The Restored: Chapter Nineteen

I blazed across the city at the fastest speed I could manage. 

The moment Jessica’s building came into view, I let out a sigh of relief. It hadn’t been reduced to a smoking crater in the ground the way that her grocery store had been. That didn’t inherently mean that she was safe, since they could have used a more subtle method, but it was at least something of a marker. 

I dropped my speed slowly, so that I wouldn’t be torn apart on landing, then braced myself at one of the seventh story windows. If I recalled correctly, her apartment didn’t have an outdoor facing window, but I could still pop into the halls, and then get to her unit. 

I raised my hand and started casting a metal shaping spell and a metal sensory spell. There were detection wards on the place to stop people from breaking and entering like I was, but I infused my aura hiding arch-star into the spell to prevent it from triggering, then cut out the area around the window. I warped the metal into long, thin rivulets that would keep the power of the metal reinforcements, heating enchantments, and wards flowing through them, then shifted the window until I had created a gap large enough to slip through. It was arduous and slow, but it was still faster than trying to enter and go up the stairwell or waiting for the lift. 

I welded it back into place the moment I landed, doing a bit of a slipshod job. I’d come back to fix it up properly later, but right now, I had larger concerns. I pounded down the hallway at a dead sprint, skidding to a stop in front of her door. The door looked completely normal, but there was something… off. A moment later, I picked up on what was wrong – I could sense the metal of the door. 

That was wrong. Jessica might not have been quite as paranoid as I’d been, but she was still a meticulous wardcrafter. She wouldn’t have left out something as obvious as not obscuring to a metal sensory spell, not in a city of brass and copper. She used her familiar ability to keep the spells hidden, so they didn’t appear to be active wards to any detection spells or city maintenance, but they were absolutely there. 

I reached for my gun and split my mind again. Half of my brain started building up spells around the bullet, while the other half worked on picking the lock. Zone – no, Jessica – had a pretty high quality lock, a stamped brass fixture with multiple shielded pins and false positives. Combined with the wards she normally had running over the door, and even using an aura-hiding archstar infused metal manipulation spell would have strained my brain to break it open. 

Now, though…

The tumblers clicked into place, the deadbolt turned, and the door creaked open. 

Nothing. 

I pushed the door open, then shut it behind me, quickly scanning the room. I hadn’t been a member of the constables, but I’d had to sweep a few airships during skirmishes with Saxum, and this was sending prickles down my spine, because despite everything that was going on, it looked normal. 

There were no signs of forced entry, no signs of violence, no signs of a struggle. There weren’t any signs of anything. The apartment looked lived in, but cleaned up, like she and her husband had just scrubbed it before going on a vacation up north. My eyes flicked around, and I really wished that I had Odril here to speak to, or had mage sight to let me look for clues. 

I moved through the apartment slowly, picking my way through rooms one at a time, gun in hand. Once I’d checked over all of the rooms in the apartment, my entire body was covered in gooseflesh.

Not a single room had been untidy, but at the same time, none of them had been so pristinely clean that they looked manufactured, like the showroom apartments that most buildings kept for people looking to move in. No, it looked lived in, but cleaned up. And there wasn’t a massage anywhere, for me or for anyone else. 

Even Jessica’s ritual room had been left alone, the layered slates on the floor where she worked completely undisturbed. The pantry and cabinet full of tens of thousands of thin-panes worth of imported and extraplanar materials had been left seemingly undisturbed.

That, if nothing else, put the idea that a thief had managed to somehow break her wards and enter out of mind. That would have been a jackpot for anyone looking for money. It even made me start to consider that the Arenamaster wasn’t the reason behind things looking so normal – after we had looted her ritual room and Devi had destroyed or untethered it, or whatever she’d done, the Arenamaster should have been low on components. 

I didn’t know much about the use of witchcraft components, but based on some of the labels in that room – soulstuff stones, voidblight, woodrot pestilence – there were plenty of demonic components. The Arenamaster would want those, wouldn’t she?

I considered that I’d just broken into her home while she and her husband were actually out and about, and that everything was okay, but my mind kept being drawn back to the fact that her wards weren’t active. 

Even if we weren’t siblings by blood, I knew my sister well. She wasn’t the kind of person to leave her wards disabled in the best of times, let alone while there was a crisis going on. 

I turned and started to sweep through the house a second time, working through some mental discipline exercises that were supposed to help break illusions, just in case this was some elaborate cover up. I ran my hands over smooth surfaces, in case they were simply an illusion of light and shadows. I checked the locations of salt and pepper shakers, swapping them around, then changing books on the shelf, then leaving the room and re-entering, in case this was a mental illusion. I spun around until my vision was spinning, which would usually mess with mental illusions as well, as they were forced to keep up with the rapid change in input.

Nothing. It was possible that the illusion was just really, really good, and had enough power that I couldn’t casually overload it or break it, but if that were the case, the odds that I’d be able to peer through the veil at all was incredibly low. No, for now it was best to assume that I was free of any mental shenanigans. 

I knew that she had a small stockpile of enchanted items for combat, so I started casting my mass sensory spell, looking for spots where there were massive gaps in mass to indicate something was hollow. 

It took me a while, but I realized that most of her drawers and cabinets in her lab had false bottoms, false backs, or something of the sort, and started poking around to pull them up. Most of the cabinets were metal, so a simple combination of mass and metal sensory spells was enough to reveal the trigger mechanisms and pop them open.

The first had a folded bit of fabric that was blank, which wasn’t suspicious in and of itself, but the second one contained several single use enchantments carved onto brass buttons, the same sort that she’d given me to protect myself from various effects. She kept them neatly sorted, as she did with most things, but…

I picked up a button and studied it. They were designed to get warm and melt slightly when they activated, dropping to the floor to alert you that the spell had been used up, and I was intimately familiar with the spell in question. I’d been the one to design it, decades ago. Heating up the metal in proportion with the spell it had blocked, then turning the metal into essentially a viscoelastic fluid for a moment, had been a pretty complex bit of spellcraft. 

Sweat beaded on the back of my neck as I examined the button.

It was broken.

Though the button had been shaped back into the right shape, the runework wasn’t right. I didn’t know enough about enchanting to say if the protective magics had been messed up, but I recognized that the melting part of the spell was completely wrong. It was in the same general shape, but it wasn’t correct. 

The best analogy I could think of was someone coming into a classroom behind an advanced maths professor, cleaning the blackboard, then attempting to write all the math back out based only on their faint conceptions and memories of what had been there before. 

I started building out a fairly complicated spell, dropping my general metal and mass sensing spells to do so. It was looking for specific patterns in metal – in this case, the spell that would slag the buttons.

When I cast it, about half of the line of buttons lit up to my spell’s proprioception, while the rest just sat there, looking completely fine to the naked eye, but wrong to my spell. If the wards hadn’t already convinced me that there was something more than met the eye here, this would have.

I scooped the handful of working buttons up, then a loud noise split the air. My heart shot up into my throat, and I whipped my gun up, then snarled a curse and lowered it. My heart was still pounding as I recognized the sound – it was their telephone. 

I took a few deep breaths to calm my completely shot nervous system, then walked to the living room and tossed if it would be better to pick it up or not. On one hand, it would be just my luck for it to be someone calling in to try and figure out something related to her grocery store. On the other, it might be actually important. 

I debated back and forth for a moment, then picked it up.

I wouldn’t have normally done that – my sister deserved her privacy. But this wasn’t a normal situation. If it was relevant, then I needed to hear it, and if it wasn’t, I could always just say she was out at the moment. 

“Hello?” I asked, using one hand to put the microphone in front of my mouth and the other to lift the speaker to my ear.

“Oh, Axel, how wonderful to speak to you,” the calm, feminine voice of the Arenamaster rang out, unmistakable even through the crackling of the phone line. “I’m sure you must be wondering where exactly Zone is at the moment.” 

“Not really, considering that the only Zone I know is a dead child.” 

There was a moment of silence, and when she spoke again, her voice was tinged with annoyance. 

“You know who I’m talking about. Your sister, Zone.” 

I was tempted to push her, because there was clearly something to the line of questioning, but I dropped it. I did need to know where Jessica was, and even if I didn’t trust a word that came out of her mouth, it was the only lead I had.

“I do.” 

“Excellent,” the Arenamaster said, her voice almost a purr. “I’m sure I could tell you where she is, if you’re willing to work with me. After all, it is your fault that I had to take her: you killed my last child.”