He heard her chanting something at once rhythmic and hypnotic, but didn’t focus on it, didn’t give it weight to where the spell might take hold.
The spell didn’t stick.
He pulled out the thumb drive.
She cried out at him. It was a nasty, evil-laced harangue. Just as he reached for the top server, Finn felt his joints freeze. The spell had taken hold. She uncoiled off her improvised throne and came alongside the statue of Finn’s sparkling, but corrupted, hologram.
“What should I do with you for all the trouble you’ve caused me? Hmm? Little boys shouldn’t play with fire…” She waved her hand; it lit on fire as it passed Finn’s face, then extinguished. “Sometimes it’s best to step back and get out of the way. A lesson you never learned, poor boy. A lesson now to be learned the hard way.”
She reached out and plucked the thumb drive from Finn’s frozen grasp. “We can’t have you having that, I’m sorry to say. And let me make something perfectly clear: I don’t go in for all this techno mumbo jumbo. Give me a good old incantation. A conjure. Why, there’s more power in the spirits of the bayou than in all the generators in this ship combined. But…I can adapt. I can play along. Hmm?” She stared at the thumb drive in the palm of her hand as if it were an insect she was considering crushing. Spiders crept out from her burlap shirt, squeezing through the dozen beaded necklaces she wore, and hurried down the length of her arm, surrounding the small drive. First three or four. Then more like twenty. The skin on her face moved fluidly, like hot lava.
Finn thought he might be sick.
Professor Philby had educated him on how to crash the servers. Water or any fluid was the preferred method. But equally incapacitating was to run electrical current through the Ethernet port—a port rarely considered when it came to surge suppression. Because the servers were daisy-chained one to the next, a single Ethernet cable would do. Movement returned to his eyes and mouth. He could feel his tongue. Whatever she’d conjured was wearing off—or, and he hoped this was more likely the case, 2.0 was giving him power. In any event, he was coming back, and Tia Dalma was none the wiser.
“A time and place fer everyting,” she growled. Such a low voice for a woman. “Wouldn’t you agree? We all have our roles to play. Some small.” She looked at him. “Some large.” She swept a hand out in a partial curtsy to indicate herself. “You have had your time. Now we goin’ have ours. You see, boy, knowledge is overrated. ’Tis shaped by history. Da two are one. So, of course, dat is where one must start: at da seat of knowledge.”
The library, Finn was thinking. His toes tingled. He could feel his hands.
“You know dem Louisiana cicadas—da bug, da insect—only present demselves once every thirteen years? We are like that. We have patience. We await our moment to return. Your world…yours, boy…has lost its way. Time for some Order. Capital O.” She sucked in a lungful of air through whistling nostrils. “Our time has come.”
He worked 2.0 like the clutch of a car: engine engaged, engine not engaged. Hologram on. Hologram off. Pivoted and clapped his hand down onto her open palm, crushing the spiders and snatching the thumb drive. Reached through her chest, his hand out her back, and then turned his hand solid––a move that was incredibly painful for them both.
He swung her to the side and switched back to hologram, letting her go. Tia Dalma flew against the wall and sank to the floor, clutching her heart where Finn’s arm had been inside her.
He tore loose an Ethernet cable, stuck its plastic clip into his mouth, and bit down hard. Drew the cable of loose wires from his lips and spit out the clip. There were five or six tiny wires. He twisted them into two pigtails a half inch apart.
A semiconscious Tia Dalma lifted her arm, and Finn saw her lips move—another curse coming.
From behind Finn, Willa flew across the room and shoved an oily rag in the witch doctor’s mouth. She grabbed hold of Tia Dalma’s many necklaces, twisted, and hauled the weakened witch to her feet, then hooked the necklaces on a pipe valve. She took off the witch’s waist sash and was tying her hands behind her back as Finn shoved the bare wires into an electrical outlet, throwing up a shower of sparks. Smoke wafted from all four servers.
Then the lights went out—he’d tripped a breaker.
His own hologram sparkled. He was half solid, half light.
Willa lost hold of the witch’s arms. She felt a withered hand at her throat.
“Finn!” she gasped.
Go full hologram! she was thinking, not understanding how 2.0 had failed her.
From outside the partially open door, emergency floodlights came on. In the sliver of light, an electricity-stunned Finn could see the semi-hologram of Willa off her feet in the clutches of a wild woman. The veins in Tia Dalma’s neck bulged, and her face went several shades darker as she choked on the necklaces. Willa danced herself backward, tightening the chokehold.