Birth of Chaos (Age of Magic: Wish Quartet Book 3) Read online

  Jo spun, dropping her hand and trying to cast away those haunting shadows. Holding out a hand, she willed the Door to appear. With a flicker, it solidified into existence.

  “One more time, gently now.” She wasn’t sure if she was reassuring herself, or bartering with the door. Whatever it was, it worked.

  The Door opened and shut, and Jo found herself standing in a familiar entryway. She’d never expected to be happy about being in the home of a serial killer. But given the week she’d had, and the whirlwind of emotion the Door had thrown her into, she was ruling off every impossibility on her list.

  Rather than beginning to search the house for what she needed, knowing she should get to work on her hacked solution to what should be a nearly impossible task, Jo walked over to the couch in the sitting area to the left of the door. She dropped onto the cushions and leaned back. She couldn’t actually sink into them without using time, and that was something Jo didn’t want to risk for multiple reasons—her current streak of bad luck being chief among them.

  Instead, she closed her eyes and just took a moment to breathe. Her first hurdle had been crossed. Not gracefully, mind you. But crossed without any sort of major desk-level mistakes.

  The USB almost felt hot under her fingertips, as if it were urging her onward. Jo stood at its silent (hopefully imagined) behest. She was a third of the way there.

  But the last two thirds would be subsequently more difficult than the first.

  The artificial intelligence androids ran on was, put simply, a work of art. It started out as a kernel, a seed, that housed all the information on the world wide web in its casing. Then, a learning algorithm was applied over-top (simple to say, not so simple to do, as her corporate espionage hacker friends would assure her). From there, the AI grew, much like a regular human child. It gathered experiences, learned from them, formulated reason and morals and ethos —all the things that made humans, human. Primus Sanguis was no different, but comparing it to basic AI was like comparing Chopin to whatever the pop hit of the day was.

  All of this meant that the androids didn’t need any kind of terminal. Like a regular human, their bodies were bioengineered to be self-contained. They fed off biological fuels, they learned through osmosis from the world around them. They didn’t need to plug in to anything, ever.

  But they could.

  And as far as Jo was concerned, that was their power—the ability to constantly refill and refresh their endless database of information from the web, and store backups of collected memories as well. To process it all with the power of a supercomputer, and make real-time adjustments day to day based on what would best suit the world around them. Every day, mankind produced more than 4 exabytes of data, and that kind of transfer was much too large to go over the air efficiently.

  “Where is your terminal?” she whispered.

  If the Bone Carver had a terminal he plugged into, it likely would be hidden somewhere. The information stored on there about the android’s state could be deadly in the wrong hands, and her serial killer seemed too smart for that. Jo started on the first floor, wandering through closets and guest rooms, clocking into time only as needed to (very lightly) tap on walls where she thought there was enough space for a hollowed-out alcove. She’d come during the day, meaning the man was at work, but she still didn’t want to draw attention to herself.

  When the downstairs proved a bust, Jo headed up. It was the more likely candidate since his bedroom was upstairs. Despite her most thorough search, she found nothing.

  Jo looked around the master bedroom, from the well-manicured closet to the meticulously made bed. Everything was perfect, not a thing out of place. It didn’t even look lived in.

  It didn’t even look real.

  But what was real anymore? Jo closed her eyes with a groan, covering them; now was not the time to have an existential crisis. Taking a shuddering breath, Jo fought against the gremlins that screamed between her ears whenever she lingered in darkness for too long. Voices and languages she’d never heard and didn’t understand were spoken from mouths she didn’t recognize. It was as if her mind and memories were slowly being fed to that inky soup, and what was being regurgitated back made little to no sense.

  Jo opened her eyes, reminded herself to focus, and turned for the bedroom door.

  There, where the door should have been, was the Door. Capital D. As if it were waiting.

  “Now you’re mocking me.” It was somewhere between a whisper and a growl.

  The Door stood, unassuming and silent. It gave her no response, but it did not disappear either.

  “I don’t even know if the terminal has its own room. For all I know it’s hidden behind his headboard.” Why am I even talking to the Door?

  USB in hand, hoodie straining against her back with how deep she was trying to dig her palms into the front. Jo stepped over to the Door.

  “The terminal,” she commanded. “Nothing else.” Jo reached out a hand, the USB curled in three fingers, her index pointed to enter in a pin code that she trusted would come to her at any moment.

  So much trust—that was her first mistake. The second was even thinking it was a remotely good idea to have her USB drive, the thing she depended on most, anywhere near the Door that had been doing nothing but toying with her like some sentient trickster. But Jo wasn’t thinking quite clearly. And in the seconds before the inevitable, the idea of letting go of the USB stick seemed just as egregious an error.

  Magic sparked and sizzled between her finger and the pin pad. It shot into the electronic she was holding in her hand. Plastic and circuits exploded like shrapnel, digging into her skin. Jo let out a cry, both in pain and anger. She held her bleeding hand—at least, she’d expected there to be blood.

  She looked down at her palm, at the impossible angles of plastic jutting from her skin. There was no blood. It was like her flesh had turned into the most grotesque Jell-o mold and USB bits were the filling. It hurt, but there was no blood.

  “Wh-what’s happening to me?” she whispered. And then, louder, Jo shouted at the Door, “I needed that you piece of—”

  A cracking noise cut her short. Jo turned to the window pane at her left. It fractured, like thin ice in the winter, and then shattered. The house’s alarm went off like a screeching bell. Jo turned back to the Door—but it was gone, vanished completely.

  Jo slapped her palm against the Bone Carver’s bedroom door. “Come back, come back,” she demanded. “How am I supposed to get out of here?”

  Suddenly, the alarm stopped. Jo looked to the window, confirming that the cracks were still there, that she hadn’t fallen into some weird time-loop. They were, which meant the alarm had been disarmed manually.

  She didn’t have a chance to contemplate what that actually meant, because the bedroom door opened to put her nose-to-nose with the Bone Carver. He stood, staring right at her—not through, not beyond, not anywhere else but at her. As if he could—

  “So it’s you again,” he said, with an almost playful smile.

  Chapter 15

  Trade

  Jo didn’t respond.

  She just stood there, mouth agape, staring at the man in the doorframe. She felt like prey, frozen before a predator she believed would not attack her if she didn’t move. In turn, he simply stood as well, doing nothing more than smiling—as if seeing her was some kind of happy accident. Like she was a friend who had stopped by to return a sweater or drop off a card.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” he asked.

  “I-I-I . . .” She took a large gulp of air, swallowed it hard and tried to pull herself together. “Can you see me?”

  “What kind of a question is that? Of course I can see you.”

  Jo raised her wrist. She gave the Bone Carver one last long stare before glancing down just long enough to check her bio band. Sure enough, her stopwatch was not counting down.

  She wasn’t clocked into time.

  “Perhaps we should go downstairs?” He stepp
ed back, motioning toward the stairwell. “We can have a seat in the living room. I imagine it would be far more comfortable than standing here, and I can sort out whatever it is you require.”

  Jo’s eyes darted between his hand in the stairwell. All she could remember was Wayne’s comments about sitting people down before carving them up. Jo didn’t even know if she could be carved up, could be killed at all. But if the USB was any indicator, she could feel some pain at the very least. She also didn’t have many options, given how the Door was acting.

  So she took his suggestion and started down the stairs. All the while Jo could feel his eyes on her back. It was the longest fifteen stairs in the history of mankind.

  “You’re actually lucky you caught me,” the Bone Carver said as he brushed by her, heading into the kitchen. He continued their conversation by projecting his voice, until Jo followed to stand in the doorframe. “I was just coming home from work, stopping in before I head out to happy hour with a few friends. The alarm went off right as I was pulling in. I can imagine what the police would’ve done with you.”

  She would’ve preferred the police.

  “I. . . Do you know who I am?” It was a weird question to ask, because of course he didn’t know who she was. She barely knew who he was.

  “Not quite. Where are my manners?” The man quickly wiped his hands on a dishtowel before crossing over quickly and holding out a hand. “The name is Charlie. And you are?”

  “Um, Jo.” She only gave him her nickname. Even if she no longer existed in this world, the friends and family she loved still did, and the last thing Jo wanted to do was tell a serial killer where her mother lived (regardless if the woman remembered her or not).

  “Jo,” he repeated. “A pleasure to meet you, Jo. Would you prefer coffee or tea?”

  A jarring layer of non-reality settled over her. This couldn’t be real; it wasn’t real. There was no way this interaction was actually happening.

  “Jo?” he repeated when he didn’t get an answer.

  “Oh, coffee please.” She didn’t really want to take anything from the man, but she also didn’t want to risk setting him off by refusing him. Maybe the caffeine would wake her up from whatever dream she had fallen into.

  “Perfect. Black?”

  “Sure.” Jo paused and watched him make coffee. Once more, the normalcy of the situation only served to create further confusion and panic. It didn’t feel like she was a member of the Society and it didn’t feel like he was a serial killer. It felt like they were two friends catching up. “When I asked if you know who I am, I didn’t mean my name.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “I meant. . .” Jo trailed off. Everything she could think to say sounded insane, but what was happening was already certifiably insane, so she might as well lean into it. “Do you know that I’m not human?”

  “Neither am I,” he responded easily—almost too easily. Jo had assumed the Bone Carver would be keeping his android identity a secret in order to keep the police off his tail.

  “I don’t mean in the way that you do,” Jo clarified but not really. “I mean that—“

  He held up a hand stopping her. “I think I see what’s going on here.”

  “You do?”

  “My sensors can pick up that you’re not human, but the electromagnetic signature that you give off is . . . How to put it? Unlike anything else I’ve ever seen before. Your existence appears to me as an orderly list of impossible contradictions.” He paused as the coffee pot sputtered and stopped percolating. He continued speaking as he poured two mugs. “I think I spoke incorrectly. It isn’t unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. This anomaly has been presented to me once already, in another entity. He called himself the Wish Granter.”

  Snow. Charlie remembered Snow. But of course he did. Time had not been rewritten yet, so this was still a man who remembered making a wish—a wish that had yet to be granted.

  He crossed the kitchen, handing her one of the two mugs, before starting toward the living room. Jo was helpless to do anything other than follow. She was genuinely curious now about what the man knew and what he had seen in Snow with his sensors—what he was also seeing in her.

  Or, the more obvious question of what had broken in her magic that was making her be able to interact with real world objects without being clocked into time. Whatever that was, she doubted Charlie could tell her.

  “So, was I wrong to assume that you are an assistant to the Wish Granter? Should I have left my alarm running?”

  “No, you’re not wrong,” Jo said, hastily sitting on the sofa opposite Charlie’s chair. “I suppose you could say I’m his assistant.”

  “You suppose?”

  “Well, there’s more than one of us, were more like a team that he commands.”

  “How interesting.” Charlie sounded genuinely fascinated by this tidbit of information. Jo could almost see the digital pathways in his head making note of it. “What are you, then?”

  “It’s . . . hard to explain.” Jo couldn’t help a glance at her bio band again. She was still clocked out of time. Something had gone haywire. Really, really haywire. “If I’m honest, I don’t even quite know how it is that you see me right now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Of course he wouldn’t understand, he had only interacted with Snow. As far as he knew, all entities like Snow shared the same signature, could all be seen, and could all grant wishes.

  Jo took a sip of her coffee, using the time to collect her thoughts. She wondered how much she should tell the man. Was it dangerous to impart knowledge of the Society to him? When time was reset, he would certainly forget it. Furthermore, it wasn’t as though he could hunt any of them down. And even if he could, they were on his side.

  With the mere thought of being on his side, Jo was forced to remind herself what this man was: a killer.

  But, in a way, so was she. Even if she excluded the Society, how many people had died, or had their lives ruined, because of the choices she’d made? Because of the people she’d helped with her “odd jobs”? Gray areas stacked on gray areas until her existence seemed like a veritable wall of ambiguity.

  “We have a sort of time system,” Jo started cautiously. “If we’re not utilizing it, we shouldn’t be able to interact with the real world.”

  “Real world?”

  “Your world.”

  “If this is my world, what is your world?” He spoke as though he were a professor, debating a thesis.

  “We exist outside of time.”

  “Interesting. . .” He tapped his fingers on the arm of the large wingback chair. “Perhaps that is why your data on my sensors seems to be so contradictory. Time is a funny thing, virtually indescribable by science. It can break down even the greatest of equations.”

  Jo had never thought of her existence from a scientific perspective. She had been offered the explanation of magic from the beginning and had never questioned otherwise—never sought an alternate explanation.

  “Perhaps. . .”

  “So I can presume your presence here has something to do with the wish I have made?”

  “Yes. I was—” the memory of the USB came back to her “—simply collecting some information.”

  “Is there any that I could provide you that may be helpful?”

  Her mind whirled around the possibilities. She could learn his motive. She could find out who he was going to target next and throw the police off the trail in advance for the sake of the wish. She could procure his help in testing her code before implementing it, to increase the possibility of success.

  But all of that related to the wish. And the wish was not what was important to Jo at that moment.

  “I need you to do some research.”

  “Me?” The man seemed surprised, albeit a little intrigued. “What information would you want me to gather? I didn’t realize the wishing wasn’t full-service.”

  “You offered to help,” she pointed out. “And it will in
crease the speed and efficiency at which your wish is granted.” She took another sip of her coffee, hoping he didn’t call her bluff.

  “Very well, what is it that you wish for me to research?”

  Jo leaned forward, back straight. Her mind was moving fast, faster than it had in a long time. There were many things that she wanted to process and find out information about. But she went with the first thing that came to mind.

  “I need you to pull up information on mythologies. Specifically, cross-reference different cultures—both modern and historical—looking for references to sacred arrows, goddesses of the hunt, and wars between divinities.”

  “How is this going to help with my wish?” he asked, rightfully skeptical.

  “It’s a magic thing,” Jo answered ambiguously, hoping he would accept the explanation at face value.

  He did, at least for a moment. “Very well, but I have something I would like to ask of you in return.”

  “Are you trying to barter?”

  “I have a sneaking suspicion you’re using me for something not related to my wish.”

  “What do you want?” Jo asked, rather than confirming or denying that particular suspicion.

  “You said there were more of you . . . I would like to see someone else.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re fascinating. Seeing you shows me there’s much more out there—others who look like humans but are categorically not.”

  The way he said it made him almost sound . . . lonely. There was a sort of desperation to the idea that there were other people out there who weren’t human, but were equally sentient. Equally worthy of life and their own autonomy.

  “If you do that,” he added. “I’ll look up whatever you want.”

  Jo knew all she had to do was reemphasize her request’s importance to the wish, and he would cave. Every whisper of her magic assured her as much, as if highlighting the places she needed to push to get him to break and give in. But instead, she found herself agreeing.

  “All right, I’ll bring someone else back.”