Auckland Allies Complete Boxed Set by Mike Reeves-McMillan

Author:Mike Reeves-McMillan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mike Reeves-McMillan

Sparx

Chapter 10

I followed up my first text with another one.

IM IN UR INTERNETS

Then I figured I should probably stop messing about and explain properly.

I found a text-to-speech program and rang all of the team’s phones at once.

Tara was the first to answer. Her voice shook as she said, “Sparx, what the bloody hell?”

All of their phones were in the same room, so I dropped the call to the other three and put hers on speaker.

“This is Sparx,” I said. “I’m OK. Well, technically.”

I would have laughed at that, because technically was exactly how I was OK, but laughter doesn’t really work over text-to-speech.

Tara was spluttering. I could hear Sally sobbing in the background, and that sobered me. I couldn’t laugh while Sally was upset.

“Sal,” I said, “it’s all right. It’s me.”

“Prove it,” she said.

That stumped me for a moment. What was something I could tell her that nobody else knew?

“I’m going to turn off everyone else’s comms,” I said, “and just talk to Sally now.”

I did that, and said into her Bluetooth earbud, “Sal, it really is me. You remember the night after the necromancer? Not the same night, but the next one? Did you ever tell anyone else what happened between us that night?”

“No,” she whispered.

“You asked me to help you with the burned places from the volcanoes. To put ointment on them. And then you asked me to unbutton you. And…”

“All right,” she said, a catch in her voice. “You don’t need to say any more. It’s you. But how?”

I went back to speakerphone. “Remember the Ennead’s get-out-of-death-free spell? The one that keeps them anchored to the world until they can find another body? It was one of the ones Lynn had sketched out in Mathematica, and it got imported into Togethr with all the others. When I was figuring out how to break it, I got an idea.”

“You used the Ennead’s spell?” said Tara. She sounded appalled. “That’s blood magic.”

“Not exactly. I made a new version of it that, basically, creates an anchor for me in the cloud. All perfectly clean technomagic. So all you guys need to do is get my body patched up and we’re golden. I can drop right back in.”

There was a long silence. Then Dan said, “Um, Sparx, there might be a problem there.”

“What kind of a problem?”

“Jay said there was massive blood loss. Basically, the bullet clipped one of the major blood vessels in your heart. It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you just come back from.”

“Can you check with him?” I said.

He dialled his phone. I was pretty well infiltrated into the phone system by this point, so I could hear both sides of the conversation, and if I’d still had guts, they would have tightened.

My body had been without blood circulation for too long. There was no way it was going to be revived.

“Well, crud,” I said, when the conversation was concluded.

☐

“What are we going to do?” said Sally. “Can you stay in the Internet indefinitely? I

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