Chapter 16

Faustus Trivium's restaurant was a shithole.

Buried on the east end of town between an abandoned gas station and a pay-by-the-hour hotel with barred windows, Corky's Cuisine was little more than a sign, a door, and a window so grimy you couldn't see inside. And based on the odor of deep-fried trash that wafted out its back door, "cuisine" was a real stretch.

Vera and I spent Tuesday morning—the later part of the morning, after sleeping—scoping the place and debating a plan of attack. After far too much standing, pacing, and trying not to breathe the back-alley reek, we retreated to a better neighborhood and grabbed an outdoor table at an Indian restaurant.

As we waited for our food, our conversation drifted from infiltration strategies to how I'd ended up in my current fun situation. I ran through my unpleasantly immersive MPD experience, touching on Lienna, Captain Blythe, the lumberjack, and my cellmate Duncan. She'd heard of the latter—or at least, she'd heard of a hydromage murderer with a three-hundred-thousand-dollar bounty on his head and a habit of shriveling up humans like raisins.

"And they put you in a cell with him?" Vera asked, waiting for the waitress to get out of earshot after delivering our meals. She dug her fork into her curry. "I thought you were a conman."

"Barely even that. I just worked for conmen."

She tore off a hunk of naan bread and stirred it around in her bowl, soaking up the hot and spicy juices. "That's typical MPD bullshit right there."

I swallowed a helping of my much milder butter chicken. "What do you mean?"

"Throwing a harmless intern in with a bona fide serial killer? That's insane. You two shouldn't even be in the same building."

"They only have one building."

"Are you defending them?"

"God, no."

She wiped her mouth. Her food was so spicy that her breath made my eyes burn from across the table. "Those bastards are so caught up in their control and authoritarianism that they forget they're dealing with real people."

That sure sounded like certain people in the MPD, namely Captain Blythe. "I guess so."

"You guess so?" She guffawed. "I'd think someone who went through what you did would be harder on them."

"Well, I mean, some of them are just trying to keep the peace."

"Some of them? Like Agent Shen?" Vera gave me a scathing look. "Was she pretty? Did she smile at you all nice while manipulating you into helping arrest your friend?"

I scowled. "I suggested it, not her. The point was to get out of the precinct to escape."

The fact I'd started to like Lienna had nothing to do with anything.

"And my point is that Shen is no better than the rest of them. She just hides it better." Vera rammed another piece of naan bread in her mouth. "My dad used to deal with those MagiPol bastards for his job sometimes."

"Your dad?"

"He was a community management liaison before he retired."

That sounded… normal. Based on the tattoos and the leather and the overall attitude, I'd assumed Vera had grown up on the streets of some grungy metropolis where she had to hunt rats for her supper.

"It was his job to arbitrate between mythic communities and the MPD," she carried on, ramming her fork into her bowl, "and all they ever did was jerk him around. Because what could he even do, right? You can't fight the MPD. You either fall in line or you hide in the shadows."

"Is that what you're doing? Hiding?"

"As far as the MPD is concerned, I am a law-abiding mythic who dabbles in bounty hunting."

"Don't we need MagiPol, though?" I speared a piece of chicken with my fork. "I mean, what would happen without the MPD? It'd be chaos, wouldn't it? They're the only thing keeping the human world from knowing about us."

"So what?" She chewed another mouthful of curry-flavored lava. "Do you think we need the MPD to keep us safe from humans?"

My mind drifted to the number of ankles I'd broken by "redecorating" a street curb, and compared to most mythics, my power was harmless. "I was more thinking the other way around. They need to keep humans safe from us."

She scoffed. "You're sounding an awful lot like a goddamn agent. MagiPol's whole game is keeping magic under wraps."

"‘Keep it secret; keep it safe,'" I quoted quietly.

"Yeah, Gandalf. Like that. The MPD doesn't give a flying shit about keeping humans safe. They barely even care about keeping mythics safe. All they care about is keeping magic safe. You wanna know why?"

"I have a feeling you'll tell me either way."

"Power." She pointed her fork at me in emphasis. "MagiPol has serious clout with all the world powers. Presidents and kings and shit. Their heaviest card is keeping magic from leaking out into the human world, because nobody in charge wants that. It would be a serious inversion of the system if all of a sudden the X-Men were running around out in the open."

"I appreciate the reference, but we're not mutants. Technically speaking."

"Regimes would be toppled in no time because mythics would rule the land. So, the MPD keeps us regular mythics from screwing up their systems, and in return, the human leaders do basically whatever the MPD wants."

I leaned back in my chair. "That's a bleak outlook."

"It's not an outlook, Kit. It's reality." She shrugged, then wiped her nose with a sniffle. I guess she wasn't immune to the million-degree curry after all. "The MPD won't last forever. Instagram and selfies and surveillance cameras are gonna make it real hard for us to stay hidden indefinitely. It's a miracle the only humans blabbing about us are wingnut conspiracy theorists who think Kubrick faked the moon landing."

"How do you know he didn't?"

"Trust me, he didn't fake anything. He was a mythic, but he wasn't a fraud."

"Stanley Kubrick was a mythic?" I gasped. Everyone at KCQ had known I was a movie buff. How could they have universally failed to mention that one of the greatest film directors of all time had magical powers?

"Yeah. A telepath."

"That is so awesome."

From there, the conversation devolved into a debate about the greatest Kubrick films of all time (A Clockwork Orange versus Dr. Strangelove) and then into a debate about the greatest directors of all time (Scorsese versus Kurosawa) and then back to our plan for stealing from Faustus Trivium.

It took the better part of the afternoon, but we nailed down a strategy. The only problem was I didn't have the skills necessary for the very first step. That skill? Making Vera invisible to every person in Faustus's crappy diner.

The "every person" part wasn't an issue. Targeting a bunch of individual minds gets hella tricky, but I can easily dump the same vision on everyone around me—a grenade instead of a sniper rifle. Or as I prefer to call it, a halluci-bomb. While this method requires far less focus, it saps my psychic fuel like a gas-guzzling pickup truck racing uphill. Still, I could handle it for long enough to pull off our little heist.

The real problem was the invisibility portion. I can make objects invisible no problem, and I make myself invisible whenever I do a Split Kit diversion. But just as I couldn't make Maggie invisible to aid in our escape from the café, I couldn't make Vera invisible. It never worked for some reason.

Now I needed to figure it out.

I gave it my first serious attempt once we were back on Vera's boat. Targeting her mind, I tried to imitate the Split Kit hallucination, pushing beyond myself and onto her.

The result? A semi-transparent Kit and a wholly opaque Vera.

Two hours of headache-inducing effort got me no further than that. Vera ditched me to get more food, and sitting alone in the gently rocking boat, I rubbed my temples. I could make myself invisible. I could make inanimate stuff invisible. Why couldn't I make Vera invisible?

With no new ideas, I practiced making objects on the boat vanish. It wasn't difficult—I did it all the time with Redecorator hallucinations. What was the roadblock between Vera's saltshaker and Vera herself?

I tried bigger objects: the microwave, the bed, the chair. I even stepped out onto the dock and made the entire damn boat disappear. I was David freaking Copperfield.

Vera returned with the sushi—beef teriyaki for me, and salmon sashimi with more wasabi than was safe for the standard human to consume for her—but my practice hadn't helped. As we consumed our respective Japanese dishes, the best I could do was invisify—invisiblate?—Vera's food as she brought it to her mouth.

Turns out that was an annoying thing to do, and it earned me a solid punch to the shoulder.

Giving up, I chewed through a piece of beef and half listened to her threatening to toss me into the ocean if I invisified her food ever again. Not very creative, as far as threats went. What about shaving off my flesh? Transforming my eyeballs into pizza toppings? Sending my bones to another universe?

Damn, Lienna's threats had been fun. Scary, but fun.

An unpleasant twinge ran through my gut as my thoughts wandered to the MPD agent. Where was she now? Still searching for me, or had she focused on my far more dangerous empath ex-friend? Had Blythe taken her off the case after my escape? Would the captain cripple Lienna's career out of spiteful vengeance?

Sounded like something Blythe would do.

I speared a crispy broccoli tree with my fork. Maggie's information about Blue Smoke circled in my brain. Their plans to steal from Cerberus. The secret vault Maggie had helped them create to seal away their prize, once they got it. Quentin wanted that prize, no doubt about it. He was picking up the pieces Rigel had abandoned in death, and the empath was more than capable of making a run at Cerberus on his own—especially now that he'd empathically charmed Maggie into helping him.

Maybe I should tip off Lienna. If I could get word to her…

Wait. What was I thinking? I wasn't risking recapture for anything, especially not an MPD agent. Even if that agent was Lienna.

I forced my attention back to Vera, my dumbass brain making dumbass comparisons between the two women who'd knocked my life off course in very different ways. One tall and blond, the other dark-haired and slimly built, with personalities even more disparate than their physical appearances.

And as I thought about how each woman was far more than she appeared, it hit me.

Eyes widening, I really looked at Vera. This time, I didn't concentrate on making the tall blond sitting across from me invisible. I focused on Vera—her whole presence. Her personality, her essence, her considerable violence. Her colorful animal tattoos, the gruff way she spoke, the rough athleticism of her movements.

And instead of erasing a physical body, I erased her very essence from the room.

She disappeared from her chair. I whooped in excitement—and she answered with a high-pitched scream. The hallucination snapped and she reappeared, face white, eyes bulging, and chest heaving. She'd held on to her fork, but a glob of salmon was lying on the table.

"You—what—that—" She gulped repeatedly. "A little warning, asshole!"

Yeah, maybe warning her would've been good. I could simultaneously see my hallucinations and see through them, so even when I invisified myself, my body was still present to all my senses. What would it be like to lose all sense of yourself? To not be able to see your own body or hear your own voice or breathing or footsteps?

I let her finish eating, then excitedly resumed my experimentation. Fun for me, not for her. Even worse than losing sight of herself, her sense of touch was substantially subdued while she was invisified—a side effect I hadn't anticipated. And it turns out that when you can't see, hear, or feel your own limbs, you get really clumsy.

We spent the rest of the evening and the next day working on it—me building up my stamina for this new psychic skill, and Vera building up her tolerance toward the erased-self syndrome I was inflicting upon her. She had to get used to moving while invisible, touching without feeling, and talking while deaf to her own voice.

That evening, we did a test run at the local supermarket. I halluci-bombed the entire shopping area and put Vera into her unsettling state of nonexistence, then we walked around the store together, picking up more snack food.

She lifted a frozen entrée of ginger beef and asked in a strangely labored voice, "What do you want?"

"Dr. Pepper and All Dressed chips. Oh! And some cheese!"

"What are you, like, thirteen years old?"

"Make it fancy cheese, then."

She fulfilled my request with stunted movements, and we walked out of the store with an armful of deliciousness, completely undetected. A block away, I dropped the halluci-bomb. Vera reappeared. Heaving a sigh of relief, she passed me a Dr. Pepper.

I cracked the can open and took a swig. "Are we ready?"

She shrugged. "As ready as we'll ever be."

A glowing endorsement if I'd ever heard one.