There’s a downside to having very well honed combat reflexes. The human brain can only process events so quickly. In a fight that processing speed is simply not fast enough. You can’t spend time thinking and analyzing unless you have significant amounts of superhuman speed. Instead, experience and training pre-wires in responses to various situations so that you can act immediately in response to them. That can make the difference between life and death in some cases.

    In other cases it can make the difference between greeting one of your friends warmly and slamming her into a brick wall so hard the mortar cracks.

    “Oof!” was the extent of Kari’s witty banter as the impact with the wall knocked the breath out of her.

    “Kari?” Way exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

    Way released Kari and the younger girl collapsed down into a sitting position.

    “Beside getting brute pummeled by Way that is.” I said.

    She took a moment to catch her breath before responding.

    “Trying to do you two a favor.” she gasped out.

    “Sorry there. Are you ok?” Way asked.

    “Yeah, I’ll be fine. Just didn’t expect that.” Kari said.

    “As a general rule sneaking up on Way is not a good idea.” I said.

    “I’m just glad I didn’t sneak up on you.” Kari said.

    “Me? Why?” I asked.

    “You don’t pull your punches like Way does.” Kari offered, with a pained smile.

    “Ugh, one little training accident and I’m never going to hear the end of it am I?” I groaned.

    “Maybe if they ever put the moon we were practicing on back together.” Kari said.

    “Yeah, yeah. Anyways what brings you here? I thought you were going to stay away from the fateweaving until we had it unraveled?” I asked.

    “That was the plan.” she agreed.

    “But something happened to change your mind?” Way asked.

    “Yep. Something named…” she began.

    “Professor Haffrun.” we all said in unison.

    “How did she trick you into coming back here?” I asked.

    “She didn’t have to trick me. The fateweaving I put down has caught to much power in its strands. The movers and shakers of this city, a dreamweaver and now you two.” she said.

    “We’re not caught in your fateweaving…” I said, my voice trailing off as I felt outwards for the strands of dream magic that gently brushed over the city. Like thin bits of gossamer thread they had spooled and twisted around both Way and I.

    “Well that’s interesting.” Way said, her gaze distant and abstracted the way mine had been. Her expression was unreadable but I guessed she felt the same surprise that I did. I turned my memories over looking for when we’d gotten caught up in the events that were going on.

    Shurman’s death had been the beginning. That was the lightest of the strands that tied the two of us to this world. It wasn’t that his death was unimportant, we simply hadn’t formed enough of a connection with him. If we abandoned Earth Glass though his unavenged death would prey on the both of us. Just because we can’t change the world through dream magic doesn’t mean we can leave it without doing our best to set things right.

    In the same vein, our burned apartment building was another wrong that I couldn’t easily leave behind. Even Eddie Stone and his bodyguard fell into that category to some extent. If Way and I hadn’t intervened he would have died in the Chimera Club whenever the Brotherhood of the Dragon finally decided to attack. He was alive though and for good or for ill that was on us.

    “So like I was saying, I stepped back into the world because this is my fateweaving, therefor it’s my problem to deal with.” Kari said.

    “Way, would you put her through the wall again please?” I said. I could recognize the beginning of an “it’s all my fault so I must deal with it alone” argument. They were stupid. I knew this because I’d used that argument myself. If crashing her through a brick wall knocked the notion out of Kari’s head then she’d thank me later.

    Way started reaching for Kari who threw up her hands in a defensive gesture.

    “Wait!” she cried. “Look I know you want to help me but it’s too dangerous. If the weave breaks apart you know that’s going to trigger the dream weaver.”

    “All the more reason for us to be here.” I said. “You don’t want to have to handle things on your own if they wind up going badly.”

    “You’re right, I don’t want that. But I don’t want you two to wind up in trouble because of this either.” she said.

    “Trouble? Bah, like we’ve never been in trouble before?” I said waving my hand dismissively at the concept.

    “I don’t think the Explorer’s Corp has forgiven us yet for what we did to your world.” Way added.

    “This is different though. You’re starting your apprenticeships in a few weeks. If you get put on probation you’ll miss the window for that and you’ll wind up with the safest, tamest, most restrictive mentors they can find for you.” Kari said.

    “Ah, and there’s the hook that Professor Haffrun set.” I observed.

    Kari sighed.

    “Yes. I know. She was manipulating me. Forcing me back into the game. But I’m not stupid. She wasn’t lying or tricking me. All she did was point out something I wasn’t looking for.”

    “So you’re going to take on the whole world for us?” Way asked.

    “It’s what you were willing to do for me! It’s what you’ve always been willing to do for me!” Kari protested.

    I laughed and shook my head. Then I grabbed Kari and drew her into a hug.

    “Kari, dear, has it ever looked like we weren’t having fun in what we were doing?”

    “For certain definitions of ‘fun’, no.” she admitted.

    I let her go.

    “I can promise you, taking on the world alone is not fun at all.” I said. I resisted the urge to glance over at Way.

    “If you get held back, we’ll all get held back.” Way said, ruffling Kari’s hair.

    “When you put it like that.” Kari said, with a conciliatory smile. If I hadn’t known her I would have thought she was giving in and agreeing with us. I’d seen that smile before though. She was plotting something still.

    “So is there anything else Professor Haffrun shared with you that we should know about?” I asked.

    “Only that we’re on our own here until the Auditor shows up. Three Parliamentary representatives is three more than a world like this would normally be allowed to have. No other Parliamentary agents will be issued permits to travel here until the Auditor clears it fully.”

    “Which means she won’t be able to help us either.” I said.

    “Not directly. You know her though.” Way said.

    “Yeah, she could teach sneakiness to a snake.” I said.

    “She does. You’ve meet Ssathara right? She’s in sophomore Identity Crafting with me.” Kari said. Ssathara wasn’t technically a snake. She was more of a naga. Identity Crafting though might as well have been named “How to be a Ninja” with Professor Haffrun teaching it. I’d gotten middling marks in it since sneakiness isn’t precisely my forte but everything I’d manage to learn in the class had turned out to be useful several times over. Say whatever you want about Professor Haffrun but she was a damn good teacher, and those are the sort of people who will always change your life for the better.

    “We should get moving.” Way pointed out. “The Brotherhood has been able to find us a few too many times already tonight.”

    “They’ll probably know about the truck crash by now.” I agreed.

    “And they’ll know that we escaped. Even if the guys from the back of the truck aren’t conscious the fact that they were left so far behind it will show that they weren’t there when it crashed.” Way said.

    “Do you think the driver survived?” I asked.

    “Possibly. We slid for a while and stopped because we ran out of momentum rather than because we hit anything. Assuming the Night Warder didn’t shoot him, he should be alive still.”

    “Alive but injured. Where do you think they’ll take him? The hospital or the police station?” I asked as an idea assembled itself in my mind.

    “With how fast we were going? I’d guess the hospital. Even if he didn’t break anything, which is unlikely, he still would have been bounced around enough to have been knocked unconscious I think.” Way said.

    “Plus there’s the chance that the Night Warder simply shot him.” I pointed out. Technically the morgue was part of the hospital too.

    “I don’t think she did.” Kari said. “I came back just before you two got out of the truck – which is another reason I came back by the way – and I haven’t heard any gun shots since then.”

    “That’s good. It’s hard to question a corpse on this world.” I said.

    “I don’t know, it’s like this whole world is a corpse.” Kari said. Her homeworld was one where magic abounded. It wasn’t as technologically progressive as the Earth I hailed from, but a surprising number of the basic amenities of life were covered by magical means. For her, a magic free world was almost soulless, despite the fact that Earth Glass had technologies like the car and the radio that were far beyond anything her world had yet developed.

    “How about we make the hospital our next stop.” I suggested. “I think we’ll be able to scare up some information there.”

    “They’ll have the driver under guard.” Way pointed out.

    “I certainly hope so.” I said with a mischievous smile.

    “You’re planning to capture the assassin they send to keep the driver from talking.” Way said, intuiting my plan.

    “The police won’t notice if he disappears and I bet we’ll be able to learn all sorts of interesting things from him if we’re persuasive enough.” I said. The number of tricks that a pair of magicians can pull on someone strapped to an operating table in a properly lit surgery room boggles the mind. Granted we’d lost a lot of our props when the Chimera burned but a simple bonesaw could be put to all sorts of suggestive uses.

    “Did I hear that these ‘Brother of the Dragon’ guys burned your apartment down?” Kari asked.

    “Yeah.” I replied, and felt a pang at the thought. I’d saved some of the people there. Some but not all, and each life lost was another thread tying me to this world and the fateweaving. I couldn’t bring them back and vengeance wasn’t going to help them at this point. The most I could do was to remember them and make sure that there was something positive that could be associated with their deaths as a memorial to the value of their lives.

    “I should check on the place I have rented. There are things there that definitely shouldn’t fall into the wrong hands.” Kari said.

    “You didn’t leave any notes about the fateweaving did you?” I asked. Those would act like a lit fuse if they ever came into the possession of a nascent dreamweaver.

    “Not directly. But I had the data that I collected about who the major players were. Just the fact that someone was collecting that info would be bad to let slip.” she said.

    “So you want to go check that out while we check out the hospital?” I asked.

    “Yeah. We’ll cover more ground that way.” she said.

    By which she meant “that way I’ll have a head start on the race to find McIntyre so I can keep you two out of trouble”.

    It wasn’t that she was predictable exactly, we just tended to think similarly and I knew that’s what I would have been planning were I in her shoes.

    Still, she had a valid point, and since I didn’t think we’d be able to keep her from running off eventually, I didn’t try to stop her.

    “Where will we meet up?” I asked, so that we’d have a rendezvous point for when our plans inevitably went horribly awry.

    “How about your Detective’s office. No one should be watching it anymore right?” she suggested.

    “That works. I’m not sure how long it will take at the hospital though.” I said.

    “That’s ok. I don’t know how long it will take me to clean out my room.” she said.

    She turned to go but I stopped her before she could walk off.

    “Promise me that you’ll be careful ok? The Brotherhood is really dangerous within this world.” I said.

    “And the dreamweaver is more dangerous that that.” Way added.

    “I know. The same goes for you two though. You’re in as much danger as I am. Probably more.”

    “We’ll be fine.” I promised her.

    “Same here.” she promised me back.

    Once she was out of earshot, Way turned to me.

    “So where are we really going?”

    Sometimes getting exactly what you’ve been searching for can be the last thing that you want. That’s particularly true when what you’ve been searching for is as volatile as a stick of dynamite. To complete the metaphor it’s worth noting that in the past I’ve had a somewhat “incendiary” effect on the people I’ve come in contact with.

    “That was close.” Way said, her eyes still wide with surprise.

    “I didn’t say too much did I?” I asked, feeling like I was standing on pins and needles.

    “No. I don’t think so.”

    “That’s good. We’ve still got some time then.”

    We’d been searching for the dreamweaver that we suspected was involved with Kari’s fateweaving. The problem wasn’t so much that we’d found her, the problem was that she’d found us.

    Under the best of circumstances, meeting a dreamweaver was something we needed to handle with care. The transition between being able to subconsciously manipulate reality and being fully awake to that capability was one of the most profoundly life altering experiences any sapient being could have. It was birth and death and transformation all rolled up together. It was different for each dreamer but there was one consistent element for everyone who experience it – you were never the same person afterward.

    That’s why no matter how forgiving the world was, no matter how open to change or accepting reality could be, we treaded carefully. It was difficult because we could never explain things fully without running the risk that the explanations would “complete the circuit” and provide the last piece needed to wake up the dreamweaver.

    In the case of a world like Earth Glass, things were even more precarious. A dreamweaver’s awakening didn’t threaten to end only their own life, it threatened everything there was. That’s why we needed to be careful. Way and I had both been throwing around about as much dream magic as Earth Glass would allow. It wasn’t observable by any regular inhabitant of the world, but to a dreamweaver it would be like a faint scent they couldn’t quite make out. If something drew their attention to it, they wouldn’t be able to let it go.

    “What do we do next?” Way asked.

    “Stay away from the Night Warder.” I said.

    “I think that will be harder than it sounds.” Way said.

    “Yeah, she’s caught up in Kari’s fateweaving. It’s going to be tough to do anything about that without knowing what the other major players are doing though.” I said.

    “Can we risk investigating them?”

    “I think we have to. We’ve got a new player in the game, but the fateweaving has them all joined together. Whatever one of them does will affect the others so any one of them could push the dreamweaver to the point where she wakes up.”

    “What about Stone and his bodyguard?”

    “Obviously not the dreamweaver.” I said with a short laugh.

    “I can see why you got an ‘A’ in your Deductive Reasoning class last year.” Way teased me.

    “Hey, I worked hard for the ‘A’!” I objected.

    “I seem to recall you spending the week before the final test dreaming you were Miss Marple.”

    “Cramming counts as working hard!” I said with a much-put-upon pout. Skills learned while dreaming don’t tend to stick around but with enough concentrated dreaming they can linger long enough for you to pass an otherwise brutally hard final exam.

    Way gave me a dubious look in response to that. I was tempted to protest that the workload I’d been carrying all but required cramming, but that wasn’t an argument I was going to win. In retrospect, I had to agree with her on the foolhardiness of working so much. I’d learned a lot but I’d trade any two of my ‘As’ to spend the time with her instead.

    “Anyways, Stone’s not our dreamweaver but he’s still one of the keystones of the fate weaving. I’d been hoping we could nudge him out of it but if the Night Warder was looking for him then he’s still got some kind of role to play.”

    “His bodyguard too.” Way observed.

    “Really?”

    “Yes. It could just be in his role as a bodyguard though. The Night Warder said she was looking for ‘these two’, not just Stone.”

    “That’s interesting, I’d missed that.”

    “It surprised me – people don’t usually notice the guards like that, and I think Eddie Stone is the kind of guy who wants all the attention for himself. I don’t think he’d be happy to be considered ‘one of those two’.” Way said.

    “Probably not. I am painfully curious what the Night Warder wants with the two of them though?”

    “To hard to speculate. We don’t know anything about how she fits in with this.”

    “Yeah, she’s not part of the original urban redevelopment deal.” I agreed.

    “Unless she is. What if she lives in Fairbanks?” Way asked.

    “So however the deal turned out, she’d be directly affected by it? That makes a lot of sense actually.”

    I thought about it. Kari had tied her fateweaving to the urban redevelopment deal between the city, Guy McIntyre and Cranston Smythe. Eddie Stone had been swept up in it because he controlled most of the large construction companies in the city. If the Night Warder was only connected to Eddie Stone then she should have pulled him out of it.

    In fact, he should have been pulled out of the deal since the bidding on it was being opened up on a national level. That meant that much bigger companies than Eddie’s were going to be able muscle in on the action. Eddie was a big player on a city level but on the national scale he was strictly a small fry.

    So Eddie hadn’t roped in the Night Warder. It had been the reverse.

    “The Night Warder needed Eddie Stone and his bodyguard, why?” Way asked.

    “Because with his bodyguard, Eddie still looks like he’s in charge. Alone, with the Chimera Club in ruins, he’s beaten. His Lieutenants would turn on him in a heartbeat.” I said, reasoning it out as I spoke.

    “If he’s still in charge then he’s still got the power to order his minions around.”

    “How would that help the Night Warder though?” I asked.

    “Maybe she needs a small army?” Way guessed.

    “What would she need…” I started to ask and then stopped myself as an idea hit me. “The Brotherhood of the Dragon.”

    Way looked at me and frowned in agreement.

    “They have more than just a few assassins don’t they?” she asked.

    “Yeah. They have at least enough men to risk an open assault on the Chimera Club and to leave an ambush group for us in the secret escape tunnel.” I said.

    “Speaking of that, how did they even know about the secret tunnel?”

    “They had to have been planning this for a while.”

    “So it’s whoever’s behind the Brotherhood is someone who had a reason to want to kill Stone.” Way said.

    “Well that narrows the list down to nearly everyone who’s ever met or heard of him.” I teased.

    Way glared at me, but I felt it was fair after her earlier teasing. We really didn’t have any idea why someone would want to kill Eddie Stone because the list of motives ranged from “revenge for my murdered family member” to “have you met the guy?”.

    “Wait! The Brotherhood wasn’t there for Stone!” I said, as a memory came back to me. “I was groggy from the knock-out gas so I didn’t latch onto the idea properly at the time but the moustached guy. He told us what they wanted!”

    “I don’t know if I heard it, I had to sleep off a little of the gas than you did I think.” Way said.

    “He said they were going to interrogate us about the location of ‘the hidden files’ we stole from them.” I said, an excited grin spreading across my face.

    “Stolen files? But we haven’t stolen files from anyone yet!”

    “I know! But this is huge! So, they were after stolen files which they thought we had, and they attacked us at Stone’s place, which they had researched and knew just how to take down, including his secret escape passage.”

    “They were already planning to take Stone out and we pushed up their time table.”

    “Right. It was a two-for-one deal. Capture us and take out Stone. But why leave Stone alive? I mean even long enough to interrogate?”

    “Because of the files. Whatever is hidden in them is so sensitive that they have to be sure they’ve eliminated any possible leaks.”

    “Right. Stone’s not a dumb guy. If he got his hands on anything that was likely to get him killed he’d definitely have backups of it somewhere, as a bargaining tool or just as spite from beyond the grave.” I said.

    “And if they’ve been planning an attack on him, they’d know that. The problem is neither we nor Stone have the files.” Way agreed.

    “Yeah, that would have made the interrogation fairly…lengthy.” I said.

    “I heard what you said, while we were in the truck I mean.” Way said.

    “What I said?” I asked, reviewing the conversation I’d had with moustache man.

    “About making them regret hurting me.” Way said softly.

    Oh. That part of the conversation.

    “I…once this is over I need to ask you something.” she said.

    My stomach felt like lead and the rest of me was envious of it.

    “O-okay.” I agreed. I hated that we couldn’t dreamspeak with each other here. I have a very strong imagination and in the absence of comforting data I’m not immune from that imagination turning against me. In the beat of a heart it filled my head with a thousand terrible possibilities, each scarier than the one before. The worst part though was that I knew exactly how to fix the problem. All I had to do was talk to Way. All I had to do was ask her what she meant. But she’d asked that we wait till this was over. Part of my wanted to respect that. Part of me said I was an idiot for being worried at all. Part of me was afraid though. All the terrible ideas that surged through my mind? All I wanted to do was run and hide from them and pushing them off till the future was one way to do that.

    “For now though we need to figure out what’s up with those files.” Way said, guiding our conversation back on track.

    “Right. The files. Well, we may not have them but we can probably figure out what was in them.” I said, trying to unscramble my thoughts.

    “Something incriminating.” Way guessed.

    “Worse, something identifying.” I said.

    “Secret society of assassins. They must have some local members who they can’t risk having exposed.”

    “And enemies.” I suggested.

    “The Night Warder definitely wasn’t their friend.”

    “And given that they’re willing to burn down buildings, shoot cops and kill private investigators, I can’t imagine regular law enforcement would be fond of them either.” I said.

    “Kill private investigators.” Way said and I could see the connection form in her mind. “I think we know who stole the files from them.”

    I blinked.

    “I think you’re right. Oh, yeah, that fits much too well.” I said, catching up to her.

    “They didn’t know who we were while we were on stage.” Way said.

    “But they knew that Shurman was meeting with his employer at the Club.” I said.

    “Yes, but why kill him then? Why not drug him like they planned to do with us?” Way asked.

    “Try this idea on: They find out that Shurman stole their files. They get to his office and find out that he’s meeting with his employer at the Club. Somehow they get a message to him that makes him think we’re supposed to meet on the roof. He shows up there and they try to ambush him like they did us. But he fights back. Maybe he kills one of them, maybe not. Either way they don’t have a choice, they have to kill him.” I said.

    “It’s possible. Detective Shurman was a fighter, and he was experienced enough to see a trap before it was sprung.” Way agreed.

    “So they’ve got a corpse on their hands but they don’t know who his employer was.” I said.

    “Or why he was looking into them.” Way agreed.

    “Yeah, they have to be paranoid and assume that someone is on to them. So they trash his office looking for a clue to who it was. Shurman didn’t keep notes on who he was working for though. I asked him and he said it was bad for confidentiality and too much work.”

    “They staked out his office then on the chance they’d get lucky?” Way asked.

    “They have the personnel, I’m willing to bet they staked out his office, his apartment and probably the top ten places we’d go if we knew what the files said. You don’t need luck when you have enough manpower to work with.” I said.

    “I don’t like where this is going.” Way said.

    “I don’t either. Their operative at his office sees us with a cop and realizes capture’s not an option. If the police get involved the whole thing blows wide open. So the lookout takes a shot and then comes in for the other kills.”

    “He and I get into a gunfight but he’s recognized who we are, so he flees to report in to the rest of the Brotherhood rather than go out in a blaze of glory, or be captured and forced to spill their secrets.” Way said.

    “And from there the Brotherhood starts targeting us. We’re obviously Shurman’s employers at that point. So they go to our apartment to wait for us.”

    “And they find the security measures we put in place there.” Way said.

    “We kinda shot ourselves in the foot with that I guess. We’d done enough to secure our stuff in that room that they couldn’t be sure they’d found everything or that we wouldn’t know someone was waiting for us before we went in.” I said.

    “Especially if they’d already had Shurman almost fight off one of their ambushes.” Way said.

    “So they burn the place down.” I said.

    “That makes sure we don’t have a place to stay, and in the confusion they’d be able to pick us off from the rooftops.” Way agreed.

    “And then you get the drop of one of them and his partner shoots him.” I said.

    “They’ve been having a miserable night haven’t they?” Way asked.

    “The Chimera Club makes up for it a bit. They had to figure we were connected to Stone somehow, otherwise why would we have met Shurman there right?”

    “Apart from needing to maintain our cover and not having a lot of time? But they wouldn’t know that.” Way said.

    “Easier to assume that we were working for Stone. He uses minions all the time. Then we get driven up to the Club with an escort of bruisers to keep us safe. We couldn’t have looked more in league with Stone if we’d tried.” I said.

    “And so they attack the club, but why wait till everyone left?” Way asked.

    “Simple: they’ve got manpower but they’re stretched thin tonight. Also take the King and you can find out everything his pawns have been up to.” I said.

    “So what’s their next move?” Way asked.

    “Well, they’ve lost us and lost Stone. Two more of their men are down. They could cut their losses and run at this point.” I suggested.

    “Except for one thing.” Way pointed out.

    “The fateweaving.” I agreed. They were a part of it as much as Smythe, Deckard and Stone. Until it was resolved, none of them would be free of its pull.

    “They’re going to call in more of their forces.” Way said.

    “Yeah. Which means we need to find out what’s going on before they find us again.” I said.

    “The file?” Way asked.

    “That and what Madelaine Deckard and Cranston Smythe are doing.” I said.

    “And what became of Guy McIntyre.” Way said.

    “Yeah. He’s at the heart of all this. We find him and I’m betting we’ll have the key to solving this whole thing.” I said.

    “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that.” a girl said as she dropped off the roof on a wire.

    Luck is a complicated thing. For one thing there’s far less of it than most people imagine. Many events can be traced back to a series of decisions, or at least physical conditions, that created them. “It’s bad luck it rained the day we went to the beach” is an example of both. That’s the result of observable physical conditions (the rain) and a poor decision (not checking the weather forecast before planning an outing).

    In that sense, Way and I winding up in the back of a moving truck, tied up and held at gunpoint wasn’t bad luck. We’d made our choices. They’d led us to a spot we couldn’t get out of. At least not without cheating. The question was what sort of cheating could manage to get the job done.

    I tested the walls of reality with a little nudge of dream magic and immediately eased off. The mere fact that I was awake was straining the bounds of what the world could tolerate. Any more direct cheating on my part would pitch the city into the dreaming, with the rest of Earth Glass to follow shortly thereafter, mostly likely as a cloud of rapidly expanding and disconnected idea fragments.

    I tested my bonds by flexing my wrists and feet. They were made of rope and tied tight enough to cut off circulation. That told me the guys who’d picked us up had put together the operation quickly, probably in response to Way beating their marksman. If they’d had time, they’d be using handcuffs or manacles. It said something about their organization that they’d had incendiaries and knockout grenades available at a moment’s notice but not restraints. Reflecting on that, I didn’t like our chances of surviving the next few hours.

    “You could save your friends a lot of pain if you told us where you’ve hidden the files you stole from us.” one of my captors said in accented English. He had the kind of pencil thin moustache that suggested he wanted to appear sauve, unfortunately it didn’t fit the blocky bone structure of the rest of his face. His companion was clean shaven and had a brow so thick I wasn’t sure he had a full set of human chromosomes. Whatever his parentage was though he knew how to hold his rifle properly.

    “You’ve got the wrong girls.” I told Mr Moustache.

    “For your sake, I hope that’s not true.” he said.

    “Why? What are you going to do to us?” I asked. I knew, in general terms, what they had in mind and I wasn’t all that interested in exploring the details but the more they talked the more chance I’d find a clue to how we were going to escape.

    “We are going to ask you some questions.”

    “And if I don’t want to answer them?”

    “We have chemicals that will insure that is not a problem.”

    “Chemicals? What kind of chemicals?” I figured playing up the scared and confused stage girl was the safest play I could make. Unless their secret society had access to technology far in advance of the rest of the world, I knew what sort of chemicals they’d be using. Opium, hallucinogens and other similar tools were the stock-in-trade of the professional (and immoral) interrogators on Earth Glass. Dosage and purity control were poor at best, as was the accuracy of the results produced, but the effects on the subject looked so profound that people had a hard time shaking their belief in the efficacy of the drugs.

    “A special formulation of our own devising. Be assured Ms. Lee, you will have no secrets from us. You’re future need not hold the special agonies that we can bestow though, all you need to do is to submit to the will of the Dragon.” the gleam of madness played in Mr Moustaches eyes. It was worrisome that he knew “The Amazing Jin’s” last name, but not that surprising. They’d been able to find where we lived in under an hour. Turning up information wasn’t a problem for them.

    I looked at him closely. It wasn’t just madness in his eyes. His pupils weren’t quite dilating right. Apparently the society was a firm believer in drugs all around.

    “You don’t want to know my secrets.” I told him.

    They both laughed.

    “You and your friend led us on quite a chase, but I assure you, to the Brotherhood of the Dragon you are nothing.” Moustache said.

    The semi-human looking guy kicked Way’s leg in agreement with his companion’s opinion. I felt something cold run through my veins and a little voice in the back of my head wondered whether I really cared about Earth Glass all that much.

    I stayed quiet for a moment to make sure I had my emotions under control.

    “I’m going to make you a promise; if you harm my friend, you will regret it in ways that no human in history has ever regretted their actions.” I said calmly and without inflection.

    I wasn’t speaking to them, not precisely. I was warning the world. For the most part injustice, cruelty and the other forms of human evil were not something I couldn’t change. To wish the world into a state where no evil could befall the innocent would mean changing it on such a profound level that most worlds would shatter under the strain. Even the one’s that could bear the alteration would lose too much for it to be worth it. A world where I dictated all that was allowed to occur would be little more than a fancy clockwork that reflected no one else’s desires but my own.  That kind of world could be fun to visit, like an amusement park, but it wasn’t a place where people could live and grow.

    So I was careful to tread gently in the worlds I visited. Unless someone hurt Way.

    I didn’t dwell on what I would do to them. I just knew that, unreasonable as it was, I would not allow them to harm her, no matter what the cost to Earth Glass was.

    “You should not speak to us like that.” Mr Moustache said with a snarl. He raised his rifle and reversed it. His next action would have been to smash me in the face with the butt of the rifle. To his good fortune though he was interrupted before he could make the final mistake of his lifetime.

    As Mr. Moustache spun his rifle around, there was a tremendous crash and the moving truck bounced violently to one side. Moustache and Cro Magnon Man were both tossed off their feet. The rest of us were already laying on the floor but the crash was violent enough to bounce us off the walls.

    I landed on my back and started working frantically on my ropes.

    “We’re under attack! Kill them!” Moustache shouted. He’d lost his grip on the rifle he was carrying but his companion was still armed.

    I wrenched my hands free of the ropes but I could see it was going to be too late. He was both too far away for me to reach and too close for him to miss.

    A blonde blur passed in front of me and I heard the rifle crack.

    I almost did something regrettable but I noticed that Way have managed to get the barrel of the rifle pointed at the roof of the truck before the shot went off.

    A moment later I heard a different sort of rifle crack – this one being where it smashed into the Cro Magnon’s nose and shattered it. The man gave a choking cry as I saw Way bury her elbow in his throat and then flip him over her shoulder so hard that he flew to the back end of the truck and smashed through the doors to tumble out onto the road we were racing along.

    Moustache dove for his rifle as Way worked the bolt action on the one she’d taken from his partner. Both of them were interrupted by another collision. From the sound and the force of the crash I guessed that some maniac was playing bumper cars with us and was using a truck that was bigger than ours to do it.

    Somehow the truck we were in manage to avoid tipping over, which gave Way and Moustache a chance to regain their balance, while I got my feet free of the ropes.

    Moustache made another attempt for his rifle, but Way pre-empted that with a strike to to his jaw using the rifle as a club. I heard bone snap and watched her kick him in the side hard enough to launch him out of truck after his companion. Seeing the impact that he made on the asphalt made me wonder if it wouldn’t have been nicer to just shoot him. He was still twitching when he came to a rest but if there were any unbroken bones in his body they could only have been very tiny ones.

    “Are you ok?” Way asked.

    “Yeah, thanks for the timely save there.” I said.

    “Thanks for distracting them. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to get out of those ropes in time.” she said, anger still rippling through the muscles of her face.

    I saw something there, in that moment. She could have dealt with our captors much more gently if she’d wanted to. She could have disabled them or even knocked them out without breaking a sweat. They’d threatened me though.

    Its hard to put into words what I felt in that instant. On the one hand there was the warm, squishy, happy feeling of knowing that I was that important to her. On the other hand though there was the understanding of what that meant she’d been willing to throw away for me. She was strong, but it was kindness that she’d always kept in her heart. To cast that off would be like destroying who she’d chosen to be. That wasn’t something I ever wanted her to do for me.

    My musings were cut off by another tremendous crash. Whoever was playing automotive patty cake was done fooling around. Our truck rolled over completely onto its side. All of us inside the truck were smashed into what had been the left wall as it skidded against the ground leaving behind sparks and random bits of metal behind.

    When we came to a rest, I checked myself over and was pleasantly surprised to find nothing was broken. Way looked at me and nodded, indicating she was similarly in one piece.

    “We need to get out of here.” she said.

    “We can’t leave the two here though.” I said.

    “Are you one of Eddie Stone’s underlings then?” a new voice asked.

    A woman, clad in black stepped around the back of the truck and peered in through the opening. She had two gleaming guns, one in each hand and was wearing bulky enough clothing that I knew she was well armored too. The full face mask was a bit surprising but far less so than the feeling that ran through me as I watch her.

    Way looked over at me with eyes as wide as mine were. Neither of us moved a muscle.

    “Not used to having guns pointed at you? Maybe you don’t work for Stone.” the costumed woman said.

    I blinked and shook my head to regain my voice.

    “No. We don’t work for him. I’m pretty sure he’d like to shoot us in fact.” I said.

    “Well that’s a mark in your favor then. What’s your name?”

    “Jin.” I said.

    “Way.”

    “Well Jin and Way, you can call me the Night Warder. I believe you were talking about getting out of here? Allow me to endorse that idea fully.” she said as she bent down and waved a small vial under Eddie Stone’s nose. Smelling salts. “The police will be here soon and I’m willing to bet that if you were interesting enough for the Brotherhood of the Dragon to kidnap then you’re not the sort who would enjoy being interrogated by the law for the next few days.”

    “What about these two?” I asked as Stone started to twitch violently awake.

    “I’ll take care of them.” Ms. Night Warder said.

    “Take care of them how?” I asked.

    “I’ll see that they get the medical care they need. If I wanted them dead, I’d have shot them already.”

    “Fair enough. Why did you rescue us though?” I asked.

    “You were a bonus. I was looking for these two, but I’m glad I was able to keep you out of the Dragon’s hands.” she said.

    “You seem to know a lot about them.” I said.

    “It’s one of the perils of my profession.” she said.

    “But you can’t tell us because it’s too dangerous for us to know?” I guessed.

    “I’m afraid so.”

    I nearly burst out laughing. It felt Poetic Justice and Karma had found me in a dark alley and were beating me with a pair of Irony bats.

    In the distance, the sounds of sirens picked up and started growing closer.

    “You better get a move on.” Night Warder said.

    “Right. See you later.” I told her as Way and I headed out of the ruined truck.

    We made it to the nearest alley before Way grabbed my arm.

    “That was her! We found the dreamweaver!”

    During times of stress a lot of different things can go through your mind. Tactical insights and strategic plans can blossom as the brain scrambles to imagine solutions to the problem it’s faced with. Those are the helpful sort of thoughts to have. Especially when you’re stuck in a narrow tunnel with two gangsters who would be delighted to see you shot full of holes and you know there’s someone waiting around the next corner ready to do exactly that.

    Then there are the not so helpful sort of thoughts.

    “Seriously? Again?” I complained silently. It wasn’t that we were being ambushed in a dusty tunnel that should have been safe. It wasn’t that we were stuck with prisoners who wanted to kill us. It wasn’t even that our attacker had gotten the drop on us. It was that this wasn’t the first time all of those things were true.

    It was one of the perils of being a dreamlord. Even when Way and I tried to go on vacation and lay low all kinds of trouble would still manage to find us. In situations like this, where we were actively looking for trouble, the sky was the limit for what could go wrong.

    I nudged Way and held up my hand to stop Stone and his bodyguard. We were in a narrow, empty corridor. That didn’t give us a lot of options. If we retreated we’d be in the Chimera Club as it burned to the ground. Having already been in one collapsing building within the last several hours, I wasn’t all that interested in repeating the experience. Moving forward was pretty certain to provoke a hail of gunfire though and that wasn’t too appealing either.

    I reached into my satchel and found a pair of “billiard balls”. One looked like a cue ball and the other the eight ball. In place of solid core like a real pool ball though, these were filled with a pair of chemicals. As long as the balls were intact, the chemicals were perfectly harmless.

    I hurled the cue ball at the turn in the corridor beyond which our ambushers were waiting. The ball shattered into a hundred pieces and the chemicals within had a violent little party with each other. Smoke filled the corridor instantly, exploding out from the point of impact to obscure all visibility.

    Way was off like a shot, with the bodyguard following her. The smoke was dense, designed so that it would puff up over the stage and then quickly sink back down to reveal the outcome of our illusion. For a stage performance that was wonderful. In this case it sucked since it meant the smoke was only going to buy us a few seconds to act.

    I was considering when to throw the eight ball when I felt something odd. It took me a second to recognize that someone on my homeworld was trying to prod me awake. I groaned. This was about the worst possible moment for me to try to split my attention. On the other hand people didn’t wake me at home unless something really important was going on.

    I tried to resist waking at home. Way needed me here. The poking grew more insistent. Worse, I felt myself getting somewhat woozy on Earth-Glass. Something was wrong with the smoke. It wasn’t dissipating as fast as it should have been.

    My head started to spin as I wracked my brain for some understanding of what was happening. Then I heard metal clink on the stone floor nearby and got a lung full of gas that left my lips and tongue tingling and numb.

    Knockout gas. They’d taken advantage of the smoke to vent a canister of knockout gas so that Way and the bodyguard had walked right into it. Then they’d tossed a canister down the corridor to take care of any stragglers.

    I really hate bad guys who come prepared. And who react quickly.

    I pulled a scarf out to breath through and tugged on Stone’s sleeve. We had to fall back, even if it meant falling back to a burning building.

    I felt something yank on my leg, and managed in my addled state to figure out that it was someone on my homeworld doing it. Sighing, I put my body on Earth Glass on auto-pilot and checked out, mentally, to see what the problem was on my homeworld.

    The trip home passed in a blink and I found myself looking down my bed at my sister. This time rather than hiding in my wardrobe, she was sitting at the foot of my bed, yanking on my toes.

    “WAKE UP!” she demanded.

    “Peri, what is it? What’s wrong?” I asked. She hadn’t woken me like this before, so no matter how desperate I was to get back to Earth Glass, I wasn’t going to be mad at her. Or so I told myself.

    “The monster under my bed ATE the puppy girl!” Peri shouted at me.

    “What?” I asked, to buy myself time. The ‘puppy girl’ was Belle, but there wasn’t an actual monster under Peri’s bed, and even if there was Belle should have been more than capable of handling it. I searched outwards with my awareness and didn’t find any sign of her though.

    “The puppy girl went under my bed and I called to her and she’s not coming out so the monster ate her up!” Peri said. She wasn’t scared by that though, she was angry. The adorable little furrows on her brow said I could either fix what was wrong, or join the monster under her bed as a subject of her terrible wrath.

    I buried my face in my hands. I didn’t have the time for this. Not right this second. On the other hand ignoring it could prove to be a horrible mistake too.

    “Ok, let’s take a look at what’s going on.” I told Peri and got out of bed.

    Peri followed me into her room, her serious expression never wavering.

    Glancing around revealed little more than the contents of any other four year olds room. More toys that normal since Peri’s birthday had been just last week, but those had mostly joined the mountain of stuffed animals or the piles of kids books that had cluttered her room since before she was born. Buried underneath the largest portion of the stuffed animal menagerie sat Peri’s little bed.

    “Don’t go under there. The monster will eat you too.” Peri said, grabbing hold of my sweatpants.

    “Don’t worry. If the monster tries to eat me, I’ll eat him right back.” I told her with a serious look in my eyes. It helped that I was being quite literal. When you can shape reality there’s less need to destroy the monsters you find. Not when you can “repurpose” them for later use.

    I went to bend down and felt the concrete floor underneath me. I’d succumbed to the gas on Earth-Glass. I closed my eyes on my homeworld and felt my body on Earth-Glass dwindling into unconsciousness. With a snarl I forced my eyes open on Earth-Glass and saw that Eddie Stone was down for the count as well. Ahead of us, another knockout gas grenade lay on the ground. They’d thrown one beyond us to make sure we couldn’t escape the effect. Reality groaned and creaked at the notion that I was somehow ignoring the effects of the gas, so rather than push it too far I let myself sink down into the proper embrace of unconsciousness, right after I made sure that my scarf was in place over my mouth so that I’d receive less of a dose than I might otherwise have to contend with.

    Opening my eyes on my homeworld again,  I glanced under Peri’s bed. There was nothing there. Or more precisely there was “Nothing” there. A small rift in reality floated under her bed leading to a place that bore only a passing resemblance to reality.

    “Oh no.” I sighed.

    “Do you see her? Do you see the puppy girl?” Peri asked.

    “I need to look closer. I think I see where she went. Stay close to me ok?” I told her.

    Normally the right thing to do is to send children as far away from dangerous situations as possible. In this case however I wasn’t about to let my sister out of my sight. Rifts to the Dreamlit World, the border between the cosmos of the real and the realm of the unreal, were not something to that should be able to exist in my world, but thanks to my presence the normal rules weren’t fully in play.

    Dreamlords have a disruptive effect on reality when they stay in a place for a while. It was something we could mitigate or even eliminate by keeping our powers in check, like Way and I were doing on Earth-Glass. The other alternative, on worlds that weren’t as fragile as Earth-Glass, was that we simply dealt with the disruptions that our presence caused. Unless someone else dealt with them first, that is.

    “I don’t think the monster ate Belle.” I told Peri. “In fact I think Belle is paying him a visit right now to sort things out.”

    The rift under Peri’s bed wasn’t like the reality fractures Way and I were looking for on Earth Glass. A reality fracture is a failure of the world to reconcile something with the essential rules that defined the world. In the case of Earth Glass, it had a whole lot of “essential rules” that made its reality very solid and dependable. They also made it brittle. My homeworld on the other hand was more fluid. In one sense it wasn’t as “real” as Earth Glass, super science, meta-human powers and faerie magic routinely ignored the “laws” of physics and somehow everything held together ok. The rift was a step beyond that, a graver violation of reality itself, but there wasn’t the danger that it would spread wildly on its own or shatter the world.

    I reached out to touch the rift and felt a resistance in the way. As I’d expected the resistance had the feel of Belle’s magic to it. On this side of the rift, I could push through it with effort, but there’d be very little that could push through it going the other direction. She’d sealed the rift after she went in to make sure nothing from the Unreal could escape into reality.

    I felt out further and could sense that there was a whole sub-realm that had spawned around the rift on the Dreamlit side of barrier. Basically a tiny dream realm to serve as a secondary border against the Unreal. Within that realm would be the “monster-under-the-bed” that Peri was so angry at. I almost felt bad for the poor thing. I’d faced Belle before she was my friend. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody I didn’t truly hate.

    “Belle’s just fine sis. She’s…locked the door on the monster so he can’t get out while she has a little talk with him.” I explained.

    “When’s she going to be done?” Peri asked.

    “I don’t know. They might have a lot to talk about.” I told her. By which I meant, Belle might take her time “educating” the monster on why picking on little girls was a bad idea.

    I felt rough hands lifting me up and realized that I was being carried somewhere on Earth-Glass. If I was willing to argue with reality there, I decided I might be able to justify waking back up in response to the rough handling.

    “I’ll tell you what, if Belle’s not back by tonight, I’ll go get her ok? Until then, maybe you can go play downstairs or at Melissa’s place?” I asked Peri. Melissa was her best friend from across the street. A quick check with my awareness showed that there weren’t any rifts or other supernatural surprises over there to worry about.

    “But…the puppy girl!” Peri complained as she followed me back into my room.

    “Belle’s way scarier than any other monster. You don’t have to worry about her.” I told my sister as I slid back into bed. I felt my Earth Glass body fall onto some hard and cold surface. I had to get back there. “Just be careful and stay out of your room.”

    Peri pouted and folded her arms but didn’t put up anymore of a fight. That really should have clued me in to what she was thinking, but I was a little too distracted to notice the signs.

    Casting myself fully back to Earth-Glass was difficult. I wasn’t willing to accept a prolonged period of unconsciousness but Earth-Glass wasn’t happy with the idea that I could shrug off knockout gas faster than a big lug like Stone’s bodyguard. I called on my dream magic and tried to reason with it.

    I’d gotten a much smaller dose thanks to moving away from the initial gas grenades. Gas grenades weren’t exactly a precise delivery mechanism though so once I’d fallen I’d almost certainly inhaled far more than was needed to knock me out. I’d had the scarf to help mitigate that I reminded the world. But to get me out of the corridor whoever had carried me would have taken that away, so I would have breathed in plenty of gas without it.

    Being jostled around could wake me though, I thought. Of course if there was a good chance of that then we’d all be awake, in which case our captors would either dose us again or just shoot us.

    In the end I settled for diminishing the effects of the gas but spending several minutes fast asleep anyways. When I finally clawed my way back to consciousness, I found that the four of us had been loaded into a van. We were tied up and two men who were wearing gas masks and holding rifles were watching over us.

    “Where are you taking us?” I asked, my voice slurred with the remnants of the unnatural sleep that I’d been dragged into.

    “<One of them is awake.>” one of the hooded men said in German.

    “<She must be resistant to the gas.>” the other replied.

    “<She will not be able to resist the interrogation though.>” the first said.

    “<Yes. It will be almost a shame to kill them once we have the list back. They were quite resourceful.> the second one said.

    There were only two of them, but I was tied up and they had three hostages to use against me. I’d been in worse situations but I’d had my dream magic to fall back on then. This time I had only stage tricks and sleight of hand and it didn’t seem like they’d be up to the job of getting us all out of here in one piece.

    Laughing when something goes wrong is a natural human reaction. It’s a line of defense for our sanity and it can diffuse a many different calamities. The downside is it also makes us look guilty as sin.

    “What the hell was that? And what are you smirking about?” Stone screamed at me.

    “The gunshots? I’m guessing that the guys who blew up my building are here to finish the job. Very interesting that they’re willing to kill you too though.” I said.

    Whoever the boss of the secret society hit squad was, they apparently didn’t care about offending the biggest, most powerful gangster in the city. Or they thought a surgical strike could take Stone out before he became a problem. I thought back to how angry Madelaine Deckard had been after Stone had brushed her off earlier in the evening. Angry enough to kill him if she was the society’s leader? That would depend on how crazy she was. Secret society’s don’t usually put a premium on sanity though so “full on fruit loops” wasn’t an unthinkable possibility.

    “Interesting is it? You bring this kind of trouble into my house? You’re going to learn what interesting is. After I take care of them, I’m going to come back here and make you sing your lungs out.” Stone said as he backed away.

    “If you go out there, the attackers will kill you.” Way said, her voice calm but firm. She was speaking to Stone but looking at his bodyguard.

    “My club, my town, my rules! Nobody tells me what to do!” Stone yelled and reached into his pocket to draw his gun.

    Only to discover that it wasn’t in its holster.

    What? He’d been standing two feet away from me, paying no attention to where my hands were! It would have been criminal not to steal from him!

    He fumbled around for a moment, and then looked wildly around the room as though the gun might have jumped out of its holster on its own. It took him several seconds to notice that I was holding the battleship sized cannon he had been toting around.

    As Way predicted, his bodyguard was quicker on the uptake than his boss. He’d drawn his own hand cannon and leveled it in the direction of my head before I even saw him move. Since she’d been expecting that, Way had the gun that I’d given her drawn and trained on the bodyguard just as quickly.

    A silent moment followed the appearance of the deadly hardware as all parties took stock of the situation. Since he was the one person in the room who lacked a firearm, Stone was at the greatest disadvantage, so of course he was the first to speak.

    “You ain’t got the guts to…” he began, all bravado and contempt.

    I pulled the trigger.

    Or rather, I pulled the trigger after pointing the pistol at one of the uglier vases in the room.

    Before the barrel cooled, I pressed the end of it to his forehead. It wasn’t hot enough to burn him, but the heat helped drive home the point the thunder of the shot had made.

    I glanced over at the bodyguard. He knew what I was doing. This was negotiation. Stone knew it too. That helped a lot. The moment when we all decided to murder each other wasn’t here yet and both Stone and his bodyguard knew they were better off waiting for the situation to change in their favor.

    “Look in my eyes Eddie.” I said, just to make the point crystal clear. “Am I just some ‘normal dame’?”

    There’s nothing magic about my gaze. Not on Earth-Glass at any rate. When Eddie Stone looked into my eyes all he saw were irises and pupils. People convince themselves that they can read more in those than they actually can. “The eyes are the window to the soul”, or so goes the saying. In Eddie’s case, he was very lucky he couldn’t see my soul, or anything else that I hid behind the dark of my eyes.

    What he could see was how I held his gaze. Calm and steady. Unafraid. I felt the world groan a little at that. “The Amazing Jin” hadn’t been exposed to the sort of mayhem that would leave her blaise about holding a gun on a gangster. I was letting a little too much of my real self bleed through which in turn made my “Amazing Jin” act less convincing. Within limits that was fine. People can be all kinds of surprising in stressful situations. So long as I didn’t go over the line and show Eddie one of the sides of myself that absolutely couldn’t exist on Earth-Glass, the world could grumble all it wanted.

    “No. I guess you ain’t at that.” Stone said, releasing some of the tension from the room.

    “Good. I’ll put our cards on the table then. We came here to find out what you were up to. With what we’ve discovered, I can tell you’re not the guy we’re looking for, but you’re mixed up with him somehow. That’s lucky for you. It means Way and I have a reason to help you stay alive.” I said.

    The idea that Eddie Stone was the dreamweaver we were looking for had been a long shot. How he reacted under stress had confirmed the impression I got from questioning him. He was dangerous, but only in a very mundane sense.

    “This is you keeping us alive? I’d love to see what it’d look like if you wanted us dead.” Stone said, the anger in his voice replaced with cocky self-assurance.

    “No. You wouldn’t.” Way said. She and the bodyguard were glaring at each other. There was no anger in their expressions. No kindness either. At best you might call it professional respect.

    “Unless I miss my guess, we need to get out of here immediately, and not through any door they can see.” I said.

    “You think I’m gonna let anybody shoot up my club and get away with it? You might as well just shoot me now.” Stone said.

    “They’re not going to shoot this place up Eddie. Just the guys that were left guarding it. Once they got a clear path to your basement, they’re going to make for your boiler.” I said.

    “The boiler? What do they care about the boiler for?” Stone demanded.

    “You know a lot of folks right? Guys in the fire department too? You know what happened to our apartment? These guys aren’t regular crooks. They’re organized and they’ve got at least one guy on the payroll who likes setting fires.” I explained.

    “Oh no! Oh hell no they are not burning down my club!” Stone swore.

    A violent bang shook the building and nearly knocked me off my feet. Stone tumbled into the cushioned chair that was behind him Way and the bodyguard twitched slightly but never lost their aim.

    “Apparently that’s exactly what they’re going to do. We have to leave right now. Where’s your secret passageway out here.” I asked.

    Stone ignored me and got up to run to the door. He would have run out and fought with tooth and nail if he had to, except that his bodyguard stopped him.

    “Boss. They’re right. I can smell smoke already.”

    “What?” Stone looked bewildered. He wasn’t used to bad nights like this anymore. As an aggressive jerk, he was almost always the one making the first play and causing other people grief. I had to suppress a smile at the thought of cosmic justice catching up with him (not that it actually existed as such in Earth Glass’s reality, but sometimes random chance could do a decent impression of it).

    “Boss, anybody who could get through the boys like that and bomb us that quickly? They’re good boss.” the bodyguard said. I saw what Way meant about not fighting him. He looked like the only thing between his ears was more muscle, but he was intuiting what was going on the same way we were, and we had more experience than anyone ten times our ages should have had.

    “So we just give ‘em the club?” Stone yelled. I could hear it in his voice though; he knew his bodyguard was right. He knew to trust him. He just didn’t like it.

    “The rest of our guys are all out , I think we round them up, come back and hit these jokers hard. Make it a real Red Christmas!” the bodyguard said.

    “Don’t think we can shoot our way out?” Stone asked.

    “No.” the bodyguard said.

    “What if we use the skirts here as cover?”

    “They’ll shoot through us and keep shooting until none one is moving.” Way said.

    “Oh, well we wouldn’t want that then now would we.” Stone said.

    “It would be inconvenient.” I agreed.

    “So tell me why I shouldn’t just leave you here to burn.” Stone asked.

    “We’ll skip the human decency angle and go right to what really matters. You’ve got nothing on these guys. The only people you had who laid eyes on them stopped breathing a couple seconds later. With how good these guys are you know your boys in the field are going to turn up nothing on them.” I said.

    “I got boys everywhere. They’ll find these guys just fine.” Stone said.

    “Really? You think guys like this just rolled into town today? They knew how to find out who we were and where we lived. They knew how you worked well enough to wait till you sent out most of your men looking for them. Smart money says these guys have been here a few months at least. And you didn’t hear anything about them that whole time did you?” I asked.

    “You don’t know what I heard.”

    “Eddie, come on, like you would let a bunch of killers set up shop here and not pay tribute to you? You’re a lot of things Eddie but you’re not stupid. Don’t think I’m going to make the mistake of assuming that you are.” I said.

    “Ok. Fair enough. But you ain’t gonna try to tell me you know these guys are ya? That a stage tramp’s got a line on them when my best boys ain’t seen hide nor hair of ‘em?”

    “I don’t like insults Eddie. Don’t make me start shooting off body parts to remind you. And, yes, you’re going to believe that we know those guys. Seeing as how they’re pretty desperate to kill us, seeing as how they’ve blown up two buildings so far trying, and seeing as how we’re not dead yet, you’re going to take the safe bet and assume that we’re just a little more on the ball than they are.” I said.

    “So what’s that do for me?” he asked.

    “You want these guys. I believe you were mentioning a ‘Red Christmas’ right? No matter what happens to us, you’ve got to make an example of them if you want to stay in business. Do you think I’m going to mind what you do to them? You know, given that they’re trying to kill me? Or do you think I’ll hand them to you on a silver platter so that you can do the dirty work that you do best and I can walk away with lily white hands?” I asked him. It was a risky question because neither alternative was the truth, but the smile that I saw blossom on his face told me he’d bought into it.

    Without waiting for any more discussion, Stone moved over to one of the less tacky statues in room. It was a small bust of Napoleon which rested on a table that was covered with various bottles of alcohol. He turned it’s head around and flicked a small tab on it to reveal a key that had been concealed inside.

    The key fit into the lock of a safe that lay behind one of the paintings in the room. The safe in turn contained a mechanism that unlocked a large tile in the floor. The bodyguard raised the tile to reveal a plain looking tunnel underneath. For as elaborate as the entrance was I’d almost expected  there to be a rocket propelled getaway car waiting for us, but alas, Eddie Stone didn’t go in for that kind of extravagance. If we wanted to get out we were going to need to hoof it.

    “Wait, how did you know about this?” Stone asked as he got on the ladder to descend to the tunnel.

    “The private room of the city’s most powerful gangster? If you didn’t have a secret way out of here I’d have shot you for incompetence.” I said, only half joking. In truth, I wouldn’t have shot him , I just would have put him back on the list of possible reality cheaters since no one that incompetent could have made it to Stone’s position without some kind of supernatural aid.

    “Funny.” he said and headed down the ladder.

    I headed down next, followed by Way and the bodyguard.

    “This little stand-off we have going here ain’t going to work when we make it to the street. Gimme back my piece and we’ll leave like civilized people.” Stone said.

    “I wish I could Eddie, but somehow I can’t shake the impression that you’d be just as happy to shoot me as the guys who burned down your club.” I said. I was under no illusions about the damage I’d done to his ego. Eddie Stone wasn’t an idiot but people with damaged egos can do the most idiotic of things no matter how smart they are otherwise.

    “But I need you, don’t I?” he said, all fake sincerity in his voice.

    “Since when has that stopped you from icing somebody who mouthed off to you?” I asked. The bodyguard, of all people, cut short a chuckle at that. Stone frowned and looked at him with a silent sneer.

    “You are too smart for your own good sister.” Stone said, still frowning.

    “I get that a lot from guys like you.” I said. It wasn’t helping the situation in terms of defusing him, but the banter was keeping both Stone and the bodyguard’s attention on me, which left Way free to watch our flanks.

    “How secure is the other end of this tunnel?” Way asked.

    “Why?” Stone asked.

    “Because we have company.” Way said.

    We went quiet as church mice. For a moment silence reigned and then from around the next corner came the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked.

    The quiet moments leading up to a conflict are interesting. There’s a sense of impending doom that can scramble your thoughts or focus them or do both at once. People in power count on that, whether they’re aware of it or not. Their confidence allows them to approach a conflict without being burdened by the fight or flight response. Fear and adrenaline can amp up your physical abilities but it’s calm that enhances your most powerful weapon. Being able to think when those around you are driven to stupidity can make all the difference in how a conflict plays out.

    Often, the powerful don’t even need to do much thinking. They know what they want, and experience and confidence tell them they’re going to get it. They may have a set of strategies they employ to make that happen with a minimum of fuss, or they may just bull through encounters by sheer force of personality. Either way though, their minds aren’t chewed up by worry. Worry is for the little people. Or so the theory goes.

    In practice, on at least some level though, everyone is aware of how small they really are. As the top gang boss in Los Diablos, Eddie Stone was the most powerful man in the city, and one of the most powerful men in the state. For all that power though, anything from a single bullet to bad plate of shellfish could still spell the end of him. If that thought didn’t keep him up at night, there was the more obvious problem that the power he held was largely given to him by his supporters.

    A guy who got to the top by backstabbing, double dealing and cheating the system couldn’t help but be aware that his empire of “loyal guys” would be loyal right up to the moment when it benefited them more not to be. Some gangsters let that make them paranoid. Some lived in denial. Some did both.

    Boss Stone had developed his own form of craziness to get through the day. Where some gangsters hid what they were, Stone erected monuments to his sins. The Chimera Club was more than a popular night spot. It was an invitation for the law, his rivals and anyone else who thought they were up to it to attack him. In place of security he had cigarette girls, in place of locks and fences, Stone had the main doors permanently wedged open. It was a declaration to the world that Stone was ready for anybody who wanted to try taking his place.

    I had to wonder as we walked into the dim entryway if there wasn’t a part of Stone that regretted that arrogance at times like this.

    Shurman’s death had drawn attention to the club, but much worse than that it had brought chaos to it as well. Eddie Stone could handle attention. From the police, from the media and from high society. He lived for it. Chaos though was another matter. Chaos threatened to destroy the illusion of control he held.

    If Stone has shot and killed Shurman on stage that would have been fine (in Stone’s eyes). It would have shown that he was brutal, but in charge, which was pretty much exactly the image he liked to convey. That someone in Stone’s “house” had been murdered without Stone’s approval though showed that he wasn’t in charge. That things could happen that Eddie Stone had no control over whatsoever.

    Like many men of power, being reminded that he was weak was the one thing “Boss” Eddie Stone could not tolerate.

    “Looks like Mr. Stone is in a meeting.” I said as the two thugs that were escorting us lead us into the auditorium. The theater crowds had gone home for the night when the police closed the club down for their investigation. A new crowd had taken their place though, one that was made up of tough guys, thugs and other low level gangsters. Stone stood on the stage along with his giant bodyguard. The men in the audience were silent and still as church mice. Stone on the other hand was pacing and swearing like a sailor with ten stubbed toes. These were the minions who had failed him, who had let chaos catch him unawares, who had allowed him to look weak. He hadn’t had a good night, so they were going to have a miserable one.

    He was on a roll with his cursing but it didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular.  Seeing us enter shook him out of whatever train of thought he’d been riding and brought him back to focusing on the people he was chewing out.

    “So this is what we’re gonna do. You all are gonna put the word out. Let everybody know that I want this guy and I want him alive.” Stone said to the assembled gangsters.

    “What are ya gonna do to him boss?” someone called out from the crowd. Directions to go make someone else’s life miserable were exactly what this audience was waiting for.

    “I don’t know yet. I’m thinking I’ll get…creative. Maybe have us a Red Christmas and decorate the Dwan.” Stone said with a big cruel smile. The ‘Dwan’ was one of the bridges that led to Fairbanks Island. The image of a “Red Christmas” made it all too clear what they’d be decorating the bridge with if they could catch the shooter.

    I remembered to recoil from that idea after a second. It wasn’t always easy to remember to be a human. There were parts of me that could have given Stone lessons in “creative cruelty” which would have melted his mind. Even on a world like Earth Glass I knew how to hurt people more than they could believe. That wasn’t who I wanted to be though. Ever.

    It was hard to keep hold of that resolution when dealing with people like the assassins who were after us though. They’d shot at me and, worse, at Way. They’d killed someone who I knew was at the very least a decent man, and possibly a pretty good one. And they’d burned down a building with families inside it. Part of me was quite on board with Eddie Stone’s plans for the shooter.

    I was a dreamlord though and that part of me was one that I had a responsibility to control. Eddie Stone’s options were limited. Violence and cruelty weren’t the only tools he had, but they were the ones he understood best. Even limited as I was on Earth Glass, I had a lot more available to me, both in terms of options and understanding.

    So I tucked away my bloodlust and frowned at “Boss” Eddie Stone as he looked to the back of the auditorium where we stood. We were too far for my expression to register but my body language threw him off enough to do a double take. Apparently he was expecting us to be cringing or cowering or in some other “girly” pose. Anyone who knew how to fight could take one look at Way and know from how she moved that she wasn’t the “cowering” type. As for me, a room full of thugs wasn’t even enough of a threat to register on my danger scale given the things I’d faced in the last four years. I didn’t project the same quiet, deadly competence that Way did. I think I just read as unnerving and inhuman when I was in a bad mood.

    Stone waved the two goons to take us into one of the rooms that adjoined the back of the auditorium. Apparently we weren’t going to questioned in front of the group. That was good for us and for Stone, given how I expected the conversation to go.

    “You two wait here.” the thug who’d driven us to the Club instructed as he shut us into a lavishly decorated private suite.

    “I take it you’re planning to interrogate the gangster?” Way asked after the two thugs left.

    “We might have it all wrong. Stone might be our dreamweaver. It would explain how he built his empire so quickly.” I said.

    “Possibly. There are a lot of ‘disappearances’ that can help explain that too though.” she said.

    “You’re probably right. I’m not seeing any reality fractures here, so odds are he earned his money via good old fashioned “murder”. He’s tied up in this though, so even if he’s not our dreamweaver he may know something we can use.” I said, passing a table topped with elegant crystal knick-knacks that had been set up as an attempt to add a touch of class to the environment. It, along with the rest of the decorations in the room, failed in that endeavor and instead screamed that the decorator had more money than artistic sense.

    “His bodyguard might be an issue if we need to leave before we’re invited to.” Way said as she settled onto one end of a small couch in the center of the room.

    “He is pretty big.” I agreed as I settled down into the couch beside her.

    “He’s a fighter too. Don’t tangle with him if you don’t have to.” she warned.

    “Are you calling dibs this early?” I asked her.

    “You get to have your fun chatting with the big bad gangster.” she reminded me.

    My attempt at a witty reply was cut-off by the door to the room opening. Stone and the wall of muscle that was his bodyguard entered, still talking to one of his underlings.

    “Yes I want you to talk to the cops. Talk to everybody! I want this guy delivered to me before my morning paper gets here!” Eddie Stone bellowed. The underling he was talking to fled without asking another question. I clucked my tongue and shook my head.

    A guy who was in charge of as many people as Eddie Stone was should have been better at people management than that. Leadership through anger bred subordinates who couldn’t think for themselves and were paralyzed with indecision in any but the simplest of situations. If we hadn’t been otherwise engaged, it would have been fun to take the cities gangs away from Stone by simply training up a replacement who had some actual people skills.

    “So do you dames know why you’re here.” Stone asked after his bodyguard closed the door.

    “Your boys said you liked our act and wanted to give us a job as the headliners for the show.” I said. No harm embellishing a little.

    “Like your act? Yeah, I liked your act just fine. Right up to the part where somebody dropped a stiff on my stage.” Stone said, pacing forward to loom over us as he spoke. He wrinkled his nose in disgust as he got close. It took me a second to figure out where that came from; I still reeked of smoke from the burning building I’d been in.

    “That bit wasn’t part of our program.” I said, looking up into Stone’s eyes without flinching. He wasn’t a big man, but since we were sitting he managed to loom over us.

    He held my gaze a couple of long moments before breaking away to start pacing the room again. Before he turned his back to us, I saw a scowl of confusion and irritation on his face. We weren’t behaving how he expected us too. We weren’t terrified by his mere presence.

    “From what I hear, it didn’t seem to bother you much though.” Stone said.

    “Should it have?” I asked.

    “Most broads would at least bat an eye at a dead guy.”

    “We’re not most broads.”

    “Yeah, so who are you then? Cause how I see it? It looks like you knew the stiff and I can’t see how that’d be true for a pair of no name stage girls working tryout night.” Stone said, waving his cigar at us so violently that he shook its ashes all over the room.

    “What makes you think we knew him?” I asked. I kept any trace of concern out of my voice, but I was interested in the answer. If Stone was our untrained dreamweaver he’d have some wildly improbable story to support how he’d found out about our connection to Shurman.

    “Don’t play dumb with me. The stiff was a P.I. and you were in his office not an hour later when a beat cop got shot in the head there. So tell me, you been going around offing private dicks and cops tonight?”

    “Wait, how could you know that? About the office I mean?” I asked. I didn’t care about covering up our involvement with Shurman. If Stone was a dreamweaver than it was worth revealing secrets more dangerous than that to find out. If he wasn’t then we could deal with him in a lot of ways.

    “How could I know? I got people on the force, I got people in the dispatchers office, I got people in places you don’t even know there are people. I know everything that happens in my town!” Stone yelled not two feet away from my face.

    That’s when the first gun shots erupted outside the room.

    When Kari had first approached Way and I to look into what was going wrong with the world she was tending, we’d put together a plan. It had taken over a week to come up with the right identities and craft them, slowly and gently, into their place in the world. Then we’d done fate weavings to get positions as the representatives of Windy Springs. That had given us an excuse to be looking into Guy McIntyre’s whereabouts. From there we’d laid out a nice intricate strategy of moves and alternatives to cover the possibilities we could see arising. Since we were waiting for our apprenticeship assignments to begin we’d made the whole scheme fit within a three week time frame and that was more rushed than either of us preferred.

    “Can we do this in two days?” Way asked after Professor Haffrun left.

    “It’ll be almost impossible.” I said, offering her a smile of reassurance. So many people had called us “impossible” over the years that we wore it as a badge of honor. It was also literally true but we didn’t dwell on that aspect as much.

    “As impossible as getting any service here?” Way smiled and nodded over to where the waiter had found yet another customer to deal with rather than us.

    “The longer he takes, the longer we can freeload here and see if our assassin friends work up the nerve to take another shot at us.” I pointed out.

    “True. I don’t know if I feel like sleeping in this booth though if they take all night though.”

    “We need to come up with some new plans. Both for the assassins and for tracking down McIntyre.” I said.

    “You think there’s any chance the one isn’t related to the other?” Way asked.

    “Any chance? Maybe. If we’re right about there being a nascent dreamweaver, they could be drawing in all sort of craziness as a side-effect of the changes they’re forcing on the world.” I said.

    “All sorts of craziness like us?”

    “We’re the best kind of craziness, and, yeah, that didn’t escape me either. If Kari got snared in someone else’s fate weaving, it could be drawing us in just by pulling on her.”

    “Should we go back to the Parliament to check? I didn’t think to look for that last time we talked to her.” Way said.

    “I didn’t either but let’s hold off for now. You’re anchored here and on my world right?”

    “Yes. It would take me a little while to transit back to the Parliament.” Way said.

    “Same for me, and I’m betting we’ll have some more questions for her once we talk to a few people.” I said.

    “So we’ll tackle things here first. I think we’ll have to throw away our original plan though.” Way said.

    I sighed.

    “I suppose you’re right. There’s no point getting a job at the Chimera Club at this point. We don’t have time for subtle investigations anymore.” I said. We’d hoped to parlay the exposure working at the Club would bring us into invitations to a number of upcoming “high society” parties. That would have let us meet some of the people at the center of the fate weaving under circumstances that wouldn’t raise their awareness (and potentially induce more reality warping on their part).

    “Agreed. Though it’s a shame. I liked the routine we’d put together.” Way stopped herself with a small frown, disappointment and something else playing behind her eyes.

    “I did too. If we’re going to save Kari’s project though we’re going to need to talk to Eddie Stone, Madelaine Deckard and Cranston Smythe as soon as possible.” I said.

    “The gangster, Mcintyre’s assistant, and the developer. If we assume the assassins who tried to kill us are the same ones who killed Detective Shurman, then we can rule out that they were working for Stone.” Way said.

    “Yeah, Stone’s flunkies wouldn’t have ruined his show for him. He doesn’t seem like the ‘multi-headed monster tattoo’ type either. If those guys aren’t part of a secret society I’ll eat the rabbit in my hat.”

    “The question is who’s leading the secret society and why did they want McIntyre out of the picture?” Way said.

    “Madelaine Deckard maybe?” I suggested.

    “Why her?”

    “She’s McIntyre’s assistant, so she would have known the most about where he was going. Easier to set up plans to take out a shy recluse when you know his whole itinerary. She’s also in the best position to take advantage of his disappearance.”

    “And our dreamweaver?” Way asked.

    “Smythe would fit. Kari arranged for the grant to be awarded to the city on the contingency that a project plan for urban renewal be submitted within three months. Smythe had one drawn up in less than a week.”

    “That suggests that we should pay a visit to Mr. Smythe first then since he’s our primary target.” Way said.

    “Only we’re not going to do that.” I replied.

    “Because if we do we’ll lead the assassins that are tracking us right to him.” Way said, following my train of thought.

    “And if we try to fight a group of prepared assassins with a nascent dreamweaver around…” I began.

    “…there’s almost no chance he won’t awaken.” Way finished for me.

    “Right.”

    “That works out for us. We’ve already got a pretext for seeing Ms. Deckard.” Way said.

    “Yeah, however reclusive and hard to reach Guy McIntyre is supposed to be, it won’t look too weird if we barge into his penthouse suite since we’re trying to save Windy Springs.” I said.

    “And if Ms. Deckard isn’t there?” Way asked.

    “Then she won’t mind us searching the place for any clues on what happened to him.” I grinned. If I was right and she was the one behind the assassins then we might find evidence of that too. It’s amazing how quickly secret societies become a lot less secret when you throw the right fate weaving at them. Once they didn’t have the veil of secrecy that would be the end of them. The police in Los Diablos might be a largely corrupt organization but that wouldn’t stop them from arresting the hell out of a bunch of bozos with snake tattoos who thought shooting a cop and burning down a building were great ideas.

    “Looks like someone’s finally paying attention to us.” Way observed, gesturing towards the door with a nod of her head.

    I glanced behind me and noticed that the waiter was engaged in conversation with a pair of new customers who had walked in the door. We stood out by being women. The new guys stood out by being well dressed. I was surprised by that for a moment but their posture and size told me all I needed to know about why two guys in suits would be in a place like this.

    “Leg breakers?” I guessed.

    “Yep and here for us.” Way said, watching them from behind her menu.

    “The next set of assassins?” I asked.

    “No. These work for Stone.” she said.

    “How can you tell?”

    “They’re comfortable here. The assassins are out of towners based on their attacks. From how they’re talking with the waiter, these guys are locals who moved up.” she said.

    I risked another glance over my shoulder and saw the two thugs heading towards us.

    “Are you da ‘Amazing Jin’?” the broader of the two asked when they reach our booth.

    “Only when I’m on stage.” I told him wearily.

    “Yer coming wit us then.” the other thug said.

     I looked at Way and cocked an eyebrow. She replied with a small shrug. These guys were big, strong, and tough. We were sitting in a booth. If it came to a fight they’d have us at a disadvantage. That didn’t bother Way at all, so she was willing to play it however I preferred.

    “Sorry there crusher, you’re not my type.” I told him.

    “Boss Stone wants a word wit you.” the first thug explained.

    “Oh, why didn’t you say so. Did he like the show?” I asked, still not rising from the booth.

    “Yeah, he liked it just fine. Wants to ask you some questions about it.” the second thug said.

    “A magician never divulges her secrets. But maybe he wanted to make us a job offer?” I asked.

    “Sure. Sure. He’s got an offer for ya.” the first thug said.

    “It’s pretty late. Maybe I’ll talk to him about it in the morning .” I said. I didn’t have any reason to antagonize the brutes. I was just being ornery because I don’t like being pushed around. Way noticed and gave me a look that asked if it was “fighty time” yet. I shook my head. For as rude as the ‘invitation’ was, getting a chance to talk to Boss Eddie Stone on what he thought were his own terms was potentially convenient.

    “He wants to talk to you now!” the first thug insisted.

    “I guess a nightclub owner keeps late hours. Ok, can’t turn down a chance at a good paying gig I guess. You two bring a ride?” I asked.

    They had.

    I’d seen tanks that wished they were as big and sturdy as the gangster mobile these guys drove. They “let” us sit in the back, which wasn’t surprising given that the door locks were controlled from the front seats. I had to chuckle at that. They wanted to be sure we couldn’t escape, but they hadn’t given any thought to how they’d be able to get away from us. The scarves I carried worked just as well as garrotes after all and we had easy access to their necks. They probably figured we wouldn’t try anything and that if we did the pistols they carried would dissuade us from getting out of line.

    I passed Way the gun I’d pick pocketed from the first thug, while slipping the one I got from the second thug into a hidden compartment in my satchel. I was more than happy to talk to “Boss” Stone, but there were limits to how understanding I was going to be.

    “So have you fellas worked for Stone for long?” I asked. I would have preferred to talk to Way but the kind of things we needed to talk about weren’t for the ears of guys like these thugs.

    “Yeah, been a couple years now.” the thug who was driving said.

    “He pay good?”

    “Why you know wanna know?” the other thug asked. I couldn’t blame him for being afraid to answer questions. He wasn’t all that bright from the look of things and the number of things he could say that would get him trouble far outnumbered the things that were safe for a guy in his line of work to talk about.

    “We’re going to talk to him about a job right?” I asked.

    “Oh yeah, the job. Uh, he pays real good.” the driver said.

    “He pays us real good.  Dames like you? You just need enough to get by till you find a man right?” the other thug said.

    “Yeah, we’re just looking to find a man.” I agreed with a smirk. It was surely some joke of Fate that he could be so technically right while being so very wrong in every other respect.

    “That’s what I figured. Just like all the broads out there.”

    “Not all the broads.” Way said and flashed me a quick smile.

    I thought about bending these guys with a little bit of dream magic, like I had with the crowds outside the Blue Star but decided not to. Dream magic was great, but it was hard under the best of circumstances to see all of the ramifications of changes that you made. Even something simple like a fate weaving could have unintended consequences, as Kari, Way and I had all learned the hard way. Our meta-awareness could mitigate some of that but with my magical awareness clamped down tight, it wasn’t wise push the boundaries where I didn’t need to. If my guess was correct, I’d have plenty of need to be pushing boundaries over the next few days.

    We pulled up to the Chimera Club which was strangely deserted. Granted it was late, but that was traditionally when the club was at its busiest. It seemed weird that a little thing like a homicide on the premises would deter “Boss” Stone from trying to turn a profit.

    Unless that is he was on the warpath.

    As we walked into the club I noticed that while its outside lights were off, there were plenty on inside. Not to mention plenty more gangster mobiles in the parking lot.

    This was going to be a fun little meeting.

    There’s something inherently spooky about someone you’ve never met knowing your name. I suppose if you’re famous it’s the kind of thing you get used to, but my powers haven’t put me in the spotlight that much. Even at the Parliament, where I can use them freely, I’m not anyone particularly unusual. If someone I didn’t know walked up to me there and called me by name I would have been surprised and possibly confused. On Earth-Glass, hearing the name “Jin Smith” was borderline terrifying.  “Jin Smith” was a girl who didn’t exist there which meant none of the natives could possibly have met her.

    “I’m sure I don’t know…” I began to say as I looked up to see who the man who’d said my name was. The coveralls of a dockworker might as well have been a cloak of invisibility for how normal they made him appear. It was only the smirk on his lips and the knowing gleam in his eyes that caught my attention. I’d seen that smirk and those twinkling eyes too many times over the last four years not to recognize them instantly.

    “Professor Haffrun?” I hissed in a shocked whisper.

    Professor Lynn Haffrun had been my first contact with the Parliament of Time. She was a dream walker, someone with the power to move themselves from world to world. She’d been sent by the Parliament to keep an eye on my Earth and had ultimately been an essential element in keeping it from being wiped from existence on the day that I “woke up”. In the aftermath of that conflict, the Parliament had made open contact with my world and “Agent Haffrun” had been replaced by a formal ambassador. Lynn could have continued as a special agent but had instead chosen to return to teaching, just in time to be saddled with guiding Way and I along in our studies.

     “That’s ‘Mr Haffrun’ to you.” the man said as he motioned me over in the both so that he could sit with us. I pushed in to make room and noticed that Way had the same nervous expression that I was wearing too.

    Technically, worlds like Earth-Glass were interdicted by the Parliament. In the case of Earth-Glass, that meant that dream travelers of any kind were not supposed to venture there without special permission (which we had) and to leave at the first signs of reality fractures (which we had kind of omitted knowing about in our application). That Professor Haffrun was here suggested she’d noticed what was going on. The open question was whether she’d let anyone else in the Parliament know about it too.

    “You seem surprised to see me.” Professor Haffrun observed. His smile wasn’t malicious. It was instructive. Which was worse. Malicious people want to cause you trouble. Instructive people want to cause you trouble and make you learn from it.

    “You’re burlier than usual.” I pointed out. That was a weak excuse. Dream walkers, like dream lords, create new identities for themselves when they travel to a new world. The age, gender, race and all other physical characteristics of the identity are based on nothing more than the whim of the dream traveler. I usually choose to be a girl of the same age and appearance as my homeworld’s self. It feels more comfortable and it’s more convenient for being able to move easily from one world to the other because it resonates with who I see myself to be.

    Professor Haffrun was a more practical sort. On Earth Glass it was easier to work in society as a man, hence he chose to be a man here. I tended to think of Professor Haffrun as female because she had a mild preference towards presenting herself that way, but I’d seen him present himself as a man on several occasions and seem totally natural in those roles as well. In terms of what her “real” gender was it came down to a “a little from column A, a little more from column B” as far as I could see.

    “We’d thought you were on vacation this week too…Mr. Haffrun.” Way said, catching herself before calling him Professor.

    “Oh, I am, but you know how behind I get. I was using this week to get caught up on the backlog of issues that my students have brought to me. And do you know what I found?” he asked us.

    I glanced over at the waiter to see if the timely arrival of a native could interrupt what was probably going to be a conversation I’d regret having. Unfortunately the waiter was busy dealing some of the other customers.

    “Our request for expedited access to an interdicted world.” I said. It wouldn’t do any good to play dumb at this point I decided. We’d filed the request with Professor Haffron’s office but since she’d been on vacation it had automatically been forwarded to the Dean of Students office which gave it a more cursory inspection than Professor Haffrun would have before granting it.

    “Yes. And do you know what else I discovered?” he prompted.

    “That it was the same interdicted world that Kari had been assigned to for her project on fate weaving.” Way answered.

    Fate weaving is a very small form of dream magic. Rather than changing anything overtly, fate weaving focuses on making subtle alterations to the probabilities of events. Instead of striking a tyrant down with a bolt from the sky, a fate weaver might make it more likely that one of his guards was disloyal while at the same time strengthening the probability that the guard would wind up in a romantic relationship with a member of the resistance. The tyrant winds up deposed either way but with a fate weave in effect the world has no reason to think that any magic has occurred at all.

    “I notice she hasn’t completed that project yet.” Professor Haffrun said.

    “No. She hasn’t.” I agreed.

    “Would you care to explain what is going on to me then, or would you prefer we continue this conversation back at the Parliament?” Haffrun asked calmly. It wasn’t a threat, although it sounded like one. There were things that it was dangerous to talk about on a world like Earth-Glass. People can pass all kinds of conversations off as “crazy talk”. An in-depth discussion of a Parliamentary project would sound insane to most listeners but if they had the right kind of imagination, and could corroborate what was said, they could wind up “awakening” and being able to use dream magic themselves. I had a worrisome history of awakening natives on previously normal worlds. If that happened here, Earth-Glass probably wouldn’t survive it.

    “Kari contacted us during her assignment. From her reports, her fate weaving was progressing well. Too well. She noticed that the changes she was trying to introduce were happening too rapidly and easily.” I said. No one was close enough to us to overhear what we were saying and people at the Blue Star tended to make a point of ignoring strangers in order to stay out of trouble so it seemed safe to continue.

    “She was concerned that there might reality fractures forming.” Way said.

    “She looked for them herself, but she wasn’t able to pin any new ones down.” I said.

    “She did find the scars of old fractures though, ones that had been small enough to seal over on their own. They weren’t active, but they did suggest that concern was warranted.” Way said.

    “Then one of the major players in the weaving Kari was making disappeared.” I said.

    “That’s why she came to us for help.” Way said.

    “I see, and you didn’t come to me with this because I was on vacation.” Haffrun said.

    “Yes.” Way said.

    “And because you wanted to see if your friend’s project could still be salvaged so that she wouldn’t have to repeat it next semester.” Haffrun added.

    “Yes.” I admitted.

    “Despite the risks to this world?” Haffrun asked.

    “No. Or, I mean, we haven’t seen any signs of the reality fractures yet. We promised Kari that if we found anything active we’d bring you and the rest of the Parliament in. She was being cautious, rightfully so, and we didn’t want her to feel like that was the wrong call. Getting a second opinion on it before shutting down the whole project seemed like a good idea.” I said.

    “The project itself is a worthwhile one too.” Way said.

    “Tell me where’s she at with it. I know the general parameters I haven’t seen any reports on how she has been progressing.” Haffrun said.

    “Her task was to create a fate weaving that would affect at least a million people. This is where she chose to center the weaving. On Fairbanks Island.” Ways said.

    “Her thought was to build up the community here. This is one of the worst sections of Los Diablos. Changing Fairbanks would change the whole city and that’s well over a million people.” I said.

    “How was she going to build up the community?” Haffrun asked.

    “She worked with Jin and I on that. There’s a lot of people here who are unemployed so we focused on the sort of jobs they would be able to perform.” Way said.

    “There was a construction boom a decade ago. When the boom went bust, a lot of the workers lost their jobs. That left the city with a skilled work force who are good at building things and nothing for them to build. Fairbanks is also the site of a civil war era shipyard, but the company that ran it went out of business due to some monumentally stupid investments. Lastly there was a pending federal grant for ‘urban renewal’ that was slated to disappear into the pocket of a local gangster named Eddie Stone.” I said.

    “Kari’s plan was to nudge that grant to go towards rebuilding the shipyard and the rest of Fairbanks.” Way said.

    “But something went wrong?” Haffrun asked.

    “More like something went right. A developer stepped forward right away with a plan for the improvements. Then another investor showed up, a man named Guy McIntyre. He offered to match the federal grant with a long term, low interest loan and to purchase some of the more dilapidated properties for his own development.” I said.

    “Even the involvement of the gangster looked like it was going to be eliminated because the work on the grant was being opened up for national bidding.” Way said.

    “This all happened in the space of less than a week.” I said.

    “She overworked the fate weaving?” Haffrun asked.

    “I don’t think so. There weren’t any fractures in her apartment. If she was pushing things too hard and fast there should have been some, right?” I asked. Professor Haffrun had been working with the Parliament for a lot longer than I had. I knew he wasn’t looking for an explanation of what had happened so much as why I believed what I did about what had happened.

    “That’s correct, though if she worked the fate weaving somewhere else, somewhere that you didn’t check, the fractures might have been hidden. On the other hand if Kari had done that then she wouldn’t have called you in.” Haffrun said.

    “The speed events were developing at concerned her but what motivated her to call us in was when Guy McIntyre went missing mysteriously.” I said. “He’d been on a pleasure cruise that left from Los Diablos but before the boat reached its destination, he vanished. Kari tried to go to his office to see what the story was and that’s when she found traces of fractures.”

    “She said they were small enough that they were closing on their own. Definitely not big enough explain the disappearance of someone, especially not someone as central to a fate weaving as Mr. McIntyre was.” Way said.

    “So you’re searching for him?”

    “Peripherally. We think there’s a dreamweaver here. Probably a nascent one.” I said.

    “We thought that if a native was using very low levels of dream magic naturally it would explain both the small fractures and the extra force that got caught up in Kari’s fate weaving.” Way added.

    “It fits but a dreamweaver, even a nascent one, is very dangerous in a world like this.” Haffrun said.

    “We know. Our plan isn’t to confront him. We just wanted to confirm our suspicions before going to the Parliament with them.” I said.

    “I see.”Haffrun said and then paused for a moment, considering the implications of that. “If there is a native dreamweaver here, and Kari’s fate weaving turns him up, without damaging the world, then that’s an automatic pass for her. If not then she would be free to continue her weaving.” Haffrun said.

    “Right!” I agreed.

    “Wrong. The fractures that she saw had a source. Even if they were small and fading, Kari can’t continue her fate weaving until the source is understood, and very likely not even then.” Haffrun said, his voice still low enough that no one could overhear us but with enough force to make it clear that he took the issue seriously.

    “Then we’ll find the source even if it’s not a dreamweaver.” I said.

    “That’s a job for a fully qualified inspector.” Haffrun said.

    I slumped in my seat, crestfallen. As I’d been fearing since he got here, Professor Haffrun was going to play things by the book and bring in the Parliament officially. That mean we’d be out of it, Kari would be given a deferment on her project and she’d need to take the fate weaving class again next year. It wasn’t quite the same as being held back a year in school but it still left the taste of defeat in my mouth.

    “I’ll file a report with the office when I get back.” Haffrun confirmed.

    “What should we do Professor?” Way asked.

    “I happen to know that nearest Inspector is on vacation as well. She’ll be returning in two days though, and barring unforeseen circumstances, this matter will be on the top of her list.” Haffrun said.

    “That means we can keep investigating?” I asked, hope blossoming in my heart again.

    “You have two days. I suggest you make the most of them.” Haffrun said.

    Adrenaline is an amazing thing. So is anger. Put them both together and you can perform awe-inspiring acts. Unfortunately in a lot of cases that will turn out to be “acts that are awe-inspiringly horrible for your body.” Running from the fire proved to be one of those “horrible acts”.  

    My lungs were a wreck from the smoke that I’d inhaled but I was too pumped up to notice. I raced across the street to the fire escape that Way had used and nearly flew up the stairs to follow where she’d gone. It wasn’t until I hit the roof and paused to catch my breath that I found I couldn’t.

    With the oxygen in my lungs used up, my vision started to swim and my balance went right out the window. The world spun and I discovered I was too dizzy to stand when I felt my shoulder hit the roof. By the time I was able to suck some much needed air into my lungs Way was by my side.

    “Easy, just breathe.” she said. She had my feet propped up on the top step of the fire escape and was cushioning my head with her right arm.

    “What happened? Did you find him?” I gasped out. Blacking out, or even coming close like I had, feels awful. My body had been perilously close to running out of a necessary resource, so it was going to make sure I was miserable enough not to push myself like that again all too soon.

    “Yes. Take a second and get your breath back though.” she urged me.

    I sighed and let myself relax. The medical facilities of this world were primitive compared to what I was used to. Worse, I couldn’t just dream myself up a fresh set of lungs. What I could do though was argue a bit with the world on how badly damage I was.

    Any exposure to a fire is bad for your lungs, I reminded the world. Also for all my physical fitness I hadn’t trained in low oxygen settings. I was used to working with a nice rich air. It made sense that even a little smoke in my lungs would knock me for a loop.

    As I breathed in I felt the tightness in my chest loosening. My lungs weren’t singed, and as fresh air replaced the smoky air I’d breathed in I felt the strength returning to my limbs.

    “I couldn’t get them all out.” I told Way.

    “I guessed. I felt your magic. You were pushing it close to a fracture but it looks like you backed off in time.”

    “How about you? You caught the shooter?” I asked.

    “I did. We fought and I disabled him, but he had a partner.” she said. The distance and chill in her eyes spoke volumes about why she didn’t have him in tow.

    “I heard a crack while I was in our building. That was a gunshot wasn’t it?” I asked.

    “Yes. A second shooter. He was watching the other side of our building. When he saw that I’d disabled the gunman on this building, he shot him.”

    “To keep him from talking.” I guessed.

    “I’m sorry.” Way offered.

    “It’s not your fault. There shouldn’t even be one professional assassin in this mess, much less a team of them.” I reached my hand up to cover hers. “I take it the second shooter got away?”

    “I believe so. Once he’d shot his partner, I took cover and he didn’t take any more shots. I think he may have fled immediately once he was sure he’d hit his target.” she said.

    “Why didn’t he shoot at you?” I asked.

    “I don’t think he had a clear shot. I was holding his partner up. There weren’t any clear angles from the building he was on, so he went with the next best option.”

    “We should get out of here before he comes back with more help, or the police get here and start asking questions.” I said.

    “Are you ok to travel?” Way asked.

    “I’ll have to be.”

    “I could carry you?”

    “It’s not as easy as it looks.” I told her, thinking of the struggle I had with carrying the woman out of our building. “You need your hands free too, in case we run into the shooter again. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. ”

    “Ok, but we shouldn’t go back down the stairs you came up. Too many people can see them. There’s another set over here.” Way said, leading me to the adjacent side of the building. The stairs there lead to the back alley that ran behind the apartment building. Apart from some trash and probably a rat or two,  it was empty.

    “Wait, before we go, there’s something you should see.” Way said, and lead me to side of the building that overlooked our still burning apartment. I saw fire trucks arriving, but that wasn’t what Way was directing my attention towards. She was pointing at the body that was slumped behind a small shack that stood on the roof.

    “Shot in the chest?” I asked, looking for the bullet wound.

    “Yes. With the available light it would have been the best shot. I searched him for a wallet or any IDs but his pockets were empty. What I did find though was this.” she reached down and pulled back the sleeve of his coat to expose his wrist.

    An intricate tattoo had been drawn on his forearm well above where the cuff of his shirt would cover. The tattoo showed seven snakes, their tails all joined at a point from which they radiated outwards to form a circle. Each serpent’s body was twisted to form a question mark shape with the head of each biting into looping body of the next one over.

    “It looks like a weird variant on the Ouroboros.” I said, thinking of the image of the snake swallowing its own tail.

    “Want to place a wager that the second shooter had the same tattoo?” Way asked.

    “I’d give a hundred to one odds in favor of that being true.” I cursed. “So we have an insane secret society to worry about too.”

    “They might not be related to the dreamweaver.” Way said, though it was clear she didn’t believe that anymore than I did.

    “I think we’re going need to deal with them whether they are or not.” I said. I looked towards the ruin of our burning building to underscore my point. Way grimaced and nodded.

    It wasn’t part of our (quasi-official) mission or our general mandate to interfere with the purely mundane problems on Earth-Glass. We were able to looking in Mcintyre’s disappearance because the dream lord who had noticed it as important, our friend Kari, had discovered that there were reality fractures relating to it. They’d been tiny ones, but even small cracks could lead to big problems. If the secret society the shooters were a part of was related to the fractures then we could take them apart however we wished. If they weren’t, we’d be treading on thin ice if we disrupted what they were doing.

    I looked at the burning building again. Sometimes it was walking on the thin ice.

    Turning away from those thoughts, and the dead body, I followed Way to the stairs down to the alley. We descended at a more leisurely pace than I’d climbed the building, which helped prevent any further dizzy spells.

    “I don’t suppose you have any more disguises?” Way asked when we reached ground level.

    “No, but if we tuck the cloaks and masks away we might not need one.” I said.

    “Where do you want to go next?”

    “Off the streets, whoever these guys are they seem pretty determined. Let’s not make it too easy for them to pick us off.” I suggested.

    “Someplace public?”

    “They don’t seem to be concerned about collateral damage.” I pointed out.

    “The Blue Star then? It’s public enough that we’ll be able to see them coming, and the people there aren’t the sort that its wise to draw a gun on.” Way said.

    The Blue Star was one of the “all night diners” on Fairbank Island. Despite its reputation, Fairbanks wasn’t actually the lawless wild west, except in certain places and at certain times. The Blue Star at night was one of those places. We were going to draw attention going into there, but we had two things in our favor. First we were dressed like locals, so it would be clear we weren’t looking for trouble. A pair of young women aren’t expected to be looking for trouble though so that would only take us so far. The second thing in our favor was that if trouble found us we were each more than capable of putting it in its place.

    It took us a little while to get to the Blue Star. We traveled by alley as much as possible to stay out of the line of fire from any of the buildings we passed.  When we arrived we were greeted with the expected crowd of drunk men horsing around in the parking lot.

    A liquor license was beyond the reach of a place like the Blue Star. That didn’t stop from them from serving it however; it was just billed as a “health tonic”. From the swaggering and excessive volume of the crowd, the Blue Star had been doing a brisk business in “health tonics”.

    “Want me to get us in?” Way asked.

    “Let me. We want any hitmen who come looking for us to have to go through them first.” I said as we left the alley and headed towards the Blue Star’s entrance. We made it across the street and two steps into the Blue Star’s lot before someone noticed us.

    “Look at this. Who ordered the entertainment?” a drunk guy the size of a linebacker said. The rest of the crowd was too busy watching another pair of drunks argue loudly that “city hall just don’t care” to notice us though. I couldn’t blame them. The argument was fascinating to listen to. From their tone and volume it sounded like they were ready to tear each others’ heads off. Their words were just the opposite though. I hadn’t run into people being in “violent agreement” often but the drunk debate was a textbook example of the phenomenon.

    “Girls, somebody sent for girls!” the drunk who’d noticed us said, smacking a guy beside him on the head. The promise of “girls” was more effective than the smack on the head. More than a half dozen heads turned to face us and the argument died down in favor of a new sport; us.

    “Looks like we got some lost little sheep here.” a brown haired drunk with a chin like a shovel said. He rolled his shoulders and pushed off the post he was resting against to lean forward and leer at us. I scanned the crowd observing their body language. His interest in us was mirrored by all the rest of the men there. None of them were shifting to back him up though. There was a distance between the loud mouth and the guys around him that was telling. He had the crowd’s voice for the moment, but not their loyalty. In fact, I told the world, there was a decent chance more than few in the crowd would enjoy seeing him brought down a peg.

    Looking at the assembled faces I could see what they expected. Two girls, alone and unprotected, read as ‘prey’ given the way women were still regarded on Earth Glass. They expected us to be nervous. We’d either not say anything and try to hurry past them or insist that we weren’t lost, letting them control the direction of the conversation. Either way they’d keep pushing and escalating until they were sufficiently “amused” or something else distracted them.

    That wasn’t how the game was going to play out though. The moment he started speaking, I whipped my head around and looked Mr. Shovel-chin directly in the eye.

    “We’re only lost if this place is out of ‘health tonics’. You fine gentleman leave any beverages for the rest of us?” Language can act as both a weapon and a shield. It’s not usually terribly effective at either when dealing with drunks or idiots but even a dull knife can be dangerous if used well.

    “Well that depends sister, how are you going to pay for ‘em” Shovel chin said as he swaggered to intercept us. He looked at me, briefly, when he spoke, but his eyes were fastened on Way. To be fair, she is a lot prettier than I am, but in this case it was as much as matter of racism as anything else.

    “Got a pocketful of wooden nickels.” I told him, stepping in front of Way and not backing down. “Think they’ll take ‘em or would the teeth of a guy who hassled us be better?”

    That got a few chuckles from the crowd. None of them took the threat seriously, but a little girl like me mouthing off to a big lunk like Shovel Chin was amusing enough to keep them entertained. Even Shovel Chin was in a good mood, if not a particularly smart one. I pushed on that a tiny bit with dream magic, suggesting that the alcohol and the camaraderie had left them as “happy drunks” rather than mean ones. They weren’t “nice guys” so I couldn’t push that too far though.

    “Ain’t safe to travel with money around here. You should let us hold onto what you got.” Shovel Chin suggested. Because being a “happy drunk” for him meant merely suggesting robbery rather than yanking my satchel away directly.

    “You’re already holding my money for me.” I told him.

    “What do you mean?” he asked all drunken confusion. The crowd wavered too. This didn’t fit how they’d expected the exchange to go.

    “Come here I’ll show you.” I told him.

    Drunk and confused can be a nightmare to work with. Drunk, confused and suggestible though? That was a joy. I pulled out a change purse, opened it up and turned it upside down and inside out to show there was no money in it aside from a single wooden token.

    “Here, hold this.” I told him and placed the wooden nickel in his left hand, folding his finger closed over it. “That’s my special nickel so don’t lose it.”

    “What’s so special about it?” Shovel Chin asked, thankfully not too drunk to take the obvious bait.

    “As long as you have that, you never run out of money.”

    “That’s impossible!” he said. The other drunk guys had gathered closer to see what was going on. Way, meanwhile, had stepped back to give me room to work, and to keep the crowd from getting to any of the spots where they could see through the routine I was setting up.

    “No it’s not. Turn your right hand over and make a fist.”

    He did, staring at his hands like they were going to turn into lumps of gold.

    “Now say the magic words.” I told him.

    “What’s that? Alakazam?”

    “What? Hell no. Try ‘I need a beer’.” I said. That got another round of chuckles.

    “I need a beer.” he said flatly. Nothing happened.

    “Pff, that’s magic words to you? Say it like you mean it!”

    “I need a beer!” he bellowed at me. I slapped the back of his right hand as he said it and put my left hand under it to “catch” the two coins that fell out. The clink of the coins hitting each other drew everyone’s attention.

    “This enough for a beer around here?” I asked, flourishing the two shiny coins.

    “Waitaminute! How did you do that?” Shovel Chin asked.

    “Do what? You’re the one who wanted the beer.” I said.

    “Do it again! Do it again!” the drunk that had noticed us first said from the audience.

    “Sure. Close your hand.” I told Shovel Chin.

    “I Want A Beer!”, he shouted as soon as he closed his fist. I was ready for that – audiences can be fairly predictable sometimes – and had the next two coins ready for the second “drop” in time. It still amazed me that all it took was the clink of coins for people to think they’d fallen into my hand. They wanted to believe though and some of them were too drunk to see straight which helped a lot.

    “Oh my god! You can make money!” a balding drunk said, pointing at Shovel Chin.

    “Again! Again!” came the cheer from the crowd.

    “I WANT A BEER!” Shovel Chin screamed.

    I hit his hand again and this time nothing came out.

    “Huh, gotta be careful using magic while you’re tipsy boys. Stuff can wind up in all kinds of places.” I said turning his hand over and back as though I was looking for where the coins were hidden.

    “Ah I bet I know.” I said and cuffed Shovel Chin on the side of the head. I had my other hand near his opposite ear to “catch” the coin that came falling out.

    “How come there was only one in there?” Shovel Chin asked. He didn’t think to question that there was money falling out of his head, just that it wasn’t as much as he’d been hoping for. So very human. Fortunately it was the perfect lead-in to the big finish.

    “Oh, they can wind up all over the place.” I told him. “The good thing is, you can use one to find the other.”

    I started waving the coin around him like a dowsing rod. It flicked up and down slowly around his head, then a little faster around his chest until I brought it down to his waist where froze and pointed at his right side.

    “Ah, here it is!” I said and yanked at his belt to drag forth a long stream of cloth which unfurled into a pair of white boxers with pink hearts on them.

    “Well that’s daintier than I would have guessed.” I said and produced the “missing coin” from the top of boxers waist band. That got a full on round of laughter from the crowd. Shovel Chin actually blushed in embarrassment despite the fact that he had to know I wasn’t holding his boxers.

    “You guys can try it out now. I going to get that health tonic.” I told them as I slipped a few more coins into Shovel Chin’s pockets so that they’d have something to find to keep the magic trick going.

    “Or you could let the nickel rest for a bit. It gets tired sometimes. Usually needs a good night sleep after that before its lucky again.” I added, thinking ahead to when the coins ran out.

    Predictably none of them cared about that. They started lining up for a chance to slap Shovel Chin’s hands and collect their loot. Or his face, or whatever. They weren’t going to beat him to a pulp and he was drunk enough that slapping him silly wouldn’t take long either. The important thing was they were all focused on him and his Lucky Magic Nickel. That left us free to head into the Blue Star without further hassle.

    The patrons inside the Blue Star weren’t much different than the ones loitering outside it.

    “What do you want?” the middle aged waiter who was working behind the counter said when he saw us.

    “Food, and something to drink.” I replied.

    “Pick a table or a seat and I’ll get to ya.” the waiter said.

    The Blue Star was less than a quarter full so there were plenty of options, including a booth that was towards the back of the “L” shaped diner and away from the other patrons. Way and I settled into it and opened the pair of menus that had been left on the table. I’d eaten breakfast on my Earth, but “The Amazing Jin’s” belly hadn’t benefited from that.

    “That was some interesting magic you did out there.” a man who stepped up to our table said.

    I assumed he was another waiter and replied without looking up at him.

    “Just some simple sleight of hand.”

    “That’s not the magic I was speaking of Ms. Smith.” the man said.

    I felt my heart freeze in place. The Amazing Jin’s last name was “Lee”. No one on Earth-Glass should have known who I really was. Or the kind of magic I’d really been working outside.

    Sometimes there are coincidences in life. As humans, we’re wired to see patterns in everything, even where those patterns may not exist. Sometimes the things that go bump in the night really are just the house creaking and a prickly feeling on the back of your neck is nothing more than your nerves getting the better of you.

    Even something as extreme as coming home to find flames leaping from every window in your apartment building isn’t a sign that someone’s out to get you. Unless, that is, you’re me.

    The fact that we’d crossed paths with a professional assassin earlier would have been enough to make me suspicious of the blaze. I could think of half a dozen reasons the killer would want to burn our building down ranging from simple murder if they caught us in it to denying us a safe hideaway if we happened to be away. Beyond that though there was the fact that Earth-Glass sort of wanted to kill me.

    As a dream lord, I could make things real or unreal. Earth-Glass wasn’t the kind of world that was happy with that sort of thing.  It wasn’t the sort of world to have a conscious “Gaia spirit” watching over it though, meaning it didn’t have an active champion like my Mom defending it. Instead it relied on skewing chance and probability against me. For events in my immediate area that wasn’t a problem. Making things “normal” was the one sort of dream magic I could get away with using. Anything outside my awareness was a different matter. If an assassin had needed some lucky breaks to set my home on fire, Earth-Glass would be happy to provide them, no matter how many innocents might be harmed.

    “We need to help the people who are still inside.” I said. Even from across the narrow end of the bay that the Bella bridge spanned I could see the flames were picking up in intensity. I breathed out carefully and nudged the world. Fires look dramatic but there could still be survivors inside the building. In fact with the boiler being on the side that we were facing, it was possible that we were seeing the very worst of the blaze.

    “It’ll take too long if we wait for the bus. I can see traffic backing up ahead of us already.” Way said. There hadn’t been a lot of traffic since we were past office hours for most of the local businesses. What cars were ahead of us were slowing to a crawl though.

    With a wordless nod we rose and walked to the front of the bus.

    “Can you let us out here?” Way asked the bus driver.

    “Sure thing.” the weary driver said with a shrug and opened the door. We’d already been stopped due to the traffic which meant Way and I were able to make our way to the bridge without any danger of getting run over.

    “The shooter could be waiting for us.” Way cautioned as we ran.

    “Disguises then?” I asked.

    “What do you have?”

    “Our performance cloaks and some scarves.” I offered, rummaging around in my (depressing normal sized) bag as we ran.

    “Scarves?”

    “We’ll tie them around our faces. It’s not much but it will help a little with the smoke too.” I said, knowing that ‘a little’ wasn’t going to do much to save our lungs if we weren’t careful.

    Putting on a cloak and tying a scarf on while you run isn’t an easy task. On the other hand quick changes are somewhat second nature for folks in the stage magic biz, so we managed it a bit more easily than most. By the time we were halfway across the bridge we were two running figures in dark flowing cloaks with bandit-style masks hiding our faces and hoods obscuring our hair. I was sure people noticed us running by but with the darkness, the confusion and our makeshift disguises I was also sure their chances at identifying us were non-existent.

    The smell of wood smoke filled my nostrils well before we reached the end of the bridge. I thought the running was making me warm but, the closer we got, the more I could feel the heat from the fire reaching out to bake my exposed skin. That left me to imagine the kind of inferno the inside of the building would be. Going in there was not going to be fun.

    “If the shooter’s here, where would he be?” I asked as we ran. There was a crowd gathered around the building but the heat of the flames was keeping them well away from the burning structure.

    “Rooftop. The nearby ones are all the same height, he’ll have the best shot and the best chance to escape.” she said.

    “Can you get to one?”

    “What about the people in the building?”

    “I’ll help them. You make sure no one shoots them once they’re outside.” I said.

    Way looked at me, a debate raging behind her eyes and then nodded.

    “Be careful.” she said “I don’t want to have to try to finish this mission without you either.”

    I smiled and nodded my agreement before she changed course towards the fire escape of the building across the street from ours.

    I had several options available to me from there. Our apartment building sat on the intersection of the road which ran around the perimeter of the island and one of the streets that lead to the island’s center. The crowd had gathered at the front of the building, which was the closest side to me since the building faced the water and the bridge. I could have avoided them by following Way and swinging around to the backside of our apartment building. With how the building was constructed that would have been the smart move too.

    The front of the building had been a later addition and was built from cheap wood that was all-too-eager to burn. The back half of the building was an older, brickwork construction. That didn’t mean it was fireproof – the floorboards and roof would still burn quite nicely but (thanks to my dream magic tinkering) the fire hadn’t spread there quite as quickly. It would be a lot safer to retrieve the people who were still alive in that part of the building before the fire got to them.

    The only problem was that would mean giving up on anyone who might still be alive in the front apartments and despite the limitations on my power I wasn’t willing to accept that.

    So instead I barreled through the crowd and hit the door with a flying kick, shattering its flaming wreckage over the main foyer.

    I don’t usually design my other identities with much in the way of physical skills. As “normal Jin” I spend most of my time sleeping and the rest solving problems with magic, so I’m not exactly the world class athlete that my brother James is. Since Earth-Glass was cranky about letting me use my magic though I figured having some physical talents to fall back on would be a good thing. As a stage magician that came in handy too. A lot of stage magic is misdirection and timing, but there are some effects that require a hefty amount of strength and speed too.

    That all served me well enough in knocking down the front door. Surviving the inferno I’d hurled myself into was another matter though. The air was so hot I could barely breath, and so smoke filled that I couldn’t risk getting much into my lungs in the first place. That severely limited the amount of time I could afford to spend looking for people.

    I sent out another whisper of dream magic. I couldn’t cheat and simply sense where people were but the crash of the door could very reasonably elicit cries for help from anyone who was still alive.

    It took less than a second before I heard a child’s screams coming from the floor above me. Being careful to stay low, I gritted my teeth against the searing heat and crawled to the stairs.

    I directed another whisper of dream magic as I climbed the stairs. The bomb used to set the fire was in the boiler room, I told the world, since that’s at the front of the building and also the easiest source for a fire that would engulf the building quickly. That meant that the people who lived in the apartments in the old brickwork half of the building would have heard the explosion and had a chance to evacuate on their own. Even the stubborn ones would have seen the smoke and the flames and there’s nothing like fire to motivate the recalcitrant.

    But, the world whispered back to me, there were all those people in newer section. All the ones caught in the bomb blast. None of them could have escaped.

    It had to be a small bomb, I countered, or else the building would have collapsed. Also what kind of assassin carries sticks of dynamite around with them? It had to be something clumsy and improvised.

    Even so, the world wordlessly sent to me, the ones in the new side wouldn’t have had any warning. The flames would have caught them unaware.

    The night was still early, and many of the people who lived here worked two shifts. They could have been out, I argued.

    Some of them, the world agreed; some but not all.

    I reached the second floor and sighed.

    Some but not all.

    I could feel the world shivering at the gentle alterations I’d managed to make in saving some of the people in the building with dream magic. Any deeper changes and I’d have a reality fracture to deal with and that was not a fight I could afford to have yet.

    “HELP! Momma! Help!” a young boy screamed from the room near the stairs. The door to the room was cracked and open. It looked like the initial blast had shook it loose from it’s cheap hinges. Similar damage was obvious on the rest of the floor.

    With the windows shattered, the toxic gases would be able to escape too, I reminded the world. Not that they’d escape entirely but the lower the concentration, the better the chances anyone had of getting out of the building alive.

    I crawled into the room, keeping in mind that whatever poisonous gases were here would be strongest at the ceiling. Inside the apartment, I saw a woman collapsed on the floor and a crying young boy huddled over her.

    “I’m here to help.” I told him as I moved over to inspect the fallen woman.

    She was still breathing, which was good sign, but she was also unconscious, which was a bad one.

    “We need to leave right now. Is there anyone else here?” I asked the boy.

    “No. Daddy’s at work. You gotta save Momma!” the boy said. He was rocking back and forth and couldn’t even bring himself to look at me. That was really bad. I definitely couldn’t carry the two of them outside on my own.

    “I’m going to save you both.” I told him. “Here, you need a magic scarf like I have to keep you safe. Want me to find one for you?”

    “Find one for Momma!” the boy insisted.

    “Ok.” I said and reached over to his ear, pulling out a long blue scarf as I did so. The boy’s eyes went wide with amazement. It was pure stage magic, but it achieved its desired effect.

    “It is magic!” he screamed as he stopped rocking at looked me straight in the eyes.

    “And here’s one for you.” I told him, and pulled a bright yellow scarf out of his other ear. “Put it over your mouth, while I fix up your Mom. Then follow me.”

    I could have told him to grow wings and fly away at that point and I’m pretty sure he would have made an effort to. The scarves weren’t going to do much for any of us, but they did make me feel a little better when I lifted the boy’s mother into a fireman’s carry.

    Physically fit or not, even as “The Amazing Jin” I wasn’t a particularly large girl and moving a full grown woman was not an easy task. I got her up onto my back without dropping her though and then turned to her son.

    “Hold your Mom’s hand ok? She needs you to stay with her.” I told him.

    Their apartment wasn’t as engulfed in flames as the foyer was which meant I was marching the two of them in the scariest possible direction. Despite the roaring flames, the little boy stayed with me, clutching his mother’s hand like a lifeline.

    Together we moved as quickly as we could but by the time we reached the bottom of the stairs I thought the fire was going to completely overwhelm us. The heat was unbearable, the stench of the smoke made me want to vomit and the brilliance of the flames made it hard to even see.

    I heard a crack that sounded like a beam splitting and prepared to dodge or run but I couldn’t see where the problem might be. What I did notice a moment later though was that the front doorway wasn’t burning any longer!

   “Let’s go!” I told the little boy and started sprinting (as best as I was able) towards the exit.

    I saw a splash of water hit the door post as we ran towards it and got another splash full into the face as we burst out into the night air. The cool water and the rush of oxygen felt so ridiculously good that I tripped and fell. Two pairs of strong hands caught me before I tumbled to the ground though.

    Blinking to clear my eyes, I felt the woman I was carrying being lifted off my back. All around us I heard a group of people in motion. When my eyes cleared, I saw that the crowd that had been watching the building had formed a bucket line and was passing water up from the bay to throw on the blaze. It was too late to save our building, but the apartments that were around it were in danger if the blaze ran unchecked.

    I tried to speak but my lungs spasmed into a racking cough.

    “Get them air!” I heard one of the people around us yell and the three of us who’d escaped the burning building were lead back to the end of the bridge where there was a bus stop to rest at. I looked over at the woman I’d carried and saw she was conscious again, though bleary eyed.

    “Are you ok?” a young man, one of the people who’d helped me walk over to the bus stop, asked me.

    “I’ll be fine.” I told him and got back up. There were still more people in the building.

    “Where are you going?” my helper asked.

    Before I could answer him, I heard a terrible shattering followed by an immediate yell from the crowd as the front half of the building collapsed. The flames roared as though the falling building was a bellows.

    Some but not all.

    That was all I could save.

    I turned to the man who’d helped me.

    “To find the person who did this.”