5

I don't know how long I stand there. It can't have been long, considering we're on a time crunch. At some point I become aware I'm not alone.

"Hey, Pax," Mechanika says. Her voice is soft. "Everything has been a bit of a shock for you, I know."

I sniffle a little, but don't turn around.

Undeterred, she lays a warm hand on my arm. "Actually, I don't know, not really. I grew up with shit like this, whereas you've only been in it a week. But I can imagine. And it's hard, really hard, but we've got to figure out what to do with that beacon."

I sigh into the wall. "Yeah. Yeah, I know."

"Come on," she says, as I turn to face her. She looks at me, not with pity, but determination. "My pop and I have some ideas, and I think you should know exactly what they are. Unlike when this was done to you."

Back in the lounge, I perch on edge of the recliner. I'm not quite ready to go back into its squishy depths. I feel vulnerable enough as it is.

"Before we get started," says Mechanika, "there's something we want to say. Pops and I talked about it, and we decided that... well, since you've come this deep with us, it's only fair that you learned our names."

I sit up a little from my slouch, grabbing onto this new distraction. "Are you serious? You want to share your real identities with me?"

Mechanika grins. Is it just me, or does she actually look a little nervous? Sticking out her hand, she says, "I'm Angela Alek. Hi."

I take her hand. I'm pretty sure my mouth is hanging open.

"Don't look so shocked, you dweeb. It's not like I just asked you out or something."

The Red Lion puts out his hand next. "And I'm Lars Alek. Pleased to officially make your acquaintance."

I look between the two of them, at a loss. "Are you sure about this?"

The Red Lion—Lars—shrugs. "No harm in it. It's rather nice to finally take off the mask, as it were."

"But what about Carrion Crow?"

Mechanika—no, Angela sighs. "I hate to admit it, but he probably knows more about us than I’m comfortable thinking about. Don't let the idiot douchebag act fool you; he's the best for a reason, and it ain't just the healing factor and edgelord get up."

"Oh," I say in a small voice. And he's supposed to be protecting me? How did I fall through this rabbit hole? And when am I gonna wake up?

"And now," says Lars, rubbing his hands together, "to business."

"Right. So Plan A, removal, is obviously impossible for us right now," says Angela. "Plan B is to deactivate the beacon in situ."

Lars flips through his ever-present spellbook, pointing pages out to me as he talks. "To that effect, I believe we have three options. We can go in with a magical probe and 'hack' it, in a manner of speaking; blast it with enough energy to destroy it; or encapsulate it in a disruptive shield so the signal cannot get out."

"I like the sound of the shield," I say. It sounds the least zappy, and the diagram in the book shows a nice, non-threatening bubble.

But Angela shakes her head. "There's too much of a risk that we'll disrupt your actual brain function, especially with how much you've strained yourself, switching like that. We're still going to have a chat about that, by the way."

"Besides carrying the most risk, it is the most temporary out of the three," Lars says. "There is little way of knowing when the shield will break, which would, of course, render it useless." He turns over a few whisper-thin pages in his book. "Hm, as I thought. The probe will take too long. We'd have to put up some massive obfuscation to prevent discovery while we work. As we've learned, our normal defenses aren't enough to dampen the beacon."

Angela rubs a hand through her hair. "And that was in the middle of a city, full of noise. Here, we have nowhere to hide."

"In addition, there is no way of knowing what anti-tampering measures are in place to prevent our probe from gaining access in the first place."

"So," I say, trying to follow along as best as I can, "blasting my head is the only option?"

Because I'm not sold on the idea. If a small shield can disrupt my brain, what would a massive dose of energy do?

"It looks like it. Or—" Angela snaps her fingers. "If we can figure out what's powering the beacon, we might be able to knock it out with the probe. Way faster than trying to hack the thing itself, and minimal tampering required."

"Good idea. Pax, if you'd be so kind as to lay back on the recliner again..."

I do so. Lars and Angela begin whispering arcane words together. Strange sigils spring to life around me and dance across my body. I feel kind of like a sacrifice being prepared from some mystical rite. The recliner beneath me hums quietly with magical tonalities. I wouldn't be surprised if it was custom made out of materials specifically chosen to harmonize with magic. Lars seems like the sort of mage who would think of something like that.

"Tell me what you see, Angela," he says, eyes tight shut.

"It's definitely synthetic," she says, concentrating on the sigils encircling my head. Her eyes glow cyan as she works. "And probably not magical. Yeah; this is machine signature all right. What do you think, Papa?"

"I think you're right. Decidedly not of an occult nature, but quite advanced for the tracking beacon it's purported to be. I can feel the way it’s affecting...” Lars trails, his eyebrows crinkling upward. “It appears somehow to be drawing power from Pax's own brain. Remarkable. A perfect cybernetic attachment, if that’s the case."

Angela grimaces. "Great. So it doesn't have a power source for us to target?"

"Impossible to say. Diabolical, really. With Pax's life signal in the way, I'm not sure we could target it even if we could see it."

"If I may voice an opinion," I say meekly, "I'd rather you not turn off my life signal to find out."

"Of course not. Doing that would mean killing you—" Angela cuts herself off. "Wait. I think I have an idea. It's a little nuts, but it might actually be safer than trying to short-circuit the beacon."

Safer is good, but I'm not sure I like where this is going. "You're not actually going to kill me, are you?"

"Not... exactly."

Lars seems to catch on to what his daughter's thinking, and looks concerned. "Are you considering inducing deathly sleep? There is no guarantee that the beacon won't do something drastic if it fails to register brain activity."

"Drastic? Like how?" I ask. "Wait, what's that about my brain activity?"

"It's sometimes called the Sleeping Beauty spell," Angela says. "It's like a coma, kind of. Mostly it just puts you into a really deep sleep, but for short periods of time, you can actually enter stasis."

I wrinkle my forehead. "Okay, what's that mean?"

"During periods of stasis," Lars says in a voice like a lecturing professor, "the body is inert, and appears clinically dead. Undetectable heartbeat, minimal brain waves; the core temperature even drops to near ambient levels."

"It’s like being put on pause,” Angela says. She actually sounds eager. “We pretend to kill you, reboot your life energy, fool the beacon into thinking it no longer has a power source, and boom! Disconnected."

That sounds pretty intense. "Is that... safe?"

"Mostly." Angela shrugs. Minus points for bedside manner, I think to myself. "For the length of time we'd need, it should be perfectly harmless."

"The problem," says Lars with a severe glance at his daughter, "arises from the fact that we don't know if the device in your head has some form of failsafe mechanism. Someone who is willing to perfom such a criminal operation on a nonconsenting individual surely must have put in some way to cover their tracks. Firewalls, alerts, perhaps even self-destruction."

That last one sounds very bad, considering where the stupid beacon is embedded.

"Between the two of us, we should be able to handle anything it can do," Angela says dismissively.

But Lars shakes his head. "Experience teaches me to never be confident in any dealings with the unknown. We cannot know what the beacon may do."

"So that's it?" I say, incredulous. "You're saying I'm stuck with this thing blipping in my head for good?"

"I didn't say that. We merely need to take precautions." He makes a theatrical gesture, and a holographic screen descends from the air. "Thus we enter the planning phase."

Angela groans. "I'll never understand how you can be a complete chaos wizard in battle, but out of it you need to overanalyze every single thing."

"It's called adrenaline, Angela, and I'm not running on it now."

"Doesn't explain why you like running decoy so much, Pops."

"What can I say? I'm a junkie."

After that is a rapid question-and-answer session that whizzes over my head, full of techno-magic jargon about psychical approaches, mystical equations, and sundry other metaphysics. I stop listening about a minute in. I have nothing useful to add, and it's not like I'll be participating. I'll just be asleep.

I hope.

"Now what if, instead of—" Lars begins, but Angela cuts him off.

"We've been over everything twice now." She gestures at the ephemeral screen, thickly scribbled with symbols and arrows. "We gotta get this thing taken care of before they find us."

"I only want us to cover all contingencies," Lars says, reproachful.

"Even if there is some infinitesimal chance that using the Epsik-Arloff technique while the subject’s under deathless sleep opens a wormhole, there is literally nothing we can do about it. Right?"

Lars sighs begrudgingly. "I suppose. And it is the preferred method for containing technical wavelenghts of—"

Angela talks over him before he can really get into his lecture voice again. "Right. Okay, Pax, we're gonna need you to get in the recliner again."

While I try to make myself comfortable and not worry about wormholes opening in my head, the mages prepare.

Turns out you don't have to do much to "induce deathly sleep" if you've got some of the secret potion squirreled away in your super-secure pocket dimension larder. While Angela builds a glowing framwork around me of magical sigils anchored by odd instruments I don't understand, Lars opens a small door into the literal void. After fishing around for a moment, he retrieves the tiniest cyrstal flask I have ever seen. Unstopping it, Lars measures out precisely two and a half glimmering drops into a small cup of water. I'm not kidding; he literally suspends a droplet in midair and divides it with a scalpel as thin as air. Half the droplet goes in the cup, and the other half slips back into the flask, which he then vanishes back into its pocket dimension.

"Drink it all," he says, "as fast as you can."

I look at the cup with trepidation. It looks like water. Smells like water. Angela touches my wrist. "It's okay, Pax. You'll be safe with us."

I think about the beacon in my head. I may be safe with them, but they're not safe with me. Before I think about it too much, I tilt my head back and chug it all down. Tastes like—

—water.

I blink up at the ceiling. It's not the same ceiling as the one in the secret lounge. It's missing the giant fume hood, for one. There's a big palm-frond shaped fan revolving in its place, for two.

I look around. I'm in a spacious bedroom, dark and quiet, except for the night creatures chirruping outside the window. I've been tucked into a comfy bed, and I'm not in my vigilante costume. I'm not in much of anything, actually. Where'd my clothes go? I frown in confusion. It doesn’t feel like I fell asleep, but clearly something must have happenend.

Did it work? Am I safe? I seem okay, physically. Tired and a little disoriented, but okay. I wobble out of bed, groping for my watch. It's late o'clock, and I feel even more tired when I see the single digits staring up at me. But it doesn't tell me what I most want to know—how long I've been asleep—because I have no clue when I took the potion. Out of curiosity, I press the watch against my skin and try to Link up, but a nauseous wave kills almost before I begin. I guess I’m still burned out by the focus gem. I can only hope the newsfeeds aren't splashing around how I aided and abetted a homicidal maniac the other day, even if it was against over-armed cultists/terrorists, and concerned friends and relatives aren’t blowing up my inbox trying to contact me. If my grandma saw that, she'd have a heart attack and die of shame. My parents might actually start talking to me again, just to tan my hide until it's see-through, before turning me over to the authorities to lock me up for the rest of my life.

Putting down the watch (what's the point of wearing it if I can't use it?), I shuffle over to the window. It looks out onto an alien moonlit seascape, hazy with tropical warmth. The sight makes me forget my troubles. Emerald has no moons, and my homeworld Topaz only has a couple of big, unbeautiful space rocks caught in its orbit. This moon, floating close to the horizon, is massive and blue. Its reflection in the gentle waves looks like a river of sapphires.

It's unreal. Maybe I'm asleep, after all, and dreaming.

But then my stomach grumbles. I realize I'm starving in a very real, very awake way.

After I find a robe and some slippers on a nearby chair, I wander down the hall, looking for the kitchen in the dark and grumbling to myself. They could've left a note for me, letting me know what's going on, or maybe a snack. Actually, I didn't think to look, so they may well have. Too late to turn back now—I've found the kitchen.

The moon's on the other side of the house, so it's nearly pitch black in here. And because they're mages, I find zero normallights anywhere except in the fridge. I spend an embarrassing amount of time patting the walls for switches before I realize that the bubble of moonlight I took to be decoration is actually a light. It comes to life at my touch like the prettiest night-light you can imagine. By its soothing glow, I set about making myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

From the shadows, Carrion Crow says, "You're awake."

I yelp and drop the butter knife, which clatters loudly on the tile floor. A snicker sidles through the gloom. I've got no weapons, nothing but a pair of fuzzy slippers and a terry robe. I stand there, staring at the mercenary like a deer in headlights as he enters the pool of magelight. I blink. He looks... pink.

"What are you wearing?" I could kick myself. I'm alone, at night and half naked, with a hired killer, and that's the first thing out of my mouth? Maybe I did give myself brain damage yesterday.

"PJ's?" says Carrion Crow. The "duh" is strongly implied. He gives a fond pat to the bubblegum pink logo of a popular animal mascot on his chest, apparently oblivious to the unsettling picture he makes, with his blood-red bird mask obscuring his face. "How was your nap? I was really hoping you needed to be kissed awake—you know, magic and shit—but Mechanika said something about real life not being a fairy tale—wasted opportunity if you ask me, what's the point of a Sleeping Beauty spell if you don't even get to kiss the beauty—anyway, I said how am I supposed to keep up my bodyguarding contract if I can't find the freaking body to guard, and she said—"

I relax minutely as he rattles on, enough to scoop up the sticky knife from the floor and drop it in the sink. Still, I don't turn my back on him. It's hard to forget the casual way he pulled a blade out of someone's organs yesterday.

"How long was I out?" I ask over his babble.

"You were gone about six hours," he says promptly. "According to Lars, you're supposed to sleep another six."

"Huh." I wonder if that's a good or a bad sign, as I take a bite out of my sandwich.

It takes a while to get through the bite. It's not easy to maintain an appetite when there's a man you actually witnessed killing people standing in the kitchen with you. Carrion Crow doesn't watch me, exactly, but he hangs out at the other end of the kitchen, playing with the novelty games on the fridge. He's unusually quiet—for him. I watch him block out a penis shape with virtual sticky notes, and try to quell my nerves.

I chew, swallow, clear my throat. "Did I miss anything while I was asleep?"

"Nothing important. It's been quiet." He pauses for effect. "Too quiet."

It's a corny joke. I’d laugh if I wasn’t so tense.

"Good news though, your head beacon doesn't seem to be working anymore."

He holds up the tracker from earlier. Little triangle, but no red dot. The interface blips as it makes sweeps for the signal. I sigh, feeling my shoulders lower a teensy bit, and take another bite of sandwich. It tastes less like cardboard.

"My client is going to be pissed about that," he continues. "And at me, too, since I kinda-sorta forgot to tell them where you are now before you blipped off the radar. But that technically wasn't in my contract. I'm just supposed to rescue you from harm, and check it—rescued."

I must be getting used to Carrion Crow's presence, because my sandwich is almost half gone now. Or maybe I'm just that hungry. "Who's your employer? And, by the way, I didn't need rescuing." Probably.

"Oh yeah? And what about all those gun-totin' spiritualists who had you pinned down? Huh? I seem to recall saving all your asses."

"If anything, I saved you," I grumble. "You know, if you wanted to help, you could have said something about the ambush instead of dancing around or whatever."

"That's what I was trying to do!" He waves his hands. "I was caught by surprise! Pants down, mouth full of spicy beans. Anyway, even if I succeeded, would you have believed me?"

He has a point. No way would I have trusted him then. I don't trust him now. "I'm still not entirely convinced you weren't working as a diversion for them."

Carrion Crown makes a hurt face—I'm not sure how I know he is, because all I can see through the mask is the glitter of his eyes. "I'm telling you, I was contracted to keep you safe. Why would I kill a nice guy—gal—like you?"

For money, but it’s probably not politic of me to say that right now. "Okay, and I'm safe now, so thanks a bunch but I think you ought to go now. Collect your pay, or whatever."

But he isn’t listening anymore. He's staring fixedly at me, and he's got his head cocked to one side like an inquisitive raptor. "Hang on. Wait a minute. Something's just... Am I hallucinating, or weren't you a dude yesterday? I know my brain can do some funny things, especially after head trauma, but you were definitely taller."

"Um," I say. I glance down, at the swell of breasts I didn’t have yesterday. The bathrobe was a mistake. "You were hallucinating. For sure."

He doesn't buy it. "There appear to be a few key details that don't add up. Either the dossier's wrong, or you are."

I don't like the tone in his voice, or the way he’s gone still and quiet. I wish I still had the cloaker. I wish I had some goddamn clothes.

I think I'm about to be in deep shit.

***