The Syker Key (5 page)

It was compelling, logically consistent, he had to admit.

And the Key at the centre of it all. No, not at the centre he corrected, but certainly a player in this ridiculous drama. An artificial construction designed to cross the boundary between densities, a power conduit, almost literally.

The entire concept of “you make your own reality” was something John had never believed, but it turned out to be true...just not for this realm. In the realm the Key was tapped into, however, not only was it reality, it was something possible for the bearer to tap into.

On top of all of this, John had some of the Key’s power. Because Pan had been a bearer, his offspring would have inherited his power. Or so he had guessed. Pan reasoned that the Key had changed his DNA, and since John was part of that DNA it had also changed him.

Again he had to correct himself silently; no, he didn’t have the Key’s power. He had power. Period. The Key was just an amplifier. He almost laughed at the analogy in his mind: Try taking a flashlight running on two AA batteries, then plug it into the 30 amp plug behind the stove. Amplifier indeed. He hoped the job wouldn’t burn out the receiver, as surely as plugging a flashlight into a stove circuit would do.

He felt like there were connections being made in his mind. Everything from the origin of the universe, all the way down to the makeup of atoms, electrons, protons, neutrons. Time was a tough one, though.

“Time is an illusion, but it’s a damned good one,” Pan had said. How the hell do you wrap your mind around that? Wouldn’t the universe unravel were it not for time? Apparently not, but he couldn’t get it.

Everything was energy. Well, that he could have gotten from traditional physics, but the way Pan described it to him made it much less complex than the exotic mathematics that science insisted was necessary. Matter was literally being created every single second, and not the way that had been taught.

The surface of the sun was 5000 degrees, but the corona leapt up to millions of degrees. So? Science could not understand why there weren’t more neutrinos coming from the Sun, since fusion must be happening at the core. Well, it wasn’t. Fusion was happening in the corona, in that incredible furnace that produced unimaginable amounts of energy.

And all of that energy was being transmitted to the planets, and the planets were absorbing the energy directly and converting it to matter at their cores.

Then it got really strange. Since all energy was electromagnetic in one fashion or another, the electromagnetic pathways of the brain were capable of controlling it. Focusing it. Since matter and energy were so closely linked, as Pan had explained it, controlling matter from the energy of one’s thoughts was literally trivial. You just had to figure that out.

Even gravity and light were related; gravity was the extremely rapid compression wave that rode streams of neutrinos, light was the much slower, relatively speaking, transverse wave through the same medium. It explained what science had not, why light behaved like a particle and a wave at the same time. Because it was.

Simple. It seemed too simple, John figured there must be a problem with it if his little mind was able to grasp it. He was no learned scholar, and was certainly never one for physics. Yet here it was, all connected, all making perfect sense. Now he just had to use that knowledge.

Easier said than done.

John took the MRE meal pack and set it down, focusing on it. “I’m guessing I just focus on the molecules, give them more energy?”

“You guess correctly.”

He looked at the MRE. Focus. You can’t create energy, you can only focus it. The very ground beneath him contained more energy than he could ever use, so use it.

As he focused, the world began to fade around him.

No trees, no ground, no cold, no Pan, nothing. Only the MRE existed. He could almost see currents of energy everywhere around him. After a few moments he hardly noticed he was breathing hard, sweating, and probably seconds from passing out from the elevated blood pressure.

But he could see filaments of energy, faint, everywhere, twisted pairs of energetic strands, and suddenly they started coalescing on the meal in front of him.

He blinked. It was gone. He looked down at the MRE. No change. “So much for that idea.”

Pan smiled. “Indeed? Well, you best eat your meal then, cold or not.”

Disappointed, John reached down to pick up his MRE. He quickly dropped it as his skin registered the coming burn. “Ow!” It took a couple of seconds for it to sink in that it had worked. “Did you do that?”

“Nope.”

He had done it. Magic. Arthur C. Clarke’s old refrain came back to him; any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. “Holy shit.”

“Nothing Holy about it. It’s just knowledge.”

John’s head was reeling. If that had worked, then...possibilities started flashing through his mind. And something else, something...

“It’s not quite mind reading, but you can certainly sense the intentions of others, especially those close to you,” Pan answered his unasked query, as though reading his mind.

“I’m getting a very strong feeling of dread.”

“That’s probably because of Jessica. She was abducted at gunpoint today.”

Jessica abducted! How was that possible? She was the bearer, the controller of the Key, with all of those mystical powers! With a wave of her hand she could have turned her attackers into dust.

“Don’t forget she doesn’t have the Key,” Pan said. “She still has great power, but I’m sensing someone else who also has a good deal themselves. In any case they have abducted and drugged her so she’s not a threat. They intend to use her to transfer bearership of the Key.”

“Can they do that?”

“Certainly. The Key probably disappeared because it foresaw this coming, and it’s decided not to make itself part of the battle.”

“So then how do they transfer the bearer from Jessica to someone else?”

“Assuming Jessica doesn’t want to cooperate, they probably have to kill her, but only at the exact moment of the eclipse. And whoever is left holding the blade will have the burden of the Key placed upon them. I get the sense that at that moment it will return.”

John’s head was beginning to spin again. He didn’t like the way this was shaping up. If they abducted Jessica, surely her parents were powerless to interfere as well. That hinted that whoever did it knew exactly what they were doing, and probably had a few of those magical tricks up their sleeves.

Only hours remained until the eclipse. How was he going to learn everything he needed to? But he did heat the meal, maybe it was possible.

Maybe.

Eight: Dominoes Fall

The sun had long since set by the time Derek pulled the sport utility vehicle to a stop in the wooded National Park. Sam was no woodsman, so he depended on his hired help for that expertise. In seconds the three men he hired had emptied the car of its contents save one, the unconscious female in the back. All of them put on night-vision goggles. The trek would be hard enough in the moonless night.

Derek and one of the other men, Alex, Sam recalled, assembled a stretcher, placed it on the ground, then transferred Jessica from the vehicle onto it. She moaned.

“Better give her another shot,” Sam instructed. “We can’t risk her coming around.”

Derek removed a syringe and small bottle from a pocket, measured out an amount of some fluid, and with a smooth confident motion injected Jessica. Sam liked his second in command. He was stable, competent. He had asked the right questions, not taking anything on faith, and Sam appreciated his boldness.

When confronted with the reality of magic, he hadn’t simply scoffed at it, instead becoming thoughtful, then asking for proof, and Sam had offered it. Afterwards he simply integrated it into his preparations.

He wasn’t afraid to “chip in” and get the job done, but he also wasn’t afraid to delegate. And this was one task he delegated. The other two men picked up the stretcher.

In moments they were off hiking into the woods. Sam monitored his GPS occasionally. They had to be within 100 meters of the path of the eclipse, or the transfer wouldn’t work. He knew enough about the legend that had been handed down, nonsense about being able to concentrate solar energy. Well, he hoped it wasn’t nonsense. But at this point they were still more than a few kilometres away, so he was more concerned about their general direction than the actual location.

Thankfully, the hike was smooth. Though wooded, the terrain was still fairly flat; another fifty kilometres to the west and it would have been a different story. Sam dreaded the idea of trying to do an actual hike through steep mountain rock.

At least the sky was clear; more than enough starlight to help their goggles make the terrain look as clear as day. Certainly Sam would have said he was more “up” on technology than most, but the night vision goggles still amazed him. The headgear required for them was a bit cumbersome, but that was more than made up by their performance.

Sam had to admit it was going to be a tough hike. He wasn’t used to this kind of walking, but the end result was certainly going to make it all worth it.

Only a few more hours, then everything would be different.

***

Arthur and Catherine didn’t have the benefit of night vision goggles, but they hardly needed them. Their eyes adjusted easily to the darkness, and in truth they had spent hundreds of years walking across every continent on the planet.

Nonetheless, it was a slog, and their mood didn’t help matters.

“Don’t worry my love,” Arthur told his breathless wife, “she’ll be safe. Pan is somewhere out here, I can feel him.”

They stopped for a moment to catch their breath. Their backpacks were light, but they were hardly taking their time and the trip was wearing on them. Plus there was the fact that there was about two hundred square miles of area they had to cover when the eclipse came. On a solar scale it was pinpoint accuracy, but on a human scale it was a day’s walk in either direction. The only saving grace was their history with the Key. Arthur would sense its location long before the eclipse hit its peak. Or so he hoped.

“I’m less worried about Jessie, and more worried about that fellow who took her. Arthur, if he manages to get the Key, we’re all pretty much going to be buggered.”

Arthur was forced to agree with his wife’s assessment. This fellow who took his daughter was dangerous, but there was something else too. He could probably be managed easily enough with Pan around, so his sense of dread was not as strong as it could have been.

As with all things in life, however, they rarely went as planned, though in this circumstance that could work for them.

They continued on as the sky began to lighten in the east.

***

Every once in a while the fog would clear just enough for Jessica to see she was being carried through a forest, flashes of green and brown mixed with sky blue. But before she could do anything about it she would feel a prick on her arm and the fog fell again.

But in those brief moments of lucidity, she called for help to the only person she could think of.

***

Twenty miles away John woke with a bolt, and the sound of Jessica's voice in his head.

Did he actually hear her? Even hear wasn't the right word. He could feel her. What had surely been only been a couple of seconds had somehow felt like a long conversation he couldn't remember, like waking from a dream that disappeared instantly. He could have sworn he saw what she was seeing; trees, sky, men, voices, sweat, jolting. Then he felt a stab in his arm and it was gone.

Pan was already breaking camp, but stopped to look at his son. "Jessica?"

John nodded. "Was it real?"

"Real enough. They must have drugged her. Don't worry, we'll be caught up with them soon enough."

A sense of dread started to take hold of John. He hadn't felt this kind of anxiety in a long time. He remembered the day he was issued a gun for the first time, the anxiety that nearly crippled him for a week as he adjusted to the idea of carrying around a deadly weapon on his hip.

The power had been intoxicating, but agonizing. Even drawing it once would result in paperwork, whether he used it or not. But what if...what if it was used, and worse, what if it was used to kill someone innocent? Could John live with that? He doubted it. The very idea of that guilt sent his mind spiralling into a panic.

He knew his friend Will didn't have this problem, and couldn't quite understand that. Hell, most officers didn't have that problem, which made John a bit of a freak. He suspected he was just too sensitive, that he should "man up" and deal with it.

But his fears had served him too. More than once he had been tempted to draw and he hadn't, instead trying to think his way around the situation. Had he just been lucky? His friend was getting into a routine of filling out paperwork for drawing, and on occasion firing, so clearly he was fearless about the whole matter. He would even joke about how often he spent filling out forms instead of doing actual police work.

And of course the great irony was that John was a crack shot, scoring higher in the firing range than nearly anyone else. He had to be. As a father he knew all too well the price of making a mistake, and he was damned if he ever had to fire that he would hit the wrong person. John had spent more time at the firing range than almost anyone he knew, at least in the few years before Zack.

He doubted, however, that his accuracy would serve him as well when the target wasn't a piece of paper.

Well, certainly he thought so until that morning. He was beginning to believe that he would have no problem firing on the four that took Jessica.

Four? He had no idea how many had taken her, so why had that number stuck in his head?

They broke camp and moved on.

John's head continued to reel. The hiking wasn't a problem for John, he was used to spending a lot of time on his feet, and in boots substantially less comfortable than the ones he was wearing. But this Pan, correction, his father, he wore what looked like the oldest pair of dirty old boots he could imagine. Not ancient, but they had certainly seen better days, so either they were really comfortable because they were broken in, or he had done so much walking that the boots didn't bother him one way or the other.

And, he had to admit, Pan was easily as energetic as he was. He didn't stop for breathers, complain about his back or his feet, groan about the walking...he was a better traveling companion than his best friend.

And how old was he, a thousand? Fifteen hundred? He didn’t look any older than forty. What the hell would you do with yourself with all that time? The mind boggled. His father had seen more than he could imagine, and that was just history, never mind what the Key had given him.

The Key. The thing was a menace. John couldn't quite understand why Pan hadn't destroyed it. Clearly he hadn't used it for anything in intervening centuries, so why even have it? Destroy it and be done with it, no more risk of some asshole getting his hands on it. John did not take his father for a fool, so there must have been some good damned reason he hadn’t destroyed it yet.

He was well aware that he could not even grasp the power of the Key just yet. These silly tricks Pan had taught him the last day were a mere taste of what it could do. He figured the real problem was whoever had taken Jessica. Clearly they knew about the Key, knew it's power. And if Jessica had been the bearer for all these years, and they were able to subdue her, what chance did John have against them?

There was Pan too, of course, but John could sense Pan wasn't comfortable about the whole thing. Something was scaring him too. He added up the score: Jessica out of commission, the Walker family nowhere to be found, one old wizard, and one rookie cop/apprentice wizard, against some group (four popped into his head again) of unknown power.

Fan-bloody-tastic, John thought, trudging through the forest in the weak morning light.

The first shafts of sunlight were coming through the trees, and it felt like being recharged. He understood now too that it was
exactly
like being recharged.

For the first time since yesterday he felt hope, and it felt like a weight being lifted from his heart.

Hold on Jessica, I'm coming, he thought.

***

They had arrived.

Only three hours until the eclipse and Sam's group had, with a little help from the GPS, found the exact peak spot of the moon's passage across the sun. At noon it would begin.

They had to be close, within a couple hundred yards, and the forest was going to make life difficult. You had to have a clear view of the sun while it happened, otherwise the Key wouldn't get the full effect and the whole effort would be wasted.

After some searching they found a small clearing where they would have an unobstructed view of the noonday sun. Of course, the problem with a clearing like this was it left you vulnerable.

Sam watched Derek bark orders to the other two. One of them was going to climb a tree and watch the clearing, the other one was going to patrol north, back where they came from, keep an eye out for visitors.

Jessica stirred slightly as they laid her on the ground. Time for another shot.

As Derek prepared the drug, Sam realized he had come to know quite a lot about the Walker family, despite their attempts to remain completely anonymous over the years. Walker, Smith, Jameson, Weebly...there was literally a page full of names they had taken over the centuries. The idea of that kind of life span still amazed him. They would even pass themselves off as their own descendants sometimes.

He looked at the slowly rousing Jessica, then grinned when Derek injected her once more. Too plain for his tastes, or at least that was how she made herself look. He guessed that she had learned this trick to avoid being noticed, to be able to disappear in plain sight. Everyone notices a supermodel walking down the street; nobody would have given her a second look.

They had been a busy family. Not always together, at least not as family, but always close. Jessica looked the same age as her parents, so he hadn't found any instance where they were anything other than siblings, in terms of having that familial assignment.

England, India, Australia, the States, and finally Canada. It was tough to track their passage through time, and it had taken Sam over a decade to work it all out. Twelve years of pouring over immigration records, the kind of thing that made corporate P&L statements look like gripping reading. It was the kind of tedium Sam was good at.

They were difficult to follow, but not impossible. Threads here, hints there. They had been very careful, probably as careful as he would have been. Of course, in his opinion squandering the power of the Key was ridiculous in the extreme. Why hide? With that kind of power, who cares if anyone, indeed everyone, knows you're immortal? There's nothing they could do about it. The Key was the ultimate expression of power, nothing on Earth could touch it.

He could feel the blood rushing to his head, the temptation of it all.

Three more hours and this would all be decided. He doubted it would be uneventful.