Wattys shortlist 2021. One morning the sun rises a few hours early, striking levitating skyscrapers in Soliara ahead of schedule. People in the streets stop to look up at the sky and then down at their watches. Most of them, puzzled but disbelieving...
The door to Cytheria's office wouldn't close. When Cristo didn't leave, it stayed open. That wasn't the end of the world, but he stood and froze in place with a bemused smile on his face.
To think that the most masterful plan a genius like Pop could come up with could be undone by an automatic door.
He had been told to leave. But he needed one more thing from Liao Cytheria's office. Playing with the powerful and sophisticated deadly weapon from the future held in his hands, he wondered if he should try to shut the office door with a spell, but that might set off an alarm. Yet every second he stood frozen, someone could see him in Cytheria's office — and set off an alarm.
Seconds passed and he decided it would be best to just get what he needed and go — and what he needed would allow him to leave.
Circling the center of the office, he found it. The trace from Cytheria's link commute to work that morning. He stood in the exact exit point for the link she had taken from inside her home, and there it was — the trace. He could see, when he stood at the correct angle, a three dimensional representation around him, a virtual reality, of the place from which Cytheria had commuted — the middle of her manor's kitchen. Scouting around carefully, he checked the corners leading to the hallway, the foyer, and the antechamber to the dining hall, and looked up to check the balustrade of the inner balcony overlooking the kitchen, even ducking down to check under the kitchen table and getting on his tippy toes to see over the counter.
Stealing the trace of her link coordinates, he teleported. The office around him was replaced before his eyes by the kitchen he had seen in a mirage, now a hard, material reality.
He slipped from the kitchen down a hallway, gluing his back to a wall, feeling like a spy. And a bit silly for slinking through Cytheria's house like a spy. But then, he was breaking into someone's house for a second time that day.
An ornate living room he passed, empty, lay quiet in the light of red and purple stained glass windows he knew well. Without running into anyone, he came to the ornate blue floralwood front door and circled around to a dazzling bright landing up the main stairs.
Tiptoeing and turning up the twisting flight, he found the corridor at the top darkened. Striding down it, he didn't wonder why every curtain was drawn on this shining glorious morning as Sol dominated with enough light to startle the whole empire — but Cristo knew it wasn't out of fear of the early dawn and what warnings it might bring. He stopped at Liao Terra's door, beyond which would be the anteroom to Cytheria's daughter's apartment, which would hold four guards who waited to receive Terra's visitors and check on her every few hours as she moped over the fiance who recently left her close to if not exactly at the altar.
Truly, with Terra's temper, it would be hours before anyone checked on or disturbed her — even if she never came out. But there were people who wanted to get to her and wouldn't know that. To most eyes she looked like a heavily guarded target out of reach.
A certain Cassus sibling had informed Cristo, "They didn't want to offer Exequi Liao the youth spell because it revealed a certain hypocrisy to their anti-magic movement. They didn't want to bribe her, they wanted to threaten and coerce her — but they couldn't get to any of the Liaos before election night."
A glance at his watch told Cristo the opportune time was in thirty seconds. All he needed was ten — the time it took for the shift change to block out any sounds Terra was going to make.
He got behind an open closet door and watched the shift change take place exactly on time. Fresh security came down the dim hall, stopped in front of Terra's door, and waited. Three women in uniform came out and when Cristo spotted a man in uniform, the fourth guard, he linked.
Popping out of the shadows in Terra's room elicited no reaction from the young woman passed out on a sofa. The grayscale room hid Cristo.
He was a shadow.
Drawing the gun the boss had let him keep, Cristo held it visible even though it wouldn't fire here. In his other hand, the silver sliver of his gnomon looked like a knife. The shuffling of the guard was a noise that concealed his when he scuffed the carpet beneath his feet in a muffled stomp just loud enough to wake the dead, even if it wouldn't penetrate the door to the foyer.
Terra's glowing eyes caught his as they opened in the dark, and she shifted upright fast, but had the sense not to yell. Gleaming eyes saw the gun and the strange man, and didn't know if it would fire or not.
Before she could test it, Cristo warned her. "Keep quiet. Security can't get to you faster than I can put another hole in your head."
Sleepiness didn't prevent her pulling a firearm of her own on him, out from a couch cushion. Before she could aim or fire he used his more sophisticated and deadly weapon from the future to yank it from her hand, pulling her forward off the couch.
And hers definitely would fire.
"Are you crazy? I could have killed you," he hushed.
Terra stilled and only whispered, "Who are you?" and he wasn't about to answer that.
He wasn't allowed to tell anyone he was from the future, but Terra was dead. She had been killed. She would be killed. "You're going to die. In a manner of speaking, you already have. Come with me if you want it to mean something."
He didn't need his words to persuade her anyway. He had a deadly weapon for that.
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Thank you for reading. Remember not to worry too much about Terra. In the words of Stephen Potestas to Cristo, "Never forget it was so long ago, most of us have forgotten now — and let the past die."
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