The Collected Christopher Connery (19 page)

It took Gail a moment to catch up with the metaphor, but
when she thought she had it, she asked, “But it was only one time, right? I
mean, it was
bad,
don’t get me wrong, but if he was just a kid…”

“Once is enough!” Nia nearly shouted, startling Gail into
silence. Then she looked back at the river, shoulders hunched against the wind
and bad memories. “The reason unbound magic is forbidden is because of how easy
it is for even a seasoned magician to lose control of it. And until we learn to
draw our circles, all our magic is unbound. Before we can talk, before we can
walk, we are taught to control ourselves, to hold our magic inside at all
costs. That is the first rule of being a magician. There can be no second
chances. Any child that loses control of his or her magic even once is bound,
for their own protection and the protection of everyone else. A magician who
has slipped once will slip again.”

“You can’t know that,” said Gail. “He lost control
because he saw some little bastards torturing a rat. How often does that happen
in a lifetime?”

Nia shook her head. “That time it was a rat. Next time it
would be something else, but there
would
be a next time. There always
is. No one is immune from losing control, but those most at risk have to be –
assisted in holding back. It’s not kind, but it’s the only way.”

“It sounds cruel to me.”

“Yes,” said Nia softly. “It is cruel. It’s cruel and it’s
unfair.”

“Then why do it?”

“Because otherwise people die.”

“Always?”

“Always.” Nia stared out at the darkness for a moment
longer then wiped a hand across her eyes and turned around. “When I was a
child, there was a magician at the Academy who wanted to experiment with
unbound magic, wanted to prove that it could be controlled if the magician was
skilled enough. She claimed that young magicians who had lapses in control
might actually be the most powerful magicians of all; they were simply
overwhelmed by their own strength. If they could learn to bend their power to
their will without the aid of circles, they could likely perform feats of magic
not seen for centuries. After conducting many successful small experiments,
this magician decided to debut her findings in a final presentation. She, along
with her students, would prove that unbound magic could not only be controlled
but was actually superior to bound magic.”

Though she had a feeling she already knew, Gail asked,
“What happened?”

“She lost control. They all died.”

“So that’s why…?”

“That’s why. And she was - if she couldn’t control it, no
one can.”

“I – I think I understand. Thanks for telling me.”

Nia nodded mutely.

Completely at a loss for what to say, Gail just stood
feeling like an idiot for what felt like several centuries. The formerly
refreshing wind had turned uncomfortably cold as it whipped against her bare
legs.

It was Nia who finally broke the heavy silence. “I think
we had better go back. We have to start work early again tomorrow.”

Gail could only nod and follow Nia back toward the
street. What a way to end the night. She doubted Nia was still classifying it
as “a lovely evening.”

You had to know. You couldn’t have worked with him
without knowing.

It was true, but it didn’t make her feel like any less of
a shithead for dragging it out of Nia that way.

Nia was leading by a yard or two, head down as she strode
toward the crosswalk. She had just stepped out into the empty street when a
trolley came lurching around the corner much faster than it should have. Nia
froze in the trolley’s headlights, but years of training had eliminated Gail’s
rat-in-a-floodlight response. She threw herself forward, catching Nia’s arm and
yanking her back on to the sidewalk as the trolley roared past.

It jangled its bell as it went, that hearty, “fuck you,
stay out of the road if you want to live,” melody that Gail was used to hearing
from the nighttime trolleys. Nia, however, was clearly less acquainted with
their behavior and was clinging to Gail like somebody who’d just narrowly
avoided death. Which, in retrospect, Gail guessed she had.

“You okay, princess? Don’t take it hard, they don’t stop
for anyone at this time of night. I’m not sure what it is they
do
if
they’re not stopping, but maybe they compete to see who can mow down the most pedestrians.”

“I thought it was going to hit me.” Nia stared after the
trolley with an expression of dazed terror on her face. She turned her wide
eyes to Gail’s face. “What would you have done if it had hit me?”

“Skipped town, because there’s no way I’d go back to the
Academy and say I got their best Illuminator hit by a trolley.”

Nia laughed shakily, dropping her head against Gail’s
shoulder. “I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to sleep now.”

“You’ll have to get used to it, princess.” Gail was
unable to resist running her hand lightly over Nia’s curly hair. When the other
woman didn’t object, she did it again. “The trolleys are always crazy this time
of night. You can never predict where they’re going to show up, even with the
tracks.”

“The tracks…” Nia murmured almost sleepily. Then her head
snapped up so quick that she almost socked Gail in the eye.

“Goddamn, what’s gotten into you?”

“The tracks!” Nia gripped Gail’s arm and looked at her
intently. “Do you have a subway map?”

“A subway map?” This conversation was speeding out of
control quicker than the wild trolley. “They never finished the subway.”

“Yes, but they started them, which means there must be
maps of the tunnels, correct?”

“Well, yeah.” Slowly, Gail began to understand what Nia
was getting at. “I’ve actually been down in the tunnels a few times. I think
I’ve got a map back at the hotel. We could go –”

But Nia had already grabbed her hand and was dragging her
across the street.

When they arrived back in the lobby, the place was
finally starting to empty out for the night. The people who still weren’t ready
for bed were headed out to other bars and nightclubs while the rest wandered up
to their rooms to sleep the rest of the night – and likely most of the morning
– away.

Nia, however, seemed wide awake as she pulled Gail toward
the elevator, all signs of her former tipsiness gone. In the few moments of
stillness in the elevator, Gail managed to say, “If you’re thinking what I
think you’re thinking, I wouldn’t get too excited. The trains haven’t been
running for –”

But Nia waved her into silence. “Leave that for later,
detective. First we have to see if my theory holds any water. Then we can move
on to the logistics.”

“Aren’t the logistics kind of important?”

Nia’s beaming smile didn’t dim a degree. “Of course, but
we have to take these things one step at a time. Ah! This is our floor.
Quickly, detective!”

Gail let herself be pulled out of the elevator and down
the hallway to her room. Nia waited impatiently, tapping her foot while Gail
dug in her pocket for her key.

When she finally got the door unlocked, Nia opened it and
pushed past her into the room.

“You know I need get them for you, right?” said Gail as
she shut the door behind them. “So there’s no point getting ahead of me.”

“I’m sorry,” Nia huffed, not sounding particularly
contrite. Then she began digging into her own handbag while Gail went to the
safe where she kept her paperwork-in-progress. Pulling out the folder, she
flipped through the scant notes she had made on the case so far until she got
back to her more general resources. A list of phone numbers, a street map of
New Crossbridge, a bunch of old notes, a few photographs – ah, there it was.
The map was creased and wrinkled and scribbled on. There were other pieces of
paper taped to the edges where Gail had extended the map with pencil, marking
out the unfinished tunnels that the printers hadn’t bothered with.

“Here.” She spread the map out on the table by room’s two
armchairs. “Sorry it’s a bit of a mess. I’ve done some work on it.”

“No, no, this is perfect! The scale’s line up almost
exactly.” Without preamble, Nia spread her own much-annotated street map across
the subway map. “Look, detective, look! Do you see?”  

Not at first, but when Nia began scratching hard on the
marks she had made on her map to indicate all the places they had failed to
find Connery over the past week, she began to get it. When Nia lifted her map,
Gail saw that the faint marks that had bled through to the subway map lined up
almost exactly with the tracks.

“You see, detective?” Nia said again. “Do you see?”

“Yeah, I see.”

Nia wore a triumphant smile bright enough to split rainy
season clouds. “We’ve found him, detective!”

“Good for us.” Gail couldn’t quite find it in her to
smile back.

The next morning, Nia’s head was fuzzy from lack of
sleep. She had gone straight to bed after her revelation about the subway
tracks, but a jumble of excitement, trepidation, and guilt had kept her staring
at the ceiling long after she should have drifted off. Excitement because they
were finally one step closer to finding Connery. Trepidation because she had to
admit that though Connery was clearly not unbeatable, he was far cleverer and
more resourceful than she had given him credit for.

But, if she were honest, it was the guilt that held her
eyes open long after her head began to ache with exhaustion.
    

Detective Lin deserved to know.

You should have spoken to Arthur first.

Why? I doubt Gail will hold it against him. She
doesn’t even seem to comprehend the seriousness of the situation, which I
suppose is understandable given that she’s a layman – but layman or not, she
deserved to know. She is our partner in this. And she asked; she wanted to
know.

And you wanted to tell.

Yes, she had.

Pillowing her heavy head on her hand the next morning at
breakfast, Nia poured herself a brimming cup of black coffee. The steam rose
into her face, soothing her dry eyes a little.  

Pure luck alone had stopped Arthur from killing himself
along with the older boys. He had been thrown backwards by the force of his
magic, out of the worst of the blast. A few magicians had muttered that this
proved the attack had been deliberate, but those who had first come upon the
scene had been convinced otherwise by the sight of Arthur clutching his unlucky
victims and bleeding from the deep lacerations inflicted by the magical
backlash. It had taken four healing circles to patch his bloodied body back
together.

A plate clattered on the table next to hers, making Nia
look up sharply, but no, Gail and Arthur weren’t down yet. She wasn’t surprised
seeing as it was just barely six in the morning, but she was glad for the
moment of solitude. After last night, she needed some time alone with her
coffee before she was ready to face the day.

She could still remember Arthur’s trial. It had been a
few weeks after their ninth birthday. Though she still missed her mother, still
woke screaming in the night needing to curl up in bed with Arthur until the
shaking stopped, she had begun to dare happiness again. Soon, she and Arthur
would be moving into the second phase of their education. Soon, they would
start learning magic they could use to make up for her mother’s mistake. They
would do it together.

But one pale spring day, she had been called out of class
and taken to the high office to see Arthur standing – no, propped up – in front
of the Directors, where her mother would have stood if she had survived her
failed experiment.

At first, Nia hadn’t understood what was happening. All
she knew was that Arthur was obviously hurt and in trouble. She had tried to
run to him, but they had held her back and made her listen while one of the
Directors explained exactly what Arthur had done. Nia hadn’t believed it at
first. Not Arthur. He had known what mother had done. He had held her after she
was pulled from the room, covered in her mother’s blood. He wouldn’t have done
it too. He would have known better.

Later, of course, she had come to understand that it had
been an accident, that he had lost control without meaning to, that it hadn’t
been his fault.

But that didn’t change the outcome.  

The Directors had asked her a few questions, asked if
Arthur was ever mean to her, if he had ever hurt anyone in her presence, if she
had ever seen him doing magic he shouldn’t have. She answered each question
with a truthful “no,” but looking back, she knew her small tearful voice
couldn’t have been very convincing.

“I’m sorry, Nia,” she remembered Arthur sobbing. “I
didn’t mean to, I swear. I didn’t know it would happen. I just…”

By then she had been sobbing too. They must have been
quite the sight.

She lifted her cup of coffee with both hands. It almost
burned the skin of her palms, but she held it tightly anyway, letting the heat
run down her arms.  

The Directors had been merciful. Had Arthur been just a
few years older, his punishment would have been much more severe: constant
confinement, transportation to one of the more distant Academy campuses, death…
Nia clutched the cup tighter, happy to let the pain distract her.

Nia took a long swallow of coffee and thought she could
feel the hot liquid seeping into her fuzzy brain and cleaning it out. Being a
bound ward meant exile from the core of the Academy. It meant having his magic
locked away; it meant an end to his magical education. Anyone who tried to
teach him magic or aided him in teaching himself could face his fate or worse.
He could not leave the Academy without the supervision of a graduated magician
and when he left, he was not to speak to anyone but his escort. He lived
entirely on the Academy’s mercy.

Only to protect him,
she reminded himself,
to
keep him safe.
 

“I don’t know why we bother keeping the bound wards,” one
of Nia’s classmates, an arrogant snake of a boy named Henry Willas, had once
said. “It’s like keeping a rabid rat in your house.”

Nia had thrown a book at his head, earning her the only
demerits of her school career. Yes, Arthur couldn’t be a magician any longer,
but he was easily the best surgeon in the Academy. Even the best layman
hospitals in New Crossbridge asked for Arthur specifically when they were
overwhelmed with patients. And he could fix cars and other machines with the
same deft skill he used to fix broken bones and faulty cardiac valves. He had
nothing to be ashamed of and her associates were fools if they couldn’t see it.
Arthur had certainly gone further in his career than Henry Willas ever had.

After cup number three, she was beginning to feel more
like herself and more confident that she had made the right decision by
confiding in Gail. Better that Gail come to appreciate Arthur’s worth with all
the facts at her disposal. Then she would have no cause to feel suspicious or
ill-used and any friendship she and Arthur formed would be an honest one.

And she did want Arthur and Gail to be friends.

Her hopes seemed like fruitful ones when Arthur and Gail
entered the lobby at the same time, chatting amicably about the earliness of
the hour – or how Gail put it “how unnaturally fucking early it was” – and
joined Nia at the table.

“Did you even sleep?” Gail asked her as she plopped down
in the chair opposite Nia and reached for the coffee pot.

“I slept for quite a while, thank you,” Nia lied. Then
she watched in mild dismay as Gail added an obscene amount of cream and sugar
to her coffee. She looked over at Arthur, who was rubbing his jaw with one
hand. Overnight, the bruise had gone from a heroic purple to an ugly
brownish-green.

“That looks like it hurts,” she said, handing him the
cup.

“It’s a badge of honor, it’s supposed to hurt.” However,
he didn’t say no when Gail wrapped some ice in a napkin and handed it to him.
He pressed the homemade icepack gingerly to his face. “Thanks.”

“No problem, doc.”

Nia smiled and moved on to coffee number four.

“Do you always drink that much coffee or are you just
really hungover?” Gail asked as she sipped her own watered-down abomination.

“I was not drunk,” Nia reminded her. “I was mildly
inebriated, a condition which was entirely cured by the application of fresh night
air.” She paused. “And the application of extreme shock due to near death
underneath the wheels of a rampaging trolley.”

Arthur stopped icing his jaw. “What?”

But Gail only laughed. “Fair enough. So, what’s today’s
plan?”

“Oh, right.” Arthur looked curiously at Nia. “Gail said
that you found out where Connery is hiding.”

“Yes, I have. Well, not specifically, but we definitely
have a place to start. Connery has somehow managed to hide himself in the
subway tunnels below the city. Now whether he and his associates have managed
to get an old train working or if they are moving him through the tunnels by
some other method, I –”

“The subway tunnels?” Arthur looked pained. “You’re
joking, right?”

“Nope,” said Gail. “Trouble is there are miles and miles
of subway tunnels and we’ve got no way of pinning him down.”

“You’re correct of course, detective,” said Nia
agreeably. “It would be impossible to pinpoint his location from up here on the
surface. However, once we’re underground, I should be able to track him easily
enough.” Now here came the difficult part. While lying abed sleepless, she had
realized there was only one way to continue their investigation. She also knew
that neither Arthur nor Gail would care for it. Ah well, there was nothing to
be done.

“However, as Connery does seem to be extremely mobile, I
very much doubt that we would be able to secure him in a single day.”

Arthur was the first to react. “Oh, Nia, you can’t be
serious.”

“I don’t see any other way.”

“There has to be a way that doesn’t involve us camping in
old decaying subway tunnels with who-knows-what Connery will have down there
waiting for us. We would be as good as asking him to kill us.”

Nia bit her lip to keep from snapping at him. He wasn’t
wrong, not entirely anyway. It would be a risk, but this entire endeavor was a
risk. The hope was that what they would learn from Connery would be worth the
danger. And they had already come so far… “I understand your position, Arthur,
I do, and if I thought there was a way to find him from here, I would, but by
the time I triangulated his location, he would already be gone. The chances of
us intercepting him from the surface are basically nil.”

Gail’s spoon clinked against the side of her cup as she
shoveled more sugar into her coffee. “Just once more, I’d like to suggest
tossing the bits of Connery we have into the river and letting him rot.”

Nia shook her head hard. “Connery’s research could set
the practice of magic forward years, if not decades. I have only seen a little
of his magic myself, but even I can tell that whatever atrocities he committed,
he was a brilliant magician.”

“Maybe so, but there have been plenty of brilliant people
who never did any good for anyone but themselves.”

“But that’s what will be true if we don’t find him! Only
if we acquire his knowledge can we make up for the terrible things he did.” The
close piercing way Gail was looking at her made Nia drop her eyes to the
tablecloth before said, “At least, there would be a chance.”

“Hm,” said Gail and that was all.

Arthur was more vocal. “Is a chance worth getting killed
for?”

“We survived the hotel, didn’t we?” A passing waiter
glanced her way and Nia felt her cheeks flush. “Not this hotel, of course – oh,
you know what I mean.”

“Yes, but we just barely got out of that, Ni. And we also
didn’t going
looking
for that. We stumbled into it. This would be
actively seeking out trouble. I think it’s a terrible idea.”

“Thank you for your assessment,” Nia replied through her
teeth, which was the only way she could stop herself from reminding Arthur that
his opinion was irrelevant. He could stay behind if he liked, but she was the
one in charge of this investigation and if she had to pull rank then she
wouldn’t hesitate to –

“Why don’t you call for back up?”

Both Nia and Arthur looked at Gail as she unfolded the
subway map on the table. “What?”

“I’m not a cop anymore, so I can’t get us any help from
that direction, but it’s not really laymen we need, anyway.” She pulled out a
pencil and quickly circled every entrance to the tunnels. “If you get the
Academy to send more magicians, we could come in from all sides, box Connery
in, and the more magicians we have, the less likely it is that Connery will get
the drop on us.”

“I – I suppose that’s true.”

Gail gave Nia a quick smile then turned back to the map.
“Anyway, if we had back-up, I wouldn’t be worried. Well, I’d be worried, but it
wouldn’t feel quite so much like suicide, would it, doc?”

“Hmph,” said Arthur.

Nia folded her hands under her chin as she studied the
map, carefully counting the circled entrances. There were eight in total. If
she, Arthur, and Gail took one that would leave seven and with two magicians at
each… fourteen magicians. Could she get the Academy to give her that many?

This is your chance,
the Directors said in her head
again,
your chance to redeem yourself.
Nia couldn’t help hearing a
certain heaviness in that “your,” an unspoken but definite
you had better be
able to handle this yourself,
but they could hardly condemn her for being
sensible, could they? And Gail was right (and Arthur as well, though he had
been significantly more annoying about it). The safest and wisest course of
action would be to attack the tunnels from all sides with enough magic to
counter whatever Connery had planned.

“Yes,” she heard herself say as if from a distance. “Yes,
that sounds like a good idea. I’ll send a message today.”

“You could call,” said Gail, nodding toward the public
phones across the way. “They’d probably even let you use the reception phone if
you asked.”

“No, no.” Nia got to her feet, taking her final cup of
coffee with her. “There are quicker ways. I’ll be back in just few minutes.
Please start breakfast without me.”

“I honestly wasn’t expecting her to agree,” she heard
Gail say as she made her way toward the stairs.

“Neither was I,” Arthur replied.

A hot flash of irritation made Nia walk faster, her left
hand gripping the strap of her handbag hard enough to press an imprint into her
palm. How unreasonable did they think she was? Did they truly believe she would
endanger their lives for pride? Well, let them sit and chat about her behind
her back if they wanted. She was in charge of this case and she would make sure
it was undertaken efficiently and safely whatever they
expected.