Night Rider

 

Dyna felt calm.

An unnatural calm, but at the moment, that feeling was rather refreshing. Her worries, her stress, even some of the pain she was in felt muted. It didn’t go away. It was all still there in the back of her mind. She wished the feeling would persist, but she had a feeling the calm state would recede the moment she touched the objects presented to her.

The objects in the truck were definitely artifacts. No blind experiment this time, though it probably was still an experiment. At the very least, Doctor Cross would be collecting data on the simultaneous use of artifacts.

Dyna didn’t particularly care so long as she could make use of the artifacts to get the Ouija board back. And the other things from her apartment, if possible. But those were a lower priority.

Two silver-suited technicians stood in the back of the truck with Dyna. She was alone in the truck otherwise and the doors were closed. Neither object here should cause anything like what the Aztec calendar had done at the airport, but being inside a shielded vehicle while binding to them was a reasonable precaution.

There was no protocol for a situation like this. No rules or even guidelines. So, lacking any real direction, Dyna simply reached out and picked up both artifacts.

Dyna held a magnifying glass in one hand and a pair of handcuffs in the other. Both were old.

Her feeling of calm faded.

The magnifying glass had a worn wooden handle, scuffed glass, and a brass ring holding the glass to the handle. It looked like something Sherlock Holmes would have used. From having read through the artifact database, she recognized this one. There were only two magnifying glasses in the Carroll Institute’s vault and the other was supposedly much newer.

This had simply been termed The Sleuth. Found in the hands of a murdered detective in early nineteenth century France, it proved to be a key clue leading to his murderer. So it had both tracked down that murderer and had been used by the detective beforehand, presumably to track down others. It was, thematically, the best tracking tool that could exist.

Dyna had no idea how to use it, what it did in her hands, or even if it would start working right away or if she had to bond with it for a time beforehand. Hopefully the latter wasn’t true. She had used her mirror, although it hadn’t been an artifact at the time, almost immediately after acquiring it.

As for the handcuffs, Dyna wasn’t exactly sure which ones these were. There were a lot in the database, from old iron manacles that came from ancient castles to fuzzy handcuffs that made her ears burn reading about their themes and where they had been found.

Thankfully, these handcuffs were more like the former than the latter. A finger-sized metal bar, shaped like a horseshoe, connected to a thick tube with a locking mechanism. Some chain links connected the cuff to an identical cuff at the other end. Interestingly enough, there was no key. The shackles were locked shut and she could see no way of opening them.

Well, not without using other tools.

Dyna still had Hematite’s bobbypin in her pocket. That thing had opened doors and padlocks, and it had even started a motorcycle. And then Dyna got her hands on it and it created a gate in a fence that hadn’t been there before, allowing her to open it and step through.

That was the reality bending power that proper artifacts had. Not like the little gadgets, as Theta put it, that Dyna had been making. They could be powerful in their own way, but the mirror and glasses and board didn’t actually twist physical reality the way Emerald’s pocket watch did.

These artifacts, the handcuffs and magnifying glass, should have similar overpowering abilities. Dyna doubted that the magnifying glass would simply reveal a trail of footprints on the ground for her to follow. No, it would do something crazy. Same with the manacles. They wouldn’t just be inescapable. They would do something.

She wasn’t sure what.

A part of Dyna expected them to do something right away. Like just standing around with both in her hands would find the thief and capture him without her having to lift a finger, but no… Artifacts weren’t that convenient. Even Emerald still had to do work even if it didn’t look like it from an outside perspective. Hematite had to follow her intuition. Sapphire… floated around.

He was a bit weird. But then, his picture was next to ‘weird’ in the dictionary.

Regardless, artifacts took a bit of work to make work. She would have to figure out what that work was rather quickly if she wanted to make use of them tonight.

“Resonance nullification confirmed,” one of the technicians said in a muffled voice, sweeping a little metal detector-style rod over both artifacts.

The other nodded his head and undid the locks on the truck’s rear doors.

Slipping the magnifying glass into her pocket for the moment and tucking one end of the handcuffs into her pants, Dyna opened the doors and hopped out of the truck.

The first thing she did was pull out her mirror and focus on one of the EMT doctors nearby who was looking at her. His point of view popped up on her mirror immediately with no delay and came through clear. No sign of any cross-artifact interference at this point. Which was either good news, because she could use multiple artifacts, or bad news if the new ones weren’t working.

Walter leaned against the hood of a small black muscle car with a t-top roof and only two seats. Its tires had white walls for some reason. That just stuck out to Dyna as she approached. She wasn’t sure if she had ever seen whitewall tires in real life. Just movies. And usually old movies at that.

Giving her a nod of his head—his broken glasses having been replaced with a shiny new identical pair—Walter shoved off the front of the car and entered the open driver’s side door. The passenger door opened automatically, waiting for Dyna.

The dashboard wasn’t so much a board as it was one long computer screen. Displays, information, maps, graphs, charts, numbers, text, and all kinds of other information covered every available space. Instead of a steering wheel, Walter had a keyboard in front of him. At first, she thought there was no way for him to actually steer the car, but then she noticed his hand on a joystick at the end of his armrest.

Strange, but it made a lot more sense. Self-driving cars weren’t quite to the point of total control just yet.

“Feel alright?”

Dyna tried to look like she wasn’t favoring one leg as she sank into the passenger seat. “Fine,” she said, hoping her annoyance at being asked that every five minutes wasn’t too apparent.

“I meant regarding the artifacts.”

“Oh.” Dyna paused, considered a moment, the nodded her head. “I feel normal, I suppose. They sent the Sleuth and some handcuffs that could be any one of a dozen handcuffs from the database.”

The dashboard in front of Dyna lit up, displaying a three dimensional wireframe model of the handcuffs along, a few lines pointing to various parts, and a lot of blacked out text where information about those parts would probably have been. “Artifact one-three-one-four. I have been instructed not to provide additional information at this time.”

“Beatrice?”

“Good evening, Onyx,” Beatrice said, a little red light at the center of the dashboard pulsing in time with her voice. “It is good you are alive. When our call disconnected abruptly, I grew worried.”

“I… Thanks?”

“Beatrice,” Walter said. “Give me a route. Last known location of our target.”

A map slid across the dashboard with a red line being drawn through the streets as it moved. It stopped in front of Walter. He tapped a button with his thumb without moving his hand from the joystick.

The car launched forward, pressing Dyna back into her seat. She hadn’t put on her seatbelt yet. As it turned out, she didn’t need to. The car did it for her, harnessing her in with a five-point restraint.

“Walter, may I make a suggestion?”

“What is it, Beatrice?”

“In light of your recent ordeal and injuries, in conjunction with irritable fluctuations in your voice, I recommend you put the vehicle into auto-cruise mode and allow me to take over. For safety’s sake.”

“That will not be necessary.”

“Understood.” Beatrice paused, and then parts of the map changed. “This system is operating at an elevated state. I am actively monitoring traffic conditions in all areas along your path. I will ensure intersections are clear before your arrival. Should I fail, I will alert you in advance, allowing for a minimum of 8.21 seconds reaction time.”

“Thank you, Beatrice.”

Dyna couldn’t help but stare. She had been in the market for a car lately. Of course, that had been before her apartment got trashed and… well… the entire rest of the night had happened. But still…

She almost asked how much it would cost to get one of these, but a flashing on the dashboard had her scowling. It was a report regarding the Ouija board. Everything Dyna had said about it and apparently everything Beatrice had inferred from things unsaid and overheard comments between Dyna and Hematite.

Dyna pulled out the magnifying glass. She could ask about getting a car later. Assuming she wasn’t in some deep trouble for her unauthorized artifact experiments.

The magnifying glass seemed the most useful artifact immediately. The map Beatrice had displayed on the dashboard was a lot like the map she had given Dyna earlier in the night. A thick line led in one direction, presumably to a confirmed location, but it branched out through different streets, even wrapping back in on itself at points. The five most logical paths were the thickest, but even those didn’t narrow it down enough.

She needed to find a way to track their thief before they reached those branching paths.

“It normally takes several hours to fully bind with an artifact and begin making use of it,” Walter said without taking his eyes off the road.

“I only had that Operation game for… five, maybe ten minutes. It… well, it did something. You saw.” She had handled the bobbypin for even less time before using it, but had technically been around it for most of the night, so she wasn’t sure exactly how that one had worked. “I can do this. Just give me a moment to figure it out.”

Dyna first tried peering through the lens of the magnifying glass. It distorted the dashboard in just the way she would have expected from any such lens. With nothing obvious jumping out at her, she worried for a moment that she really did have to go examine footprints or something stereotypical. But no. This was a full artifact. It would do something special.

Having really only had experience with her mirror, she thought of that and pulled it out. The mirror required someone to have eyes on her or for her to focus on someone else. But that someone else had to have eyes on yet another person in order for it to work. If she didn’t know the targets, even vaguely, it failed to perform.

The magnifying glass would probably work similarly, but rather, it would track someone unknown down. But it would probably need clues to start with. Dyna didn’t have scraps of cloth handy, but she did have her thoughts and this was a psychic tool.

Dyna pictured someone wearing similar armor to those soldiers she had already seen. A person with a Russian-made submachine gun slung over their shoulder. She also had a name. Bobson Dugnutt. Fake, it had to be, but might count as a clue, along with the United States Department of Paranormal Security and that weapon. The Carroll Institute had collected it while she had been getting her arm relocated. One of those in charge of collecting it had said experimental technology… probably. She had been grinding her teeth and trying not to shout at the time.

The more she thought, the more her mind raced to other odd aspects of the night. The soldier she and Hematite had interrogated, for instance. He had spoken French to her and Russian to Hematite. But when he had called out Hematite’s location before Dyna had attacked, she was pretty sure he had used English.

How had they known to attack tonight? Coincidence? Her apartment had presumably been under more surveillance than that one old woman. But the timing seemed suspect. Right after the Ouija board started demonstrating anomalous properties, everything crashed down on her. Could it have been Hematite?

No. Dyna didn’t get that impression at all. Unless she was a better actor than Ruby, she didn’t want to get into fights at all. Not to mention her severe injuries. If she was part of that group, she could have easily turned on Dyna in the department store, shooting her in the back.

Dyna thought of herself. She honestly couldn’t say why. She knew where she was. Exactly. In the car, driving down the road. She knew the direction, speed, heading. She knew the name of the street. Although she only had a vague idea of her destination—that of the main branching point for the paths Beatrice had laid out—she found she knew the street names there as well despite having not looked that close at the map.

“Warning: Driver wishes overruled.”

The car, driving a lot faster than the speed limit, swerved to the side and jostled Dyna out of her thoughts. Her eyes widened as she watched, seemingly in slow motion, the side mirror of the car barely miss the front end of a pickup truck that had pulled out of a side road. Although dim and dark, she managed to catch enough details of the driver’s face to note his sudden surprise and shock.

It wasn’t an attack or an attempt at blocking them. Just a random hazard caused by an inattentive driver and their own excess of speed.

“Beatrice…”

“Driver control resuming in three… two… one… now.” There was an almost imperceptible lurch as the vehicle’s speed changed to match Walter’s input. “I apologize for taking control. I estimated human reaction time to be insufficient to avoid a collision.”

“It’s fine. Dyna? Progress?”

“I…” Dyna shook her head and then stared down at the magnifying lens. It hadn’t done anything at all as far as she could see. No changes to its physical shape and no images on the lens itself. The warped image of the dashboard coming through its lens looked as normal as could be expected.

But her thoughts just now? Both her odd train of thought and picking out the details when that truck almost hit them were… abnormal, to say the least.

“Sorry. I think I got distracted. I think I’m figuring it out though.”

She wasn’t quite sure why she had focused on herself. Dyna couldn’t think of anything she had done that would have caused all of tonight—aside from merely existing as an artificer—but decided not to think about it any longer. Her train of thought had clearly been derailed at some point.

Dyna focused on a new target. She could try to figure out how the night started later. Right now, she had a different objective. The Ouija board itself.

The Ouija board was anomalous, but could not just walk away on its own, so her thoughts immediately went back to the unknown soldier. The moment her thoughts started to stray toward anything even tangentially related, such as the mountain man or strange names and languages, Dyna forced herself back on target.

She focused on the soldier. Where was he headed? How did he plan to escape the city? Did he have other allies out there, or were they all dead or captured? The answer to some questions changed the answers to others, but logical deduction based on her incomplete knowledge slowly narrowed down options.

After a few moments of thought, a concrete picture coalesced in her mind.

It wasn’t as clear of a picture compared to when she thought about herself. Some details—name, age, and such things—eluded her.

But she figured out the important details.

“Map,” Dyna said.

An identical map of the city appeared on the dashboard screen in front of her. Dyna didn’t recognize the layout or the street names. Many streets were too small to be properly labeled at the current resolution.

That didn’t affect Dyna in the slightest.

Stretching out a finger, she touched a street corner where one of the thicker red lines was. A blue dot appeared. Rather than follow the thick line, she dragged her finger through one of the narrower branching paths.

“Here,” Dyna said. “Heading this direction. He has more allies waiting for him… here, I think.” She tapped the screen again, this time at the side of the Snake River. “If he doesn’t have allies, I think he’ll head over here,” she said, moving her finger up the river slightly.

“Status of those spots, Beatrice?”

“I apologize, all areas indicated are affected by the power outage.”

Walter grumbled at the back of his throat. “Are you sure about that, Dyna?”

Dyna stared at the magnifying glass. “No. But I don’t think I would randomly point at a spot with quite so much confidence if I wasn’t pulling the information from somewhere. Can’t say how I got it beyond psychic nonsense though.”

“The roads terminate. There are no bridges there. Do they have a safehouse where they plan to bunker down?”

“I don’t think so,” Dyna said, dragging a finger down the Snake River. “A boat. Submarine, maybe? To avoid being spotted. It would be a tiny one, but it doesn’t need to be that big. They just need to get far enough to throw us off their trail.”

Walter hummed. The map in front of him had been updating with the blue dots and trails that Dyna had marked out in real time. He stared at it for a moment before nodding his head. “Good work. Beatrice, fastest available route?”

A new yellow line sprung up on the map, unbranching as it pathed from their current position to the areas Dyna marked. “Warning: Traffic conditions are unknown in power-affected areas. Advise enabling auto-cruise.”

“Rejected,” Walter said as the car accelerated even more. “But feel free to jump in again if we’re about to crash.”

“Understood.”