying itself. It lifted higher into the air and took a trajectory over the the campus. Winnie didn’t know where. Her mind was still watching the marines struggle. They crammed their hostages into their remaining pods just as the building quaked again.

And then the tower started collapsing.

It happened slowly, as though something so catastrophic couldn’t happen all at once. The world needed time to witness itself change. Each floor crumbled into the next. Soon, the tower fell into a bed of smoke and dust. A cloud spread outward, filling the campus like a bowl until it reached the edge of the city.

Lights were coming on throughout Porto Maná; the city was waking up.

And what about the queen? Did she make it out? Winnie hoped so. Victoria would be her best chance of fixing all of this. Though somehow Winnie knew that everything would not work itself out as she hoped it would.

This affair was a prelude to a dark, bleak future.

48. Scaffolding

“Your Majesty, the military transport has docked and is awaiting your arrival.”

Victoria didn’t bother looking up. “Have it stand by.”

“And I’ve just received confirmation that the building has been evacuated of all non-security staff.

She nodded, hardly listening.

Her mind was on Quentin. Whatever it was he had planned, Alexander found it funny, and his sense of humor made her stomach churn.

Currently, Sakhr, Sibyl, and Alex were lugging an assembler down the service stairwell. It carried like an oversized couch. They had to hold it sideways to get it through doors.

Four floors down, Alex had them set it down in the rear lobby and go up for the next.

Quentin sat cross-legged before the first assembler, so involved with the tablet that he hardly noticed the others return. Victoria frequently visualized his design: pipes, or bars. They had notches at points along the length where it looked like they might fit together with one another. Some notches allowed for more angular connections.

It was scaffolding of some kind. It was taking him a while just to make that. The assembler’s local library was so bare-bones that he’d had to waste minutes piecing together low-level molecular fuse instructions just to make the metal he needed.

Victoria checked her phone. Eighteen minutes and Stephano’s men would coast in from the stratosphere, suited up and ready to go. Maybe Quentin could print the pieces in time, but he wouldn’t have time to assemble it—whatever it was.

She could move earlier…

Quentin and Christof were alone while the others were carrying the machines. She could put a team in the elevators, bring them up, and nab those two while Sakhr was away. Christof also carried their tortoise hostages. Sakhr would lose his leverage.

But it had too much chance of failure. Even if security could get a team ready in time, Sibyl would sense people coming up the elevator. Her range was substantially farther than any exemplar, and even Victoria herself. Sakhr could be up the stairs and in the lobby before the elevator doors would open.

Of course, if Victoria herself went up there, Sibyl wouldn’t sense her coming. She could destroy Quentin’s machine and be gone before they could react.

Victoria dismissed the idea. Too much risk.

She watched the others drag the second machine down the stairs. They all gasped and wheezed. Two floors down, Alex dropped his end of the machine. “Okay, forget it,” he said. “This is good enough, let’s just get it in here.” He opened the door to that floor’s lobby.

“You said this goes four floors down,” Sakhr said.

“Never mind that. We’ll just leave it here and carry the supplies down as they assemble.”

“We’re not going to be lazy. If Quentin wants these on the fifty-sixth floor, then we’ll put them there.” Sakhr lifted his end.

“I know the plan. Okay? It doesn’t need to be exactly the fifty-sixth floor. So let’s drop this off here. If Quentin says to finish, then we’ll finish, but I know he won’t.”

Sakhr frowned. “Fine.” He maneuvered his end toward the door.

Alex wiped sweat from his face…

…then when Sakhr wasn’t looking, he held his finger to his lips and shook his head at Sibyl.

She had looked like she was about to say something, but that stopped her.

So it was a ruse.

Alex wanted the machine on that floor. Sibyl could sense the falsehood of his supposed exhaustion, and he kept her from mentioning that.

Why?

What plan needed one machine on fifty-six, and another on fifty-eight?

As they navigated the doorway, Victoria’s mind jumped back to Quentin. He’d finished whatever he was designing. Now he and Christof were carrying the fuser assembler out of the room and down the hall. They dropped it off in Victoria’s servant corridor, just outside the service elevator. As they finished, Sakhr and the others returned.

Quentin looked at Alex. “You guys ready to get this one downstairs?”

Alex shook his head and rested his hands on his knees. “No. We’re done with that. We’ll just bring the materials down as they assemble.”

Quentin shrugged. “Sure. Whatever. I guess we can get them started.”

Oh, Quentin. He cannot lie, not like Alex. If Victoria had any doubts that this wasn’t exactly what Quentin wanted, Quentin dispelled them the moment he didn’t throw a fit about the others’ incompetence.

So why orient the machines like this, vertically aligned, with a floor between each?

She could only watch on…

Christof took over watching Winnie, Helena, and the other tortoise. He’d found a box to keep them in. While the jostling was nauseating, Winnie preferred Christof to Alex as a captor. He was gentle. When Helena accidentally flipped trying to peer over the lip, he righted her.

Winnie didn’t need to crane to see what was going on.

She’d watched the struggle to move the machines downstairs. Now, they stood around as Quentin hooked the tablet into the assembler and fiddled with the menu. The machine hummed.

“There we go,” he said. “Let’s go.” He headed for the stairs.

“We’re just leaving that there?” Sakhr asked.

“We’ll come back for the stuff later.”

Sakhr eyed Quentin as they descended. On the next floor, Quentin set that machine to assemble the another set of notched bars. Same with the fifty-sixth floor. Whatever he was making, he was making three of them.

Quentin led them back up to Victoria’s private suite. “All right, now the next part is a little tricky,” he said. “On the balconies, I bet we’ll find reflexors set up around the banisters.”

“What are those for?” ask Sakhr.

“Security. They push things away from the balcony: birds, bullets, would-be assassins. The nodes will be lining the rim of the balcony floors. We need as many as we can get.”

“I meant why do we need them?”

“Because I can’t assemble those things. I mean, I could. But they’re complicated. It would take me too long to design. No more questions.”

They found Victoria’s bedroom. It was filled with rich, dark woods and tapestries. There was a fireplace large enough to stand in. It had real ash beneath its grate, and a chute leading to a lonesome chimney on top of the tower. The bed had four posts at the corners with adjoining draperies for privacy. It redefined the term king-sized.

“Jesus…” Quentin eyed the decor. Everyone else looked about like guests in a museum. On the balcony, Quentin inspected the base of the guard rails. “Good. Here they are. You guys start on the other side.”

The others drifted closer, though only Alex helped. The nodes were strung together like Christmas lights. Once they’d detached a length, Quentin pried a node open.

“I need a… yeah.”

Before he could finish, Alex handed him a screwdriver. He tinkered with its insides, then popped it closed. Holding it at arms length, thrust it downward. Instead of smashing it against the floor, Quentin’s arm moved as though he were pushing his arm through a viscous fluid. His muscles strained.

“Perfect,” he said. He started on the next node.

Sakhr frowned at the device. “I don’t understand. You just unplugged those. How is it getting power?”

“They’re getting it from the fall. These are reflex nodes.” Seeing Sakhr’s confusion, Quentin continued. “Okay, do you know about the law of energy conservation?”

Sakhr nodded.

“That’s what this is. When a node generates a repulse field, it pushes everything inside that field away from itself. How much energy it expends is relative to how much mass is in the field. So a node projects into air, it doesn’t spend much energy. If something enters that field, then suddenly there’s more mass to push. More energy is expended. That’s how repulse nodes detect things, like with Stiller fields. You with me?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, so if the node pushes on something that’s at rest, it adds kinetic energy relative to the node. Electricity into kinetic energy, right? Energy is conserved. But when mass enters the field moving toward the node, the node pushes on the mass, slowing it down. It’s expending electric energy to reduce relative kinetic energy, so where is the energy going? Heat. Then one day I figured out how to optimize repulse nodes, like this.” He held up a node. “When this pushes on something such that it slows the mass relative to it, it converts the kinetic energy into electricity. That’s why these little things don’t need power, because pushing mass through their field toward the node collects energy. Then it uses that energy to push back.”

He pointed the node downward and dropped it. The node drifted slowly down at first, until it rotated. Then it arced and fell.

“If you have three oriented like tripod legs, they won’t tilt and fall. That’s basically how most drifting ships work. In theory, with perfect efficiency reflex nodes, they would stay floating forever once it pushed against something that doesn’t flow, like earth. Too bad nothing is ever perfect, but these are still great for gliding.”

Sakhr tensed and spun toward Quentin. “No!”

“What?”

“Is your plan to… are you building an aircraft?”

Quentin grinned broadly. “No questions.”

“Absolutely not. We are not flying on some cobbled-together gliding device.”

“I thought you said you trust me.”

“Not with this! I know how complicated flying machines are? You expect me to believe you can build one out of salvaged parts? I don’t care what your flair is. That can’t possibly work.”

“What if that is what I’m doing,” said Quentin. “Would you rather stay here?”

“Look, look.” Alex addressed Sakhr. “Sure, this isn’t the safest mode of travel. It probably doesn’t meet your standard ‘point zero zero one basis points‘ of acceptable risk. Quentin doesn’t have time to perform enough test flights to satisfy you. And sure, there’s a slight chance of instantaneous death. But since the alternative is to wait here until Victoria moves on us, what the hell?” He put his hand on Sakhr’s shoulder. “Tell you what. How bout I find you a helmet.”

Sakhr slapped away Alex’s hand. “Is this what you found so damn funny? There is no chance in hell I’ll fly out of here in a ramshackle machine.” He faced Quentin. “Change the plan.”

“What would you rather do?” asked Alex. “Blast our way through the security lobby? Fight all of her people? You think that’s safer? We need a head start, and we won’t get that walking out of here on foot. I’ve seen Quentin’s mind. What he’s building is risky, sure, but he knows what he’s doing. He’s got his power. Don’t you trust our powers?”

“This is insanity.”

“Just remember. My life is on the line too, and I agreed to this.”

“And you’re insane.”

“Maybe. Seventeen years as a leather pet can do that. Are you in?”

Sakhr scowled at him. “We’ll see.”

We’ll see, he said.

Surely Sakhr would know better than to go along with such a dumb plot. Surely his desperation hadn’t exceeded his aversion to risk. Quentin should know better too. He may have insight into physics, but that doesn’t make him a good pilot… unless the idiot considered his video game skills as experience.

This still didn’t explain why they bothered separating the assemblers.

She visualized what the machines were producing. Each had only made three or four bars that could latch together, hardly enough to build a glider for one, much less for all of them. Since Stephano would deploy in… (Victoria checked the time) six minutes. Quentin clearly thought he had more time than he actually had.

She called for Gandara. “Captain.”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“If an unregistered vehicle were to leave from the tower, would the grid be able to catch it?”

“Unregistered vehicle?”

“Like a hang glider.”

“It should, ma’am. The Lakiran campus has a sensor grid starting at the eighth floor and up. Any unregistered mass greater than twenty kilograms will be snagged and delivered to a holding area.”

“Where is that?”

The military base at Leguan Island.”

“Can you arrange for the system to separate the objects and isolate them from one another?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Call the base. Have them stand by. Tell them that if the grid should deliver anything, that they are to isolate the target with wall bots and stand by. They are not to approach.

“Yes, ma’am.” He got to work.

Not that Victoria could allow it to come to that. If Quentin did try to fly off, the grid would not pick up small things, like falling tortoises. That was unacceptable.

She’d capture them all and figure out their plan later. This nonsense needed to end now.

Quentin set down the string of reflexors. “There. That’s done. Time to get the supplies.”

Sakhr stood and headed for the door.

“Not you,” Quentin said.

“What? You need help carrying the supplies upstairs, no?”

“I do.” Quentin ripped some drapes off Victoria’s bed. “So take these and go to the roof while I get the poles. We’ll put it all together up there.”

“What about those reflexor nodes?”

Quentin shrugged. “I’m taking them.”

Sakhr narrowed his eyes.

Alex came came over and took the drapes. “Stop worrying, Sakhr. I’ll be with you. Quentin will meet us on the roof.”

“I do need somebody to help me,” Quentin replied.

Alex looked around. “Sibyl, you’re wearing a strong body. Help Quentin carry the poles up. Christof, get the tortoises and come with us.”

So they split up. Quentin and Sibyl headed downstairs while Alex, Christof, and Sakhr headed to the roof.

“The marines are dropping now, Your Majesty,” Stephano said.

“There are three people on the roof. One is my daughter. You need to neutralize her immediately.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And another has a handgun, but you must not hurt her. Incapacitate, disarm, and isolate. That’s all.

“Understood.”

Victoria was micromanaging again. She couldn’t help herself. The action would start any moment, and Quentin was up to something…

Sibyl followed Quentin to the elevator lobby on Victoria’s private floor. The assembler there had produced five rods which lay in a row in the dispenser tray. Each was an arm’s length. Quentin bundled them up and wrapped the cable of reflexors around them, making sure the reflexors faced outward.

“What are you doing?” asked Sibyl.

“You’ll see,” Quentin replied. “You’ve got to promise me that if I tell you to do something, you’ll do it. Don’t hesitate. Okay?”

“Okay.” Sibyl sounded unsure.

“Good.” Having bundled the bars together, he let them drop. They lowered into the dispenser tray gently, as though the rods were trying not to make a clatter. “Let’s leave this here for a minute. And get down to the others.”

He headed for the stairs. Though Sibyl frowned in confusion, she followed.

Alex was on the roof first. He went straight to Victoria’s hopper and opened the hatch.

“The craft?” Sakhr said. “I thought we couldn’t fly this.”

“We can’t, but that’s not—”

“What are those?” Christof was pointing up.

Six black dots were rapidly approaching from the sky.

“Get inside!” Sakhr dashed for the rooftop door, but Alex caught his shirt, nearly yanking him off his feet.

The black dots expanded to become deployment pods. Each slammed onto the rooftop along the edge. Their hatches exploded outward. Marines jumped out. Each wore full covering military gear, complete with a respirator mask over their faces. They all brandished rifles.

“Inside!” Sakhr yelled.

“No. The ship. Get in the ship.” Alex pulled him toward the hatch.

The marines open fired. Barbed flechettes ricocheted off the hopper. One struck Sakhr in the side. Screaming, he crumpled.

Alex drew his security pistol fired wildly at the marines. They evaded.

Turning back, he grabbed Sakhr’s collar and pulled him toward the hopper. “Help me,” he yelled. Christof tossed the box of tortoises into the hopper and helped Alex with Sakhr.

Before they could pull him aboard, a marine fired electrified barbs at the hatch. Christof crumpled into the hopper. Sakhr fell to the platform concrete.

Alex returned fire. Two bullets punched into the marine’s reinforced armor, causing him to stumble back. Other marines approached. With Christof incapacitated, Alex couldn’t lift Sakhr fast enough. He pushed him out of the way and slammed the shuttle door closed. Inside, he frantically yanked a switch that looked like it might be a lock, but kept a constant pull on the door handle, just in case they could open it anyway.

Seconds passed. Tentatively, he let the hatch door go. When nothing happened, he scrabbled to the cockpit.

Out the window, he saw the marines dragging Sakhr toward their deployment capsules. They shoved him inside one and slammed the lid. The capsule lifted into the sky like a buoy released from the ocean bottom.

“Ta ta, old man. I never said there wasn’t risk.”

He fumbled with the dashboard. Once he’d turned the hopper on, he sat back and waited.

But what was Alexander waiting for?

Whatever it was, it had to do with whatever Quentin was doing. It made Victoria nervous.

Her mental gaze of Alex was diverted by Captain Stephano.

“They’ve rescued your daughter,” he said. “We’ve sent her off in a deployment pod. Other hostages have holed up in your shuttle.”

“Good. Leave them alone for now. Have your team proceed downstairs. There are two in the service stairwell. I want them stopped.”

“Understood, ma’am.”

She nearly hit the call end button, but stopped. “And keep my daughter isolated. No one opens her pod until I say so.”

Quentin was opening the door to the fifty-sixth floor when Sibyl snapped her head up to look at the ceiling.

“People just arrived,” she said.

“What? How many?”

“A dozen, maybe. They’re fighting. Sakhr is panicking.”

“God fucking dammit,” Quentin growled. “I needed two more minutes. That’s all. Fuck.” He glared at the door. “Fuck it. We’re still doing this. I’m not going back in a damn lizard. Come on.”

The assembler in the lobby had produced five poles, just like the others. Quentin ran past it to the service elevator. Popping a release catch along the door frame, pried open the door. “Okay. Grab those sticks in the tray and throw them down the shaft.”

“What?” said Sibyl. “Down the elevator?”

“Do it now.”

Sibyl grabbed the bars. Her hands recoiled at first, but she tried again and tossed them through the door. They clattered down the shaft.

Quentin released the elevator door and ran toward the stairs. “Come on. Next ones.”

Sibyl hurried after, cradling her hands. “Why were they so hot?”

Quentin held the stairwell door open for her. As she passed, he mumbled, “Because they’re radioactive.”

47. An Unspeakable Plan

Victoria called Captain Stephano.

“Your Majesty?”

“Inform your men that the targets may potentially be armed.”

“Do you know with what?”

“Explosives most likely. I’ll have more details for you before your men move in.”

“Understood.” He frowned. “Are you… in the tower right now?”

“I am.”

“I recommend you evacuate, ma’am.”

Victoria smiled patiently.

“I see no reason why you should take any such risk remaining there. Especially if this enemy has access to explosives.”

“Thank you for your concern, Captain. I’ll take it into consideration.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She disconnected him.

Bishop was still on the line. “He’s right, Your Majesty.”

“Oh, don’t you start too.”

“You can coordinate just as well from a shuttle.”

“I will not be run out of my own home by a few ruffians bumbling about in the upper floors. They won’t blow themselves up just to hurt me.”

“This is no time to be brave, ma’am. If anything should happen to you—”

“Fine. Hold on.” She motioned for Captain Gandara. “Have a craft prepared and ready to go in the shuttle bay.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Gandara got to work.

Victoria spoke to Bishop. “I’ll take it if the situation gets out of hand.”

“I suppose that will have to do. Thank you.”

The call ended, and Victoria pondered. Sakhr would have explosives soon. He didn’t know yet that they wouldn’t help him get out of the tower. Even if he managed to destroy some wall bots surrounding the tower, other wall bots would replace them before anyone could move through, but explosives did mean Sakhr might get in this control room.

She checked the time. Twenty-eight minutes until Stephano could deploy marines with old gen wall bots. When that moment came, the first one set up would lock the stairwell down. If Sakhr moved before then, it’s not like he could take Victoria by surprise. She’d be gone before any real threat came her way.

It all depended on what Quentin made with that fuser. She’d forgotten about those prototypes. Once again, Quentin was full of himself. He had not designed them. A team of dedicated scientists developed them using theoretical techniques Quentin once described. He did one percent of the work. At best. And he spoke of that Stiller generator as if it was his idea, as though power plants around the world weren’t already pushing hydrogen together years before she imprisoned him. And obviously they’d be restricted. The empire was already having problems with rebels using hacked Food-Ready assemblers to create everything from explosives to nerve gas.

But no, he thinks she shelved the prototypes because of her greed. It had nothing to with how those machines could build nuclear weapons.

Quentin had been out for only twenty minutes and he was already getting on her nerves. He always had. Her scouts found him in Michigan State College decades ago. To everyone else, he’d been an unremarkable student slowly dropping out, but her scouts saw his flair. When he actually tried, his engineering and science courses came effortlessly to him, but he rarely did. She’d offered him a job to the amazement of everyone—from the LakiraLabs hiring board to Quentin’s parents. Her idea was to give him a lab, a hefty paycheck, and a team of scientists and let him do what he wanted without tying him down with busywork. He might innovate any of endless ideas dormant in his skull.

It worked, barely. After four years of sick days, complaints, pointless projects, and a staggering number of excuses, he finally outlined something worthwhile: repulser fields. He’d claimed it took him all four years, but she saw in his mind that it took him only days.

It’d been worth it. Repulser fields changed LakiraLabs from an obscure private company into a household name. Unfortunately, Quentin’s next twelve years were a waste. He’d claim credit for every improvement on repulser fields LakiraLabs scientists ever developed just because he’d have doodled the idea once. The worst part was that she was stuck with him. A glyph of his flair only marginally affected other engineers.

Over time, he and Victoria argued more over compensation and results. He frequently accused her of stealing his invention, never caring that she had supported him, funded him, and managed the entire business his invention required. It’d nearly came as a relief when he tried to leave to “start his own company and get the credit he deserved.” Putting him in a tortoise was a weight off her mind.

Of course now he finds initiative, now that he was pitted against her.

But then spite always was the best motivator.

“Ma’am?” Captain Gandara approached her cautiously.

“Yes?”

“The security staff keep requesting information about our situation. They want to know if they should evacuate. What should I tell them?”

That seemed to her a timid way of asking what was going on. “How many people are in the tower?”

“Just resident staff, ma’am. Forty or fifty people.”

She considered this. “Go ahead and evacuate floors eight and below. No one above that floor.” She paused. “And send people to barricade the eighth floor stairwell door. I expect our intruders may try to use explosives on it.”

He nodded and turned back to the screen. His aura swelled with frustration, but he’d survive.

She turned her thoughts back to Sakhr…

Alex and Sakhr booted up the next two fuser assemblers. The workshop room was awash with packing peanuts by the time they were done. Quentin would pull himself away from his assembler designs long enough to check that the new machines were operating correctly.

Everyone was busy when Sibyl and Christof came in.

“Something is going on outside,” Christof said. “Little things are floating around outside the tower. They’re forming a perimeter.”

“Wall bots.” Quentin spoke without looking up from his work. “They’re supposed to stop us from walking out of here, but we still can. Don’t worry. I expected this. We’ll be fine.”

“What are wall bots?” Sakhr asked.

“Don’t worry about it. You’ll see when we get there.”

“There’s more,” Sibyl added. “There are noises in the stairwell. Sounds like construction.”

“They’re reinforcing the doors,” said Sakhr, “buying time.”

“But surely we expected this,” said Christof. “If anything, this just proves that whatever she’s planning, we’ll at least have time to use the explosives first.”

“We can’t assume that,” said Sakhr. “She’s just being careful.”

“Doesn’t matter what they’re doing down there,” Quentin said. “Won’t work. Not against these explosives.” He looked up in thought. “Unless of course they’re fixing the doors with repulse bracers…” He chewed at his lip, then shrugged. “Hell. They can reinforce them all they want. We’ll just blow a hole in the floor somewhere on the ninth floor.”

“Don’t say that out loud,” Christof said. “Now she knows.”

“What’s she going to do? Reinforce the entire ceiling?”

“She can plan for that though.”

“Yeah? So?” said Quentin. “Just get used to her knowing our plans. I’m not taking a vow of silence.”

Christof considered this. He turned to the others. “He’s right. Even if we get out of here, what are we going to do? We can’t hide. Can we outrun her?”

“We have hostages,” Sakhr said. “We have her daughter. We have many of her… flairs.” He seemed to dislike that word. “She can’t risk losing them, or she loses her damned glyphs.”

“But she will be watching,” replied Christof. “She’ll always be watching. Sooner or later, we’ll slip up.”

“Then we’ll find some place to go where she can’t follow.”

“Does such a place exist? You said she’s queen of the world now.”

“Nah,” said Quentin. “She just calls herself that. Half the world still fights her. There are plenty of places to go.”

Alex shook his head. “Not anymore! She owns the world now.”

“How do you know?”

He tapped his forehead. “I skimmed glimpses from our caretakers.”

“Then what do we do?” Christof said. “If she’s all powerful, do we stand a chance?”

“She’s not all powerful,” Sakhr replied. “We’ll figure something out. We’ll… keep moving. We’ll get a ship and fly. How long can a ship fly for?”

“Actually,” Quentin patted the assember, “If we get a ship with a Stiller generator, we could fly forever. ”

“Well, we can’t anymore,” Alex said, “now that you said it out loud. She’ll make sure we never get one. We need to stop talking.”

Sakhr spoke. “We can’t avoid discussing our plans.”

“We communicate in other ways. Say… how about telepathy?”

“You’re the only telepath here.'”

“Yes, but it can work. Let’s say you come up with an idea. Instead of saying it, you convey it to me mentally. I can communicate to the others by telling them stray details. They can imagine what the plan is, and I’ll adjust their thinking by saying Yes or No. They’ll figure it out eventually. Anton and I used to do this. It takes practice, but it works, and nobody except me and the person I’m reading has any idea what I’m talking about.”

“So every plan must pass through you?” Sakhr said. “I must trust you to convey our plans to everyone? No.”

Christof pointed to the unknown tortoise in Sibyl’s hand. “Maybe he can help.”

“Who is he?” asked Sakhr.

“He’s the man Victoria stole glyph writing from. If he can make glyphs of Alex’s power, then we can all communicate telepathically.”

Alex sat up. “Wait just a minute—”

Sakhr cut him off. “We have the original glyph maker?”

“I’m certain it’s him,” said Christof.

Sakhr looked at Alex. “And you thought he wouldn’t be helpful?”

“I never said that,” replied Alex. “I said he’d be a liability. He won’t want to help us. Not on short notice anyway.”

“I see…” said Sakhr.

“Listen,” Quentin said. He chewed at his nail thoughtfully. “What if I had a plan? Would you all trust me enough to do it?”

“Do you have one?”

“I might. It’s kind of a long shot, but it might work.”

“What is it?”

Quentin didn’t answer. Instead he stared directly at Alex. They shared eye contact.

Alex burst out laughing. “Yes! I love it. We’re doing it.”

Sakhr looked from one to the other. “What? What is the plan?”

Quentin ignored Sakhr and maintained eye contact. “But answer my questions.”

Alex stared back and answered Quentin’s unspoken queries. “Yes… Yes… No, I’m pretty sure of that…” He smiled “Yes. Sakhr can promise that.”

“Promise what?” Sakhr asked, annoyed. “What is this plan?”

Alex looked at him. “It’s a plan that will work, but it’ll work better if we keep it to ourselves. We’ll talk about the promise later, but you would agree to it.”

“And I’m supposed to be content with that? Letting you make promises on my behalf? Putting my life on the line for a plan I don’t know?

“You will if you want to get out of here. I’ve seen the plan. Trust me.”

“I don’t trust you.”

Christof spoke. “And I’m not sure I’m comfortable with any plan that makes Alex laugh like that.”

“We don’t have time to be picky,” answered Alex. “I’ve seen this plan. It’s a good one. Regardless of what you all think of me, I want to get out of here too. So for once in your lives, trust that I’m right. And if not me, trust that our new friend here knows what he’s doing. Okay?”

Sakhr’s expression was somewhere between suspicion and contemplation, but he nodded. Christof and Sibyl gave their consent.

“So what do we do?” asked Sakhr.

After Alex and Quentin shared eye contact, Alex said, “First, we get these machines downstairs.”

“Why?”

“No questions. Let’s go. We’ve got a lot to do, and no telling how much time to do it.”

46. Sems and Clems

Sakhr and the others split up to find the other assemblers, although he made sure that everyone stayed within Sibyl’s Empath range.

Alex found a pair on his own. Before heading back, he sat down in the hall with Winnie and Helena. Alone here, he held Helena up to look her in the eyes. Winnie would have tried slipping away again while he was distracted, except that Alex had set her on the floor upside down. Every time she got close to righting herself, he’d casually pushed her back over. She had just about resigned herself to this dizzying position when Alex set Helena down and picked her up. He studied her just as he had Helena.

Telepath, Winnie remembered. She shut her eyes.

“Ooh,” Alex said. “I saw that. You know what’s going on, don’t you?”

Winnie pulled into her shell and covered her face with her feet.

He shook her. “Come on. Open up. Let’s have a look at you.”

She didn’t respond. Suddenly, she was falling. Startled, she opened her eyes and jolted. Alex caught her just before she hit the ground. His gaze immediately locked onto hers.

She covered up again.

So Alex dropped her again. This time she kept her face covered, trusting her flair to see. Alex was keeping his arms poised to catch her each time, hence she was in no real danger, even if her heart leaped each time he did it.

Then the light on the assemblers changed. Their hum stopped, then started again sounding differently. Lights around the edges were pale red. Noticing this, Alex collected Helena and Winnie and returned to the others.

Quentin, who’d remained by the first machines, was swearing and stabbing his fingers on their touch screens. All but a few buttons were gone from the menu.

“Stop.” Quentin stabbed another button. A padlock symbol in the upper right flashed.

“Stop!” Another button. “Cancel.”

Another button, another flashing padlock.

“Damnit!” He banged the machine.

The others returned.

“What’s going on?” asked Sakhr.

“The machines are reclamating.”

“Meaning?”

“They’re reclaiming assembled resources, destroying what they were making. Someone accessed the machines remotely.”

“Is there anything you can do to stop it?” asked Christof.

“Good idea. I should do that instead of banging on it uselessly. Is that what you’re saying?”

“If people are controlling this remotely,” Sakhr said, “why can’t you just disconnected it from the network?”

“Oh. My. God. You have no idea how technology works. You think the Lakiran empire would let people use these things offline? If the cloud servers disconnect you, your machine won’t even know how to assemble.”

“And you knew this could happen?” asked Sakhr.

“This is not my fault. There’s no way I could have known they’d lock the machines two minutes after we started using them.”

“You just said they have central control over them. Can’t they see what the machines are doing?”

“Yeah. If they have the server logs open and are actively looking at them. They’d have to already know we were using them first.”

Pausing, Sakhr looked along the ceiling of the hallway. “Then how did they know? I’ve seen no cameras on this floor.”

“She doesn’t need them,” Alex answered. He held up Winnie. “I took some time to look into our tiny friends. I think this little one right here is the explanation.”

“Who is that?” Sakhr asked.

“It’s the little Asian girl who so kindly lent me her body. She has the power to see and hear remotely. Haven’t seen how it works yet, but from what she knows,” he tapped Helena, “Victoria can see anything, anywhere, anytime she wants.”

“So she’s been watching us every step of the way?”

“Probably.”

Sakhr pinched the bridge of his nose and muttered something in another language. He eventually looked up. “We need another plan then. And quickly.”

“But she’ll know what it is,” said Christof.

“I know. We’ll just have to move faster than she can react.” He looked around. “Quentin. Do you think you could make explosives from something else? Maybe from things laying about?”

“Depends on what we find.”

“Then we do that. Everyone split up and search. We’re looking for chemicals, electronics, anything that might be useful.” He sighed. “Anything at all.”

Victoria was mulling through strategies. The last time she captured Sakhr, she’d had mercenaries in hazmat suits with her. She could try that again, but if it failed, it would fail spectacularly. It would be safest if she had time to wait for her high exemplars.

Unfortunately, none of them could get here in time. She had ordinary exemplars nearby, but they had no idea who Sakhr was. More importantly, they didn’t have shields.

Victoria considered waking Sara. If that girl could draw up extra shields for her… But no. Even if that was a good idea, Victoria would need to supply Sara with a master glyph, and that just wasn’t possible right now.

That left only non-glyph solutions. It had to be military.

She called Bishop back. It rang four times.

“I’m here.”

“Have you made my arrangements?” Victoria asked.

“Standard wall bots should be arriving outside now.”

“And the orbiters?”

“That’s a little more tricky. Their flight trajectories were set so they’d be over West Europe. They’re redirecting, but it’ll take almost two hours before they can get a reliable overhead window.”

“Why so long?”

“They’re going really quickly in one direction. Now they’ll need to go just as quickly in another. To change that much speed, they’ll need to come into the lower stratosphere. It’s almost as bad as landing and taking back off. But you will have windows before that. One orbiter will pass near the capital in thirty-five minutes. He’ll have a four minute window in which to deploy. Then there’ll be another about forty minutes after that, but that orbiter won’t have old gen wall bots. It’s just a patrolling orbiter.”

“Thirty-five minutes, and then seventy-five minutes…”

“It’s bad, Your Majesty. I know. The air force doesn’t trail orbiters over the homeland that much.”

“I know…”

“The marines won’t know anything about the situation they’re going into, will they?” she asked.

“I didn’t tell them. What would you like me to say?”

She considered. “Nothing. I want to talk with whoever is in charge of the thirty-five minute orbiter.”

“Yes, ma’am. Here is the contact info.”

A chime in her phone indicated incoming information.

“Stay on the line,” she told him.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She examined the info. Captain Stephano was the CO aboard the HIMS Venezia. She called the number.

“This is Captain Stephano.”

“Captain. This is your queen.”

A pause. “How can I serve you, Your Majesty?”

“You’ve been redirected to pass over Porto Maná. I understand you’ll be ready to deploy in thirty-five minutes.”

“That’s correct, ma’am.”

“And you have old gen wall bots?’

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do your men know how to use them?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And what do you know of your assignment?”

“We’re to be ready to deploy onto the Capital Tower within our window, and await further instructions.”

“And here they are. There are enemy agents inside the Tower. It will be up to your men to apprehend them. Unfortunately, they have hostages, including my daughter.”

“I see.”

“High Exemplar Bishop informs me that you have nonlethal means of incapacitating targets.”

“Yes, ma’am. Our electric flechettes.”

“You’ll be using those. Under no circumstances are your men to kill anyone.”

She paused. Should she issue that order? This problem could be solved much more easily if she had a sniper shoot Sakhr before anyone came in. Then the marines wouldn’t need to do anything special. It was, after all, her refusal to kill him in the first place that allowed this to happen. Was the risk really worth the remote chance his power could be evolved further?

But then he wasn’t about to get out of Helena’s body either, and that she couldn’t kill.

“Anyone. Is that clear?

“Yes, ma’am. Don’t kill anyone.”

“This includes animals.”

“Animals, ma’am?”

“They took my tortoises out of their enclosures. And I don’t…” she sighed, knowing how ridiculous this sounded, “…I don’t want them hurt. They’re important to me.”

“Understood, ma’am. We’ll look out for the tortoises.” He sounded entirely professional about it too. Victoria would remember this man.

“And there’s another complication.” She thought about how to put this. “Your men cannot come into physical contact with anyone.”

“Ma’am?”

“One of the hostiles is using technology similar to that used by exemplars. They are capable of… compromising anyone they touch. Once compromised, the victim must be treated as a hostile. All of the hostages, including my daughter, have been compromised in this way.”

“If we can’t touch anyone, how are we supposed to apprehend them?”

“They require skin to skin contact. Make sure your marines are covered. Use your wall bots to section off the tower floors. Most of the hostages will not be able to compromise your men, and I can tell you which ones are dangerous and which are not, but I won’t be able to do that until the time comes. So I will need to be in contact with you and your men during the strike. Do you understand so far?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Will your deployment pods be capable of carrying away hostages after you’ve incapacitated them?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll arrange for those pods to deliver to a secure location, where everyone will be quarantined and kept separated until we can sort this out. This includes your men.”

“Understood.”

“And remember. You must treat the hostages as hostiles. Once compromised, they are effectively mind-controlled. Your men must be ready to incapacitate anyone I tell you to, even if its your own men.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Get your men ready. I’ll call you with more details soon.”

Victoria disconnected him. “Bishop? Did you get all that?”

“I did,” Bishop said.

“Then you heard about the need for quarantine. Make it happen.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Bishop stayed on on the line as he worked.

Victoria focused her mind back on Sakhr…

“It’s not going to work,” Sakhr said.

“You don’t know that,” Alex said. “This is the glyph maker machine.”

They watched as Quentin worked the console to the plaque assembler. He’d opened a saved file, which displayed a glyph on the screen. The only option was to send it to the assembler, which he’d pressed. The machine hummed. A progress screen was delayed.

“But the glyph will be useless,” Sakhr replied. “If you remember, she always had to finish the glyphs. Look.” He hit the back button, returning to the displayed glyph. Picking up the stylus, he doodled across the image. “See? It’s not done. She kept bringing us up here because she needed to see us before she finished it.”

“Okay,” Quentin said, “but it might not be entirely useless. Look at those. What the hell is going on inside there?” He peered through the glass as a robotic arm applied explosive gel to the back of the silicon glyph wafer. “There’s got to be something useful we can do with this.”

He didn’t recognize what the gel was for. Winnie would have to make sure they didn’t learn that from her. That meant not letting Alex look her in the eyes.

“What about these?” Christof was standing by three crates in the workshop room, the ones labeled as military property. “Military. Might be something good in here.”

“Let’s see.” Sakhr and Christof pried the lid of a crate. After they pulled away the side panels, packing peanuts flooded out. There was the same clunky machine Winnie had seen earlier that day. It seemed so long ago. In the light, she got a better idea of how it looked. It was like something teenagers might throw together in their garage. Its circuitry was housed inside what looked like a retrofitted footlocker. The reception pan stuck out side like an open car door. Every nut and bolt was plain to see.

“Quentin?” Sakhr asked. “Do you know what this is?”

Quentin looked it over. “It looks like an old assembler.”

“Do you know why it this would be military property?”

“No. It looks like it should be in a museum.” He tapped a tablet plugged into the device by USB. It lit. “It’s a modern tablet though, isn’t it.” He opened an app and paged through its menu.

“Is this something that can help us right now?” Sakhr asked.

“Probably not. It doesn’t look like it’s hooked up to the assembler cloud. Either it’s really old…”

He trailed off, frowning at a particular page. Then he grinned. “Oh my God. Seriously?”

“What?”

“It’s a fuser.” Excitedly, he skirted over the assembler until finding the footlocker circuit box. He popped it open and poked through.

“What’s it do?” asked Christof.

“It’s something I designed before Victoria put me in the zoo. It’s like an assembler, except better.”

“Better how?”

Quentin flipped a switch inside the box back and forth. Nothing happened. He left, fetched a power cable from a lamp in the other room, and returned. “So most assemblers work with micro-sems inside of them, right? Once they’ve constructed a molecule, they pass it along to macro-assembly.”

“Micro-sems?”

“Micro Assemblers. Look. How much do you know about microfield technolog—oh, right. Grandparents.” He stripped the power cable, exposing bare copper. “Okay. Assemblers work by having billions of tiny, tiny robots that work on individual molecules. Then they push them together or tear them apart to make other molecules. Then they pass them along to bigger robots who take those molecules and make bigger chunks. Who pass them on to bigger robots, and so on, until you have robots the size of your fist that put together the final product.” He patted the assembler’s reception bin. “Got it?”

“Okay.”

“This one is a little different. It does everything that other assemblers can do, except it also has robots that are so tiny, and so precise, that they can actually push atoms together to make different atoms.”

He attached the power cable to something inside the circuit box. “It makes the assembler a thousand times more useful. Take ordinary assemblers, right? They can make all sorts of things, literally out of thin air. It pulls its carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen from CO2 and humidity. Then it puts them together to make synthetic fabrics and foods and all sorts of stuff, but that’s it. If you want something made of iron or silicon, or any metal, you need to supply those elements to the assembler with little cartridges. This thing can make all those heavier elements from the same air. It doesn’t need anything.”

He plugged the other end of the cable into the wall. “The best part is this looks like it has a Stiller generator. Assemblers use ungodly amounts of power. This thing even more so, but it should be able to reclaim the power released whenever it pushes molecules together. It basically makes power out of humidity using the same principle that microfusion plants use. But the microassemblers in this fuse a lot more than just hydrogen. All this assembler needs…” He flipped the switch inside the circuit box again. This time, lights came. Cooling fans hummed. “…Is a little jump start.”

Quentin took up the tablet and got to work.

“If this thing is so wonderful, why is it locked in here?” asked Alex.

“Victoria is greedy,” replied Quentin. “She likes to hoard her technology. I’ll bet that even today, no market assembler can make another assembler. Even years after the war, she kept all the food-ready assemblers under contract-only release. Unauthorized use of one was a felony. And this?” Quentin tapped the machine. “She locked all my notes on fuser assemblers away. She didn’t want anyone making these. I’m surprised she built these.” He chuckled. “I’m surprised she figured out how without me. Her scientists aren’t much better than monkeys in lab coats. I made her business empire for her.”

“Can it help us?” asked Sakhr impatiently.

“I think so. It looks like it’s got a debug build of the designer. Shouldn’t need access to the assembler library. The downside? It doesn’t have access to the assembler library. I’ll have to design everything we use from scratch.”

“What can you make?”

“Anything simple.”

“Explosives?”

“Sure. I can make better ones now actually.”

“Then do that.”

Quentin got to work on the tablet. He glanced at the other two crates. “Are those other ones? You guys should probably get them booted. Did you all see what I did?”

No one responded.

“Of course not,” Quentin mumbled. “Hey. Telepath girl.”

Alex had been fiddling with his stolen sidearm. “Referring to me?”

“Eye contact right?” He stared Alex in the eye. “You can get the other machines going. Do you see what I need you to do?”

“I’m not seeing a ‘please’.”

“Alex,” Sakhr warned, “help him.”

Alex smiled winsomely at Sakhr. “Absolutely.”

44. Fault Detected

“And the orbiters are in position,” Bishop said.

Victoria nodded. “Good.”

They were now more prepared to capture Josephine when she did inevitably land. The old model wall bots those orbiters carried probably wouldn’t come up. The newer models could still deploy faster and without human interaction, but it was nice to have the alternative. Wherever Josephine landed, whether in open field or a covered building complex, the military would be ready.

Between all options at Victoria’s disposal, she couldn’t think of a way that Josephine could outwit her. Even with Tan and his erratic flying, Victoria had already won.

…or Victoria just hadn’t figured out what they were doing yet. Her mind was admittedly foggy. She glanced over at Willow. The hawk was sound asleep.

She really should do the same. Even if just to lay down for an hour, it would help. Nothing else was going on. Bishop would notify her the moment Josephine’s ship started descending, that’s if Victoria wasn’t already aware through her own constant tracking. More importantly, she couldn’t afford to be drowsy.

“I think, Bishop, I might actually turn in for a bit.”

“A good choice, Your Majesty. I will watch them. You’ll have your phone on you?”

“Yes. Regardless of whether they do something, I want you to wake me in…” She brought up her phone’s screen. There was the notification. She vaguely recalled it coming up before. Unlocking her phone, she read the message.

"Office terrarium 00:12, Nov 13^th 2055: Fault detected."

For a second, her mind couldn’t make sense of those words. It just puzzled them, even though she recognized it as a warning she’d typed long ago, for a threat she hadn’t considered in ages.

She snapped into focus. Her mind was in her office at the tower top. The lights were off, but she still saw the cage. The front was caved in. Marzipan was missing. Who? Who in the hell would have let him free?

The answer came immediately, and as much as she wanted to choke the life out Helena’s skinny little neck, this wasn’t the time. That notification came almost forty minutes ago. That’s a hell of a head start. Where would Sakhr go?

Her mind jumped to the conservatory reptile section. One dead tortoise was on the walkway. Several were missing from their enclosure.

Damn it all.

Her mind raced about.

The lobby. The grounds. The shuttle bay. The rooftop. The security suites. The elevators.

…

The elevators.

There they were.

“Your Majesty?” Bishop asked. “When should I wake you?”

She spun to Captain Gandara. “Shut down the elevators now.”

“In… this building, Your Majesty?”

“Now!”

Sakhr and all his fellow escapees were in the elevator sliding down the side of the Capital Tower. It stopped, smoothly and without any jarring, and then nothing. Sibyl pressed buttons. Still nothing.

Winnie’s relief was profound. Somewhere, someone had found out. If it wasn’t Victoria, she would know soon enough.

“Well, there you go,” Alex said. “What twenty more seconds would have gotten us.”

Sakhr grunted.

“We should probably get out of the elevator,” Christof said.

“Yes. Help me.” Sakhr handed Helena to Sibyl and pried at the elevator door. Christof joined, but it wouldn’t budge. Quentin shouldered to the button panel and opened a small compartment. He flicked a switch, and the doors popped. Sakhr and Christof easily slid them open.

“Did your power tell you that?” asked Christof.

“No. My rudimentary knowledge of elevators did. How come none of you knew?”

“I don’t remember elevators having switches like that.”

“All repulse elevators do. How long were you all in tortoises?”

“Long enough,” Sakhr’s tone ended the conversation. The elevator was stopped midway between two floors. One by one, each climbed out into an office hallway.

Sakhr led them to the stairs. He started heading down.

Christof hesitated. “They’re going to have people waiting for us.”

“They may, but they won’t hurt us. Not in these bodies.”

“But they can apprehend us.”

“They won’t come near me. Victoria knows I’d just swap bodies. Therefore, they can’t come near any of us.”

Alex spoke. “Perhaps you’re forgetting about the hazmat suits they wore when they put us in tortoises in the first place.”

“I’m not forgetting,” Sakhr replied testily, “but we don’t have a choice. If we stay here, we will encounter those hazmat suits again, but they only just shut down the elevators. That means they’ve only now realized we’re loose. Our best chance of escaping is if we move right now before she organizes. Now, come along.”

He resumed down the stairs. The others followed.

Six floors down, the stairwell ended on floor eight. Sakhr tried the door. It didn’t budge.

He turned to Quentin. “Do you know this building? Is there another stairwell?”

“Yeah, but it’ll end on this floor too. It’s the security floor. Everyone coming and going gets screened here.”

“Are the doors normally locked?”

Quentin shrugged. “I don’t know. I never used the stairs before, but I wouldn’t think so. Seems like a fire hazard.”

“Can we can break this down?”

Quentin’s eyebrows raised. “Does it look like you can?”

A mere glance at its steel frame was enough to answer that.

“What about any—”

“Who’s there?” a voice yelled through the door.

Sakhr yelled back. “This is Princess Helena. Is this door supposed to be locked?” His accent was less pronounced.

“Tower’s just gone into lockdown, Your Highness. I can’t let anyone through.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“Don’t know, but something. You should probably wait upstairs. It’ll be over soon.”

“But I need to get out now. Surely the lockdown doesn’t apply to me.”

“Sorry, ma’am, but the lockdown came from the queen herself. Nobody is passing, not even you.”

Sakhr glanced at the others. “Is my mother in the building?”

“She’s in the security headquarters downstairs.”

“Good to know,” Sakhr muttered. He looked at the corners of the stairwell ceiling. “Let’s assume her eyes are on us through every camera in the building.”

Winnie knew Victoria didn’t need cameras, but there was no reason to correct them.

“Quentin,” he continued, “are you sure there is no other way to the lower floors?”

“Nope. Each security floor has separate stairs and elevators. Everyone goes through the lobbies.”

“How many security floors are there?”

Quentin considered. “Just two, I think. This one, and the ground floor one.”

Christof spoke. “I remember when we first came here, we landed in some kind of garage on a higher floor.”

“The docking bay, yeah. Floor eight. That’s why security is on this floor, but now that I think about it, Victoria has a personal bay on the roof.”

“Is somebody with you?” said the voice through the door. Everyone ignored it.

“Will there be a ship we can use?”

“Maybe,” replied Quentin.

“Then let’s go.”

“Captain, is my personal hopper still on the roof?”

Victoria had already confirmed with her mind that it was, but not asking would raise questions. Winnie’s power was not public knowledge.

A guard seated at a security terminal pulled up a view of the roof. Captain Gandara peered over his shoulder. “Yes, it is, Your Majesty.”

“Is it possible for someone to steal it?”

He frowned. “I’m not sure, ma’am. Are there intruders inside the building?”

“Yes.”

“Then we should contact the police?”

“Just answer my question. Can someone steal it?”

“I’m, uh…” Gandara looked at the officer seated at the console. “Do you know?”

The officer answered. “Possibly, Your Majesty. If someone got inside, they could boot up the craft’s systems, but it won’t let them fly anywhere without the key fob.”

“Is such a key on the imperial floors?”

“Possibly, but even if they found one, they’d be restricted to grid travel unless they had remote clearance to use the engines.”

“And who can grant clearance?”

“That’s us, ma’am. We register all non-grid flights with the military and the Lakiran Airspace Division.”

“Is there anyway around that?”

“No, ma’am. Clearance has to come through us—me, actually.”

“Very well.” That answered that concern. If Sakhr managed to get inside, at least they couldn’t fly anywhere, unless they were dumb enough to try grid travel. Then she could have LAD flag that craft and keep it indefinitely suspended in the air until she was ready to deal with them. Too bad Quentin would know better.

All this imperial hopper business did was buy her time—time she should be using.

She grabbed her phone and strode from the communications room. In a closed office, she put it to her ear.

“Bishop?”

“I’m here, ma’am. What’s going on over there?”

“Sakhr is loose.”

“What? How?”

“I don’t know. We’ll sort it out later. This takes priority over Josephine.”

“Of course.”

“Right now they’re wasting time getting to my hopper. Where are the other high exemplars? Get them back here.”

“I’ll tell them, but they won’t get there for hours.”

“How are you so sure?”

“I checked when you asked earlier. Stone is in Argentina. Dosia left for Denver. Liat had to—”

“Forget it.” The timing of this unfortunate accident was infuriating. She envisioned Josephine’s craft floating miles above the Sahara. There might still be time for her afterward, but this came first.

“Get a swarm of wall bots surrounding the Capital Tower,” she said, “and have the orbiters change route. I want them over the tower as soon as possible.”

“For the old generation wall bots, ma’am?”

“Yes.”

“They’re already at full speed in the stratosphere. It might take time before any of them can redirect enough to get over the tower.”

“Well, do it. I’ll call you back.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She returned to the control room. The people there stood about.

“Captain,” she said. “The military will be deploying wall bots around the tower. No one will be coming or leaving. Inform whoever needs to know.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He jumped to the phone. His aura was tense and confused. She could sense how badly he wanted to ask what this was all about. Too bad for him, there was no need for him to know about Sakhr. She visualized the stairwell once again.

The group stumbled onto the roof of the Capital Tower. The sky was a dark, mud brown—polluted from city lights occupying the horizon. A steel canopy overhung the landing pad, hiding most of the sky from them. It left the roof in near shadow. Only white light from the open stairwell door outlined the hulking shadow of the queen’s personal hopper. It lay straight ahead on a raised platform. Winnie had to rely on her flair to see it in this dark. Tortoise eyes were awful.

Sakhr and Alex breathed heavily, but they were better off compared to the others. Sibyl came up clutching the handle rail with white knuckles. Quentin and Christof came moments later supporting each other. Christof had the other tortoise tucked in his shirt.

“You took your time,” Alex said.

“You’re the ones who put me in a fat-ass,” Quentin replied, wheezing, “…leave yourselves in the teenage coeds.”

“Enough.” Sakhr pointed to the ship. “Can we escape in this?”

“We need to get inside first.”

Everyone paused before the hopper. Sakhr slid his hand along the surface, feeling for something. Alex did the same farther along, so did Sibyl on the other side.

“How do you…” asked Sakhr. “Where’s the handle?”

“Are you serious?” Quentin disentangled himself from Christof, reached under the frame, and squeezed a release hatch. The shuttle yawned open. “You guys are incredible.”

It was strange for Winnie to be back here again tonight, under such incredibly different circumstances. Her own body even took the same seat as before. Only now she was sitting its lap.

Quentin and Sakhr got in the cockpit. “Are you a pilot?” Sakhr asked.

“I know the theory.” Quentin pressed a prominent button, and the cockpit lit up. A dashboard touch screen showed several options. Quentin tried to access a menuscreen named Autonav. Each time it prompted him to select a flight plan from a list, but the displayed list was empty. “Hmm.”

“Can we fly?” asked Sakhr.

“Maybe not.”

“But on the other menu, it said ‘pick destination’.”

“That was Telenav. We don’t want that.”

“What’s telenav?”

“Telenav is the grid system. The repulse nodes through the city would fly us instead of the ship’s own repulse engines.”

“What’s wrong with that? We just need to get off this tower.”

Quentin took a calming breath. “Except that they know we’re escaping. If we use Telenav, they can override our destination remotely and put us anywhere they want. Including right back on this tower.”

“Can you hotwire it somehow?”

Quentin turned to him. “Does this ship look like a Ford pickup? Maybe if we pop it into neutral and push it off the tower, the momentum will get the engines started before we hit the ground.”

“So that’s a no…”

Alex called from the back. “Did we just waste our time coming up here?”

“Have any other ideas?” Sakhr asked Quentin.

“Hey, why is this all on me? It’s not like I had time to think this out. I didn’t even know I’d be escaping today.”

“We let you out because Alex thought you could help us. Now can you, or not? We can always give your body to him.” Sakhr pointed to the mystery tortoise in Christof’s lap. “Perhaps he’ll have a better plan.”

“Jesus Christ, guys. I don’t hear any of you suggesting anything.”

Christof intervened before Sakhr could respond. “We don’t know this world like you do. Repulsers, Telenav systems… That all means nothing to us. We would have used the Telenav system if you hadn’t warned us. That’s if we weren’t still outside looking for the handle. We need you. That is why we’re turning to you.”

“Okay. Fine.” Quentin sighed. “Let’s head back down a floor. I think I’ve got an idea.”

“Then let’s go.” Sakhr stood.

Everyone headed downstairs. One floor down was Victoria’s personal suite. This brought them into her foyer, near the office containing the terrarium that started this whole mess. Sakhr gave it a lingering glance as they passed by.

“You do have an idea, yes?” he asked.

“Yes, yes.” Quentin led them to a pair of assemblers installed in the wall outside the kitchen. “Yesss. This is what I hoped for.” He brought the first out of standby and paged through the menu. “Perfect.”

“What is this?” asked Sakhr. “Some kind of computer?”

“It’s an assembler.”

“Like a 3D printer?” asked Christof.

This caused Quentin to gape at him. “Good God. You’re all a bunch of grandparents, aren’t you?”

“Will you just focus?” Sakhr replied shortly. “What can you do with this?”

“A lot.”

“Can you make weapons?” Alex asked.

“We can’t make a gun if that’s what your asking, but a lot of things can be weapons with a little knowhow. Maybe we can blow open those security doors.”

He queued a few chemicals from the Home Improvement section, then moved to the other assembler. Here he picked items from the Hobbies section, then navigated to a list of all connected assemblers nearby.

“All right. I’ve got these machines going. Looks like there are a few others downstairs. I’ll just send some items to those aaand… that should be it. Give it about ten minutes and we should have ourselves some decent grenades.”

43. All Wrong

Winnie’s first thought was that she’d somehow been transported underground. She could hear voices, but they were muffled, as though something were covering her ears. Worse, something was covering her entire body—dirt, or some kind of pebbly rubble. Perhaps the ceiling had collapsed; there was something heavy resting on her back.

She could move, kind of, but it felt wrong. Her limbs felt swollen and stiff. They must be numb since she couldn’t feel her hands, fingers, or feet. Had they been crushed?

Panicked, she tried to remain motionless. Moving her crushed limbs would make them worse. Why didn’t she feel any pain? Was she in shock? Maybe. She felt cold, yet her surroundings felt warm. Was this blood loss? Was her body shutting down?

Winnie tried to scream—in distress, in pain, in fear. All that came from her mouth was a pitiful wail that sounded wrong. She couldn’t make words; her tongue felt swollen. And her teeth… were missing? Everything about her mouth was wrong. Everything about her body was wrong.

She screamed again. Again, the same raspy wail. This time, she didn’t stop.

Her inertia shifted; she was moving. Then something indistinct was before her, hardly visible in the dark. She screamed again. It came closer. It wasn’t human. Was it a ship? Someone in an armored suit? No. It was… a hand? A giant hand?

It flicked her on the face.

“Shut up, you. We’re talking.”

The hand floated away. Winnie followed it with her eyes. It was attached to a giant human, one that was holding her.

And then she understood.

She wasn’t buried underground.

She was being held by a human.

…a human that looked identical to her.

Winnie closed her eyes. Concentrating on her power, she visualized herself.

She was a tortoise.

She screamed all over again. In her mind, she saw her tortoise-self make the same little yelping gasps Marzipan had been making. It was pitiful. No one would ever know what she was trying to convey. This was a terrible dream, or a bad trip. Even her mind felt broken and sluggish.

A part of her was aware of her bladder releasing.

“Oh, hell,” her human body said. It shuffled her from hand to hand as it shook off urine. It looked her in the eye again. It’s expression was alien to Winnie, as though she’d seen the face a million times, and now it didn’t look like a face anymore. It took her time to realize it was sneering.

“Tell me we don’t have to take these shits with us.” Winnie’s tortoise ears could hardly make sense of his words. It was only through her power that she could understand him.

“No,” said Helena, or whoever was occupying her body, “We can leave them. This one though.” The Helena impostor stepped over the enclosure and picked up Marzipan, or rather the real Helena. Everything was starting to make terrible sense. “This is Victoria’s daughter. We will take her with us.”

Winnie’s body put Winnie on the ground. Winnie tried to stand, but failed.

“Hold it.” This was the caretaker. “That one has a power.”

“This one?” A foot rested on Winnie, keeping her pinned.

“Yes. It has awareness of all that it chooses to notice, at least that’s my best guess.”

“Anything?”

“In the present physical world, yes.”

“Then Victoria will no doubt consider her valuable.” Helena’s imposter faced Winnie’s imposter. “Alex, hold on to her. Christof, are there any other powers here?”

“Three that I see,” the caretaker replied. “Sibyl is over there. And there and there are two others.”

“Point them out. We’re taking them with us.”

“Why?” replied Winnie’s impostor, apparently Alex. “If we walk out of here with an armload of tortoises, we might draw some attention.”

“Victoria locked them in here just like she did us. They could be allies. And we need to know their powers. Anything they can do, she can do. Come.”

Alex picked Winnie up. They walked to the other enclosures. The one called Christof stopped before one. “Here is Sibyl.”

“Damnit,” the Helena impostor muttered.

Alex burst out laughing.

Winnie saw in her mind what was wrong. The tortoise was humongous. So much so that any one of them could climb on its shell. It’s plaque said it was a Galapagos tortoise.

“Oh my God,” Alex said. “She’s still a fat-ass.” He stooped to look the tortoise in the eye. It gazed back. “Oh. Oh my. They had to put her on a diet… because she was gaining weight.”

“Take this seriously,” impostor Helena said.

“Should we swap her with one of the other tortoises?” Christof asked.

“We’ll have to.”

“Or,” Alex regained his composure, “we leave her, because she’s deadweight. Heavy deadweight.”

“We are not leaving her behind,” impostor Helena said. “Or any of the powers.”

“We can’t have much time. Any minute she could figure out we’ve escaped. We can’t go saving everyone.”

“Would you rather I have left you?”

“I am useful. Sibyl is not.”

“We are not leaving anyone behind. You might not realize this, but Victoria is the queen of the world now.”

“What?” Christof said.

“Of course I know that,” Alex replied.

“Then you will realize that escaping is just the beginning of our problems. She will hound us to the ends of the earth. We need allies. We need to work together.”

“Hold on,” Christof said. “She’s the queen? Of the world?”

The Helena impostor hushed him. A white flashlight beam danced from behind the trees and shrubs. Winnie could see who it was long before they could. Two guards were approaching. She recognized one from the night before.

“How many?” Helena impostor peered toward the light? “Is it two?”

“Yes. Two,” answered Christof. “Do we hide?”

“No. They must know we’re here. But this is good. Alex, you can read tortoise minds, right?”

“Did you miss just now when I read Sibyl’s?”

“Go with Christof. Figure out which of the other two will most likely help us and bring them. Go. Be quick!”

Christof hid the tortoise in his hands behind the enclosure. Alex did the same with Winnie. They hurried off toward the other enclosures. As the guards approached, the Helena impostor likewise put Helena out of view with the others. Winnie knew what was about to happen, the impostor would need her hands free, because she was about to steal those guard’s bodies.

This was a nightmare. No, it was worse, because no matter how foggy or slow Winnie’s mind was working, she couldn’t wake up from this. It was reality, and it was all because of her. She had cracked Marzipan’s cage. She had invited that impostor to come down here, where all these other prisoners were. And now these guards would suffer too.

But right now, she couldn’t think about that. Her captors had put her down, and they were preoccupied with the coming guards. If there was ever a chance to escape, it was now. It wasn’t just a matter of saving herself and Helena, is was about not letting herself become a pawn.

These people had been the queen’s prisoners once. They clearly still feared her. She would have all of their powers on that necklace of hers. That meant she could swap bodies. Why had she never told anyone about that? …well, there were probably a thousand reasons why not, but Winnie didn’t ponder them right now. What was important was that Victoria had the power fix all of this.

If Winnie could get away, then she couldn’t be used against Victoria. It was all she could do, but it would help.

It was time to figure out how to be tortoise.

Winnie concentrated on her new body. Her limbs felt like stumped clubs. She tried setting them on the ground and lifting. No matter how much she tried, she couldn’t get her legs beneath her. It had to be possible though.

She looked at herself with her mind and saw a tortoise trying to do ballet with its legs bunched up beneath it. Of course that was wrong. Tortoises walked with their legs out to the side. She tried it. The stumps of her new limbs pressed flat against the ground. She felt like a bow-legged cowboy, but it worked. Concentrating, she put one foot in front of the other. It was progress. Up ahead, she could see the shrubs along the side of the walkway. If she disappeared into that, then maybe she could hide from her captors.

Then a tortoise cried from behind her. Glancing with her mind, she saw Helena struggling to catch up. She was doing the same ballet leg bunching Winnie was doing. Close behind her was the caretaker. He’d figured out how to stand and was looking from Winnie to Helena. He couldn’t possibly know what was going on, but he seemed more in control that Helena.

It was excruciating waiting for Helena to catch up, but Winnie did so. She kept her mental eye on the humans.

The guards came close. The one with a flashlight was potbellied. He aimed the light at the impostor.

She shielded her eyes. “Hello?”

“Your Highness? Are we going to go through this again?”

The potbellied guard heard Alex and Christof mucking about at the other enclosures. He shined his light. “Who’s over there?”

The others approached. Alex carried a tortoise.

“You’re taking them out for a stroll this time, I see.” The guard focused on Christof, who was in the caretaker’s body. “Did you let them in here?”

“I did,” Christof replied.

“This couldn’t wait until morning? This place is supposed to be off limits at this hour.”

“Nevermind that,” Alex said. “Look at this little guy. Here.” He held the tortoise out toward the guard with the flashlight.

“I don’t want to—”

Helena grabbed his hand and slapped it onto the tortoise’s back.

A shiver passed through all of them. The guard collapsed. “Wooaah,” he yelled. “Woah woah woah. What? What the fuck?”

The other guard reached for his sidearm, but Alex, Christof, and the Helena impostor swarmed him. Each grabbed an arm and wrestled him into the pen with the galapagos tortoise.

“What. Hey?” The struggling guard fought against the others, but his legs caught on the low enclosure wall and he tumbled backward next to the giant animal. The Helena impostor placed a hand on both. Another shiver.

The giant tortoise wailed and thrashed. The Helena impostor and the others quickly got out of the enclosure.

Compared to the flashlight guard. Whoever took this person’s body was much more calm. They looked about wildly, then settled their gaze on the Helena impostor. “Sakhr?”

“Yes, it’s me,” the Helena impostor said.

She looked about at the other two. “Alexander? Christof?”

“That’s right,” Christof said.

Winnie’s mind caught on that. Alex was short for Alexander? There was a man in her body? That was such a worse violation than before. What would that man do with it? If Winnie got her body back, would it ever feel clean again? She tried not to dwell on it. Helena had finally figured out how to walk like a tortoise. She caught up with Winnie, and together with the caretaker, they hiked into the shrubs. Winnie led the way.

“How did you escape,” the guard asked. They’d called him Sibyl, right? That was a woman’s name.

“It’s a long story,” Sakhr said.

“Yes,” Alex said. “And quick question. Am I drunk?”

“Yes. We both are.”

“Ah. I see.” Alexander took the sidearm from the one called Sibyl. She didn’t seem to notice. He pondered for a moment how to holster it on the dress Winnie had been wearing, then made do with tucking it down down Winnie’s cleavage. It hung out of the dress awkwardly, but stayed put.

“Excuse me!” This yell came from behind them. The guard who’d held the flashlight was still sitting on the ground. Beside him lay the tortoise Alexander had carried. In the struggle, it had dropped onto the walkway. Its shell cracked open. Red flesh glistened within. Blood seeped. The wails it made were pitiful. Winnie had only been a tortoise for minutes, but she already understood its pain—like having her nails crack and fall off, exposing the nail bed, only for her entire back. Whoever was inside that tortoise was going to die, slowly and miserably.

She could only plod onward.

The impostors turned their attention to the guard sitting down.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “I’m free?”

“In a matter of speaking,” replied Sakhr.

“You freed me?”

“I got you out of the tortoise, yes.”

“Is Victoria dead? Are you the queen now?”

“No. This is a jailbreak. I have released you because we believe you might be of help to us in getting free.”

“Free?” said the man. “What are you escaping from?”

Alex chimed in. “He thinks you’re the queen’s daughter.”

“I am not,” Sakhr corrected. “I took this body for myself, just as I gave you that body.”

The man blinked, then glanced down at himself. “What the hell? Who the hell am I? Who’s body is this?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s fat. I wasn’t fat. Where’s my body?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. We don’t have time to get you another body right now. We are currently inside—”

“Will we get my body back?”

“Listen. The only reason we got you out is because my friend here thinks you can help us escape,” Sakhr gestured to Alex, “but if you’re going complain, we can put you back in the tortoise and leave you. Understand?”

The man looked at the broken tortoise beside him. It didn’t move much anymore.

“Yeah. Okay. I get it,” the man said, “but we will deal with this later, right? This isn’t my body forever now. Maybe we’ll find mine?”

Sibyl spoke. “And do you think maybe I could get a woman’s body? I don’t want to be a man.”

Sakhr held his palms up. “Later, everyone. Right now, I want to know who you are.” He looked at the other man.

“I’m Quentin Avery.”

“Do you have a power?”

“A what?”

“Yes, he does,” answered Christof. “Some kind of understanding of the world around him.”

“He has an extra sense?”

Christof shook his head. “No. It’s… understanding, not knowledge or awareness. He intuits the natural world.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Quentin asked.

Sakhr studied him. “Your power. Your… flair, I suppose. You do know about it, don’t you?”

“Flairs? You mean those magic things? No. I don’t have a flair.”

“Katherine never told him,” Alex said, “but he’s an inventor. This is the guy who developed repulser technology. He didn’t have to work very hard at it either. Hey,” he snapped his finger at Quentin. “Look at me.”

Quentin gave him a scrunched look. Alex gazed back as though reading small font.

He was reading Quentin’s mind, without a glyph. That made him the original mind reader, not Bishop as Victoria had let Winnie believe. All of these people were the original flairs, and they hadn’t been Victoria’s loyal exemplars, but her captives. That meant Winnie and Sara the shield girl were the only two flairs who weren’t prisoners. Winnie didn’t have time to dwell on the implications of that either. Right now, she needed to escape.

She, Helena, and the caretaker were well off the path, but they weren’t hidden yet. She’d already found a spot beneath a hedge where they could hide. Its underneath was a pocket that a human would have a hard time reaching into. If nothing else, it would stall these impostors and buy Victoria more time to find out about this. If Victoria set all this right, Winnie would never, ever, ever do anything disobedient again.

Alex was still scrutinizing Quentin’s eyes. “Yeah. Science. That’s his power, and he definitely didn’t get it from studying. Katherine kept him in the dark on purpose.”

“What the hell are you all talking about?” said Quentin. “Who’s Katherine.”

“You know her as Victoria,” Sakhr said. “You have a supernatural power. She knew about it, but she never told you.”

“What? How the hell could you know?”

“Because we too have powers. I can swap bodies with others. Alexander here can read minds. Christof can see your power directly. Sibyl is an empath. You, it seems, have a supernatural understanding of the sciences.”

“Uh, or I’m… you know, intelligent.”

“Perhaps. We’ll discuss it later. Only one question matters now. Victoria locked us into these animals and kept us like pets. I don’t know how long I’ve been her captive, but now that I’m out, I will make her pay for what she did to me, and ensure she can never threaten me again.” He stared fixedly at Quentin. “I don’t know you. I don’t know what your relationship with her was or why she locked you away like us. All I care about is this: Will you help me destroy her?”

A smile spread over Quentin’s face. “Yeah. Yeah. I’ll help you. Let’s kill the bitch.”

“Excellent.” Sakhr turned to Christof. “The other tortoise. Does he have useful powers?”

“Very useful,” Christof replied.

“Unfortunately,” Alex said, “he won’t help us.”

“Why not?”

“He’ll be a liability. Trust me.”

“Hmm. Get him anyway.” He scanned the ground. Winnie could tell he was looking for her and the others. Fortunately, they were just now entering the hidden pocket beneath the shrub.

“Sibyl?” Sakhr said. “There are three people hiding from us. Where are they?”

Sibyl didn’t even have to to think. She pointed, through the leaves and bushes, directly at Winnie. “Are you talking about them over there?” she asked. “They crawled away when they thought no one was looking.”

Winnie’s heart sank. Of course the empath would see her. Winnie’s great escape amounted to nothing. The imposters reached the bush before Winnie could even consider running farther.

She wasn’t going to go peacefully though. She oriented herself toward them and prepared.

Christof and Sibyl knelt and reached for them. Winnie snapped her jaw. Christof whipped his hand away.

“Damn,” he said. “They’re fighting.”

Winnie tasted blood. It was the caretaker’s body. Hopefully he’d be okay with that once he got his body back.

Sibyl reached from the other side and snatched Helena. Helena thrashed and snapped, but it didn’t help. The caretaker had his jaw ready, but Christof caught him from behind too, giving him no chance to fight back. Only Winnie was left, but they wouldn’t sneak up on her. Her power let her see their approach. Christof got down on his belly and reached in from two sides. Winnie whipped her head back and forth to face both hands, her jaw ready to clamp.

He reached with his left, she snapped, then he latched his right onto her shell. With leverage, he kept her from turning as he got a steady hold of her and pulled her out. He peered at her at eye level. “That wasn’t nice,” he said.

Back with the others, Sakhr took Helena from Sibyl.

“What about these two?” asked Christof.

“Leave them.”

“But this one has powers.”

“Oh, right.” He considered. “Then yes. Bring it.”

“What’s the plan?” asked Alex.

“Simple,” said Sakhr. “No one knows that we’re out yet, but we’re still not free. As far as anyone else can tell, I’m the queen’s daughter and you’re all with me. We walk out the front door.”

41. Time to be Kings

2038, June 8^th
Collapse – 11 years

“Time to be kings,” Alexander said.

Time indeed, Sakhr thought. Having a tower halt everything to greet him was not a pleasure he had ever had before. Money had never been a problem, but this was a life money couldn’t buy. This required fame, something Sakhr had arduously avoided until now.

A small woman approached. She was olive-skinned—a common color here.

“Greetings. My name is Madeline. I’m Victoria’s assistant coordinator. Are you Sakhr?” Her aura was nervous, self-conscious. It put Sakhr at ease.

“I am.”

“And you must be…”

“Alexander.” He bowed.

She greeted Sibyl and Christof, then turned back to Sakhr. “If you will please follow me. I will take you to Victoria.”

She led them to a conference room on the fifty-fifth floor. It had an office feel, complete with a conference phone and a projector at one end with a cable for a computer to connect to. It wasn’t quite what Sakhr was expecting. After preparing them drinks, Madeline assured them Victoria would be right with them, and she left.

They took seats and waited. After Madeline’s aura disappeared off the edge of Sakhr’s Empathy, he realized that no one else was around. No one at all. He knew the building was still under construction, but certainly there would be someone nearby. Or was this building mostly abandoned? Why meet here then?

He sensed her approach long before she entered the room. Four auras came up the elevator. One he recognized as Madeline. She split off once they were on the same floor. The other three approached. Hers was easy to identify. It bled arrogance.

He figured it would, but sensing it didn’t ease him. She would be difficult to work with. There would be many disagreements between her and Sakhr. It wouldn’t take long before one of those disagreements became an irreconcilable problem.

Two auras waited outside.

Victoria entered. She was every bit as beautiful as the news made her out to be. Sakhr didn’t know why, but that put him more ill at ease.

“I’m glad to finally meet you in person,” he said.

She settled into a chair at the head of the table. “Likewise.”

“Are those your guards outside the door?”

“They are.”

“One might think you don’t trust us,” Alex said.

Sakhr cast him a glare.

Victoria replied calmly. “If I felt threatened by you, they would be waiting inside the room with us. They’re for everyone else. In the past decade, I’ve made quite an impact on the local region through LakiraLabs. I’ve brought a lot of jobs and aid to the community. The place has been thriving like it never has before. I’m sure you’ve heard the news refer to me as the baroness of South America. I’m not sure I’d go that far. Unfortunately, not everyone sees my impact as a positive thing. Many see me as a unwelcome capitalistic influence.”

“I can imagine,” Sakhr said. “We passed through Brazil once decades ago, during the first Cold War. It was not a time to be making ripples. I can’t imagine it’s much different now.”

“South America is not as involved as it was before, but it still faces political troubles.”

“It leaves the question,” Sakhr asked. “Why relocate your company’s headquarters here? Why leave the US at all?”

“It’s certainly brought its hassles, but it’s was worth it. The burden of the United States’ latest laws and regulations had been hindering our progress. LakiraLabs already outsourced labor to Brazil and Venezuela. Moving here put us closer to our operations. And I’ve had an easier time shaping the law to my needs. The South American governments are more amenable to my money.”

“When they’re not threatening your life,” Sakhr added.

“Most of that threat actually comes from outside parties. My influence over labor laws here has negatively impacted the bottom line of many American corporations that outsource here. They pressure the US government, who in turn pressure the South American governments to put a stop to my growth. My most dangerous detractor, if you’ll believe it, has been a banana company that exports from here. I’ve caught them working with drug cartels to raise hell on my territory. So far, no government is willing to acknowledge this. Then there are the Russians denouncing me as a capitalistic exploiter. They fund rebel groups in the region. Frankly, if it weren’t for my edge, I would have failed a while ago.”

“Your edge being the powers you’ve stolen from us, right?” Alex said.

“I merely copied, but yes, with yours and others’ powers.”

“And when exactly did you copy our powers?” Alex said. “I’m sure Sakhr merely forgot to tell me.”

“Several months ago.”

“Funny. You only been in contact with us for three weeks.”

“Alexander…” Sakhr warned.

“It’s quite all right. I’m a careful woman. I observed your group as a matter of my own safety. I’ve had bad experiences when reaching out to other such flairs.”

“Others?” Christof perked up. “What other powers have you discovered?”

“A few. Years back, I found a man named Quentin Avery. He has a power which gives him a fundamental understanding of our world’s physical properties. He works with a team of my scientists out of a think tank in Virginia.”

“I see,” Sakhr said. “Hence your repulser field.”

“Hence all of our technologies which have put LakiraLabs decades ahead of its time. Not only do I have Quentin, but with my ability to write glyphs, I’ve hidden glyphs inside the ID badges of all of LakiraLabs scientists, allowing them to be better at their jobs.”

“Very clever,” Sakhr replied, “but why are you hiding the glyphs from your own people? When you first contacted me, you expressed the desire for us to come out of the shadows.”

“Which,” Alex interjected, “not all of us are on board with.”

Both Victoria and Sakhr ignored him.

“I do intend for that, but not on a wholesale level. Flairs are my edge. If I were to reveal that edge, others would try to gain it. I plan to keep both flairs and my technological advantage until I’m done expanding my domain. Only then will I reveal the powers, and only in a manner I can control.”

This constant use of the singular I bothered Sakhr, as was the way she wouldn’t look any of them in the eye. “How much do you intend expand your domain?” he asked.

“As much as possible.”

“So…” Alex said. “You want to conquer the world?”

“Yes.”

Alex laughed. “Wow. You’re for real. You actually think that, don’t you?”

“With the tactical use of your flairs, I can.”

“Of course you can. We could have done that any time we wanted. Maybe you don’t know about Sakhr’s power, but he could be president of the United States by tomorrow. Each one of us could be a world leader.”

“It’s not the same. You would be the world’s figureheads, but you wouldn’t rule it. You’d have to hide behind the bodies you puppeteer.”

“So it’s about arrogance then?”

“No. What I mean is you could not change things the way they are. You’d have the power of the presidents, but that’s it. That power if far from absolute. They have congress’s to appease and elections to run. They cannot change the world with their will, but must compromise with everything they do. Even if you surpassed that obstacle, you could only change the world so much. Your coven does not have real power, not yet.”

“We could stop the cold war resurgence tomorrow if we wanted,” Alex said.

“You could,” she agreed. “Why haven’t you?”

“Because it’s not our concern. I don’t care about saving the world. I care about living in it the way I choose.”

“Does he speak for all of you?” Victoria glanced around. “You don’t care about the world?”

“Of course we care,” Sakhr said. “We live in it, but by taking over important people, we would risk exposing ourselves.”

“And so you choose to stand by and hope that the world fixes itself? Even when you could correct it?”

“We could alleviate the situation between the world’s superpowers for a time,” Sakhr said, “but as you point out, our power would be limited. The amount of effort it would take to wrest the countries out of their own madness would be monumental.”

“Of course it would,” Victoria said, “but I haven’t failed yet, not significantly so.”

“So what then?” Alex said. “You’re going to fix the world? Listen. You’ve only been on this planet a few decades. We’ve been here for centuries. We’ve—”

“And yet you are all exactly where you have always been,” Victoria said. “A group of nomadic travelers who steal what they want and run at the first sign of trouble.”

“Do not accuse us of cowardice, Victoria,” Sakhr said.

“I’m not. I’m accusing you of wasting your potential. I, on the other hand, have worked for fifteen years toward this goal. I own countless tracts of land across South and Central America as well as other parts of the world. My control over the regional politics is near absolute. I’ve made a small business into a dominant international empire using technologies I’ve developed and brought to market—technologies that have shaped every corner of this planet.”

Sakhr was silent. This conversation was going in a direction he hadn’t predicted. She was acting different then the few other times he’d spoken to her. He wondered if Alex had been right. Answering her call may have been a mistake, regardless of any risk from ignoring her.

Alex argued on. “That’s fantastic for you. We don’t want to run businesses and governments. We’re content as we are.”

“No. You’re complacent. You’ve wasted these powerful gifts on worthless indulgence.”

“Oh right,” Alex gestured to the room. “None of this is indulgent. Your own personal tower. Making yourself baroness of the region. Perfectly frugal.”

“Unlike you, I am accomplishing something. I am using my gift to its fullest potential, as well as all other powers I encounter. I explore them, figure out out how they work, what I can make them do. And then I use those powers to accomplish great things. You are content to accept your station in life. I have never stopped asking questions.”

With that remark, Sakhr knew.

An echo of a memory flew into his mind like a key and unlocked the full picture. In one singular moment, every gap filled in. Every question was answered. He understood what she was doing, why he was here, and why none of this felt right. It all made hideous sense.

The other’s kept arguing, yet their voices came to him from miles away. Sakhr reflected on the fatal mistake he’d made. Though his features hid his revelation, he knew Victoria could see his aura. Her own swelled exultantly, even while answering another inane remark of Alex’s. She knew he knew.

What could he do? What could he possibly do that she hadn’t already considered? The trap was sprung hours ago, and the cat was playing with it’s food. If he ran, the guards were beyond the door—guards who’s bodies he knew he wouldn’t be able to steal; he was certain she’d thought of that. Could he leap to his death? He was over fifty floors up. As long as he could shatter the window, he might save himself from whatever fate she had for him, but he couldn’t. After centuries of wandering, never had he realized more than right now how much he wanted to live.

“I’m sure,” Alex said, completely oblivious, “You’re amazingly proud of yourself. I never doubted that for a minute. But you still don’t get it. We don’t care. Why bother ruling the world at all? Apart from the appeal to megalomaniacs such as yourself, that kind of power doesn’t give us anything we don’t already have.”

“It’s about making a difference.”

More auras were coming up the elevator. These ones were tense, ready for combat. The ruse would be up soon.

“Oh, so you’re a humanitarian then,” Alex replied. “You’re pretty damn naive if you think you’ll amount to any positive change in the world. I’ve been around a lot longer than you, woman. I’ve seen a dozen dictators spout words just like yours. You’re just—”

“Alex,” snapped Sakhr.

Alex looked at him, already sneering for what he thought was Sakhr coming down on her side. But then he saw into Sakhr’s eyes, and it came together. He startled to his feet, his chair clattering over, as though he’d finally seen the gun pointed at his head this whole time.

“What?” Christof said. “What’s going on?”

Sibyl was frozen like a mouse.

“No, Alexander,” Victoria said. “You do not know patience. In your centuries of life, you have never spent more than a year working toward any endeavor. I, however, have been working towards a goal ever since a very singular event happened to me. You might recall when. It was around same time that all of you found a particular girl in an airport. You took her in. You told her she was special. You treated her like a friend, and when you found out that she could pose a threat to you, you broke into her home and murdered her and her father.”

“…Katherine?” The word came from Christof.

Alexander looked around wildly, frantic for a course of action. It didn’t matter. That girl wouldn’t reveal herself unless there was nothing he could do. Sakhr wanted to try, maybe get to the door, or attack the woman, but his logic told him it would only amount to an undignified struggle—a wild animal fighting against its net.

Victoria kept talking. “You might remember that girl had the ability to copy other powers once she understood them well enough. The first power she took was yours, Alex. It made discovering the secrets to the others easier for her.” She looked at Sakhr. “Do you remember what you thought before giving her to Alex to murder? What a shame. You looked her in the eye when you thought that.”

Alex charged Victoria. Something stopped him. Sakhr felt a burst of air against his face. An unseen wall divided the room—a repulse field. It was probably on even before she entered. Not a single chance taken.

Alex tried to push through it. As though pressing repulsing magnets together, his hands kept veering off to either side. Wind burst each time.

Victoria sat peacefully on her side. “That girl’s story ended that night. But there was a fly that landed on her body before she died, no doubt attracted to the blood. The story of that fly is dull. It flew about aimlessly for hours afterward, until sheer chance would have it land on the arm of a boy who watched as police carried bodies from his neighbor’s house. His story is more interesting. Days later, he ran away from home, only to turn up in a week, behaving just like a dog. Tragic.”

Everyone but Victoria and Sakhr was out of their chairs. Christof and Sibyl both wasted time testing the repulse field. Alex was trying to force open the door to the hall. There was no point. If Sakhr was going to escape, it would not come from scratching the cage’s walls. Victoria would need someone to grab him for whatever she had planned. That would be those auras coming toward the door. That might be a chance. If he could manage to swap bodies, he’d have a chance. To hell with the others.

Or perhaps he could bargain. He could capitulate to her, help her take the others while he served. God, how he would detest serving this little girl, but he could do it, for centuries if he needed. Alex might not know patience, but he did. So long as he didn’t die here.

“There are other stories like that boy’s,” Victoria said, “stories of more important people: business men and politicians. They might encounter a friendly cat or a bird, and their behavior changes wildly. They’d make make drastic changes to their finances, only to break down one day and believe themselves to be animals.” She held out her hands to present herself. “I am the victim of this pattern as well. Me, Victoria Palladino. As an adolescent. I was a bubbly, over-privileged child drifting through her education like a unmanned vessel. I was to inherit my father’s tech company, but I didn’t have shred of ambition. That all changed one day when a bird collided with my pet dog while I was walking on the Princeton campus. My dog acted most peculiarly the rest of the day. Especially that night, when it attacked me as though I were an impostor. The poor thing had to be put down, and I’ve never been the same since.”

No one was listening to her. Christof had joined Alex in breaking down the door. It might as well have been made from brick. Sibyl was weeping in the corner. Her comfort threshold had been crossed. She would be useless now.

“That was the summer I found my drive. I became a woman who deserved the company she would inherit. The only person to ever question this change was my father. He sensed I wasn’t quite the little girl he’d raised. It unfortunately caused a rift in our relationship. Not that it matters now. He had a mental break himself. He lives in Silverside Sanitorium now, though I’m sure he’d be proud of my success. You see, Sakhr, when one is as gifted as we are, it’s amazing how much we can accomplish if only we have the proper drive.”

“Will you shut up, you little bitch,” Alexander said.

The doors burst open. Men poured in, all in hazmat suits and wielding stun batons. One shocked Alex before he could react. Christof rushed them, only to drop when one buried their baton in his chest. Sibyl cowered at their approach. They stunned her anyway.

Then they turned to Sakhr, and his dignity was gone. He was poised like a feral cat. Pouncing, he pulled at masks and tore at fabric, trying desperately to expose any skin.

The batons reached him first. His body failed. On the ground now, he kicked and screamed as they piled onto him, but it was too little, and much too late. With his face pressed against the carpet, he could see the feet of the others as they dragged Alexander, Christof, and Sibyl from the room. It was just him and the people holding him down… and her.

“Put him on the table,” Victoria said. The men dragged Sakhr up where he could see her. She was still reclined in her chair, making a phone call.

Someone answered immediately.

“I’m ready for Mr. Bishop now.” She hung up without waiting for a reply.

Sakhr tried to remember anything about the name Bishop, but he’d never heard of it. “Wait,” he stammered. “Just wait. Don’t kill me. We can talk about this.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to kill you. You’re much too valuable to waste.”

“What?” Sakhr struggled helplessly. “What are you talking about? What are you going to do?”

She got up and came around too look at him as though he were a specimen. “Where’s Josephine?”

“…What?”

“Josephine. I had expected her to be with you, but apparently not. You must have some idea where she is.”

Sakhr’s mind raced. This non-sequitur had no meaning to him. He’d never heard that name before. Was she someone close to Victoria? Did she think Sakhr had done something to someone named Josephine? Something she blamed him for?

Victoria frowned. “You really don’t know that name at all, do you? I’ll find her eventually. I have patience, and you’ll be waiting right along with me.”

The door opened again, and a woman dressed as an orderly entered, pushing along a geriatric old man in a wheelchair. He looked as frail as old parchment and had not a single hair on his gaunt body. Oxygen tubes snaked around his ears and wrapped under his nose, yet his breaths still took heaving effort. An antiseptic hospital smell wafted in with him.

This must be Mr. Bishop, and Mr. Bishop looked at Sakhr with lively, hopeful eyes unbefitting of his dying body.

“No,” Sakhr yelled. He struggled anew. “Don’t put me in that body. Please, Victoria. Katherine. I’ll do what you want. I’ll serve you if that’s what you wish. For however long. I’m sorry. I was wrong. Just please! Don’t put me in that body.”

“I won’t.” Victoria smiled at him. “I have promised Mr. Bishop your body, but I wouldn’t dare leave you in a body on death’s door.”

Sakhr looked at her with wild, confused eyes as Victoria took a box from the orderly.

From inside, she took out a tortoise and set it on Sakhr’s chest. “Meet Marzipan.”

This marks the end of Part 1. Thank you all who’ve been reading so far.

I’d love to hear from you, whatever your thoughts or critiques may be.

34. Time for a Change

2038, June 8^th
Collapse – 11 years

Alexander pressed a button on his armrest. His seat moved forward. Another button, and it reversed direction. Like all seats on the airplane, it had a staggering number of buttons available. Sakhr had also enjoyed experimenting. One set of buttons had puzzled him, until he figured out it moved a lump in the lower back of his seat. Lumbar support, he supposed. How amusing. But unlike Alex, Sakhr and the others eventually settled down and behaved like adults. Alexander was still goofing around four hours into the flight.

Alexander pressed another button and watched as his chair stretched into a fully-reclined bed. “It’s the sedan of private airplanes,” he said.

No one answered.

A flight attendant entered from behind a small curtain separating the cabin from the cockpit. “We’ll be landing in a few minutes. If everyone would please fasten their seat belts.” She stepped through the cabin, checking on Sibyl, Christof, Sakhr, and finally Alexander. “Sir, You need to return your seat to its upright position.”

He looked into her eyes and grinned. “Can we can make an exception? I think I prefer the bed to the chair.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but it’s for safety.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s regulation.”

“Very well. I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble.” He corrected his chair. The attendant smiled and moved on.

Alexander eyed her backside as she retreated to the curtain. His aura was saturated with a disgusting shade of lust. No, thought Sakhr. It was different than that. Lust was desire. This aura was of someone who couldn’t wait to claim a prize they’d already won. It was revolting.

Sakhr was beginning to understand how Sibyl always felt. He’d only had the power of Empathy for a week, and it had given him more insight into Alexander’s psyche than he ever wanted to know. At least he could turn the power off by removing a small card from his wallet and setting it aside. It had the look and feel of a credit card, except with no numbers or microchips, just designs on it’s surface. It reminded Sakhr of a celtic knot or a middle eastern tapestry, a meaningless cluster of lines and curves that represented nothing.

“You don’t suppose she’s included in the accommodations, do you?” Alexander said. His aura stood poised, waiting for any of them to react. “I might need her on my other flights to make sure I’m in an upright position when I need to be.”

“Will you settle down?” Sakhr said.

Alexander’s aura swelled with satisfaction. “What? She wants me.”

Sakhr ignored him, until Alex reclined his seat back into a bed. “Put your seat back and behave yourself.”

“She just said those things because its her job. This is a private flight. If we want to have a dance while the plane lands, there’s nothing she can do about it.”

“Put it back up.”

“What? For safety? What are the odds this plane is going to crash?”

Sakhr didn’t answer.

Alex leaned and peered at him. “No, honestly. What are the odds?”

The question brought numbers to Sakhr’s mind. 0.06 accidents per 100,000 traveler hours. Casualty rate was about a tenth that. With full engine failure, this jet could still coast to a rough but safe landing. Once they were over Brazil, the LakiraLabs repulse grid would pick up the plane. Apart from a few unfortunate incidences in its cutting edge days, the grid had a phenomenal safety record.

Alexander’s grin widened, and Sakhr realized he’d mistakenly made eye contact. Alexander had his answer, but thanks to the second symbol on the reverse side of that little card, Sakhr glimpsed inside Alexander’s mind too—his own power used against him.

Alex glanced away, still grinning, but his aura betrayed his annoyance. Finally, the immature mood faded.

“You’re having fun now,” he said. “but you realize this whole thing is a mistake, right?”

“It’s not a mistake. You’ll understand that soon enough.”

Alex nearly laughed. “Why can’t you, of all people, see this? You’ve spent millennia playing it safe, and now you’re throwing in with this woman? She found us before we knew about her. She’s been watching us. She copied our powers. She copied yours. You know she must have. Now you want to dine with her? She’s a threat, Sakhr.”

“Of course she’s a threat. You think I’m an imbecile?”

“Then why are we entertaining her invitation.”

“Do you think we should ignore her instead? This woman could be a dangerous enemy. And who knows, Alex, maybe she is our answer.”

“Right,” Alex said. “Our answer. To all of our nonexistent problems.”

“Are you so foolish that you can’t see the world changing around you, Alex? Our ways aren’t going to work much longer. We need to change.”

“But we don’t need some fat-assed, white woman to do that.”

“No. We don’t, but we will hear her out. It is not wise to ignore her.”

Sibyl chimed in. “I, for one, think this is a grand idea.”

“Of course you would,” Alex said. “It would mean spending the rest of our time sitting on our asses, eating, and riding horses, and all those other rich people things.”

“It’s not about that,” she replied. “It’s about how I’m sick and tired of constantly moving around. I think this woman is right. We should embrace who we are, not run and hide. The world is ready for us.”

“To be clear,” Christof said. “Victoria never said we would reveal ourselves.”

“No,” agreed Sakhr. “We’ll still be hidden… for a while. This is just about pooling our resources, building a foundation.”

“Of course she would say that,” Alex said. “She’s the one who gains the most from this. She’s the one who’ll get all our powers.”

“She already has our powers,” Christof answered.

“Oh, so then no one else wonders why she wants us then?”

“Not everyone is as selfish as you,” Sibyl said. “Maybe she wants all us witches together because she agrees that we should be in charge, not running around like rabbits.”

“She’s bringing us together,” Sakhr said, “because we can no longer afford to live the way we have, as nomads. And I agree with her. You will all stop bickering about this. We’ve already agreed we’re going to hear her out.”

The group quieted down. The plane jolted as the repulse grid picked it up. Alexander slid and bumped his head against his bed frame. Sakhr savored the comeuppance.

The rest of the flight was eerily silent with the plane’s engines off. They landed at a private pad at Boa Vista International. A swarm of security and airport staff were waiting. A red carpet led from the plane to a shuttle.

“Are you sure we’re not already famous?” Alex asked.

“Our flairs are unknown as of yet,” Sakhr clarified.

“That’s another thing,” Alex said. “Why flairs? A flair is something a child has if they’re talented at the cello. What we have are goddamn powers.”

“I agree with Victoria on this,” said Christof. “Magic powers. Super powers. If we describe ourselves in those terms, it’ll draw unflattering comparisons.”

“But flairs?”

“It’s a matter of appearances,” Sakhr replied, “something she knows about.”

” You’re going to agree with her on everything, aren’t you?”

“On many things.” When Victoria had contacted Sakhr, she had shared with him many concerns that he’d been mulling over for decades. She was suggesting changes he knew would not come easy, but were no less necessary. The others would go along with it, even if they weren’t thrilled. The woman certainly was a change of pace from how they had been living. They were nomads, living from place to place, and body to body, while this woman was on the cover of Time magazine. She was the heiress to her father’s company, and with the world-changing invention of the repulse node, she’d changed it into a multinational corporation with tendrils in governments around the world. Victoria had hinted that flairs were the cause of her success. Sakhr was curious to find out how.

Like Sakhr, she had the marvelous power of foresight. The world was changing. Countries were more connected than ever, and people kept records like never before. The coven could not run away from their problems like they used to. They couldn’t wait for time to erase their past. Mankind had grown more efficient at killing one another, meaning Sakhr could no longer trust in his power to keep him alive. Guns, bombs, even those wretched automobiles—any could kill him before he’d have a chance to swap bodies. And then he watched as the world threatened to destroy itself over utter political nonsense. He and the coven had spent the nineteen sixties sequestered in obscure corners of the world. And now, nearly a century later, the world was threatening to do it again. Watching from the sidelines was not an option anymore. Victoria understood that, and she already had a start in building a solution.

Sakhr didn’t trust this woman. She was a threat he knew too little about, but whether Sakhr liked it or not, she may be the future.

After customs and immigration, their shuttle floated them to the LakiraLabs headquarters. It stood isolated from all the other skyscrapers, half finished but glimmering proudly. This was to be their new home, from where “flairs” would rule.

It might not be that bad.

They landed inside a shuttle bay. Sakhr stepped out to a full staff of security and assistants awaiting him. Auras bubbled with curiosity. They all knew Sakhr was important, even if they didn’t know why. For the first time in his long life, Sakhr was about to live as himself, not masqueraded as a person who’s life he’d stolen.

Alexander stepped up beside him and gave a mighty sigh.

“Time to be kings,” Alexander said.

Time indeed.

The Glyph Queen

An ongoing sci-fi / fantasy web serial about a nuclear winter, a corporate police state, and an ancient witch coven.

Sibyl

56. Bloody Tiles

54. Sedatives

49. Glow

48. Scaffolding

47. An Unspeakable Plan

46. Sems and Clems

44. Fault Detected

43. All Wrong

41. Time to be Kings

34. Time for a Change