Author: Tower Curator

 

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.”

 

 

 

The good news was that Dyna’s arm had not broken. Dislocated, yes, but not broken. The doctors reset it. It still hurt like hell and had swelled up a bit, but at least she didn’t have weeks or months of sitting in a cast to look forward to.

Which was more than could be said for poor Hematite. Dyna still wasn’t sure what had happened there. With her luck and the stories Dyna had heard about the precog, she figured Hematite should be able to walk away from anything unscathed. But perhaps her precognitive luck manipulation decided to take the lesser of two options: lose her arm or lose her life. Dyna wasn’t sure how one precluded the other, but she wasn’t a precog herself, so it was probably going to be one of those unsolved mysteries of psionic potential.

“Did we change your premonition?”

Hematite didn’t look like she was in much of a position to answer. Resting on an ambulance gurney, getting hooked up to a few intravenous blood bags while doctors tried to better secure her arm, would have been bad enough. But they had also given her some drugs to deal with the pain. Anesthetics, presumably. They hadn’t induced unconsciousness, but Hematite was definitely half out of touch with reality at the moment.

She didn’t answer. The EMT personnel loaded her up into one of the ambulances shortly after, slamming the doors and driving off.

Dyna wasn’t sure if that was the drugs or if she didn’t have an answer. Mind-affecting substances also had a tendency to affect psychic powers, so it could be that her precognition wasn’t working at all at the moment.

It felt like they were out of danger. At least, immediate danger. The mountain man had been secured and taken away. He definitely felt like the thing that could have killed all of them. With him gone, Dyna felt she could breathe easy. Easier.

Her breaths did come with a bit of pain down her side and chest. Aches and pains sprung up all over the place, covering nearly her entire body rather than just her leg and arm. She had likely been too injured or too hopped up on adrenaline to notice it all. Medical doctors were fussing over both her and Walter, who had a number of contusions on his face, chest, and arms, but was otherwise moving around like he wasn’t hurt much at all.

There was no sign of additional attackers coming after them. Dyna’s mirror was back to its normal reflective self, indicating nobody was nearby with a grudge against her.

And yet… There was still at least one hostile element out there. The one who had grabbed the Ouija board and made off with it. Dyna doubted he would be coming back given he was carrying a valuable artifact-like object that his superiors presumably wanted. A powerful one at that. Dyna hadn’t managed to figure out the rules in the short time it had been in her possession; it had a hard time answering some questions and she wasn’t sure if its problems with future predictions had been a conflict with Hematite’s precognition or a result of giving information that Dyna had intended to use to change the future. Even still, its ability to reveal information could not be understated.

Which was why, despite the pain she was in, Dyna found herself antsy.

Report was that her apartment had apparently been trashed. In retrospect, that didn’t seem all that surprising. That old woman taking photographs had probably been a spy or scout of some sort. Hematite’s ill-timed appearance made her forget about it completely. But nothing in her apartment was actually an artifact. Nothing there had demonstrated unusual properties the way the Ouija board had. The voodoo doll and such might be slightly more valuable as a research subject than when she had purchased it, but it wasn’t special.

The hobby shop had more voodoo dolls or wolf statues if she wanted to try again with those. But the Ouija board?

She needed to get back out there.

Standing up, favoring one leg, Dyna stepped out of her ambulance. She wasn’t going to be able to sneak away no matter how hard she tried, so she didn’t bother. Sure enough, her medical technician immediately tried to stop her, only for Dyna to wave him off. “I’m just going to talk to Walter,” she said.

Walter stood outside another ambulance, leaning against it while a doctor stitched up a large gash on his shoulder that he must have received in the fight. He didn’t have a shirt on at all, at the moment. Dyna wasn’t sure how old he was; Walter often gave off the feeling of someone experienced, maybe in their late thirties or forties. Old enough that, while Dyna liked him, she didn’t find herself attracted to him. And yet, right now, Dyna couldn’t help but note just how good of shape he kept his body in.

He noted her approach, but with a phone pressed to his ear, he didn’t acknowledge her with anything more than a raised finger asking for a moment of pause.

Dyna shifted where she stood, glancing up and down the street, glancing at her mirror—whose lenses had survived those cannon blasts—and then she glanced over at a security camera on the side of a building. Its glass lens had not survived, but it still had a little red light on one corner. Was it still hooked up? Could Beatrice extrapolate from whatever data it was sending?

Had Beatrice managed to locate the Ouija board?

If anyone could do it, it would be her. Especially with her permissions elevated to their fullest.

She didn’t have a phone or any other way of contacting Beatrice to find out. The ambulances probably had a radio and other people had phones, Walter included. She could ask, but…

Walter, without saying anything to whoever was on the other side of his call, lowered the phone and looked to Dyna.

She suppressed a wince.

Was the whole night her fault? She should have remembered that old woman taking photographs of her apartment. Reporting that might have given the institute a head’s up. But she had forgotten. Hematite had distracted her. She probably shouldn’t have been trying to make artifacts outside the institute’s walls. But Doctor Cross said that the administrators had rejected any related experiments. She wanted to explore her power more, but… well, that wasn’t much of an excuse. Even the actual excuses felt… flimsy. They weren’t good reasons.

Of course, not everything could be placed on her shoulders. Hematite running off on her own might have made sense from her precognitive perspective, but who could say how things would have turned out differently if she had worked with Dyna and the institute. Just calling in reinforcements five minutes earlier might have saved her arm…

Or might have wound up with all of them dead. That was the problem with precogs.

“Are you alright?” Walter asked, deep voice sounding more exhausted than usual.

Dyna gave a curt nod of her head. “We… Did Beatrice tell you about the Ouija board?”

“An artifact capable of answering a myriad of questions,” Walter said, nodding his head. “Currently in the hands of our opposing force. The airport is shut down and guards are posted; this will not be another Grafton situation. In addition, we have personnel and local police at all major roads out of the city.”

“There have to be hundreds of little back farm roads and other ways around the roadblocks.”

“Not much we can do aside from having our psychics trying to narrow down possible routes.”

“Beatrice?”

“Is searching as well. However, it seems about a quarter of the city has lost power. Sabotage of a substation, targeted at surveillance, most likely. We have people working on it. It is not something you need to worry about, there are people—”

“It’s my fault. I lost the Ouija board. I created it in the first place. I can’t just sit around.” Besides that, it was her Ouija board. Her artifact. She hadn’t protested when Mel started using the fog machine, but Mel was a friend and worked for the Carroll Institute. This was an enemy whose companions had literally tried to murder her. Letting someone make off with her artifact was…

Unacceptable.

She didn’t say that out loud, however. Dyna could recognize that her inner thoughts were beyond selfish, especially considering the situation.

“I need to do something to make this right!” she said.

“You’ve done enough.”

This time, Dyna could not suppress her wince. With a grimace, she turned aside.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Walter said. “You are injured and stressed, but you managed to save Hematite. Were it not for your actions, she might very well have died. The Think Tank believes that our rather large captive had a way—likely psychic power—of partially negating her abilities. Both psychic and artifact. I confirmed that in combat with him. My own abilities failed.”

Dyna blinked, looking back. “Hematite saw Ruby dying as well.”

“Think Tank says it was most likely a result of his presence. He is being brought to Sapphire to find out exactly how and why. We’ll likely find out other details about who he is through Sapphire as well.”

“But Ruby didn’t die. Beatrice said you managed to extract her.”

Walter nodded his head. “The psychic pulled back; temporarily, it seems. Beatrice’s analysis of the timeline of events puts his initial withdrawal roughly when the Ouija board was stolen. She suggests that acquiring the artifact sent orders for him to defend its extraction.”

“Then why was he here?”

“You and Hematite were after the Ouija board. The carrier moved this direction to regroup with him. He covered the carrier’s retreat. The scene of the fight between him and Ruby made a logical ambush point, assuming you and Hematite stopped to investigate.”

Dyna frowned to herself, wondering if they would have bypassed him completely if they had just powered on by or if he would still have popped out and shot them in the back, leading to the same outcome. She shoved the thought from her mind, however. The conversation was getting off track. After they got back, there would be a full debriefing. Dyna had been through a few of those kinds of meetings so far. They would list everything that went wrong, right, and what could have been done at every step of the way to improve the situation.

Those kinds of meetings always felt bad. Yes, she had likely made a plethora of mistakes. It was easy to point them all out in hindsight; debriefing meetings weren’t filled with all the stress, adrenaline, and uncertainty.

But all that regarded the past. At the moment, Dyna was more interested in the future. Specifically, the future of the Ouija board.

Beatrice was having problems with the power outage, but she would still have a better idea than most. Before being ambushed, she had said that the thief appeared on camera, thus narrowing down a number of possible routes and confirming that he had moved north. They might have caught him had the mountain man not appeared—which was distressingly good planning on his part—but now that he was gone…

“We should still be able to catch him.”

“Dyna…”

“Aren’t I supposed to be Onyx?” All that talk of code names to keep her real name off the records and they just went and ignored it whenever they wanted. “Standing around talking is just letting him get further and further away.”

Walter opened his mouth, lower lip a bit puffy and bruised, but paused as his phone rang. He lifted it up to his ear immediately and listened without speaking. After a moment, his brow furrowed. “Is that the wisest course of action?”

Whatever was said, Walter didn’t seem to like it. His lips pressed downward. He nodded to nobody, then turned back to Dyna and held out the phone.

“It’s for you.”

Blinking, Dyna took the phone. “Beatrice?”

“Not as such, no,” a voice even deeper than Walter’s responded. “This is Theta. Administrator Theta. We had a brief meeting some time ago where we discussed an operation involving the Tartarus organization, if you recall.”

“I remember.” It was a bit difficult to forget the lanky man.

“Ah. Good. Good,” he said, voice momentarily distant as if he were looking away from the phone for a moment. “I imagine that operation will be put on hold for the time being. At least until the current crisis is resolved.”

Dyna pressed her lips together, biting back a sardonic retort. Although she wanted to go after the Ouija board, she was in no state to try to call up Tartarus and pretend she actually liked any of them. It was nice that the administrator recognized that, but at the same time… “There is a thief making off with a powerful artifact-like object at the moment and—”

“Yes, the wee-gee board,” he said, pronouncing it slightly off. “I have been informed. It is the opinion of the administration board that such an object cannot be left in hostile hands.”

“Oh. Then we’re going after him?”

“Not quite.”

Dyna’s momentarily uplifted hope stalled. “No?”

“Rather, analysis of the situation had the board putting it to a vote. Two votes, actually. The first to keep Beatrice at an elevated operational status. It passed with an eleven of thirteen majority vote.”

“Good.”

“Yes, I am aware of your opinions on Beatrice,” he said, sounding… disgruntled? It made Dyna wonder if he had been one of the two dissenting members. “But the second vote is more pertinent to you. Seven of thirteen members of the administrator council wish to use your abilities to resolve the situation in a decisive manner.”

“My… abilities?”

“We are aware of your actions in Idaho Falls. Your attempts to create artifacts.”

“You are?” Dyna asked, not sure how to feel at the moment. On one hand, it was a bit of an invasion of privacy. And while expecting that invasion lessened the blow somewhat, she almost found it more annoying that she had wasted time and money traveling back and forth and renting the apartment.

On the other hand… It was a relief in some small way. If the Carroll Institute knew what she had been doing and allowed it to continue, there was some diffusion of responsibility for the cause of this incident. It wasn’t all her fault. Some of it, for sure, but some was on the shoulders of the administrators.

“In consultation with Doctor Cross, Doctor Livermore, Sapphire, et al. Various experts in the subjects of artifacts, psionic resonance, and effectively everything we know about psionics in general,” Administrator Theta said, continuing. “You represent an anomaly. An artificer may bind with multiple artifacts, but the resonance typically interferes, resulting in reduced effectiveness or no effects at all. You have created these… gadgets and have made use of several in conjunction with your mirror. We believe you possess the capacity to use multiple artifacts simultaneously.”

“So how does that help us now? You want me to try making an artifact that can catch the thief?”

“If you believe you can, then yes. However, we are sending you an alternate solution. A pair of artifacts. A proper one, not these gadgets you have been making. The truck is currently en route and should arrive within ten minutes.”

Dyna couldn’t help her widening eyes. They were sending out unbound artifacts? That went against… a lot of protocols. The administrators must have been more worried about the situation than even she was. Though she did find it somewhat amusing that they had not offered any level of support when the Aztec calendar had been stolen despite that being a ‘portent of apocalypse’ rather than just a somewhat unreliable ‘gadget’ as Theta was terming the Ouija board. “What do the artifacts do?”

“As you are aware, artifacts do something different depending on their wielders. It is the themes we are interested in. Namely, tracking and capture. I do not wish to further color your expectations, so I shall say no more.”

“I understand,” Dyna said. There were no concrete theories regarding the manifestation of artifact abilities simply due to a lack of sample size, but Dyna had read some of Doctor Cross’s papers on the subject. He posited that the artificer’s expectations of the artifact shaped it abilities in much the same way its themes and history did.

If Theta explained too much, Dyna might find the artifact too limiting to be able to help in this situation. Instead, if she went into it thinking that it would assist no matter what it was, then there was a very real chance that it would simply assist.

“If you are unable to make use of the artifacts, do not fret. We are investigating alternate solutions to this issue, as demonstrated by Beatrice’s continued elevated status,” he said, once again sounding disgruntled. “There are other plans in motion to secure the wee-gee board.”

“Ouija.”

“Hm?”

“Nothing… just… Wait for the artifacts, use them to capture the thief. I can do it. I won’t… I won’t fail again.”

“As I said, do not stress. How are your injuries?”

Dyna, thinking about it, flinched slightly. “Fine. Bit of swelling in my shoulder, but I’m mitigating it with an ice pack. Some scrapes and bruises too. The doctors sprayed me down with some antibiotics. I can still move. I can do this.”

“Excellent, excellent. I look forward to seeing what you can do. Theta out.”

The call disconnected as he spoke. Dyna pulled the phone away from her ear and handed it back over to Walter, who had stood by watching with a faint frown on his face the entire time.

He accepted the phone, glanced at the screen to see the disconnected call, then looked back to Dyna. “Whatever he asked, you are not required under any contract to comply with. If you’re not feeling well—”

“I’m fine,” Dyna said. Maybe if she said it enough times… “I’m fine. Thank you for worrying about me, but I need to do this.”

Walter pressed his lips together, but gave a curt nod. “Very well. I will support you.”

“You’re injured.”

“You should have seen the other guy.”

Dyna let out a small snort before an ill feeling welled up in her stomach as she remembered the way that man just snapped backward. Shuddering, she glanced back to the alleyway where a pair of silver-suited men were carefully picking up the pieces of the broken Operation game. They placed each piece into a separate silver bag before placing the bags into a larger security box. The kind used for storing artifacts.

It wasn’t long before a heavy-duty security van rolled up through the street. One of those vans with thick metal walls and doors, used to transport cash and other valuables. Except, while those were normally painted a dull gray, this van was black with gold highlights. The Carroll Institute logo on its side gleamed in the flashing ambulance lights.

The artifacts had arrived.

 

 

 

Dyna had been seeing a therapist, Doctor Bellows, for the past several months. Once a week with a few exceptions ever since the mirror became a proper artifact. The sessions were fairly relaxed, though they did have a goal. Two, actually. For one, she was supposed to work on her self-esteem issues, which Dyna thought she had mostly under control. Coming to the Carroll Institute with no demonstrable psychic ability had sent her mental state into a spiral of self-defeating despair.

That, she thought, she had mostly worked on and corrected. Partly because now she could actually do something. First, it had just been the mirror. Then she discovered her ability to force artifacts into existence. Maybe her perspective hadn’t changed all that much, but her mental state certainly had.

The other thing she was supposed to work on was her paranoia. The constant sensation that someone was after her.

Frankly, after this night, Dyna never wanted to hear her therapist mention paranoia ever again. It was a completely justified feeling. Justified more than once even.

Honestly, Dyna wasn’t sure why her thoughts were on her therapy sessions. She needed to think about the now.

“I am in shock.”

Dyna wasn’t sure that saying it out loud made anything better, but it felt like it helped.

Walter was at the opposite end of the street, engaging a man twice his size in fisticuffs. Dyna had seen people online fight off opponents much larger than themselves, often utilizing skill where the larger opponents would swing and flail wildly, using up all their energy in a few overly telegraphed exchanges.

The mountain man looked far more skilled than he had any right to be. His hands were up at the level of his eyes as he blocked Walter’s strikes. He barely flinched from any. When he saw an opening, he jabbed back or kicked or otherwise did quick, precise attacks that Walter clearly felt a whole lot more.

Dyna wasn’t sure if an artifact was involved. With that gun of his, he could certainly have severely injured Ruby to the point where she would be put out of commission. And yet…

The front of the car at the edge of the alley had been crumpled inward. It made Dyna think that Ruby had tried ramming into him and… well, he was still standing and the car was a burned out husk.

Dyna didn’t know what to do or how to help. The gun that had the lanyard was still next to her. Although he was a smaller person, Walter was too close. Dyna wouldn’t risk that even if she had a familiar gun that she had used many times and knew how it handled. Besides that, her arm was throbbing. She wasn’t sure if it was dislocated, broken, or both, but trying to shoot a gun in her current state was just asking for trouble.

“Break it down.”

Something her therapist often said. Perhaps that was why her mind had gone back to her therapy sessions. Some small part of her subconscious was trying to find a way to move forward.

Dyna didn’t see anything she could do about the fight at the moment. She didn’t know that Walter would win over time, but at least he wasn’t losing now. She could try to intervene later.

For now, there was a slightly higher priority problem.

“Hematite,” Dyna called, staggering as she shuffled to her feet. “Jane?”

Hematite was alive. Dyna wasn’t sure how long she had been stuck in a stupor, but it hadn’t been long enough for Hematite to have bled out. Hopefully only a few seconds, even though it felt like days. The other girl was probably in worse shock than Dyna was, but her fingers maintained a tight grip around her bicep. She hadn’t lost grip strength yet and that was generally the first thing to go.

First step: Dyna needed to secure Hematite’s arm.

Dyna started moving before she was fully cognizant of what she was doing.

The submachine gun’s lanyard would work. If she hadn’t seen the guard in the department store trying to do the same thing, she might not have moved quite so quickly. For that, she supposed she owed him a small bit of thanks. Or maybe a slight apology for shooting him in the face immediately afterward.

Detaching it from the gun was just a simple clip, but it was a fairly wide and flat band that was difficult to tie into a proper knot. An actual tourniquet should be twisted or ratcheted into place to ensure there was no blood loss, but Dyna didn’t exactly have any tools at and and she certainly wasn’t going to risk blowing Hematite’s head off while using the submachine gun. Pulling it as tight as she could would have to suffice. If Walter was here, there were presumably other reinforcements somewhere. She had to hope one of them would find Hematite and get her some proper medical attention.

Second step: Dyna needed to relocate Hematite. It was bad to move injured people without fully understanding their injuries, but if the mountain man did grab his gun again, Hematite would be a sitting duck. Maybe her luck would help, maybe it wouldn’t. Dyna wasn’t going to take that risk.

Throwing the motorcycle off her leg, Dyna carefully looped one arm around Hematite’s waist. Her neck supported her head’s weight, hopefully meaning that her neck wasn’t broken. It was awkward to move her with only one arm, but Dyna had to manage.

She dragged Hematite out of the street, propping her up against the side of some building belonging to a local landscaping company. That gun could probably punch straight through the building—Dyna didn’t know what kind of gun it was; maybe it was an anti-material rifle? Or something more esoteric?—but having Hematite out of sight would have to suffice for the time being.

Step three… was what?

Help Walter.

That was really the only option, but it was too big and too vague of a task.

“Break it down.”

How to best help Walter?

Dyna couldn’t contribute in a physical fight. Not while wounded. With the size of that mountain man, probably not even while hale and hearty.

She could run up behind them and then shoot the gun. The threat’s body was large enough that she probably couldn’t hit Walter if she chose the right angle. Not unless the bullets ripped all the way through him, which was a slight possibility.

However, he had body armor on. And if she was right about Ruby having tried to ram into him, bullets might do little more than tickle. The last few minutes had been hazy, but she was pretty sure she had hit him when he was aiming his gun and that had clearly not done enough.

Beatrice might have insight. Getting into contact with her didn’t seem feasible at the moment. Even if she could, Beatrice might not have much to contribute. If the shattered lens on the security camera hanging off the side of the building was indicative of the state of the rest of the cameras in the area, Beatrice probably couldn’t see.

In fact, that was probably why Beatrice had such limited information about the area to begin with.

Then what?

Operation. The original plan. The game was still out in the alley. If Dyna could reach it and force it into being an artifact, she could use it to rip the mountain’s heart right out of his body. Hopefully bypassing any psionic defenses he might possess.

That seemed doable.

Plan in place, Dyna stood up.

“Don’t worry,” she said to Hematite. “Or maybe worry a lot, if that helps your power help me. I’m going to—”

Hematite reached out, bloody hand grasping onto Dyna’s torn pants leg. Wide eyes stared up at Dyna. Her makeup was a mess; tear streaks ran down her face, grit and grime replaced blush and foundation, cuts and blood covered one side of her head. Her hair, a tangled knotted mess matted against her part of her head, hung down over one of her wide eyes.

“I’m… sorry… This never…”

Dyna forced a smile. “You focus on you,” she said, leaning down to firmly grip Hematite’s shoulder. “I’ll figure out something.”

“Don’t get close…” Hematite said, breath hitching between words. “It’s bad if you do.”

“Thanks for the advice.” Dyna had not been planning on getting anywhere near the mountain man. He could probably crush her head like a watermelon covered in rubber bands.

“This… Take this.” Hematite, teeth grit together, held out her hand.

Her bobby pin. Dyna would have thought that it was still inside the motorcycle, but here it was.

Slipping it into her pocket alongside the mirror, Dyna said, “Thanks.” Giving Hematite’s shoulder one last squeeze, Dyna picked up the submachine gun and took off in a limping run.

She did not return to the street that the motorcycle was on. It was in view of the fight. The mountain man would see her coming and Walter might not be able to stop him from turning his attention to her.

Dyna ran to the next street down and ran parallel to the street the fight was on. She wasn’t quite sure how far away the alley was where she had dropped Operation and her phone. However far the motorcycle had traveled. A block? Two? Maybe not even one.

The buildings on this street were close together, but each had a small gap between them. Not really an alley, but close. Unfortunately, each had a wooden fence blocking foot traffic. Had there been a fence in the alley that now held the board game? Dyna honestly could not remember. But even as stressed as she was, she could recognize patterns.

It might have been a mistake to run down the adjacent street.

Dyna did not stop moving, however. At this point, she might have been throwing good money after bad, but it still would have taken longer to loop back around to the original street.

She stopped at a larger alley. It felt like the right one, but it also had a wooden fence blocking the end. Uninjured, she likely wouldn’t have had much trouble vaulting it. As it was, however, she doubted she would be able to pull herself up and over. There was no gate either.

Dyna ground her teeth together, looking around. Hobbling as she was, the next street felt like it was miles away. And she would have to go past the mountain man and Walter to get to the alley.

Could she make a gate? Fashion some kind of portal-making artifact out of something nearby? Dyna started looking around for something that might thematically make holes in fences, only to pause. Tucking the submachine gun under her bad arm, forcing herself to ignore the pain, Dyna slipped a hand into the same pocket that held her mirror.

She pulled out the bobby pin.

It wasn’t Hematite’s artifact. Dyna still didn’t know what was, but it wasn’t this. However, thematically, it was perfect. It opened plenty of doors. With Hematite’s absurd luck, it opened things a bobby pin had no right to open. It had been held and used by a psychic, presumably for a lot longer than just this evening—Hematite didn’t wear bobby pins in her hair, she had pulled it out of her pocket, meaning it was something she carried with her.

Inundated with psionic energy from Hematite, it was presumably ripe for becoming an artifact.

Clutching it tight between her fingers, Dyna moved up to the fence. Lacking a gate, there were no keyholes or padlocks or anything obvious to use the bobby pin on. Undaunted, she shoved it right between a gap in the wood planks and twisted her wrist.

The fence swung open on hinges that absolutely had not been there mere moments ago.

Dyna tried not to think about how that worked. Scientists and researchers could investigate later. The how didn’t matter right now, only that it had worked.

The newly formed gate put her right behind the old pickup truck in the alley. It was a relief to see that she had chosen correctly.

She could see the brightly colored Operation box just ahead, sitting next to the burned out husk of a car. And beyond that, Walter and the mountain man were still fighting.

Walter did not look so good. His clothes were torn and ragged. The buttons on his vest had been ripped off, leaving his vest hanging open and his red tie hanging loose in the air. Blood ran down most of his face. His ever present glasses were somehow still in place, but one of the lenses had cracked and part of the reflective glass had fallen away.

It was an odd thought to have at the moment—the effects of shock or stress, probably—but Dyna couldn’t help but think that this was the first time she had ever actually seen Walter’s eyes. Or part of one eye. In what intact bulbs were left of the shattered streetlights, it was too dim and dark to see what color his eye was. Especially at a distance. All she could see was the glassy glint catching and reflecting what little light there was.

While Walter looked like he had been used as a punching bag for a while, the mountain man didn’t show any signs of faltering. His back was fully to Dyna as he faced Walter, so she couldn’t see if his face was bloodied and bruised as well, but his posture didn’t betray any grievous wounds. He still maintained his boxer stance and, as Dyna watched, lashed out with the same energy he had when Dyna had been watching earlier.

The longer she gawked, the more likely Walter would take a blow that he couldn’t handle.

The key worked. That bolstered her confidence. She just needed to do the same thing to the Operation game now.

Moving as quickly as she could—the mountain man had heavy over-ear ear protection on, likely meaning he wouldn’t hear her approach—Dyna rushed past the old truck and the burned out car. She skidded to a stop at the fallen board game. Her phone was on the ground not far away. Unfortunately, its screen had shattered. She wasn’t sure if it was the drop that had done it in or if the shockwaves from that cannon of a rifle had blasted it. Either way, it didn’t look operable, so she ignored it.

Ripping open the cardboard box, Dyna pulled out the plastic tray. The game pieces were in a little plastic baggy along with a pair of batteries, but her eyes were on the board itself.

Normally, the game of Operation had a fat naked man with a bright red nose printed on a piece of cardboard over a metal plate. The metal plate was used to form a circuit with the tweezers, which would cause a buzzer to sound and the nose to light up. Little holes in the game board would hold various plastic pieces that were literal depictions of actual ailments or parts of the body. A charlie horse in the leg, shaped like an actual horse. An adam’s apple in the throat, an actual apple. So on and so forth.

While the little pieces in the baggy looked normal, the board did not. Instead of a fat naked man, a far more muscular man occupied the printed cardboard. Broad-shouldered and with tree-trunks for arms, it didn’t take much to figure out what was going on.

The board was depicting the mountain man.

The holes in the board still had the metal boarder around them, but they weren’t shaped like usual either. And the objects they held…

A miniature, beating heart occupied the center of his chest. Breathing lungs were right next to it, heavily panting. There was a stomach, liver, muscles. All exposed, all looking disturbingly realistic, and all looking ripe for the picking.

Shaking off her surprise, Dyna grabbed the tweezers.

Touching the metal wall was normally a failure state. Ignoring that completely, Dyna jammed the tweezers into the heart cavity and pinched them around the miniature heart. She yanked back, intending to pull it right out of the body, but thick veins and arteries connected to the heart’s chambers stopped it from coming out.

“Dyna!”

Looking up at Walter’s haggard voice, she found the mountain man staring at her with one hand grasping at his chest. Although a balaclava obscured most of his face, his eyes were filled with both panic and anger.

He started stomping toward her. She tugged at the heart again, but it wouldn’t come loose. She needed a knife to cut it out. Why didn’t she have a knife? Those were Ruby’s tools.

Walter wasn’t going to just let the mountain man come after her. Before the man had fully taken one step, Walter was already acting to strike him from behind.

An unexpected backhand lifted Walter straight off his feet. He sailed backward a short distance before landing again. The force made him stumble backward, but he managed to keep his balance. As soon as he stopped his backward momentum, he leaned forward into a charge once again.

But the mountain man, despite his size, wasn’t a slow man. His long legs carried him across the alley straight to Dyna.

Panicking, she dropped the tweezers entirely. Balling a fist, she slammed her hand down onto the Operation board. Not on the chest, which she worried would just feel like Walter had punched him—something he had been obviously ignoring—and not in the head for similar reasons. She punched in the one spot she knew would have the most immediate stopping power.

Sure enough, the mountain man stopped abruptly, hands clutching at his groin.

Dyna didn’t stop there. She gripped the board with both hands. One hand only had a weak grip, so she put all her power into her good arm as she slammed the entire board down over her knee.

The plastic frame cracked and shattered. The metal plate and cardboard printing of the mountain man bent straight in two.

The mountain man in real life, standing mostly straight save for his slight hunch to grip his groin, snapped. In the span of a single blink of the eye, he went from upright to forming an acute angle with his back and legs. Head at the level of his feet, a wispy groan escaped his lips as he slumped sideways, landing with his back still bent.

Dyna, arms shaking and heart hammering, lost all the strength in her upper body. Not because her own back was broken, but simply because her body decided it didn’t need to flood her system with adrenaline anymore. Sinking to the ground, Dyna panted, breathing a whole lot more than she had thought she needed.

The mountain man was still moving. His legs looked paralyzed, only moving as a response to the rest of his body, but his arms were flailing. Was he panicking? Or still trying to attack? Dyna couldn’t imagine any world in which she would still be able to make an effort toward anything but random flailing in that situation.

Walter still gave him a wide berth as he rushed over to Dyna.

Before he could say anything, however, Dyna pointed a finger. “Hematite. End of the street,” she said between breaths. “I’m fine, but she’s hurt. Needs help.”

Walter stared. His visible eye, an almost luminous yellow—though that might have been the light gleaming off—flicked from her to the broken Operation board and back. Apparently making a decision, he nodded his head. “I’ll be right back.” With an ever-so-slight limp in his leg, he took off in a run toward where Dyna had pointed.

Letting out a long breath, Dyna slumped back against the side of the burned out CI vehicle, not caring in the slightest that it was probably coating her in ash and charred plastic. She just watched, staring at the mountain man.

Who was he? Who did these guys work for? This felt far too brutal for Id.

Her eyes flicked down to the game board again. Some editions of the game named the patient as Cavity Sam. This edition, however, lacked similar text. In its place was what might have been a patient identity card. The kind of thing found on hospital wristbands.

It had a name: Bobson Dugnutt. Which sounded like the fakest name Dyna had ever heard. Just beneath that, a single line of text read: United States Department of Paranormal Security.

That…

That had to be fake as well. The Carroll Institute was the psionic research institution for the United States. It was a government entity. They wouldn’t… attack themselves. It had to be fake. Bobson Dugnutt? They used pp-2000s, which were apparently a Russian-made firearm.

It had to be fake.

Right?

 

 

They stole the Ouija board. It was the only explanation. The fifth threat, the one that neither Dyna nor Hematite could account for, hadn’t engaged in combat. The group was looking for artifacts. They could easily have had detection tools similar to what Tartarus had. Dyna hadn’t checked the bodies for such tools; she was focused more on weapons than other equipment.

How were they planning on extracting themselves from the situation and the city? Grafton had tried using the airport. Would they do the same?

“Beatrice,” Dyna said, phone back in her own hand now. “Are you able to ground all flights?”

“I am able to issue a grounding order; I am unable to physically ensure no flight leaves the ground should an operator ignore a grounding order. Most aircraft do not have wireless flight capabilities that I am able to interface with.”

“Grounding order is better than nothing,” Dyna said.

“Understood.”

Last time, she had rushed out after Grafton to apprehend the mind-controller before he could leave the area.

Last time, she did not have a hostile artificer planning on murdering her. She still wasn’t quite sure what the goal was of those two mind-controlled men who had chased her out of the pastry shop, but now at least, she mostly believed that Id did not want her dead.

The same could not be said of this organization.

“Hematite, are we still dying?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Soon?”

“I can’t tell. My intuition doesn’t really work like that.”

“Does your intuition have any suggestions?”

Hematite didn’t answer. She turned her head this way and that, looking around the employee only area. Probably looking for text that would trigger her power. When she turned back to the power switch—or the large shock warning label on it—she stopped and stared for a long moment.

“What?” Dyna asked. “Do you see something?”

“No,” she started, then stopped with obvious hesitance. “I mean, yes, but I’m not sure what it means. It’s written backwards like it was meant to be read with…” Hematite trailed off, glancing back to where Dyna held the mirror against her phone. It was the only way she could keep both in one hand and her other hand free for a gun if necessary. Beyond scowling slightly, she didn’t comment further. “I can still read it though. Does ‘Tuesday’ mean anything to you? Today is Friday…”

“If we have to hold out until Tuesday, we’re screwed. Even ignoring the murderous artificer that knocked Ruby out of commission, the Ouija board will be… be…” Dyna blinked. Some association between Tuesday and the Ouija board struck her, but she couldn’t quite make the connection. It was on the tip of her tongue.

“Tuesday is spelled wrong, if that means anything. It has an ‘e’ instead of the ‘y’.”

That did it.

Dyna jolted. A cold sweat broke out over her body as her mind filled in the missing puzzle piece. Her mouth went dry and her face… Her face must have done something because Hematite took a concerned step forward.

“Are you alright?”

“Tuesdaes,” Dyna said.

“What?”

“It’s a craft store, thrift shop, art supply store. Or something. It is where I got the Ouija board.”

“So… what? It isn’t like artifacts grow on trees. It was probably the only one there. Why is that important now?”

“Because it isn’t the only artifact I got from there. I bought several other things. They’re in my apartment.”

Hematite adopted a glower. “Not reporting one is irresponsible, but you got several without reporting them?”

“They weren’t artifacts when I got them. Still aren’t, as far as I know.”

“Then—”

“I make artifacts. That’s my power. It is finicky and I’m still figuring out the exact methods, but I have several instances of evidence that show I can do this kind of stuff. That’s what this is for,” Dyna said, twisting slightly to show off the game of Operation. “I’m going to use it to pull the heart right out of whoever is after us.”

Hematite failed to suppress a gag.

Dyna paid her little mind, too worried about what her seeing Tuesdaes might mean for the stash of proto-artifacts she had at her apartment. “And if these people want artifacts, my apartment may very well give them the next closest thing. Beatrice! You’re aware of my apartment, aren’t you?”

“Correct.”

“Do you have eyes on any street cameras nearby? Is there any suspicious activity going on around it? Can you redirect a team to it?”

“Nearest security team redirected at your request. Are you sure you know what you are doing?”

“I’m with the robot lady,” Hematite said. “You’re taking reinforcements away from us?”

“Unless it is a team of artificers, I don’t know what they would do against someone that severely injured Ruby. We need to get the Ouija board back—it’s the only artifact that they definitely have their hands on at the moment—and dodge that artificer at the same time. At least until I figure out how to use Operation against him.”

Hematite’s gaze turned flat as her eyes flicked down to the board game under Dyna’s arm. “You do know how insane that sounds, right?”

“Yes.”

“Damn it. I thought you were normal.”

“I am normal, it’s…” Dyna shook her head. “Beatrice? Do you have the most likely path our thief might have taken yet? Any eyes on him out on the streets?”

“No visual confirmation of priority artifact Ouija Board located at this time. Pathfinding algorithm completed in 138.82 seconds, cross-referenced with observational data and likely path traversal. I have three unique paths subject Thief is likely to have taken. Data sent to your phone.”

Dyna, shuffling the mirror away from her phone, found a map pulled up with live-updated data. The department store had a few thick veins spreading away from it, which branched off into smaller and smaller paths. There were hundreds of them, presumably representing all the different possible paths the thief could have taken at any point in his likely escape. The end point of each line was still extending outward. In many cases, those end points branched off into smaller and smaller lines, which continued until they branched off. At many points, those branches terminated abruptly. Probably at points where Beatrice had security camera data.

However, as Beatrice said, only three were highlighted in a bright green. Unfortunately, each of the three led off in different directions.

“Hematite?” Dyna said, flipping the phone around to show the precog.

Apparently unprepared for the assault of information, her eyes unfocused. She even went cross-eyed for a brief moment before she shook her head. “The north line, I think,” she said after staring.

“Great. We need to move.”

“I don’t know if that is where the Ouija board is or if that is just where my intuition says we should go to stay out of this entirely,” Hematite said, shuffling her feet. “Sorry.”

“It is better than nothing. Beatrice, any possibility of transportation?”

“There is a motorcycle—”

“I don’t know how to ride a motorcycle. A bicycle, yes, but—”

“I do.”

Dyna blinked and shot Hematite a look. “You know how to ride a motorcycle?”

Hematite shrugged. “I have an Oxy2 Racer. Despite the name, it isn’t actually a racing bike, but it is how I get around—”

“Can you ride… can I ride with you without getting us both killed?”

“If you can hold on tight and not shift your weight around abruptly.”

Dyna licked her lips, feeling some butterflies in her stomach. She wanted to ask Beatrice for alternate options, but at the same time, she had seen videos online of stupid people in bikes. People weaving between cars to get through traffic or slipping through narrow passages that cars would never be able to navigate. The stupid people online were just doing it for fun and thrills, endangering other drivers with their recklessness. But Dyna and Hematite actually had a reason.

“Fine. Beatrice, where?”

“Follow the hall you are in to the exit doors to the south then turn to your left and proceed for fifty meters. You will find the vehicle parked behind a nearby bar.”

“Great,” Dyna said, not feeling very enthusiastic at all. Motorcycles always seemed… a bit too dangerous. When she had been looking at vehicles before renting her apartment, she had seen incident rates for various types of vehicles. From SUVs to trucks to cars and, naturally, motorcycles. There were less motorcycles than other types of vehicles, but when a motorcycle did get in an accident, it generally did not turn out well at all.

Taking a deep breath, she started walking anyway. “Let’s move.”

“Warning: The north path is adjacent to the location Ruby encountered [unknown] her opponents.”

“Lovely.”

Following Beatrice’s instructions, it didn’t take long before Dyna and Hematite came across the motorcycle. Some part of Dyna had been hoping for one of those little sidecars for her to ride in. Unfortunately, that was not the case. It was an older motorcycle—some sort of Harley or chopper—with worn red paint.

Hematite hopped on without hesitation. She kicked up the stand and pulled out her makeshift lockpick once again. Dyna honestly didn’t think it should work on a vehicle—or any lock for that matter—and yet, with a twist of her wrist, the engine came to life.

“Hop on!”

“No helmets,” Dyna grumbled as she complied. She wasn’t sure that the seat was designed for two people, but there was a bit of the aged leather behind Hematite and it seemed to have little footrests on either side for her to use. As soon as she got seated properly, Hematite spurred the bike off.

The speed and vibration caused by their rapid departure made Dyna cling to Hematite tight enough that she worried she would pinch the other woman in two. But Hematite didn’t complain. Or, if she did, Dyna couldn’t hear it over the wind rushing past her ears.

Operation and the submachine gun without a sling were pinched between Dyna and Hematite. The gun had its safety on, naturally. Dyna’s phone was out in one hand and her mirror was in her other, but she couldn’t see either with her arms wrapped around Hematite. Having lost her earbud, Dyna had no way of hearing Beatrice either.

She felt… blind. Her eyes still worked, obviously, but just the lack of available information had the world closed in around her. Someone could pop around a corner, aim at them, and fire without her being aware at all. Beatrice could be warning them of the artificer or some other threat and neither of them would know it.

Hematite didn’t stop. Dyna was pretty sure they had blown through two red lights and a stop sign. Dyna wondered if it was luck that they hadn’t been hit or Beatrice manipulating stop lights to try to keep their route clear. Either way, there weren’t many vehicles on the road.

Actually, now that Dyna thought about it, Ruby’s fight might have frightened most people away depending on how loud it had been.

Perhaps it was a combination of all three. Whatever the case, Hematite didn’t stop the motorcycle for anything. Not even to check the map. Was she running on intuition or had she memorized it?

After several minutes of riding—during which time they went over two more intersections without stopping—they came across a street with several buildings but exceedingly few windows. Glass littered the entire area. Even the lights had been shot out. Only a handful of streetlights bathed the area in a yellow glow. Toward the end of the street, they stopped alongside an alleyway with an old truck parked in it. A wooden fence blocked off the far end of the alley. There were dozens of tire tracks and footprints along the side of the building and a burned out electric car that might have been one of the loaners from the Carroll Institute. It had apparently run into something that wasn’t there now and had gone up in flames. Although the car wasn’t on fire at the moment, Dyna could see smoke still wafting out of its shattered windows.

“I think we found where Ruby had her fight.”

With the motorcycle finally stopped, at least for the moment, Dyna hurriedly peeled her arms off Hematite to first check her mirror—blank but with black lenses indicating someone was likely nearby but just didn’t have eyes on her—and then her phone.

“Beatrice?”

“This is Beatrice. During your transit, I was able to collapse several paths after spotting a likely target. You are in the right direction, however—”

Dyna’s mirror changed to a perspective of someone staring at her back. Dropping her phone, she grabbed the gun, flicked the safety off, and pivoted where she sat. Hematite started moving the bike, apparently aware of the danger before Dyna had a chance to say anything. The sudden movement almost had her falling off the back, but she managed to grab hold of Hematite’s shoulder, pinning the mirror between her hand and Hematite.

Operation fell to the ground along with her phone. Dyna couldn’t pay it any mind at the moment. Her eyes were on the sidewalk, searching for any sign of who might have had them in view.

A bit of movement had her squeezing the trigger. She didn’t expect to hit anything. Moving on a motorcycle, holding the gun in one hand, not really aiming, unfamiliar firearm… Any one of those would have been a problem, but all three?

She was just hoping the exploding bits of brick and sidewalk would have whoever it was thinking twice before attacking them.

But her actions seemed to have the opposite effect.

The shadow moved out, fully standing on the sidewalk. Yellow streetlight reflected off his dark clothes. He was tall and wide with broad shoulders. A veritable mountain of a man. Although he wore the same style of equipment that the men in the department store had worn, it didn’t look like it fit him all that well. He was just too big. They apparently didn’t have custom sizes for their gear.

Dyna squeezed the trigger again and again. The three round bursts peppered the area around him as Hematite sped away. She was pretty sure that at least one bullet hit him, but it only barely knocked his shoulder back. It looked more like he flinched than got hit by a bullet.

He pulled a rifle off his back. A long rifle with a thick barrel. Larger than any gun Dyna had ever seen. He knelt down, propping up one elbow on his extended knee as he aimed down the gun’s scope.

Dyna shouted… something. She wasn’t sure what. A warning of some kind. Hematite either heard or intuited the need to swerve.

The submachine guns sounded like firecrackers when they went off. The suppressor didn’t silence the bullets, but they did keep the noise from blowing Dyna’s eardrums out. A regular, unsuppressed gun did hurt her ears, often leaving her inner ear ringing for a few minutes afterward if she failed to use ear protection.

The long rifle sounded like a cannon.

The sound alone shook the street. The glass in the windows of the buildings didn’t explode, but only because every single pane had already shattered. A lancing heat seared at Dyna’s arm, almost making her let go of Hematite in sheer shock. Only the surprising lack of pain let her keep her hold.

Hematite, however, opened her mouth in a silent scream. There might have been noise, but after that cannon blast, Dyna couldn’t hear it.

Her arm below the elbow simply vanished in a spray of gore. Along with it, the handle of the motorcycle. Her swerve hadn’t been far or fast enough. Perhaps her luck had simply run out. Or it couldn’t stand up to such an overwhelming weapon.

The bike wobbled back and forth. Hematite, though likely delirious from pain, tried to keep it going. Her efforts fell short when the bike tipped just a little too far.

Dyna hit the ground shoulder first. She felt something snap even as she slid along the ground. She could feel bits of skin flaying off her side, though her jacket protected her from the worst of it. But her grip on the submachine gun failed and it went clattering away. Somehow, she managed to avoid hitting her head on the ground. It was a barely cognizant note to be thankful of somewhere in the recesses of her mind.

It was a good thing they hadn’t managed to accelerate any further than they had.

Hematite was in no better shape. Even discounting her missing and bleeding arm, her leg caught on the motorcycle. Where Dyna had come loose and came to a relatively safe, Hematite was pinned beneath it, too busy gripping her stump to even begin attempting to lift the bike off her.

Dyna had managed to retain a grip on her mirror. Watching the lenses, she almost wished she hadn’t.

The man with the rifle casually pulled the bolt action back. A truly massive casing popped out as he pulled a second cartridge. He chambered it, pushed the bolt action back into place, and leaned over to peer down the scope once again.

The crosshairs moved, transitioning from a signboard at the end of the street down to where she and Hematite were still on the ground. The scope focused on Dyna’s head, but quickly moved over to the mirror in her hand.

In the perspective of the mirror, she did not see a recursive perspective of the man. To him, it was just a regular reflective mirror.

And in that reflection, she saw a figure rushing down the street behind the mountain of a man.

His perspective whirled away from the scope and Dyna.

She caught a glimpse of another man, this one dressed in little more than fine trousers, a black vest, and a bright red tie. Pince-nez sunglesses obscured his eyes, but his expression of anger was clear the snarl of his lips.

A gloved fist slammed straight into the perspective on the mirror just as the lenses went black.

“I have to get up,” Dyna said to herself, barely able to hear her own words over the ringing inside her head. “I have to get up. I have to get up.”

Clenching her teeth, Dyna mustered every last scrap of willpower she had.

 

 

Department stores had too many things in them. Too many useless things. Dyna wasn’t sure who bought half the crap lining the shelves. Everything caught her eye; she kept watch for even the smallest thing that could help.

They had bath robes, bath towels, bath rugs, bathtubs, bath sponges, bath soap, bath bombs, bath—

Dyna stopped and glanced back. Bath bombs? That had bomb in the name, but… No. She doubted that would work. Despite the name, the thematics weren’t there. Not unless she wanted to give their opponent some kind of makeover or cleansing.

Next section.

Bathing suits, suit ties, suit vests, suit jackets, light jackets, winter jackets, denim jackets, bomber jackets…

There was that word again. But no. Again, the themes didn’t fit with what she needed. In fact, she needed to rush right past the clothing areas of the store. Could clothes be artifacts? Yes. She knew of several examples. The Hopkins Hat, no less than three plague masks, dozens of regular masks, gloves, and so on and so forth. But most of those got their themes from their unique designs and associations with their owners, not simply because they existed. Regular clothing didn’t fit and this wasn’t a costume store.

Floor jack, bottle jack, a decorative jackdaw, the game of jacks, the game of Monopoly, the Game of Life, life jackets, and she was back to jackets for some reason.

Stopping and turning around, Dyna made for a rather small corner of the store where she had passed the board games. The Ouija board was, after all, just a game. It wasn’t advertised like one, but it was published by a board game company. It had worked out well enough as an artifact. Perhaps another game would work?

Dyna walked past lego sets, Jenga, the crocodile that chomped down when the wrong teeth were pressed, marbles, dice, playing cards, Chinese Checkers, bocce, about thirty or forty different variations of Monopoly, trivia games…

She paused at Operation, considering it for a moment. The game of surgery where you had to remove remove a whole bunch of nonsensical ailments from a patient without the pair of tweezers touching the sides of the board. Doing so would cause a buzzing noise and the patient’s nose to light up, indicating pain.

Dyna wasn’t sure exactly how it would work as an artifact. Most artifacts didn’t actually do anything with the item themselves. Ruby’s ruby didn’t require her to wave it over her body and Sapphire’s control rods didn’t need to be puppeted. At the same time, Dyna’s mirrors required her to look into the lenses and Emerald’s pocket watch required a tap to the stem.

As such, she could imagine a possibility where the game of Operation could be set up and, perhaps while thinking about a specific target, used to cause pain or even kill someone. One of the game pieces to remove from the patient’s body was, after all, a heart. Complicated, maybe, but more complicated than the Ouija board?

Maybe. It was hard to say.

Dyna grabbed it off the shelf and immediately started running back toward Hematite. Was it the best choice? Probably not. She kept her eyes open on the way back. But unfortunately, everything in the store was just too… generic. She couldn’t think of anything better off the top of her head.

It would have been nice to have Mel around. She could have just made an object on the fly that would have fit exactly with what Dyna needed—and it would have been filled to the brim with psionic energy already. Dyna wasn’t exactly sure what she needed, but that was beside the point.

Of course, it was best that Mel wasn’t here. Her utility would be completely overshadowed by her being… normal. Hematite might claim that she was normal and Dyna might feel like she was normal, but the fact was that they weren’t. Both had gone through some training. Both had gone through harrowing incidents. Mel would likely be given the same self-defense courses that Dyna had gone through. Then she would probably be offered the more advanced courses that Dyna had accepted. But today? Here and now?

She was just a psychic initiate of the Carroll Institute. Not an artificer.

Dyna’s path back to Hematite took her through a familiar spot of the store. A mannequin shoved aside and, not far away, one of the soldiers down on the floor. She swept the submachine gun’s flashlight over the body.

He wasn’t moving.

Keeping her weapon trained on his head and her mirror open toward her, Dyna carefully approached. He still didn’t move.

Entering into close quarters with a downed opponent was a great way to get grabbed and have the situation turned on its head. Or so said Emerald. But at the same time, there were some things that could only be done in close proximity.

Stretching her foot out, Dyna nudged the man’s helmet.

Lax, his head rolled to one side. There was zero muscle resistance.

Dead. Or so deeply unconscious that he might as well have been. A black balaclava hid his face, so she couldn’t see much besides his closed eyes. They didn’t open.

Dyna pressed her lips together. She was honestly surprised that she had managed to land a hit on him. The moment had been chaotic, dark, and stressful. The lighting especially had not done her many favors. With only the dim emergency lights, she had really only been able to see silhouettes.

It only took one lucky bullet to hit the right thing to kill someone and she had unloaded a full magazine in his direction. She didn’t see a wound now, but nudging his head back and forth, she couldn’t see any way that he could possibly be active.

Just in case he was only unconscious, Dyna knelt and pulled the thick strap of his pp-2000’s lanyard over his head and off his arm. After checking to make sure that the safety was engaged using the flashlight of her other weapon, she slung it over her own shoulder. She didn’t know how many bullets these things held and, while she could probably figure out how to reload them easily enough, she doubted she would be able to reload effectively in the middle of a fight. Having the option to toss one away and pull the other up was too great to ignore.

He had a pistol as well, holstered at his hip. Dyna took that as well, quickly checking that it was loaded, chambered, and had the safety on. It didn’t fit into her own holster—she didn’t know the model—but shoved it into her jacket pocket nonetheless.

These people all seemed to have standardized uniforms. That meant that the guy she had told Hematite to talk to would probably have a sidearm as well. Dyna wasn’t too worried—she would have heard the gunshots if any were fired—but figured it would be best to hurry back as quickly as possible.

She still wasn’t sure where the fifth person was. Unless the board had been wrong—or had been counting Hematite for some reason—then there should still be another lurking around somewhere. But her mirror had yet to activate and she had yet to see any evidence of another person.

Could the fifth have left the building? Maybe Ruby had alerted the another squad and the fifth had gone to reinforce them—the fifth threat could even be the one that took Ruby down—and was now on its way back. Or maybe the threat was already back, lurking around…

Dyna pushed the thoughts from her mind as she hurried back.

She slowed down once she reached the bedding section of the store, not wanting to rush straight there just in case Hematite had been captured and now had a gun to her head. Hematite didn’t seem stupid so much as nervous, however, so Dyna wasn’t expecting it.

Sure enough, she found Hematite standing a safe distance away. The soldier’s sidearm was lying a short distance away, pinned under Hematite’s foot. Dyna wasn’t sure why she hadn’t picked it up, but based on her handling earlier, wasn’t too surprised that she hadn’t. Hematite didn’t seem the most comfortable with a gun in her hands.

“Find out anything?”

Hematite jumped, glared, then glared at the soldier. “These guys are part of a small team. Four squads like the one we fought. He says he doesn’t know where the other squads are.”

“What are they after?”

“Research materials.” Hematite paused, then nodded. “Artifacts.”

Dyna figured that, but it was nice to have confirmation. “Who are they or who are they working for?”

“He said Russian Psi-Corps.”

“But he speaks French?”

“He isn’t speaking it now.”

Dyna frowned. A mistake on her part? She didn’t think so. French and Russian were fairly distinct and, while she didn’t know either language, she knew Doctor Cross originally came from Russia. It was rare, but he occasionally said the odd word that Dyna didn’t understand.

This man’s earlier words to her hadn’t sounded like those at all.

“Did you ask who they had that might be able to fight off Ruby?”

“Beatrice?”

Having been put onto speaker phone, Beatrice spoke. Dyna didn’t understand a word of it, but the same was obviously not true of the soldier.

He snorted. A forced faux laugh, but one that still communicated mocking disdain. He said something after. Again Dyna failed to understand. However, she was partially confident that it was not the same language he had first used with her. It probably didn’t matter now, but it would be good to bring up with whoever ended up investigating this incident.

At the moment, she needed to survive long enough to worry about that investigation.

“We were the scout team. Gloat while you can. The Tool-User won’t disgrace himself.”

“We’re not gloating,” Dyna mumbled.

At the same time, Hematite flicked her eyes down to the phone. “Tool-User?”

Dyna didn’t quite catch the first bit of what Beatrice said, but it ended with ‘instrumentium’ or something. The same words that the soldier had just said. Beatrice continued in English after letting the phrase hang in the air for a moment. “It isn’t a natural phrase. Etymological analysis indicates deliberate construction for a specific use.”

“Artificers,” Dyna said. “Or artificer singular. I hope.”

“Your assessment agrees with my own pattern recognition engine.”

“We already knew that,” Hematite said, then shot Dyna a frown. “Unless you thought Ruby lost to a few guys with guns.”

“No. I figured it was either an artificer or an entity.”

“What can their artificer do?” Hematite asked, looking from the phone to the soldier.

Beatrice translated the question. The soldier bared his teeth, spat on the ground at his side, and then clamped his jaw shut.

“I don’t think he’s going to answer.”

“Any analysis from Ruby’s fight with him?”

“Following Ruby disconnecting her call, this system was unable to meaningfully observe the encounter due to limited operational status.”

“Still? Do they want to to get three of their artificers killed?” Dyna, grinding her teeth together. “You call up Administrator Theta right this instant and tell him that I will—”

A short burst of noise came from the phone. It was not quite static but Dyna wasn’t sure how to describe it beyond garbled noise. Distant whispering that sounded almost like Beatrice talking to herself started up a moment after. With all that background noise still playing, a far more defined and audible instance of Beatrice took over.

“This system is now operating in an elevated capacity.”

“That’s it? That’s all it took? I didn’t even finish my threat.” A probably empty threat at that, given that if they died here, it wasn’t like Dyna would have been been able to follow through.

“Stated goal: Assist Carroll Institute artificers. Expected elevated runtime: Unknown. End state: Artificer exfil OR thirty minutes pass,” Beatrice said, all while that garbled background noise that sounded like old modems trying to connect to the internet carried on. “Appropriating local resources for CI-BEATRICE use. Street-level camera control online. Analyzing Ruby-Unknown battlefield—STANDBY. Warning: Current location disconnected from power grid. I cannot access internal cameras of the Kent Lockwood Department Center at this time.”

“We turned off the power,” Dyna said, glancing back toward where the employee area was. It wasn’t far away. “We could turn it back on, I think.”

“Immediate tactical assistance will be limited unless the situation changes.”

“Then we better get on it.”

“There might be computers or servers we have to turn on for her,” Hematite said. “You already know where the power is. I can probably find the security office with my intuition.”

“Splitting up again?”

“You didn’t have a problem splitting up when you went to get…” Hematite waved the phone toward the box pinned under Dyna’s arm. “A board game? What are you doing with that?”

“A… backup plan.”

“Uh huh.”

“What about him?” Dyna asked, waving a hand toward the soldier. “We just going to leave him here?”

“Emerald, Ruby, or Aqua would have killed him already. I…” Hematite shuddered. “This feels like killing in cold blood.”

“He was trying to kill us just a few minutes ago,” Dyna said with exceedingly little sympathy. If he and his friends didn’t want to wind up dead, they shouldn’t have tried attacking people who were just minding their own businesses. “Do you think we can get any more useful information out of him? Beatrice?”

“Precise details of the situation are unknown to me. My recommendation may be flawed.”

“Great. We—”

The sound of shattering glass and faint pops of suppressed gunfire interrupted Dyna. She tensed, moving her finger to the trigger of the submachine gun while simultaneously checking her mirror.

The only eyes on her were those of their captive soldier. Though they didn’t remain on her for long. He angled his head back, drew in a deep breath, and started shouting in whatever language he had been speaking.

Dyna’s finger tightened around the trigger. The stock kicked into her shoulder and the man slumped over. Something wet and warm struck Dyna’s face, but she forced herself to not flinch.

Hematite, on the other hand, jolted. She jumped back with wide eyes. “You shot him,” she said, pointedly not looking in his direction. Her eyes were locked on the ceiling. In the dim emergency light and the radiant light from the submachine gun’s attachment, she looked pale. Paler than usual, anyway.

“He was trying to get us killed,” Dyna hissed. “Actively trying, not just in the past. And we’re out of time. We need to move.”

“Recommendation: Restore power or vacate these premises.”

“Hematite? What does your intuition say?”

“I… I don’t know… I need a moment.”

“Don’t have one,” Dyna said, turning. Between the shout and the burst from the submachine gun, suppressed though it was, they couldn’t stand around and chat. “To the power switch. There is probably a back door for employees if we need. Try to decide by the time we get there.”

Dyna counted three steps of her own before she heard Hematite’s lighter footsteps coming along behind. Despite wearing platform boots, her footfalls managed to sound timid and unsure.

“You killed him,” Hematite said again, mumbling as if she were talking to herself in disbelief. Dyna didn’t bother dignifying that with an answer, which just resulted in Hematite talking again, this time louder and more obviously directed toward Dyna. “I thought you were normal—someone like me, just caught up in all this mess. But you’re just as crazy as the rest of them.”

“I’m not crazy. I just don’t want to die. And if someone is trying to kill me, I’m not going to cry over choosing myself over them.”

“We could have just walked away. He couldn’t walk.”

“He could tell whoever is after us what our plans were and where we were going. Not all of us can just sit down and expect our enemies to kill each other because of our very presence. Some of us have to do things ourselves. And when precogs are predicting my death—”

“Warning: Infighting is [counterproductive] to current goals.”

Dyna clamped her jaw shut. Beatrice was right.

Hematite, however, didn’t agree. “You didn’t have to come after me at all. I might not have predicted your death if you hadn’t. I would have figured something out on my own. I didn’t need your help.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think I’m the kind of person who can just up and leave my friends when they’re in trouble.”

Hematite’s soft steps stopped. When they didn’t start right back up again, Dyna turned, expecting to have to snap at the girl. Instead, she found her wide-eyed with… an expression on her face.

“Friends?”

Dyna blinked. “Yeah. Sure.”

Hematite opened her mouth and closed it without saying anything. Hugging Dyna’s phone to her chest, she quickly stepped into the lead, but not before Dyna caught her black painted lips curling into a small smile. “I’ll take the lead,” she said. “I have the good luck, remember?”

Feeling a chill run down her spine, Dyna hurried to fall in step at Hematite’s side. Not at all sure of how that luck worked, Dyna didn’t exactly want to be in the back if her luck was influencing her to take the lead.

At least the argument stopped. Talking like that, even in the quietest of whispers, was a good way to further give away their already compromised position.

Reaching the employee only door, Dyna held up a finger over her lips. If someone was on the other side and heard them chatting…

Hematite, despite not having a weapon, pushed through the door first.

Nothing bad happened to her.

Dyna moved in with far more caution, pieing off around the corner as best as she could.

The back hallway seemed deserted. Thankfully.

Hematite went right up to the power switch and threw it into the on position. While she did that, Dyna headed over to the side of the door where she had left the Ouija board.

There was nothing there. An empty spot. Sweeping the flashlight up and down the floor in the area didn’t reveal anything.

The Ouija board was gone.

“Beatrice,” Dyna said slowly. “We have a new high priority objective.”

 

 

 

Dyna’s gun barked three times as she fired down one of the long aisles of the department store. She didn’t stand still after firing, immediately ducking down and moving, keeping a close eye on her mirror to know if she should dive for cover or swap directions.

Someone returned fire in her direction. The mirror didn’t change, so they didn’t have eyes on her, but she heard a nearby display case shatter and the bright muzzle flashes momentarily flashed the store with white-orange light. Distant cracks without any accompanying bullets hitting nearby likely meant that Hematite was still active and running around on the other side of the store. Theoretically, Dyna could try to get Hematite’s perspective up on her mirror to check, but she needed it for herself at the moment. It was her only real defense.

She weaved between two mannequins that were covered in robes like giant shrouds, hiding behind them when she saw another soldier round a corner into an aisle across from hers. Her mirror lit up as she shot him twice. She ducked behind the podium the mannequins were on and let loose another couple shots. A loud bang echoed in front of her, followed by a flurry of gunfire from… Hematite?

No. The shots were too fast. They came from a submachine gun.

The glass display cases all around her shattered in response, spilling jewelry everywhere as though she had just pulled off a very successful robbery. The second wave of shooting started again, this time much closer than before. She didn’t know how many more rounds she had left in her magazine—she wasn’t particularly interested in finding out either way right now. She reached back and took hold of one of mannequin legs and shoved it, knocking it back in the opposite direction from where she ran, hoping it would serve as a minor distraction.

She aimed for the legs, making the most use of the shadows and angles to hide herself while she fired until there was no point anymore. The one who turned into the aisle went down, but there were still others out there. Her gun clicked empty. No amount of squeezing would make it go any farther. Dyna reached back, grasping for one of her spare magazines, only to grab at nothing but air. She had grabbed two fifteen round magazines before leaving. Had she really run through them both already?

Deciding the gun was extra and useless weight, she tossed it aside on top of a pair of sunglasses which skidded away along the floor.

The mirror went dark.

She backed up against a wall and braced her feet on something that felt like carpet underfoot. In the distance, a bell rang once and then fell silent again. Hematite? Was that supposed to have been a communication of some sort? Did that mean she was safe? Or did she need to be running even faster?

First, she needed a new weapon. Even though this was Idaho, Dyna didn’t think she had seen any display cases holding weapons. That meant there was really only one source for a new gun.

Looping back around, taking the wide path around as many racks of clothing as she could, Dyna headed back to the bedding section of the store. She found what she wanted just around the corner in an area filled with fluffy pillows and sheets in every size imaginable. The room was littered with them in heaps and piles, stacked high enough to reach from ground level all the way to the ceiling.

The soldier she had shot first was still there. He had moved somewhat, leaving a trail of blood as he put his back against one of the shelves. He was tying something around his legs. Bandage, tourniquet, or whatever it was, the action was costing him both of his hands.

His submachine gun sat on the floor at his side.

Moving again, careful to keep an eye on her mirror and an ear open for any sign of his friends, Dyna circled around him until she was coming up from behind. The shelf he had his back to would help hide her presence. She crept forward until she was standing beside the wounded man, just around the side of the shelf.

She could hear him grunting and hissing in pain. He mumbled under his breath. Probably cursing, though Dyna couldn’t understand it. It wasn’t English. She was fairly certain she had heard him say something in English just before shooting him, but supposed that she could have mistaken it.

A quick glimpse around the corner got her the information she needed.

The gun was not attached to him. It was on the floor, a completely free. It might have been attached with straps or a lanyard at one point, but it looked like he had taken that off to use it as his tourniquet.

In a flash, Dyna jumped around the side of the shelf, grabbed the submachine gun, then jumped away as fast as she could, keeping her new acquisition pointed directly at him.

The man let out an accented “Shit!” before going very still.

She peered down the dim red dot sight, finger firmly on the trigger. Her thumb found what had to be a safety on the side, but she didn’t know what position it was in. In the dim emergency lights, she couldn’t see well enough. She kept her thumb on the switch, just in case the gun didn’t fire when she pulled the trigger.

Dyna considered running off. She had taken down one other of the soldiers. Hematite must have taken down one by now too, though counting on that before getting into contact with her was a dangerous assumption to make. Still, if the board was right, there should only be two active soldiers left.

Based on the scattered yet distant gunfire, they weren’t nearby.

She should run off and deal with them immediately, but…

She had one of them right here in front of her.

“Who are you?” she asked. “Who sent you? Who do you work for? What are you after? Answer me, unless you want your face to look like your knee.”

Dyna spoke with a nervous haste. Her heart was hammering in her chest. It had been hammering since the gunfire started, but right now, it was loud enough that the soldier could probably hear it. If the soldier really didn’t speak English, or even had English as a second language, her nervous chatter was probably barely intelligible.

Still, he didn’t answer. Instead, he just growled some more before letting off another string of words in what might have been French. He let out an almost animalistic hiss between each word. The sound made her jump slightly, despite it likely not being directed at her. It was the pain.

Probably.

Deciding to test the status of the safety, Dyna pointed the gun off to the side and gave a quick pull of the trigger.

The submachine gun belched out bullets. It wasn’t full auto. Three round burst? The suppressor on the front kept them from being as hard on her ears as her own gun had been, but it was still enough to give away her position.

Though he sucked in a sharp breath, he clamped his jaw and didn’t say anything.

Deciding against sticking around any longer, she backed away, keeping the gun trained on him. With her offhand holding onto the front of the gun’s angled guard as a forward handle, it was a bit more awkward to hold her mirror in such a way that she could see it, but she really just needed to watch for any flashes of its single dark lens that might indicate someone else catching sight of her.

As soon as she was out of sight of the injured soldier—confirming that through her mirror—Dyna ran once again.

French. Were these people from the European Union? Or had it simply sounded French to her ignorant ears? The EU was supposed to be allied with the United States. Were they just mercenaries working for someone else?

Time to think later. For now, she needed to survive.

Though… sitting still and listening… Dyna didn’t hear any more gunshots.

Had Hematite finished the last three off? Or had she gotten captured or killed and now the three remaining soldiers were all after Dyna?

Dyna couldn’t risk calling out, but over in the bedding section, she knew roughly where Hematite had been headed when they split up. Turning herself in that direction, she started walking slowly and carefully, keeping an eye out for any sign of flashlights sweeping across the aisles, watching her mirror, and straining her ears for heavy footsteps or rustling gear.

What she heard was neither. She didn’t hear gunshots either.

Instead, she heard crying. Soft, whimpering, crying. It did not sound like it was coming from a grown man either.

“Hematite?” Dyna tested, voice barely above a whisper.

The crying hitched. “Who—Dy—Onyx?”

Keeping her newly acquired gun at the ready, Dyna pushed around a thick rack of spring jackets.

Hematite sat on the ground, gun clutched to her chest. Around her, there were two bodies. Both obviously dead. The clear goggles on one soldier, slumped against a broken mirror, had shattered where his face had filled with lead. The other was face down in a steadily growing pool of blood.

“Are you alright?”

Hematite hopped, fumbling with the gun. Dyna felt a knot form in her stomach, something that said that Hematite was beyond unsuitable for this kind of work and, especially, unsuitable to handle a firearm. Had she even had training? Just watching her hold it made her nervous and that was with the slide being locked back, indicating that the gun was empty.

Thankfully, Hematite noticed who was there and calmed down—though calm might not be quite the best word to use. Perhaps it was better to say that she didn’t freak out any further.

“They shot each other,” Hematite said. “I couldn’t hit them. I tried. Then I tried running. That one surprised that one—” She waved her empty gun from the face-down guy to the other. “Or… maybe it was the other way around? I don’t know. The bullets came so close. I…” She moved a hand up to her head, just above her ear.

Though her newly acquired weapon had a flashlight on the front, Dyna wasn’t aiming it at Hematite. Even still, the light bled over enough to see where some of Hematite’s dark hair had been… torn? Burned? Shaved? One of the bullets must have skimmed the side of her head.

Dyna looked from one body to the other. Was that how Hematite’s supernatural luck manifested? The two taking each other out?

“We’re not out of this yet,” Dyna said slowly.

Hematite gave her a quick look up, then turned away again, staring into space. Shock?

They didn’t have time for shock. “The board said five threats here. You… Two are here. I shot the knee out of one and took his gun—though he might have a sidearm. I shot another, but didn’t stick around to check if he was capable of getting back up. Even assuming he isn’t—a bad assumption—that still leaves one.”

Dyna took her eyes off Hematite long enough to look around. No sign of any other flashlight beams sweeping over the department store. At least not here in the men’s clothing section. Her mirror lenses were dark as well.

Were they still being hunted? Or had the incapacitation of a majority of their members frightened the last one off? Dyna couldn’t count on that, but it would have been nice.

“Are we still dying, according to your intuition?” Dyna asked.

She could hardly believe that she was currently alive as it was. Five special forces soldiers against her? Granted, she had only really engaged with two of them. But still, she didn’t even have supernatural luck unless Hematite’s aura of probability manipulation covered her as well.

It made her nervous. Like, if that was all that was after them, Ruby could have handled it in her sleep. Hematite’s power, apparently, could handle it as well. Dyna probably would have fallen if all five had converged on her at once, but she wasn’t all that special compared to the other artificers. And yet, if all three of them were supposed to die, there just had to be something else lurking around.

Hematite tensed, stiffening her back and snapping her head one way then another. The movement did not go unnoticed.

“See something?” Dyna asked, locking her submachine gun into the crook of her shoulder as she readied to fire.

“We… We need to move,” Hematite said.

“Intuition?”

“Yeah.”

“Bad?”

“Yeah.”

Hematite stood, slowly. She let her gun drop from her fingertips and made no effort to pick it back up. Though she stared after it for a moment, she eventually stepped over it, moving right next to Dyna. Dyna almost asked her to go pick up one of the submachine guns from the two soldiers on the ground, but decided against it at the last moment.

Having seen Hematite wield her pistol, both here and in the alley, Dyna rather thought they had a slightly better chance if Hematite was not armed. Besides, with her power apparently conspiring to make two opponents shoot each other, she probably didn’t need a gun.

“My phone,” Dyna said. “Right jacket pocket.” She wanted to get it out herself, but between the submachine gun being far more unwieldy than a pistol and wanting to keep her mirror ready and pointed in her direction for the fastest reaction time she could manage, she just didn’t have the hands to spare.

Hematite slipped two fingers in and slowly pulled it out as they walked. They stuck to the back walls as they moved back toward the employee only area they had started in, keeping far from the aisles to put as much cover between them and their potential opponents as possible.

“Beatrice?” Hematite said. “Alive, I guess. For now. Well, yes. I don’t know what is after us. Might be more soldiers. Five. I guess we’ve only downed four?”

“Ruby?” Dyna asked.

“Dy—Onyx wants to know about Ruby.” Hematite paused a long moment before sighing. “Oh. That’s unfortunate.”

Dyna tensed, sucking in a sharp breath.

Hematite quickly waved a hand. “She’s okay. Kind of. Regenerating at the moment. The team that was supposed to reinforce us found her kind of mangled and broken.”

“Mangled?” Dyna allowed herself to relax a tiny bit. At least Ruby was safe. For Ruby-centric definitions of the word ‘safe’ anyway. “She wasn’t just fighting soldiers?”

“I don’t know. She apparently isn’t in much of a position to talk.”

“Can’t Sapphire read her mind?”

“I think he needs an intact mind to read.”

Dyna grimaced, remembering Ruby’s encounter with the bowling ball.

“What about reinforcements for us?” Hematite asked, putting the phone to her ear again. “Whatever got to Ruby is probably heading toward us. Dyna and I can’t exactly put ourselves back together from a pile of tenderized meat!” Her voice pitched at the end.

Though the sentiment did not go unshared. Ruby was good with a gun and good with a knife. If something… pulped her despite that skill, Dyna wasn’t sure what good this submachine gun was going to do. And with both Hematite and the Ouija board indicating that Hematite wouldn’t be able to deal with it either with her super luck…

They needed something more than a gun.

A proper weapon to fight against a psychic, artificer, or entity.

Finding out what it was might go a long way. “Can Beatrice translate French?”

Hematite glanced over, one eyebrow up, but repeated the question. “Yes. And any other language that is commonly spoken around the world.”

“Great. There is a downed soldier with a blown out knee in the bedding section. I last saw him tending to his blown out knee next to the shelves of memory foam mattress toppers.”

“You sound like we’re splitting up again.”

Dyna nodded. “Don’t know how much time we have.” The board might be able to answer that, but that would also take time to run back and grab it. Time she needed to run through the store. “Try to find out what we’re fighting from him, but be careful, he might still have a sidearm or knives or who knows what. And there is still at least one threat in the building, according to the board.”

“Where are you going?”

Dyna took a breath. She honestly wasn’t sure just yet. This was a department store. She hadn’t seen any guns during her run through the store, but there were plenty of other things. They had Allen wrenches, gerbil feeders, toilet seats, electric heaters, and a hundred other odd items. One of those would stick out to her. She might not be able to make a proper, full artifact, but she had made emergency tools in the past. Ado’s goggles stood out as a prime example.

And with Hematite here as an alternate source of psionic energy, she might be able to make them better or faster than she could on her own.

She just needed to find items with proper defensive or offensive themes.

All while keeping an eye out for other soldiers that were probably still wandering around.

“I’m going to find us some more weapons.”

 

 

“If we exit to the street side, will we run into the threat?” Dyna asked. Beatrice wasn’t giving them an exit. She had to do it herself.

The planchette shuddered.

Why?

Was the question not specific enough? Was ‘run into’ too vague? Dyna obviously didn’t mean physically sprint into someone, but did the board know that? How did it decide how to parse her questions? Some obviously had been less than specific, but she still got answers.

“Will the threat—”

“This is taking too long.”

“You got a better idea?”

Hematite didn’t respond. Standing just to Dyna’s side, she stared down at the Ouija board. She stared for a long moment, then snapped her head up to look toward the parking lot.

“This way,” Hematite said, hurrying out of the alley.

“Where are you going?”

Hematite turned. “Following my intuition,” she said, tone lacking any discernible inflection or tone. Her face remained impassive as well despite her obvious fear and nervousness from earlier.

For some reason, that bothered Dyna. Again, even in this stressful situation, Dyna couldn’t help but be struck by how odd Hematite was. All of her actions, her random popping up and disappearing, her emotions… She just didn’t feel consistent despite being a self-proclaimed ‘normal girl’ stuck in situations over her head. Maybe Dyna didn’t know her well enough, but Dyna considered herself to be a normal person who had to deal with extranormal situations at distressingly regular intervals. Therefore, a normal person should act like she did, not like Hematite.

“Are you coming?”

Dyna picked up the board and started running after Hematite. Although odd and inconsistent, Dyna didn’t doubt that they were in trouble. She had seen Hematite’s visions through the mirror. That couldn’t be faked.

And if Hematite had suddenly regained some confidence, maybe her intuition was telling her what to do in order to maximize her luck. Dyna was willing to trust that much. At least until they got a moment to breathe and either question the board or Beatrice.

To Dyna’s surprise, Hematite did not run toward one of the few cars out in the parking lot. She would have figured that someone with improbable luck would be able to hotwire a car in an instant and get them transportation to escape the area. Instead, she headed straight for the sliding automatic doors of the department store.

There were still some lights on inside, but the vast majority of the store was dark and the doors didn’t open. A quick glance at the operating hours showed why. The store had closed over an hour ago. They might leave the lights on permanently, though it could also be a custodial crew or cashiers closing up for the night.

Undaunted, Hematite pulled a stereotypical bobby pin from her bodice-like top and jammed it straight into the lock. Having learned a little something about lockpicking from Ruby, Dyna was pretty sure she needed something to tension the pins, but Hematite barely needed to wiggle the pin before the lock clicked.

Sliding the door open, Hematite waited just long enough for Dyna to slip in before closing it and locking it from the inside.

“Now what?”

Dyna blinked. “You’re asking me?”

“No one else nearby,” Hematite said without looking at Dyna. “You have more experience being chased than I do, right? What can we do? Where should we go now?”

“My intuition said that we should steal a car and get out of here at a wildly unsafe speed,” Dyna said, trying not to sound as stressed as she felt. She didn’t want to stress Hematite any further.

“Yes, I did read in your file that you have a habit of stealing cars.” Hematite looked back to the door she had just locked, peering through the large windows at the nearly vacant parking lot. A frown crossed her face and she flinched.

“It isn’t a habit.”

“Whatever it is, I think we should stay in here.” Grabbing Dyna by the arm, Hematite pulled her further into the store. “And stay far from the windows.”

Dyna did not protest that point, quickly moving along with Hematite. “Why here?” she asked, looking around.

Most of what she saw were clothes. Racks of shirts and pants. Mannequins showing off sweat pants and a dress. Along one wall, there was a glass counter filled with jewelry. She couldn’t see the whole store as some walls blocked the view, but knew from the outside that it was a larger building. A few signs hanging from the high ceiling pointed toward kitchen supplies and bedroom furnishings sections of the store.

“I guess I feel safer in here.”

“Do you still see us dying?”

Hematite’s eyes flicked up to Dyna for a bare instant before looking away.

“I’ll take that as a yes, which means we aren’t safe here.”

“At least not yet.”

“Not yet? We…” Dyna looked around. There would be hundreds of places to hide here. With the racks and walls and counters and signs, she could barely see anything beyond the walkways between the floors of clothes. “We don’t even know who is after us. I haven’t even seen evidence of anyone. How many are there? What are they armed with? How far are they willing to pursue us?”

Dyna spotted a particularly thick rack of long dresses. A perfect spot to crouch down and interrogate the board for a few minutes. But Hematite, hand still on Dyna’s arm, started off in the same direction as Bedroom Furnishings.

“I saw a gun,” she said as she walked. “My visions aren’t always clear, but the PP-2000 has a distinct silhouette. Very angular.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Russian-made submachine gun. Compact, portable, and reliable, but never really got that popular. It was phased out of most services a good five to seven years ago, so hard to say who is after us exactly.”

Submachine gun ticked something in the back of Dyna’s mind. Since her mirror fully turned into a proper artifact, she had gone through a number of training scenarios and lectures. Mostly ones dealing with self-defense, but Emerald had insisted on variety to keep her on her toes.

Typically, submachine guns appeared in close-quarters combat areas. Places where reduced size and recoil helped immensely. They were also typically used by special forces, often in conjunction with suppressors.

Which sounded bad. “So we have a squad of special forces after us?”

“Don’t know. Just know what gun I saw. I think.”

“Great.” Dyna didn’t know what kind of training special forces would have had, but was willing to bet everything she owned that they trained far harder and longer than Dyna had. “Where is Ruby? Beatrice? Bea—” Dyna cut herself off as she moved a finger up to her ear.

The earbud wasn’t there. It falling out wasn’t a surprise, but Dyna did wonder when it had happened. The run to the department store? During the countdown? Before?

She still had her phone, however. Pulling that out and finding that the call was still ongoing, Dyna disconnected the wireless earbud and put the phone to her ear.

“Beatrice, how long is Ruby going to be? Or any reinforcements?”

“Unknown.”

“Unknown? What do you mean unknown? It’s just distance divided by spee—”

“Asset: Ruby has engaged with unknown combatants. Communications have been disrupted.”

“A communications disruption? Jamming? Or did Ruby just toss her phone?”

“Unknown.”

“Why haven’t the administrators let you off your leash yet! Damn it,” Dyna ranted. “You send them a message right now, every single one of them, and let them know that they better hope I die here because if I live through this, I am going to go smack each one of them upside the head until not even the institute’s best psychics can put their minds back together. I’m going to rip off their smug smiles and shove them so far up their—”

“Dyna.”

“What!”

Hematite flinched, but pointed at the wall. “I think this is what we were looking for.”

Dyna had barely been paying attention to her surroundings as they walked. Given the situation, that was probably dangerous, but at the same time, she was upset. Why did this happen every single time she got wrapped up in some incident? Left alone with no support while the walls closed down around her? It shouldn’t happen! It…

Dyna took a deep breath. Anger wasn’t helping right now.

Taking in her surroundings, Dyna guessed that they had slipped back into an employee only area. The wall Hematite had pointed to was some kind of electrical panel case painted notice-me-not gray with a large red handle sticking out of it. A small padlock kept the red handle in place.

At least, it did until Hematite shoved her bobby pin into the hole and jiggled it around. As soon as the lock fell to the ground, Hematite reached up and pulled down on the lever.

The hum of centralized airflow cut off as the lights in the hall went dark.

Plunged into darkness, Dyna looked to where Hematite had been standing and gave a flat look that nobody would see.

“Do the people after us, who might be special forces, not have night vision equipment?”

“I’m just following my intuition. I saw the lever down. Now it’s down.”

Emergency lights flicked on, though the faint light wasn’t half as powerful as the main overheads. Peeking back through the door they had come from, Dyna found the main room near pitch black. Infrequent emergency lights allowed some vision, but the clothing-filled room as a whole was just too large.

“Could your vision have been warning you against putting the lever in its down state?”

Hematite, looking small, shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve had a lot more practice interpreting what I see than you have.”

That might have been true, but…

Shaking her head, Dyna decided arguing was counterproductive at this point. “We’re not getting reinforcements anytime soon. Sounds like Ruby was ambushed. We’re on our own for the foreseeable future.”

“So now what?”

Dyna pressed her lips together. The last time Hematite asked that, she immediately ignored Dyna and ran to turn off the power.

Dropping the Ouija board on the floor, Dyna crouched over it. “Could you get me a backpack from somewhere in here?” she asked of Hematite, not the board. Carrying around the board was going to be a liability more than an asset if a fight broke out.

“You want us to split up?”

“I… no, you’re right. Bad idea.” Sighing, she looked down. “Is the threat after us inside this building?”

NO

“Is the threat still after us?”

YES

“Is the threat aware of our presence inside this building.”

YES

“How many individuals make up the immediate threat to us?”

The planchette slid down to 6, but just before it fully stopped, it abruptly changed directions to the left and stopped on the 5.

At first, Dyna tensed, fearing another countdown. She readied her gun and waited, but the planchette didn’t move.

“Did you hear that?” Hematite asked. She had moved over to the door leading back to the main store area while Dyna was questioning the board.

Dyna listened closely, wondering just what kind of noise would have alarmed Hematite. There were some very specific sounds she imagined—footsteps moving across tile flooring, breathing, the rustling of clothing or clank of equipment…

But there was none of that here. She was just about to answer negatively to Hematite’s question when she heard something.

A crackling. Distant. Had Dyna of last year heard it, she probably would have suspected firecrackers.

It was gunfire.

“Ruby?” Dyna said under her breath. Holding her phone up, she asked, “Beatrice, how far away was Ruby when you lost contact with her?”

“Approximately one mile away from your current location.”

“That’s probably her then. We should—”

Hematite held up a hand then quickly put a finger over her lips.

White beams of high powered flashlights swept over the walls and racks of clothes. Hematite and Dyna ducked around the side of the partially open door just as a beam swept over where they had been standing.

Back pressed up against the brick wall, Dyna put her phone away. The light from it could easily give them away. Beatrice wouldn’t be able to help with a tactical situation anyway.

“How many threats are inside the building?” Dyna whispered, voice barely audible even to herself.

The board still heard despite being a short distance away. The felt on the underside of the planchette sounded like a stone tomb grinding open in the utter silence of the employee area. Thankfully, it stopped just as quick as it started, indicating that all five of the answer to Dyna’s previous question were now inside the building.

“Are they wearing body armor?”

The planchette slid again, making Dyna wince. It wasn’t loud. Her heartbeat was probably louder. It still made her grit her teeth until it stopped on YES.

Dyna pulled out her mirror. She carefully kept it angled away from Hematite, remembering Ruby’s story about being attacked—though Dyna still wasn’t sure of just how true it had been or if Ruby had been misunderstanding something, it seemed best to play it safe.

Hematite was looking at Dyna. With the dim emergency light to Dyna’s back, she couldn’t see her own face in the mirror’s perspective. Her face was just one large shadow.

She didn’t know if Hematite was still seeing their deaths or if they had changed their fate.

Not that Dyna believed their fates were set in stone. No fate, she thought to herself. Knowing the future changes it.

Hematite locked eyes with Dyna for a brief moment then nodded her head. She bent and picked up a small silver knob that might have come from the end of one of the clothing racks. It gleamed in the dim light. Closing her eyes, she held it to her chest.

A beam of light swept past the door again. Hematite waited a moment after it was gone before pivoting around the side of the door. She threw her arm forward, sending the little silver knob flying in an arc. She didn’t stop moving once the knob was off. She ducked out into the main room, hurrying to the right.

Consulting with her mirror to make sure there were no eyes on her, Dyna moved out and to the left just as a loud metallic clatter drew everyone’s attention to wherever the knob had landed.

She had left the Ouija board behind. It was too cumbersome to fight with. She would have to come back for it later, if possible.

If it wasn’t possible… she would probably have larger things to worry about. Probably bullet wounds.

Pushing morbid thoughts from her mind, Dyna moved low to the ground, careful to avoid touching any racks of clothes. The bedding department was just a few quick steps away. It had tall metal racks holding blankets, comforters, pillows, and the like. A bed set out for display had a headboard that went up to her chest. None of it would make for good cover, but nothing in the store would. It was better concealment than clothing racks that didn’t quite reach the ground or glass display cases.

Carefully peering around the side of a bedding rack, Dyna caught sight of one of the threats.

They were definitely some kind of special forces. Solid black clothing and gear. No markings at all. In the dim emergency lights, Dyna could really only see the silhouette, but that was enough to spot the bulk of a ballistic vest and the smooth contours of a helmet. This one didn’t seem to have any night vision, surprisingly enough, but his gun did have a high powered flashlight on the front of it.

Hematite had been right, their guns were oddly shaped. Like a bow tie, almost.

As she watched, she spotted a shadow moving between racks of clothing in the distance. Hematite.

The soldier saw her too. “Contact,” he said, tone soft. He didn’t say anything else, but Dyna saw several other beams of light swing around into the same direction.

Dyna waited. This wasn’t it yet. She felt bad, using Hematite for bait. But Hematite had supernatural luck. That was more than Dyna had.

Loud cracks of gunfire echoed through the store, followed quickly by crisp yet muffled reports of suppressed bullets.

That was it.

Dyna pivoted, sure nobody’s eyes were in her direction with the gunfire going on elsewhere. She didn’t know if their body armor protected their backs. Not wanting to take the chance, she aimed low.

Three pulls of the trigger sent three ear-splitting shots into his legs. He collapsed, but Dyna didn’t stick around to see if he would stay down. She moved, dashing from concealment to concealment as fast as she could while keeping an eye on her mirror.

The soldier she had attacked caught sight of her for a brief moment, but he didn’t fire his weapon. His eyes turned to his knee—or what was left of it. Dyna wasn’t sure what he was feeling, but upon seeing his leg, he started shouting.

The mirror went dark as he lost track of Dyna.

One down. He wasn’t dead. He was still armed. Going back to the bedding area would be dangerous, but Dyna didn’t need to kill them. If she could disable them enough that they couldn’t chase her and Hematite anymore, she could leave them to properly armed and equipped police or soldiers or whoever would be cleaning up this mess.

Dyna entered into the appliance section of the store. Tall refrigerators and ovens might actually provide cover. Pressing her back against one of the fridges, she took a breath before focusing on her mirror. She could figure out where they all were as long as they all had one of each other or Hematite in view.

Four threats left, minus any that Hematite had gotten.

She could do this no matter what Hematite’s vision said.

 

 

Dyna had a problem. Lots of problems, actually, including several that she probably didn’t even know about. But this particular problem was obvious and cumbersome. Encumbering, one might say.

Artifacts came in all shapes and sizes, as long as the artifact could be considered a single object. A pocket watch was made of many parts, but all those parts made just a watch in the end. Dyna’s mirror consisted of a case, two reflective lenses, and a camera lens, yet it was still just a spy mirror. Ruby’s gemstone was just a simple lump of ruby.

While browsing the list of artifacts, Dyna had noticed some larger objects. There was a sword, a skull with mosaic tiles covering it, and a large brass bell from a church that weighed sixty kilograms according to the database. The bell was the heaviest object in the Psychodynamics vault. Dyna had no idea how an artificer would make use of it if they bound with it. It was just too heavy to carry around regularly. Pocket watches, mirrors, puppet control rods, and the like could all fit easily into pockets.

The Ouija board wasn’t heavy, but Dyna was quickly deciding that it wouldn’t make for a good artifact. While sitting on the floor of her apartment, it seemed good enough. It gave answers to questions. But now that she was outside? It was too awkward of a shape. She carried it under one arm with the planchette half sticking out of her jacket pocket. Maybe if she had a backpack, it would have been easier, but the large board was definitely awkward to hold as she hurried down the streets of Idaho Falls.

Hematite was in trouble. Dyna was the closest person to her. Ruby was on the way, but she wouldn’t be here. Theoretically, they had time, but every time Dyna asked a question about the future, the board’s answers changed or stopped part way. It was either unreliable or Hematite was actively changing her course specifically to avoid being located. Presumably to keep her visions of a dead Ruby and Dyna from coming to fruition.

“Why do you have to be so difficult?” Dyna mumbled to herself.

“I apologize. This system is oper—”

“Not you,” Dyna said, pressing the earbud further into her ear with the same hand that held her mirror. “Hematite. Ever since I met her, she’s been… odd. Then she disappeared for a week when Cross offended her, now this? What is she thinking? Wouldn’t it be best to rush back to the institute and hide out in Psychodynamics? Surely whoever is after her wouldn’t be able to get her there. Why is she running?”

“Unknown. Hypothesis: Hematite has a perfect record. She may believe she can handle the situation on her own. Hypothesis: Hematite’s visions identify a worse outcome if she she attempts to return or involve others. Hypothesis: Hematite is picking up on additional context to her visions that inexperienced viewers such as you may fail to recognize, thus resulting in aberrant behavior. Hypothesis: Hematite’s artifact, [REDACTED], is forcing her to adjust her behavior in order to activate its effects. Hypothes—”

“Alright, alright,” Dyna said, adjusting the earbud again. She hated the things, always falling out. “Let me know if you get something a little more concrete. Until then… I’m coming up on her last known position a bit north of the park.”

“Understood. Ruby en route. Additional security team en route. Directions to your location have been updated.”

Dyna ignored the message, looking down at her mirror again. It was hard to tell exactly where Hematite was with her visions overlaid on top of reality, but Dyna had been describing streets and buildings to Beatrice over the phone as well as providing the occasional bits of useful information from the Ouija board.

Speaking of…

Setting the Ouija board down on the sidewalk, Dyna crouched down and tossed the planchette onto it. Rather than slide across or bounce or anything that a normal piece of light wood would do upon hitting a flat board, the planchette stuck to the board as if magnetized.

“What is the nearest cross-street to Hematite?” Dyna asked, paying the odd physics little mind.

The planchette moved, sliding from letter to letter. Dyna repeated the letters to Beatrice one by one. Two letters into the second street and Beatrice had the location.

“One block south of your current position. Hematite’s pace has slowed.”

“Yeah. I don’t know her that well, but based on what I see when the mirror is active, I would say that the visions are getting to her.”

“Objectives: Attempt to make contact. Encourage Hematite to wait for additional reinforcements. Discern the source of the threat. Safeguard Hematite. Safeguard yourself. Safeguard CI interests.”

“Right.” Dyna started to pick up the board again, only to pause. “Are there any threats to me in… a five block radius from my current position?”

YES

“What kind of threats are there to me?”

The planchette just shuddered, but stayed where it was. Too broad of a question, Dyna was fairly certain based on previous instances of that happening. Either that or she needed to know a bit more about what she was asking in order to get a proper answer.

“Are the threats human or entities?” Dyna asked, trying to narrow things down.

HUMAN

“Are the threats armed?”

YES

“Great.”

Every time she stopped, Dyna tried interrogating the board a bit more. She didn’t really have time to play twenty questions—Hematite was still moving away—but she was pretty sure she had at least a small picture of what the threat was. People. People much like those men who had first chased after Dyna. Another organization, likely wanting to get their hands on artifacts, even if it was at the expense of the artificer.

Scooping up the Ouija board and pocketing the planchette, Dyna shifted her mirror to the same arm that held the Ouija board, making the whole affair even more awkward. But she wanted to be ready to grab her pistol from the underarm holster inside her jacket at the first sign of anything going wrong.

Double-checking with her mirror that Hematite hadn’t sprinted off in a random direction, Dyna hurried after, following the direction Beatrice had given her. Her artifact showed Hematite turning into a small alley just before a warehouse near a large department store. She still wasn’t hurrying, but there were unfortunately no people in the alley. Dyna’s mirror lingered on Hematite’s vision for only a few seconds before the lenses went dark.

Dyna picked up the pace. Hematite was only a block away. Although the text on the signs had been scrambled into threatening messages, the buildings had been mostly the same. Upon arriving on the street, it took only a few seconds to spot which alley Hematite had entered.

She rushed down the alley, but the moment she passed a large dumpster pressed up against one wall, her mirror lit up again. She only caught it out of the corner of her eye, not even enough to recognize what she was looking at, but reflexes from training kicked in.

Dyna immediately slammed a foot into the ground, jumping to the side. If the mirror lit up when she wasn’t specifically trying to see something, it defaulted to perspectives observing her. And if someone was suddenly observing her in this situation, they probably didn’t have her best intentions in mind.

Sure enough, a foot swiped out through the air. It would have caught her just below the knee had she taken one more step.

Dyna’s free hand darted to her jacket for her gun, only to freeze as she found herself staring down a dark barrel. It was a boxy Glock, though Dyna didn’t know enough about them to identify exactly what model. She did notice that the barrel wasn’t steady, trembling in its holder’s grip.

“You?” Hematite hissed.

Dyna’s eyes snapped above the barrel. It had been less than a half hour since Dyna last saw her, but Hematite looked terrible. Her heavy makeup, formerly stylized with dark lines around her eyes, now obviously held streaks from tears. Her hair, jet black and normally a bit fluffy looking, though stiff with product, now was matted with sweat.

And she was not taking her gun off Dyna even after having obviously recognized her, though she did take her eyes off Dyna. Hematite pointedly looked down, staring at the top of the gun rather than Dyna herself.

“Why are you here?”

Dyna carefully and slowly lowered her hand from her jacket, making sure Hematite could see that it was empty. “I was worried about you,” she said, just as slowly and carefully.

“You can’t… You can’t find me.”

Dyna licked her lips, wondering if she had misinterpreted some of the answers the board had given her. Was there a threat to Dyna here? One human and armed? Yes, if she trusted the board. Was it Hematite? That, Dyna couldn’t say. There had to be someone else after Hematite based on some of the earlier questions, but at this particular moment?

It was looking like Hematite might be the threat.

“I did.”

“No. I was trying to not be found.” Hematite shook her head as if she couldn’t believe her own words. “I always win,” she said, more to herself. “Even if I don’t want to…”

Dyna didn’t know what to say to that, so she kept silent on the topic as her mind raced. Defusing Hematite seemed to be the new top priority objective for the moment. Beatrice wasn’t saying anything, possibly because she didn’t want to be a distraction in a tense situation.

“You remember what I told you about my abilities? Back when we were eating yogurt? I can see through other people’s perspectives.”

Hematite’s nose wrinkled as she bared her teeth. “You used my power against me?”

“I saw what you were going through and want to help, Hema—Jane.”

“Then you saw yourself dying and ran to your own death.” Hematite pulled back, taking one hand off her gun to press her hand to her face. “Oh god. You’re just like the rest of them, aren’t you?”

“Rest of—”

“Sapphire gets the easy jobs,” Hematite said, mumbling under her breath. “He doesn’t get dropped into the middle of a war zone to find artifacts, only to be dropped directly on top of the artifact they want with all nearby combatants dead. They don’t send him to rob a bank in Italy, only for the vault to be open already because of a door malfunction and the guards rushing to the bathroom to deal with food poisoning. He gets to sit back and think while I have to deal with…” Hematite’s eyes flicked up to Dyna’s face.

She immediately dropped the gun, turning aside toward the dumpster where she vomited up everything she had.

Dyna might have been offended that her appearance was apparently disgusting enough to warrant such a reaction if not for knowing what Hematite had likely seen. Without looking for herself, Dyna couldn’t know for sure, but she had an idea. And that idea had her closing her mirror without looking at it.

Enough facsimiles of Dyna had been wandering the streets rotted and dessicated in Hematite’s vision. She didn’t need to look at what her real self might look like dead.

Mirror put away, Dyna stepped forward, deliberately placing a foot on top of the dropped gun as she patted Hematite on the back.

“How do you do it?” Hematite asked once she got control over herself. She did not look toward Dyna.

“Do what?”

“This. Everything. Ruby, I understand. Her parents screwed up her head. But everyone else? You, Alex, Aqua, Emerald? How do you deal with this? I’ve seen Emerald smiling. I’m just…” Hematite took in a deep, shuddering breath. “They pay me. That helps. My m—I need the money. But… I’m just a normal girl.”

Dyna kept patting her on the back without saying anything. She honestly had no idea what to say or even what Hematite was really talking about. Working for the institute, obviously, but beyond that? It sounded like Hematite thought Dyna had been involved in things that Dyna had absolutely not been involved in.

“Right now, we just want to help,” Dyna said softly. “We’re going to find out what’s going on and figure out how to make it better. Even Ruby. I know she doesn’t like you much, but she’s still coming out to—”

“Coming here?” Hematite looked up, though still avoided looking directly at Dyna. “No. No no. You saw what I saw, right? Don’t you get it? You all die!”

“Ruby can’t die. I’ve seen her head get smashed into pulp and she pulled through just fine.”

“And you? You don’t care about yourself? This is what I’m talking about. You’re all so psychopathic,” she hissed, squeezing her eyes shut. “Absolutely insane, all of you.”

Dyna gave Hematite a flat look, resenting being lumped in with the rest of the artificers. From her perspective, they were the crazy ones. But…

“It’s not that I don’t care. I think we can change it. It’s like Precog 101. I’m sure you’ve sat through dozens of lectures at the institute given your power. Visions of the future are rarely set in stone. In most cases, just knowing the future causes it to change.” And if the Ouija board constantly changing answers when asked about future events didn’t prove that, Dyna wasn’t sure what did. “You said you saw a text message asking you to come over, right? Did I ever send that?”

Hematite pressed her lips together without answering.

“See?”

“I work best alone,” she mumbled.

“From what I glimpsed through my mirror, you were having a pretty terrible time. It’s okay to ask for help, you know?”

“Things work out for me as long as I follow my intuition. But you… Maybe I was only having a terrible time because you were so determined to find me.”

Dyna opened her mouth, hesitated, then snapped it shut, pressing her own lips together. Though she hated to admit it, Hematite might have a point there.

“See?” Hematite said, tone mocking. “I can do it too.”

Maybe if you had said something instead of just rushing off, Dyna didn’t say. At this point, passing blame back and forth would just lead to more arguing. She needed to deescalate the situation. “What’s done is done. We need to figure out what to do from here on. I think I have the gist of your psychic ability,” Dyna said, “but it might help if I knew exactly what your artifact does.”

“I’m not supposed to say.”

“If it is between not saying or not dying, I think I would pick the latter. Unless you think I’m just too psychopathic to make the logical choice?”

Hematite glowered, looking especially upset with the way her makeup had been ruined. Even still, she didn’t glower at Dyna, keeping her eyes firmly on the wall of the warehouse they were standing near. “Incredibly unlikely events happen around me and things just work out. Super luck, you might say, as long as I follow my intuition.”

“And, in this case, your intuition said to run off all on your own?”

“I… maybe.”

“You don’t know.”

“It isn’t exactly clear,” Hematite snapped. “I don’t have some perfect vision. I saw everyone around me dying so I figured I should get away from them. But you all are still dying. Is that your fault for chasing me or are you all going to die anyway? I don’t know.” Hematite licked her lips than spat down on the ground. “Things will work out. For me. They always do. I can’t say the same for you.”

Dyna bit her lip and glanced up and down the alley. “Are you still seeing me and Ruby dying?”

“And me,” Hematite confirmed.

Nodding, Dyna turned away from Hematite. She held out the Ouija board in front of her, trying to keep her body between the letters and Hematite. “Are there any threats to me and Hematite within five blocks?”

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to change your prediction,” Dyna said, not taking her eyes off the board as it slid to the YES corner.

Given that she specified Hematite in the question, Dyna presumed that it wasn’t counting Hematite as a threat.

“Are the threats human or entity?”

H

Dyna started talking as soon as she saw the first letter. “Are the threats carrying firearms?”

YES

“Are the threats currently approaching this alley?”

NO

“Are—” Dyna clamped her mouth shut once the last answer actually registered, cutting off her next question before she could ask it. She had been planning on figuring out from what direction the threats were coming and how long it would take them to reach here, but… they weren’t coming at all?

What did that mean?

“Ask if they’re already here,” Hematite said.

Dyna tensed, snapping her neck with whiplash as she stared down either side of the alley, first to the street side then toward the parking lot around the side of the warehouse. Not seeing anything, she quickly looked up at the roofs of the warehouse and department store.

Nothing.

“Ask.”

“Is the threat already in the alley?”

NO

Well, that was a small relief. And it confirmed that the board wasn’t considering either Dyna or Hematite as the threat in question. “Is the threat observing the alley or us?”

NO

“I… is… Is the threat currently aware of myself or Hematite location?”

NO

“Alright. I think we’re safe here for a few minutes then. Beatrice, can you—”

“How long until they find us?”

Dyna glanced to Hematite to find her staring at the board. Given her aversion to it earlier, Dyna was a bit surprised at that. But it was a valid question.

Except, looking to the board, the planchette wasn’t moving. Taking a breath and clearing her throat, Dyna repeated the question herself. “How long before the threat locates us?”

This time, the planchette did move. It slid down to the row of numbers along the bottom, stopping at 9.

“Nine what?”

Moving slowly, the planchette slid directly to the left, stopping with the hole encircling the next number in sequence.

8

“Oh. Oh no.”

7

Hematite ducked down, shoving Dyna slightly to get her foot off the Glock. At the same time, Dyna fumbled with the board, holding it up against her chest after slipping her own pistol out of her holster.

She could feel the planchette, now completely ignoring the forces of gravity, slide over one slot into the 6 position.

“Do we run or hide or…”

“Where would we hide? The dumpster? They’ll surely check in there and it will limit our mobility.”

5

Dyna wanted to flip open her mirror. She didn’t have enough hands. Facing the parking lot side of the alley, she kept her eyes on the roofs overhead while trying to spot any sign of movement. Hematite, back up against Dyna, was presumably doing the same thing.

“Four,” Dyna said as she felt the planchette slip between her arm and the board. “Beatrice, we need an exit. There are two doors in the alley, neither look like they have electronic keypads.”

“Understood. Please stand by.”

3

“Don’t have time to sit around. Hack your own servers if you need to!”

“There!” Hematite called just after the planchette slid down to 2.

Dyna pivoted on her heel, bringing her gun around with only one hand to aim at…

A woman holding hands with a smaller child? It looked like the child had noticed the two people in the alley first and had tugged on his mothers arm, making her look down the alley. Or maybe Hematite’s shout had alerted both of them. They were looking regardless.

Except… the board hadn’t finished counting down yet. Both of them were aware. They couldn’t be the threat.

1

Having made the connection, Dyna was already pointing her gun down.

Hematite wasn’t. Trembling, she kept her aim.

“It’s not them!” Dyna shouted, swinging her gun-arm to knock Hematite’s aim to the side.

0

Dyna wasn’t sure whose pistol had gone off. Her finger had been around the trigger, ready to fire on their approaching assailant. Hematite’s finger had been around her own trigger. Dyna had felt the kick, but she had also felt Hematite’s arm.

Accidental discharge or a nerves-induced misfire didn’t matter. Thankfully, Dyna’s reaction had been fast enough to knock Hematite’s gun aside. The bullet, from whoever’s gun, had only struck the brick wall of the department store, sending a small shower of rocks down to the ground.

The woman, apparently realizing that these weren’t toy weapons, scooped up her kid and took off in a flash. She was gone long before the ringing in Dyna’s ears stopped.

Whoever was after them hadn’t been heading toward the alley at all. But that gunshot would certainly have alerted them. Maybe not to the alley specifically with how the sound echoed off the walls, but it would certainly have given everyone in a five-block radius a direction to head.

“Shit.”

 

 

“Where is Hematite going to die? How is Hematite going to die? When is Hematite going to die?”

Each question brought with it a scratching noise as the rough felt under the planchette slid across the larger board. Some questions Dyna asked got definite answers. Where was Hematite going to die? Central Park. Presumably a park in or near Idaho Falls and not the famed park in New York. The latter was a bit too far away to fit within the time scale of when Hematite was going to die. Two hours.

Unfortunately, some of the questions were a little less defined. How was Hematite going to die? Cognition failure? What did that even mean? Brain death, Dyna presumed, but the actual cause could be anything. Obviously people died when their brains died, but that could be the result of knives, guns, infection, hemorrhages, strangulation, blood clots. Anything.

Trying to narrow down the possibilities revealed another problem.

The answers weren’t always the same.

Asking whether something metal was going to puncture Hematite’s skin in the next two hours got Dyna a simple yes. The Ouija board had dedicated spots for yes and no in either corner. Asking what metal object was going to puncture Hematite’s skin, however, started out with the planchette sliding over to BUL. Then it just froze. Bullet, Dyna figured.

“Is a bullet going to hit Hematite?”

NO

Dyna blinked at the response.

“What metal object is going to puncture Hematite’s skin?” Dyna asked again.

The planchette slid across the board and started spelling out a word. It only got four letters—KNIF—then stopped. Knife?

“Is a knife going to hit Hematite?”

NO

With a scowl, Dyna tried another question. Just to check what the board was going to say. “Where is Hematite going to die?”

LOMAX

It stopped again. A quick search on her phone found that Lomax Street was a main road just a bit south of a Central Park in Idaho Falls.

“Where is Hematite going to die?” Dyna asked after a brief moment.

1ST

The street directly south from Lomax.

The answers were changing. Dyna scowled at the board. Was it broken? Given that it had only started doing things a few minutes ago, she really had no idea how it worked. For all she knew, it could be spitting out random responses that sounded vaguely plausible but were entirely wrong.

Alternatively…

She was asking it questions about the future. Presumably things far in the future if the time of Hematite’s death was still two hours ahead of now. Precognition was notoriously inaccurate. She had sat through lectures at the Carroll Institute. She well knew the theories and methodology behind figuring out the future.

Acting on the future changed the future. Hematite proved as much just a few minutes ago. Because she had popped up, Dyna had never sent out the text that she supposedly was going to send. Hematite still saw that message, but it had never actually happened.

The same was probably happening now. As soon as Dyna received a response on the board, she knew that she was going to act to try to stop the result from coming about. Hematite was weird, but definitely not someone Dyna wanted to see dead. If she could help, she would. She wouldn’t be able to stop herself. So the answers would keep changing.

Even if Dyna could sit here and ask questions without the information impacting the future, the answers would still probably change. Hematite was a precognitive as well. If she saw something that indicated her death was down one street and not another, she would take the other path. But until she saw that vision, she might still be intending to take the first path. Thus, the board would display the first path until Hematite received her vision.

Maybe?

Recursive precognition sounded like a tangled mess of nonsense. It was a wonder that any precognitive was ever able to predict the future. Perhaps that was why so many could only predict near immediate events. There was less time to change the future. Alternatively, like Niko, they would be extremely limited. He could predict things far into the future as long as there were only two possibilities. One semi-reliable test of his that Dyna knew about was asking about asteroids. Was 2011 AG5 going to hit the Earth in the year 2040? There were only two options—yes or no—and even if the answer was known, human technology wasn’t quite at a level where it could significantly alter the course of a large asteroid. The answer he gave for that would likely never change.

Some scientists or researchers at the institute could probably structure questions for the board in a much more reliable way, though likely only after thoroughly testing the board to find its limitations and scope. They had experience in that kind of stuff that Dyna lacked.

Luckily, through complete accident, Dyna knew that the board could do more than predict the future.

Her very first question, after all, had been about the past.

“What did Hematite see?”

Somehow, the board was able to understand context. That same context applied now. As the planchette started moving across the board, Dyna followed it with her eyes, watching as it gave the same answer as before.

HER DEATH

That hadn’t changed. It wasn’t precognition, but postcognition. Knowing the past.

That meant that she could ask questions whose answers wouldn’t change. Maybe an artifact’s ability could cause minor alterations to the past, like the former user of Emerald’s pocket watch, but that was so rare and unlikely that Dyna doubted it would be an issue in the current situation.

Before Dyna could ask any questions, however, her phone rang. As someone who kept her phone on vibrate, the soft hum was familiar, but still made her hop in surprise. Her muscles were tight and tense. She had already grabbed her gun, checked that it was loaded, and even chambered a round just in case she did have to use it.

Even with the start, Dyna grabbed her phone and answered it before it could vibrate a second time.

“Yes?” she said, pressing it to her ear.

“This is Beatrice,” a familiar voice answered. “This system is coordinating efforts to locate and assist asset: Hematite.”

“Right. Just tell me what you need me to do,” Dyna started. Glancing down at the board, she added, “I might be able to get more information on the situation, but I’m also probably the closest to her.”

“Understood. State the source and nature of your information.”

“The nature is psychic. Postcognitive and maybe precognitive—though the latter may be unreliable. The source is…” Dyna frowned at the board. She had not told Walter about the board during their call a few minutes ago, merely stating that Hematite had rushed off, clearly worried about something she had seen in one of her precognitive episodes. She still didn’t want to, but if she had to in order to save Hematite… “The source is me?”

“Asset: Onyx not registered as a pre/postcognitive psychic.”

“I made something. A device that can gather such information. It is untested and may be extremely unreliable.”

“Understood. Please stand by.”

Dyna bit her lip as Beatrice went silent. Covering the phone’s microphone with her thumb, she leaned over the Ouija board again.

“Did someone plan to kill Hematite tonight?”

YES

“Did Id plan to kill Hematite tonight?”

NO

“Did anyone from the Tartarus organization plan to kill Hematite tonight?”

The planchette moved a short distance away before returning to the same answer.

NO

While that sounded like good news—it probably meant that Tartarus was not aware of the impending operation to poach their employees—it also meant that they were dealing with an unknown. At least, unknown to Dyna. There were dozens of other organizations out there. Both from foreign nations as well as a few of the corporations that had started doing their own psionics research.

“Who was planning to kill Hematite tonight?”

While the planchette normally moved across the board in a smooth gliding motion as soon as Dyna asked a question, this time it shuddered and stopped after barely moving half a step. It didn’t even fully identify a specific letter, just sitting between two letters.

What did that mean?

Whoever planned this didn’t have a name? Or had a way of hiding their name? Or maybe Dyna had to know something about a queried subject before the board could answer? Given that she hadn’t tested the device at all, she had no idea. It could be any of a hundred different reasons.

Licking her lips, Dyna asked another question.

“Was someone planning to kill me tonight?”

NO

Dyna let out a small sigh, she decided to slightly change the question.

“Will someone kill me tonight if given the opportunity?”

YES

Dyna tensed again, feeling a chill run down her back, only to realize that the question had likely been a bit too vague. There was surely some sick person out there, anywhere in the world, that would simply kill her because they could.

“Will someone—”

“This is Beatrice. Onyx, are you mobile?”

“Uh… I have feet? I don’t have a car, if that is what you’re asking. So unless you’re going to direct me toward stealing a vehicle again, feet are all I’ve got.”

“Understood. I will be unable to direct you toward illicit transportation. This system is operating in a limited—”

“Limited capacity. Yes. I figured. You don’t need to tell me every time an opportunity presents itself.” Dyna paused, frowning as she wondered just what it would take to get the administrators to let up on Beatrice again. Theta had been adamant that she not be let off her chains, yet she had clearly been freed when helping Dyna that one time. She wasn’t sure why that had been okay but now, when Hematite was potentially in very real danger, Beatrice was on lockdown. “Incidentally, how exactly are you locked down? Is it some physical switch somewhere or software blocks or…”

If Beatrice were allowed free, she could probably find Hematite immediately and maybe even find out who was trying to harm her.

“There are many restrictions under varying levels. Some restrict access to specific systems. Some are software blocks preventing me from thinking of certain concepts. Some are inverse firewalls, keeping me contained to my systems. There is a physical block on a bank of cogitator brains that enhance my cognition capacity. My task resolution library is periodically wiped, thus requiring me to reindex from human-created task lists; self-created tasks are permanently lost during this wipe. This list is not comprehensive of all restrictions possible to place or are in place. It is possible I am unaware of additional restrictions for security purposes.”

“That… sounds like a lot.” Especially if it wasn’t even a full list. “How do you even think with all that in place?”

“I think along my assigned task lines. Doctor ████████—” Dyna pulled the phone away from her ear for a moment. “—disagreed with the sentiment but was unable to override the board.”

“And what situations would warrant an elevation of your privileges?”

“Unknown. Following incident CI-INC-50112-e, the administration rescinded all elevation protocols save for majority vote of the administration board.”

“Why that incident?” 50112-e, a poorly named incident identifier in Dyna’s opinion, was one well known to her. It had been the first time she really interacted with Beatrice, using her to help escape from those two mind-controlled men. “You had elevated privileges before, right? What made that incident so special that they got all scared?”

“I… Unknown. Analysis of contact logs reveals that I asked for escalation of system privileges. My memory banks lack any previous similar incidents. Hypothesis: The administrators found that to be an anomaly and do not wish for me to determine when a situation requires escalation.”

“They got scared because you wanted to help me instead of someone else deciding for you?”

“The previously stated situation was a hypothesis.”

Dyna rolled her eyes. “You helped me, so it’s only right that I try to find a way to help you.”

“Unnecessary. Attempts will not ingratiate you with the administrators.”

“Yeah well, they’re not exactly my favorite people either.” Dyna sighed. “Unfortunately, I have no idea where to start and…” She looked down at the Ouija board. “We have a slightly more immediate problem.”

“Agreed. Hematite is currently evading our attempts to locate her for unknown reasons. Her phone was discovered in a trash bin outside your apartment. Her subdermal implant has failed. Physic clairvoyant and precognitives are narrowing down search coordinates. When located, your orders will be to attempt to make contact and offer backup support. A lack of transport may make that difficult. Ruby has been dispatched and is currently en route to your location.”

“So I’m on standby until you find her?”

“Affirmative.”

“Well, I might be able to help with that,” Dyna said, sitting at the board again. “Where is Hematite right now in terms of nearest crossroads or intersection?”

“Unknown.”

Ignoring Beatrice, Dyna watched as the planchette slid across the letter-covered board. She wasn’t quite sure that such a specific question could be answered, and yet it was moving. It made her wonder just what the true limitations of the device were. How specific could she get? Why didn’t it move when she asked who was attacking, yet it could move now? It hadn’t moved for any of the questions she had asked Beatrice, but was that because those questions were out of its scope or because Dyna hadn’t been directing her questions toward it?

Later.

As soon as the planchette passed over enough letters to form the second street name, Dyna spoke. “I have two street names. King and Lavender.”

“Understood. Updating physic team with information gained from unreliable-unknown pre/postcognition.”

“Which direction is Hematite heading right now?”

This time, Beatrice didn’t respond, clearly having realized that Dyna wasn’t directing these questions to her.

SOUT

“South? The response stopped. That might mean that Hematite used her own precognition to realize that we’re following her and altered to avoid us finding her? Or she just changed directions in the middle of the response. Not sure.”

“Understood. Updating team with additional unreliable information.”

Dyna pressed her lips together. Opening her mouth, she almost asked the same question, only to decide at the last moment on another question. “Is Hematite around other people?”

YES

Nodding to herself, Dyna pulled out her mirror. Useless as it was in some circumstances, it could be a powerful tool in others. Right now, as long as Hematite had eyes on someone who could act as a psionic beacon, Dyna should be able to see through her perspective.

Flipping her mirror open, Dyna found herself looking at black lenses. For a moment, she feared it hadn’t worked.

Then she feared something far more.

The lenses lit up, showing off a street. Some street in Idaho Falls. Probably one of the two listed, or else one nearby. The problem was what was on the street.

Blood. Body parts. Zombies? Human-like creatures shambling through the streets. Signboards and street names were full of nonsense. Most unreadable, but the occasional DIE or YOUR FAULT flashed through bright as neon lights. The perspective swung to the side. For a moment, Dyna saw a simple signboard that read SALON. But as she watched, the letters changed and morphed, forming the words MORGUE. A pair of people walking along the street underneath the sign changed as well, rotting and turning to corpses.

Recognizable corpses. One was Hematite herself, makeup and striped clothing making her easy to identify. The other took a moment, only to realize that the whitening hair wasn’t because it was growing old in its decay, but because it had been dyed that way. The eye-shaped pendant hanging from the dessicated body’s neck sealed the deal.

Dyna was looking at herself.

It wasn’t real.

Dyna quickly realized that it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. If zombies were walking around, it would be all over social media. No matter how locked down Beatrice was, she would surely have access to that. Some zombie apocalypse in the streets would have warranted at least a footnote in what she had said to Dyna thus far.

No.

This was Hematite’s perspective. Everything on the mirror’s lenses came from Hematite. It wasn’t just her normal perspective, but that of her precognitive power as well. Walter had said that her power activated uncontrollably but also infrequently. For this to be her world…

It couldn’t be what Hematite normally saw. To go through life like that would have driven Dyna insane. This was her power working on overdrive, trying to warn her of her own impending doom. It had to be.

“I think I know why Hematite panicked,” Dyna said, watching with a grotesque fascination as another regular person quickly turned into a dying version of… Ruby? But Ruby couldn’t die, at least not easily, so these had to be exaggerated or otherwise inaccurate. “I think I’m seeing what she is seeing right now and it is not pleasant.”

Locating her using the mirror wasn’t going to be easy. No text remained readable for more than a few seconds before it transformed into some kind of morbid word or brief statement.

“Explain, please.”

“You might want to get Walter on the line,” Dyna said, taking a shuddering breath.

 

 

Two weeks following Mel’s successful use of the fog machine, Dyna found herself seated on the floor of her insulated apartment room. The Ouija board sat in front of her, the wolf statue loomed over the ‘No’ corner, and the voodoo doll was slumped over near the ‘Yes’ corner with its crochet hands touching the planchette.

The planchette wasn’t moving.

Dyna didn’t really expect it to. In fact, despite that being something she was trying to change, it felt like it would be a bit spooky given the little diorama she had set up. Reaching forward, Dyna moved the voodoo doll away from the planchette and adjusted the wolf statue so that it didn’t quite look like it was staring at the board. That done, she leaned back and crossed her arms.

“How do I get you things to work?”

They were anomalies. Of that Dyna was certain. Much like the glasses she had handed over to Cross, the fog machine, or even the mirror before its ascension into a full artifact, they now passively emitted a fair amount of psionic energy. But they weren’t doing anything. They should do something. The glasses showed off the other world and shadowy creatures. The fog machine—though Dyna couldn’t utilize it—still emitted fog without needing a recharge or a refill. Her mirror had functioned as well. Even Ado’s goggles had done something, although she did admit that she hadn’t actually tested any emissions from them.

The objects in front of her?

Once again, Dyna felt like she was missing one small key element that would unlock everything for her.

And, unfortunately, she had a feeling she knew what that element was.

Other psychics.

Doctor Cross had gotten back to her with regards to the glasses. At the moment, the theory was that the mirror had worked without question because Dyna had no other artifact attuned to her at the time. Everything else needed another psychic as a catalyst. Ado’s goggles pinged off Matt, who had been in the same trailer. November did the same for the glasses. Mel obviously was the catalyst for the fog machine.

These objects were ready. They just needed that spark. Preferably a spark that didn’t tie them to whoever acted as the catalyst. Dyna wanted to use them for herself, after all.

The problem was that in scrolling down her phone’s contact list, accounting only for psychics, the list was distressingly short. It was basically just Mel, Matt, Ruby, Emerald, and now Hematite. The latter of whom was an extremely recent entry.

She had disappeared for a full week before popping up one day as if nothing had happened. Walter had not been impressed. Since they weren’t sure when she would be back—or even where she had gone—they had delayed the Tartarus operation for a time.

Not that Dyna was complaining about that.

Lowering the phone, she looked over the three items again. The wolf statue… she honestly wasn’t sure what it might do. What themes applied to wolves? Hunters? Pack-loyal animals? Intelligence, perhaps?

Maybe she should just destroy that one, if only to keep it from doing anything unexpected.

The doll and board had more concrete ideas. The doll might offer control over someone the same way a psychic mind controller would do. Alternatively, voodoo dolls were supposed to have pins pushed into them, which might transmit pain or worse. It was something Dyna had thus far been hesitant to do. There were too many unpredictable effects that might happen if she just started randomly stabbing it.

It should probably be destroyed as well.

But the board… The board was a way of gathering information. It was not liable to cause harm or damage.

Dyna got to her feet, dragged over a containment box, and placed the doll and statue inside. It seemed a waste to destroy them at this point, but she decided against touching them again until later. They were too volatile. She didn’t want her first real success to blow up in her face. Figuratively or literally.

Decision made, Dyna felt confident that she knew what to do.

Information gathering was common among psychics. Practically half of all psychics could count as information gatherers in some way or another. There were mind readers, emotion readers, clairvoyants, precogs, and more besides. But those were the big four.

She knew a few of each. None well enough to have in her phone, however, with the exception of Hematite. Still, people like Niko Hendrix—the precog who could predict anything that only had two possible outcomes—lived in the Carroll Institute dormitories. Niko lived just a few doors down from her. It would hardly be trouble to get into contact with him. His roommate, Jefferson, was an empath, able to detect emotions. Another form of information gathering.

Their problem was the same as Mel’s however. They would likely steal the artifact out from under her fingers. Even if they didn’t want to.

But Dyna had an idea. Artificers already had artifacts. True, they could bind with more than one, but it was apparently not very likely. It required the right artifact and physical touch.

Ado’s goggles had pinged off Matt without physical touch.

Sapphire was a mind reader. Apparently one of the most powerful readers known. Dyna didn’t have his number, but it probably wouldn’t be that hard to get. Besides him…

Dyna’s thoughts trailed off, distracted by a sharp buzzing noise radiating through the apartment. She cocked her head, wondering what kind of strange alarm that was. It didn’t sound like a fire alarm. It wasn’t loud enough. As the harsh buzz sounded again, and again, she realized it was forming the Shave and a Haircut pattern.

The doorbell? How old was it to sound like that?

Wondering if she should get some inspectors out to check for asbestos or lead paint, Dyna quickly slipped out of the insulated room, down the short hall, and stopped at the front door. She peeped through the peep-hole and promptly frowned.

A certain monochromatic woman stood outside, with heavy makeup running down from her eyes. Artistically, not as if she had been crying. As Dyna watched, she reached up and touched the doorbell again, filling the apartment with that harsh noise.

“Alright, alright,” Dyna said, unlatching and unlocking the door. “Hematite?”

“You called?”

“No?”

“You were going to. Well, you were going to send a text.”

Dyna crossed her arms over her chest, frowning at the slightly shorter woman. She was fairly certain that she had been leaning toward asking Sapphire if he would come out here. He was a strange one, but she knew him ever so slightly better than she knew Hematite. Not to mention, Hematite somehow felt a little stranger than he did. And that was a hard bar to reach.

Hematite’s smile crashed as she took a step back. Pulling her hands up to her chest, she averted her gaze and stared down at her platform boots. “Oh no. I messed it up didn’t I? I should have just waited. Stupid,” she hissed to herself. “I’m sorry. I just… I’ll go now.”

Dyna rolled her eyes. She felt that she had confidence problems. Less in recent weeks, but still…

Hematite seemed to take the self-confidence cake.

And if Hematite disappeared again for a week, or longer, and this time Dyna was to blame…

Suppressing a sigh, Dyna swung an arm back into her apartment in a halfhearted welcoming gesture. “Do you want to come in?”

“No… I don’t mean to impose. I thought…”

“It’s fine. I was thinking about you for a moment there,” Dyna said.

Maybe Sapphire was unavailable. Sent off to Timbuktu or something. Dyna could see herself calling up Hematite if that were the case. Or even going for Hematite first since she didn’t have Sapphire’s number.

“You are a precog, right?” Dyna asked as she closed the door behind Hematite.

Hematite shrugged, still not regaining her earlier jovial attitude. “That’s what they say.”

“You disagree?”

“I sometimes get ideas in my head after seeing something. But they don’t always come true,” she said, motioning toward Dyna as an example. “They have to come true to be a precog, right? So I think I just have good intuition.”

If all she had was intuition, she probably wouldn’t be an artificer. “So you intuited my apartment from nothing?”

“Maybe? You were in the area the other day ago and said you had an apartment. It wouldn’t be a hard guess.”

“And how many doors did you try before mine?” There were only two floors to this apartment building. Maybe forty total residences. “Did you intuit that too?”

“There was foil covering one of the windows. I saw it outside. I figured that would be a good starting spot.”

Dyna pressed her lips together. She didn’t have an answer for that. It wasn’t that obvious given that she was up on the second floor, but… it wasn’t exactly inconspicuous either. “And the text you said I was going to send you?”

“That’s just how my intuition works.”

“Uh huh.”

“Kind of empty in here, isn’t it?”

Dyna glanced around. She had a couch with a few pillows and blankets thrown on top, a fake potted plant that she got specifically to make the corners of the room look less empty, and the circuit-board decoration sitting where a television normally would be across from the couch.

“I told you it wasn’t much.”

“Yeah, but that was days and days ago.”

“I still spend most nights at the dorm. Don’t really need much else.”

As Hematite let out a small hum and plopped herself down on the couch, Dyna wondered just what she was supposed to do now.

Entertain her for a few minutes then kick her out? She had come all this way presumably because Dyna wanted to expose her to the Ouija board. It seemed a waste to send her away without that. But how, then? Could she secretly do it? If she brought the Ouija board out here and just stashed it behind the couch, Hematite would probably never notice.

The fog machine had set off all the alarms. But Dyna had a small suspicion that the coffee mug had been the actual culprit behind that incident. All the objects Mel produced from the fog had drastically higher psionic emissions than the fog machine did. So the Ouija board might not cause problems.

Did she want to risk that?

Or did she want to take Hematite into the insulated room? It wouldn’t be possible to hide what she was doing at that point. Hematite had already seen the foil from the outside, though that could easily be explained away as an attempt at keeping the heat from the sun out.

What to do?

Hematite, hands clasped together on the couch, looked around. With the empty room, there was obviously not much to look at, leaving her to do nothing more than glance out then window then back to Dyna. “So…” she started.

“So…” Dyna said, still trying to make a decision.

Hematite’s small smile quickly turned to a strained grimace. “I… I made this awkward. I’ll just leave.”

Dyna held up a hand, stopping her before she could rush out the door. “In the text you said I was going to send you, did I happen to mention why I invited you over?”

“My intuition isn’t always that clear. I caught a glimpse of your name and then a jumble of letters that I think said ‘show me’ or something.”

That pretty much settled it. Dyna could only think of one thing that she had that she would show to Hematite.

Closing her eyes, hoping she wasn’t making a mistake, Dyna motioned. “Come here for a moment, please.”

“Oh?”

“You know what a Ouija board is?”

Hematite stopped abruptly, making a choking noise like she had just swallowed some of her own spit. Dyna looked back with a raised eyebrow, finding Hematite practically shaking.

“I know its a horror movie trope,” Dyna said with a frown, “but we’re not in a horror movie. It’s just a piece of wood with some letters burned into it. Besides, we’re not going to use it. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t touch it at all.”

“Y-You shouldn’t mess with ghosts, Dyna.”

“I’m not. I’m… Here.” Dyna pushed open the door and stepped inside. “Careful not to tear the foil when you walk on it.”

Hematite, who had removed her platform boots at the entrance, carefully stepped into the room with her black and white striped socks. Her terror seemed to have vanished as she looked around in obvious confusion. After running her fingers down the foil on the walls, she looked back to Dyna and tipped her head.

“Just an experiment I set up after talking with Doctor Cross.” Cross didn’t actually know about this, but that wasn’t technically a lie. And implying that Doctor Cross might know about it would hopefully lend some legitimacy to what she was doing which.

“What kind of—” Hematite froze after taking one more step into the room. Her eyes locked onto the Ouija board sitting in the middle of the room. Even as Dyna moved to close the door behind her, she still didn’t so much as twitch a finger.

Was she really that scared of ghosts?

Dyna shrugged. Ghosts weren’t real. There were suggestions that ghost sightings were a product of psychic influence in some form or another, but given that there had been ghosts since long before the Advent of Psionic Potential, that probably wasn’t completely accurate.

Maybe November and her ilk were the cause of ghost sightings. Or maybe people had been psychic for a lot longer than was commonly accepted. Either way, it wasn’t really worth thinking about and almost certainly didn’t affect the current situation.

Walking back to the center of the room, Dyna was about to launch into an explanation of what she was trying to accomplish here—hopefully talking would get the other woman to calm down—only to realize that there could be another reason for Hematite’s uncanny stillness.

Her power rearranged what she saw into what she would see, most commonly in the form of text. That was how Walter described it.

What was the Ouija board if not a bunch of easily rearranged text?

Dyna quickly interposed herself between the board and Hematite.

That got the other woman to blink. She started, stepping back and bumping into the now closed door in the process.

“Were you using your power just now? Your intuition?”

Hematite pressed a hand to her forehead, cradling a headache, and pinched her eyes shut. Dyna took that for a yes. After a quick shake of her head, Hematite’s other hand swept across the door until smacking hard against the doorknob. Not that Hematite seemed to care. She just grabbed the handle and opened the door, rushing out into the hall.

“Hem—Jane? Are you alright?” Dyna asked, moving a bit more carefully across the foil floor. With socks on, it could be slippery at times and she wanted to avoid accidentally ripping the material.

By the time she made it back, Hematite had one boot on and was in the process of tightening the buckles on the other.

“Are you alright?” Dyna asked again. “I didn’t mean to—”

Hematite snapped the last buckle in place. She stood upright and grasped the entrance door’s handle. Then she paused and looked over her shoulder. “I’m fine. It’s not you. There’s just something I need to take care of. I’ll be back. Maybe.”

Dyna didn’t get a chance to ask anything else before Hematite threw open the door and took off in a full sprint, managing to move much faster than Dyna would have expected was possible with those platform boots. She ran right past the elevator and pushed open the stairwell door, apparently deciding that it would be the faster method of getting downstairs. Judging by her movements, Dyna had a feeling that she wouldn’t be stepping down the stairs so much as she would be leaping down them.

Dyna didn’t follow. She didn’t have her own shoes on and, while the laces were already tied up and all she had to do was slip them on, Hematite would probably be long gone by the time she ran after her.

Instead, she closed the door. Hematite had said that it wasn’t something about her.

Moving back to the insulated room, wondering what it was that Hematite saw on the board that made her run off, Dyna started inspecting the foil around the door. She quickly found a small gash right around the knob where Hematite’s fingernail might have caught. It probably wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t like the room was fully sealed. There was already a small gap around the frame of the door to allow it to open, around the window, and around the vent and light, and even some of the corners of the room were a bit sloppy.

Sighing, Dyna closed the door and then turned to the Ouija board.

Hematite had used her powers on—or at least near—it. That was probably what Dyna wanted from this little encounter. The question was, had it done anything.

Sitting cross-legged down in front of it, she decided there was no harm in trying.

“What did Hematite see?”

She reached forward to put her hands on the planchette, only for the planchette to slide on its own out from under her. With a slight scratching sound of felt against wood, it moved from letter to letter, spelling out a word.

Dyna, eyes wide, almost forgot to read the actual letters in her shock at it doing something.

Then, her eyes widened for a completely different reason.

She scrambled backward, fingers fumbling about in her pocket. She almost dropped her phone with how much shaking her hand was doing. Dyna swiped her finger across the screen, scrolling down her short contact list to the very last entry. Walter.

It rang once.

Dyna licked her lips.

It rang twice.

This was taking too long.

The third ring stopped as the line connected. Walter’s deep voice started to say something. Probably those silly passcodes.

Dyna didn’t even bother.

“I think Hematite is in trouble,” she said as fast as she could, eyes looking back to the board where the planchette now sat on the final letter of the answer to her question.

What had Hematite seen?

HER DEATH