Nebraska slipped away to wherever he went when he hid from everyone, and Austin emerged from the woods into the fuel exchange clearing.
Victor the Wizard’s eye was back in his head, and JT and Buzz were standing together near the ladder of the passenger side of the truck. They weren’t talking and both had their eyes closed. “They haven’t finished yet?” he asked Victor.
Victor turned to him. His eyes were even freakier than before. One was dark and tarnished; the other, bright. It made him look unbalanced. “They’ve only just started.”
“I’ve been gone for twenty minutes.”
“Yes. Well. I’m glad we have a few minutes. I was hoping we could talk.”
“Yeah? About what?”
“I wanted to apologize for what I said earlier . . . about wanting to study you.”
Austin scowled at the wizard. He didn’t like the topic, and he didn’t like apologies.
Victor misread the scowl as a demand for more instead of a demand to stop and kept on talking. “One hears stories about children disappearing off the streets, elven and orc children, sick experiments, but it’s hard to know whether these stories are real or urban legends. One hopes they are urban legends. It was bad enough the way the zero generation of your people was treated; no one wants to believe—”
“Yeah, that’s nice, thanks.”
“It’s science. Science consumes the soul. I’m pleased I forsook that world and became a wizard.”
Austin stared in disbelief and wrestled between the urge to set the record straight and change the subject. “For your information, JT and I weren’t taken as children. We were taken when our team was killed two years ago. They got killed; we got captured. And we weren’t taken by scientists; we were taken by wizards.”
Victor paled and blinked his mismatched eyes.
“So, apology accepted. Now shut the hell up. What the fuck is taking so long?” He waved toward JT and Buzz standing there.
And then the details sunk in. Why had it taken them so long to start? Why were JT and Buzz standing like that? So close to each other, turned to each other like that? With JT’s hand twitching like that, like JT wanted to touch Buzz . . . or maybe in cyberspace JT already was. “They had sex.”
Victor coughed and looked at the ground.
“Are they still having sex?”
“They don’t appear to be.”
“Virtual sex.”
“I really couldn’t say. That world is barred to me.”
But one glance at JT told Austin they weren’t doing that. Some things the orc couldn’t hide.
“You know we’re in the middle of a dangerous mission?” Austin said.
“I . . . am aware, yes,” Victor said.
“That kind of behavior, that’s irresponsible.”
“I didn’t feel it was my role to—”
“You two!” Austin strode toward JT and Buzz. “Do I need to turn a hose on you two?”
“Austin’s back,” Buzz grumbled to JT. Was that disappointment Austin heard in the ungrateful twerp’s voice? And JT’s little chuckle didn’t help one bit.
“You’re right, Austin’s back,” Austin said. “Austin’s goddamn back and ain’t going anywhere. Now let’s get this started.”
There were disadvantages to working with humans and orcs, and the stink was one of them. The four of them were crammed into the cab of JT’s truck with the AC blasting, but that only went so far. Austin was wedged against the passenger-side door, Victor straddled the middle, and Buzz might as well have been sitting in JT’s lap. Wasn’t that just fucking adorable?
Buzz’s eyes were open and kept focusing on things no one else but he and JT could see. JT’s eyes were closed. He kept flinching or grimacing as if whatever Buzz was doing to the network of his truck physically hurt him. Buzz talked while he worked, like whatever he was doing was nothing more difficult than walking and chewing bubble gum.
Austin sat there and glared at Buzz and JT and thought vague dark thoughts.
Buzz was saying, “So the Electric Dragon Triad contacts me, says they have this ghost problem, and right off I’m thinking like you guys are: you got a ghost, you find a necromancer or a holy man, not a hacker. But they didn’t mean that kind of ghost. They meant a ghost in their network, an AI fragment.”
He paused and no one said anything, which apparently was not the reaction he wanted. “An AI fragment,” he repeated. “No one knows? Really? This is what happens when you get everyday magic: no one learns about technology anymore. An AI fragment is what you get sometimes when an artificial intelligence breaks, or when it’s forming and it gets a trait it doesn’t want; it sheds it. It’s like glaciers and icebergs. Pieces of its mind break off and go floating around cyberspace and sometimes they get washed up on beaches and people find them. The fragments are barely sentient, usually just a clump of bad memories, and they’re kind of obsessive. So: ‘ghosts.’”
“Whales,” Victor said.
“What?”
“Whales. Whales used to get washed up on beaches, not icebergs.”
Buzz’s eyes focused on Victor. He blinked a couple of times. “What are you talking about?”
“Never mind.”
JT cracked a smile. One of JT’s huge arms was propped across the back of the seat behind Buzz. He shifted so that his fingers brushed against Buzz’s hair. Real slick, Austin thought. Not subtle at all. Austin tried to imagine JT and Buzz having sex. What would they have done? Handjobs? Blowjobs? Had they actually fucked? Austin couldn’t imagine Buzz on top (like Buzz would know what to do with someone like JT under him), and he couldn’t imagine Buzz on bottom (like Buzz would be walking after JT finished up). Austin couldn’t imagine any of it.
Victor nodded at the data cube in Buzz’s hand. “So that’s what you’ve stolen? This ghost? This must be very valuable to go to all this trouble: my apartment ruined, a gunfight over the city . . .”
“They’re valuable to some people.” Buzz’s eyes lost focus again as he went back to work. “We’ve got no idea how many unregistered AI’s there are out there—not even 3djinn has a good idea—and a ghost can contain all kinds of fragmented, recoverable data about the original entity. So it’s kind of a big deal to catch one.” Buzz blinked as he pulled out of the truck’s cyberspace. “That’s it, JT. We’re ready.”
But Buzz didn’t slot the data block just yet. “So the Electric Dragon Triad, they’re behind a lot of shit: drugs, of course. Arms dealing. The slave trade. And porn.”
“Pornography isn’t illegal,” Victor said.
“The kind they make is.” Buzz didn’t elaborate, but they all knew what he meant. He asked JT, “You ever jacked an elf porn sim?”
Austin smiled, satisfied. “He’s never needed to.”
Buzz went red as neon. He looked away from JT and shifted uncomfortably.
JT stopped playing with Buzz’s hair. The green tips of his ears tinged red like he was embarrassed, but the look on his face was anything but. He glared at Austin. “Maybe I needed to more than you think.”
Austin didn’t know what that might mean, but he didn’t see any reason why anyone should be embarrassed or pissed, either one. Everyone knew JT and Austin had fucked. Hell, most of the world thought they’d been in some kind of relationship.
“Virtual sex,” Victor sneered. Magic and tech didn’t mix, which meant Austin and Victor couldn’t wear the implants that allowed simulated stimuli, including high-end pornography. Austin could pop on a pair of VR glasses and at least got the first-person, 3-D effect, but Victor probably refused to wear even those. Probably, if Victor wanted porn, he just looked at still images or read print stories, the poor bastard. Probably Victor the Wizard was a virgin and told everyone his virginity was a source of his power.
“Well, it all sucks,” Buzz said. “I mean, it isn’t any better than human porn sim. It’s the glamour. Everyone always talks about elf glamour and how amazing it makes the sex—”
“It isn’t all that,” JT mumbled.
“You haven’t had an elf?” Austin said to Buzz. “I should introduce you to an elf.”
That first time for Austin and JT had been JT’s first time with an elf. And what had started as a nice, casual blowjob had gone a whole lot more wild once Austin’s glamour got hold of JT. JT had given Austin a throat-fucking that left Austin so sore he’d spent two days whispering. It had been amazing. Imagine Buzz taking all of JT down his throat like Austin had done? No way. So it had to have been handjobs while Austin was gone into the woods, and handjobs hardly even counted as sex. That was just saying hello. And somehow Austin felt better about the whole thing already.
“I’ll find you an elf,” he told Buzz.
Buzz ignored them all and, to his credit, didn’t miss a beat. “—but you can’t record it or re-create it. It’s magic. They always try to code in something that’s supposed to fake an elf’s glamour—pull certain memories out of the jacker and lay them over the scene, add in experiences that are supposedly universally erotic—but it’s never right. There’s a lot of money for the person who figures it out. A whole lot of money.”
“No one can figure it out,” Victor said. “You can’t figure out what is impossible. A computer cannot cast spells, cameras cannot see spirits, and a glamour cannot be recorded or coded. You may as well say that someday mathematicians will learn how to make one plus one equal three.”
“That’s what I would have said two weeks ago,” Buzz said. He held up the data cube.
“You’re telling me that ghost has a glamour?” JT said.
“Yes.”
JT and Victor started to argue, but Buzz cut them off. “I’m almost done with the story, and then you can jack it yourself.” He turned to Victor and Austin. “Even without the hardware, you are going to feel it—you just won’t be able to see the ghost.” Victor looked doubtful, but Buzz continued. “So, end of the story: The Triad offered me a job to figure out how the ghost worked. Reverse engineer it.”
JT said, “Because once they knew how to do it, they could put glamour on pornography. And you fucking said yes? Those people are fucking animals, Buzz. Do you know what they do? Do you know what kind of porn they’re making? It ain’t just people having fun, and it sure as hell ain’t a romance!”
“What was I supposed to do, JT? I was this far away from the most important discovery since the Awakening: how to break down the barrier between magic and technology. And you think I should have left that to a fucking Triad? It was right in front of me, and all I needed to do was work with some bad people for a while. Don’t tell me you’ve never worked for bad people. You’ve spent your entire life working for bad people!”
The AC fans were a loud whine in the quiet. JT shifted. He lowered his arm across the back of the seat again so he was touching Buzz’s shoulder. “So how did Austin get involved?” he said.
“I called him. I called Austin and asked him to help me steal her. I told you it was my idea. Once I saw what the Blue Unicorn was, I couldn’t leave her there. Not with them. Not knowing what they’d do to her. So I broke my contract. Jesus, I’m the first 3djinn ever to break a contract, I think. They are going to be so pissed.”
“You said ghosts were barely sentient,” JT said. “Why are you talking like this thing’s a person all of a sudden?”
Buzz shot a glance to Austin.
This was it. For two years now, Austin had been looking for this proof. Proof JT had been wrong to leave. Proof JT had been kidding himself when he thought he could make a normal life. Proof JT should come back and the two of them—just the two of them—should be a team like they had been before everything had gone bad. If this didn’t convince JT to come back, nothing would. “Just play it.”
Buzz whined, “Austin, I don’t think . . .”
“Just play it.”
Buzz sighed. “Jack in, JT. You ain’t gonna like this.” And Buzz slapped the data cube into the port on JT’s truck.
It felt like a séance JT had once joined in, the four of them squeezed so close into his truck, waiting for something to reach out from cyberspace and touch their minds. All apprehensive quiet, all but the fans blowing cold air on high.
JT fell into the truck’s cyberspace. It was neither light nor dark. It was neutral nothing, electric gray.
JT never bothered with avatars much. He’d never cared what he looked like in here. For JT, cyberspace was a network interface, not a social space; he rarely needed an avatar. Buzz, on the other hand, looked just like Buzz, not even the slightest alteration to what he looked like out there. He was sitting cross-legged like some kind of yogi. —Open up, Buzz sent, meaning the sim ports.
—That’s not safe, not with that thing in here. And I won’t need those ports open if it has a glamour. I don’t need to be here at all.
—C’mon, open up.
JT did. He felt Buzz’s fingers intertwine with his. —My world. My turn to keep you safe.
JT wished he had the program so that Buzz could feel JT’s hand the way JT could feel his. They sat there holding hands, waiting as if for the sun to rise.
Cactus flowers. —Cactus flowers. “I smell flowers,” JT said aloud.
“Weed,” Buzz said.
“The sea,” Victor said.
A thrill shot through JT. If Victor smelled something, could it be this was true?
“I don’t smell anything,” Austin said.
“You will,” Buzz said.
JT told Buzz he was going to drop out.
—Okay, but come back. I want you to see it.
JT dropped back into real space. Even without a direct connection to the truck’s cyberspace, he could still smell flowers. The scent grew more complex. Not just flowers, but dust and hot wind.
JT fell back in to watercolors, warm horizontal stripes: yellows, oranges, and reds. A blue unicorn chasing butterflies. The unicorn was stark and exact against the smeary watercolor backdrop. It charged, all piss and vinegar, and tried to spear monarchs on its horn, and then it lost interest and simply trotted around. Yellow-orange-red became a mountainside. “The Painted Desert.”
“Twin Peaks,” Buzz said.
It was true. It was an honest-to-goddess glamour somehow coded into a broken-off piece of some AI. The glamour took the simulated stimuli and somehow made them more than real. It spoke to each of them individually and stirred up old memories and daydreams and nightmares and made the world vivid, lush, and seductive. How was this possible?
Austin said, “Winchester Mountain.”
“You can see it?”
“No.” Austin’s voice was soft and distant. “But I can smell the wind now and the snow, and I know that smell. Buzz, you found her.”
And then the sensoria crashed down on JT like a thunderstorm.
A thousand fragments of memory like holographic glass: each containing the whole, yet still broken ragged. So many images and sounds, JT couldn’t sort them all, and it was all just sound and fury. Except that it hurt. The pieces of it grazed against his mind, and JT couldn’t flinch away from it because the Blue Unicorn was everywhere.
It was raining.
Mounted police. What city was this? Seattle. Except the policeman was riding a blue unicorn and its silver hooves struck sparks from asphalt. The policeman’s visor reflected them when he looked down.
“She’s my sister,” Austin said. He was fourteen maybe and beautiful as sin. Roan was brown-skinned and Austin was pale as funeral lilies, but in this day and age, what did that mean? Nothing—same way Buzz and Austin could both be Irish and two different species entirely.
The policeman didn’t seem to care who was related to who. “Move along.”
In puddles, Austin and Roan reflected. Austin and Roan in Seattle. Austin and Roan in San Francisco. Austin and Roan in an alpine wilderness. Blue Unicorns everywhere. JT couldn’t tell if the Unicorn was a memory or a daydream. He wasn’t sure if there were any unicorns. When the elves and orcs had Awakened, had horses Awakened too? When Austin had been born, had a unicorn also been born somewhere? When JT was born, was there a nightmare born, smoke-maned and breathing fire? Had ranchers drowned their mutant horses the way some humans had their mutant children?
—Buzz? JT was starting to panic. This was not just a glamour. The images were coming too fast, alien thoughts and memories flung at him like a poltergeist, furious and throwing anything it could find. “Buzz!” JT shouted aloud. He couldn’t feel Buzz’s hand in his anymore. “Buzz! Where are you?”
—I’m here, JT. But JT still couldn’t feel Buzz’s hand, and he was afraid the voice wasn’t Buzz’s but the Unicorn feigning Buzz. He was losing himself.
A blue unicorn on a Washington mountainside. If JT reached out to it, it would turn to look at him. So he reached for it. It turned. Then JT remembered only a virgin could touch a unicorn. He pulled his hand back before he could ruin it.
“Don’t, you’ll scare it away,” Roan said to Austin. They were children in bushes, elegant elven eyes blinking amid needled-leaves, hiding like wild animals.
“There is more to this world than heaven and earth,” Roan misquoted. JT didn’t correct her. JT couldn’t remember where they’d been when she said that.
Blood. There was blood. JT could smell it now, and his heart was going like a trip hammer. Blood reflected everywhere in the street puddles of Seattle. JT tried to drop out. It should have been easy. All you did was fall back and out, but there was nowhere to fall back to because the Unicorn was everywhere. —Buzz? Buzz, get me out of here. But Buzz didn’t answer him, and he felt the glamour blood-scent seep in, setting his orc blood afire. It stoked him with need.
An arrow struck the Unicorn. It sprouted from its neck like disease. A bullet. More. Holes bloomed in the blue. Horse carcasses. Silver-blue horns, bloodstained.
—Buzz, get me out of here!
Swarms of monarch butterflies swirled, unchased.
Roan wept onto Austin’s shoulder. JT could taste her tears and grief. “Buzz!” JT didn’t know if he was screaming out loud or only in his mind. He could hear nothing but the gunshots and the thrumming of bows. Nothing but horses screaming, Roan’s crying, and the whine of a bone saw that sounded like AC fans on high.
Blood wept from the hole in the head of a horse where a unicorn’s horn should have been. The mounted policeman didn’t seem to notice. “Move along,” he said. “Move along.” He flipped up his visor, erasing Austin and Roan. It was an old elf JT didn’t know.
In a room in Seattle, a bone saw opened Roan’s head, and the surgery began.
JT drowned in her tears and the smell of blood. He lashed out at everything, every image, every scent, every sound. He roared like only an orc could roar, loud enough his throat broke and bled.
Buzz found his hand, and the nightmares stopped.
Silence.
Electric gray.
In the gray was a woman, but that was all he could see.
—Who are you? she sent.
JT was afraid of her. Buzz’s hand tightened on his.
—I should know you, she sent.
She walked toward him out of nothing. She was a silhouette and watercolor.
—There’s something about you. He’s tangled up in you. I can almost see him.
She was dark-skinned and lithe as a cattail frond.
—Where’s my brother? Where am I?
Her ears stuck out of the halo of her hair, and butterflies circled her.
—Where’s Austin?
And JT could see the ghost now.
JT couldn’t stand the sight of her. It tore him apart. He fought free, erasing Buzz’s touch on his hands, and fell into the real world.
JT hit the ground hard enough to force all the air from his lungs. He’d sprung the door in his need to be away, and fallen two meters to the parking lot pavement and landed flat on his back. Now he couldn’t breathe and stars nova-ed in his eyes. Never mind the pain in his back and ribs, he had to be away from here. He scrambled to his feet and ran into the woods.
Behind him people shouted his name. Still in range of the truck, he heard Buzz in his head, —JT! He closed the link and ran.
“JT!” he heard behind him. It was Austin. JT ran faster.
“JT.” Austin was right behind him now. It didn’t matter how fast JT ran, the fucking elf could always outrun him. So he stopped and he spun and he hit him.
He hit him as hard as he could, one good solid crack across the jaw for every goddamn thing Austin had ever done to him: for blindsiding him with that fucking ghost and exposing a wound that JT had never allowed to heal, for all Austin’s endless lies, and for forcing JT to leave him when JT had wanted nothing more than to stay. JT hit Austin so hard the elf nearly flew into a backflip. Austin hit the ground. And the elation of seeing Austin laid out flat like that was better than any sex.
Austin didn’t move, and for one horrifying, sobering split second, JT thought he’d killed him.
Then Austin groaned, wiped at his jaw, and missed. Now JT was even angrier for having worried one moment about this asshole. Austin tried to push himself up.
“Stay down. Just stay down or I swear by the moon I’ll put you back down.”
Austin collapsed onto pine needles and dust. He opened his eyes dazedly.
“You know, Austin, the sad thing is that after all the shit you’ve pulled, I still can’t believe you just did that to me. I must be the most naive, gullible, stupidest goddamn orc on the planet. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you warn me? Because that was the most . . . the worst . . . Goddamn you. Goddamn you . . .” JT’s eyes burned, and the world went blurry. He wiped furiously at them, and his arm came away wet. “Goddamn you. Why?”
“Because if I’d told you what Buzz had found, you wouldn’t have believed me.”
“Bullshit. You and your fucking bullshit rationalizations—”
“You would never have listened to me. You’d never have helped.”
“Bullshit!”
Austin got to his knees and shouted up at him. “It’s not bullshit. You know how I know? Because you’ve done it to me before. Two years ago, you did it to me.” JT wanted to shout bullshit again and again, but Austin kept on. “After we escaped those wizards and we were holed up in a basement for three weeks hiding, scared, I told you something didn’t add up about that job. Something wasn’t right. We didn’t screw up. It wasn’t bad luck. We were sold out. But you wouldn’t believe me. You wouldn’t listen to me. And you wouldn’t help me. You left me. You left me alone.” Austin punctuated every you like everything was JT’s fault. Well, it wasn’t.
“You were obsessed. You didn’t sleep, you didn’t eat, you spent hours looking at surveillance tapes with nothing on them. I was not going to stand around and watch you destroy yourself. I begged for you to leave it behind and go with me.”
And now it was Austin’s eyes that had gone red and watery. “You asked me to forget her!”
“I asked you to give up your crazy conspiracy theory! Sometimes bad things happen. They just happen. And people we love die.”
“You see? You see! That’s why I had to lie to you: so that I would get the chance to prove I’m not crazy, otherwise you never would have given me one!”
Austin started to get to his feet, and JT bunched up his fists ready to take another swing. “I ain’t gonna let you hit me again. Once, I deserved. But that’s all you get.”
“You didn’t let me hit you.”
“Please. You ain’t a fighter, JT. It doesn’t matter that you’re strong as a fucking ox. You can’t throw a punch worth shit, and you’re slow as dirt.”
JT let him stand. He might not have been able to throw a punch worth shit, but that swelling jaw was damn satisfying to watch.
Austin pointed back to the truck. “That ghost proves I was right.”
“That ghost doesn’t prove shit. We don’t even know what the fuck it is.”
“Buzz knows. You don’t want to listen to me? Fine. Listen to Buzz. He’ll tell you.”
JT looked over at the truck. The words Country Orc written down its side looked ridiculous, and JT wished he hadn’t painted it there. Buzz and Victor were still in the cab, hidden behind tinted glass.
“If Buzz wasn’t in danger, Austin, I would leave you out here, right here in the middle of fucking nowhere. But this isn’t over, and Buzz still needs our help. So we’re going to do this, and then I’m going home.”
Austin started to say something, but JT stopped him. “It doesn’t matter, Austin. It doesn’t matter whether you’re right or you’re wrong. That was two years ago. It’s ancient history. It ain’t bringing Roan or Grayson back. I have a life now. It’s a perfectly good life. And once we’ve finished up this mess, I’m going back to it. So please, just stop it. Stop fucking with me and let me be happy.”
JT started back to the truck. Austin didn’t follow. “What did she look like, JT?”
Austin sounded so broken that JT almost stopped and went back to him. But that was just Austin’s glamour, always calling to JT and adding one more lie. Odysseus lashed to his mast. “It’s not her, Austin.”
“But what did she look like?”
If they had a pair of VR glasses, Austin could have seen the ghost for himself, but they didn’t. Austin, the only person around who actually wanted to see the ghost, couldn’t. So thinking it was probably the cruelest thing he could do, JT answered him. “She was wearing a silk dashiki like she used to wear. African patterns. She had butterflies in her hair.”
While the boys fought, Buzz and Victor watched from the safety of the truck. Austin was lying flat on the ground with JT standing over him shouting.
Buzz shook his head. “I hate to say it, but I saw that coming. Austin should have just told him the truth from the start. I hope JT ain’t mad at me too. I don’t think I’d live through a punch like that.” He turned to Victor. “Um. Hey. I’m sorry about dragging you into this.”
Victor the Wizard shrugged. “This Blue Unicorn, it is priceless.”
Buzz turned back to watching the two men outside. “Yeah, I suppose.”
“You have a buyer for it already? How much are they going to pay?”
“A buyer? Are you kidding? We ain’t selling her. We’re going to free her.”
They watched the elf and the orc argue.
“I see,” Victor the Wizard said.
Finally Austin stood. JT didn’t punch him again.
Victor said, “You are right, Buzz. Austin should have told the truth from the start.”