“Dig up whatever I can find. We need to move fast.”
By the time I got back to my flat it was late. I spent an hour or two calling around and checking my contacts. None of them had seen Anne, which wasn’t surprising—as far as they were concerned, she was just another apprentice. I put the word out that I was in the market for news on Anne’s whereabouts and got a few promises to look into it, but I didn’t hold out much hope. If any of them found her, it’d be pure luck.
The ugly thing was that what had just happened to Anne wasn’t all that unusual. Young people in the magical world go missing a lot, and the reasons are rarely good. If you have a master, you’re relatively safe—you have rights under the Concord, and (more importantly) there’s someone who’ll care if you go missing and who’s powerful enough to do something about it. But if you’re an adept or a novice mage on your own, then you’re in very real danger. The disappearance rate of unattached adepts and mages in the teenage bracket is worryingly high, and while some of those disappearances are benign (abandoning their magic, choosing to stay away from the magical community, signing up as apprentice to a secretive mage), most aren’t. It used to be that young and inexperienced mages were the favourite prey of nonhuman magical predators. Nowadays that particular spot on the food chain has been taken over by human magical predators, and being the same species doesn’t make them any less cruel.
Luna had asked why a mage would go after Anne; there were a lot of answers to that question and none were good. Some mages like taking slaves, Dark mages in particular. The more able and powerful the slave, the more prestige they bring, and young and attractive ones are favoured. There are mages like Crystal who prefer human subjects for their experiments, and since those experiments generally involve magic, magic-using subjects are correspondingly valuable. Some mages target others for Harvesting, turning their victims into fuel sources. And then there are other reasons, running the gamut from the brutal and logical to the totally incomprehensible. In the end, all the reasons come down to the same thing: because they want to, and because they can.
Enslavement, imprisonment, experiment, death . . . it wasn’t a happy picture. For all I knew Anne’s fate was being decided right now, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to do about it. Divination is great for finding people, but only if you know where to look; trying to find a specific person by walking down random futures has about the same chance of working as trying to get someone’s phone number by dialling random digits. Without something to go on, there wasn’t much I could do.
The only plan I could think of that had a chance of working was to use Elsewhere, the half-real place somewhere between dreams and thoughts that I’ve used before. If you know someone well enough, you can touch their dreams through Elsewhere, talk to them across worlds. It’s a dangerous place and I’ve tried to avoid it in the past year—too many narrow escapes—but right now it was the best chance I had. I undressed, switched off the lights, and lay in bed staring up at the ceiling, searching through the futures to see if a visit to Elsewhere would find Anne.
It didn’t work. I lay awake in bed for a long time, searching back and forth through the hours of the night, but every time I came up dry. Either Anne wasn’t asleep, or there was some other reason I couldn’t reach her. At last exhaustion caught up with me and I fell into restless dreams where I was lost in an endless maze of corridors, trying to reach someone whom I could hear calling but who never seemed to come any closer. There was somebody following me but I couldn’t see who it was, and every time I turned on them their footsteps would fade into silence and I was left alone.
Chapter 4
It was early next morning.
Sonder’s flat is in St. John’s Wood, a London borough just northwest of the city centre. It’s famous for Lord’s Cricket Ground and for being one of the most expensive places to live in all of Britain, if not Europe. I used to come by often, but it had been nearly a year since my last visit.
The inside of the flat was a mess; it didn’t look as though Sonder had tidied up since the last time I’d been here. Dust-covered computer equipment competed for shelf space with stacks of books; the books tended to win the argument, leaving cables and electronics to be pushed with old piles of paper into the corners. A new and well-cared-for PC sat on the desk, along with piles of notes and empty glasses. Caldera, Variam, Luna, and I were spaced around the room on whatever seating arrangements we could get, while Sonder was in front of the desk balancing a whiteboard on a stand. He’d brought a set of markers and was testing them on the board to see if they worked.
“What’s with the board?” Variam said. He’d come down to London instantly upon Luna’s call and she’d caught him up on what had happened.
“Maybe it’s Lupus,” Luna suggested with a grin.
“Nah,” Variam said. “It’s never Lupus.”
Sonder shot a slightly harassed look at them. “What?”
“Now is not the time,” Caldera said, and Luna’s and Variam’s grins vanished. There was an uncomfortable silence for a moment, then Caldera gave Sonder a go-ahead nod.
“Right,” Sonder said nervously, fiddling with a board marker. “Um. Okay. We need to find out where Anne is and what’s happened to her, and get her back.”
“Then why are we sitting here?” Variam said.
“We need to figure out what to do,” Sonder said. “We don’t know who’s behind this, so—”
“Yes, we do. His name’s Sagash.”
“That hasn’t been proved. Crystal has a more recent record of—”
“Sagash kidnapped Anne once already,” Variam snapped. “How much more proof do you need?”
“We can’t just go—”
“Variam,” Caldera said. “Do you have evidence that Sagash was behind the attack?”
“All we have to do is go to his shadow realm and—”
“Do you have evidence that Sagash was behind the attack?”
Variam glowered.
“I don’t know what your master’s been teaching you,” Caldera said, “but Keepers do not get to kick a mage’s door down and go in shooting just because they might have done something.”
“I’ve seen Keepers do a lot more than that.”
“With evidence,” Caldera said. “So far we have nothing linking the two suspects to Sagash. Unless there’s something you’re keeping from us?”
Variam was silent. Caldera nodded again to Sonder. “Go on.”
“Okay,” Sonder said, sounding slightly annoyed. “So, um . . . First we have the two mages who carried out the attack.” He wrote ATTACKERS on the top right of the whiteboard in blue marker and drew a circle around the word. “We don’t have very much information on them, but I’ve put what we do know on these handouts. So, uh, take one before you go and see if you can find any leads.”
Handouts, I thought. Right.
Sonder had written SUSPECTS on the top left, underlined it, and written CRYSTAL underneath. “So while we’re doing that, I think we should start looking at who might be behind this. We’ve agreed that the most likely—”
“Point of order,” I said, raising a finger. “How do we know someone’s behind this, rather than those two attackers acting on their own?”
“I don’t think that’s helpful,” Sonder said with a frown.
“Okay,” I said. “Why do you think that someone’s behind this?”
“Ah . . .” Sonder looked at Caldera.
“Typically in these kinds of cases the victim has had prior contact with the perpetrator,” Caldera said. “When we check the history, about eighty percent of the time we find an escalating series of incidents. The abduction’s just the final step. In Anne’s case, she’s been targeted for similar attacks on two previous occasions.”