Trapped

'Stole it from one of my mother's sorcerers. A gullible man who always wore orange.'

Jode couldn't hide the taunt in those words. The ‹BINK›-rod had come from the Spark in orange armor — Mind-Lord Priest, killed at the winter anchorage. With such a rod in hand, Jode had apparently avoided the fate of the Lucifer in the tobacco field: when Dreamsinger had 'rolled' Jode aside, the alien shapeshifter could use its own ‹BINK›-rod to return. Apparently, such rods could both send you away and bring you back.

Even wearing Rosalind's face, Jode looked smug. And the Lucifer wasn't finished. 'Do you want to see who's real?' Jode asked Sebastian. 'Use your powers to dispel all the sorcery in this room. You'll see the whole truth.'

Dreamsinger had time to narrow her eyes — her beautiful Hafsah eyes, so calm and perfect. Then something went thud in my head, like a concussion from the inside out: things rearranged themselves in my brain, making my body as weak as water. If I hadn't been down on the floor already, I think I would have collapsed. But the dizziness passed in seconds; when my vision stopped reeling, the woman in Sebastian's arms had changed.

The first thing I saw was red — full body armor colored sorcerer's crimson, made of plastic and molded in the shape of a chunkily voluptuous female figure. This was no graceful Hafsah in harem pants; the armor wasn't as bulky as plate mail, but it possessed a similar stolidity. The breasts and hips built onto the underlying shell had the crude excess of a Stone Age fertility carving… so extreme they were almost a parody. Especially in contrast to the woman beneath.

I could finally see the real Dreamsinger because she wasn't wearing her helmet — she must have decided to remove it when she started kissing Sebastian. Surprisingly, the Sorcery-Lord looked the same age as the girl she portrayed: Dreamsinger was a reedy weedy sixteen-year-old whose tan skin revealed vivid acne pimples. Her facial features would have fit in well on the streets of Seoul, but her hair was dyed an unnatural red, the same bright shade as her armor. She hadn't touched up the hair coloring for quite some time, as evidenced by a deep darkness at the roots.

Behold the all-powerful sorceress: a plain-faced poseur decked out like a femme fatale. But I reminded myself Dreamsinger was still lethal — perhaps more than ever, now that her disguise had been stripped away.

Sebastian cringed back from her, sliding along the wall of the airlock shack. Dreamsinger didn't go after him. One hand twitched, and suddenly a rod appeared in her grip, identical to the one held by Jode. She thumbed the activation button, waking red and green glitters along the rod's length. Meanwhile, her other hand snapped into a sorcerous pose, some fingers bent, some splayed, aimed at Sebastian in case he tried a psionic attack; but the boy did nothing except stare aghast.

'Don't look at me that way,' Dreamsinger told him, not lowering her guard. Her voice had changed from Hafsah's purring alto into a high and scratchy soprano. 'You can see I'm a Spark Lord — you must recognize the armor. So don't get ideas about taking me on. I doubt if you'd win… and if you did, my brothers and sisters would come after you. You wouldn't like that. You wouldn't like that at all.'

Sebastian was still staring in horror. 'What… when…'

Dreamsinger laughed — a false laugh I'd heard from teenagers many times before. Trying to sound amused and superior when her feelings had just been hurt. 'When did I take over Rosalind's place? Did you sleep with me when you thought you were sleeping with her? That would have been just awful, wouldn't it? But I'm not the one you have to worry about, dear brother. I only stepped in a short time ago… while you were killing my Keepers.'

Sebastian looked outraged. 'They were trying to kill me!'

'True. I knew they wouldn't succeed, but at least they distracted you so I could make my substitution. A valuable sacrifice, don't you think?'

'No,' Jode said. The Lucifer hadn't moved since Sebastian knocked away the Element gun. 'Sacrifices are only valuable if they accomplish their goal. Otherwise, they're just deaths.'

'Rosalind…' Sebastian began.

'You're in for a surprise.' Dreamsinger laughed again. This time her laughter sounded more genuine. And mean-spirited. 'Dear brother Sebastian, do you realize you've fulfilled your final purpose?'

The boy glared at her. 'What do you mean?'

'You were used to gain access to this station. To shut off the electricity. To cut the cables feeding this room so nothing will happen even when the water finally spills around your dam. On top of that, your lovely wife just tricked you into dispelling every enchantment in this room. My Chameleon glamour wasn't the only spell you removed; you also erased thirteen charms of protection to prevent this cage from opening.' Dreamsinger made a mock bow toward the Lucifer. 'Clever you. But your kind has always been clever.'

'More so recently,' Jode said.

'So you believe.'

'What are you talking about?' Sebastian demanded.

Jode gave a nasty smile. 'You'll never know, boy. You've outlived your usefulness.'

The Lucifer made a darting motion with its hand. Something went bang, like thunder.

For a moment I was certain the bang meant Sebastian's death: some murderous alien surprise that would beat the boy's psionic defenses. The Lucifer might have planted a booby-trap while consummating the sham marriage — one long deep kiss and a tiny curd of maggoty white could have slid down Sebastian's throat. That curd might lodge itself in the boy's stomach, stealing atoms and molecules from nearby tissues to build an explosive chemical… or perhaps the curd could mutate into an explosive all its own. One way or another, Jode must have a trick for blowing people up from the inside: that's how it got the Mind-Lord, blasting him to pieces above the winter anchorage.

But the explosion we'd heard didn't come from Sebastian — the bang erupted back near the exit tunnel. Jode's leer of triumph dissolved to bewilderment… and Dreamsinger laughed at the sight.

'I'm not the only one who's predictable,' she told Jode. 'I knew you'd rig the boy for a fatal finish… so I removed your surprise from Sebastian's small intestine. Switched it by sorcery to the corpse of one of my Keepers. As I said, they made a valuable sacrifice — without them, I couldn't save one of the most powerful psychics the world has ever known.'

Jode's face twisted with fury. The Lucifer's right hand turned puffy, as if the creature was so enraged it didn't have enough self-control to retain its Rosalind form… but the moment passed and the hand resumed human shape. Sebastian seemed to have missed the brief transformation — he was too busy staring at the alien's fierce expression. 'I don't understand,' he said. 'Rosalind, what's this about?'

'She's not Rosalind,' said the Caryatid. Her voice was wheezy — the bullet through her shoulder must have pierced a lung. But she struggled to her feet, still pressing her wound with a blood-drenched hand. 'The real Rosalind is dead. Murdered by this bag of skin filled with pus.' She took a shaky step toward Jode. 'We found Rosalind's body last night. Dead in her dorm room. The thing you married was her killer.'

'No,' Sebastian whispered. 'No. The Rosalind I married… she was my Rosalind. She knew things — secrets only we… how could anyone else know?'

'How do you think?' The Caryatid took another step toward Jode. 'This thing is called a Lucifer. It's a shapeshifter; it can look like anyone it wants. If it made itself look like you and visited Rosalind in her room… secrets would naturally spill out. Amongst other things.'

Bile boiled up in my throat. I remembered the position of Rosalind's corpse: lying naked in the bed, arms and legs splayed wide. If Jode had come to her in Sebastian's form soon after supper… if Jode had said, 'I know we didn't plan to get together till later, but I just couldn't wait…'

I could guess what the Lucifer would want. Not just talk. Not just secrets. Jode wanted the perversity of bedding the girl before killing her. Certainly, there were practical reasons for such an atrocity: seeing the girl naked in order to duplicate any moles, birthmarks, etc., hidden by her clothing; learning if there was anything distinctive in how she made love. Fundamentally, though, the Lucifer was just so damnably evil it wanted to be astride Rosalind when it spewed curds into her mouth — filling her with death and horror at the moment the betrayal would be most shattering.

Jode liked to cause pain; it was that simple. The Lucifer reveled in the anguish on a victim's face just before the face went slack. Even now, though the alien hadn't managed to kill Sebastian, Jode must have enjoyed the boy's look of dawning revulsion.

'No,' Sebastian whispered. 'No.'

'Oh yes,' Jode said. Then three things happened almost simultaneously.

First: Jode lunged toward Sebastian, slamming a fist toward the boy's face. The blow didn't make contact — Sebastian's nanite friends would never permit that — but the boy reflexively retreated from the attack. Backward. Into the airlock shack that led to the electric cage. At some point when we'd been distracted by other things, Jode must have opened the shack door. Still backing up, Sebastian tripped over the lip of the airlock doorway and fell to the floor inside. He didn't hit the ground hard — his nanite friends cushioned the fall — but Jode shut the door behind the boy and threw a lever on the shack's outer wall. The inner door of the airlock, the one to the prison cube's interior, slid open in response to the button. The mass of dusty black inside the cage, quiescent all this time, lurched instantly toward Sebastian and rolled over him like a midnight avalanche.

Second: the Caryatid cried, 'Damn you!' and erupted into flame. Spontaneous human combustion — an age-old legend dismissed by scientists, but if anyone could manage the feat, it was the Steel Caryatid. She lit no match to start the blaze; she simply waved her hands, and suddenly she was burning. Not just on fire… the Caryatid was fire, a woman turned an inferno: advancing on Jode as her legs withered to ash, then continuing forward as flame incarnate, a final conflagration accelerating across the room and roaring into the alien at full speed. Jode was just turning away from shutting Sebastian in the airlock. The fire struck the Lucifer blind-side and ignited its Rosalind clothing. A howl of pain. A wet sizzle. There was nothing left of the Caryatid at all, her flesh and bones incinerated in a flash; but Jode was awash in searing flame.

Third: Dreamsinger turned toward the burning alien. The light of the flames lit her face with orange intensity, but the Spark Lord's expression was blank. She'd been caught by surprise when Jode and the Caryatid acted. I think Dreamsinger had expected someone to attack her, she wasn't prepared to be ignored, treated as if she meant nothing compared to more important targets. Now as she approached Jode-in-flames, I couldn't tell if she intended to put out the fires incinerating the alien or to stoke them higher. Dreamsinger apparently couldn't decide either — she moved slowly, distractedly fingering the ‹BINK›-rod in her hands, finally coming to a bemused stop in front of the Lucifer ablaze.

Which is how she was standing when the Element gun went off.

She was hit by a volley from all four barrels — bullets, fire, acid, sound. The first three attacks stopped short of their target as the force field around Dreamsinger's armor blazed into violet life. Bullets turned to molten lead as they hit the energy barrier; fire and acid splashed the violet glow but couldn't reach the gawky girl inside. Only the hypersonic waves got through… and I assume they would have been stopped as well if Dreamsinger had been wearing her helmet.

Without that helmet, she was vulnerable to simple sound. Amidst the clatter of bullets and the whoosh of flame, she gasped and crumpled to the floor.