“It’s my choice to make!” Pip shouts right back. “And if it’s between me and all these people—”
“What of Alis?”
“You think I’m not thinking of our daughter, too?” Pip counters.
Ahbni makes a strangled, pained keening noise and screws her eyes shut. “Oh my god, you have a kid. I forgot you had a kid. I just . . . I didn’t. . . . It’s real, and you have a kid, and real people are getting hurt, and I just . . .” she trails off, choking on her own realization.
“It’s ‘real’?” Bevel says, bemusement evaporating into concern. “Are you well?”
Ahbni trembles, her voice shaking as she turns to him. “You’re actually him, aren’t you? You’re not just cosplaying Bevel Dom and Kintyre Turn. You’re not just a family member he based the character on. You’re actually him.”
Silence hangs between us as we share glances, debating, wordlessly, what truths to tell, and which to keep hidden.
“Yes,” I say finally, because I do not see the point in lying to her. Not if she is to be our ally in this. Not if we must trust her.
“Oh god,” she breathes, and staggers back a step. Her chair falls sideways behind her and she climbs backwards over it, as if she fears that the moment she stops looking at us, we’ll vanish. Or attack. “Oh, god . . . I can’t . . .”
And before anyone can ask her what it is that she cannot do, she spins on her heel, the cloak and her scarf flaring out behind her, and runs out of the ballroom.
Chapter 13 Elgar
“Son of a bitch!” Lucy snarls, turning in circles just outside the ballroom like a bloodhound seeking a lost scent. “It’s like she walked across the threshold of the door and just . . . ceased to exist.”
Kintyre, already taller than everyone else, rocks up onto his toes, as if the extra height will reveal Ahbni and her violently pink scarf between the forest of tumbled concrete and furniture.
“He’s taken her,” Lucy says, with absolute finality. Elgar’s scalp crawls. “He’s taken her to get to us. Fuck. Fuck.”
“Maybe she’s just ducked into the washroom, or . . . ?” Elgar offers, hoping. “Someone must have seen—”
“Ahbni,” Lucy says, grabbing the arm of a passing blue-shirted volunteer. “Where’d she go?”
“Who?” the volunteer asks.
“The guest liaison—dark hair, very pretty? Pink scarf?” Forsyth urges.
“Ichiro’s the guest liaison,” the volunteer says, and looks at them like the stress of what is happening has snapped their minds. “I can get him for you.”
“The other liaison, the girl,” Lucy insists. “Where has she gone?”
The volunteer shakes off Lucy’s hold. “I don’t know who you mean.”
The pronouncement should have been more ominous than that, Elgar thinks. If he’d been writing it, there would have been a clap of thunder, or a flicker of lights, or something more than just the volunteer’s bland truth and distrustful expression.
“Look, some of the ConComm are looking for you,” the volunteer says when everyone has finished glancing at each other to check that, yes, the rest of the heroes had heard that, too, and yes, they’re all equally surprised. “You guys seem to know what’s going on.”
“Slightly,” Forsyth dissembles.
“More than slightly,” Kintyre corrects, trotting up behind him with a grin. Forsyth rolls his eyes and sighs hard.
“Well, you’re in costume, too, so maybe you already know, but we think that . . .” The volunteer stops and shuffles, hunches in, suddenly mortified by what they have to confess. “We sort of . . . um . . . think that the . . . the costumes are coming to . . . life?”
“They what?” Lucy asks, eyes going wide.
Forsyth makes a thoughtful sound. “Yes, that makes sense.”
“It makes sense?” Elgar can’t help but repeat.
“Pip is still here, still shedding magic.”
Lucy grimaces. “Like fleas, awesome. Make me sound like a plague carrier. No, go on. I love this analogy.”
“Bao bei,” Forsyth chides her, and Lucy huffs.
“In what way are the costumes—?” Lucy begins to ask, but the approach of someone else cuts her off.
“Hey! Something’s wrong with my prop!” a cosplayer shouts.
“Has everyone but me forgotten the girl in the pink scarf?” Kintyre groans. “I think we have more to worry about than—”
“It’s not a prop anymore!” the cosplayer says, and Elgar turns to get a better look at the woman in the costume. She is dressed as some sort of spaceship crew member, though he doesn’t know from what franchise.
“What do you mean, it’s not a—?” Lucy starts, but is interrupted by a bright flash of blue streaking across the ballroom, accompanied by a sizzling zing! The blue light slams into a bit of empty wall, juddering the entire structure, and leaves a scorch mark as wide as a man’s chest smoking in the wallpaper. There’s already a second scorch mark right beside it.
“What in the seven hells is that?” Bevel yelps, stumbling back a step and colliding with Kintyre’s chest. Kintyre just steadies him there, his own eyes wide and on the wall.
“Holy shit,” Lucy breathes. “Can you—can I see that?” She barely waits for the cosplayer to hand it over before she snatches it away and is aiming across the same empty stretch of ballroom to fire her own bolt of energy at the wall. Her aim isn’t as good as the cosplayer’s, though, mostly because her hand is shaking. “Holy shit.”
“Pip,” Forsyth says urgently. “Ahbni.”
“I know, I know. Just . . . the magic is pooling again. That has to be it. The cards, now this?”
“This is good?” Kintyre asks. “Instead of Players’ props, these people will be armed with real weapons. They can defend themselves. Let’s go find the girl!”
Elgar wonders idly if Kintyre will want to sleep with her if he saves her. And then he wonders what Bevel would have to
