Jak Koke - Stranger souls

A thin, tight smile graced Senor Oscuro's face, barely discernible beneath his black mustache and beard. He was hopeful; his eyes showed intense eagerness to proceed with the ritual. He held out a strong white hand for her, and as she approached, she focused on that hand, on the individual black hairs that protruded from the back of his fingers. Like tiny snakes; she imagined them writhing over his skin, all of his hair transformed into living flagella.

The image passed, and Lucero climbed up onto the altar, the chill of the stone passing through the thin cotton cloth beneath her. She lay completely still as Senor Oscuro opened her robe, spreading the sides of it so that the front of her body was naked. She did not look down at her own flesh, the hideousness of the scarred skin. She focused her gaze on Quetzalcoatl, on the god's brightly colored feathers shimmering in the yellow light. He seemed almost indifferent to her inside the statue.

Oscuro started his spell, summoning the first adept. Holding the girl's head at the proper angle to give the knife easy access to her throat. Lucero saw the cut, the ceremonial obsidian blade opening the girl's neck, the welling of her blood. It pooled on Lucero's stomach, filling the room with the iron tang, before Oscuro dropped the dead girl and spread her blood over Lucero. Over the scarred flesh of her breasts, stomach, and thighs.

The liquid was warm and sticky for a second. Then Lucero lost consciousness and was flying through the astral. Crossing over the threshold to the metaplanes, past the guardian blood spirit. On her way to the place of light and song.

She came to a stop in the place. She knew that she stood on the hard stone of an unfinished bridge, but she could not see her feet. The light was so bright and white that she could see nothing else. And the music, the song of the woman whose name she did not know, was beautiful, clear, and crystalline in its pitch, exact in timbre. Lucero loved that voice.

The dark stain of her blood tie was the only blackness there. And as Lucero stood, basking in the ocean of light and sound, the stain began to spread again. Like last time, it

welled forth from Lucero's heart, a black ooze that darkened the space immediately around her. It grew until a ragged shell had formed, a tattered swatch of bloody cloth on white linen.

Suddenly, Lucero felt a surge of power so immeasurable that she could not fathom it. Oscuro had formed the connection to the submerged obsidian stone. The Locus, they called it. The extra power was helping her darkness grow, making her thirst for the blood magic again. Lucero did not care, as long as she could stay and listen to the voice. But the voice was growing more and more distant as the power grew, the connection to the Locus.

As the darkness around her gained strength, Lucero became aware of the precipice, of the huge crevasse between the narrow outcropping where she stood and the other side, a wall of stone in the distance. And she felt the presence of creatures, of nightmare entities with frightening power, held barely in check by the strength of the song. They wanted to come across, she knew. They wanted it more than anything, and they would stop at nothing to accomplish that. Her presence made them happy.

Then, as suddenly as the first time, the dark stain was washed away in a flood of light. Her power could not hold out against the sheer impenetrable beauty of that voice, of the song that resonated deep inside Lucero. Touching a chord, a harmonic thrum through the core of her spirit.

Throwing her back into the physical world.

Lucero woke on the altar, her naked body slick with blood from the sacrificed adolescents, the adepts and trainees who had given their life energy so that she could stay in the place longer.

Oscuro's face hung above her, hair and beard as black as soot, eyes like chips of coal in his head. But he smiled down at her, flashing white teeth. "Well done again," he said. "The Locus helped, but it is still too weak. Next time we will assemble the Gestalt."

Lucero nodded her understanding, and sat up. Oscuro wrapped a clean white sheet around her. She had never felt better. Energy pulsed through her body, making her ecstatic. Like fire in her veins.

Power. Close to what she had felt when she'd been part

of the Gestalt. It was enough to make her forget that she hated her addiction. That she abhorred the stain on her soul. She climbed down from the altar, and made her way out of the sanctuary and to her chamber so that she could wash herself. The rush inside her would fade, she knew, and so she enjoyed the sweet ecstasy of it, the pure pleasure of invincibility.

But through the burning ambrosia of her high, she felt a twinge of yearning. A desire that was growing stronger and stronger. It was the desire to return to the place of light and song. To simply listen to the beautiful music. She would do anything to stay there forever.

Anything.

Roxborough slept, dreams of walking through the clinic's hallways fluttering in his mind. He was physical in the dream. Inside a real body, alive in the world of atoms and molecules. Of flesh and steel.

Sometimes, when he dreamed, his mind moved through the clinic's computer system, like sleepwalking. Murmurs and fragments of sentences would come from the speakers throughout the clinic. His face would fade into the trideo and telecom screens like an electronic ghost, spooking the patients and workers alike. Some said the clinic was haunted. On rare occasions, even his simulacrum would come to life in the boardroom when he slept.

Roxborough didn't care really. The more his workers feared him, the better. And his Matrix technicians said that nothing could be done, short of disconnecting him from the virtual reality when he slept. And for Roxborough, that was not acceptable. He had a phobia of being permanently cut off. The fear that came in the moment of absolute absence of sensory input before the computer recognized he was awake.

The black void of silence, of nothingness, was like a womb of suffocation. And that moment stretched on. And on until Roxborough panicked, thinking he was permanently disconnected from the world. Thinking he would have to spend all of eternity in that void, unable even to kill himself. Going slowly, inexorably, insane.

So he left himself connected to the host while he slept.

Now, something woke him. A gentle beeping that indicated a telecom call. Roxborough saw that it was Meyer. His elven face showed fatigue and satisfaction. He'd been hard at work on the ritual magic for six hours.

"Yes," Roxborough said.

Meyer took a breath. "We're finished," he said, "We didn't find him. Mercury is either dead or so well protected that it's beyond our power to locate him."

Roxborough nodded. "Well done," he said.

Meyer smiled. "Thank you."

"What are the chances that he's alive, but protected?"

"Slim to none. The only places we can't see are inside very powerful magical wards, well beyond the capability of the runners who took him. Unless he's in space; we can't detect anyone outside the manasphere."

"Thank you, Meyer," Roxborough said. "Get some rest. You deserve it."

Meyer nodded and disconnected.

Roxborough was pleased. Meyer was the most powerful mage he had known, a man who took pride in his work. If Ryan was alive, Meyer would have located him. The likelihood that Mercury had found his way into space or inside a ward was extremely improbable. Statistically insignificant, in Roxborough's opinion, and could be ruled out. Roxborough had made a fortune by using statistics and odds. Numbers never lied in the long run.

It was with those satisfying thoughts settling in his head that Roxborough prepared to fall asleep again. But just before he entered the dream state, his Matrix interface indicated another incoming telecom call. This time it was Darke. Not someone he could ignore.