Adjuster's Dilemma
The kid behind the counter nudged the garbage cage, containing three wardergs, and mumbled in practiced chant, "Welcome to Frosty's, how may I help you, lord or lady?" His gaze never left the calico array of ice-cream buckets under the glass.
"Waffled cone, double dip, vanilla," London said, pronouncing the words with crisp exactness.
The kid swiped a napkin from the holder, reached behind him, snagged a waffle cone from the stack, carved a round dollop of vanilla from the depth of the bucket, deposited it on top of the cone, added another perfectly round globe on top, and dropped the scoop into the bucket full of water, all in a single layered motion. The complexity of the muscle memory could be truly amazing, London thought as the clerk extended the ice-cream over the counter.
"Thank you come again," the kid said. A moment later he realized that the ice-cream still remained in his hand. His gaze met London's chest, he looked up, and his eyes went wide. The clerk shied back, the ice-cream still clutched in his fingers. His elbow bumped the slushie machine lever. The mechanism purred, and he spun to shut it off before the shimmering paste of lemon-flavored ice spilled on the floor.
The look in his eyes said, "Please don’t hurt me."
"No worries," London answered. "Even at my worst, I would never harm a man who is serving ice-cream."
"Your cone, lord," the clerk murmured. His voice betrayed a slight tremble.
"It is deficient."
"In what way?"
"There is a smudge of chocolate on the left side."
The kid hesitated for a moment and tossed the cone and napkin into the funnel of the garbage cage. The wardergs puffed into purple furballs, trying to make themselves look bigger, and pounced on the food. Before their sandpaper tongues scraped the last drop of ice-cream and shred of paper from the cage floor, the kid finished another cone, taking care to thoroughly rinse the scoop.
London slid the cred card into the register slot and gently took the cone from the kid's fingers. For a moment his shovel-sized hand swallowed the clerk's palm. The kid let go off the cone and stepped back, relief of staying in one piece plain on his face.
Alam London stepped outside the icecream shop and paused on the edge of the crosswalk waiting for the steady stream of cars to ebb. The city heat mugged him, clinging to the wool of his black suit and equally black dress shirt. The ice-cream, began to melt and he licked it before it made a mess.
Out of the corner of his left eye, he could see the clerk craning his neck from behind the counter to get one last look. He supposed he cut an odd figure in his solid black attire, a dark rectangle cut in the gauzy shroud of sunshine, but the young man behind the counter had been too focused on his dimensions to pay attention to the color of his suit. London took a small bite of the icecream and smiled. There was a time when reactions to his size made him uncomfortable. Now he simply took it as another of life's minor inconveniences, so unavoidable they had to be embraced.
A distant siren wailed somewhere to the left. Across the street two adolescent girls exited the high school, walking with wary alertness. Cutting class for the sake of spring sunshine.
The light changed to green, and London stepped onto the crosswalk, just as a quiet buzz by his ear announced an incoming call. With a practiced flick of his fingers, London shifted back a lock of his pale hair, exposing a small black strip of communicator on his left temple. He tapped the box and a hair-thin filament slid downward and curved to his lips.
"Yes?"
"You're needed in the office, Mr. London," murmured a smooth female voice.
A red ambulance cannoned around the corner in an explosion of lights and sound. It took the turn at a breakneck speed, nearly careening, and shot toward the intersection.
"I'll be right there," London said.
The driver of the ambulance finally saw the lonely pedestrian. His face blanched white, he mashed the break pedal into the floor, the wheels locked, the vehicle skidded forward... As the ambulance hurtled across the zebra stripes, the driver braced for the sickening thump of a body meeting metal at sixty miles an hour.
It never came.
Even after the ambulance finally slid to a screeching halt in the middle of the street amidst the stench of smoking tires and the driver staggered out the door, neither he nor the paramedic riding in the ambulance could find any trace of the man, who should've been dead on the crosswalk.
#
Two years earlier It was said that the hiring standards of the POM Insurance conglomerate were stricter than those of Secret Service guarding the vault containing the genotype of the Royal Family. To the man sitting in a lonely chair under a sharp cone of electric light, these claims didn't seem as exaggerated as he originally thought them to be. He peered into the darkness of the room, where shadowy figures moved just beyond the limit of his vision. The flood of white light streaming from the overhead lamp hurt his eyes. He blinked. "Why did you choose the name Ordinator, Mr. London?" a disembodied voice asked from within the depths of the room. "It seemed appropriate," the man answered. The metal frame of the chair, too small to support his large body, forced him to keep most of his weight shifted forward and the muscles of his legs were beginning to ache. "Do you consider yourself an instrument of order?" The man considered the question. "Biologically, all humans are the engines of entropy. We consume organized forms of matter and energy and replace them with their less ordered counterparts. We exist on the boundary between order and chaos and our express purpose is to accelerate the conversion of the first into the second. And yet, our minds gravitate to order. Harmony and structure attract us, perhaps because our bodies prey upon them. Our consciousness seeks to create, while our body must destroy to fuel that creation. I am sure you can see the inherent paradox. In that sense, I am no more an instrument of order than any other human being. I simply strive to replenish a little of that which I destroy. In doing so I often achieve an entirely opposite effect." A different voice entered discussion. "What is the substance of your power, Mr. London?" The man blinked against the light. "I assume you are familiar with the concept of Shrodinger's probability wave. Each object has a probability wave function. Imagine if you will a cloud of pigment that spreads through known space to the very limits of our universe. Within that cloud there is an area of darker color corresponding to the shape of my body. The probability of finding me within that area is very high. And yet some of the pigment, as pale and weak as it may be, can be found beyond the limits of the solar system, beyond our galaxy, at the farthest reaches of known space. The probability of finding me there is vanishingly small. Infinitesimal, in fact." The man fell silent. "I still do not understand," said a disembodied voice. The man smiled. "Let me simplify, then. The probability of an object controls its location. I control the probability."
#
The secretary sitting behind a massive cobalt desk raised her head and peered at the empty space above the luxurious Tabriz rug. Behind her the offices of the POM Insurance Adjusters lay silent. Most Adjusters spent very little time being actually in the office and most of them preferred it that way.
A strange sort of anxiety crept upon her, as if she were being watched by predatory eyes. Her hearing heightened. Her ears and eyes searched the room for any sign of an unwanted presence.
The feeling of anticipation intensified. The secretary leaned forward a little. She could feel a tension in the air, as if an invisible guitar string was being stretched tighter and tighter...
With an imperceptible snap Alam London materialized in the center of the rug. The secretary's legs gave out in surprise and she suffered a two-inch fall back into her chair.
"Good afternoon, Mr. London."
"Did I catch you off guard, Evgenia?"
"Always, Mr. London."
The big man took a small bite of his ice cream. The secretary reached into the top drawer of her desk, produced a napkin, and handed it to him.
"Most people don't anticipate my appearance the way you do," he said. "I keep hoping I'll catch you off-guard. It's not my intention to bring you discomfort."
The secretary shrugged. "It's a purely physical surprise. A vague feeling of something going awry, as if I edged an inch out of my driving lane." She held out a thin leather-bound folder. "The coordinator will be with you in a minute."
London took the file, sliding his fingers on the back of the binding to find the priority mark by feel.
"Priority M," he said.
"Does that catch you off-guard?" The secretary permitted herself a small smile.
He shook his head slowly. "No, rather it feels me with anticipation of correcting something gone awry."
She watched him open a massive wooden door and disappear into the hallway leading to his office.
#
Alam London pressed his hand against the palm reader panel. The mechanism took a fraction of a breath to recognize the swirls and lines of his skin. The lock clicked, and London stepped inside, taking care to shut the door behind him.
The office lay shrouded in shadows. The only light came through a dagger-edge gap between the heavy emerald-green draperies. The sunray fell in a bright stripe over the cherry filing cabinet, setting the wood aglow; slid across the burgundy Khotan rug; stretched over the desk to the enormous map on the wall; crossed Angola, the Belgian Congo and finally terminated somewhere in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.
London strode to his desk, made a motion to put the file down on its surface, and halted, realizing his hand was empty.
"All you had to do was ask," he said.
"Why waste words?" Siran's smooth voice answered.
London turned on his heel. She curled in the client's chair, the file on her lap. Her pale grey suit provided perfect camouflage against the chair's silver-green upholstery. He knew that her hair, cropped short into a ragged messy halo, was naturally blue-black and glossy with highlights. Today it was grey, not the grey of old age but rather the grey of a heron's wing.
She must've thought her natural color too striking for whatever she had engaged in over the weekend.
London sat behind his desk, into an oversized leather chair. It groaned, accepting his weight. He cocked his head to the side and moved the bottle of Bombay Sapphire a quarter of an inch to the left. The bright blue liquid caught the beam of light coming through the gap between the draperies and sparkled with all the fire of the real gem.
In the chair, Siran leafed through the file. Her eyes didn't flicker from the line to line, rather she concentrated on each page for a fraction of a breath and moved on, turning the pages with slow measured movement of her long fingers.
Curled like that, she presented a curious figure. She made no sound; her movements were small; her clothes and hair blended with her light skin into a monochromatic flat whole, and yet he could not ignore her presence no less he could've ignored the presence of a starving tiger.
Her gaze flickered from the file. Their stares connected and London felt the instinctual urge to freeze. There was nothing especially threatening in the way she looked at him now. The raw bloodlust he saw in the depth of her eyes last week had died down to mere spark. He wondered how much blood she had to spill to douse it.
Siran looked back to the file. A satiated shark, content for the moment, but always a split second away from a feeding frenzy. What did she do over the weekend? She would tell him if he asked. He had only to decide if he truly wanted to know.
A careful knock send tiny aftershocks through the wood of the door.
"Enter," London called.
The door swung open, admitting the narrow-limbed figure of Keth Nao. The coordinator closed the door behind him and halted for a moment to hear the reassuring click of the lock. He crossed the room to the reader console that sprung from the floor like a mushroom on a lean metal stalk. His movements flowed with grace of a trained dancer.
"I've never seen you drink, Alam," the coordinator said, opening a file. "Especially dry gin. So why the bottle?"
"He likes the color," Siran said.
London smiled.
Nao slipped a thin rectangle of the card into the reader's slit and let his fingers dance across the console. The reader awoke with a mechanical purr. At the far wall a false window displaying a pastoral scene shimmered and came to life with a soft glow of grey pixels.
The screen blinked and blended into a portrait of a lean man in a business suit, bending forward, looking into the dense torrent of traffic, possibly waiting to hail a cab. London concentrated on the face: somber, confident, almost severe. Slick lines, square jaw, elongated shape of the face inviting comparison with a doberman-pincher, light skin, light blond hair cut very short. Possibly of German origin. Early to mid-forties.
"Your target," Nao began. He kept his voice low - like most true neo-hermaphrodites, he preferred to be viewed as a male, although his fragile beauty would've permitted him to adopt either sex. "His name is John Sobanto, an attorney with Dorowitz & Sobanto."
"The Sulfur Wyrm settlement," London said.
"Yes. Mr. Sobanto is worth seven point two million cred, not counting his investments in Left Arm Securities, which are projected at two million plus. The Corporation was unable to obtain a more precise estimate."
London leaned back. He felt the curious sensation he had come to identify as pre-job stress - a mix of controlled agitation, anticipation, and regret. It was a disconnected, undefined feeling of being in limbo and awaiting change.
Obeying the flick of Nao's fingers, the screen split. The portrait of John Sobanto shrank and slid to the left, giving space to an image of a woman standing next to the waist-high rail. Beyond the rail, a wide river the color of lead unhurriedly made its way to the nearest sea. Unlike the man, the woman was aware of being photographed and looked straight into the camera. Pretty in an unremarkable way that came from good breeding and careful attention to one's appearance. Shoulder length hair, blond, worn loose, a standard fair for an upper class spouse.
"Zoom in," London said. Nao tapped the keys. The face of the woman crept forward, filling the screen. There it was, in the eyes, an unexpected hard emotion. Defiance? No, determination.
"Mrs. Sobanto," Nao's voice informed them. "A holder of the POM policy number 492776-M. She spent the last three years funneling an obscene portion of Mr. Sobanto's earnings into POM bank accounts to pay for it."
A severe, confident man on the left, an equally severe, determined woman on the right. An ominous combination, London thought. "So what did Mr. Sobanto do to warrant our attention?"
"It appears he murdered his wife," Nao said.
Siran's black eyes shone once, like an obsidian blade catching a stray ray of the sun.
The mix of sensations that filled London solidified into a purpose. "I take it Mrs. Sobanto's policy had a retribution clause."
"A most detailed one at that."
"How was she killed?"
"Strangled. His thumb print was lifted from her throat. He had defensive wounds on his face and neck, and his DNA was found under her fingernails."
"Is he expecting us?"
Nao nodded in a slow measured way. "Most definitely."
The pixels of the screen blinked and snapped into an image of a building. An aerial shot showed a monstrously large ranch-style house, hugging the top of the hill like a bear.
"Guards stationed in a pyramid formation, four shifts. Gun tower here," Nao clicked a light pointer and a glowing dot highlighted a blocky structure to the left of the driveway, "and here." The dot shifted to the rear of the house and hovered on a triangular roof peeking from behind a tree. "The house is trapped and extensively warded. At least two arcane disciplines were utilized in creation of the wards. For all practical purposes, it's a fortress."
The image shivered as the roof and walls peeled off the hilltop, revealing a transparent construct of an underground level. Red partitions ignited in the design, radiating in three concentric circles from its center.
"A wheel-and-spokes design," London said.
Nao inclined his head again. London decided it wasn't a nod, but rather a short bow. "The possessor-piloted mice got as far as the first staircase and were destroyed by an environmental ward. The top floor is masking the underground layout, but the radial defenses indicate a high probability of a well-defended central chamber surrounded by a cluster of room in a wheel-and-spokes pattern."
Siran shifted in her chair. "The guards?"
"Red Guard," Nao answered.
"Expensive to hire," London murmured, plaiting the fingers of his hands together.
"And very expensive to kill," Nao said. "Red Guard lawyers are truly excellent, particularly when negotiating a wrongful death compensation."
London looked at the Bombay Sapphire. The rates of compensation had been prearranged in advance. He suspected that every bodyguard establishment circulated a charter stating specific rates for the accidental murder of their employees. He had never seen one, but he was reasonably sure they existed.
He became aware of Nao waiting politely until he finished thinking.
"Your permitted allowance of error is three," Nao said. "A higher death count would negatively impact the Corporation's profit margin."
Siran snorted. She said nothing, but London heard her all the same. The cost of an M-class policy with a retribution clause paid over the period of several years would buy the death of everyone in the compound several times over.
"Your permitted allowance of error is three," Nao repeated. "The Corporation was quite specific in its recommendation."
"I've heard you the first time," she murmured. Her voice gained a low quality that shot shivers of alarm up London's spine. The coordinator's empathy complex made Nao hypersensitive to intonations and moods. Siran's voice must've lashed him like a sword blade, but he managed to keep his expression neutral. The fingers of his left hand, resting on the edge of the console, trembled. "I apologize, my lady. If I may be so bold, I would suggest that you save one of those three kills for him."
The screen presented another image of John Sobanto, a thin-stemmed glass in his hand, surrounded by men and women in business suits. A thin rectangular frame ignited in the corner and slid, guided by Nao, to highlight the section behind John Sobanto's left shoulder. A cowled figure stood in the shadow of the column, watching over Sobanto. Siran leaned forward, suddenly intense, predator's eyes focused. "Magnify."
With a click, the frame expanded, the pixilated silhouette taking up the entire screen. "A Zorthian," Siran said softly.
"Most astute," Nao favored her with another of his nod-bows. "We're not exactly sure when or why Mr. Sobanto acquired a restructured bodyguard. However, we do know that he has been in Mr. Sobanto's employ for at least a year. He will prove very difficult to eliminate."
London leaned back in his chair. "You have a talent for understatement."
"Thank you, lord."
"Is there anything else?"
"Yes. The window of collection is eight hours starting twenty five minutes ago. After that Mr. Sobanto will pass into the jurisdiction of the marshals. It will take you approximately one hour to reach Sobanto Manor. Will you require a priest for your final rites?"
London glanced at Siran. She gave a barely perceptible shake of her head.
"That won't be necessary."
"Thank you for your attention. Lady, lord, by your leave." Nao popped the card from the reader and fled the room.
"You scared him," London said.
Siran shrugged, watching the screen resume its window masquerade. "He gets paid a small fortune to put up with me. A job involving that much money should be spiced with an occasional stab of fear." She frowned, stretched, and pushed free of the chair. "Disable the guards, break into a fortress, shatter the wards, disarm the traps, bust into the central chamber, kill a preternaturally fast bodyguard, and eliminate the target. Shall we drive?"
"Yes," London said. He would need all of his power for the job.
The sleek "Silver Bullet" Krieger shot up a winding road, taking the curves with a smooth ease only a German-built motor could provide. Through the spotless window of the passenger seat, Siran watched the greenery slide by in a smudged stain: red oaks, pines, and ancient hickories vying for space with an occasional hemlock, ash, and dogwood. London drove with exactness he did everything, keeping the Krieger exactly a foot and half to the left of the double line, as if the vehicle glided along a track.
Some found this obsessive precision maddening. She simply accepted it the way he had accepted her insanity.
"Something is bothering you," London said, taking the headphone out of his left ear. The tiny noise of a man's voice piped from the headphone and died as London pressed the off key on the control console.
"What does home mean to you?" she asked, resisting the urge to draw with her finger on the perfectly clean glass.
London thought for a moment. "Freedom," he said.
"To me it means safe haven." She drew her knees to her chest, straining against the hard line of her seat belt. "A place of my own. Two people love each other. They live together for years. How can you murder someone who had made you feel safe?"
"'Here is the key to my soul,'" London said, obviously quoting. "'Take it, beloved. Take the poisoned dagger.'"
She shook her head.
"Those we love know us best and wound us the worst," London said. "Love and hate, both are means of emotional control, to which we are willingly subjecting ourselves. For instance, I suspect you would be likely to murder your spouse."
She frowned. "Why?"
"You're a maximalist. All or nothing. Overwhelming victory or absolute defeat. Total harmony or..."
"Total discord," she finished for him. "You oversimplify, Alam."
"If your love for your spouse became hate, you would seek to be free of him. Absolutely free."
"No."
The Krieger slid around another turn. Siran touched the glass and drew a small glyph meaning "end" on the smooth surface. "Strangulation contains death. There's no release. It's deeply personal. He wanted to see her eyes as he squeezed the life out of her second by second. To drink it in. He must've hated her."
"The question is why." Alam frowned. "He is a skilled lawyer. Particularly when it comes to the jury selection - in every trial he manages to pick precisely the right mix of jurors to favor his case."
"He seems to be able to read people then," she said.
"And therein lies the problem. I have been listening to his latest summation and he does not strike me as someone who would be in tune with the prospective jurors. People are passions. He is precise, logical, thorough, but hardly passionate."
"Still waters run deep," she murmured.
"Perhaps." The distance in his eyes lengthened. Once locked onto a problem, he remained keyed into it until he solved it. She left him to his thoughts.
#
The Krieger slid in the small space between two ancient pines and came to stop. They stepped from the car onto a forest floor thick with five centuries of autumn. Stripping with practiced quickness, they changed into their hunting suits: for London a military issue camo jumpsuit, drab with a pixelated pattern, and for Siran a loose-fitting trousers and a turtleneck swirled with brown and green. The huge trees watched them in silence.
Siran raised her head and drew the air into her nostrils, tasting it on her tongue. "Wood smoke."
London slid the short needle-rifle in its holster on his belt and watched Siran buckle the last strap of her back sheath. She looked up, high above, where the rough column of the tree trunk erupted into thick branches, blocking the sunlight. For a moment she tensed, the smooth muscles coiling like springs beneath the fabric, and burst forward, across the soft carpet of pine needles and fallen twigs, to the trunk. She leaped, scrambled up the stem in a brown and green blur, and vanished into the branches as if dissolved into the greenery.
London locked the car with a remote keyed to his thumb print and dropped the remote behind the front right wheel. The forest waited for him.
He headed up hill, to where his compass told him Sobanto's mansion lay on the summit. The old trees spread their branches wide, greedily hoarding the sunlight, and the undergrowth was scarce. A few times a vampire vine cascading from an occasional trunk made a grab for his limbs, but starved of sunlight and prey, it proved too sluggish to catch him.
Forty five minutes later London stepped over an electrified trip-wire, strung across the greenery at what for most people would've been a mid-thigh level and for him was just below the knee. Beyond the wire the trees ended abruptly, as if sliced by the blade of a giant's knife. The gaps between the tree trunks offered glimpses of the electric fence and Sobanto House, a dark shape beyond the metal mesh. He saw no guards, but than the Red Guards didn't stroll along the perimeter. They hid.
London went to ground. The fragrant cushion of pine needles accepted his weight without protest. He glanced at his compass to orient himself. It told him that the south Guard tower should be to his left. He slid forward a few feet and saw it, a blocky structure wrapped in a cage of metal bars. He was willing to bet that the current running through them would fry him within a fraction of a second.
London reached into his camo suit and freed the small rectangle of the locator suspended on a metal chain around his neck. Gently he squeezed the side of the metal, still warm with his body heat. The tiny square window in the center of the rectangle turned green. Siran was in range and ready. There would be no radio communication, unless he wished to bring the Red Guard in force to their location.
London squeezed the communicator twice in rapid succession. The metal lid popped open, and he shook a small plastic bag onto his palm. Within the bag, suspended in a clear liquid, floated a thin lens. London tore the plastic along a perforation, pulled the edges apart in a gush of liquid and slid the moist lens into his left eye. A jolt of pain rocked his head as the nano tech spun minuscule filaments connecting to his optical nerve. The world slammed into focus, from the ethereal red of the shocked eye to crystal clarity. A faint green target wheel spun within the lens.
London focused on the house. The fence slid closer. A standard eight-foot-high fare, coils of razor wire guarding the top edge, octagonal mesh. A bit distorted - not a prefect octagon, but a slightly concave one. The flatness meant an active ward, just beyond the electric fence. The magic field it generated pulled the fence to itself. The same magic field would prevent his transfer past the ward.
A ward of that potency had to be fed. London craned his neck, looking for the pipeline. He found it twenty five feet above the ground. A long green shoot, passing through the guard tower and terminating in a network of thin roots. The roots hung suspended in thin air, dripping magic into the invisible spell.
London reached into one of his left pockets and pulled a thin plastic vial. He unscrewed the top, shook a strip of white fylacon paper onto his palm, and put away the vial. He licked the strip, grimacing against bitter aftertaste, and held it up. A wave of green spread through the strip, picking up the absence of the environmental magic - if the magic field generated by the forest of this age was normal, the paper would've turned purple. Somewhere beyond the trees an enormous Anore-Farlesi bud sucked the magic from the environment in preparation of a bloom. It would never flower - the shoot grafted onto its five foot stamen channeled the power into the ward protecting Sobanto's house. To pipe the magic, the shoot had to have been artificially grown from the culture of Anore-Farlesi cells. It would take a monomolecular edge to cut it. Or a focused-beam laser, neither of which were at London's disposal right now.
Siran might be able to sever the fragile network of pipeline's roots, but to do so, she would have to bypass the fence and hack at the pipeline out in the open, in plain view of the guards manning the tower, who were at the moment quite safe behind the electrified current and in an excellent position to snipe. First order of business: he had to disable the electric fence.
London looked past the ward, to where a small guardhouse adhered to the main building. A lone guard sat behind the bullet-proof plastiglass, scanning the sprawling console before him. The control switch for the perimeter fence and both guard towers had to be in there. To disable the fence he would have to take out the control console in the guardhouse. However, he couldn't reassemble himself past the ward - the distortion it offered was too great. A ti-needle, of which he had three, would penetrate the ward, both because of its small diameter and its magic neutrality. It would seek and destroy the electric console but if he fired it now, the current running through the fence would render it useless.
He squinted, trying to gauge the space between the ward and the fence. Three feet. Tight.
London extracted the narrow cartridge of ti-needles from the depth of his right pocket and pressed it into the rifle. It popped into place without a sound. A current of calculations flooded his mind. He took comfort in their symmetry.
Seven minutes and thirty one second later, he derived at a set of coordinates. London stood up, slid the safety off his rifle, and vanished.
#
In theory, teleportation was an instantaneous event. However, no matter how precisely he calculated, London always lost one eighth of a second in a transfer. He felt it was stolen from him and he missed it keenly.
With a silent snap, London materialized between the fence and the ward. The pull of the defensive spell jerked him forward. He gritted his teeth, trying not to overcorrect, and swung the rifle up. The short barrel cleared the ward by a few scant millimeters. Through the clear plasti-glass of the guardhouse window he saw the guard look up, slow as if underwater. The man''s eyes widened, his mouth stretching into a surprised o. London fired.
The guard's face was still trying to mirror his shock, when a mono-molecule ti-needle pierced the charged shield of the ward.
A bullet tore through the mesh by London's left foot, a gift from the guards within the tower. The current from the fence distorted the path of their projectiles. They would correct in a moment.
Another bullet whistled two inches from his left ear.
His lens picked up a pin-head hole in the plasti-glass, formed by the heat of the ti-needle burrowing between the molecules of plastic.
The third bullet singed London's neck.
The array of blue lights on the console light blinked and went out. London dropped, pressing against the wire, trying to avoid the next projectile.
It never came. The guard tower stood silent. No bullets sliced into his flesh.
The tower's door slid open and Siran emerged. Behind her a camouflaged figure fell to the floor, its arms slack. Siran leaped onto the green shoot and dashed along its length as if it were a wide path on solid ground.
Within the guardhouse, the sentry mashed the panic button the wall, saw Siran, and stared at her. His gaze slid to London, as if inviting him to share his disbelief. London waved at him.
Siran leaped from the shoot, landing in a soft crouch past the ward. Her curved sword whispered, as she pulled it from the sheath on her back. The sword blade seemed black, as if it drew the photons to itself swallowing them whole, but London knew that the blade was actually a very dark green. Siran struck, nicking the roots. Pale liquid oozed from the cuts. She slashed again, lightning-fast. The ward trembled and vanished. The green shoot that fed it crashed to the ground.
London sprinted. His massive body wasn't capable of great speed, but when he got going, he was impossible to stop. His shoulder smashed into the reinforced door of the guardhouse and it flew open with a pitiful screech of snapped bolts. London stumbled in, glimpsed the black eye of a gun staring at him from six feet away, and dodged to the left, knowing it was too late. The gun barked twice and bullets bounced from the dark blade with a metal clang. Siran swung and the guard's head rolled to the floor. Blood spurted in a thin spray from the stump of the neck, painting the wall crimson. The body took a step forward and tumbled.
"Number one," Siran whispered.
#
Slowly the prisoner cocked her head to the left, then to the right, popping the vertebrae of her neck. Her chains kept her arms apart, so she couldn't fold them the way she wanted. The harsh concentrated cone of electric light emanating from the overhead lamp short-circuited her night vision and she could see only the edges of the shadowy figures moving in the darkness of the room. "The light won't help you," she said. "I can hear your heartbeats." "The State has condemned you to death," said a disembodied male voice. "Your execution is scheduled for tomorrow at thirteen hundred hours." The prisoner smiled, revealing sharp even teeth. "The Twenty Ninth Amendment, article 2, subsection 2, paragraph 3 permits a corporation or an individual to purchase your life by compensating the State for the cost of your capture, containment, trial, and execution. In addition, the interested party would make the necessary compensation to the families of your victims, which in your case triples the already sizeable sum, and assume responsibility for any further damages your existence might precipitate. Our research indicates that no other conglomerate or individuals are interested in your option. POM Corporation is prepared to extend you this offer. As you know, we are unable to purchase your life without your consent." The prisoner flexed her biceps, trying to get blood flowing into muscles held static for too long. Her motion sent the two-inch thick links of her chains clinking softly. "I make a piss-poor gladiator," she said. "I kill too quickly. And you would have to be clinically insane to attempt turning me into a whore. So what could you possibly want with me?" "The POM Corporation deals in insurance," a female voice told her. The prisoner laughed. As the eerie sound of her amusement rolled echoed through the room, the pulses of the shadows quickened. "We have other interests besides those, but your line of work would concern the Insurance division," the same female voice said. "The details of our proposal will be brought to you for your review. You will enjoy a reasonable degree of personal freedom. You will draw a salary, although a curtailed one, since a portion of your paycheck will be allocated to compensate the Corporation for its expense in procuring your life. I assure you that even with that limitation, the financial compensation you will receive will enable you to lead a comfortable existence. You will have a chance at a productive, fulfilling career, limited by only two provisions: first, you may not quit your employment with the Corporation and second, the Corporation reserves the right to terminate your life at will, should you give it probable cause." The chains clinked again. "Is it true that you have a supervillain working for you?" "If you're referring to the individual formerly known as the Ordinator," said a male voice, "then the answer is yes. He is, indeed, employed by our Corporation." "I would like to meet him." The prisoner stretched as far as her restraints would allow. "And I would like my sword back." "That," a male voice assured her, "can be arranged."
#
They found the first ward at the end of the hallway, twelve feet past the breach they made in the wall. London moved toward the ward, casually bumping the halo-lamp on the ceiling with his hand and drowning the hallway in darkness. The ward barred the way in a wall of translucent red. As London swept his palm over its surface, close but never touching, thin streaks of yellow lightning snaked through the red, trailing the heat of his hand.
The ward was local and of fixed power. Given time, he could break it. But time was in short supply - he had to do it before the guards turned the corner and sprayed them with the hail of gunfire.
Siran crouched in the passageway, her sword held at the ready. London pulled a carbon rod from the long pocket on his left thigh.
"They're coming," Siran whispered in a silken voice.
London concentrated on the pyramidal tip of the carbon rod. It began to glow, first gently, then brilliantly.
A thin stream of the guard's blood made its way through the breach into the hallway and spread on the Italian tile, forming a narrow puddle along the wall.
Holding the rod like a crow bar, London brought it toward the ward. A long white spark burst from the rod and licked the surface of the magic barrier.
Siran shifted forward, like a cat ready to pounce. A whisper of power stretched from her to the puddle. Small drops of blood detached from the surface of the liquid and hung in the air, slightly flattened spheres glistening weakly.
The rod melted as individual atoms began tunneling through the ward. The yellow lightning curled and zigzagged within the red, but failed to lock on the errant atoms streaking through the minute thickness of the barrier. Sweat broke below London's hairline. He gritted his teeth.
The first guard, a grey shadow armed with a burst rifle, crept into the hallway on silent feet. The blood drops shot toward him and splashed over his nostrils, worming their way through the nasal cavity, to the mouth, through the alimentary canal to the larynx. The guard strained, tried to cough and found he couldn't. He dropped the rifle and clutched at his throat with both hands, his feet sliding from under him.
The end of the rod reassembled itself past the ward. A faint path of pure yellow separated the part London still held in his hands from the carbon tip on the other side.
A second guard launched himself into a combat roll, coming from around the corner in a blur, firing as he rolled, fast but Siran's blood drops proved faster still. The bullets, gone too wide, sank into the ward with splashes of yellow, as the man who fired them joined the first, trying to claw the sudden obstruction from his windpipe.
New drops hovered above the puddle. They would be the last - he had never seen Siran hold more than three humans at the same time.
The first guard began to jerk, his feet kicking in a spasmodic frenzy.
With a concentrated effort, keeping it perfectly level, London rammed the rod into the ward. The part in his hand connected with the part that had reassembled itself beyond the wall of red, sucking in the energy from the ward. Yellow lightning clutched at carbon. The ward turned solid as if it were suddenly transmuted into glass.
The drops of blood moved forward, waiting as Siran zeroed in on the next heartbeat.
The ward shattered along the yellow lines. Individual fragments of the red glow fluttered softly to the ground, melting as they fell. London lunged into the gap. Siran leaped through a fraction of a blink behind. The red glow swept up, nearly slashing their feet. Behind it the guards finally coughed and drew their first shuddering breaths.
"How long before they bypass the ward?" Siran murmured as they conquered the hallway.
"They won't." London pressed against the wall before turning the corner. "It's too potent. Wheel and spokes design ensures the ward extends through the entire length of the house. Most likely the one ahead of us will do the same." They both knew that each successive ward would be harder to break.
Siran paused for a moment to sample the sounds ahead of them and moved forward. They rounded the corner, following the map in the minds along the shortest route to the nearest staircase.
"They are locked in," she surmised. "Groups of guards between the rings of wards."
Ahead London saw the hallway terminating in a heavy door.
"What did you do this weekend?" he asked.
Her voice came flat. "The Ministry of Wild Life put out a culling call on the giant thylacines. They were beginning to threaten the dire wolf packs."
"How many did you kill?"
She shrugged. "Not enough. Never enough."
Three men burst from the side room on their left. London barreled into them like a battering ram. The two front guards flew several feet and crashed to the ground in a heap of cracked bones. Siran snapped a kick, and the third guard went down with a low moan. London jogged to the nearest guard. The woman jerked back when she saw his face. He probed her side and his fingers found the bump of broken bones, jutting from the ribcage.
"You have a broken rib," he informed the woman. She glared at him with remarkably blue eyes. "Do you wish a pain soother?"
"Go fuck yourself," she snarled. He moved on to give space to Siran armed with the roll of adhesive tape.
Within five breaths, they were running down the hallway, leaving the guards taped securely behind them.
They reached the door at a run. London gripped the handle, found it locked, and smashed his shoulder into the reinforced wood. The door splintered, and they burst into the room. A foul stench hit them, the lingering, heavy odor of a greasy roast burned by an open flame. Bile rose in a stinging flood in London's throat.
A barrier rose before them. Flesh-colored and transparent, almost gel-like, it cleaved the room in a half, stretching from the left wall to the Onord Mene masterpiece on the right. Long thick veins, pulsing with deep purple, pierced the gel, branching into smaller vessels and finally into hair-thin capillaries. Between the veins, clusters of pale yellow globules formed long membranes, folded and pleated into pockets. A loose network of dark red filaments bound it all into one revolting whole. London stared at it in horrified fascination, unable to turn away.
Tiny gas bubbles broke free of the capillaries and slid to the surface of the barrier to pop open. Here and there small spherical vesicles of the yellow substance floated through the lattice of the filaments and veins, pushed by the invisible currents, bending and swiveling when they came to an obstacle. Alive, a thought sliced through the revulsion in London's mind. This barrier, this thing was alive.
His gaze traveled to the far left, drawn to the source of vesicles, and found a gross, misshapen thickening of the yellow membranes, a bulging sack, tinged with carmine filaments pulled into tight strings by the membrane aggregation. Globules of yellow matter detached from the surface of the sack and fluttered away one by one. London focused on the deformed bump at the very top of the sack - it resembled something he couldn't quite place. The target wheel in his eye spun; one by one, it found points in the contours of the sack and marked them by tiny glowing dots. London frowned. The last point sparked into existence in a speck of green, and the eager nanites drew the line between them, highlighting a contorted silhouette of a human hand, complete with outstretched fingers. Another vesicle slid from the sack's top, allowing for a glimpse of a swollen blue-black thumb. As London watched, the nail broke free from the bloated digit and spun away, caught by a current.
London's stomach jerked. He gagged and retched, spilling the sour vomit onto the one-of-a-kind Sultanabad rug.
Siran's fingers grazed his elbow. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and turned to the ward, reaching for his carbon rod.
"I know this." Her voice was bitter. "You can't break this with carbon, Alam. This requires a different approach."
She moved past him toward the barrier. He caught her shoulder and held it. She paused long enough to gently disengage his fingers and thrust her hand into the barrier.
The filaments trembled.
The yellow membranes shivered as if in anticipation. Folds slid and unfolded, streaming toward Siran's hand.
London moved, determined to pull her from the thing before it stripped the flesh from her bones.
Blue fire burst from Siran's skin. The pink gel around her hand shriveled and melted in a plume of acrid smoke. London coughed. The fire grew brighter, biting chunks from the barrier in a greedy fury. The membranes tried to sliver away, the filaments collapsed and curled, but the fire chased them, farther and farther until nothing was left. A swollen, blue corpse crashed to the floor, one arm stretched upward. Its stomach ruptured and a thick brown liquid drenched the rug. The stench of decomposition flooded the room.
The last glowing droplets of the gel dissipated. Siran's blue fire calmed to mere lambency, clothing her hand like a glove. She turned her hand back and forth, watching the glow with a dispassionate interest as if it were some curious object she had found. She blew at her fingers. The fire vanished.
She stepped through the ward. Pale glyphs ignited on the floor, wheels within strange arcane signs. Siran glanced back at him over her shoulder, and London tried not to flinch at the blood-red glow filling her eyes.
"Covenate spells," she said. "I can do little against other disciplines, but I will trump the magic of the witches every time. Follow me. Beware stepping on the glyphs."
#
Two plain wards and seven guards later, they reached the utility stairs bathed in a harsh electric light. As the last ward fell in the shreds of pale red, they took the concrete stairs down to the underground level.
Siran was moving softer now, with more care. Witch magic relied on subterfuge. It clouded the unwary mind, befuddled, and misled, but only those who didn't pay attention. Alam, while subtle in some things, preferred direct approach when it came to magic. She had to remain vigilant, doubly so, to keep him out of harm's way.
A question itched the tip of her tongue and she finally asked it out loud. "Why would a lawyer have covenate spells in his house?"
"It's a good question," London said. "The covens do not hire out their services."
"No." The witches imagined themselves in a sisterhood, bound by ties stronger than blood. To sell their services would mean instant sanctions and drawn-out death.
They rounded a corner to a deserted hallway. A pang of disappointment shot through Siran. She could feel the bloodlust building within her, boiling hotter and hotter, demanding to be satiated. She pushed it away and forced herself to think, imposing the cold rationale of her mind, strengthening her control. "An even better question is why the two-way ward was used."
He frowned. "A ward that both protects and contains."
She could almost feel the wheels turning in his large skull, assembling a complicated picture from the fractured mosaic of evidence. She knew he would tell her once it all clicked into place.
The staircase brought them to a curved hallway. The floor gleamed with malachite swirls of green and black marble. Small bronze statues stood in the niches along the walls, betraying the owner's preference for Greek antiquity. To the left in the concavity formed by the curving hallway, an ancient necklace of gold leaves graced a headless bust behind the shield of plasti-glass. Like the rest of the house, the bottom floor promised to be opulent yet devoid of character. It was a house, but not a home.
London halted, considering the options. Siran crouched at his feet, ready to leap. The map that guided them through the top floor offered no clue to the plan of the underground level. All they knew now was the number of the wards they had to breach - three.
"What now?" she wondered.
"We knock," London said. He stepped forward, turning slightly, and rammed his shoulder into the nearest door.
A heavy gun barked and they lunged to the opposite sides of the doorway a fraction of the moment before the blast blew a three inch hole in the wood of the door. Tiny wooden shards slid across the marble floor. London's face took on the disconnected cast she had come to know well. Calculations were streaming through his mind. He was giving Siran's ears the luxury of minimal interference.
She hugged the wall, resting her head against the alabaster-white paneling and raised four fingers. She could dispatch all four with a minimal injury to herself, but she couldn't incapacitate them without killing at least one. London raised one finger, then three. He had enough power for one transfer or three wards. Taking a transfer now meant rest. The internal clock implanted in the thickness of her shoulder told her they had two hours, thirteen minutes, and twenty four seconds, and each ward took him longer to break. They couldn't afford rest.
A whisper of power tugged on Siran, and Siran looked away from the door, to the staircase from which they came, surveying it with the intense concentration of a predator.
Something was following them. Something inhuman. She waited for it to make a move, but it halted, hovering just out of reach. Very well. She would wait.
London pushed himself from the wall, signaling calculations completed.
Siran freed a small octagon of the gas bomb from the pocket on her left thigh and squeezed it to activate the mechanism. Bomb in her left hand, sword in her right, she examined the door for a space of a breath.
Silence. The guards on the other side of the door noticed nothing.
London raised his fist. Siran crouched, ready to kick. They hit the door at the same time - he in the middle and she at the bottom left corner, slashed free by her sword seconds earlier. The corner of the door fell with a thud. She tossed the octagon into the opening and was gone, escaping bullets that buzzed like angry bees, snapping chunks of plaster from the staircase doorway.
A muffled cough echoed from the room. The sound of running feet, a dull thud, a throat-scraping hack and everything fell silent.
Siran attacked the door in a fury of sharp strikes and dashed through as the pieces of wood tumbled to the ground. Three guards lay on the floor, knocked out by the SE-47. Odorless, tasteless, it would hold them asleep for another fifty minutes, but she by virtue of her ancestry was born immune to its effects. She regarded the three prone forms. Where was the fourth? She heard three pulses, slow but clear.
London watched from the doorway. She turned on the ball of her foot, looked behind the antique couch, saw the body, and swore.
"Damn it all."
London raised an eyebrow. She reached behind the couch and dragged a body by its foot into the plain view. The woman's face had turned the color of a red plum.
"No pulse," London guessed.
Siran kicked the cadaver and landed on the couch, folding her legs and glaring at the corpse. It would take another four minutes or so for the gas to completely dissipate.
"You look outraged," London observed.
She bared her teeth at the corpse. "An allergic reaction. What are the odds?"
"One out of three hundred has a reaction. It proves fatal for every eight hundred and forty second of them."
Sometimes London took things too literally for her taste.
"We lost our second kill," she said.
"These things happen."
She grimaced.
"Could I trouble you for that photograph?" he asked, pointing to a delicate glass and wood table graced by a single photo in a plain frame. She rose and brought it to him. A man and a woman next to each other - Mr. And Mrs. Sobanto, together yet separate, standing close but not touching as if they were afraid that their contact would spark. Between them a boy stood holding a small blue panda. The photograph caught the panda licking his hand, and the boy's face was bright with a mischievous grin.
"A son," London said, his voice full of wonder.
"They must not have loathed each other at some point," Siran murmured.
London popped open the frame, freed the photo, and put it in his pocket.
#
The second ward took almost twenty minutes. London pushed himself through the gap, his breath coming in hoarse gasps, his chest heaving as if he were a clydesdale forced to run a race against arabian mounts. He was nearly at his limit. He staggered down the hallway to the next room, but Siran shook her head.
"Wait."
He sank against the wall and swiped the beads of sweat off his forehead. She peered into the hallway, watching the dull wall of red rebuild itself. The ward was closing slowly, much more slowly than the upstairs wards. She was sure London could tell her why, but she didn’t care enough to ask.
Their pursuer still tracked them. It made no noise, it offered no pulse, it radiated no heat, but she was sure it was there, a malevolent presence waiting just on the edge of her perception.
The ward finally closed. An impenetrable wall of red sealed them from the rest of the house. Alam's breathing slowed to a steady rhythm. It was time to go.
She sliced the door into the next room, the last before the final ward and halted. A glowing network of glyphs ignited on the floor, dozens of them in peach-yellow lines, together yet separate. A glowing glyphic wheel, six feet wide and more complex then a dozen spider webs put together, slowly rotated at the far wall. It would have taken great power and many hours to draw it. Next to it a bloody torn curtain of cerulean blue lay in a heap on the floor. Siran looked to the wall and saw it bristling with wooden stakes, set at forty five degree angle, waiting to impale something or someone. Smears of dried blood marked the two stakes near the right side.
"Blue's the color of mourning," she said for Alam's benefit. "Witches wear it at funerals."
He looked to the stakes. "Is the blood human?"
She inhaled, tasting faint traces of metal on her tongue.
"Yes."
"A very painful way to die."
She nodded.
"Do you know what the patterns stand for?" he asked.
"Most of them. The small spiked triangle to the right of the stakes is the anud's perfection. It seals the wounds."
"Then perhaps the person that became impaled had survived?"
"No." She shook her head. "It seals the wounds, not heals them. It's used on corpses to prepare them for burial. The large circle next to it is the vision-wheel. It permits the caster to produce a vision. A wheel of this size would produce a very vivid image, probably indistinguishable from the reality."
"Is there a way to find out what the last vision was?"
"No."
London nodded. Carefully picking their way between the glyphs, they crossed the room and opened the door to the last ward.
#
The ward dissolved in a puff of crimson. London stumbled forward, into the huge chamber. He had barely enough time to take in the domed ceiling, half-lost in the gloom, the bare walls and the lonely figure sitting motionless under a column of blue light. Heat seared his left hip. He saw nothing, felt nothing save for that brief fiery slice, but his leg gave and he crashed to the floor, catching himself on his bent arms and rolling on his side to diminish the impact.
A dark stain spread across the leg of his pants. He still felt nothing and pulled back the sliced fabric revealing a slash across his muscle. The edges of the wound fit so tightly together, it may have been made by a razor blade. He was struck by a sword coated with a paralyzing agent, probably containing anti-coagulant. He needed the antidote, or risk full body paralysis, but he didn’t dare to move. Prone like this, he presented too big of a target and the smallest twitch could set off another strike.
London scanned the chamber.
Nothing. Only the gloom and a man seated in a metal chair. His slack expression identified the blue beam as a localized stasis field. But even the stasis failed to completely erase the severity of the man's face. John Sobanto. Invulnerable as long as the stasis remained active.
London returned his gaze to the gloom. To the left, he saw Siran. She held so still, at first he thought she was caught in stasis as well.
Her lips parted. "I see you, sirrah," she whispered, her hiss carrying to the farthest heights of the chamber.
A blur struck at her from the gloom. The Zorthian, flashed in London's mind. She parried, blades clanging together, and it withdrew. A shred of dark fabric fluttered to the floor.
She had the Zorthian's attention. London jammed the syringe into the flesh above his wound. The soothing flood of antidote washed over him, followed by an inferno of pain. The cut was deep, the blade had grazed the bone.
Siran laughed, an eerie sound that shot ice down London's spine. "I'm coming, sirrah. Face me!"
The blur landed on the floor at the far wall, solidifying into a cloaked man. Soundless like a phantom, he pulled off his cloak and dropped it onto the floor. Chiseled, each muscle cut to perfection, he stood nude, save for a muya thai shorts. His bare feet gripped the floor, toes curved like claws. Colored tattoos blossomed across his legs, stomach, and chest, muted against the faint green tint of his skin. A striking Cobra on one arm, a crouching Monkey king on the other, Tortoise on the abdomen, Elephant on the chest, Iguana under the right collarbone, Tiger under the left. Faint outlines of scales, tattooed or real, shielded his shaved skull. His eyes were yellow like amber, luminescent with cold intensity, reptilian in their lack of feeling.
The yellow-edged tanto in his hand looked sharp enough to rival Siran's black blade.
A wave of heat emanated from Siran. She closed her eyes, slowly, deliberately, and when she opened them again, her irises burned with red like two glowing coals. She charged.
They clashed and danced across the chamber, preternaturally fast, slashing, parrying, kicking and finding purchase on the sheer walls.
London began dragging himself toward the stasis field.
Fifty feet separated him from John Sobanto's slack form. He pulled, gripping the slick floor with his fingers, ignoring the jolts of acute pain rocking his thigh.
For a space of a breath Siran landed on the floor next to him, barely long enough for him to register a blood gash across her forearm, and leapt away again, sailing across the chamber. He crawled by the drops of her blood, fixated on the blue beam of light.
Only fifteen feet. Fourteen. He saw Zothian loom before him, saw the feral grin a predator a split second before a lethal leap… And then Siran crashed into the bodyguard. The amber-edged tanto struck twice, biting deep into her side. They broke free and halted six feet apart.
Zorthian's yellow eyes focused on crimson drenching Siran's side. "You're finished," he said, his voice hollow and devoid of intonation.
Siran smiled. Pale red flush crept on her cheeks and spread, flooding her neck, diving under her clothes, reaching all the way to her fingertips. Heat bathed London. "Not yet," she whispered and charged, sweeping the Zorthian from the floor like a gale.
London focused on the blue beam. His entire side was on-fire now, and he clenched his teeth, clutching onto consciousness. He could feel the soft welcoming darkness hovering on the edge of his senses, ready to swallow him whole. His hand grazed the metal of the stasis console. He dug his fingers into the metal and with a muscle-snapping effort pulled himself upright.
His vision blurred, but he knew the layout of the console, knew it intimately from many months of experience he earned while he called himself Ordinator. He punched the sequence by feel, the soft keys pliant under his fingertips.
The stasis beam blinked and died.
A hoarse scream echoed it. Across the chamber a body fell from the ceiling, but Siran was faster still and she landed a fraction of a heartbeat before it hit the ground, in time to catch it into her arms. The blush had gone from her features. Gingerly, she carried the prone form to him and lowered it by London's feet. The Zorthian's face lost its feral edge. His tattoos bled colored ink in dark rivulets, the images draining slowly from his skin.
Siran kissed her fingertips and touched the Zorthian's forehead. Her eyes were luminescent and warm. Not a trace of bloodlust remained. London glimpsed kindness within their depths and stunned, held on to the console.
"Thank you," Siran murmured. "For permitting me to let go."
In the chair, John Sobanto drew a long shuddering breath. London activated the recorder in his sleeve and leaned onto the console to keep upright.
Sobanto's eyes snapped open. "You turned off the field and broke the wards," he said. "She is coming."
#
The lawyer stirred in his metal chair. His eyelashes fluttered and Siran held her breath. Not yet. Please, not yet. Just a few more moments of quiet. She was not ready to kill. Not yet.
The lawyer opened his eyes and the weak hope slipped away from her. She mourned it. Already the hunger stirred, returning. She smelled the hot metallic odor of blood, her own and that of the fallen Zorthian.
The lawyer was looking at London. She looked too. Slow, like a man underwater, London pressed small square of the recorder sewn into his sleeve and fell onto console, bracing himself. His big hands trembled.
"You turned off the field and broke the wards. She is coming," the lawyer said.
Siran looked back to the entrance, searching, waiting. Something was there. Something…
"Your wife?" she heard London say.
The force lashed her like a splash of boiling lead. Siran recoiled, snarling. The entity came faster and faster, roiling with fury, churning with magic and malevolence so dark she had to fight to keep clear. It didn’t bother hiding now – there was no need. There was nothing they could do to stop it.
They would need time. The questions must be answered for the proper elimination to take place.
She thrust her mind into the path of the entity and struck. Her blow did little damage but the rage that filled the entity would not permit it to ignore a threat. Siran withdrew, and the presence followed, chasing the shadow of her mind.
"What did she show you?" London's voice asked, calm, persistent. "What did you see in the room with the glowing wheel?"
Sobanto swallowed. "Our son. I saw her cut our son's throat."
"You attacked her," London said.
"Yes. I grabbed her by her throat. I tried… I meant to pull her off of him. I didn’t know."
"You hurled her through the curtain onto the spikes," Siran said.
A grimace twisted his face. He almost wept, and then with a clenching of his fists, she saw him reassert control. "Yes. Yes, I did."
In her mind, the pieces fell into place.
"There is only one way to become a wraith," Alam said.
"To die in great anguish and pain by the hand of another," she finished for him.
"You see," Sobanto's features went slack. "I took her down. Evira was dead by the time the medic arrived."
"And her wounds had sealed," Alam said.
Sobanto only nodded.
Siran shook. The effort to keep ahead of Evira Sobanto's wraith was taxing her reserves. "Why?" she snarled. "Why does she hate you?"
"I don't know. We had a good marriage, considering the circumstances."
"The circumstances?"
"Hurry, Alam." She forced the words out. "I cannot elude her much longer."
Sobanto hesitated.
"We have little time," Alam told him.
"My father had bankrupted the firm before his death. I had nothing, less than nothing, a mountain of debts. I couldn't pay the electric bill for my own office. I had only one client, my last client, and I needed to win. I had to know the mind of the jury. The empathy-complex jury consultants are illegal." Sobanto swallowed again. "So I went to a coven. They needed a lawyer. I needed a sensate."
And the only way a witch could leave a coven was through the bounds of marriage. The wraith bit into Siran's defenses. Sharp needles of pain stabbed her lungs and for a moment she could not breathe. She ripped herself free.
"They gave me a choice. I chose Ovira. She did not object."
"Of course not. She would have been ostracized. " Siran spun to Alam. "I can’t hold her any longer. We must kill him or she'll rip him to pieces."
"She chose the juries for you," Alam said. "She monitored them through the trial and you claimed the credit."
"I didn't abuse her!" Desperation rang in Sobanto's voice. "I denied her nothing."
"Is he telling the truth?" Alam faced her.
He didn’t know what he was asking. She closed her eyes and dropped her defenses. The wraith that was once Ovira Sobanto sensed her husband. No longer interested in her, the wraith spun, shooting off energy, and barreled toward the chamber. In her mind's eyes Siran saw it loom and then it was upon her. Emotions twisted her into a knot. At once she was lonely, longing, caught between the need to please and desire to be appreciated, bitter, empty, watching life passing by and having no will to take change, growing tired, growing old, growing stupid, knowing she was not loved, would never be loved, would never be free…
And then it was over. She could barely stand. "He's telling the truth," she said.
"Why does she hate him?"
"Because he did not love her. End it, Alam. We must kill him."
"You must," Sobanto said suddenly. "I want to die."
London raised his chin, his face, blanched of all blood, strangely proud, almost regal. "We have no claim on this man. He served as an instrument in his wife's suicide. On behalf of the POM Conglomerate, I, Adjuster Alam Nikolai London, resign all rights to retribution, as specified by Part 23, paragraph 7 of the POM policy manual."
"You can't do this." Emotion cut across Sobanto's face. "She will tear me to pieces. Even if I survive, you've sentenced me to years of litigation. I have no proof! Will you testify on my behalf?"
"No," Siran said.
He spun to her. "I've seen people sink every dime they had trying to clear themselves. I will do it too, for I cannot help myself. I have a son and I'll leave nothing for him. You can’t do this to me!"
London's legs gave and he sagged against the console. "We have no claim."
The wraith burst through the doorway, a boiling cloud of black, streaked with violent scarlet. The cloud churned and a woman's face congealed from its depth. She opened her mouth. Sobanto took a step back, his hands raised before him. The wraith lunged…
And howled in fury.
Siran wasn't sure what made her move. She didn't know she had until she felt the slight resistance against her blade as it cut into Sobanto's neck.
A thick stream of blood slid across the blade to drip on the floor. Sobanto opened his mouth. Blood gushed. She withdrew the blade. He stayed upright for another moment and crumpled to the floor.
The wraith screamed. The crimson within her flared and streaked apart, ripping the darkness into pieces. The darkness folded on itself, sucked into a tiny point, and vanished. Quiet reigned.
Siran crouched by London.
"We had no claim," he murmured.
"I know," she said and wiped a smudge of blood from his lips.
The End.
Adjuster's Dilemma by Ilona Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.