“Our instruments indicate the wards surrounding the agency were down for approximately 47 seconds. No outages of this caliber have occurred in the 52 years the agency has mechanically monitored the state of the wards. Security will spend the coming weeks frantically trying to determine the cause of the outage. I am assured they will succeed.”

~ Bek Trent, M.A.S.O

The damage left in the wake of the Zara’s attack was incredible. Bek stood at the edge of it, eyes drinking in the cracked glass at the edge of the lab, peering down at the cracked foundations of the destroyed room. Where before the beast known as the river spirit had lay resting, its great coils home to the dragon eggs, now there was glass, cement, debris, and slowly growing puddles of dirty water.

His bronze eyes trailed upward, cold and hard.

“Hendricks,” he said, glancing in the direction of the other young man, only a few years older than himself. Hendricks was crouched over the body of one of the lab technicians who had been caught in the lab when the Zara appeared, nodding as the medical examiner pointed at something on the victim’s chest. There were other personnel scattered throughout the room, mostly investigators hurriedly pulled back from the field. Bek was used to their examinations, and he stepped carefully, making no assumptions as he shifted slightly aside to allow Hendricks to peer into the room beside him. He pointed up.

“Have someone stop the rain until we can temporarily cover the ceiling. Then drain the collected rainwater. There shouldn’t be much in the way of evidence down there, and the water damage could be significant if we don’t act quickly.”

There was no argument, this time. A nod, affirmation, and Hendricks left him. Rather than interfere with anyone else’s work, Bek had turned to leave when his phone rang. Glancing at the number, he answered.

“Bek Trent. You have a report for me?” he prompted. Several minutes passed as one of the technicians from the crime lab gave him all the information he would have preferred to have had two weeks before. When they were done, he hung up. His expression remained unchanged.

Silver Alurian.

Early blood tests had revealed that it was her blood on the asphalt outside of the house. It had taken longer for the results of her magic capacity tests to come back. Blood tests were notoriously fallible because they tended to come up short. If hers was accurate, Ryan had been wrong about her rank; in capacity, she was at least a four. It was practically unheard of for the physical assessment to be so very wrong. Of the eleven gene markers they had learned to associate with magic-users, she was missing only one. What that meant was hard to say, except that she was incredibly predisposed to being a magic user.

There were also finally results from the site investigation. Incredible levels of magical radiation from the ruins of her house had raised concerns that it might pose a long-term risk to the surrounding area residents, forcing them to deploy a team to contain the mess. It would be at least a year before the lot was buildable again. As he had initially suspected, that type of magical radiation could only be sourced back to a magical lifeform, and ultimately, to something like the Zara. The fire damage, too, was abnormal. Class six magical flames of a type no one had ever seen. At least, no one contemporary; he was sure if the MASO was willing to outsource parts of their investigations to vampires, they would find the magic less novel than they currently believed.

As Silver had suggested, the fire seemed to originate from the lower floor, but there had not been enough of the house left to corroborate more of her story than that. There were no human remains, but they had little material to work with. Aside from the box he had found, nothing else had remained in the building, and the box was still in his possession.

What they had found outside was more interesting than inside. The fire had melted the snow directly around the house, leaving the ground soft and impressionable. Thus, it had not been hard for them to identify wolf prints leading from the back of the house around front, and then vanishing into the trees. Silver might have believed she had imagined the wolf, but she had not. It had been there, possibly saved her life, and then disappeared without a trace.

If all of that was not enough, they had investigated claims by the surrounding residents that they had lost power the night of the fire. There was no technological indication anywhere that the story was true, but without fail, every witness claimed to have experienced a blackout. The few who had access to a clock placed the power failures within minutes of each other.

He was now certain that Silver had caused the Zara to be able to breach the MASO’s defenses. The timing of her explosive magic and the power outages that signaled the Zara’s attack were too perfect...but there was no evidence that what he believed was even possible.

It was time to find the evidence.

It took half an hour to extricate himself from the investigation, fifteen minutes to return to his room to collect the box and the Book of Lineage, then reach the maintenance elevator on the other side of the building. There, finally, he left the chaos behind. The west half of the fourth and fifth floors had been evacuated to contain and repair the damage from the attack. Though the Zara had taken a singular path, its magic had permeated both floors, destroying any unprotected electronic systems and causing fatal flaws in several base spell circuits that provided protections to half the building. Lighting had returned gradually to the afflicted areas, but the shadow beast’s magic remained, a spine-tingling aura that clung to everything the specter had touched.

The expression on Bek’s face was one of iciness, his bronze eyes dark as he stared at the steel of the closed elevator doors. The moment the elevator touched down in the deeper reaches of the MASO’s underground, those doors would slide open. He would then find himself in the upper hangar, home to a number of transportation projects and the offices of two of the MASO’s most brilliant engineers. Jack Weiss was one of them.

When the elevator finally jerked to a halt, Bek glanced once more at the cracked keys on the backlit number pad of the maintenance elevator before stepping out onto the landing. The upper hangar was concrete on every side, scraped and cracked by too many encounters with heavy machinery. The tubing in the ceiling was blatantly left uncovered, though it was dark enough down the narrow tunnel ahead of him that such minor details would go unnoticed to most visitors. Most of the lower floors had been constructed long before the advent of electricity, and remained powered by the magics that had kept them running for years immemorable. Unfortunately, those magics often left something to be desired in the way of light. Their preponderance also meant that the insulation in the walls was not enough to reduce the deep humming noise that the various tubes and air hoses constantly emitted.

He moved swiftly despite the darkness, approaching the broad square of light that indicated the main hangar. There, the ceiling opened up to a massive warehouse. Its outer edges were bordered by ceiling-high steel shelves piled with massive boxes and crates and lengths of silicon tubing. The lower shelves were taken up by untapped reams of silver and gold wire, and tires of all sizes. Tools of the magical trade.

Bek eyed the shelves and the space ahead of them, but Weiss was not in his immediate line of sight. There were three helicopters that took up roughly a quarter of the room, part of a project to eliminate retreating blade stall with high-speed forward movement; no one stood near any of them at the moment. Two jets similar in appearance to the JF-17 Thunder used overseas, and one closer in model to the F-22 Raptor that had been put under construction by the US military for who knew how many years, obscured most of his view. Land vehicles were elsewhere, so what dominated the rest of the room departed from transport vehicles. This meant he was left to pick his way around stretches of strange but exceedingly useful machinery that gave the hangar both its distinctive copper and grease scent and its constantly cluttered appearance. Bek neither entirely understood nor cared about most of what filled the warehouse, though he had made a habit of visiting it in the past to gather supplies for his own, much smaller-scale mechanical pursuits. He knew of Weiss’s work only because the man had once told him about it during lulls in their conversation. Those were conversations that had happened a long time ago.

In the past, it would not have taken him long to find a trail of cut wire, loose washers, and grease that would lead him invariably to an engineer. Today, the floor was unexpectedly clean. There must have been an inspection earlier in the day. He sidestepped several leg-width yellow tubes and an air hose that had been strapped across the concrete and strode forward, apparently heading towards the far corner of the warehouse.

There was not much space beyond the jets, or the massive reams of 5mm silver and copper wire that dominated the space beneath their wings, but he managed to find room enough to slide through. At the back wall of the hangar, he finally came across a man seated precariously on a footstool, head nearly vanished into a hanging hatch in the tail end of a jet. The clutter here was more of what he had expected. Wrenches, screwdrivers, sockets, washers, electrical tape – the man dropped one hand out of the hatch and pointed, catching the wrench that flew to his outstretched fingertips, and then resumed working.

“Weiss,” Bek stated to the man’s back.

“Jorik send you down here?” the man’s voice echoed, muffled, from the interior of the jet. Bek hesitated a moment.

“No.”

There was a metallic snap within the hatch, following by some low mutterings before the man hurled the wrench back to the concrete with a loud clang. His head emerged several seconds later as he ducked out of the jet’s interior to eye Bek.

Weiss was a man with a face that said he had seen more of the world than most. Carved by the elements, his leathery skin was creased into a perpetual squint. The wiry stubble that shadowed his chin seemed to cling to his flesh, harsh and unrelenting. His brown hair was cut short and neat as usual, the same shade as that stubble, just a hair darker than his impressive eyebrows. Like Dr. Smarthawk, Weiss was well respected in his field of electric engineering and spell circuits. No one doubted his capabilities, and yet he put them to little use outside his mechanical pursuits. Solving problems that lesser people could solve, day in and day out, he seemed content to waste his energies only on the more eccentric projects the MASO brought to him.

“Visiting? I was beginning to think those days were behind us,” Weiss half-laughed, pointing behind Bek to an open cooler. “I don’t suppose you’ve taken up drinking yet?”

Bek reached in to grab one of the amber bottles, which was as icy against his fingers as if it had been submerged in ice water, and tossed it carelessly towards the man. Weiss could just as easily have used magic to get the bottle, but he never had in the past, just as he had never once failed to invite Bek to drink with him, nor ever once failed to be turned down. It was their casual greeting to each other, and its unchanging nature was something that Weiss generally acknowledged with a grim grin and a nod.

Today, however, there was an unusual seriousness in the man’s expression that meant Weiss must have read something in Bek’s demeanor that had put him on edge.

“I have questions, Weiss, that I think you can answer,” Bek said, pulling the black box fully from beneath his arm, but not quite extending it in the man’s direction. Weiss reached for it anyway, and when Bek handed it over, leaned back on the stool to eye it suspiciously.

“About what’s going on upstairs?”

“It’s related.”

“They raised the code level three times in the past hour, but no one’s been down here to say what happened,” Weiss observed. He was still ogling the box, turning it this way and that in his thick hands.

“A Zara entered the building, and took the dragon eggs.”

Weiss set the box heavily on his lap and fixed Bek with a look of disbelief.

“Jorik’s lab is nearly destroyed. He’s with the surviving samples now, scrambling to get things in order. One casualty in the lab, eight more in the field...we’ll be holding a wake next week. Most of the techs were able to escape the lab, and from the witnesses we have that the river spirit fought violently against the Zara to protect the eggs, as per the agreement when we brought it in,” Bek continued calmly.

“At whose suggestion was that?” Weiss prompted.

“Dr. Jim. You know the tribe has a long history with the river spirits.”

“Sure,” Weiss muttered, glancing more curiously at the box. “So, what is this?”

“That is a part of a larger puzzle.” Bek held up the Book of Lineage now as well, coming closer to Weiss and tugging a step ladder near enough to sit down. “Ryan must have contacted you about one of our newest employees. Silver Alurian. Shortly after the Zara’s attack, the cameras came back on line. We have footage of her leaving with the serpent, presumably to chase after the Zara.”

“The pyromancer?” Weiss stated. Bek nodded agreement.

“Most likely, the river spirit was waiting for the doctor. We also have evidence it was severely injured in its initial encounter with the Zara. It’s unclear exactly why this particular agent’s arrival would have changed things, but I have my suspicions. In confidence, Weiss, she can speak with the beasts. The serpent might have sensed as much, and deemed her good enough to bear witness that it was fulfilling the promise it had made to the tribe.”

“Those are some incredible claims you’re making,” Weiss gave Bek his full attention. Bek flipped to the page of the book that had been destroyed when he showed it to Silver.

“More incredible than this?” Bek asked.

Weiss ran a finger down the ink-stained page, loosing a low whistle.

“Backlash?”

“It seems like it. Something interfered with the spells in the book.”

“Something particularly well-crafted. There are several overlays on this book, Bek. You can see the signs of it in the fading at the edges of these pages. They should never fade. Over time, spells layered over spells interfere with each other. The result is degradation, anomalies, imbalance. Whatever magic did this, it had to have been particularly well-crafted to affect only the base spell circuit. Otherwise, you would have seen destruction of the physical page as well.”

“That’s your area of expertise, Weiss,” Bek observed.

“And I’m trying my best to make it yours, too. You said the damage began when you showed her the book, eh? When this happened, I’d hazard a guess,” Weiss slid his finger to the missing names sprinkling the tree of Silver’s lineage. “That tells us something. We’re not talking some generic spell. We’re talking a specific enchantment. Obfuscation, most likely. Protective or malicious, difficult to say from this.”

“I had planned to bring this to you sooner, but after she was brought here, I determined it was better to wait on information from the lab,” Bek agreed.

“Blood tests?”

“The results are in your inbox, Weiss.”

“I’m a lucky man,” Weiss commented.

Saying nothing more about the reasons he had originally been sent to observe Silver, Bek gestured to the box.

“Found at the site of her home the night the Zara destroyed it.”

Weiss grunting disbelievingly. “Her home was destroyed by a bloody Zara, too? Seems obvious enough to me why someone went to such lengths to protect her identity.”

That brought Bek pause. It was so stunningly obvious. He had assumed from the beginning that the Zara had appeared suddenly...but what if it had appeared suddenly because it had finally discovered the location of its prey? What if the obfuscation spell had been meant for the Zara specifically?

“Weiss, the Zara would have killed her long ago. Her and her entire family,” Bek said anyway.

“Would it?” Weiss had returned his attention to the box. “I told you, the spell is well-crafted. If it was meant to hide her, and this agent had no inkling the spell existed, how long do you think it would’ve worked? Now, should I be looking for something specific in regards to this box, or am I just admiring the fine craftsmanship?”

“I need to open it,” Bek said. Weiss looked mildly surprised, though he nodded grimly. It was a calculated risk to expose the box’s existence, much less give it away, but it was unlikely that the box contained anything earthshaking considering its size and state of repair – it had most likely survived only because its wood had been infused with some ancient magic. It was not unusual for such objects to turn up in non-magical homes, usually as some ancestral relic. Bek had already held on to it too long, hoping it would reveal some sign of Silver’s identity if he could get it open. If Jorik found out he had held back evidence...his thoughts were evidenced only by a hand half-raised to his neck. He dropped it quickly when he saw Weiss glance in his direction. If there was one thing this man was too good at for his own good, it was reading people.

And he was too good at many things.

“This is a hefty piece of work,” the man said, turning his gaze back to the box. He was tracing his fingers across the lip of the wood. “What have you tried?”

“Disabling, un-shielding and opening spells, tracing, silver wire, Selerian’s method…,” Bek said simply. Weiss looked up at him, dark eyes gleaming.

“And brute force, I’m betting. An extensive list, all things considered. Yet you did not ask Alurian to open it for you.” Weiss tilted the box to the side and lifted it to his ear with a look of extreme concentration. “I know what you’re doing, Bek, and it’s a darn dangerous path you’ve chosen.”

Bek just stared at him levelly before asking, “Will you be able to open it?”

“Do you really have to ask?”

“Good.”

“What now, Bek? You said this agent is gone,” Weiss asked astutely. Bek knew there was more to the question than there seemed to be.

“For security reasons, of course she’ll have to be retrieved. Jorik has suggested the Inscription Chambers.” There was silence between them for a moment, heavy with unsaid words. “The river spirit has a complicated relationship with the people of Icthuria. Given the chance, we think that’s where it will go now.”

There was a long pause.

“I know what you’re planning, Bek,” Weiss warned.

“If she’s not there, it may be the only way.”

“Jorik won’t forgive you.”

“I’ve never forgiven him,” Bek stated icily. Weiss nodded, seeming to weigh his next words.

“What will it take, Bek?”

“I had been told that the MASO’s defenses were impenetrable, particularly for the Zara,” Bek ignored the question, meeting Weiss’s gaze. He could see that Weiss wanted to continue the conversation about Jorik, but he bit anyway.

“They should have been. No doubt I’ll be called on to figure out why they weren’t soon enough.”

“One thing I noticed...something about Silver. She has terrible control over her magic, Weiss. When she got emotional while we were talking,” he pointed towards the warehouse ceiling, “the lights flickered.”

“There’s no way she could have interfered with the circuits surrounding this building,” the man said, but Bek could hear the hint of uncertainty in his tone. The seed of doubt.

“So far as I can tell, the Zara arrived moments after she tried to burn down the gym. Ryan was trying to coax her power out of her through meditation.” Weiss regarded him levelly, but he was rubbing the stubble of his chin now, clearly deep in thought.

“You don’t have the faintest idea what you’re suggesting, Bek.” The man’s voice had become quiet. “But I’m not one to pass up happenstance on principle alone. Meanwhile you...don’t let yourself sink too deep.”

Bek flashed a half smile, stood, and started to turn away, back to the narrow space between wing and reams. “You’ve said the same thing before, Weiss.”

Bek did not turn back. As he strode away, Weiss talked after him, “I’m going to keep saying it until it sinks in, excusing the pun. Don’t wait half a year to come down here next time.”

“I won’t.”

More words they repeated every time they met, but Bek wondered if either of them ever took any of it to heart. There was one advantage to being Jorik’s grandson, and it was his role in an agency that made no illusions about passing ownership within his family. Whatever their relationship with the governing bodies of whichever country each branch of the MASO resided in, the agency was, first and foremost, private. That gave Bek an incredible amount of freedom – freedom to make decisions like the one Weiss was hoping he would not make.

That freedom also meant that, if he had wanted it, he could have had any simple management position in the agency. Confined to the sprawling reaches of the MASO campus and isolated from the struggles beyond its buildings, he could have a cushy job if he so desired. Instead, he had trained to become one of the most talented special investigators in the agency. His specialty was anything that fell in the categories of most bizarre, most improbable, and most dangerous. Serial murderers, vampires, curses, spell circuits, the mythical beasts...it was all within his domain. Good men and women followed him, and they followed him not because of who he was, but because they knew the value he placed on their lives and expertise. Jorik permitted it, and Bek had no doubts as to why; one day, the director of the MASO hoped to get the call telling him his grandson was no longer a problem. That was why he had been personally ordered after Silver, and after the Zara. If he met the Zara face-to-face, Bek knew his chances of survival were extraordinarily low. Jorik was counting on that.

The elevator was almost at his floor before Bek glanced again at the broken control panel. Even broken, it had worked for three years so far. No one bothered to fix it. Little nuisances tended to be like that...easy to ignore, but left too long…

He nodded slowly. It would not take him long to find Silver. It was what he would do when he found her that was the problem. Silver Alurian needed to disappear and she needed to disappear fast.

At least, he mused, that was Jorik would be counting on.