When I was little I had a few close friends in school. I thought we’d be “Best Friends Forever”, but the “forever” part only turned out to be till we were ten. Mom was a single widow by then and she had to go where the jobs for a research chemist were available. My friends and I promised that we’d write and keep up with each other but it didn’t last. I guess we just weren’t that close.

    Without them, I sort of floundered through middle school. I didn’t feel betrayed by my friends; I was as much to blame for not keeping up with email as they were. At the time I didn’t think it had anything to do with losing my Dad, but in retrospect I have to wonder if my apathy towards making new friends was driven by the accumulated belief that I couldn’t count on the people I cared about to stay in my life.

    Whatever the case was, everything changed in my freshman year of high school. That’s when I met Way and a whole new set of friends. Becoming a dream lord destroyed the girl I’d been. That wasn’t a  bad thing though. In fact, I was luckier than words can express. From the ashes of who I’d been I was able to call forth a new me and get to work on becoming the person I wanted to be.

    That’s why it felt so uncomfortable to be wrestling with the same old fears and worries in terms of being parted from Way. I’d thought I was better than that.

    “I’m not sure about the apprenticeship yet.” I told my Mom.

    “Oh? Did something come up with it?”

    “No, but it’s kind of a long commitment. And I’d need to be away from home for most of it too.” I said. Dream worlds don’t have actual distances between them – they’re not ‘real’ in regards to each other. That said it could still take a dream lord time to move from one to the other. Kind of like how it can take time to shift mental gears from one activity to another, only a bit more difficult since, to enter another world, you need to sync yourself with what it means to be real in that world. I was a stage magician on Earth-Glass because that was the closest I could come to who I really was. By making “The Amazing Jin” similar to plain old “Jin Smith”, I could ‘travel’ between Earth-Glass and my homeworld faster. In truth I wasn’t traveling at all, I was in both worlds simultaneously, but adjusting my awareness from one to the other felt a whole lot like I was moving between worlds.

    Part of the apprenticeship program was that our mentors would take us to worlds we’d (literally) never dreamed of. Attuning to alien landscapes was difficult enough that ‘commuting’ back home every night wasn’t an option. That’s why Way and I couldn’t simply meet up in our dreams as we normally did. We’d be so “far apart” conceptually that we wouldn’t even be able to grasp where the other would be.

    “I remember being worried about the same thing when I was your age.” Mom said.

    “You had to choose between living on an alien world for years or staying with…” I paused and came up with “…your family?” instead of what I’d been thinking. Mom’s expression told me my “expert” rating for deception skills did not apply to her in the slightest.

    “You could say that. When I left for college, my parents seemed to think California was as far away as the Moon. I knew I was going to need to do post-graduate work to have any success in my field too so I knew I wouldn’t be coming back home for years and years.” she said.

    “Did you have to leave anyone behind? I mean aside from Grandpa and Grandma? Anyone special?” I asked.

    “I thought so. My boyfriend was a year younger than me. He promised he’d come out to California once he graduated.” she said.

    “Did he?”

    “Two weeks after I left he started dating your Aunt Susan.” Mom said. Whatever pain that had caused her was long since gone leaving only a sardonic smile as the ghost of her anger.

    “That must have been a fun Christmas.” I said, imaging the epic battles I’d heard my Mom and her younger sister engaging in.

    “I don’t know. I didn’t come home for a year after that. And then I met your Dad. Who I must say was much more handsome and charming and in every way an upgrade. So it worked out for the best I suppose.”

    “Wait, didn’t you dye Aunt Susan’s puke green hair while she was sleeping?” I said, remembering a story I’d overheard while they were reminiscing.

    “Yes, but that was just because she was Susan. We hadn’t quite outgrown our childhood rivalry by then.”

    “Weren’t you like twenty five when you did that?”

    “Well, your Aunt Susan managed to avoid me for several years. But we’re past that now.”

    “Because you got the last licks in?”

    “Because we both have children, so there’s no need for more insanity in our lives.” she said and flicked a small cloud of flour at me.

    “So what do you think I should do?” I asked. I could be far wiser and more mature than my eighteen years would normally allow. All I had to do was channel a version of myself who was old and wise. This didn’t feel like a problem for any of them though. This was my problem as “Jin Smith”. Part of hanging onto her, of hanging onto who I’d been, was to live my regular life as her. It wasn’t always fun or easy, but that’s what made it real.

    “Well, I went to college and fell in love and learned more than I ever would have imagined. But that’s what worked for me. I think you might have rearranged the order on those.” she said. She put aside the ingredients she’d been working with for the pineapple upside cake and came over to hold my hands. Looking into her eyes I could see understanding and patient acceptance.

    “I don’t know…” I began, feeling uncomfortable under her all-too-knowing gaze.

    “You don’t know if you’ve learned more than you ever imagined you would? What have they been teaching you at that Parliament of yours?” she asked.

    “No, I mean…” I squirmed and felt even more uncomfortable. I talked to my Mom about all sorts of dream world related things. And she knew Way and I were close. I’d just never told her how close.

    “Oh you don’t know that you’re in love with Way then?” she asked. Because, apparently, I didn’t need to tell her that for her to figure it out.

    “No, I know that too.” I said, not quite able to meet her gaze. I felt a blush spread to my cheeks.

    “Then do you know that she loves you?”, she asked gently.

    “Yes.” my voice was just above a whisper. One of the things about the dream speech that Way and I shared was that we could communicate what we were feeling without the need to put it in clumsy, limited containers like ‘words’. So we didn’t bother to very much. I felt her tenderness and her joy at being with me directly. Saying that she was my girlfriend felt, I don’t know, redundant? Saying it to my Mom, even having my Mom openly aware of it, felt even weirder somehow.

    “Then maybe you should talk about this with her.” Mom suggested, her voice still gentle.

    “But I don’t want her to give up on this just to stay with me. I mean, it’s a really good opportunity and she’ll be so great as a Guardian.” I said. It was easier to tell Mom that than it would have been to say it to Way. I could talk to Way about anything. I trusted her. I just didn’t trust myself. I knew if I talked to Way about what I was feeling I’d wind up as a tangled mess of wanting her to stay and hating myself if she did.

    “You think the time apart will help you both to grow?”

    “I don’t know. I can’t see the future. Which sucks.” I complained. I was whining. I knew I was whining, but that’s one of the things Mom’s are good for. Acting as a sounding board for their daughter’s insanity.

    “I’ve spoken with a number of precognitives. It sounds like much less fun than you’d imagine no matter how they manage to see the future. Either way though, I think this is a decision that you need to work out for yourself. There are a lot of ‘right’ answers here, only you can decide which one is right for you.” Mom said.

    I sighed. Sometimes the right answers don’t help at all.

    “You know what would help?” I said, shoving my worries down into the back corners of my heart.

    “What?”

    “Cake batter!” I said with a big smile. Uncooked cake batter is terrible for you and also so very delicious.

    “This was all a ploy to get the bowl when I’m done with it wasn’t it?” Mom asked, returning my smile.

    “Yep, all’s fair in love, war and Mom’s cooking!” I lied. It was easier to pretend to be happy than to mope on something I couldn’t do anything about. At least for the moment. And I was still hungry.

    “You haven’t eaten anything yet today. You need some real food. Get me the frying pan and I’ll make you some scrambled eggs.” Mom counter offered.

    “Cake batter has eggs in it though!” I pointed out.

    “The frying pan.” Mom said, pointing at the cabinet it was kept in. It wasn’t a debate I was going to win, though if I was lucky she’d set some of the batter aside for me for later.

    I spent the rest of breakfast catching up on what she was involved with. The sewage treatment plant design (not the best breakfast topic, but also not the worst we’d ever shared) was a modular design. She’d be traveling all over the world for the next few years to supervise the treatment plants’ construction so that they would mesh with the eco-systems they’d be installed in. Each would be custom designed to take advantage of the local conditions and be easy to maintain given the environment. That would mean a lot of onsite work but, unlike me, she’d be able to “commute” thanks to being Gaia’s Chosen champion. The upside to being unable to leave the Earth was that she could appear anywhere on it she wanted to in seconds.

    Our conversation drifted through a handful of more mundane subjects as I ate my scrambled eggs and toast. We were talking about her plans to expand our living room (I’m not the only one in the family who can multi-task) when I noticed Way kiss my forehead on Earth Glass to “wake me up” there. I felt a little bubble of delight at that as well as a sinking drop of despair at the thought of the lonely years to come.

    “I need to get back to work.” I told Mom.

    “Ok. Say hi to Way for me.” she said and flipped her holo-computer display back to the sewage plant designs.

    I tromped back up to my room and stretched a bit before getting back into bed. Breathing and stretches didn’t do much to make my tension go away so I cast a spell of “Repose” as I settled into the mattress. It was essentially a “Sleeping Beauty” spell. I fall asleep just fine without the aid of magic, but it was handy to leave my normal body in a light state of suspended animation so that I wouldn’t need to attend to any biological functions on my homeworld while I was otherwise occupied on Earth Glass.

    The “trip” back to Earth-Glass felt like I was rising up through the clouds only to go plummeting down into the bus where I was sleeping beside Way.

    “Are we almost there?” I asked, blinking my eyes open.

    “Not yet, but I think we need to change our plans.” Way said.

    “Why’s that?” I asked.

    Way pointed out the window. We were descending down one of the hills that lead to the bridge over to Fairbanks Island. On the far side of the bridge I could see the apartment building that we’d rented a room in.

     It was engulfed in flames.

    Kids can be adorable. Not all the time, but when you find a four year old hiding in your closet and staring at you with wide open eyes its hard not to find them at least a little cute.

    “Good morning Peri!” I said, sitting up on my bed.

    “You sleep a lot.” my sister said with perfect seriousness. Her expression said she’d just noticed this and had decided it was the most important thing in the world. From past experience I knew that would last maybe a minute at most before something else caught her attention.

    “I have really good dreams.” I told her, matching her seriousness and fighting to keep a grin off my face.

    “No. I had a nightmare.” she replied, reminding me that she wasn’t at the age where she’d fully worked out how a conversation was supposed to flow. Also, at four the world more or less revolved around her, at least in her mind.

    “Those aren’t fun are they?” I asked.

    “No. It was bad. And now I got a monster under my bed.” she said.

    “Did you tell Mom or Dad about it?” I asked.

    “Mommy said I could sleep in here.”

    “That’s ok. But I don’t know how comfy my wardrobe is. Why don’t we go talk to the monster and see what he wants?” I suggested.

    “He wants to eat me.”

    “Oh they say that but they’re lying. Kids taste terrible. You’re too bony for them.”

    “I don’t wanna.” she said, unconvinced by my explanation.

    “How about if I ask the monster under my bed to go talk to your monster then?” I asked.

    “You have a monster under your bed?” Peri asked. She leaned out of the wardrobe, looking to catch sight of it.

    “Sure. Who do you think keeps me safe at night?” I said. I leaned over the bed and peered under it. “Belle, can you come out and say hi to Peri, I don’t think she’s had a chance to meet you yet.”

    In response to my request a small puppy made of shadows and smoke wiggled out from under my bed. With it’s floppy ears and wiggly tail, the shadow puppy gave Peri a serious run for her money in the adorable department.

    “Hi Peri, nice to meet you.” Belle said in a diminutive voice that matched her tiny stature. “You’re back sooner than I expected Jin. Are things going ok?”

    Belle wasn’t really a “monster under the bed”. She was Way’s “familiar”. Way had formed Belle from a piece of herself to act as her loyal attack beast. Like Way though, Belle had become something more once the two of them were freed to grow as they wished. Their relationship had grown too, from
“master/servant” to “big sister/little sister” with Belle taking the role of the protective older sister. Her relationship with me had changed as well, although in that case it was more from “predator/prey” to “co-conspirators” (since we usually teamed up to make sure Way was taking care of herself).

    “Yeah. Way sends her love and thanks for watching over me.” I said, passing along the sentiment Way had expressed earlier.

    “You have a puppy!” Peri screamed. I winced in response to that. I’d known Peri was puppy crazy for a bit but I thought she’d gotten that out of her system when she started to fixate on ponies. I guess nearby puppy cuteness beat out hypothetical pony cuteness though.

    “I’m not a puppy. I’m just in disguise.” Belle said, saving me from my faux pas.

    “You look like a puppy.” Peri said, insisting on the reality she saw in front of her.

    “Do you want to see how else I can look?” Belle asked.

    “Yes.” Peri said. For someone who was sleeping in my wardrobe because she was afraid of the monster under her bed, there wasn’t much in the way of fear that I could see in her eyes.

    Belle drew in her breath, inflating her puppy chest until she looked so full she might burst. Then she sneezed. The jerking spasm of the sneeze shook her from her puppy body to the body of a girl not much bigger than Peri. Where Peri’s skin was a lovely dark brown, like my step-father and brother, Belle’s had the same black of darkness and smoke as her puppy form.

    “Ooo. Do it again!” Peri squealed.

    “Belle’s not a doll Peri. And you’re supposed to be say ‘Please’ remember?” I told her.

    “PLEASE!” Peri insisted.

    “It’s ok if you want to take a break Belle.” I offered.

    “No, it’s ok. You’re awake now, so I can take care of Peri for a bit. How long will you be here?” Belle asked.

   “A little over an hour I think. We’re taking a bus ride back to our apartment and I’m snoozing for the trip.” I told her.

    “You’re not snoozing. You’re awake.” Peri said, understandably confused at the direction the conversation had taken. Belle was aware of my mission on Earth-Glass with Way. Peri on the other hand was a little young to fully grasp the kind of things I could do. On the other hand there were some simple ways to describe it.

    “Yep – I’m awake here. We’re talking about a pretend place.” I told her.

    The idea that I was in two worlds at once was something I’d seen adults struggle to grasp. I think the only reason I didn’t have a hard time with it was because I’d experienced it before I had to think about it too much. Technically I wasn’t limited to two worlds, but I didn’t have much talent at fragmenting my consciousness so I tended to focus on just one place at a time. That meant that I effectively spent a lot of time “asleep” at home, but as a teenager that wasn’t unheard of. Where I lost out on social time on my “Earth”, I made up for it by making friends on other worlds and being awake, somewhere, at all hours of the day. That was sort of counter intuitive given that I was a “dream” lord but I’d grown accustomed to a lot weirder stuff than that.

    Peri, on the other hand, was still in the process of figuring out how one world worked.

    “Can I go to the pretend place?” she asked.

    “Sure, there’s a lot of old guys there with cigars, just like grandpa.” I told her. Psychological warfare against a four year old used to seem cruel and unnecessary. That was before I’d spent my first five minutes with one. Experience has taught me that using any and all tricks I’d picked up as part of my diplomat training was completely fair game when it came to dealing with children and family members in general.

    “Yuck! I don’t wanna go there.” Peri announced.

    “Aww, but they’d love to pinch your cute little cheeks!” I teased.

    “No! No! No! I’m not going to go!” she said and pulled the door to the wardrobe closed.

    I met Belle’s eyes and giggled silently.

    “I’ll keep her entertained when she comes out.” Belle said.

    “Are you sure it’s ok?”

    “Yes. I feel better when I have something to do.” she said. “Maybe we’ll look into the monster under her bed too.”

    “Monsters under the bed” were, for the most part, just kiddie stories in my world. We had all sorts of weird things, but by and large the world was more mundane than the news made it out to be. Alien invaded fairly often for example but a lot of people had never even seen one much less had to fight against a ‘Reptoid from Beyond The Stars’ (one of the aggressor races that kept coming back for rematches a lot).

    I nodded my thanks to Belle and slipped out of bed to head downstairs. I might be a super powered, reality altering dream lord, but my body on this world still needed to eat unless I wanted to patch it up with magic constantly. That was doable there were as many consequences to eating magic as there was to eating regular food and food tasted better.

    I shuffled into the kitchen in a zombie-like search for sustenance and found my Mom working on a design for a new sewage treatment system on her holo-computer while she mixed the batter for a pineapple upside down cake. How those two thoughts lived together in her head was something I didn’t really want to think about.

    “Oh, you’re up! How are things going with Way?” she asked.

    Early on I’d thought I’d have to take the classic approach of hiding my powers from my parents. That particular bit of idiocy hadn’t lasted longer than 24 hours though. The first day I’d had my powers had been an eventful one. By the end of it, my Mom knew who I was and had accepted me for what I’d become. As simple as that sounds, I’m not sure I could have made it through the years that have passed since then without the simple act of her standing with me that day.

    One of the nice side benefits of being open with her, was that I could keep my Mom in the loop on the things that were going on in the dream worlds. It felt a lot less like I was living a double life when I was able to share all that was happening to me with the people that I loved.

    “She’s doing pretty good. I’m sleeping on her shoulder now actually. We had a bit of break in the case we’re working on.” I said.

    “You’re trying to track down a missing person right?”

    “Missing or possibly dead. Though I’m beginning to think it might be ‘dead’ unfortunately.”

    “Why’s that?”

    “I hired a detective to help us and someone killed him. Then they tried to kill us.”

    My mother stopped her mixing and turned away from the hologram where she was reviewing the sewer plans.

    “I can’t tell you how weird it is to hear your daughter say that and know that you don’t need to worry about her.” she said looking at me like she expected to see fresh bullet wounds somewhere on my body.

    “I know. Though, to be fair, James could say the same thing.” James was my brother, also known as the superhero Aegis. He was Athena’s Champion on Earth and was, for the most part, invulnerable. We weren’t actually competing to see who could get shot at more often but my Mom seemed convinced that we were.

    “His powers I understand a little better than yours.” she said.

    “Says the Champion of Gaia.” I retorted. Like I said, the first day I had my powers had been a little hectic. Among many other unexpected events, I’d wound up bearing Gaia’s Sacred Laurels, the emblem of her chosen champion. Then I’d passed them onto my Mom for safe keeping. I hadn’t actually meant to make her the champion of the planet’s raw life force but sometimes crazy things like that just happen.

    Being Gaia’s Champion had turned out to be a fairly simple deal. The Earth reacts slowly to change, so there wasn’t much day to day work to be done. Gaia’s Champion was needed to stand against any cosmic level threats to the planet but there was a long line of heroes that those threats would need to get through first. Including my indestructible brother James and me.

    Since neither of us had any interest in seeing our mother get into a knock down, drag out brawl with world destroying super villains or alien invaders (and since we had the power to prevent that from happening) Mom’s life as Champion had been reasonably peaceful. She wasn’t one to “rest on her laurels” (James made that joke far too often) though so she’d turned her attention to improving the global systems we had in place for dealing with humanity’s impact on the world.

    Gaia, as the personification of all life on the planet, didn’t actually care much about humans one way or the other. We were a tiny species that hadn’t been around all that long in the grand scheme in things. We could render the planet “uninhabitable” tomorrow and life would change and adapt and largely forget we’d ever existed. There weren’t many Earthlings that wanted that to happen, but there also weren’t many who could see how to prevent it either. With Mom’s help that was changing.

    Complex interactions were something she’d been trained to understand as a chemical engineer. With the mantle of Gaia’s Champion to help feed her information and connections to research labs around the world, she was steadily improving our ability to mitigate the impact we had on the planet. It wasn’t about “being one with nature”. We’d always been “one with nature”, it was one of the most complex technologies that existed and it surrounded and permeated our lives. Mom’s view was that the key lay in understanding that technology and learning to work with it rather than ignoring the consequences of what we did and assuming the biosphere would sort it all out on its own.

    “It sounds like you’re close to wrapping the case up?” Mom asked.

    “Maybe. We still haven’t found who we’re really looking for though.” I said.

    “The missing person?”

    “No, there’s a dreamweaver there. Or a nascent one. That’s why Kari asked us to look into it.” I said. To say Kari was a classmate would have been correct but to say she was the 3rd Musketeer along with Way and I would have been more accurate. I’d met Kari two years ago and had helped her develop her powers as a dream lord. Peri was my sister by blood, but Kari was my sister by choice.

    “That’s like what you are right?”

    “Not exactly. You have dreamwalkers. Those are folks who can travel between world but not change things. Then you’ve got dreamweavers. They can’t travel from world to world under their own power but they can edit reality on the small scale. Then you’ve got dream lords. We’re basically just limited by our imaginations.” I explained.

    “That still seems hard to believe. It makes it sound like you’re God.”

    “Not even close actually. I’m simplifying things a lot too. There’s plenty of stuff that is difficult for me to do or has consequences that I’m not willing to endure. Honestly most of my training with the Parliament over the last few years has been teaching me when not to use my powers and the other ways that I can work out problems that I run into.”

    “I still wish I could go with you and see you in action. It’s strange to see you sleeping so peacefully and then hear later how you were fighting for your life against a sea monster or something.” my Mom said.

    “Well, I’m usually not fighting for my life. Usually it’s other people I’m trying to keep alive. Though I’m not doing a great job of it at the moment. One person dead and another nearly killed.” That had rattled me a bit, but with my meta-awareness in full effect it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. “The Amazing Jin” was a “tough as nails adventure girl” so I could draw on her innate mental fortitude while I was playing that role. As normal Jin, the violence I’d been exposed to was a bit freakier. On one level it helped that I knew I was inherently safe and on another level I had meta-awareness to see that while Shurman’s life was over, his spirit endured. Without those resources to draw on, I knew I would have been a basket base long ago.

    “And even though its a dream, they still seem real to you don’t they?” Mom asked.

    “As real as anyone here. To them, we’re the impossible dream, the fairytale land that they could only find in comic books, just like to us they might as well be in a black and white movie.” I said.

    “Are you going to be ok? Not physically, but, I mean, this seems like a lot to put on two girls your age, even if you do have special powers and training.” my mother said.

    “I think so. I’m hoping we can get out of there as soon as possible actually. We can’t really talk there like we can normally and it feels weird.” I said. My Mom looked at me with appraising eyes. She couldn’t actually look into my soul, but it felt like she was doing a good job trying to.

    “How are things looking for your next semester with the Parliament? You’re going on to your apprenticeships next right?” she asked.

    My heart dropped past my stomach and into the bottom of my feet at the mention of that. Apprenticeships are a part of the Parliament’s advanced curriculum. They’re a chance to learn about the roles that you’re interested in via actual experience. Way and I had both been accepted into the program based on the academic and practical work that we’d done leading up to it. Our “grades” on both were pretty high and we’d managed to get connected with two very experienced and well regarded mentors.

    And that was the problem. Way’s interests and talents lead her towards the Diplomat Corps’ “Guardian” program. They were the ones who acted as security and enforcement for the worlds that were under the Parliament’s protection. My own talents pointed in another direction though. I was bound for the “Envoy” program. We were the ones who dealt with nurturing worlds that weren’t yet ready to join the Parliament and coordinating with worlds that knew of the Parliament but chose to remain outside it.

    It wasn’t uncommon at all for Envoys and Guardians to work together and that was exactly what we planned to do. There was just the small matter that the apprenticeships usually ran for four to six years, during which time we’d be traveling far and wide. Forget seeing each other every day, we’d be lucky if we saw each other once a season, or maybe even once a year.

    I hated it.

    A part of me didn’t want to go through with it. I didn’t want to be apart from Way for that long. Another part of me though couldn’t bear the thought of holding her back.

    Way had grown so much since I’d first met her. I knew if she had the chance to become a full fledged Guardian, she’d blossom into one of the best that there’d ever been.

    For an impossible girl, I hated feeling like I was in an impossible situation, but for all my power the one thing I couldn’t change was who we were. And so I sat caught in a trap of my own making, feeling like I was going to split in two without the aid of a magician’s box or a giant sawblade.

    Fighting an unseen enemy can make for an interesting mental puzzle. You look for the tell-tale clues, small sounds, or ripples in the environment that give them away and when you find them, you pounce. That tends to work better when you can actually fight back though. When one side has a high powered sniper rifle and the other is unarmed, it makes for a less than enjoyable contest. At least for the unarmed people.

    Way was having the same thoughts I was and solved the “unarmed” problem by liberating Officer Smith’s gun from his belt. Stealing from a cop is not generally the brightest of ideas, but under the circumstances we were short on better options.  She checked the gun and then nodded to the door. I crawled over to it with her and, just before she got up to leave the office, I turned off the light. She moved the instant darkness returned and there were no further shots to greet her departure. Either the killer was patient, or they were already on the move. Neither of those prospects filled me with joy.

    Guys who work as guns for hire tend to be meaty and prone to thoughtless violence. Those qualities are great for someone who needs to be intimidating but they’re not optimal for an assassin. Whoever the killer was, they weren’t making the kind of mistakes I’d expect from a typical leg breaker. They’d only shot once for example, and only when they had a clear view of their target.

    That made me think of the room I was in. It was a wreck, but someone as careful as the shooter could have searched it without leaving any trace that they’d been there. So either someone else vandalized Shurman’s office or the killer wanted someone to know they’d been there.

    Frowning at yet another puzzle piece that didn’t seem to fit, I applied pressure to the gash that the bullet had cut in the side of Officer Smith’s head. I’d made sure he hadn’t received a lethal wound but any kind of head injury was dangerous. He’d need medical attention and probably a dozen stitches at least. The problem was he was a beat cop working alone. No one would think to look for him until the shift change and my guess was that wouldn’t be until morning.

    That presented some problems. I couldn’t leave him alone and uncared for, but I had other responsibilities to attend to as well. Add to that the fact that being around me hadn’t been all that safe recently and I was forced to conclude that I needed some help. Looking around for inspiration, I noticed the phone sitting on Shurman’s desk. I almost hadn’t recognized it and had to remind myself to expect technology to look like something from the age of the dinosaurs as long as I was on Earth-Glass.

    Whatever model phone Shurman had invested in didn’t look like any of the “Olde Tyme” telephones I’d ever seen pictures of. Fortunately, it didn’t look terribly complicated either. I fished it off the desktop, being careful not to expose myself to a clear line of fire from the window. In the dark it was harder for anyone to see me moving but not impossible, the street lights were still illuminating the room pretty well. On my world I would have been a sitting duck but Earth-Glass’s ancient technology worked in my favor there. I didn’t have  to worry about the shooter having night vision goggles or computer-aided targeting optics or “Jin seeking missiles” (the way some Mad Science types on my homeworld would).

    “How may I direct your call.” a woman said a few moments after I lifted the phone’s components off their stand.

    I tensed my throat muscles in an odd and slightly painful way.

    “Connect me to the precinct. This is Officer Frank Smith. I’ve been…” I paused. One of the ‘tricks’ I knew as a stage magician was mimicry. I hadn’t heard much of Officer Smith’s voice but I was banking on the same being true for the operator. I let the pause stretch on for an uncomfortable moment and then spoke again. “I’m at 6 Lamont avenue. I’ve been shot. Feeling a little…light headed. Maybe you should put me through to the hospital. Which one’s close to Lamont? I’m going to sit down for a second here. Maybe you should call me an ambulance. I’m just going to sit down here.”

    My acting was a bit over the top, but the operator wasn’t familiar with the idea prank calls and the situation I was describing was sufficiently serious to push her past questioning me too deeply. She called out to “Officer Smith” a few times before I heard her turn to one of her coworkers for help. I mumbled something unintelligible back to her, as though Officer Smith was just barely conscious still. It didn’t take them long to decide that calling both the police station and the hospital was the correct procedure.

    “I’ll buy you a new shirt after this over.” I whispered to the unconscious Officer Smith as I tore off his sleeve. It made a longer bandage than the swatch of dress that I’d been using. I tried to be careful as I wrapped it around his head, but not so much that it looked like someone else had arranged it for him.

    As I fastened the makeshift bandage around his head, I heard a trio of shots ring out. The acoustics of the building prevented me from making out which direction they came from. Another pair of shots came a few moments later and then silence reigned. I held my breath waiting for some sign of how the battle had gone. Instead of that though I heard the operator talking to her coworker about hearing something. She hadn’t been able to make out the gunfire exactly, but she knew something was happening on the other end.

    Officer Smith chose that moment let out a pained groan. In one sense it was perfect. The operator heard it clearly and I could hear her telling her coworker to have the ambulance hurry. On the other hand, I also heard footsteps in hallway drawing closer to the door and the chatter from the phone was sure to draw attention. Leaving my injured patient propped up against the wall with the phone in his hands, I crawled over to the door and peeked out.

    I breathed a sigh of relief to see Way advancing carefully down the hall. She didn’t speak until she was close enough to whisper to me.

    “I winged him and I think he’s fled for now.” she said.

    “Where was he?”

    “By the time I got out there he was on the street and heading towards the door we went in.”

    “You’re sure it was him?”

    “Positive. He still had his rifle.”

    “Did he see you?”

    “Not clearly. That door is pretty well shadowed. He was ready for trouble though. He snapped a shot off at me as soon as I looked out the door.”

    “He missed?” I asked, looking her over in the dim light to see if I could spot any wounds.

    “Just barely. For a snapshot he had good aim.”

    “And the other shots I heard?”

    “I fired back but he had too much cover from the garbage bin at the end of the alley. He tried to fake me out by opening and closing a door on one of the parked cars. That’s what brought about the second exchange of fire you heard. He tried for an ambush shot but I clipped him in the arm and ruined his aim. I guess that’s all he had the stomach because he took off on foot after that. I was going to chase him, but it would have been too easy for him to double back and get here before I could.” Way explained. She’d prioritized me over stopping the killer, which I couldn’t necessarily disagree with. I wanted to express my thanks for it and assure her that I was ok and that she could let me take some risks too but words failed me.

    As dream lords we have methods of silent communication that can impart a whole lot more information than simple words. Unfortunately, Earth-Glass was fragile enough that it was risky to use that kind of communication. I frowned. Nothing important would be gained by risking dream speech here, Way already knew I was grateful for what she did and that she could trust me to hold my own. I didn’t need to tell her but I wanted to anyway and I hated that we were being kept apart like that.

    “How’s Officer Smith doing?” Way asked.

    “Still out of it. The bullet rung his bell pretty good. He’s bleeding too. Nothing life threatening yet, but I called for an ambulance to come for him.

    “You’re thinking we’ll wait with him till they arrive and then slip out in the hustle and bustle that follows?” Way said.

    “Yeah, it sounds like the shooter won’t be back, at least not right away, but I don’t want to take chances. And if he is waiting for us, it’ll be easier to pass unnoticed with a crowd of people to hide in.

    “What about this?” Way asked, gesturing with the gun that she’d taken from the policeman.

    “Wipe your prints off of it and give it back to him. I’ll shatter the window out a bit more, make it look like he fired back at the guy who shot him. The neighbors will remember the gunfire from the fight you just had so they’ll report multiple shots fired. If he was shooting out the window though it’d be really hard to find where the bullets would have landed.”

    “How long till the ambulance gets here?” Way asked as she unloaded the remaining rounds out of the pistol. Handing an unconscious man a loaded pistol was a recipe for disaster but an empty pistol would be both harmless and believable for the scene that the paramedics and police would find.

    “Five to ten minutes I would guess. Might see a police car show up first though.” I said as I poked out more pieces of the shattered window so they’d fall to the street below.

    “Let’s assume the shooter isn’t going to come back. He’s a pro. He won’t want to risk a fight against an armed and alert foe when he’s wounded.” Way said.

    “That makes sense. He’ll probably try to figure out who we are first and then hit us when we’re not expecting it.”

    “I don’t think he got a good look at me, but if he was watching the room he probably saw you pretty clearly.”

    “Yeah. That’s not so good. I’m a bit distinctive. It won’t take him long to figure out who the Chinese girl in the stage magicians outfit is.”

    “Maybe. You had your coat closed until you started making bandages. He probably knows what you look like, but he may not have a sense of what you do.”

    “Except, he was at the Chimera Club tonight. He didn’t know I was the one who hired Shurman then or he would have shot me there. Seeing me here too though? He has to have connected those dots.” I said.

    “Think its safe to go back to our rooms then? It wouldn’t take him long to find out where we live. Plenty of people in the stage crew at the club know.”

    “They know we live in Fairbanks, but they don’t know our exact address.” I said.

    “That wouldn’t be that hard to get either.” Way said, her smile suggesting an idea had occurred to her.

    “So we set a trap?” I said. I can’t read her mind, but when you know someone as well as Way and I know each other it’s not always that hard to guess what the other is thinking.

    “If we can catch him, he might be able to tell us what happened to Mcintyre.”

    “It’ll be trickier without our magic.”

    “But not impossible.”

    “Shame it’s not, then it’d be right up our alley.” I said with a small smile. Way smiled back in agreement. More than a few people, often enemies we were fighting but occasionally friends as well, had observed that we were impossible girls. We took some pride in that, even (or especially) when it was driving other people crazy.

    “Can you open the door across the hall?” Way asked.

    “Yeah, let’s head over there. The ambulance should be here any minute.” I replied.

    The Art of Disappearing, as well as much of the rest of stage magic,  revolves around understanding and guiding the flow of attention. In other words, the easiest way to “disappear” is to not be where people are looking. That sounds simple, and it’s made easier by the fact that people are much less attentive than than they’re aware of, but it can still be nerve wracking.

    Picking the lock on the door to the office across the hall was trivial. Waiting for the ambulance crew on the other hand was semi-agonizing. Intellectually I knew they wouldn’t look in the dark room we were in when there was a nice brightly lit room with a gunshot victim in it to draw their attention (we’d turned the lights on before we left the room). Until I heard them go into Shurman’s office though I kept imagining them throwing open the door to the room Way and I were crouched in and calling a gang of police down on us.

    In the end though they rushed in to Shurman’s office and were none the wiser as we slipped out of our hiding spot and then out of the building.

    We caught a bus about a half hour later and roughly a mile away. The meant a lot of extra stops before we reached our apartment but that was ok by me.

    “Quite a day.” I said, slumping against Way’s shoulder.

    “Why don’t you catch a quick nap while we head back.” she suggested. “We’ll need to be alert later for the trap if we’re going to set it up.”

    “That’s not a bad idea. Wake me up when we get close to the apartment ok?” I said.

    Way nodded in agreement and I slipped down into the welcoming embrace of darkness. A moment later I opened my eyes and stretched feeling somehow both groggy and refreshed. I gazed around and found everything in my room just as I’d left it. Everything except for my wardrobe which had a door cracked slightly open and my little sister peering out from the darkness within.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “What do you mean?” the cop asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “And Stone’s involved in that too?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “Was he married?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “And then someone found him.”

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

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

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

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

    “And people would have noticed.” I agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    “To who?”

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

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

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

    “What about his home?” Way asked.

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

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

    “I’d rather not.” I admitted.

    “Me either.” she agreed.

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

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

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

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

    “That was interesting.” I said.

    “Think we should follow her?” Way asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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