Chapter 1140: Dream World’s “Illegal Immigrants”
That night, Roland told Anna about the meeting.
She listened with her head resting against his shoulder, her dark hair loose, and when he reached the part about the God’s Stone bullet she asked a quiet question: “Has anyone tested whether the stone survives the firing process?”
“Not yet. That’s your part.”
“Of course it is.” She stretched her legs out in front of her, examining her own hands with the expression she wore when running a sequence of operations mentally. “I’ll need to understand what Agatha has on the demon blood samples first. The hardness properties will determine what caliber we can even attempt.” A pause. “Also the seating geometry. A God’s Stone deformed by the propellant force before it exits the barrel is worse than no bullet at all — it would destroy the firing chamber.”
He watched her work through it in real time: the metallurgical constraints, the energy transfer problem, the downstream effects of each solution. She had been the Minister of Engineering for eight months. The position had not changed her; it had clarified her. She was the same person who had held a flame in her palm in a Witch Camp cell, only now the scale of what she was building had expanded to match the scope of what she could imagine.
“The workload never ends,” she said, but her voice carried no complaint in it — the observation was affectionate, the way someone describes a place they have chosen. “I keep a list of projects. It’s twenty-three items long. I add to it more often than I cross things off.” She turned her head to look at him. “You said there might be more people in the Ministry soon.”
“Rex from the Society of Wondrous Crafts. I left the decision with him, but I expect he’ll come.”
“What’s his area?”
“Marine engineering, currently. But the instinct that made him build a working diving suit from a steam engine adaptation is the same instinct that makes a good engineer. The specialization is just what he’s had access to.”
Anna considered this. Then: “I’ll want to meet him before he starts.”
“Obviously.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist and was quiet after that. He stayed awake after her breathing slowed, looking at the ceiling. The list of decisions that could not wait stacked themselves in familiar formation — the God’s Stone bullet timeline, the ambush preparation, the Endless Cape excavation, Celine’s request — and he let them arrange themselves and did not try to resolve any of them tonight.
Morning light through the curtain.
Roland brushed his teeth, made coffee, leaned on the balcony rail and watched the city below sort itself into its daily pattern: students with backpacks moving in one direction, suited professionals in another, an old man doing slow exercises in the alley below with the unhurried determination of someone who had done this for forty years and intended to do it for forty more.
Nothing had changed in the visible city. The buildings were where they had been yesterday. The street vendors were occupying the same corners. And yet — the Dream World had been shifting, steadily, in the way a room shifts when someone has rearranged the furniture while you slept: the same elements, different weight.
The red book. The note. The café that did not exist.
Raison d’être had no author. The café it named had no address in any directory. The witches had checked forty-six coffee shops. The city had forty-six. None was called the Rose Café.
The book’s concerns were not abstract. A foreign race that had vanished completely. Cyclical wars. Awakenings and erosions as though they were seasons rather than disasters. When he had read it before the discovery at the Endless Cape, the parallels had seemed possible coincidences. Now — the tablet civilization, the murals, the Magic Ceremony Cube — the Dream World felt less like an escape from the real one and more like a translation of it. A version of the same story told in different terms.
He could not determine yet what to do with that.
Three knocks sounded at his door: one loud, two soft. The code that meant the hallway was clear.
He opened it.
Three witches stood in the corridor, dressed in nondescript clothes that were nonetheless twenty years too carefully selected for the casual-observer cover story they were attempting. Dawnen was in front, her ability already operating — the trace-erasure that kept the corridor cameras in the building showing only empty hallway. Behind her, two women who looked exactly like the high school students they were not.
“Good morning, Your Majesty,” all three said, and the salute was crisp and formal in a way that was going to need significant modification before they set foot in a classroom.
Roland pressed his hand to his forehead.
Dawnen: transfer-soul witch, Blessed Army veteran, twenty-eight at the time of transfer, ability in trace erasure. Battlefield experience sufficient to handle whatever the Dream World’s Fallen Evils could produce. She had the eyes of someone who had spent years in a war and the face of someone who had never left school.
Saint Miran: ability in impersonation. Non-combat origin — she had developed expertise in observation and social navigation instead. The introduction she delivered was precise and brief and she watched his face while she gave it.
Dido: ability in the invisible pocket, a spatial storage that operated independently of physical laws. Useful for carrying equipment quietly. She offered her credentials with the earnestness of someone who had spent years being underestimated by combat witches and had decided to simply be excellent instead.
“Ms. Celine explained the mission,” Dawnen said. “We’re ready to begin.”
Ready was relative. They were combat-hardened soul-transfer witches with centuries of collective experience in surviving things that killed ordinary people. They were also going to be asked to pretend to be seventeen in a classroom and accept instruction from a human teacher without demonstrating that they already knew more about certain subjects than that teacher did.
“Before anything else,” Roland said, “the salute. We’re changing the salute.”
He closed the door behind them and considered how to explain the handshake.
The problem of cover was manageable, in principle. The larger problem was Garcia.
He picked up the telephone.
“Hey,” Garcia said, before he could open with anything. “I want to talk to you. Come to my room. You just got up, didn’t you.” It was not inflected as a question.
He glanced at the three witches arranged expectantly on his furniture. “I’ll be there in a moment.”
Room 0827. Garcia in a summer dress and cartoon-patterned sandals, holding two glasses with the competence of someone for whom all environments were training environments. The gray hair down, sweat at the tip of her nose from her morning session. Two to three years older than him in apparent age, though the biographical facts were more complicated. She handed him a glass of iced green tea.
“I said Coke.”
“You didn’t exercise this morning.”
He did not have a rebuttal for this that would not invite further commentary.
She pushed a folded piece of paper across the table, and then a brochure. “Congratulations. Your official membership came through. And then—” she nodded at the brochure, “—that arrived with it.”
He opened the brochure.
Hunting License. Prism City Martialist Association. Issued to:
He looked up.
“There are fewer than a hundred of those in circulation,” Garcia said. “Fewer than ten in this city. It means the Association trusts you with independent judgment on classification and response.” She was not looking at him with the competitive evaluating look she sometimes wore. She was looking at him with something cleaner than that. “I told them what you’d done. They reached their own conclusion.”
“You’re not—”
“Upset?” She shook her head. “No. My master told me you can’t judge people by what they say. You have to watch what they do.” She picked up her tea. “I’ve been watching what you do for eight months. You’re—” she paused, with the momentary difficulty of someone paying a genuine compliment for the first time in a while. “You’re honest.”
The word landed more heavily than she probably intended.
He thought about what he had not told her. The Taquila witches. The warehouse. The other world that all of this was, in truth, a side project of. The license he was holding represented trust she had built a case for on his behalf — trust he was about to spend without telling her why.
“By the way,” Garcia said, the moment already moving on in her manner. “What did you actually want? You called me, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” He put the brochure down. “I need your help with something. I’d rather show you than explain.”
She set her glass down and stood up in a single motion. “Sure.”
He took a breath.
They crossed the corridor to Room 0825. He opened his door and Garcia stepped in.
The three witches turned from where they were seated on the sofa, their faces bright with the exact quality of excitement that would not read, to someone who didn’t know them, as anything other than very eager young women.
Garcia made a sound that was not a word.
Then: “You — you finally—” She took a step back toward the door, one hand already reaching for her phone. “They’re children. They are children. I’m calling the police.”
Roland closed his eyes briefly.
“They’re not—” he started.
“I’m calling the police,” Garcia said again, with the flat, resolute calm of someone who had made a decision and was not reconsidering it.
“Garcia,” he said. “Please listen to me.”
Dawnen, Dido, and Saint Miran watched this exchange with the polite, attentive expressions of experienced soldiers encountering a new class of situation and gathering information before responding.
“I am going to need you to sit down,” Roland said, to Garcia, and then to the witches: “Don’t move. Don’t say anything unusual. Don’t salute.”
He pulled out a chair.
This is going to take a while.