Thresholder, ch 168, Returned to Sender

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The first stop of the night was at the workshop, so Marchand could do a sonic scan of the device. This didn’t take terribly long, and Perry finally had an answer to what was happening internal to it, something that he’d only seen the edges of. There was the electrical aspect to it, which pulled from a person’s body and wasn’t actually electricity at all, and there was a lens, which pointed upward in a way that Perry thought must be pretty unsafe. But below the lens and hooked into the electrical equipment was a coiled piece of yarn, wrapped tight around a small bar of gold.

“What the fuck?” asked Perry.

“I believe it to be magic, sir,” said Marchand.

“What color is that yarn?” asked Perry. “Is this potentially from the scarf?”

“It’s an acoustic scan, sir,” said Marchand. “You do understand that sounds don’t have colors, sir?”

“Yeah,” said Perry. “If that’s the active ingredient, so to speak, then we can just steal it, ruin any possibility that Grayspear can do this again.”

“Is that your goal, sir?” asked Marchand. “It seems to me that your goal is to reverse the process, and the only path to doing that is through Grayspear.”

“Right,” said Perry. “But … fine.”

“We can smash this infernal device to pieces once we’ve finished with her,” said Marchand. “Once we’ve reverted the Yuuksen, then we can destroy the entirety of her research, and kill her in such a way that she can never be recovered.”

Perry nodded. “Cold blooded, but yeah.”

“I could argue for her essential humanity if you’d like, sir,” said Marchand. “I do not believe I’ve ever felt cause to use them, but I have protocols for ensuring that a soldier does not commit war crimes.”

“Really?” asked Perry.

“Oh, yes sir,” said Marchand. “I was originally military equipment, if you recall, and even with the modifications to both my structure and purpose, Miss Richter never saw fit to remove every trace of protocol.”

“And through the whole time we’ve known each other, you’ve never seen fit to engage those protocols?” asked Perry.

“I might have, if I understood what I do now,” said Marchand. “But without direction or vital knowledge of where we were engaging, it never felt prudent.”

Perry stared at the machine. “I suppose the Union States government didn’t see fit to tell you what to do about this sort of thing, huh?”

“They did not, sir,” said Marchand.

“Then I guess we just … leave it,” said Perry.

And that’s what they did. Perry didn’t like the yarn, or whatever strand of textile was wrapped around the gold. If it was a part of the scarf, then the scarf had some additional power to it, something he hadn’t seen yet. Ripping away the yarn wouldn’t do anything but deprive Grayspear, and if Queenie came back, she could almost certainly just supply another.

Grayspear’s house wasn’t far from the collegium. It was with a row of others, all having shared walls. The houses were narrow at the front but quite deep, each three stories tall, with rooms placed behind each other. Aside from the odd shape, it was pretty standard, and a decent place to live by the standards of Charlonion. From the listening device that Perry had placed, Grayspear didn’t spend much time at her home, instead preferring the workshop. She would arrive back late, having stopped for wrapped up food from a vendor, eat, shower, and then read in bed for a bit, and make herself a cup of tea and some jammy bread for breakfast before a return to the collegium. It was a rather solitary life. The person she spoke with most often, at least in the past few days, was Perry.

Perry came down from above and slipped in through an open skylight, which was high enough up that no one but him could possibly have entered that way. He made almost no noise. The sonic scan had shown that Grayspear was asleep and alone. He had put up some blackout curtains in the shelf space to keep the lights in it from getting out if he needed to use it in a hurry, and he stashed the sword once he landed.

It didn’t make Perry feel particularly great to go into her room in the middle of the night. That was stalker behavior. Still, it was what the situation called for. Maybe he could have dropped in while she was preparing for bed, eating a wrapped sandwich at her kitchen table, but he didn’t want her screaming and alerting anyone — it was a nice enough neighborhood that he’d be worried about the police showing up in a timely manner.

The house was the nicest place that Perry had been in through the entirety of the Dusklands, very unexpectedly given the state of the office/workshop. There were lots of plants, finely made furniture, nice wood floors and long woven rugs that went with the long rooms. Perry was looking at it through March’s enhanced vision, but during the day it was probably a nice place to be. The ceilings on the top floor were nice and high. Everything was neatly set up along shelves in nooks that seemed made for them.

She was sleeping in her bed, and Perry watched her softly snoring for a moment.

“Not sure about this,” he said to Marchand. It would have been an extremely awkward time for Marchand to misjudge which conversations were meant to be muffled and kept internal to the helmet.

“We need to know what she knows, sir,” said Marchand. “I’m unsure what you’re objecting to.”

“The decorum of it, I guess,” said Perry. He considered the experiments that Grayspear had been doing earlier that day, how callous she was about the people she was changing, how little she had cared about the impacts this might have on the world. “Alright, let’s do it.”

He took a breath and then got up onto the bed, moving quickly. The armor was heavy, and he was on top of her in a moment, pinning her in place, making sure not to actually put his weight on top of her. He placed his armored hand on her mouth as she was waking up, and her eyes went wide when he changed the scene around her — nothing threatening, yet, just a stretch of the Flux with its ugly skies overhead.

“I need answers,” said Perry. His voice was cloaked by Marchand, buzzing like a bee, completely distinct from the one that Grayspear had heard. It was low and quiet. “Have you been interrogated by the Inspectors before?”

She tried to say something, then tried to nod and must have felt how firmly her head was being held in place. So instead, she showed him an image of herself, being spoken to by an Inspector, in a train car similar to the one that Perry had ridden in.

“Good,” said Perry. “I don’t plan to hurt you. Show me what I ask you to show me, and I’ll leave, like I was never here.”

Grayspear’s eyes were still wide, but she was looking over the armor.

“Show me the origin of the device in your workshop,” said Perry.

Grayspear closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again.

He could feel her pushing the vision on them, and when she did, he allowed it, replacing the interior of the train car with her workshop. It looked quite a bit different than the place that Perry had been working in. There was no device in the center, for one thing, and it was better organized than it had been, with orderly bookshelves and a collection of nicely labeled parts. Bits and pieces of that system still remained in the present day, but it was more clean and neat in the past.

There was a knock on the door, and Grayspear furrowed her brow, then finished the letter she was in the middle of writing, whose contents couldn’t be seen from where Perry was. To all appearances, they were on the floor watching as she moved across the room to answer, irritation visible on her face.

“It’s not office hours,” she said by way of greeting as she opened the door. “But come in, come in.”

The person who came in was Queenie. She was exactly the same as Perry had seen her in the tavern, though she was wearing different clothes, more upscale, higher class, a pleated skirt with a vest and lots of different layers, with tights and polished black shoes. The striking red scarf was still wrapped around her neck though.

“I’m not actually your student,” said Queenie. She smiled at Grayspear, showing off her chipped tooth. If she had shape-changing powers, she wasn’t using them. Her accent was the same too. “But I was hopin’ that you might have some interest in what I’ve got to show you?”

“Mmm,” said Grayspear. “How did you get my name?”

“The office said you were a smart one and had a lot of time,” said Queenie. “That’s all.”

“I swear I’m going to murder someone down there,” said Grayspear. She sighed. “You have something of interest? Otherwise you’ll have to leave.”

“Got a few things,” said Queenie. She stuck out her hand. “Trigger Queen.”

Grayspear eyed the hand skeptically, but shook it all the same. “Doctrix Grayspear.”

Queenie laughed. “What kind of a name is Doctrix?”

“It’s a title, not a name,” said Grayspear, frowning slightly. “What kind of a name is Trigger?”

“Nickname, isn’t it?” asked Queenie, wrinkling her nose. “One I got on account of my rifle.”

She held her hand out to the side, and the rifle appeared as though from a trick of the light, like it had been hiding behind a mirror. Up close, Perry was struck by how absurdly large it was, far too big to be practical. The stock was enormous, like for an elephant gun, and the barrel was stuck out too far, but it was a piece of precision machinery, well-loved with nicks and scratches all over it.

“This beaut?” asked Queenie, running her fingers over the rifle. “I can knock the tits off a melon from a mile off with her.”

“How did you do that?” asked Grayspear, looking over the rifle as though she would be able to see the trick to it.

“Oh, I’ve all sorts of tricks,” said Queenie with a smile. “And that’s where you come in, don’t you? Because you’re going to help me make those tricks better.”

The vision dropped, and Perry looked down at the Grayspear whose mouth he was still holding shut.

“Why did you stop?” asked Perry.

Grayspear stared at him, then looked down at his hand on her mouth.

Perry sighed, and the mechanized voice outside the suit sighed too, which was Marchand’s call. “Speak using the power.”

Grayspear narrowed her eyes at him, but the vision around them changed. Grayspear was much younger in this one, maybe a teenager, in a classroom with an older man. She had on a school uniform, crimson and silver.

“If I have to explain everything like this, we’re going to be here all day,” said the young Grayspear. Then the vision abruptly ended.

“I’ve seen inside the device,” said Perry. “I know what it does. I only want to know how the woman is involved.”

Grayspear’s nostrils flared, and she pushed forward another vision.

She was younger in this one too, but older than she’d been as a teenager. She was in someone’s office, yelling at them.

“You understand nothing!” she shouted at a bearded man who was clearly not accustomed to being shouted at.

That vision was replaced by another, clearly at a later date, with changes to both their outfits and demeanor.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean that,” said Grayspear. “I get emotional about the work, and your dismissal of it was something that I took very seriously.”

The man she was talking to was leaning forward, hands folded together on his desk, giving her a very serious look, and then it was over before Perry could take in any more of it.

“Tell me about the scarf she wears,” said Perry.

Grayspear tried to say something beneath his hand, and he didn’t move it.

“Show me,” said Perry.

She narrowed her eyes at him. Maybe she was getting the impression that he wasn’t actually thinking of hurting her, that he didn’t have in him the capacity for violence, in spite of the fact that he’d shown up in her house in the dead of night wearing full armor and with the power of an Inspector.

The scene changed, and they were once again in a workshop.

“Yeah, it’s from a world with psychic moths, made from their silk,” said Queenie. For whatever reason, Grayspear had started the conversation in media res, and Perry hoped that she wasn’t resisting, cutting out vital information. He would have to check it, and that would add on more time.

“And what, may I ask, is a psychic moth?” asked Grayspear. She looked more disheveled, though Perry thought this was almost certainly the same day as before, the first day they’d met.

“It’s a moth that gets in your brain, isn’t it?” asked Queenie. “Anyway, they were terrible things, but their silk had magic powers to it, and the scarf was knitted for me later, in a different world, where it gained a mind of its own.” She demonstrated by having the scarf move around, slipping from her neck and slithering across the floor like a snake. Grayspear leapt up onto a chair like she’d practiced the maneuver.

“It’s alive,” said Grayspear.

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Queenie. “We’re linked in the heads, me and him. He doesn’t bleed, if that helps, and I’ve seen him come back from all kinds of things. He says he’s using some of the psychic power that’s all around us or suzzo.”

“You can talk?” asked Grayspear.

“Oh, well,” said Queenie. “We understand each other, yeah?” She tapped the side of her head. “He feeds off the air, is what I mean, says that it’s thick in cities, like almost drowning in food. But this is the sort of thing you’ll help me with, figure it all out, making it better.”

Grayspear hesitated. “And what’s in it for me?”

Queenie laughed. “Oh, well I like that. What’s in it for you is being the only one who knows, the first to get a crack at it. Don’t you want to know?”

“I know enough not to do things with no payment,” said Grayspear. “I’ve put in work that others have taken for themselves.”

“Bah,” said Queenie. “You think that matters to me? Credit? Payment? Some chubbo sayin’ to me that I can have a medal? Gold or scrip or whatnot?” She laughed.

“The point stands,” said Grayspear, folding her arms. “You’re very powerful and mysterious, and yes, my curiosity is burning, but you want me to drop all my work to help you for unclear means. You came to me for a reason, didn’t you? And I don’t believe that it’s just because I was available, no.”

“Curiosity ain’t enough for you?” asked Queenie with a smile.

“It would be, if I were a different person,” said Grayspear. “Knowledge is fundamental, but we live in a world that does not value knowledge alone.”

“Well then,” said Queenie. “I don’t have riches to give you that I couldn’t just take right back — that beauty of a rifle isn’t my only weapon.” She smiled again. “Someone hurt you, I reckon, and bad. How can I show I won’t do the same? Because believe me, all I want is your expertise. Anything else, you can have.”

“I want a piece of it,” said Grayspear. “I want bits and bobbles, trinkets you have. A piece of your power, to call my own, and not something that stays here, something I can keep safe from you. Not leverage, power.”

“A piece of the scarf then,” said Queenie. “You’ll need it to test with anyhow. And here, this is a knife.” Again it was like a trick, sleight of hand, the knife appearing as though from a hidden pocket she couldn’t possibly have been hiding it in. Perry watched that closely, because it was a trick he was going to have to contend with.

Grayspear took the knife. It was hefty, with the same red yarn wrapped around the hilt. Grayspear didn’t look like she knew how to use a knife very well, and her grip was experimental.

“What does it do?” she asked. “We have these things, you know, strange equipment from the Flux, or imbued by it.”

“Oh, I know all about that,” said Queenie with a laugh. “Nothin’ like this though.” She came over and pointed to the handle. “That wrapping there, it’s part of the scarf, just a bit of it, enough to give it some thrust. You drive that into a man, you can scramble his mind. And the blade itself will cut straight through steel. You be careful with it. Came from a place with a lot of good knives, I should have taken more.”

“It affects the mind?” asked Grayspear, looking at the knife more closely.

“Not as much as the big one,” said Queenie. She was all smiles. “Though I don’t expect that you want me to show you that.”

“Of course I want to see it,” said Grayspear. “Can you … control the mind?”

“Not as such,” said Queenie. “It’s crude. Could be a little less, but I like big swings. The main thing is a sort of breakin’ of the mind, but it’s hard to get there, and after that … you have to talk to them, get them to see things.”

“Interesting,” said Grayspear. She placed the knife on her table. “Very well, we’ll work together.”

“Good,” said Queenie. Her smile went wide. “Otherwise I’d have had to kill you.”

The vision faded again.

“Where is she now?” asked Perry.

Another vision started, almost right away, like she’d had it queued.

“He’ll come lookin’ for me,” said Queenie. It was sometime later. The machine was built, the workshop in disarray. “Or she will, maybe, but I haven’t had too many women. Point is, they’ll come lookin’ for me, and I’ll shoot them in the face, and then it’ll be over. If I know these people, it might not be as simple as just shootin’ them in the face, they always make things complicated, but fate’s a funny thing, and we’ll find each other in due time. Which means that there’s a good chance they'll find you, and that they’ll try to stop this work.”

“You could have told me this earlier,” said Grayspear. “In fact, you could have told me much earlier. You’ll protect me, won’t you?”

“Not a chance,” said Queenie. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to protect someone from a person with powers like mine? You’re wet meat, missy. No, I won’t protect you, the only thing I’ll do is try to kill anyone who comes after you. But I have my own business to do, so you’re on your own for a bit, I’m just lettin’ you know, so you know that if they come by here, you’re free to break.”

“How would I tell them from a Peony?” asked Grayspear. “Or from an agent of the Commission? We need their funding, and they know I’ve grabbed greatness by the tail — or if they don’t know, they’ll know soon enough.”

“Every one of these people I’ve fought has come at me like a bullet through porcelain,” said Queenie. “You hear about a man slaughtering people by the hundreds, that’s your guy.”

“And how do you propose that I survive?” asked Grayspear.

“Not my business,” said Queenie. “Roll over like a dog, hope that there’s some mercy in them somewhere. Or honor, maybe, some of them have that, that’s a good one. But it might be that I’ll be back before you have a problem. And it might be that we have problems with the Commission before we have problems with my partner.”

“This is unconscionable,” said Grayspear. “You should have told me.”

“Here on out, you’re just a normal scientist,” said Queenie. “Man comes to you with his gun drawn, best you can do is appeal to his fundamental humanity, if he’s even human. Some of them aren’t, or aren’t any more.”

Grayspear drank what Perry first thought was a cup of tea, but the bottle on the desk gave it away as whiskey.

“I’m doomed,” said Grayspear.

“I haven’t lost yet,” said Queenie.

“If you lose me, you still won’t have lost,” said Grayspear. She ran her fingers through her hair. “Can’t you at least tell me where you’re going? What you’re planning?”

“Better you don’t know, because if someone comes asking questions — your people or my chubbo — you won’t be able to say, yeah?” Queenie grinned. “And now I’ll take my leave. If I don’t come back, it’s because I was killed along the way, or I found something better to do with my time.”

She swept out of the room, just like that, and Grayspear watched her go while the other Grayspear watched from the floor while Perry kept his hand in place over her mouth. The vision held for quite some time as Grayspear drank more and more of the whiskey, knocking back the shots from her teacup like she was trying to make herself forget it all — something that clearly hadn’t worked, given they were watching the vision.

Perry slowly removed his hand from Grayspear’s mouth. She worked her jaw for a moment before speaking.

“I’m going to do what she said,” replied Grayspear. “I’m going to tell you everything. I’ll show you everything, if you need me to. Just let me live, please, there’s so much more work to do. Please.”

“You don’t know where she went,” said Perry. “You don’t know what she’s doing, or when she’ll be back. You know nothing.”

“Yes,” said Grayspear. “Please, yes, I know nothing, she never wanted to speak with me about her plans, only her past, only her conquests, and I can show you those too, here —”

She tried to push a vision through, and Perry denied it, keeping them in the present moment, completely in the dark. He was probably only apparent to her as dark metal looming over her, not quite putting his weight on top of her but definitely locking her in place.

“Please,” said Grayspear. “I can help you! I can show you the device, if you want it for your own, I can tell you things that I never told her, secrets I kept to myself, I can help with your own magic, whatever you have, from whatever worlds you’ve been to.”

The bullet hit Perry before he could answer.

It took him a moment to realize that it was a bullet, but by the time he had recovered from the hit, Marchand had already lit up the HUD to show both the sustained damage to the back of his head and the likely path that the bullet had taken. Perry had been knocked forward by the hit, and had knocked his head into Grayspear before Marchand had a chance to tense up the whole armor. She was bleeding from her nose and mouth, yelling as Perry got to his feet.

Perry took off running in the direction the bullet had come from, its path highlighted in an angry red by Marchand. It had pierced two plaster walls in the dead of night, with no angle at all from which he’d been visible. As Perry ran, more of the damage became visible, the things the bullet had traveled straight through, including the window at the front of the house.

“Countdown,” said Perry as he grabbed the sword from the shelf. He was out the window, crashing straight through it, before Marchand could respond.

The countdown in the HUD was only an estimate, based on how long Queenie had taken to chamber another round and fire. It was in the tenths of seconds as Perry flew up to get some height, and hit zero almost exactly at the same time the bullet came zipping across the city to strike Perry in the leg. This one hit harder, spinning him around, damaging the armor but not piercing it, injuring his leg where a piece of the armor cut into his flesh.

The shot had created a flash of light that preceded the hit. Queenie was an achingly long way away, almost a full half mile, camped out at the top of one of the huge cathedrals. Perry couldn’t see her, not even with the magnification that Marchand was offering, but he flew in that direction as fast as the sword would allow.

“Get ready to fire on her as soon as we’re in range,” said Perry. “Two to the chest, two to the head.”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. His voice was cool, calm, and professional.

When the timer finished counting down, the third shot didn’t come immediately. The shot that had hit him while he was in Grayspear’s house was impossible for any normal rifle and any normal marksman, but he’d also been staying very still for it. The shot that had hit his leg was, by rights, a miracle from that distance, given that he was flying straight up at thirty miles an hour. The bullet drop, wind speed, all of that, it should all have made it impossible. But it hadn’t, of course, because she was a thresholder. There was no doubt in his mind that it was Queenie, and that this was finally the start of their fight.

A part of him was eager for it, though maybe that was because he had been shot twice and wasn’t too injured for it. The blood had already stopped flowing from his leg, and the ringing in his ears had cleared with a pulse of energy.

When Perry landed in the upper part of the cathedral, right at the point where Queenie had been, there was only one sign of her: two shells were laying on the marble.

“Fuck,” said Perry. “She’s on the run.”

“Stairs,” said Marchand, and Perry would have spotted them anyway without being told. He set off, taking them three at a time, worried that he was heading for a trap but incapable of stopping himself. How could she trap him, given she couldn’t possibly know what Marchand did?

Except that Jeff had been able to see into the past, so maybe it was less impossible than he was thinking.

He reached a heavy door and burst through it, finding himself in a long hallway that ran along the side of the building, one half of it exposed to the air, dotted with arches to support the roof and a railing made of thick, ornately carved marble. It was rain-weathered, exposed to the elements, but still high above the city below.

“Which way?” asked Perry.

Marchand had been doing an acoustic scan, and pointed left, though with a small question mark to make it clear that this wasn’t very reliable. One of the thick wooden doors was indicated with another arrow, and Perry kicked it in. The shoulder gun was up and ready to fire.

A group of women began screaming as they got up from their beds. The lights from the armor were on, illuminating spartan beds in two straight lines, nearly twenty women, and none of them Queenie, or none of them looking like Queenie. There was no distinctive red scarf to be seen. But she could change her appearance, so she could easily have hid among them, depending on how that power worked. These were nuns, he was fairly sure.

“Fuck!” screamed Perry, and for whatever reason, Marchand chose to broadcast that, which did not stop the women from yelling.

Perry reached into the shelf space and pulled out the mask, slapping it on his face in a hurry, trying to see whether one of them had an aura to them — and in fact, one had a multi-colored hue around her.

Marchand fired four times in quick succession without being asked to, and a short woman with brown hair took the bullets without dropping, spraying acidic green blood behind her that caused whatever it landed on to start smoking. She screamed in pain then ran forward at top speed, her face mangled and chest bleeding, but still standing and capable of moving faster than Perry. Marchand fired at her again, and her head jerked back as her teeth were shattered by the bullet, but she was close enough to leap.

Perry was ready with the sword, and found himself needing to whirl around when she faked him out and snaked around him instead. He took off after her, out of the room, and jumped after her as she leapt from the side of the open hallway. She pulled out her sniper rifle, as from nowhere, but rather than aiming it at him as she fell, she swung it around to angle down at the ground.

The crack of the rifle was deafening up close, or would have been without the armor’s protection, but it was different than before, more explosive. In defiance of physics, it pushed her in the opposite direction, hurling her through the air.

She fired again, before the countdown had even started, and Perry watched in disbelief as she began propelling herself with the recoil of the rifle blasts. He flew after her, and the shoulder gun fired another few times, but she was much faster than him, launching herself ever-faster with the periodic bursts. She was making no attempt to hit him, if she even could when she was doing this, and soon she dropped down between the buildings, more than a mile away from them. Marchand put a pin on the HUD where she’d dropped, which widened into a search zone. By the time they were overhead, the search zone was eight blocks across and growing.

“Oh fuck off,” said Perry. “We had her.”

“We manifestly did not, sir,” said Marchand.

“She’s gone to ground,” said Perry. He looked around the empty air. “We need to regroup. We made a hell of a racket. Show me Grayspear.”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry started flying at once. He wasn’t sure what the Commission’s response to gunfire across the city would be, but he was sure he wasn’t going to like it. There had been witnesses too, the nuns or whatever they actually were, plain-clothed women who slept in rows of beds near the top of a cathedral. They had seen him, which meant the Inspectors would see him too.

Time was limited.

He entered Grayspear’s house through the window he’d smashed out of. She had stumbled to her feet and was getting her clothes on — it had only been minutes, and she was covered with blood where he’d either scratched her face or broken her nose, maybe both. Her eyes went wide when she saw him, and she screamed, but he grabbed her without too much fuss and shoved her into the shelf space, where he spent some time tying her up. Anaksi was there, but keeping quiet and out of sight, as they had agreed she would if the night took this sort of direction.

When Perry was finished, he looked into her eyes.

“I’m willing to let you live,” he said. “So long as you show me everything I want to see. I need to take care of something, but I’ll be back.”

He closed the shelf space behind him and left exactly the same way he’d come, looking down to see two men jogging toward the house and lights on in the surrounding houses. Those were lawmen, and they both stopped to watch him go. He needed a place where he could come out safely, and settled on a region of the Flux interior to the city, dropping down after checking that he hadn’t been followed.

Queenie was back, and with a bang, so the only thing to do was to milk Grayspear for all she was worth.