Staring down the barrel of a gun isn’t a particularly fun experience, even if it can’t actually kill you. As a dream lord I’m not immune to bullets but the death of a dream body means I can’t use that identity anymore.If I got shot, I could always set up another identity but it would be time consuming and more difficult to “sell” to the world. Reality would be a bit too stretched if there were too many people who came out of nowhere and had the interest in playing amateur detective for the same missing persons case. Also, I liked ‘The Amazing Jin’. I’d paid special attention in dreaming up that identity, even studying the basics of stage magic so that the dream magic would have a solid frame to build on. As a result, being a stage magician was more fun than I’d expected. If the man holding the gun on us decided to ruin that I’d be all sorts of unhappy with him.

    “We didn’t break in.” I said. “The door was already broken when we got here. We just came inside to see what had happened.”

    The cop reached to his side and flicked the switch for the single bulb that hung over the center of the room. I blinked at the illumination but the poor bulb didn’t make the room much brighter than the streetlights had managed so it wasn’t much of a transition. The added light did give me a better view of the cop though.

    He was older, which wasn’t surprising, and Chinese-American, which was. His uniform had the rumpled wear of someone who’d been working for too many hours. Despite that, his aim was steady and solid and he didn’t appear sleepy in the slightest.

    “Strange thing for a pair of young ladies such as yourselves to be troubling yourself with. Especially since none of the other lights in the building are on either.”

    “It’s easier not to be noticed when the lights are off.” Way said.

    “And why would you not want to be noticed, I have to wonder?” the cop asked.

    I considered the possibilities that we were faced with. A police uniform and gun proved nothing. He could as easily be Shurman’s killer as a beat cop who happened to stumble on us. Him being the killer would make a lot more sense really. It would explain how he’s happened to just stumble on us like he did. Something told me he wasn’t our gunman though.

    One of the other perks of being a dream lord is a special sort of awareness that you develope. It’s like getting to read the stage directions and glance at the cast list of the play of “Life”. It’s not full blown omniscience or even precognition, but it gives a dream lord access to a lot of information they wouldn’t normally be able to possess. I had mine clamped down almost completely due to the fragility of Earth-Glass but little bits could still sneak out. Or in other words, I didn’t know who this cop was, but I my guess that he wasn’t the killer had better than even odds of being right. So I took a gamble.

    “Because Mr. Shurman was working for me and someone killed him less than an hour ago at the Chimera Club.” I said. That got the cops attention the same way a mallet blow to the forehead would.

    “Rick’s dead?” the cop asked, his gun lowering under the weight of the news.

    “I’m afraid so, and I’m pretty sure it’s because of what I asked him to look into.” I admitted.

    “What do you mean?” the cop asked.

    “He was supposed to meet us at the Club tonight if he found anything. We were performing there for the new talent night. In the middle of our act, someone dropped him from the rafters after shooting him in the head.” I explained.

    “What was he looking into?” steel returned to the cop’s voice when he asked the question.

    “Information concerning the disappearance of Guy Mcintyre.” I said.

    “And you’re saying someone killed him for that?”

    “Unless he had a jealous ex with an incredible knack for coincidental timing.” I said.

    “Why did you have him looking into the Mcintyre case?” the cop was angry, and it was coloring how he saw us. He was talking though so there was still hope of bringing him around to our side.

    “Mr. Mcintyre holds the loan for a community development project my city is doing. One of our repayments didn’t go through because of a bad wire transfers and the bank that represents him changed their collection terms. We only have until the end of the month to pay the loan off or they’re going to declare we’re in default and take the collateral that was put up.” I said.

    That was true, in a sense. There was a town, Windy Springs, that had received a generous development loan from Mcintyre. They’d missed a payment due to a snafu at their Western Union office and the First National Bank of San Francisco was eager to take ownership of the collateral. I was even, nominally, the representative of the town, though that was only because I’d been the one to volunteer at the town meeting. Everyone else was convinced it was a lost cause, but I’d pleaded for a chance to locate Mcintyre and have him tell the bank that he didn’t want to exercise the penalty against “us”. The mayor and the rest of the town were already making plans to move though since no one believed I’d find Mcintyre. And even if I did, they argued, he might be unwilling or unable to change the bank’s mind.

    It was a solid background. Anyone who checked out the story would find plenty of support for it. It just had nothing to do with why Way and I were really involved in this case.

    “What’s the collateral?” the cop asked.

    “The town. Or the land the town is on to be more specific.” I said. Land that was much more valuable than it had originally been due to the railroad’s interest in it, which was why the bank was so eager to claim it.

    “And Stone’s involved in that too?”

    “He shouldn’t be but we don’t know. That’s part of what Mr. Shurman was looking into.” Way said.

    The cop put his gun back in its holster and sighed.

    “I need to take you down to the station. Have you say all this on the record. Then I can get some police protection for you.”

    “Thank you, Officer…” I prompted, since he still hadn’t told us his name.

    “Smith, and yes, I know it’s an unusual name for a guy like me.” he held out his badge and showed us the back. His name, “Frank Smith”, and official number were recorded there. I blinked in a surprise at the name. Smith was an uncommon name for a Chinese-American. It was also my last name.

    In my case it was because my Great-Great-Grandmother had been something of rebel. She’d married an outsider, named Smith, and had a whole bushel of kids with him. My Great-Grandfather had reconciled with his mother’s family and married a “nice Chinese girl”, but he’d been close with his father and had kept his name. Most of that branch of my family was ethnic Chinese but succeeding generations held onto the Smith name.

    I had the suspicion that Officer Frank Smith’s story might be rather close to my family history. With Earth-Glass lagging about a century behind my world, you could find echoes of the past in it. As a dream lord I tended to draw weirdness to me, so in a sense running into Officer Frank Smith wasn’t so much a coincidence as a natural by-product of who I was.

    “Before we go though, let us help you look around here. I think whoever killed Mr. Shurman was the one who did this.” I pointed to the ransacked office.

    “I can’t do that. This is a crime scene. I can’t let you disturb anything.” Officer Smith said.

    “I just need to know what Mr. Shurman recorded about our meeting. He had to have at least written down the Chimera Club somewhere or the killer wouldn’t have known to find him there. If he wrote down our names then the killer may be looking for us too.” I said.

    “We’ll find that out. Don’t you worry.” Smith said.

    “His log book is there.” Way said pointing across the room to a small lap stand, behind which was lodged a notepad with it’s pages sprawled open. While I’d been talking with Smith, she’d been searching the room by sight.

    “We’ll leave that there till the Detectives get here.” Smith said.

    “You knew Mr. Shurman? Didn’t you?” I asked.

    “Yeah, Rick’s the one who got me on the force.” Smith said.

    “Then we need to see what’s inside that notebook. He might have mentioned who the killer was.” I said.

    Smith wrestled with that for a few seconds before temptation and his own need to know got the better of him. He strode over to the lamp stand and picked up the notebook smoothing out its pages. I saw him start flipping through it and moved to read over his shoulder.

    The last page had three entries on it; “Talk to the Money at his office, 8:00am”, “Lunch with the Mrs. at the Blue Gala, noon” and “Talk with the skirt at the Chimera, 9:00pm”.

    “Was he married?” I asked.

    “Yeah, twice. First one hated him enough to move to Europe. Second one left him for a doctor on the east coast.” Smith said.

    “So who was meeting at the Blue Gala then?” I asked.

    “Nobody you need to worry about. This is police business. We’ll look into it.” Smith said.

    I sensed danger a moment before the glass of the street side window shattered. I dropped to the floor on reflex, only catching as I fell that I’d been standing in front of the window in clear sight of the buildings outside.

    The crack of a rifle seemed to come at the same time as I saw blood spray from Officer Smith. I was out of the line of fire, but by ducking out of the window I’d left Smith a wide open target. Way, grabbed him as he fell too and pulled him down with her, taking them both out of the line of fire. No more shots rang out, probably because there was no one left to shoot at.

    I shimmied over to Way and Smith and looked for where he’d been hit. There was blood everywhere in the few seconds it took me to reach them, which wasn’t a good sign. When I looked him over I saw that the bullet, and several glass fragments had hit him in the head and neck. I couldn’t tell how bad the damage was but I knew any head wound would bleed like crazy.

    Breathing out slowly I let my imagination spin out a tale as I tore a strip of cloth from my dress to use as a makeshift bandage. Bullets that hit bone can do all sorts of things. Sometimes they make great big holes in the bone and scramble tissue anywhere near the impact sight. Other times, they can glance off the bone doing only superficial damage. This was going to be one of the latter occasions.

    I couldn’t change the fact that Officer Smith had been shot with dream magic. At least not without fracturing the world. What I could change was how badly he’d been injured. Since it was perfectly possible for a bullet to behave in the manner I’d suggested, a glancing blow that left a nasty bleeding gash without damaging anything vital, it only took a small spark of dream magic to make sure my story was the ‘real’ one.

    “How much were you able to heal him?” Way asked. After working together for four years, she knew me well enough to guess when I was cheating with unobservable dream magic.

    “He’ll live. He’s going to have a concussion though.” I said.

    “I’m going after the shooter.” Way said. She wasn’t any more bulletproof than I was but given that there was a good chance the killer was coming over to finish us off in person, going on the offensive was possibly one of the safest things she could do.

    “Be careful. I don’t want to have to do the rest of this without you.” I told her, grabbing her sleeve.

    “I know.” she replied. Her frown echoed my own. “I’ll be careful.” she promised and laid her hand over mine and gave it a squeeze of reassurance. It was nice to feel her warmth, even though the thought of her leaving left me with a cold pit where my stomach was supposed to be.

    There are a lot of different reactions people can have to seeing a dead body. From screams, fainting, and vomiting to silent, wide-eyed shock. Then there’s the sort of reaction the jaded and the unimaginative will show.

    “Want I should go get a mop?” Frank, one of the stagehands, asked staring at the widening puddle of red-stained water under the body that was sprawled on the stage.

    “Better leave it for the police to clean up.” I suggested.

    “I don’t think Boss Stone’s gonna want the cops crawling around his club.” Herman, another of the stagehands, said.

    “I don’t think he’s going to want to explain why he hid a dead body he had nothing to do with.” I replied.

    “What makes you think he ain’t the one who capped this schmuck?” Frank asked.

    I rolled my eyes. I knew Frank wasn’t the brightest bulb out there, but I’d assumed anyone who worked for Boss “Eddie” Stone would know when to keep his mouth shut.

    “Frank, even if your Boss were ever to find himself at odds with the law, which we know would never be the case for a fine upstanding man like him, what possible reason would he have to screw up a show and bring the heat down on his own place?” I asked.

    “Oh yeah. He’d just dump the body off a pier.” Frank said, smiling and nodding. He was happy to have kept up with part of what I said, even though he’d missed one of the more important points I was making. I sighed. Frank was a nice guy. He’d been good to work with when we’d been setting up our water tank escape trick, so I didn’t want to see him get hurt. Keeping him out of trouble though wasn’t looking too promising though. Not that I was doing a great job of protecting anyone on Earth-Glass. The dead guy was sort of evidence of that.

    Rick Shurman P.I., had been an ex-cop who’d gone into private practice after a shoot out had left him with a bum leg, bad memories and a bit too much fondness for Kentucky bourbon. Way and I were playing amateur detective, which meant information gathering mostly. Neither of us were phenomenally wealth but we had enough to afford to hire outside help to do some of the legwork for us. That had seemed like a great idea at the time. Someone apparently disagreed though.

    “I don’t think the show’s going to be able to continue.” Way said.

    “Not if the cops lock the joint down.” Herman agreed.

    “Stone’s gonna be steamed about that.” Frank said.

    “You girls should beat it before he gets here.” Herman suggested.

    “Won’t the police want to talk to us?” I asked.

    “Yeah, that’s why he’s not gonna want you here.” Herman said.

    “We don’t want to get in trouble with the law.” Way said. The slight quaver of fear in her voice was another demonstration of her acting prowess.

    “We’ll tell ‘em you went all weepy and had to leave for a constitutional.” Herman said with a wave of his hand to cover our concerns.

    “Thanks. Let Mister Stone know that we’re still interested in auditioning though ok?” I said, the eagerness in my voice was only partially an act. I didn’t particularly care about the audition, but it was a nice routine we’d worked out and a part of me wanted the chance to finish it up. Plus we still had a lot of digging to do and it would be easier if we didn’t have to break-in after hours to find everything we were looking for.

    By the time Way and I slipped out the backdoor of the Chimera Club, the other acts that were set to follow us had gotten word of what had happened and were making their way out of the club too. In the press of performers that were exiting the building, it was easy to merge into the crowds passing by on the street. Way caught my sleeve and glanced up to the roof of the building across the street. I nodded and we crossed the street to head down an alley that we’d scouted before the show. The only remarkable thing about the alley was a fire escape that was out of view from the street. Using that we got to the top of the building which put us far enough from the people below that we could talk freely. It also placed us at a vantage point to watch the audience of the Chimera Club exiting the building.

    “Did you see anyone in the rafters?” I asked as we settled in to observe the people leaving the scene of the crime.

    “No, I was paying too much attention to the audience. What do you think happened?” Way said.

    “Shurman was supposed to meet me after the show if he discovered anything. Looks like he found something.”

    “And then someone found him.”

    “Yeah. Someone professional. Did you see how much blood there was?” I said.

    “Yes, too little for a head wound like that. He was dead before he fell.”

    “And we didn’t hear a shot during our performance so he was shot somewhere else too.”

    “Carrying a dead body up into the rafters would have been difficult, Shurman wasn’t a small man.”

    “And people would have noticed.” I agreed.

    “Maybe not Frank, but you’re right, with all the people backstage someone would have seen something.” Way said.

    “Unless the murder happened on the roof and the killer only had to bring the body down to the rafters from there.” I suggested.

    “That fits. What would Shurman have been doing on the roof though?” Way asked.

    “Lured up there somehow? With his leg, there’s no reason for him to go to the roof on his own, but if he thought I wanted to meet him there for privacy I could see him climbing up and being taken unawares.” I said.

    “Someone would still have heard the shot though wouldn’t they?”

    “Maybe, but it would be distant enough they could write it off as a car backfiring. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of people who “remember” hearing something when the police ask, but I’ll be amazed if any of them can provide any useful info on when it happened or where it came from.”

    “That leaves us with the questions of why they killed him and why they dropped the body on the stage.” Way said.

    “I don’t think we have enough info to work out why they killed him yet, but there’s only one reason to drop his body like that. The killer wanted to send a message.” I said.

    “To who?”

    “Whoever hired him. Meaning me. A little warning that we shouldn’t be looking into this. I’d bet the killer doesn’t know who we are though. If they did, they’d have shot us too, or followed us when we left the building.” I glanced around to make sure there weren’t any gunmen lurking in the shadows of the rooftop.

    “Why drop him on the stage if they didn’t know you’d hired him?” Way asked, still puzzled. I saw an idea flash to life in her eyes. “The killer knew to lure Shurman to the roof because he knew Shurman intended to meet his employer at the Club. He expected the employer to be in the audience. How would the killer know that though?” Way said.

    “I think we need to get to Shurman’s office. Now, before the police lock it down. I’m betting we’re going to find that someone’s been there before us.” I said.

    “What about his home?” Way asked.

    “Might be something there too.” I said, frowning.

    “So do we split up and each take one?” Way asked.

    “I’d rather not.” I admitted.

    “Me either.” she agreed.

    Unspoken concerns filled the passing seconds before we shook off the worries we held about problems that had no place on Earth-Glass. Tomorrow’s problems would have to wait in line behind the more serious and immediate issues at stake.

    “Let’s hit his office first. It’s closer and the cops will probably lock that down first.” I said.

    Way nodded her agreement and I saw Boss Eddie Stone’s tank of a luxury car glide up to the entrance of the Chimera Club. For a “tough guy” Eddie Stone wasn’t actually that big. At average height and average build, he appeared on the tiny side compared to the goon that got out of the car with him. The slab of muscle that walked beside the crime boss wasn’t belligerent but he didn’t need to be to part the crowd. He just walked and people cleared a path the same way they would for a locomotive. I’d seen bigger guys, much bigger guys, but not on Earth-Glass.

    As Boss Stone followed his henchman to get into his club, I saw him run into Madelaine Deckard. She was Guy Mcintyre’s secretary and principal assistant. Also one of my number one suspects in his disappearance and possible murder. I was too far to hear anything they said over the buzz of the street traffic but even from a rooftop away it was clear that neither Stone nor Deckard were happy to see each other. Their brief exchange left Stone shaking his head and Deckard clenching her fists. I lost sight of Stone a moment later when he passed into the Chimera Club. Madelaine, on the other hand, was easy to see stomping down the street. Anger radiated out of her posture and every movement as I watched her quicken her pace and turn down a side road towards one of the nearby parking lots.

    “That was interesting.” I said.

    “Think we should follow her?” Way asked.

    “No. We’d need an ‘in’ to talk to her and right now would be a bad time to make one. She’s going to be too on guard at the moment.” I said.

    “Let’s get to Shurman’s office then.” Way suggested.

    A quick climb back down the fire escape and one taxi ride later, we pulled up in front of a diner near Shurman’s office. I tipped the cabbie enough to make sure that if he remembered us, he’d also remember that the diner was right next to a bus stop that would take us back to our flat on Fairbanks Island. No one would be surprised that two up and coming theater girls would be living in the low rent district that Fairbanks Island had become and nobody would wonder why we hadn’t paid for a cab ride the whole way there. Apart from the distance, cabbies levied an automatic surcharge for the “bridge toll” on any ride to Fairbanks. The “bridge toll” was really more an “I don’t want to get robbed again so don’t make me go there” fee and for the most part the people who had an interest in going to Fairbanks weren’t the type who could afford any extra fees in their lives.

    Time was precious so rather than ordering something in the diner for the sake of appearances we headed straight to Shurman’s office. It wasn’t terribly late at night but anything after sundown meant the offices in the city were largely closed up. We didn’t bother to check front door of the building. It was too visible from the street. The side door however did not have the problem. It was locked as well but a nail file, a bobby pin and ten seconds of lockpicking remedied that problem handily.

    One of the benefits of being a stage magician was that “The Amazing Jin” had all sorts of useful talents, like lock picking, to draw on. I kept the nail file and bobby pin handy to use on the door to Shurman’s office but, as I’d expected, they weren’t needed. The door was closed, but from the shattered wood around the handle it had clearly been forced. A light push was all it took to send it creaking open.

   The blinds hadn’t been lowered in Shurman’s office, so the glare of the street lights showed us the disarray the office had been cast into. It looked like a hurricane or a small bomb had hit the furniture and scattered the contents of his files everywhere. Even the padded mat on the cheap bed frame that rested in the far corner of the office had been torn to shreds.

    “You were right. Someone’s been here.” Way said.

    “And it looks like there’s someone still here. Two someone’s in fact.” a voice from behind us said.

    I whirled around to find a man in a police officer’s uniform standing behind us in the hallway. He had his service revolver out and pointing directly at me.

    “Now why don’t you ‘someones’ start explaining why you broke into what is clearly a crime scene?” he said.

    The main issue with sawing a girl in half is the question of trust. To the audience it looks as though the trust is between the magician and her assistant. In reality though, there are two sorts of trust at work, and both are critical for a “magical” performance.

    On one level there’s the trust the audience places in their senses. They see the lovely assistant led to the box. They see the box spun around, presumably to assure them that it’s just a normal box. They see the girl being locked securely in the box and they know there’s no way she can get free. Then the magician takes out her giant saw and proceeds to make the impossible happen.

    That’s the other level of trust. The audience wants to believe their eyes, but they’re trusting that the magician is going to show them a tiny miracle. They believe there’s a girl, they believe there’s a box she’s trapped in and a saw that can cut through it. As the saw tears through the wood, they’re glued to watching something that should be horrifying and yet they can clap and laugh because they also believe, in their hearts if not in their minds, that the magician can bend the laws of reality a bit and show them that the world is more than what they perceive it to be.

    “You’re a natural at this.” Way whispered to me as I picked up a comically huge mallet and started hammering on the saw which had gotten “stuck” halfway through the box as part of the act.

    I had to smile at that. While Way was the last person in the world I’d ever want to saw in half, she was also the only person I could ever imagine running a vaudeville show with. I think the audience could sense that too.

    “Apologies for the sawdust, this can get a little messy, as I’m sure you can imagine.” I said, playing to the front row but speaking loud enough to be heard by the back seats. There was a round of mild laughter at the joke. I’d considered playing up the horror element of the routine, but Way had suggested the lighter touch of only making a few jokes that suggested she was actually being ripped in two by the sawblade. Looking at the smiling faces in the audience, I saw she’d been right on that call.

    For her part, Way played the act with smiles and hammy overacting, never for a moment suggesting that she was in peril or pain. In truth that was better acting than it appeared. While I was busy “sawing” through the box, Way had herself contorted into the upper half of it. It wasn’t the hardest part of our show but it also wasn’t anywhere near as comfortable as she made it out to be.

    It was that level of showmanship that had won us the audition at the Chimera Club’s New Talent Night. Not many acts made it past the New Talent Night. A lucky few would get called back for a repeat performance or two but you had to really bring the house down to get a full time contract.

    The amusing thing was that Way and I were more than capable of bringing the house down, in a very literal sense, but we had to manage the performance without relying on any true magic. That was scary in its own right, but comparing our act to the talent we shared the stage with had given me a horrible case of performance jitters. It had taken Way nearly laughing herself silly at the sight of my fretting to remind me of who we were and why we were really here. Where our fellow performers were following dreams of fame and fortune, we were on the trail of a murder which might not even have happened.

    The trail of the missing Guy Mcintyre, uber-wealthy philanthropist and social recluse, had led us to the Chimera Club and its owner “Eddie” Stone, the gangster who owned enough of the city of Los Diablos that they might as well have renamed the place in his honor. Eddie had a lot of secrets and it wasn’t hubris to say there wasn’t anyone on the planet who had better chance of figuring out what they were than we did. Signing on as performers at the club would make it simple to observe the the things that were hidden backstage. Simple, and dangerous, but that’s what made the detective work so interesting.

    Which is not to say that your typical detective would think that way. In fact, to say that two eighteen year old girls weren’t exactly your typical detectives would have been an understatement even on my homeworld and there we had a kitchen sink full of craziness. That we weren’t on my homeworld was probably the first clue that Way and I weren’t your typical eighteen year olds though.  “Jin the Amazing” was a magician but the real “Jin”, the real me, was something a whole lot more.

    Like Way, I was a Dream Lord. I’d woken up one violent, crazy night and understood a whole lot more about the world than I’d ever imagined there was to know. I still thought of myself as an eighteen year old girl, but for the last four years I’d been able to walk between worlds that were joined only by my dreams. I’d met fantastic and amazing people of all species and morphologies and been inducted into the Parliament of Time’s Diplomatic Corp. Oh, and I could change what was real with nothing more than my imagination. That’s what it means to be a Dream Lord.

    Which isn’t to say that altering reality is easy or safe. While we can change the world, Way and I had spent a good part of the last four years learning to recognize all of the various situations where it was a tremendously bad idea to do so. Like, for example, Terra-2407, the parallel Earth we were playing amateur detectives on.

    Terra-2407 was a lot like my Earth, except progress had been delayed a bit. Technologically and socially the people were about a century behind my world. To them it was the modern day, but in my eyes they looked to be in the early years of the 20th century. Airplanes had crossed the Atlantic ocean but not the Pacific yet. The telegraph had been invented, as had radio and the motor car, but people were only beginning to see their lives changing because of them. Women had won the right the to vote, but the Civil Rights movement was still decades off, assuming history here was shaped by the same forces that shaped the history I knew.

    From my perspective, as a Chinese-American girl, it was a weird and unsettling world. I was spared the worst of it in the sense that it wasn’t a reality I would be forced to live in for the rest of my life. As a performer, I benefited a little from the “Asian Mystique”. It helped people believe in the magic shows a bit more, but getting them to take me seriously outside of the performances was another matter. That was a big part of the reason that I’d chosen to appear as I normally looked though. Being dismissed as a lesser lifeform for my gender and ethnicity would have been aggravating under normal circumstances, but given that I needed to ferret out some rather deadly secrets without relying on my dream magics having people underestimate me seemed just fine in my book.

    On another world, discovering who had murdered Guy Mcintyre (or finding him if he was still alive) would have taken five minutes at most. Terra-2407 wasn’t like most other worlds though. The barrier between the real world and the dreaming world, between what was real and what was imaginary, was the most brittle of any world I’d ever been too.

    Using dream magic was possible, but any sort of overt, obvious effect would leave a crack in reality that the world couldn’t heal. On my Earth, those cracks formed in the wake of dream magic but reality was more fluid. History would change and come up with a path that explained why a car decided to suddenly explode that had nothing to do with a dragon breathing fire on it. Or it would decide that the dragon had always been there and the car owner would have “destruction by dragon fire” as one of the coverages on their insurance. Not so for Terra-2407.

    Earth-Glass (as I’d come to call it) would leave the ruined car there as a visible sign of the break in the laws that governed the world. Fixing a fracture like that was a dicey thing. There were decent odds that anything you did it would cause the effect to spread until the world eventually crumbled to illogical dust. The alternative was worse though.

    As a magician I brought wonder forth from the impossible. There’s more than wonder in the dreaming though. There are monsters that lurk in it too and quite a few of them love nothing more than finding worlds like Earth-Glass to slip into and terrorize. Those were not fun fights to be involved in.

    That’s why Way and I had crafted a pair of very “mundane” identities for ourselves when we’d stepped into Earth-Glass. A stage magician and her lovely (and strong) assistant resonated with our overall identities which made them easy to wear while not straining the bounds of reality too much. We were unusual but not unbelievable, especially among other theater performers.

    With Way “cut in half” and still waving to the crowds, I gestured for the stage hands to bring out the water tank for the second part of the effect. The script called for me (with the help of a few burly stage hands) to drop the two separate boxes underwater where my poor vivisected assistant would have to somehow escape from her bonds and reassemble herself before she drowned. While she tried to that, the stagehands would spin the water tank around while I added “magic powders” to it to brew her into a potion that would make me the “most beautiful woman in the world!”

    The “magic powder” was nothing more than colored earth that would make the water murky enough that people wouldn’t notice Way slip out of the one box she’d contorted herself into. The stagehands would be the first to “notice” that she was gone and would form a convenient wall for just a moment while she slipped out of the water tank as well.

    From there it was all on me to fill two minutes with “spells” in the form of rapid fire card tricks and conjurations to keep the audience enthralled and wondering what had happened to my assistant.

    The big finish followed that with me “remembering” how I’d always told my assistant that she was “angel” and “could she please come down now”. Way would then descend on a wire from the roof of auditorium, a quick costume change having dried her off and put wings of downy white feathers on her back.

    Way and I had gone over the routine dozens of times. We had our timing nailed down. I had my patter all worked out and a dozen effects at my fingertips. We’d prepared for everything.

    Everything except a dead body crashing down into the water tank as the stage hands wheeled it out.

    I caught sight of the man’s body, as it fell and had to suppress a surge of anger at the interruption of our act. I banished that particularly idiotic impulse a moment later as the glass walls of the water tank shattered.

    There’s a saying that the “show must go on” but when the stage becomes the scene of a murder investigation the normal rules are suspended. I glanced over the audience and saw that what had been a delightful show was about to become a terrified riot as people fought to escape. Before they could give in their natural and potentially justified panic though I turned to them and hooked my thumb at the body.

    “You’ll have to give us a moment folks, seems someone’s trying to sneak in to the show without paying for their tickets!” I said, giving them a broad smile to let them know it was “all part of the act”.

    It was callous and probably cruel, but sometimes that’s what was called for. Four years of training in the Diplomat Corp had taught me a lot of things, not the least of which was that crowds can be dangerous beasts when they’re spooked, both to themselves and others.

    I wasn’t the only one who keep their wits together thankfully. As though we’d rehearsed it, the curtain guy let the front curtain fall with a dramatic thump as I gave a parting wave to the audience.

    Way was out her constraints and out of the top half of the box before I had a chance to get over to her. Together we walked across the stage to where the body lay.

    “I think he’s really dead.” Joe, one of stagehands, whispered.

    I looked at him and flinched. He was definitely dead. The bullet wound in his head left little doubt of that. What was worse was that I knew him!