The Lucifer desk

25

“You’re crazy!” Masaki shouted into the telecom unit. “The spirit is dangerous. It’s just as likely to kill Carla as to save her!”

A three-dimensional image of Aziz glared at the reporter from the projection unit of the telecom. “You’re wasting valuable time, Masaki. Bring the girl to the address I gave you. Now. Every minute counts.”

Pita rubbed the sleep from her eyes and sat up. She’d been sleeping on the couch in Masaki’s apartment and had only heard fragments of the conversation. Something about Carla, the spirit-and herself. She leaned forward, listening avidly.

Masaki shook his head at the telecom. “No,” he said firmly. “I’ll get in touch with the building’s security guards. They’ll call the guard dog off.”

“It’s a hell hound, not a guard dog,” Aziz spat back. “And what do you think its handlers will do when they find an intruder who’s compromised the security of a top-secret research facility? The security guards aren’t just going to politely ask who she is and then let her go. Any questioning they will do will be brutal. And if they don’t get the answers they want…”

“Carla’s a reporter covering a story,” Masaki countered. “The station will back her up.” His voice, however, held a hint of uncertainty. Aziz pounced upon it.

“She’s also someone who illegally broke into a restricted area of a powerful corporation, and that makes her no better than a shadowrunner,” he said. “Do you honestly think Mitsuhama cares about adverse publicity when it can downplay the incident as security guards who were ‘just doing their jobs’? And what’s to stop them from coming after anyone else connected with the story? You could be next, Masaki. Your byline was on the original report, too. You even did a stand-up for it, as I recall.”

The reporter wet his lips nervously. “I still don’t think that using the spirit is the right thing to-”

“What’s happening?” Pita asked.

Masaki turned, surprised to see her. He’d obviously forgotten she was there.

“Carla’s been trapped in the Mitsuhama complex by a hell hound. Aziz wants to use the spirit against it. He seems to think that if he can attract its attention again, you can control it. But that’s crazy. I don’t see how you could possibly help. Control a spirit that’s already killed one mage? Impossible! You’re just a kid with no formal magical training. I won’t allow it.”

Pita narrowed her eyes. Just a kid, huh? Yeah, just a dumb ork kid who could be shoved around by the police and shunted off to a group home when she became inconvenient. She pushed the blankets to the floor and stood up. Her eyes bored into Masaki’s. “I can so control it,” she told him in a level voice. She turned to the telecom unit. “What do you want me to do, Aziz?”

The mage spoke rapidly. “Remember the boarded-up Stuffer Shack you came to in astral form when the spirit was attacking me?”

Pita nodded.

“I want you to go there-in person-as quickly as you can. I’ll give you the address. I’ll meet you there and explain what we have to do. I’ve ordered a taxi for you. Tell the driver to hurry.”

Pita started to answer, but Masaki cut her off. “Never mind the taxi,” he told Aziz. “I’ll drive her.”

Pita stared at him. “I thought you forbade me to do this.”

Masaki said goodbye to Aziz, and tapped off the telecom. Then he sighed. “You’re obviously going to go through with this crazy idea, no matter what I say. You think I want to sit here, worrying about you and wondering if you’re all right? I intend to be there. In case anything goes wrong.”

Pita blinked, surprised. If the spirit refused her commands and attacked, there would be nothing Masaki could do. Except, maybe, get fried alongside her and Aziz. Perhaps the reporter really did care about her, after all. But there wasn’t any time for speculation. Aziz had told her to hurry. She scooped up her jacket from the floor and shoved her feet into her sneakers.

The drive to the shop was a quick one-traffic was relatively light for a Saturday night, and for once Masaki seemed more than willing to break the speed limit. He didn’t say a word to Pita, but instead sat in a tense silence, drumming the fingers of one hand nervously against the steering wheel. It wasn’t until they reached the boarded-up Stuffer Shack and parked in front of it that he at last spoke.

“Aziz asked me to bring this,” he said, reaching into the back seat and lifting out a portable trideo camera. “He wants to document this. I guess something rubbed off when he was living with Carla; there’s a little reporter in him, too.” He gave Pita a forced smile. She supposed he was trying to be funny.

Pita clambered out of the car and made her way into the boarded-up building. The convenience store looked much as it had during her astral visit to it. The counters and display racks were still covered with dust but the floor was swept clean. On it, a hermetic circle enclosing a pentagram was marked in faintly luminescent paint. Aziz knelt beside it, laying out earth, water, and a lighted candle in the angles of the pentagram. He looked up at Pita, then smiled as he saw the reporter.

“Thanks for coming, Masaki. Set your camera up over there, and then stay put. Whatever happens to us, don’t try to cross the hermetic circle. You’ll only make things worse if you do manage to break it-not to mention putting yourself in danger. And keep your camera rolling. If the spell fails, the trid may help me learn what did wrong.”

He waved Pita over. “You, Pita, will sit here, at the apex of the pentagram. Once you’re in position, it’s vital that you don’t interrupt the protective spell I’ll be casting or try to leave the circle. It’s best if you don’t try to move at all. Just close your eyes and concentrate on the spot on your aim where the spirit wrote its name. When you feel its presence, use the visualization techniques we talked about earlier, and form a clear image of Carla in your mind. Then picture the hell hound-a big black dog-and order the spirit to attack it. If it helps, you can speak the command out loud as well as in your mind. The spirit will be forced to obey you once it’s under your mental control.”

“What if I can’t control the spirit?” Pita chewed on her lip, feeling nervous. She was just starting to realize the danger she was placing herself in. Her earlier bravado and pride had evaporated, leaving her with second thoughts. She looked at Aziz’s heat-blistered skin, and scratched the itchy spot on her arm, remembering the sharp sting when the spirit had burned her.

“If you feel the spirit getting the better of you-if you find you can’t control it-then raise your arm and wave it away,” Aziz answered. “You’ve already banished it once. This time, you’ll be inside the hermetic circle. The simple act of raising your fist against it should be enough to drive the spirit away, as long as the force of your will is behind the action”

The force of her will. Now Pita was really nervous. Her magical powers weren’t, strictly speaking, under her direct control. She couldn’t be certain they would manifest themselves here tonight. She eyed the door, tempted to back out. As if sensing her fear, Aziz moved to close it, then secured the door with a chain and padlock. “We don’t need any interruptions,” he said.

He crossed to the hermetic circle and motioned impatiently for Pita to sit down. “Come on,” he said. “Carla’s life depends upon this. You don’t want the hell hound to kill her or the security guards to catch her, do you? We’re the only chance she’s got.”

Pita hesitated. She couldn’t tell if that was genuine concern for Carla in Aziz’s voice. From what Carla had said, she and the mage had been pretty close, once. But that had been years ago. Aziz’s story about Carla and the hell hound might be nothing more than an elaborate hoax, dreamed up by the mage to trick Pita into helping him to control the spirit. Carla might not be in any danger at all. But then Pita shook her head. That didn’t make sense. The spirit had nearly killed Aziz the last time he’d messed with it. He wouldn’t be willing to risk his own life again without a good reason. Would he?

If Carla’s life were really in danger, Pita was obligated to do what she could. The reporter might have lied about doing a story on how Lone Star killed Chen, but she’d saved Pita’s ass when the yakuza came gunning for her and Yao. Pita owed her one for that. Besides, Pita was curious. Could she really do it? Control a spirit that corp mages and other experts like Aziz couldn’t get a handle on? The thought of having so much power at her fingertips was tempting. Just let anyone try to call her “porkie” again with a spirit backing her up. She’d show them.

“Show me where to sit,” she told Aziz.

Masaki watched her from a corner of the room. “You don’t have to go through with this, Pita,” he said. The wheeze was back in his voice. “It’s not too late to call-”

“Keep quiet!” Aziz snapped. “If you call attention to yourself, the spirit might choose you as a target.”

Masaki swallowed, then moved so that a dusty counter was between himself and the hermetic circle. He adjusted his trideo camera nervously. A tiny red Eight came on. “We’re rolling,” he said.

Pita sat where Aziz told her to, cross-legged at the apex of the pentagram. She toyed with the laces of her sneakers as the mage positioned himself within the hermetic circle. He lay on his back, clutching a broken chunk of window glass and staring up at the store's grimy skylight, his head beside Pita’s feet. He cautioned Pita and Masaki once more about interruptions, then took a deep breath and began to chant.

Pita couldn’t understand a word Aziz said. She glanced at Masaki, moving only her eyes. Her arm itched, but she didn’t dare scratch it. Instead she worried the tip of her shoelace between blunt fingers, afraid to shift position.

Masaki gave her a nervous smile from the shadows. His face was seamed with worry lines, and his gray moustache was twitching as a tic tugged at his lip. Was it only Pita’s imagination, or could she see the reporter more clearly now? Something was shining in through the skylight.

Aziz just kept chanting, his voice droning a series of weird, harsh sounding words.

Panic began to claw at Pita’s gut as the interior of the Stuffer Shack grew steadily brighter. What was she doing here? Masaki was right. Despite any natural shamanic talents she might have, she was untrained. Just a kid, and way out of her depth. It took everything she had to fight back the urge to jump up and run.

Out of the corner of her eye, Pita saw movement. Not overhead, where the spirit would materialize any moment, but down low, in a corner by the floor. Was that moving shadow cat-shaped? Was the whirring of Masaki’s trideo camera really starting to sound like a purring cat? Or was Pita just going crazy?

Then she felt the brush of soft fur against her hand. Cat! The touch calmed her, gave her the courage she needed to resist getting up and running from the room. She flexed mental claws, preparing for what was to come.

Suddenly a bright spiral of light flashed overhead, throwing the room into stark relief. Masaki let out a horrified cry and threw up his arms, then ducked down below the counter, leaving his camera running. Aziz raised the jagged sheet of glass be held, chanting louder, stronger. He twisted his head away from the light, staring back at Pita and raising a finger to point at the ceiling. Then he squeezed his eyes shut.

The light that filled the room was painfully bright. Taking her cue from the mage, Pita closed her own eyes. She didn’t want to look up, to see the spirit looming above her. She could feel its heat on her body. At the same time, shivers ran through her, making the hair on her arms rise. Instinctively, she clutched at her forearm, squeezing the spot where the spirit had burned her, trying desperately to concentrate.

“Carla,” she croaked fearfully, visualizing the reporter’s face in her mind. She concentrated, adding the image of a huge black dog menacing the reporter. “Kill it,” she whispered fiercely. “Save her.”

The light strobed around Pita, dazzling her eyes with red spots, even through her closed eyelids. She could feel the heat beating against the top of her head and shoulders. Sweat trickled down one cheek. The spirit was pressing closer. It was coming for her, trying to suck her up into its spinning vortex. She couldn’t control it. She’d never control it. The thing would tear her body to atoms.

“Go!” Pita leaped to her feet, raising her burned arm. She pointed to the skylight, focusing her will in an arrow-straight line. “Go!”

At that same moment, Masaki began to scream her name. “Pi-”

Suddenly the convenience store lay far below her. She was a flash of light, streaking through the star-speckled heavens. Arcing up, then swooping down and skipping across the lake below. Flashing in a jagged ladder toward a series of six silver towers with black-tinted windows. Rushing in through one of those squares. Zig-zagging impossibly fast along a corridor that was more a boxy blur than a hallway. Coming suddenly upon a dark-haired woman, sprawled on the floor on her back, a huge black dog atop her, fangs a few centimeters from her throat. Arcing down, plunging in through the animal’s burning red eyes, sizzling them in an instant and piercing its brain. Then out again through its nostrils in twin white beams, so quickly that the animal had no time even to collapse, so quickly that the woman below it had not yet even blinked. Back through the hallway, back up into the heavens. Expanding into a flash that spread paper-thin over hundreds of kilometers, stretching ever outward into a sheet of lightning, waiting, waiting, while the nanoseconds ticked by with impossible slowness…

Pita’s mind sluggishly formed a thought. Control. Command?

She could sense the spirit’s impatience-its desire to flow, be free. And its anger. Somewhere below were fiber-optic cables, humming hardware, and knots of computer nodes that together spread an invisible mesh across the globe. The Matrix. A sticky spider web into which the spirit was forced to throw itself, compulsively returning over and over again. Break, it hissed at her. Tear.

Pita felt the creature’s anger blaze through her mind. There, it joined with her own. An image formed in her consciousness. A cop’s face, leering at her, twisted with hatred. A chromed hand. A patrol car, hissing through the night.

The spirit coalesced into a point, then shot down toward the city in a jagged streak of lightning. Pita watched from an impossible height as it zoomed down into the street where the beams of headlights crisscrossed, frozen like rays of ice. In through the tinted windshield of a police patrol car.

Through the glass she saw two frightened faces, washed with brilliant light. Their eyes were squinted tight, their hands thrown up as if to ward off a blow. One of those hands was chromed. The patrol car was just starting to spin in response to the driver’s panicked reaction. Kill? a voice whispered in Pita’s mind.

In the same instant, Pita heard an echo. A second voice had overlaid the first. It somehow seemed more in tune with Pita’s own thoughts. No, it whispered with a soft purr. Play.

Recognizing the voice of Cat, Pita tried to smile. She felt her brain start to send the command to her lips. The world she was occupying was moving much too quickly for it to get there. Yes, the first voice echoed, long before Pita could either agree or disagree with the suggestion. Play.

Fingers of light licked out at the two cops in the patrol car, searing their faces, crisping their hair, blinding them instantly. A part of Pita exulted, enjoying the fear and pain the spirit was causing. These were the two cops who had killed Chen, Shaz, and Mohan. She had them now, right between her paws. She could bat them about or rend them with her claws. She would draw their blood a little at a time and savor the taste of their scurrying panic.

At the same time, another part of her was repulsed. What was she doing? She’d ordered the spirit to kill the hell hound without a second thought. But this was torture. And it was ugly. Suddenly horrified at what she had become, she drew back violently from the scene that was unfolding…

Something snapped. A light blinked out in her mind. At the same moment, her muscles twitched her lips into a smile, at last obeying the command that her brain had seemingly sent hours ago. She opened her eyes on a darkroom, her mouth curled in a foolish grin.

“Pita? Are you all right, Pita?”

Masaki peered at her from behind the counter, eyes wide with fear. He clambered to his feet, then edged around the corner of the counter, one eye on the skylight. Beside him, the trideo camera was still whirring softly.

Aziz rolled over, groaning and rubbing his eyes. Then he jerked around to look up at the ceiling. “Where is it?” he asked suddenly. “Where’d it go?”

Pita sighed as relief made her body rubbery. “It’s gone. I let it go.”

Aziz clasped her knee. “Were you able to control-”

“Yes” Pita answered. Her arm was itching fiercely. And she was dead tired. The spell seemed to have taken a lot out of her. “Can I get up now?”

“Of course.” Aziz helped Pita to her feet and guided her out of the hermetic circle. “We did it!” he chortled, slapping her on the back. “We controlled the spirit!”

“You mean Pita controlled it,” Masaki interjected. He moved closer to Pita, then wrapped an arm protectively around her shoulders. Pita slumped against him, too tired to protest at him taking the liberty of hugging her. Actually, it felt kind of nice.

“Pita didn’t do it on her own,” Aziz said. “She’s not a trained-”

An electronic beeping in a corner of the room cut him off. Aziz ran over to it and picked up a cel phone. “Yes?”

After listening for a second or two he flipped the phone shut. “That was Carla,” he said with a broad smile. “The hell hound is dead. Carla’s a little shaken up, a little bloody, but she’s on her way out of the MCT building now.”