Firewall (Magic Born) (2 page)

Hayes had ultimately been cleared of wrongdoing three years ago, but suspicion lingered. He still caught the occasional whispers when people didn’t think he could hear.

Did he let her get away?

Was he really stupid enough to sleep with a witch on his team?

Worse
,
I
heard he had feelings for her.

There had been no proof of anything—not of a relationship between them, or whether or not he’d helped her escape. His warrant officer and second-in-command Yolanda Gibson had backed him all the way. Her exemplary record and force of personality had helped shield Hayes from all of the mud thrown at him by Scott Channing. By then Hayes had finally been able to get Channing thrown off his team and demoted. It also helped that Channing quickly spiraled into trouble, the rage he carried like a totem landing him into one fight after another until he’d been busted out of the service.

Hayes had refused to resign and slink away in shame, so they’d kept an eye on him by assigning him a desk job as an analyst. Technically he still had a security clearance, though not as high as before, but the information that came across his desk might as well have been collected via overseas newswires. His new colleagues had finally accepted his presence and spoke to him more or less cordially, but he had no real friends. The stink of failure scared people away, along with all of the rumors and innuendo and a lack of confidence in him and his abilities.

The only friend he had left, the only person he could be honest with, was unable to respond.

Hayes pounded his fist on the flimsy door. His head was too full of muck to make sense of things. Talking it out with Halif would be the only help for it.

He stopped at a drive-through on the way to the long-term care facility. The greasy tang of charred burger and paprika fries served to mask the institutional smell of the place. Staffers greeted him with nods and smiles, long used to his visits. Halif Osman, the other witch who’d been on his team, occupied a tiny room of his own, his once-muscular form now scrawny in the narrow bed. Hayes glanced at the monitors as he entered. There was no change. There never was. Halif was alive, if one could call it that, with low levels of brain activity. No one could explain his condition or had any idea how to help him recover.

“Man, you look like shit,” Hayes said, his customary greeting. He retrieved the folding chair the staff left for him and settled down to eat, talking around mouthfuls of food.

First he recounted the meeting with Colonel Talbot. As he went over it, little details he’d been too distracted to notice at the time jumped out at him. “All that crap about how it was best to keep this quiet unless she could be brought in. I don’t think this is just being kept quiet, I think he’s hiding it. So how’d he get the video? Who all would know that glamour? I guess putting me back in the field is cheaper than paying out that reward money, but I still don’t trust this.”

Hayes brushed salt and paprika from his hands then took a long drink from his milkshake. “What the hell is she doing in New Corinth, anyway? She’s supposed to be in some little village in the south of France. Working as the town mage. Casting prosperity spells for the local wineries, divination for engaged couples. Nice, quiet, respectable stuff, you know.”

He laughed, imagining the look on her face at such a suggestion. “Okay, okay. So, running the tables in a Shanghai casino would be more like her. Busting cheaters trying to use magic to win. Beating somebody up every once in a while, just to keep from getting rusty.” An image of her in the slinky gold dress she wore during the Hong Kong job flashed in his mind. Quiet and safe wasn’t for her. Tuyet Caron was meant for excitement, glamour, danger.

The troubled city of New Corinth held only danger.

“Why New Corinth? Just passing through, maybe? It’s just a matter of time before that place lights itself on fire. Anybody sane should be as far away from there as possible.”

He was silent for several minutes. Soft beeping from the machinery took the place of any replies from Halif.

“It makes sense though. I mean, if she was crazy enough to stay stateside, it would totally make sense that she’d wind up right in the middle of that shit storm. Talbot wants to believe she’s a terrorist.” He sucked down milkshake until it gave him an ice cream headache. “She’s definitely up to something, but she’s no terrorist.”

Hayes stood and walked to the small window, the pane of glass so gray it barely let in any light. “I’m going to have to do what I should have done three years ago. The hell of it is, I still don’t know what that is. Arrest her? Run with her?” A chuckle slipped out. “Stand there and gape at her, like the first time I met her? Remember that? God, that was embarrassing. This stunning woman gets the drop on me, you’re laughing your ass off in my earpiece. Then I wind up on my back with her high heel in my throat, and even then all I can do is look up her dress. Man, I deserved being called Hayseed that day. Shit.” It was one of many things he’d left out of his reconstruction of Tuyet’s service record.

Hayes gathered the debris of his lunch and tossed it in a garbage can. “What the hell is she still doing with that glamour? She should have destroyed it. Not even taken it with her.” Dan and Tina Jones had been their most successful cover identities. They’d passed for a married couple all over the globe, on one dangerous assignment after another.

“There was something I never told you.” He faced his comatose friend. “She asked me to go with her. The night she left and I caught her, she asked me to run with her.” He closed his eyes against the painful memory. “I couldn’t do it. It would have meant turning my back on everything I believed in. Everything I’d worked for. The service that gave me everything I had and made me who I am. I couldn’t turn my back on those things, Halif. I just couldn’t.”

He ran a hand through his hair. He wore it longer now. Still within regulations, but longer than the close crop he used to keep it in. Was that some kind of subconscious thing? Another thing to set him apart? He’d always wanted to stand out, be the best. But standing apart—that was a different thing altogether in his mind.

“Of course, then she shot me and stole my bike.” He tried to laugh at the memory but couldn’t quite make it. “I still don’t know if I made the right decision. It just felt like the only decision I could make.”

He shook his head. Too much introspection was making him maudlin. He had work to do, whether he wanted to do it or not. First he would collect all the information on New Corinth he could get his hands on, then make travel arrangements. Book a hotel. Figure out a plan to find her. Not worry yet about what he would do when he did.

Because if she was there, he would find her. They had unfinished business and he aimed to settle things between them, one way or another.

For once, talking things out with Halif had not helped. Hayes still had no answers, only questions and a deluge of memories.

The Rangers had a saying for when they received orders to dangerous parts of the world, the places no one wanted to go because all sides would be shooting at them, the weather would be awful and the food worse, and there was no telling how long the job would take or how bad it would get before they could call it done and get the hell out. Hayes smiled as he said it to his former teammate. “Wish me luck, ’cause I’m headed for the suck.”

Chapter Two

The section of Interstate 40 between New Corinth and Memphis designated for commercial traffic was dark in the moonless night. Automated semis transporting goods glided across the road, the loudest sound their wheels over the asphalt. The trucks had no drivers or security. Tuyet wondered how much longer that would last since this would make the third hijacking in eight months. Or was it nine? Whatever. The Magic Born trapped inside FreakTown needed the food. For that matter, so did Normals in Rockenbach. They worked together when they could, using a basic plan cooked up by Vadim Bazarov and carried out by a handful of volunteers.

With the advent of self-driving semis, the old weigh stations along the interstates had either been abandoned or converted to automated refueling stations. Tuyet waited in the darkness outside of one such station as a semi full of food meant for New Corinth’s largest grocery store rolled to a slow stop.

Blue-white lines of code shimmered in her vision. Her job was to override the trailer’s programming and have it stop long enough for the cargo to be unloaded. First she’d trancehacked into the refueling station’s system and found her way through the trucking company’s intranet to the vehicle they wanted. After that, it was just a matter of changing the truck’s orders. Now she waited in one of the vans as the others cleaned out the goods.

Easy. Simple. Boring. Not like the old days. But that was a good thing. There were a couple of veterans among the Normals who had volunteered, but most members of the group were civilians with no real experience handling anything dangerous. Luckily, the forty-mile drive on deserted two-lane back roads that were no longer maintained or patrolled would be the riskiest part of this milk run. They would return to the city via the old subway and sewer tunnels formerly used by the underground railroad to move people out of the country. Tuyet knew those tunnels well from her time as a sojourner, leading people to safety. She’d traveled the old roads through the wastelands between cities too, and much preferred the underground.

The wastelands were mostly arid ruins of small towns long deserted due to devastating unemployment and the ravages of extreme weather. Tornados were common in the flat, empty stretches between cities. The damages wrought there somehow seemed worse, probably due to the lack of infrastructure and modern construction techniques. She’d seen a twister once while on a run as a sojourner. Later, she’d told Vadim she’d much rather be shot at than face that kind of nature-made wrath again.

The wastelands weren’t entirely devoid of inhabitants, and they were in general the kind who liked to shoot. Normals were not restricted in their movements and monitored on a regular basis the way Magic Born were. If they were of a mind to, Normals could theoretically walk away from their lives and disappear. The ones with money went overseas, to countries where their children would be safe no matter what was in their DNA. The ones without dropped off the grid and lived in the forgotten spaces, the empty places. That is, if they had the constitution for that kind of life. It was rough living, doing without all of the things people needed ID and background checks to get. Without all of the simple conveniences that existed in even the poorest parts of the cities, like the Rockenbach section of New Corinth.

She’d watched a classic movie once, some decades-old Australian action flick, with someone who grew up in one of the few semi-civilized areas left in the Midwest. The son of a mechanic on a corporate biofarm, he’d insisted the movie was exactly what his childhood had been like. She didn’t believe him, of course. Not until she actually got a taste of the wastelands for herself. Then she believed about half of what he’d told her.

His face floated up from the recesses of memory, all pretty-boy looks and vivid blue eyes and sun-kissed golden hair. Too good-looking, too blue and bright for a girl like her. Climbing up out of hell only earned prizes in fiction. Tuyet’s reality was its own stark wasteland, and there was no oasis other than memories that weren’t as buried as she liked to pretend.

She blew out a breath. Three long years and Dale Hayes still wouldn’t get out of her head. So she did what she always did when he slipped like a ghost into her thoughts—she shoved the past away and focused on the mission.

Forty miles from the city—they were on the very edge of the wastelands. It was unlikely they’d cross paths with any of the roving bandits who worked the transit lanes committing the same type of crime they were. That was one reason for choosing a refueling station so close to New Corinth, that and the back roads were still in somewhat decent shape. The other milk runs had been uneventful. Tuyet expected this one to be so as well.

Her earpiece crackled and the voice of Nate Perez broke into her thoughts. “Cargo secured. Let’s go.”

“Roger that,” she said. Their voices sounded muted and watery to her, a side effect of being in a working trance state. She blinked and the blue-white lines sharpened. Quickly, she launched a virus hex into the truck’s computer. It was designed to send conflicting commands to the autodrive unit. Ten miles down the road, the truck would ease to the shoulder right before its programming crashed and the electronics fried. By the time a manned unit arrived to investigate, the truck would have sat alone and unprotected by its security systems for hours. The cargo would already have been written off as a loss, assumed stolen by wasteland bandits.

No one would suspect Magic Born involvement.

Tuyet left the truck’s computer system, careful not to leave any trace of tampering behind. It was one of the greatest advantages that a witch like her had—Normal computer experts and hackers simply weren’t capable of recognizing the telltale signs of magic left by a trancehacker’s presence. Even so, she’d been taught to be diligent and never assume that she’d be the only witch in the wires. She just had to be the best.

An engine rumbled behind the van, then the vehicle next to it came to life. She dropped out of trance as Nate climbed into the driver’s seat. He said, “Ready?”

Tuyet nodded.

Nate spoke into his comm unit. “We’re clear. Move out.”

The three decades-old vehicles left the refueling station, Nate and Tuyet taking the lead. They drove over brush for several miles, slow and staying close together as they traveled without headlights. The two-lane blacktop she’d chosen for this run was some distance from the station and would make for a twisty, laborious trip home, but it had the advantage of being relatively intact. The two vans and one SUV they’d managed to acquire for this weren’t in the best shape and couldn’t handle too much rough travel.

Nate’s phone beeped, the screen lighting up with a map he’d downloaded before leaving the city. He slowed and flicked the blinker to alert the other vehicles of the impending turn. Twenty feet of bumpy terrain later, they came to the road.

He relaxed somewhat as the ride smoothed. “You coming to Vadim’s birthday party?”

“He’s having a party?” Only Vadim would think to have a party under these conditions.

“He’s gonna open up the dance floor for a night, waive the cover charge. Two free drinks for everybody, even.”

“Free drinks? Wow. Is he dying or something?”

Nate chuckled. “He just wants people to have a good time for a change. There’s gonna be about a dozen of us meeting in the railway kitchen at midnight. Lizzie said she’s making a cake.”

“Now I’m really scared.” Tuyet grinned.

“Yeah, me too.”

An orange light flickered in the darkness. She tensed immediately. “Did you see that?”

“Yeah. Think it’s hijackers?” His voice had turned to gravel. “The scary kind, I mean.”

“It’s closer to the city than they normally get, but who knows?” She scanned the night for any other light, finding nothing. “I’ll tell the others to keep their eyes open.” The volunteers were equally split between Normal and Magic Born, with a witch in each vehicle so they could trancehack to communicate.

Tuyet didn’t want to take her eyes off the road or surrounding trees so she tranced into his phone and sent a quick message to the two other vehicles.
Light spotted
,
advise caution
. For a brief moment the blue-white of cyberspace lit up the interior of the van. She quashed it, dropping out of trance with a hard jerk.

The van topped a rise. Bright headlights in orange and red flooded the night. Tuyet threw her arm up to shield her eyes as Nate slammed on the brakes. Shouts could be heard from outside.

Nate said, “Have you dealt with these people before?”

Their colors indicated a group who called themselves River Ghost. Based within sight of the Mississippi, they ventured farther afield for hijacking jobs when supplies ran low. They didn’t like to work too close to their home base, which she respected as smart. They also preferred to shoot rather than talk, something she respected for altogether different reasons.

The New Corinth group had only stun guns, no serious firepower. Real guns were too difficult and expensive to procure, and the consequences for a Magic Born getting caught anywhere near one were far too high. Tuyet had a few tucked away for a rainy day, but this wasn’t the kind of operation for them.

A man with a rifle slung across his front approached the van and pounded on the hood. “Everybody out!”

Nate glanced at her as he reached for the door handle. “Hope you brought your badass.”

“I never leave home without it.” She stepped from the vehicle slowly, hands up. They were outnumbered and definitely outgunned, but if the leader was reasonable they might be able to leave with some of the much-needed food.

A voice from one of the rear River Ghost vehicles called out, “Which one of you bitches is in charge of this pathetic outfit?”

Tuyet fought the urge to indulge in some creative swearing and stepped forward. “That would be me, Doran.”

River Ghost members parted as the team’s leader made her way to the front. “Hey!” She swung a flashlight up. Tuyet blinked against the harsh light. “I know you!”

“Hello, Doran.” Tuyet kept her voice polite, hopeful she could still manage the situation.

Doran slapped the arm of her nearest gunman. “Yeah, I know this bitch. She thinks she’s all kinds of hot shit, with her city ways and her city magic.” The woman stepped closer to Tuyet, grinning. “Your fancy city magic doesn’t mean shit out here, cupcake.”

Tuyet bit back a retort. “We’re just here for some cargo, that’s all. We don’t mean to be any trouble to anyone.”

“As if you could be.” Doran eyed Nate appreciatively. “He yours?”

“He’s a friend and part of my team.” She put just enough warning in her tone to remind Doran of the last time they’d crossed paths.

Doran’s grin widened. “What kind of haul did you get?”

“Food.” It was best to keep it simple.

“Just food?”

“The rations aren’t enough inside the zone,” Nate said. “We’re just trying to supplement.”

Tuyet wanted to scream at Nate to shut the hell up. He’d already drawn the psycho’s eye with his looks. The last thing he needed to do was go looking for her attention. Plus, the less said, the better. He had no idea what these people were like. She started to speak but Doran beat her to it.

“The rations aren’t enough inside the zone?” A hard, grating laugh fell from her lips. “No shit, pal. But what do you expect when you allow yourself to be treated like fucking animals at the zoo? You take your scraps like good little witches and you say, ‘Thank you,’ and slink back into the nasty little hovel they let you live in.”

Tuyet stepped between them, the movement of her body through the headlights throwing shadows across the tree line. “No harm, no foul, Doran. Let’s just work this out and get moving.”

Doran stood half a head taller than Tuyet’s medium height and packed considerably more muscle. If that wasn’t intimidating enough, there was the shotgun strapped to her back to consider. Tuyet knew from past experience that the woman had other weapons hidden on her as well. The question was, had she left her most dangerous weapon at home? Memories of the time
before
the last time they’d tangled made Tuyet hope that Doran had.

Nonetheless, she held her ground and stared at the River Ghost bandit.

Doran kept her eyes on Tuyet but turned her head a fraction to address her nearest minion. “Take it.”

Nate said, “What?”

“Take it all,” Doran said with a smile.

“No!” Nate surged forward, caught by two River Ghost men on either side. “There are kids in FreakTown who need that food!”

“We’ve got kids to feed too.” Doran began to walk away.

Tuyet said, “Don’t do this. Let’s work something out.”

“You’re in my world now, cupcake,” she called over her shoulder. “What I say goes.”

Tuyet drew a deep breath. The act called forth power that spiraled up from deep inside and coiled like a snake ready to strike. She had one chance to make this work. They couldn’t afford to use their stun guns, not when River Ghost had firearms. But if she could make a statement, maybe Doran would respond. Displays of strength were respected by these people, so Tuyet intended to put on a show.

The River Ghost bandits traveled in trucks and SUVs as old as what the New Corinth group had scrounged, but their vehicles were modified for tougher use. Even so, they had electronics. Tuyet started with that, casting a wide net to gather all of the vehicles’ computer systems under her control as she dove into a working trance. She shut the rumbling engines off, the sudden quiet jarring.

Confused voices called out. Nate edged closer, practically vibrating with the anticipation of a fight. Doran turned back to face her, a mix of amusement and annoyance on her face.

Tuyet went for the headlights next. The night plunged into darkness. Nate moved quickly, disarming the nearest River Ghost. The other four in their group acted just as quickly, the drivers headed back into their vehicles and the others engaging with members of River Ghost. Tuyet was aware of it all. The sounds of the fight reached her through the dark blue haze of trance. She kept her focus on her task, pushing virus hexes into the vehicle computers. Every system networked into each car’s computer would be affected and soon inoperable, which would make the vehicles little more than a dusty art exhibit for twenty-year-old autos.