Chapter 8
“How?” I asked, shock flooding my system.
“It’s ridiculously obvious,” Caeco said sharply, clearly calling my intelligence into question.
My thoughts took her tone, my brain her suspicious intent, and suddenly I jerked free of the rut I had found myself in.
“Oh, excuse me, Super Senior Special Agent Jensen,” I said, my own tone just as snarky. “Some of us haven’t the clarity of having grown up in a lab where everyone told us how our mother redesigned nature for her own agenda.”
“You have no memory of your mother applying tattoos?” Declan asked, jumping into the opening before Caeco could fire back.
“Of tattooing me with invisible tattoos? No. No, I don’t.”
“Nika?” Tatiana asked her telepath.
“He has shields now,” Nika said, one brow raised.
“I should fucking hope so,” Erika said. “I’ve only spent the last three months beating on him to build and hold them.”
“Would you drop your shields if I watched Nika through our bond?” Vesta asked. She was holding my hand, and I didn’t remember when she had grabbed it.
“Okay,” I said, reluctantly.
“Don’t love this at all,” Erika said, frowning, her arms crossed in a manner much like Caeco’s. “A lot of arm-twisting on my student.”
I went through the mental exercise I used to raise or lower my mental and magical shields.
Witches who learned early didn’t need the kind of tricks that I did, but hey, I was happy I could do it at all.
My trick was to visualize a Greenacres tank lizard tucking its six legs under its heavily armored body and closing its thick-scaled eyelids.
Only a foot long, they were one of the few smaller creatures who could shrug off a centipede attack or a tick bite if they tucked and bread loafed like a cat.
Didn’t help them with actual cats, or at least Buster, as she just flipped them like a fisher flipping a porcupine, attacking the soft underbelly at will.
My mental lizard opened its eyes and stood up on all six legs, then opened its mouth too.
Instantly I felt the alien presence of the telepath’s mind, but I also felt Vesta there alongside me, her mental image standing with arms crossed and foot tapping.
Nika seemed to stay on task, a blur of images moving back in time through my childhood to a final scene of me looking up at my giant mother, her smile wide and warm, the liquid silver she drew on my skin just slightly cool as she cooed to me.
The alien presence withdrew and I instantly imagined my mental tank lizard shutting its mouth, closing its eyes, and tucking its legs.
“She did it to him when he was a babe,” the vampire telepath Nika said, her tone even. Which was good because I would have hated pity.
“Craig, this is going to be an odd request, especially coming from me,” Vesta’s dad said. “But could you take off your shirt?”
The room-wide intent shifted slightly. Still curious, just different.
I glanced at Vesta, but she was no help, just smirking at me.
The shirt was a pullover, and I rolled it off as two more drones shot into the room. As soon as I lowered my arms, blue laser light illuminated me from head to belt.
“Whoa,” Erika said, her eyes flicking across my skin, her curiosity changing to a professional academic sort from what it had been a moment ago.
“Omega?” Declan asked.
“I am referencing each image, although so far there are nine that I have no information on,” the avatar said.
“Same, although the ones that I don’t know all feel like the first one… the elemental,” Declan said.
“How could she do that?” Vesta asked, directing the question at her father. “Know and use sigils that you don’t?”
“I’m not sure she did. I think she might have thrown everything she could think of at him.”
“Oh lad, Da-Ni may have been a quiet girl, but she wasn’t ever a reckless one, ” Ashling said, moving up close to look at my sudden profusion of blue-silver body art. Myself, I was frozen, mind numb at the realization that I was just an experiment.
“There is order here,” Ashling declared, looking from one arm to the other. “Symmetry. And the European glyphs and sigils are placed correctly, they are. Ye never let her read yer mum’s grimoire, now did ye?”
“What? No!” Declan protested. “Nobody’s read that but me, you, and recently Vesta.”
“Well, like as not, it would appear she had access to an Irwin Book of Shadows,” Ashling said. “Tis done precise and textbook-like.”
“What about the other symbols?” Erika asked, moving up close and bending down to look close at the blue-scored symbols in the flicker of blue laser light. “Asian, African, West Indies, maybe Australian.”
“Most are similar to the ones we typically use,” Declan said, now moving the other direction around me. “Placed together to maybe increase speed and strength. Some I haven’t seen in years.”
“And the unknown ones, the elemental ones?” Agent Jensen asked, arms still crossed.
“No idea. But all were done with rhinocodium, all applied expertly in tiny detail.”
“Tiny?” Chris asked.
“They were applied to a baby yet are perfect in shape and symmetry on an adult.”
“So, I’m as much an experiment as Agent Jensen,” I said, not needing an answer but meeting the agent’s glare head-on.
“There are likely more on his legs and…” Erika noted, trailing off to look at Vesta, who was growling softly.
“Omega can scan them privately,” Declan said, looking side-eyed at his daughter. She quieted and straightened up.
“How and where did she get pure or relatively pure rhinocodium, what are the known and unknown effects of this blanket of sigils, and why would a mother do this to their only child?” Vesta’s mom asked the room at large, ticking off each question on her fingers.
“Excellent questions, all,” Gina said with a nod. “My understanding is that our advanced students’ best attempts to isolate rhinocodium from the organic materials provided from Greenacres has resulted in something like a tenth of a gram of impure material. Omega? Any thoughts?”
“I have backchecked the survey and early explorations reports from Golf Alpha and noted every inquiry made at that time. Prior to leaving for Golf Alpha, Da-Ni Blackmore searched those survey databases, and also reached out via email to Samantha Damara, the geologist who found the first ruby. All of her questions were focused on rhinocodium,” the AI reported.
“No one has ever found any kind of deposit?” Lydia asked.
“There are no records or even hints in thousands of chat rooms regarding a deposit,” Omega said. “Quite a few discussions speculated on the possibility of such a deposit but nothing remotely factual. Nor are there even rumors.”
“So source of material aside, what do the modifications do?” Tatiana asked.
“At the bare minimum, they speed up his reflexes and response capabilities, strengthen his skeleton, increase muscular strength and twitch capacity, and increase health and healing,” Declan said, thumb and index finger holding his chin in thought.
“Standard warlock results but magnified. I am absolutely certain that they do other things as well, but I don’t know what.
What they don’t seem to do is create the warlock rage or adrenal response and its subsequent addiction. ”
“How do you know?” Katrina asked, looking fascinated.
“Because the sigils necessary to invoke the rage are not placed on the back of his neck, ye see,” Ashling said, moving around behind me. “But there be others here, including one of the unknowns.”
Declan followed his aunt around behind me to look at whatever they were seeing. “That one looks like a version of the Kalachakra Seal from Tibetan Buddhism. Sanskrit symbols and other graphics, but I’m not sure. Omega?”
“It is very close, but with a few subtle differences. The ksha, ha, and la disks are all emphasized, while the remaining symbols are slightly reduced. Form, formless, and earth are what those disks are linked to.”
“That means nothing to me,” Erika said, blowing a strand of blonde hair away from her face.
“So she turned her infant son into a modified warlock using every symbol including the kitchen sink and he turns out to be stable, extremely effective, and maybe not addicted to adrenaline,” Caeco said, staring at me. “How could she have known all this would be even slightly effective?”
“The answer to that is unknown,” Omega said. “However, I calculate that the source of the knowledge to do this was likely nonhuman.”
“The Adversary,” I said quietly. They all heard me.
“A disturbing thought,” Vesta’s mom said.
“And yet it has the highest current probability of being correct,” Omega said. “As to why she would do it to her child, is it possible that a mother on a frontier world would take extreme measures to provide her only child with enhanced chances of survival?”
Stacia and Tatiana were both nodding, as was Gina.
“And now, exposed to the greater magic on Earth, they have reached maximum effectiveness?” Caeco asked.
“I don’t believe that to be true,” Omega said. “My observations show a continual increase in capability. The curve has flattened out, but he still improves on his run times and scores. Also, I think there’s an additional ability that’s just now beginning to show itself.”
“What’s that, Omega?” Declan asked.
“If I may conduct a simple experiment, I can perhaps provide empirical evidence. Observe.”
Two pairs of tiny drones floated up to his avatar. One from each pair continued on to me while the other half stayed on his avatar’s shoulders.
As they landed on my own shoulders, he explained. “One pair is completely synchronized for atomic time like all my drones but not entangled. The other pair is both synchronized and entangled. Now we add the last element.”
A grapefruit-sized drone floated in, moving toward me but then past, taking up position in front of Vesta. My Intent suddenly flared as I read the drone’s preparation to fire an energy bolt at Vesta and everything went sideways.