Lisa Smedman - The Lucifer desk

The light strobed around Pita, dazzling her eyes with red spots, even through her closed eyelids. She could feel the heat beating against the top of her head and shoulders. Sweat trickled down one cheek. The spirit was pressing closer. It was coming for her, trying to suck her up into its spinning vortex. She couldn’t control it. She’d never control it. The thing would tear her body to atoms.

“Go!” Pita leaped to her feet, raising her burned arm. She pointed to the skylight, focusing her will in an arrow-straight line. “Go!”

At that same moment, Masaki began to scream her name. “Pi-”

Suddenly the convenience store lay far below her. She was a flash of light, streaking through the star-speckled heavens. Arcing up, then swooping down and skipping across the lake below. Flashing in a jagged ladder toward a series of six silver towers with black-tinted windows. Rushing in through one of those squares. Zig-zagging impossibly fast along a corridor that was more a boxy blur than a hallway. Coming suddenly upon a dark-haired woman, sprawled on the floor on her back, a huge black dog atop her, fangs a few centimeters from her throat. Arcing down, plunging in through the animal’s burning red eyes, sizzling them in an instant and piercing its brain. Then out again through its nostrils in twin white beams, so quickly that the animal had no time even to collapse, so quickly that the woman below it had not yet even blinked. Back through the hallway, back up into the heavens. Expanding into a flash that spread paper-thin over hundreds of kilometers, stretching ever outward into a sheet of lightning, waiting, waiting, while the nanoseconds ticked by with impossible slowness…

Pita’s mind sluggishly formed a thought. Control. Command?

She could sense the spirit’s impatience-its desire to flow, be free. And its anger. Somewhere below were fiber-optic cables, humming hardware, and knots of computer nodes that together spread an invisible mesh across the globe. The Matrix. A sticky spider web into which the spirit was forced to throw itself, compulsively returning over and over again. Break, it hissed at her. Tear.

Pita felt the creature’s anger blaze through her mind. There, it joined with her own. An image formed in her consciousness. A cop’s face, leering at her, twisted with hatred. A chromed hand. A patrol car, hissing through the night.

The spirit coalesced into a point, then shot down toward the city in a jagged streak of lightning. Pita watched from an impossible height as it zoomed down into the street where the beams of headlights crisscrossed, frozen like rays of ice. In through the tinted windshield of a police patrol car.

Through the glass she saw two frightened faces, washed with brilliant light. Their eyes were squinted tight, their hands thrown up as if to ward off a blow. One of those hands was chromed. The patrol car was just starting to spin in response to the driver’s panicked reaction. Kill? a voice whispered in Pita’s mind.

In the same instant, Pita heard an echo. A second voice had overlaid the first. It somehow seemed more in tune with Pita’s own thoughts. No, it whispered with a soft purr. Play.

Recognizing the voice of Cat, Pita tried to smile. She felt her brain start to send the command to her lips. The world she was occupying was moving much too quickly for it to get there. Yes, the first voice echoed, long before Pita could either agree or disagree with the suggestion. Play.

Fingers of light licked out at the two cops in the patrol car, searing their faces, crisping their hair, blinding them instantly. A part of Pita exulted, enjoying the fear and pain the spirit was causing. These were the two cops who had killed Chen, Shaz, and Mohan. She had them now, right between her paws. She could bat them about or rend them with her claws. She would draw their blood a little at a time and savor the taste of their scurrying panic.

At the same time, another part of her was repulsed. What was she doing? She’d ordered the spirit to kill the hell hound without a second thought. But this was torture. And it was ugly. Suddenly horrified at what she had become, she drew back violently from the scene that was unfolding…

Something snapped. A light blinked out in her mind. At the same moment, her muscles twitched her lips into a smile, at last obeying the command that her brain had seemingly sent hours ago. She opened her eyes on a darkroom, her mouth curled in a foolish grin.

“Pita? Are you all right, Pita?”

Masaki peered at her from behind the counter, eyes wide with fear. He clambered to his feet, then edged around the corner of the counter, one eye on the skylight. Beside him, the trideo camera was still whirring softly.

Aziz rolled over, groaning and rubbing his eyes. Then he jerked around to look up at the ceiling. “Where is it?” he asked suddenly. “Where’d it go?”

Pita sighed as relief made her body rubbery. “It’s gone. I let it go.”

Aziz clasped her knee. “Were you able to control-”

“Yes” Pita answered. Her arm was itching fiercely. And she was dead tired. The spell seemed to have taken a lot out of her. “Can I get up now?”

“Of course.” Aziz helped Pita to her feet and guided her out of the hermetic circle. “We did it!” he chortled, slapping her on the back. “We controlled the spirit!”

“You mean Pita controlled it,” Masaki interjected. He moved closer to Pita, then wrapped an arm protectively around her shoulders. Pita slumped against him, too tired to protest at him taking the liberty of hugging her. Actually, it felt kind of nice.

“Pita didn’t do it on her own,” Aziz said. “She’s not a trained-”

An electronic beeping in a corner of the room cut him off. Aziz ran over to it and picked up a cel phone. “Yes?”

After listening for a second or two he flipped the phone shut. “That was Carla,” he said with a broad smile. “The hell hound is dead. Carla’s a little shaken up, a little bloody, but she’s on her way out of the MCT building now.”

Carla twisted a scanning stylus between her fingers, trying to contain her anger as she stared down Greer. The scratches from her close call with the hell hound stood out as red welts on her hands. “What do you mean, the story is spiked? I got what you wanted-proof that Mitsuhama Computer Technologies was behind the spirit. I’ve even got a hardcopy document addressed to the director of their research lab, outlining the uses the corporation planned to put this tech to. I risked my drekking life to get it and nearly got mauled by a hell hound in the process. I spent all day yesterday-my day off-putting the piece together. I have footage of a hermetic circle in the Mitsuhama lab that matches the diagram on the datachip, and I obtained a collaborating quote from a Renraku source who admits that their corporation is also experimenting with Farazad’s spell. And all you can say is, ‘The story is spiked’? I can’t believe it!”

Greer leaned back in his padded chair, rocking uneasily back and forth. He seemed distinctly uncomfortable. Usually when he called a reporter in for one of his infamous “private conferences” he would bluster and roar like an angry bear. The whole newsroom would hear the dressing down, regardless of whether the door was shut or not. Normally, he and Carla would have gone at it tooth and nail, shooting at each other across the desk, and eventually-maybe-Carla would win and the story would air. But today Greer refused to be provoked. Instead he picked up his mug and took a sip of soykaf that had long since gone cold.

“You heard what I said,” he said gruffly. “The story’s not going to air. Drop it.”

“That’s insane!” Carla protested. “This story is huge. Not only does it imply that magic might be used to access the Matrix, but it foretells a possible repeat of the Crash of 2029. It’s a groundbreaking story-and ironic, too, Imagine a corporation secretly developing a magical spirit that could single-handedly destroy the entire information and telecommunications industry! You can’t bury a story like that! If KKRU doesn’t run it, somebody else will.”