Setting out to find Skamar and actually doing so were two different things. She’d been at war with the Tulpa essentially from the moment she’d been “birthed” or fully realized in this world, so she didn’t have a home, any contact information, or even the ubiquitous cell phone. Still, randomly wandering the city was the least effective way of finding someone in short order. So the next morning, under an unseasonably warm sky, I headed to the one place I knew I could leave word that I was looking for her.
The parking lot of the pink-stuccoed strip mall where Master Comics was housed was only half full when I drove by, but I parked a few blocks away at a day spa Cher had once dragged me to, and walked back.
Although none of the Shadows knew about my Olivia Archer cover identity, I still felt exposed just waltzing up to the building in the middle of the day. Perhaps I should have taken the added precaution of approaching via a portal. It wouldn’t necessarily have kept me from being spotted by an observant Shadow, but the black and white camouflage might get me past the inattentive.
“Too late now,” I muttered, reaching the storefront. I visually tagged two portal entrances-one alongside a sewer grate, and another above the passenger side of an abandoned car-options if I had to flee, priceless in a world where I suddenly found myself with too few.
Oddly, I also found the entrance locked. I glanced around, but the OPEN sign was bright orange against the glass front, and the hours of operation hadn’t changed. I gave the door another tug, and when it didn’t budge, found a sliver of space between a Green Lantern poster and the ever-popular Spider-Man and peeked inside. The shop was teeming with children. I saw Kylee and Kade, two of the newest changelings, and Douglas, the little shit who used his body to shield the Shadows from harm when they were in the shop, but none of them looked my way. Even when I rapped on the glass, they just continued perusing comics and playing games too complicated for the mind of someone as simple as me.
“Excuse me.”
I glanced over to find a skinny kid staring up at me, arms so straight at his sides I wanted to tell him to fall at ease. He was watching me open-mouthed, as if mesmerized by a movie screen. As if, I thought with a degree of annoyance, he was watching a horror flick. Unwilling to continue with the absurd stare-down, I stepped aside, and he pressed his back against the glass, inching toward the door. I got a whiff of adrenaline and fear, but before I could grab the handle he slipped inside, cowbells jangled…and the door rocketed shut behind him. I stepped back, looked around, and tried to follow. It might as well have been a handle attached to a cement wall for all the good it did.
What was going on?
Squinting between Spider-Man’s legs, I saw the kid who’d slipped inside point to me, and a man’s head popped into view. I waved…with my middle finger.
Zane Silver scowled in reply. He was the shop’s owner…and though he looked like a nerd who got off on things like freeze-dried ice cream and collectible sock monkeys, he was really a seventy-three-year-old man trapped in time. It was that whole “great power requires great responsibility” maxim at work. He had the ability to mentally watch the events of our world and record them in comic book form-a gift, sure-but ever since he’d accepted the position of record keeper, he couldn’t resign until someone else took over the duty. Nobody’d been willing to in a good half century, so a retirement including bridge games and gumming his food was a long way off.
Drawing back, Zane then reappeared outside of what I’d begun thinking of as his command center, circling the counter grumpily to head my way. I rolled my eyes, straightened, and waited for him to let me in.
“What the hell-” I began as soon as the door swung open.
“Go away!” he snarled, and began pulling the door shut again. I barely got my foot wedged between the door and frame.
“Let me in, Zane! It’s dangerous out here.”
“That’s because
And with that, he stomped on my foot, kicked my leg out of the way, and pulled the door shut.
“Evil, psychotic, geriatric Martian…!” I hopped on one foot while cradling the other, and decided to stop complimenting him. He couldn’t hear me anyway. Fine. If the old coot wasn’t going to let me in this way, I’d break in via the rooftop skylight. That’s what I’d done last time.
Bound to the building as surely as he was bound to his service, Zane worked on the lower floor and lived on the upper, with groceries, mail, take-out food, and dry-cleaning-for all his valuable T-shirts-delivered to his door. If he even attempted to leave-and he hadn’t in the time I’d known him-then the voices in his head that helped transcribe our world’s events would turn on him and drive him into madness.
I kinda felt sorry for the guy, even as I removed a skylight pane for my break-in. After all, I’d probably be cranky too if World of Warcraft action figures were the highlight of my existence. Then pain splintered my limbs like sliv ers of glass were being inserted via my nail beds. Sizzling sounded nearby, and I found myself on my back, staring up at a blank, blue sky. I blew a tendril of burnt hair from my eyes, wondering if my appendages were missing from my body. Because I couldn’t feel any of them.
“Wow! That was great! It was like she was yanked backward on a fisherman’s hook!”
“Awesome.”
“Do it again!” The first voice said, and I felt a light thump on the rooftop as someone hopped up and down. “Zane! Zane! Make her do it again!”
I grunted in objection and pushed myself to a sitting position, having to squint to focus. Two blurred silhouettes sharpened, but blurred again when they shifted. A rat’s nest of shit-brown hair appeared behind them at the half- open skylight, followed by chunky cheeks and a body that had to be wedged through carefully to access the roof. Zane joined the two nimble preteens already there, a remote control in his hand. I looked at it balefully.
“About time, Archer. I’ve been dying to try out my new toy.” Zane put his hands on his hips, belly jutting from below his T-shirt as he inspected me for damage. He, and the changelings, knew exactly who I was, what I looked like, and what I was trying to do. They weren’t allowed to say, just as they couldn’t tip the balance the other way and reveal those selfsame details to us about the Shadows.
“Let me guess,” I said, wiggling my toes. All still there. “You’ve got cameras up here?”
“Sensors, man!” The first kid, whom I now recognized as Dylan, was so excited he had to draw heavily on his inhaler. Shoving it back into his pocket, he pointed. “Under that wadded up newspaper…inside that Coke can over there too.”
“Awesome, huh?” said the other kid again. Kade. He had a habit of turning every statement into a question.
The high-pitched excitement did nothing to help the buzzing in my head. “Please, please, piss off.”
“My mother would be mad if she heard you talk to me like that.”
“She can-”
Dylan knew what I was going to say. “Don’t talk about my mother!”
“Yeah, because politics, religion, and mothers are off limits,” I muttered, clamoring to my feet. The jolt had been a thankfully short, if powerful, shock.
Zane was looking at me with a down-turned mouth. “You really shouldn’t talk to kids that way.”
“They’re not going to remember it anyway,” I said. All memory of this time in their lives would be erased upon onset of puberty. Just as it
“Zap this bitch again, Zane!” Dylan was still pissed about his mother.
I held out my hands as Zane cocked his thumb above the red button. “Look, I just need some help.”
“You’re dangerous, Archer. You could get us all killed. Just look at Jasmine.”
“I didn’t touch her!”
“You did. You touched her inside. You displaced part of her
Because such a thing had been done before. An agent named Jaden Jacks had displaced a changeling’s aura, and the details of how he’d ultimately fixed the kid were somewhere in the Shadow manuals. It was just a matter of finding it, impossible without spending months in the effort…and if Zane wouldn’t let me in.
As expected, he shook his head. “As record keeper, I can’t reveal anything that might unbalance the equilibrium of the Zodiac. I work for both sides.”
