Cybermancy (22 page)

“Or corrupted,” I said. “Everything is still there. It just can’t find it anymore. That sounds promising. So, if we go with that for a moment, the next question
is,
what’s causing the corruption? I wonder. Why don’t we go have a look?”

“Sounds good,” said Melchior. “There’s something about Goldilocks and her very bad hair day here that sets my teeth on edge, something both right and terribly wrong, if that makes any sense.”

“Eris?” I asked.

“You’re driving.” She slithered loose of the stony hair, and I remounted the saddle on her serpentine back.

I pointed at where I wanted to go, and we went, a particularly prominent dark spot in the pattern of light. I don’t know how far we traveled in space, but it took only a few seconds of time for us to get to a point above the blot. On closer inspection it proved to be more complex than first impressions. Instead of a simple point of darkness, it looked like a seething ball of stringy shadows, each with a more intense dark point at its tip, and those tips appeared to be eating away at the dancing lightning around them. I was reminded of a ball of worms, or . . . snakes. A disturbing thought occurred to me.

“Take us closer,” I said to Eris, and we dropped down toward the water.

“Yes,” I said leaning over. “That looks like—”

“Get lost!” The words came from the center of that roiling darkness in the disturbingly familiar voice of our guardian gorgon and were echoed from the island behind us. This time I recognized the voice. It belonged to Shara.

I whipped my attention back toward the island and its sentinel. The gorgon had sprung to life once more, moving its great marble hand up toward its face, a hand veined in the exact purple of Cerice’s webgoblin familiar. The figure tore away its mirror shades and lifted its killing gaze toward us.

For a frozen instant I tried to fathom what her presence here could mean. Then I let it go. I didn’t yet know what was going on, but I knew that if we stayed here, we would die.

“Dive!”
I screamed and, suiting action to words, flung myself off Eris’s back into the dark waters.

With a splash, I plunged through the surface and touched the lightning. In that instant I understood how a bullet feels when the hammer comes down. With a bang and a stunning impact, I found myself accelerated to impossible speeds. The world blurred around me, becoming a tunnel of light roaring past too quickly to comprehend.

The trip ended as suddenly and harshly as it had begun when I slammed back into my own flesh-and-blood body with a stunning impact, as if the bullet I had felt myself to be an instant before had lodged itself in my heart. For long seconds I simply couldn’t breathe. I pulled the athame from my hand but couldn’t whistle the healing spell and had to watch silently as my blood dripped and spattered on the tiles of Discord’s computer room.

When the seven notes that closed the wound did finally come, it was Shara’s lips that shaped them, not mine. She stood before me as she cast the spell. When she was done she reached up and gently stroked the thin white scar that marked both the back of my hand and my many comings and goings into the electronic elsewhere of the mweb. I met her eyes and tried to hold them, but she looked away.

“You know,” she said, utterly defeated.

I nodded, though I wasn’t yet certain of exactly what it was that I knew. Somehow Shara—or something that wore her face and magical signature—had taken up residence in the heart of Necessity’s computer system while at the same time she kept walking around in the real world. It shouldn’t have been possible—the whole reason I’d had to go to Hades to fetch her was that souls are one-off, no copies allowed. Somehow, I’d messed up the rescue.
Badly.

I could figure all the details out later. The more immediate problem, the one that was all too likely to get me killed, broke down into two parts: A, whatever the gorgon was, its presence in Necessity’s domain coincided with the ongoing destruction of the mweb. And, B, it had almost certainly gotten there via the e-mail I’d sent from Hades.

Now, if I’d managed to cat-burgle my way in and out without leaving a trace, that might not be so much of a problem, but I hadn’t. While my break-in wasn’t quite as famous as Orpheus’s little venture yet, it was all over the Olympian gossip circuit. So when Necessity started looking around for someone to punish, my name was going to be right at the top of the list. Because of that I had a number of questions I wanted to ask Shara. Before I could start, Eris intervened.

“I think you owe me some answers, Ravirn.” Her tone was deadly serious. “About her”—she pointed a finger at Shara—“about the mweb, and about your involvement with both.”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” I said, with as straight a face as I could manage.

“Don’t play games with me, child. Necessity’s guardian and this little one”—she tapped the top of Shara’s skull lightly—“look to be sharing a whole lot of code. The obvious link is you, my little chaos godlet. And—” She was cut off by a harsh buzz from the master console for the Grendel group. She turned toward the controls, calling to me over her shoulder, “We’re not done.”

“Boss,” whispered Melchior, who chose that moment to shift back to goblin form.

“Yes.”

“What the hell is going on?”

“Ask her.” I jerked a thumb at Shara.

She looked at the floor. “I’m not sure, but I’m starting to have some flashes, maybe memories coming back.”

“Of what?”
I asked.

“Necessity.
Hades.
I—”

“Get your skinny butt over here,” called Eris. “Tell me what you make of this.”

I joined her at the console, where an alarm bell icon blinked beside a message. “Mweb access cut off. User Eris does not match any profile in system. Close this window or face immediate sanction by Necessity.”

“I’d close the window,” I said.

“But . . .” A countdown had started on the screen: 5. 4. 3—Eris clicked on the close button.

Another window opened.
“Mweb carrier unreachable.
Reboot?”

Eris looked down her long nose at me. “I was only joking about your trying to usurp the throne of Discord back in the conference room. You do know that, right?”

“I wouldn’t have it on a golden platter, with a side order of anything I want.”

“Why am I having trouble believing you?” she
asked,
an unspoken threat in her tone.

“Because you’re naturally suspicious?”
Behind me, I heard the familiar sound of Melchior slapping his forehead.

Eris snorted. “Even paranoids have enemies, little Raven. But you might be right. Not, of course, that that’s important. No, what’s important is that either you’ve succeeded in the most amazing hacking job since Prometheus stole the encryption key for fire, or you haven’t, but no one’s going to believe you. In either case, you have just added a great deal to the cosmic balance of entropy, and for that I must take my hat off to you.”

She leaned forward in a low, sweeping bow, pulling a propeller beanie off her head and saluting me with it. It hadn’t been there a moment before, and when she let it go after completing her bow, it flew off like a Blackhawk looking for its target zone.

“But taking on Necessity is going way too far, and the consequences are likely to be
very
messy. I can’t and won’t protect you on this.”

“Surprise,” I said. I hadn’t expected it of her. “Are you going to hand me over?”

“No,” said Eris. “I respect your accomplishment too much for that.
But I won’t lie to the Furies for you either, and they’ll be back to ask about what I found out soon enough.
The best I can do is
offer
you a head start. If you leave quickly, you might get far enough ahead of them to make an interesting chase of it.”

“Will you take Cerice for me?” I’d run faster if I didn’t have to protect her.

“I—”

“No,” said Cerice. She had entered without my noticing her. “She won’t. I’m not staying here, and I’m not going with you either.” She was no longer crying, but the tracks of dried tears stained her cheeks. “How could you even think of hacking Necessity? Do you
want
to end up chained to a rock with an eagle tearing your liver out every morning?”

“You heard the bit about Prometheus, then,” I said.

“That’s when I came in, yes.” Her voice was flat and furious.

“Are you going to listen to my side of the story, or are you just going to leap to conclusions and snarl at me like you usually do?”

“What the hell is your problem,
Ravirn!
”

“What’s my problem? Honey, look in the mirror when you ask that.” I’d finally, completely had
it.
“Bailing
your
webgoblin out of Hades is how I got involved in this mess in the first place!”

“Don’t you dare pick on
Shara!
She’s got enough problems!”

“You mean like the fact that she, or her twin, is right smack in the middle of whatever’s wrong with the mweb! Or did you not eavesdrop on that part of the conversation?”

Cerice looked stunned. “I didn’t know . . . No. What? How is that possible?”

“I . . .” I paused then because a thought had occurred to me, and I really looked at Cerice for the first time in . . . how long? That’s hard to say. We see the people we spend our lives with all the time, but how often do we actually look at them?

Cerice is at least as good a coder as I am. I can outcrack her, and on most things outhack her, but she writes better code than I do. Look at her thesis program. It’s huge and elegant and designed to totally own Clotho’s network. Shara is the tool she built expressly for that purpose, taking over a Fate network. Now Shara, or her evil twin, was in the process of doing something sinister to the network belonging to the Fate of the Gods. Was I missing something vitally important because I was too close to the problem? Suspicion laid her icy hand on the back of my neck in that moment.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” asked Cerice.

“I’m just . . . thinking.”

Eris’s laugh shattered my concentration. “What fun you children are. If time weren’t pressing, I’d love to watch this little tiff play
itself
out. But it is, and I won’t. I really don’t want your radioactive self on my premises when the Furies arrive, so if you could speed this up and get out of here, I’d appreciate it.”

“And if we don’t?” snarled Cerice.

“Why then, you’ll have to learn how to backstroke through Primal Chaos. If Necessity hasn’t already figured out what your Raven has done, she soon will. At that point, I do not want to be seen as sheltering him or you and your equally radioactive webgoblin. In fact, I don’t want to be seen anywhere near you.”

“But I thought you said you wanted an explanation from me,” I said, “about Shara and Necessity and the mweb.”

“That was before this.” She pointed at the computer screen. “The collateral damage possibilities in your likely splash zone are now greater than my curiosity. As much as I’d like to know exactly what you’ve done, and even more what in the name of all gods you were thinking, I’m not willing to have you around long enough to give me the answers. You have exactly two minutes to get out of here on your own power. After that, you’ll be leaving through a hole in the floor, one that’ll take you straight out to the Primal Chaos. Good-bye, Ravirn. It’s been interesting knowing you.”

With that, she vanished.

“What do we do now?” asked Melchior.

“Leave,” I said.

I opened my shoulder bag and gestured for him to climb in. As he managed that, I looked back to the place where I’d been sitting. Cerice had sense enough to come with me, at least for the moment. But I was worried about Shara and called her name. She didn’t answer, and I could hear her slide a little farther under the table.

Let’s see
, I thought to myself.
Eris is gone. Does that mean she’s relinquished local control?

I pictured the room sans the table Shara had hidden herself under. It vanished, exposing the webgoblin. I breathed a little sigh of relief. Eris hadn’t needed to do that. That she had meant she retained at least a little goodwill toward me. It also meant I might be able to do everything I had to and get us moving in the minute and a half of grace we had left. I didn’t kid myself that she’d been bluffing about the trapdoor.

“Come on, Shara. We don’t have time for games.”

“This is
all my
fault.”

“It is not,” said Cerice. “It’s Ravirn’s.”

“I won’t argue with you about that last until I’ve got more facts, and we’ve got more time,” I said. Besides, she might be right. It was my blown rescue that put us all here. “Hurry up, Shara.”

“All right,” she answered, standing up and coming closer. “I’ll come, but you’d be better off leaving me to fall into chaos and oblivion.

“I doubt it,” I said. “Besides, I’m sure as heck not going to let all the work I did breaking you free of death’s cold grip go to waste in one quick drop with a sudden stop at the end.”

Catching her by the scruff of the neck, I lifted her in beside Melchior. That left us about one minute. I rearranged my mental image of the castle, putting myself inside a memory from an earlier visit, a flower-filled greenhouse with a neat circle of forget-me-nots. Though in the present, I imagined myself outside the circle and standing within touching distance of Cerice. She looked startled by the transition.