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Part 4-8: Diamonds
He stumbled and fell, the polearm vanishing in a cloud of sparkling dust as it hit the floor. I had turned to see this, and when I looked back at The Minder, he was gone.
“Are you alright?” I said, rushing to Fergus, who sat upright.
“What the shit, Alena, god,” he complained, rubbing at his head.
“I know, this place is not a vacation, sorry,” I said, trying to see around his fingers. No blood. Yet.
“Dackman, I saw him.” Fergus got up, then started to look around, presumably for the weapon he’d dropped.
I rematerialized it and tossed it to him. He looked about as bewildered the first time I did it.
“I saw him too. We need into that room. First though, we need out of here.” I let my rapier sink back into my hand and snatched up the book on the floor. On the back page, a perfect, high definition picture of Persi stared back at me. Bad lightning and framing. Fergus had not treated the book like a camera.
“He was in the fireplace?” said Fergus, shaking his head.
“Parlor,” I corrected, moving to where he stood and linking our elbows. “Steady yourself. This could be another game.”
But when I put my face close to the picture, the edges snapped to all points in my periphery and then Persi blinked.
I turned around, and was almost kissing Fergus.
“Wah!” I said, stumbling away from him.
He said, “Gah!” and dropped the book, staring at it.
“What is it?” asked Persi.
I looked at her, waved my hand, making sure I was still ghostly. She did not react to me.
“We… we… sweet succulent jebus,” explained Fergus.
“There was an anomaly a moment ago,” said Deluxe. “Lost signal for a two hundred milliseconds, it returned at extreme frequency then stabilized again.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We just took a five minute trip to Fort Ticktock, is all.”
“Intel? What did you learn?” said Deluxe
“That Minder chum, he is a grade-A asshole,” said Fergus.
“I recall that he was unpleasant,” agreed Persi. “He mocked Alena and I.”
“Not my favourite fella, no,” I said, looking down at the book. There was a glow about its edges, strange and patchy. I knelt closer to find that checkerboard pattern built into the light; a weird holographic crossword puzzle with no letters filled in. I stood back up, and saw it all over the place, faint, like a fading afterimage. And it felt like something too… it was all over, wrapping me in a fuzzy blanket.
Then I knew. It was the buzz of the Band, my tingles that I no longer considered as tingly feeling but just the feeling of the power that cycled in the ring, in me. I brought my hand to my face and looked at it—the pattern was fervent there, flickering and shifting fast, reminding me of the stuttering motion of a film when you slow it down just enough to see the individual frames.
“Guys, the clock!” said Fergus, rushing to place his ear against the bookshelf, which had gone back to being grey and dull.
The visions fled into the backdrop of my senses, still there but needing a special concentration to find (I still felt them, sort of). I moved close to the shelf as well, trying to hear.
“What do you hear?” asked Persi.
“It’s ticking, and…” said Fergus.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“But, listen,” he said. “There’s, it’s… Dack’s only got about… I don’t know but we have to hurry!”
I also heard nothing.
“Fergus,” I said. “How fast is it ticking? Can you tell me what time it says it is?”
“Uhm, it’s,” he began, then crinkled his brow. His lips moved as he tried counting, then he huffed out a frustrated scoff and tried tapping at the wall. After a while of this, he bashed a fist into the books and backed away from them, eyes wide.
“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t, I can’t tell. All I know, is it’s soon.”
“The Minder did something to him,” I said.
“What is soon?” asked Deluxe.
He shook his head, grabbing at his ears. “Time is up, soon. Uh uh uh, rapido, imminent, final Jeopardy music!”
“You guys should get the hell away from here,” I suggested, not liking the crazed edge in Fergus’ voice. “Take that damn book though. I have a feeling someone wants us to have it.”
“Where should we go?” asked Persi, as she collected the book.
“Central library,” said Deluxe. “I cross referenced your new title. No record of The Secret to Overcoming Obstacles, but there are several named Overcoming Obstacles. One of which’s latest edition is printed in a yellow jacket. There’s one copy at the main library. Do the shelves there appear richly stained and made of cherry?”
“Prime, I wouldn’t know a cherry tree from an oak, much less what its damn planks look like,” I said.
“There is stain on these though,” said Fergus, distractedly, rubbing at his temples.
“No matter,” came the reply. “We’re reasonably sure the room can mimic the likeness of a point of invasion, per the jungle encounter last time. There are a manageable number of literature retailers in town but the broad match on the title gives us a workable theory. I’m worming into their network now and hope to be able to confirm the presence of the rogue signal.”
“Let’s boogey then,” I said.
I made sure the alley was danger free for Fergus and Persi before returning to my body. I had a feeling I’d be needing a lot of refuels today.
The condo living room snapped back into focus. I immediately felt a new sensation: a cool, bunched weight nestled on my lap. Keeping my chin level, I carefully swiveled my head towards the girl beside me, who clicked and clattered away at her machines.
“I’m back, ‘Luxe.”
“Welcome. Hungry? Almost cracked the library network.”
“Is there a ball python sleeping on my crotch?”
She looked over, assessed my situation, kept her face straight, and managed a tiny, apologetic grin.
“Motherfucker. Get it off, I’ll be right back,” I said.
“Wait, the wifi is—” she said, but I flickered back out of myself again, and into my room. A few seconds later the condo’s wifi returned from the temporary outage Deluxe had prepared for my return. The lighter Clockworld greys burned away to white, and the darker bits went fuzzy and formless. I felt like I stepped out of an air conditioned bunker onto an asphalt parking lot in Mexico at noon, but it was preferable to having to process snakes.
As I waited to be de-Lobstered, I noticed something odd in the invisible blind heat of the wifi. Namely that it wasn’t so invisible after all. It raged with wiggling lines, a mess of translucent floss, woven like fabric. I looked deeper, a mental squint of my eyes, and a pattern of diamonds flushed forward, the lines that made them all caught in standing waves, like when you can see a vibrating curve in a guitar string.
An intrusive thought came forward and let me know that those mad little things would look a lot better as chilled out squares.
“All squares are diamonds, you idiot,” I scolded my brain.
But as I remembered what I’d seen in the journey through the yellow book, and all around the damned office hallway, it seemed possible that there could be a big difference after all.
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