Cybermage, p.1
Cybermage, page 1
CYBERMAGE
WORLDWEAVERS
BOOK THREE
ALMA ALEXANDER
CONTENTS
Worldweavers
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Acknowledgments
So who was Nikola Tesla, really?
About the Author
About Book View Café
Published by Book View Café/Kos Books
Cover art by Les Petersen
Copyright ©2009 (original publication), ©2022 (current edition) by Alma Alexander
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever (except for quotations used for purpose of critical articles or reviews) without the author’s permission.
ISBN (paperback) 978 1 61138 926 5
ISBN (ebook) 978 1 61138 927 2
WORLDWEAVERS
Book 3:
Cybermage
Alma Alexander
For Sara, the youngest
child of the new millennium
who has never known a world without cybermagic
ONE
Thea had started the new school year at the Wandless Academy with enthusiasm and a sense of purpose which she could not remember ever having had before–but then things began to unravel with unnerving speed.
The first unpleasant surprise was her roommate. Thea had actually done a double take when Magpie all but fell into their room, a large and apparently heavy backpack on her back and a smaller duffle bag in each hand.
“Hey!” she said, dumping the bags on the floor in an untidy heap. “Back at the salt mines, eh?”
Magpie’s right ear appeared to have been pierced at least a dozen times along its edge, encasing the edge of her ear with tiny silver rings and giving it an air of being sheathed in chain mail; in the piercings that had been there before, one in each ear, she was wearing long dangly earrings wrought from copper wire and some sparkly crystal.
But something else was different. Something far more disquieting.
“Your hair,” Thea said, startled.
Magpie flicked back a long strand which had been dyed an improbable shade of platinum blonde. A purple bandanna sewn with sequins held back the rest of her hair which had been hacked into uneven layers, as though her mane had been attacked by a straight-edge razor. A couple of plaited rats’-tails, left long on purpose, were hanging from the back of her head.
“You like it?” Magpie asked, craning her neck a little to catch a glimpse of herself in the dresser mirror. “I just got bored with it–I’ve worn my hair the same way since I was in the cradle. My cousin Clarice did it, back home–she trained as a hairdresser before they kicked her out of beauty school for, I don’t know, being too weird for the clients or something.” She turned to give Thea an appraising look.
Thea covered her own hair with both hands. “Don’t even think about it.”
Magpie laughed. “You might actually, you know, like it.”
“But you were so proud of your hair, last year,” Thea said plaintively.
“It’s a change.” Magpie shrugged. But the platinum strand persisted in hanging over her face like some strange visiting alien tentacle, and Thea couldn’t quite tear her fascinated gaze from it.
She cast about for something else to take her attention away from the hair. “You usually travel lighter than that,” she said, eyeing the pile of baggage on the floor.
“You wouldn’t believe how much room make-up bags take up,” Magpie said airily, picking up the smaller of the duffels. She rooted around in it and came up with about seven different lipsticks and spilled them on top of the dresser.
“Since when do you wear so much stuff on your face?” Thea asked with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. “And what on earth do you use this one for? It’s black!”
Magpie shot her a coy look, under lashes spiked with mascara. “It’s fun,” she said. “You’re welcome to try them, if you like. Even the black one.”
She was still bubbly, full of her usual brand of charm and high spirits, but it was different, somehow. Focused in a different way, on a different place, on things that Thea was finding it unexpectedly difficult to reconcile with the Magpie whom she had come to know and expect, and even depend on at the Academy. This was not the same Magpie who would cuddle close a wild creature wrapped in a ratty blanket. It wasn’t as though they had suddenly found each other to be complete strangers–the solid base of the shared room-mate camaraderie was still there, they were still friends, on the surface–but there was something missing, something that Thea couldn’t quite put a finger on until she woke abruptly one night from a choppy and unsettling dream, nearly two weeks after their return to school. She propped herself up in bed on one elbow, rubbing her eyes with her free hand, and cast around for whatever had awakened her.
“Shhh,” Magpie whispered from the shadows, “it’s just me. Go back to sleep.”
“What have you got now?” Thea asked sleepily, knuckling her eyes back into sharper focus.
“Got?” Magpie echoed, sounding surprised. “What have I got?”
“What sort of critter have you picked up now…” Thea began, sitting up, and finally catching her first real glimpse of Magpie, who was standing in a patch of moonlight slipping through the half-closed curtains. The light caught a hint of gelled glitter and dark eyeliner around her eyes; in the dim room, her mouth was a dark slash on her pale face. She appeared to be dressed in something tight and black, with the ensemble completed by a short flouncy skirt that barely came past the tops of her thighs and what looked like a pair of lace-up sneakers with platform heels.
“No critters,” Magpie said, even as Thea completed her astonished inspection.
“Where are you going?”
In the moonlit shadows, Magpie’s sudden grin was a disconcerting flash of white teeth, like a cat suddenly yawning to bare its fangs. “I’m meeting Gary, over by the pond,” she said, “Be a sweetie, and if Mrs. Chen asks…”
“I’m not going to lie to Mrs. Chen!”
“You would have it I were out with a sick raccoon!”
“It’s not the same thing at all!”
“Whatever,” Magpie said, after a beat of awkward silence. “I gotta go, he’ll be expecting me. I should be back in a couple of hours, anyway. I’ll be just fine, I already know all the tricks of keeping myself out of harm’s way.”
“Wait a sec, I don’t…” Thea called, struggling with twisted-up bedclothes wrapped around her legs, but Magpie didn’t wait for an answer. By the time Thea got to the door of their room, opening it a crack to peer into the corridor, Magpie was already gone.
They didn’t share lunch in the cafeteria the next day, with Magpie apparently defecting to a new crowd of friends who found life a lot more amusing than Thea did. Magpie did look up, as though she felt the weight of Thea’s gaze on her, but neither she nor any of her companions seemed inclined to invite Thea to join them. Feeling oddly hurt, Thea looked around for someone who might make her feel more welcome, and saw Ben sitting at one end of a long table, looking bored and picking at his food without much enthusiasm. Across the table from him, Tess, her own half-finished lunch on the tray in front of her, had her nose buried firmly into what looked like a textbook of some sort. She was taking several accelerated programs and even college level classes that year, and had been entirely wrapped up in the workload ever since they had all come back to school. Now that a rift had opened between her and Magpie, Thea was suddenly aware how little she had seen of her other friends since the beginning of the semester.
“Hey,” she said to Tess, pausing beside the table.
Tess looked up. “Hey yourself,” she said.
“Mind if I join you guys?”
Tess threw a quick glance at the large wall clock which hung above the cafeteria double doors. “I’m almost done–I’ve got class in ten minutes,” she said apologetically.
“You’re always rushing to class these days,” Thea said, slipping into a seat beside Ben, who had scootched up to make room for her.
“With a bit of luck, I’ll be able to graduate early, too,” Tess said. “Terry has enough credits already to graduate at the end of the year, if he wanted to, and he’s thinking about it.”
“You plan on graduating this year too?” Ben said, sounding a little astonished. “Why is everyone in such a hurry? What about you, Thea? That summer thing that you and Terry were on…”
“It wasn’t for academic credit,” Thea said. “I don’t think it counts, really.”
“Besides, it all seemed to end rather prematurely,” Tess said. “With the FBM descending on everything and taking over, and that was just wild, everything that went down. I was half expecting banner headlines in the Daily Magic Times, but I think they kept a pretty tight lid on the whole thing. Mom told me a little about it, after, and Terry filled in the rest of it.”
“He could talk to you about it?” Ben said sharply. “Wasn’t there a very large pile of magic-related stuff tangled up in this? He can’t utter a word about it without choking on it, that allergy of his–”
“Not in our house,” Tess said, rolling her eyes a little. “Good grief, my parents took care of that when he was really li ttle. As soon as they figured it out. Otherwise he wouldn’t have lived long past his first attempts to talk–not in our household, not with our family’s history with the FBM–the place has always had somebody from the clan in it, from just rank-and-file to head of the whole shebang. And with Mom and Uncle Kevin being involved with it on a daily basis, they had to clear the house for Terry or else. It’s just that it had to be drilled into him that he couldn’t breach that topic anywhere else, anywhere that he wasn’t directly and closely supervised or had access to the antidote–same way that it was hammered into me that I could not eat anything outside our home unless I was absolutely one hundred percent certain of where it came from and that magic wasn’t one of the ingredients. Hence the school–here it’s pretty much absent, and it was considered to be a safe environment.”
“Yeah, until the whole spellspam thing descended, here and everywhere, and he started to turn blue when he so much as tried to open his mouth about it back at our ‘war council’ last year,” said Ben. His nose wrinkled as though he was expecting a sneeze, but it was a reflexive action–there was no real magic present to trigger his own allergic response, only a vivid memory of it.
“Can we talk about something else?” Thea said, a little sharply. Every time she thought she had dealt with the whole experience of that summer, and her encounter with Diego de los Reyes, something about it made her heart beat a little faster. She could not seem to quite shake the guilt of it, the sense of having been personally responsible for what had finally happened to Diego.
“Spellspam?” said an unexpected voice from the far end of the table. “What did you have to do with that?”
In some way they were all misfits, every single one of them who wound up at the Wandless Academy, removed from their usual social and magic-rich environment by their inability to function inside that world. But there were circles within circles, cliques within cliques, and even given that equalizing factor there was a totem pole within the school, and some students invariably wound up occupying the lower rungs of that. It was one of these unfortunates who had had the temerity to interrupt a conversation which she had not been invited to be a part of–Kristin Wallers, still pudgy with what looked like persistent baby fat, wearing her nondescript dishwater-blonde hair down around her face in an attempt to hide the two prominent front teeth that stuck out like small tusks and which had apparently defied all attempts at correction, large blue eyes peering out from underneath that curtain with a self-conscious gaze that was half hope and half resignation.
Kristin wasn’t part of Thea’s circle. One of Thea’s first instincts, in fact, had been to pretend that she had not even heard Kristin speak, lest she, Thea, be observed in actual conversation with a social outcast–she didn’t particularly want to find herself stuck on the same wallflower bleachers with Kristin at school dances. But there had been a twinge of… sympathy. Something. The way she had responded with such instinctive and overpowering curiosity, even concern.
Even that might not have quite been enough had Thea not happened to glance over again at where Magpie was just getting up to leave, giggling over some shared joke with her new friends. There was a hole in Thea’s life, new and jagged–the place that Magpie used to fill in her own inimitable way.
“Sorry,” Kristin said into the silence that followed her interruption. “I couldn’t help overhearing. That three wishes thing… that got me, pretty good.”
“Oh yeah? What did you wish for?” Ben asked, curious in spite of himself.
Kristin gestured at her mouth, a tiny, helpless motion that suddenly made Thea give her a sympathetic smile, reputation be damned.
“I’m sorry. What happened? Didn’t it work?”
“Of course it worked,” Kristin said. “In the way it usually works. So excited was I at the opportunity that my first wish was something along the lines of, ‘I wish my teeth would go away!’–and of course they did. All of them. Then I rushed to repair the damage and I wished for ‘them’ to be back–and of course the only ones that came back were the ones I wanted gone. I’m pretty sure there must have been a way of putting things right, even then, but I panicked, and I just used my third wish to put things back the way they were. And there I was, back on square one…”
“Ben saved us,” Thea said. “He figured it out, long before we got into any real trouble.”
Ben squirmed at that. “Just being in the right place at the right time,” he muttered.
Kristin smiled, a lopsided grin made into a thing of horrid fascination by the protruding teeth.
Tess glanced up at the wall clock again, but she, too, was curious now. This was the Academy, and questions were not asked–but Kristin herself had opened the door.
“What… happened?” Tess said, with a small diplomatic nod in the direction of Kristin’s mouth.
“Beware of Faele bearing gifts,” Kristin said morosely.
“A Faele did that to you by accident?”
“Nuh-uh. But the one who was supposed to be the last in the line to bestow the Faele gifts when I was born wasn’t there. And in her place was one of the Maledicent tribe, and somehow my mother had managed to insult one of them while she was carrying me, and they sent a representative along to the gift-giving and made sure she was last and wished… this on me. It isn’t fixable, you know–not by mundane medicine, not by reversospells, not even by a veiling spell or masking spell. It’s a Faele gift, and it shines through everything. That’s why they sent me here–because in an ordinary school there would be constant badgering and teasing about it, and constant, constant, questions about why I don’t do the simple things to deal with it. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
That was the longest speech Kristin had ever given in Thea’s hearing, and even she suddenly seemed to realise that and got all shy all of a sudden, dropping her gaze and flushing a bright pink underneath her curtain of hair.
“Anyhow,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve other things to do.”
Under ordinary circumstances Thea would have blown off those other things because now she was genuinely interested. But Tess was already stuffing her books into her bag, and Ben was gathering up the remains of everyone’s shattered lunches to take back to the disposal units.
Thea slipped out of her seat, hoisting up her book bag, and then hesitated, just for a brief moment, as she glanced back at Kristin, the only one who had not moved. A circle in which Kristin Wallers did not ordinarily belong had opened up briefly and included her, but now it was over, and everyone, of course, would go off without her once again without looking back.
Thea had been an outcast once, out in the “real” world, the one held back in Ars Magica classes in order to make her repeated attempts at doing the impossible–and all of a sudden she felt a rush of sympathetic understanding for Kristin.
“See you later,” she said, and then turned and scurried away in a self-conscious manner–just in time to completely miss a thoroughly astonished look from Kristin who still stood rooted to the spot where Thea had left her.
Thea’s next class happened to be biology, a subject which ordinarily interested her but that day she found herself distracted by every little thing–she’d found a seat by the window, and found herself more than once just sitting with her chin propped in her hand and staring outside at a handful of deciduous trees which still clung to the gold of their fall foliage and glowed amongst the dark cedars. She had to drag her attention back to the class by main force and at least look as though she was paying attention–because this was one of the teachers who taught through sarcasm and mockery, and any daydreaming, if the culprit was caught at it, was punishable by being publicly humiliated as the butt of some cutting joke. She escaped notice, but at least one other poor sap in the front row felt the lash. Thea, wincing on his behalf, noticed Magpie openly giggling with every appearance of enjoying her classmate’s humiliation. She was not the only one, to be sure, but it just seemed another alienating thing to add to the list.
