With her heightened senses, she could just barely see Mutex. He was moving incredibly quickly, his body a blur of faintly red-tinged motion, wielding an obsidian knife to cut out Dalton’s heart. He’d accelerated himself somehow, far beyond the normal human time-scale, so that relative to himself, everything else probably seemed to be standing completely still. That’s what the flicker of motion on the video had been—the brief opening and closing of the front door as Mutex had entered. He’d either somehow cloaked his body heat, or else he was moving so quickly that Dalton’s sensors hadn’t been able to pick it up. Distantly, Marla wondered how he achieved this effect without destroying himself—most experiments in physical acceleration this extreme ended with the researchers dead. Marla could only accelerate herself to this extent because of her cloak, which was a magical artifact whose origins and mechanisms were unknown and highly resistant to analysis.
In the microseconds it took Marla to identify Mutex and bunch her muscles to leap at him, he finished taking Dalton’s heart and ran from the room, holding it, dripping, in his hand. On his way out he looked at Marla—a stare long enough for her to notice, which must have been quite a long look from his perspective—and she jumped for him anyway, but missed by yards. He was out of the building before she hit the ground, landing in a crouch by the door.
With an effort, she reversed her cloak, and the healing qualities of the white side began to immediately soothe her strained muscles—though she didn’t hurt as much as she usually did after using the cloak, since she hadn’t actually done anything this time. Normally, when she reversed the cloak, she tore people apart. The purplish shadow-tendrils withdrew into the lining now, leaving her with the taste of pomegranate seeds in her mouth.
The mirror-Daltons stared at her. “That was amazing,” one of them said. “You looked like…like a panther made of smoke, or…or…”
“I looked like a goddess,” Marla said. She felt marvelous, crystal-sharp and filled with piercing white light, able to do anything. All her problems were suddenly in focus, and the solutions were obvious. Why not abdicate control of Felport to Susan Wellstone? Then Marla could sit back here as Mutex killed off all the other sorcerers in San Francisco. When he was done, Marla could kill him, and take over this city. It was bigger and more important than Felport, and once Marla established herself out here, she could send her warriors to kill Susan as punishment for her insolence. It all made sense, now that she was wearing the cloak again. Why had she ever taken it off? The cloak made the imposition of her will as simple as—
“Shit,” Marla said, clutching her head in her hands, grinding her teeth, and squeezing her eyes shut. The alien intelligence that possessed her in the aftermath of using the cloak receded a little, and she mentally pushed until it withdrew completely. Her hope that the cloak’s power over her had faded was unfounded—it still had its hooks deep in her. “Damn. Yeah, I was like a goddess, I know. Not that it did me much good. Mutex got away, and Dalton one-point-oh is dead.”
The mirror-Daltons looked at the body of their originator. “Oh, we’re fucked,” one said.
“Oh?” Marla said. Rondeau and B came back into the room. B’s face was milk-white, and he was shaking. Real life was nastier than any of his visions had led him to expect, Marla supposed.
The Daltons nodded. One said, “We’ve got…shit, ten minutes until the next ping. When the computer checks his—our—the original’s current status, and finds him offline…we’ll just disappear.”
“There’s no way you can, I don’t know, break the connection?” Rondeau said. “Make it so the computer doesn’t check, or thinks the original is still alive, or something?”
The Daltons looked at each other. “Sure there is,” one said.
“But not in ten minutes,” said the other. “It’s a very secure system, designed to be impervious to tampering. This is a problem we didn’t expect. When we refresh in nine minutes…ah, fuck, I don’t want to die.” The Dalton sat on the floor and held his head in his hands.
Marla turned her attention to the one still standing. “I need a list of the names and addresses of all the other sorcerers in town.” The Dalton didn’t react. Marla snapped her fingers in front of his face, and he blinked. She repeated herself.
“What?” he said. “I can’t tell you that. You’re an outsider.”