Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Kit
Breaking into Dr. Ricard Ballester’s place of employment felt like a throwback to my pre-archmythic days. No fireballs, no telekinesis, no levitation. Just some old-fashioned sneaking around, hiding in plain sight, and the occasional warp.
Okay, “breaking in” might be a stretch. The museum didn’t charge an entrance fee or man the doors with any kind of stringency, so getting inside was as simple as ensuring our ball caps were pulled low over our foreheads to shadow our faces before we strolled across the threshold.
Lienna and I had spent the afternoon studying the documents we’d received from Teddy’s helpful friend like we were cramming for the LSATs, so when we ambled past the info desk, we knew what to expect.
For example, we knew the building was originally a nineteenth-century market constructed almost entirely out of iron and later converted into a museum when medieval ruins were discovered underneath during renovations.
We knew there were typically four uniformed guards and eight plainclothes mythics. We knew they were primarily mages, so we likely wouldn’t have to deal with psychic interference.
We knew there was a shit ton of cameras.
No amount of psychic magic could shield us from their electronic eyes—you know, because cameras don’t have brains—but thankfully, M’s map detailed their locations and their approximate fields of view.
So we also knew how to navigate the museum without giving the eyes-in-the-sky a look at our notorious fugitive faces.
What I hadn’t fully realized, despite M’s package providing the museum’s dimensions, was how massive the place was. The floor space was easily as large as—to put it in European terms—a football pitch, and the peak of the slanted ceiling must have been close to a hundred feet above us.
Keeping our faces tilted away from the two cameras near the entrance, Lienna and I approached the main attraction.
Three large sections of the floor had been cut away, revealing the ancient ruins below.
Several staircases led to that level, but a tour down there cost actual coin.
And unfortunately, our self-guided experience didn’t budget enough time for goggling at roads and homes that had existed during the War of the Spanish Succession.
Each cutaway section had a plainclothes guard doing a loop around the railing every few minutes.
As the central guard neared us, I took a quick peek at her with my clairsentience.
She was, unsurprisingly, a mage. When I tried to sense her emotions, a prickle of unease crawled down my spine.
I’d expected her to be drowning in the tedium of her endless laps around the museum, but she was hyper-alert.
On edge, even. Had something spooked her?
I leaned against the railing to gaze down at the ruins, and Lienna mirrored me. The guard stopped a few steps away, pretending to read an information board. I felt her gaze pass over me and Lienna, taking in the details of our clothes, hats, VIP lanyards, a museum-branded tote—and our faces.
But this wasn’t my first security con job. I’d had a halluci-bomb going since we’d entered the building that altered our faces so we no longer resembled the most wanted mythic in the world and his almost-as-notorious accomplice.
The guard continued her loop, leaving Lienna and me to weave in and out of various exhibits.
We passed a handful of other patrons who were making their way toward the exit.
A voice over the PA system announced something in Catalan, then Spanish, then English—a five-minute warning that the museum was closing.
We drifted into one of the temporary exhibitions lining the museum’s perimeter.
Ten-foot-square photos and art pieces detailed the ordeal of the thirty thousand or so children evacuated from the country during the Spanish Civil War.
Out of sight of both cameras and guards, I swapped my disguise warp for a full invisi-bomb, erasing Lienna and me from everyone’s perception.
From our nook, I clocked the other security guards sweeping the exhibits for any stragglers.
When M told us that a local guild was handling security, I’d anticipated aging retirees and out-of-shape mall cops.
These guys were not that. They appeared to be seasoned pros—genuine combat mythics who could bench press a smart car and kick some serious ass even without their elemental capabilities. Maybe this was a side hustle.
I turned my attention to our destination: a nondescript, staff-only door off the exhibit we were currently lurking in.
Stationed in front of it was a vigilant security guard who, judging by the way his biceps were testing the tensile strength of his sleeves, had been given a uniform three sizes too small.
A camera was mounted in the corner above his head, angled to observe anyone who approached or exited the door.
The camera aside, the sheer muscular width of Mr. Creatine would prevent us from sneaking past him, so I whipped up a second warp: a toddler with cute pigtails gnawing on a half-melted chocolate bar as she approached one of the exhibition photos.
Mr. Creatine looked around in search of the tot’s parents, then stepped away from the door. With clumps of sticky sweetness barely clinging to their fingers, the child reached for the oversized photograph.
“Ei!” Mr. Creatine called, striding toward the toddler. “No toquis això!”
The little ankle-biter tore off, giggling with delight.
Grunting something under his breath, the bodybuilder jogged after my warp.
Keeping that warp going along with the invisi-bomb, I pulled a clump of lint from my pocket. Things found in pockets that I never thought would be useful for five hundred, Alex.
I pinched the innocuous bit of lint with telekinetic fingers and floated it up toward the ceiling until it was sitting right in front of the camera lens.
My technique could’ve been better. I wasn’t sure I’d really captured the motion of carefree random fluff tumbling along on the currents of dry HVAC air, but to be fair, a lot of my concentration was going toward my warps.
The moment I blocked the camera, Lienna sped toward the door.
She punched in the access code and swung it open.
I followed her into a wide, brightly lit corridor with clean white tiles and light oak walls, intermittently broken up by office doors.
Just before closing the access door, I made the pigtailed toddler run into another exhibit and dropped the warp.
Hopefully, the guard would spend a while trying to find her before it dawned on his brawny brain that something strange was going on.
Following M’s map—which we’d both memorized—we turned right, heading toward the back of the building. But as we were about to round another corner, my clairsentience picked up a mythic mind close by.
I caught Lienna’s arm, bringing her to a halt just as a uniformed security guard stepped into the hallway mere feet in front of us.
According to M’s info, this area wasn’t patrolled, but I could guess where the woman had come from: the security office was just ahead.
Was she on her way to investigate the lint-obstructed camera?
The guard’s gaze probed the empty space where our invisible selves stood. A deep furrow formed between her dark eyebrows.
She couldn’t see us, so why was she so suspicious of an empty corridor? As I honed my clairsentience to detect her magic, a sudden gust of wind almost whipped my hat off my head.
Lienna’s arm snapped forward. “Ori dormias!”
Her stun marble hit the woman in the cheek, and she crumpled bonelessly toward the floor. I eased her collapse with my telekinesis.
“An aeromage,” Lienna said as she grabbed the unconscious woman’s shoulders. “She must have sensed the air currents moving around us.”
“Let’s hope she’s the only wind wizard on duty.”
Together, we dragged the guard into the security office. Her empty chair waited in front of a cluster of monitors full of camera feeds. We deposited her in her natural environment, closed the door behind us, and continued along the hall.
Four offices down, we found the room we were looking for. At eye level on the door, a fancy little plaque declared, “Dr. Ricard Ballester, Investigador Principal d’Artefactes.”
And according to my clairsentience, an Arcana mythic with an inflated sense of self-worth was inside. M’s notes indicated that Ballester typically stayed in his office for about an hour after the museum closed.
Lienna positioned herself in front of the door and I stood behind her, keeping myself hidden. I dropped her from the invisi-warp and reapplied her makeover to ensure she didn’t match her bounty photo.
“You ready, showstopper?” I asked.
“As I’ll ever be.”
“Break a leg.”
She took a breath and knocked. As footsteps from within thumped closer, I swapped out my clairsentient lens for my empath one, targeting his mind. As soon as he opened the door and saw Lienna’s brightly smiling face, I nudged his emotions toward affability and goodwill.
“Oh, wow,” Lienna gushed. “Dr. Ballester. It’s so amazing to meet you.”
“How can I help you, dear?” he asked, words tinged with a Catalan accent.
“My name’s Amy,” she said, offering him her hand. “Huge fan of your work. I’ve read all your papers.”
The archaeologist’s bushy eyebrows rose above his dark-framed glasses.
Where Teddy was tall and thin, his ex-partner was short and thick in the middle, with graying hair and a goatee as pretentious as his office, which was lined with wooden bookshelves containing leather-bound tomes and glass-encased artifacts on pedestals, lit by their own little spotlights.
Various diplomas, certificates, doctorates, and participation awards filled the remaining wall space.
I opened the friendliness faucet a little more, and he shook Lienna’s hand.