“Okay. I’m going to go. You need anything, give me a call. Otherwise, I’ll pick you up for lunch before I take you to see the lawyer, yeah?”
“Sounds good,” Jason said.
Taika called Hiro, from his car, neither aware of the shadowy creature hiding a body in each of their shadows.
“Are you getting Jason settled?” Hiro asked.
“No worries, boss. Well, maybe some worries.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Your nephew’s weird.”
“He’s certainly different to what I remember. You think there’s a problem?”
“It’s just a lot of little things. He disappeared, yeah, and now he’s back and all mysterious and stuff? What if he’s EOA?”
“Clearly he’s been through something,” Hiro said. “It’s a big leap from there to the EOA, though.”
“We know they’ve been sniffing around,” Taika said. “You saw how jumpy it’s made Growl. What if your nephew is their foot in the door?”
“That wouldn’t be their style. They go heavy, not subtle. What makes you think Jason is EOA?”
“When I checked on him this morning, I saw someone had put all the weights up to maximum. Your nephew isn’t exactly a huge bloke.”
Hiro thought about Jason lifting the gold bar with one hand.
“You think he’s one of the EOA’s juiced-up thugs?”
“I like your nephew, boss, but he feels dangerous.”
“He’s not one of their juicers,” Hiro said. “Have you ever talked to them? That drug cocktail they put them on messes up their heads.”
“Like brain damage?”
“Exactly like that. It’s not that bad, but I talked to Jason for a while and didn’t see any signs. Did he seem slow at all to you?”
“No, boss; he seems pretty sharp. I can’t help but feel like he seems dangerous, though.”
“I thought the same thing. Keep an eye out, but make sure nothing happens to him. If the EOA do get it in their heads to make use of him, it’ll be by grabbing him, not recruiting him.”
“No worries, boss.”
The abandoned hospital’s helipad was still serviceable and Annabeth Tilden’s helicopter landed mid-morning. She was dressed in a sensible suit, as was the woman waiting for her with a powerful torch in hand. They looked like government functionaries, which was exactly the intention.
“Director,” Ketevan greeted loudly over the sound of the helicopter winding down. Anna didn’t bother to respond over the noise, instead letting Ketevan lead her inside the building. The corridors were filthy and the broken fluorescents didn’t have power anyway. Ketevan guided her boss through the building by torchlight.
“What do you have, Keti?” Anna asked. “I’ve got the Engineers of Ascension pushing into Sydney that I have to keep an eye on, now this Children’s Hospital miracle nonsense that blew up this morning.”
“The hospital miracle thing is ours?”
“A hospital full of kids were mysteriously cured by an angel made of stars, Keti. It would be weirder if magic wasn’t responsible.”
“That really happened?”
“Yeah. The media doesn’t even need to sensationalise. Not that they aren’t trying, bless them. Whoever’s responsible clearly doesn’t give a crap about the mess they’re making, but the media is Terrance’s problem, thankfully. What do you have for me here?”
“It definitely wasn’t a glitch in the grid,” Ketevan said. “The magic event is over, but it was so powerful that we can still read the residual magic like it just happened. After our investigators picked up on it, I sent in an after-action team to see what we could learn.”
“And?”
“Well, you remember that I told you the event was localised?”
“No. You woke me up in the middle of the night.”
“Sorry, Director. Well, it turned out to be very, very localised.”
Ketevan turned off the torch when they reached the maternity ward, where a number of lamps had been set up to illuminate the area. The after-action team looked like a forensics team as they bustled about. In the maternity theatre, a flat board had been set out and a magical diagram drawn onto it. Floating above the circle was a horizontal figure that looked to be made of fire.
“What am I looking at?” Anna asked.
“As best we can tell,” Ketevan said, “this is the echo of a variant incursion event.”
“That’s a rather extreme variant,” Anna said.
“Yes,” Ketevan agreed. “I told you about the rated strength, which still registers above five in every test we run. The proto-astral space existed for less than a second, which is quite a lot less than the usual forty-three hours. And, of course, instead of covering kilometres, it was the size and shape of a person.”
“You’re suggesting a person came through,” Anna said.
“Or something person-shaped,” Ketevan said. “Maybe it was an angel made of stars.”
6
NOT THE REGULAR SORT OF DANGEROUS
“How’d it go?” Taika asked as he drove Jason through the city. They were in one of the cars Hiro kept in a pool for his staff, a luxurious town car Taika had picked for the roomy interior.
“There are some hoops to jump through in legally coming back from the dead,” Jason said. “That lawyer you set me up with seems to know his business.”
“Yeah, he’s good,” Taika said. “We’ve got some time before you meet your uncle for dinner. Is there anything you wanted to do?”
“I don’t suppose you know where I could get some powdered silver?”
“I know a guy.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, bro. No worries.”
“You’re not going to ask what it’s for?”
“A job like mine,” Taika said, “you learn when to ask questions and when not to.”
“You seem like a really good employee.”
“That’s why your uncle pays me the big bucks.”
For each of his shadow bodies subsumed into Jason, Shade could mask his summoner from one form of sensory perception. He could muffle Jason’s sound, mask his scent, and even eliminate the heat radiated by his body. The only senses Shade could not mask were aura senses and direct looking at him. Those, Jason had to control himself.
While Shade couldn’t prevent direct observation, doing so through a secondary medium was another matter entirely. How effective the obfuscation was depended on the medium in question. Shade could hide Jason entirely from a magical telescope, for example, as if he were invisible. Non-magical means, such as an ordinary telescope, Shade couldn’t block at all.