The magnitude of our mistake unpacked itself very quickly in my mind.
From the cabal’s perspective, teleportation was originally the major advantage the anarchists had. Once the cabal possessed the teleport sequence, they would not simply master it themselves, but they’d try to figure out how to protect themselves against it. Tactically you couldn’t prevent someone from initiating a teleport into your location, but once they were in your sphere of influence, you could theoretically trap that person from getting out the same way they’d gotten in.
Not theoretically—you could definitely do that. I was watching it happen on a big projection screen.
And Jordon hadn’t warned us about this because Lonso would’ve had no reason to tell her about the cabal’s new teleportation sequence in the first place.
And we almost certainly did not have time to try to reverse engineer their jamming tech in order to disable it. Maddy and Jordon would have to make a run for it on foot.
I didn’t have a way to communicate these realizations to Maddy, but she was always three steps ahead of me and she knew. No audible alarms were going off; no one was pounding on Jordon’s door. Maddy soothed Jordon’s nerves with a calming sequence, and then got her started drawing a map of the compound for Maddy to study.
They couldn’t actually get through the gate on foot, as Jordon explained. The walls were fifteen feet tall, and the gate was a massive metal structure, reinforced against anyone from the outside ramming it to try to get in. But Jordon had an idea: if they could get to the garage, they might be able to steal one of the Church’s armored trucks and make a break down the driveway. The trucks all had remote controls to open the gate. Maddy liked this idea.
The garage was basically a sub-basement of the main complex, and the driveway was on the complete opposite side of that complex from the chalet. They’d have to sneak across a wide open courtyard lit by bright ugly streetlight fixtures and patrolled by perimeter guards armed with automatic weapons. Jordon didn’t know the frequency of the guard rotation around the campus, so they’d need to find a place to hide and do recon to figure out if there might be a good gap in coverage to make a dash for the garage. Problem was, they’d first have to get past the guard at the door to even get to a hiding place in the courtyard, and attempting that might well summon the perimeter guards down on top of them.
But Maddy had different ideas.
“Isobel,” she said, “I would like to request the backup you originally suggested.”
Christ yes, I thought.
She gave me a small list of items to bring, told me where to meet her, and what to do when I got there. Normally on raiding parties in the game, I was the one giving the orders, but Maddy was just a faster tactician on her feet than me. I was happy to report for duty.
I appeared around the side of the chalet and caught my breath, reintegrating as quickly as I could manage. I was in darkness here. I scouted out the situation at the front porch. One guard, a tall and probably male individual, looking bored as absolute fuck, illuminated from above by a garish porch light. Tiny me, wearing Maddy’s sleek black jacket, crept up close and delivered a healthy burst of stun gun action. The guard dropped hard, disappearing out of the light. He wouldn’t be incapacitated for long, so I had to move fast—grab the keys to the front door, knock three times, unlock it, hand supplies in to Maddy.
Moments later, Maddy, Jordon, and I briskly ducked into the darkness behind the chalet, temporarily moving away from our destination, sticking to an unlit trail that led into an isolated little flower garden. From here, we had an excellent view of the mayhem we’d initiated.
The first floor of Jordon’s chalet was now consumed with a roaring fire.
“Such a pleasure when ‘burn it all down’ is not simply a metaphor,” Maddy said.
This turned out to be a pretty wild diversion. If they ran fire drills on campus, you couldn’t tell judging by the chaos that erupted when the perimeter patrol realized Jordon’s chalet was burning. The Church wanted to be self-sufficient from city resources whenever possible, so they had to go through the motion of trotting out the one fire truck they owned, operated by the three or four firefighters they had on campus. In the meantime, we got through the perimeter guard and down the ramp into the underground garage without incident.
Our luck continued in the garage. No reason for the “motor pool” or whatever to be staffed after midnight, so we had our pick of twelve armored trucks, four armored vans, and two armored town cars. Jordon made it clear we should take a truck: the vans had shitty handling and the town cars had the lightest armor plating, whereas the trucks were high performance vehicles that generally came with gun cabinets full of weapons and ammunition.
We climbed into a truck, with Maddy in the driver’s seat, me riding in the passenger seat, and Jordon in the back looking for a gun she could figure out. Maddy accelerated up the ramp out of the garage, but didn’t aim for the vehicle’s top speed or anything. Just made it look like an ordinary late-night run to the Greyhound station to kidnap some fresh new faces. A few bewildered perimeter guards saw us roll past but didn’t seem to react.
Then our world basically exploded into trouble. I was in the flow state so I could observe things happening in discrete beats instead of a whirlwind blur. First, a quick burst of wild electricity appeared for a second in front of us on the driveway. I instinctively interpreted this as an inexpert teleport taking place, accidentally flashy due to ricochets of loose energy that hadn’t quite been controlled during the sequence. Then Maddy slammed on the brakes because there was now a human being standing in the driveway, illuminated by our headlights, and no matter what kind of hurry we were in, her reflexes were trained to avoid killing innocent pedestrians. It was an unfortunate mistake.
The man in the driveway was Lonso Drake. It sure would’ve been really nice to run that guy over. Instead he had an opening to fuck with us. We couldn’t hear the sequences he delivered, but before Maddy could get the truck moving again, he levitated the fucking thing a foot off the ground and held it there, smiling cruelly. He shouted something at us that I couldn’t hear over the sound of general panic inside the truck.
“Stay with Jordon,” I ordered Maddy, because I wanted this for myself. I popped open my door and dropped out of the truck to the ground.
He couldn’t see me yet with the headlights beaming in his face. I whispered a power morpheme sequence that got me up into the air as though I had a jetpack, because really, thought-based propulsion didn’t need a physical vehicle. I’d spent so much time in a jetpack traveling through the logosphere that my body vividly remembered how to maneuver. It was nerve-racking to realize I was making this work against gravity, and inhibiting in terms of how much height I dared to reach. But it was also freakishly cool and it wasn’t even the main thing I had in mind here.
I gently drifted forward into his field of vision, so that he saw a silhouetted figure floating in front of him.
“Release Jordon, and your death will be painless,” he shouted at me.
“I am releasing Jordon, you towering prick,” I shouted back.
After a pause, he said, “Isobel. I should have guessed she would know how to find you.”
The only time I’d seen Lonso Drake in combat, he’d materialized a handgun out of thin air. I didn’t have my glittersteel hoodie so I wasn’t excited about getting shot at. Still, this felt like the showdown at the O.K. Corral, where each of us was waiting for the other to draw first, so our murderous rages would be justified when we finally tried to annihilate each other. This moment seemed to stretch for ages, in which entire distinct attacks were simulated in my mind as though I was shuffling a card deck looking for an ace.
Lonso said, “Olivia would happily take you back, you know. We can forgive youthful indiscretions. You’re learning your place, and you’ve certainly earned our respect.” Glowing balls of light began to grow in each of his hands. “But if you insist on trying to leave here with Jordon, Olivia won’t be able to identify your remains.”
“I have a counter proposal,” I said. “You get the fuck out of our way and let us go, and I disarm the truck full of explosives we rigged underneath your complex.”
He didn’t know me well enough to know I was bluffing. He didn’t know where I’d been for the last eight months. He didn’t actually know fuck all about what I was capable of now. I was struck with inspiration and subvocalized a sequence that transmuted my actual skin into organic glittersteel. Lonso was over there with glowing hands that kept getting brighter. At some point, was he going to try to sunburn me really badly? This was a deeply weird life.
“I have nostalgia for this place to be sure, but I’m based in Sacramento now,” he said. “Blow these helpless people to pieces, if that’s the kind of person you’ve become.”
I realized I was hearing a strangely familiar sound starting to emerge around me, might have been building for a bit now, which I hadn’t noticed because Lonso was keeping me focused on him. It was a highly organized and impressively martial version of the chanting that typically accompanied Gorvod’s Frenzy. This couldn’t be more than four or five voices, though.
But I’d only experienced what I’d generously call second- or third-level Frenzies. This was something else entirely, much more competent and sophisticated, and the air above the truck started to ripple and pulse in tune with some aspect of the chanting I couldn’t quite follow, and then suddenly a bolt of lightning came out of the rippling and smacked me hard in the back, knocking me straight to my face on the ground. My glittersteel skin repelled the electrical damage I should have taken, but the sheer propulsive quality of the bolt was like being struck in the back by a fastball getting smacked off a bat at me.
I struggled to get to my knees, and another bolt hit me in the side, part of a web of bolts that struck the truck in several places as well.
Lonso was smoothly sauntering up the driveway, closing the distance between us, the balls of light in his hands starting to coalesce into a pair of electrical maces. I couldn’t catch my breath fast enough to improvise any kind of defense. But he was leaving me to his minions to keep contained, while he assessed what other threats were lurking in the truck. Overconfident move, if you asked me.
The thing about Gorvod’s Frenzy was the attacks were unpredictable in timing, and constantly evolving to be more dangerous and powerful with each successive strike. The ministers of Gorvod who had us surrounded were supremely focused on their roles in generating these ambient burst attacks that threatened me. One last web of malignant energy descended like a sheet of sudden hail, and the glittersteel could only deflect a portion of this assault. I actually shrieked despite myself, feeling hit points burning off of my psyche in droves, as one particular string of lightning actually sustained itself for several seconds, keeping me pinned down.
“Jordon,” he said loudly, ignoring me writhing on the pavement next to his feet. “We really should talk.”
Turns out, Jordon Connelly knew how to operate an AR-15, which she proceeded to demonstrate by firing a hailstorm of bullets out of the back seat, precisely obliterating three different ministers of Gorvod in rapid succession. Gorvod’s Frenzy was disrupted. I had a reprieve, and just enough available lung power to instantiate a weapon out of thin air, just like Lonso had taught me.
I rose up, the striking majesty of Blades Per Minute suddenly in my hand. The shock on Lonso’s face was absurdly satisfying. I activated the sword in its primordial mode of exactly one blade per minute and impaled him straight through the chest.
The truck landed on the ground next to me with a hard crunch. Maddy ripped the acceleration to propel the truck past me toward the gate. I let Lonso’s dead body slide off the sword and crumple to the pavement, then I jetpacked myself off the ground to follow the truck.
Apparently they couldn’t find the remote control for the gate inside the truck, because Maddy made the executive decision to ram the gate at top speed. It was reinforced the opposite direction, to stop imaginary enemies from getting in; it buckled with a wrenching lurch and collapsed in a pile of twisted metal as the truck plowed through it and exploded into the street outside the walls, spinning wildly as Maddy lost control until coming to a hard crashing stop against a telephone pole.
I rocketed up to the truck. Maddy was pounding the dashboard, wildly aggravated that she couldn’t get the vehicle moving again. Jordon climbed out of the back seat.
“We don’t really know each other very well, do we,” she said to me.
Maddy extracted herself from the driver’s seat, grimacing in pain, and grabbed Jordon’s hand.
“Let’s try this again,” she said, and moments later, Maddy and Jordon teleported away.
I slumped to the ground, suddenly overcome with pain and fatigue. I got dizzy and couldn’t keep my eyes open, wondering in the back of my mind if I’d suffered a concussion or something worse. My memory wasn’t functioning, that was the main problem. Turns out spellcasting was a lot harder when you were suffering from real physical damage while you were trying to concentrate. I could see armored trucks coming up the driveway toward the gate, toward this wreck in the street with me slumped against it.
Maddy popped back in next to me and said, “Dammit Isobel.”
She grabbed my hand and we were gone.