Beta Readers Wanted. If you're interested in providing actionable feedback on this story, please contact John Harvey for a Beta Copy of Scattered. This is the third book in its series and I'm looking for feedback from both those who have--and have not--read the first book. If you would like to read Book One first, please request a free ePub file from the author. Those who leave a review on Amazon for Book One will also receive a free copy of Book Two.

Chapter 1

Jack Scatter waited in the cramped hollow formed by a trio of pine trees, nearly invisible in his dark clothing. When the moonlight returned, he crept forward again, concentrating on the spell that guided his feet to where they would make the least noise. His opponents, unseen but nearby, were skilled and potentially lethal. One was a martial artist armed with a magical Bo staff, the other could predict the future and had a penchant for throwing fireballs.

He stepped over a fallen branch. His foot was only inches above the ground when a ghostly footprint appeared two inches to the left. The spell wasn’t perfect, but it was only giving him one choice. He shifted his weight to land directly on the pale mark, and sank into a carpet of leaves without a sound.

Forty yards. He could see the cache now: a barely camouflaged tarp strung between two trees. He eased the other foot over the branch but no marker appeared. They’re close. Time for another spell.

He twirled his wand in a circle near his ear and the music of distant crickets became a thunderous orchestra. Filter. The insects faded and were replaced by a chorus of tree frogs. Filter. He silently repeated that command until the only sounds were of grass and twigs stirred by the evening breeze. Of course, that’s exactly what someone approaching would sound like.

Back to the first spell, Jack willed the forest floor to show a safe path. A flicker of motion caught his attention. He glanced ahead but saw nothing. When he looked down again he had a dozen footprints to choose from.Too many possible futures. But then they started dancing. It's a trick.

He’d opened his mind to the AI and one of his foes had slipped in an illusion. That was the downside of ongoing spells, they left the caster vulnerable. He guarded his thoughts and the footprints disappeared. But had he been seen? Or heard? One thing was certain, he couldn’t stand there forever. He lowered his foot gently. A twig snapped under his shoe.

Intense light illuminated the forest as a ball of blue plasma sped through the trees. Jack created a shield and crouched low before the caged lightning splashed against his invisible barrier. Even so, he felt its heat and smelled ozone.

He dove and rolled for cover behind a tree. Hugging the trunk, he pointed his wand and spelled a whirlwind. An expanding cone of leaves, bark, and soil hurtled through the forest. It had almost reached the spot where he thought his attacker hid when another plasma ball erupted from his left, so close he had to neglect his own attack and raise a new shield. But instead of scattering, the glowing ball passed through his defense without slowing. He threw himself backwards, narrowly avoiding a serious burn.

No, wait. The plasma attack had carried no heat, no ozone. Another illusion. “That does it,” he bellowed.

More angry at himself than his assailant, Jack abandoned guided attacks and hijacked the portal of a snowmaking machine. Instead of glazing the slopes of a luxury resort somewhere on Earth, its ice crystals were diverted to his wand, where he used the wormhole’s energy field to compress them into solid pellets. He sprayed them in a ruthless hail without aiming as he ran. The pellets wouldn’t seriously harm anyone, but they’d keep his attacker busy. More importantly, he didn’t have to focus on the task or risk another intrusion into his thoughts.

The cache was only steps away. He hurdled a stump and threw the tarp aside, eager to capture his prize.

“What the …?” The only object in the shelter was a twenty-pound quivering mass of lime gelatin in the shape of a flag. He shouted, “That’s cheating, Ethan. I can’t carry that.”

Jack’s cousin, Ethan Marke, laughed and stepped out of the darkness. “Sure you can. You could freeze it, or—”

“The whole point of three-way capture the flag is to get both our opponents flags. We should be able to carry them, not have to use another spell to deal with them.”

“The only rule was that we hide a flag. What’s yours made of?”

“It’s an actual flag, made of cloth.”

“What about the pole?”

“It’s real wood.”

Ethan narrowed his eyes. “How long?”

Jack couldn’t pretend anymore. He laughed, then said, “About sixteen feet.”

Ethan threw up his hands. “How is that any better?”

Jack curbed his laughter. “Where’d you get the jelly from?”

“Sarah helped me find it. She think it’s from a hospital cafeteria. They’ll never miss it.” Ethan shuffled his feet, mimicking a popular dance move. “What did you think of the extra footprints?”

Jack frowned. “I should have noticed how big and clumsy they were.” He looked towards the lake. “Do you think I can still get past Sarah?”

“I doubt it,” Sarah said as she stepped out from behind a tree.

“Gah.” Jack stumbled as he spun away from her.

“I’m sorry.” Sarah stifled a laugh. “I couldn’t help it. I tried to ignore my intuition but I still remembered what path you took.”

In the eight months since they’d discovered the technology they now called magic, Sarah Rogers had mastered a range of skills. Like Jack, she could tap distant portals for their resources, but the Traveller Effect also supplied glimpses of her future in a form indistinguishable from her own memories.

Ethan stretched an arm to help Jack stand. “You know, we’ll never be able to do this fairly. Sarah will always know weeks or months ahead of time what path either of us will take, and you can come up with new spells on demand. Or just sense our crystals unless we’re constantly shielded.”

“Your two-second warning will eventually be better than my two weeks,” Sarah said. “The more often we practice, the more paths I have to remember.”

Jack brushed himself off. “Well, the next time we do this, we’ll—” A snapping noise interrupted. Something was falling through the branches nearby.

Ethan raised his staff to a defensive posture. The large crystal mounted at its center brightened. “What was that?”

Jack reached out. “It’s a portal crystal, for sure.” He pointed his wand. “That way.”

Sarah summoned a fireball, holding it ready to launch from the tip of her own wand. It illuminated the forest with an orange glow as it burned. Jack kept his wand at the ready but had a good idea what they would find. His portal-sense led them directly to the fallen object: a gold-plated disc with a shiny central gem.

Ethan picked it up and spelled a light from one of the four gemstones on his ring. “It’s a coin portal.” He flipped it over to expose a tracery of delicate lines that looked more like geometric art than circuitry. “One of Pieter’s.”

Coin-mounting was the most common format for portal crystals. They’d been used that way for decades in everything from power cells to phones. This one was different, though. It was one of Pieter Reynard’s Third-Eye crystals, which was entangled with an identical pair on Earth. He’d intended to use them to monitor and control high-level government officials remotely, but Simon, his chief engineer, had destroyed the cargo and launched the coins into orbit around Cirrus.

“How long do you think they’ll be falling for?” Sarah asked.

Jack shrugged. “Years, probably. There were five million on the shuttle when it disintegrated. That’s like one for every … roughly three square miles on Cirrus.”

“Should we keep it?”

“Are you serious? Dragons can sense these as far away as I can. There’s nowhere in the village they won’t find it.”

He scoffed. “How often is a dragon going to come near Icarus?”

“They’re obsessed with those coins. I sensed one circling the village last week.”

Ethan paled. “And you didn’t you tell us?”

“I would have liked to meet another dragon,” Sarah said.

Jack gestured to the lake. “They swam over to the island.”

Ethan shivered; he didn’t even like snakes. “Actually, I’m glad you didn’t tell us. I wouldn’t be able to sleep knowing it was near.”

“They,” Sarah said. “Not it. Dragons are intelligent, and they don’t have gender.”

“How do you know that?”

“Anders told me. They don’t breed, either. They’re grown.”

“Fine, I’m not a fan of them.”

“They won’t bother us as long as we don’t bother them,” Jack said.

“Says the only person who can talk to them. Is that why Dusty was so anxious the other day? Did she know they were around?”

“I’m sure she knew a few hours before they showed up.”

Dusty, Ethan’s golden retriever, was psychic. At least that’s how the three friends liked to think of it. She was, in fact, the canine version of a Traveller—someone who could remember their own future through a portal-enabled interaction with an Artificial Intelligence. For humans, those AI memories served as warnings or guides. Dusty used them to sneak up on squirrels.

“So, what should we do with the coin?” Sarah asked.

Jack levitated it with his wand. “I’ll get rid of it.”

He flew it at eye level to fifty feet away, near the limits of his control. Then, shifting to line up with a break in the trees, he swung his arm over his head in a smooth arc. The coin—at the end of a fifty-foot invisible tether—followed his movement. By the time Jack released it, the golden disc was moving at supersonic speed. A whip-like crack signaled the beginning of a miles-long flight away from the village.

“Should we play again tomorrow night?” Ethan turned to Sarah when they resumed walking. “What’s the weather going to be like?”

“I’m not your personal weather forecaster. And we can’t tomorrow because of Priya, remember?” She registered his surprise. “Oh, sorry—Traveller memory. Priya’s going to call tomorrow.”

Jack didn’t doubt that Sarah was right. “What about?”

A worried looked crossed her face. “I don’t think even she knows yet. But it’ll be important.”

 

Chapter 2

Seattle stinks.

Priya couldn’t ignore the smell as she scouted the city’s industrial section. Once a model of environmental management, it now choked under the exhaust of massive generators burning the world’s remaining reserves of bunker fuel. Foul, ochre streams flowed into the gutters from hills of trash piled in streets once maintained by an army of sweeper bots.

She’d followed a tip to the city’s high-tech core, where skeletons of empty warehouses rusted behind shattered glass panels. After two days of searching, she was certain that Angel was hiding in the four-story office building across the street. It had been looted, the same as its neighbors, but the garbage bags piled in front of the doors only made sense if someone wanted to discourage vandals from entering. If anyone could lead her to Pieter Reynard, it was Angel.

She examined the boarded-up, ground-floor windows again. A jungle of overlapping graffiti on the plywood sheets proclaimed messages of hope, despair, hate, love, or just the artist’s tag. A stylized ‘S’ caught her attention, not because of its bold color, but because of a break in its swooping curve. She focused her binoculars on a small rectangle cut at eye-level from one edge of the board. Got you.

Priya backtracked from her hideout, turning her jacket inside-out to hide the word POLICE written in large white letters on its back. Without streetlights she’d be nearly invisible to anyone watching, though not entirely safe. Pieter could predict the future and would have warned Angel of her arrival.

Despite the relative handicap of being able to see only the present, she wasn’t without extrasensory weapons. She drew her phone as she entered the alley behind the office building and pressed a faded lightbulb icon. The dimly lit passage brightened for her eyes only.

While not as effective as it was for Jack and his friends, the spell processed invisible energy streaming from the phone’s tiny wormhole and fed it to Priya as a memory—a lesser form of the Traveller Effect. So, she wasn’t exactly seeing the back door. She was remembering it in real time with enough detail to read the painted sign: employees only.

She vaulted onto the loading deck and slipped her hand into the two-inch gap below the roll shutter. It rattled when she applied pressure. That’ll make as much noise as any alarm. She tried the handle on the adjacent door. Locked.

Priya placed the phone against the door. One of Jack’s programmed spells was a burglar’s fantasy: a forcefield-pick that worked on any lock. She tapped its icon and heard several soft clicks. Cautiously, she swung the door open.

The corridor was windowless, so Priya raised her phone and activated the light spell again. Every door was open except for the one at the end of the hall, and a bundle of aluminum ducts blocked the path. Her intuition bristled. The tubes were not only out of place in a building completed decades ago, they were also balanced on their ends instead of stacked horizontally. She kneeled on grubby tiles and ran her light along their base.

Trip wire. In the dim light, the ankle-height thread was nearly invisible. She’d have caught it for sure and pulled the metal tubes down, alerting anyone in this half of the building.

She drew her weapon, stepped over the taut string, and crept the final steps to the steel fire door. Slowly, she turned the knob. The door didn’t open. The problem wasn’t the lock, but the deadbolt six inches above.

Priya let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. This was good news. A deadbolt could be released from the inside without a key, and the spell could do that silently. She pressed the phone against the door and tapped the icon again. The bolt glided home. She crouched, turned the knob, and eased the door open.

Duck.

Something whooshed over her head, snagging stray hairs before shattering against the metal door jamb. Wooden shards bounced off her jacket.

At five-three, Priya’s height had saved her from serious injury. The man in the room stood six-four and had swung the 2x4 like a bat. Priya lunged and drove her head into his abdomen, hearing a satisfying ‘woof’ as she forced the air from his lungs. The move wouldn’t have won respect at her dojo, but it was as effective as any of the traditional strikes she’d employed while earning her third-level black belt.

Angel tried to swing again but Priya was faster. She dropped low and swept her foot into his. Already off balance, he went down hard. Priya leaped onto his back and wrapped her arm around his neck. He struggled briefly, too briefly, before passing out.

She flipped him over and checked for a pulse. Under her hands, his gaunt shoulders felt at odds with his broad frame, and a scruffy beard faded into his collar, covering his neck tattoo. Capturing Pieter’s personal bodyguard shouldn’t have been so easy.

Moonlight shone through the notch in the plywood and illuminated an unexpected squalor. Angel had been living in the abandoned office, and from the looks of it, not very well. Other than a thin mattress on the floor, the only furniture was a chair by the window. Priya stepped over Angel and peered through the opening. Naef Dynamics.

It hadn’t occurred to her that she’d be able to see the entrance to Holden Marke’s former laboratory from here, but the buildings in between were set far enough back from the street to perfectly frame Naef’s glass doors. Angel had chosen the ideal spot to watch from without being seen.

She focused her binoculars through the window. The shattered glass littering the ground around Naef had once hidden three stories of windowless concrete walls: shielding for the many portals within. Someone, probably Angel, had blocked one door with garbage and propped a painted steel bar across the other. The bright white bar bisected the door into two triangles. Even without binoculars, Angel would know at a glance that someone had entered Naef.

Why watch from a distance? And why had he been doing it for so long? She focused again on Naef. If Angel had been willing to commit months to watching the building, that’s where she’d find an answer. And, hopefully, Pieter.

- - - - -

Priya woke Angel by dumping cold water over his head. He swore loudly and lunged at her before realizing he was tied to his chair. “Morning, tough guy.” She swirled the remaining water in the plastic bucket. “Where’s your boss?”

Angel struggled briefly with the ropes binding his wrists and ankles. “Aren’t you out of your jurisdiction?”

She threw the rest of the bucket on him.

He laughed. “Is that supposed to upset me?”

“No.” She tossed the bucket through the open door. It rolled into a stream of effluent flowing from the overloaded sewer. “But I’ve run out clean water.”

Angel winced but held his tongue.

She dragged a wooden crate over, sat opposite him, and faced him solemnly. “Why are you protecting him? You’re here, so obviously Pieter didn’t think enough of you to take you back to Cirrus.” A slight furrowing of his brow told Priya she was on the right track, but Angel wouldn’t be swayed by a simple play on his emotions. “You didn’t put up much of a fight, did you? And you’ve lost a lot of weight since I last saw you. It can’t be easy for a vegan to get enough protein these days. How long have you been waiting, anyway?” She gestured at the blankets piled at the foot of his mattress, far too heavy for late-March. “A month? Two?”

Angel remained stubbornly silent, but his body language betrayed him. He’d been having doubts.

“I visited Marke’s lab while you were sleeping. There’s been no one there for months, the same as Pieter’s office downtown. The portal frames are damaged. Their crystals are missing. Pieter’s not coming back for you.” She stood and made to leave.

“Wait.” Angel’s voice was insistent. “I can help you.”

“How? Wherever he is, you’re no longer part of his plans.”

“Not Pieter. I can lead you to Danny Kou.”

Now it was Priya’s turn to be silent. Danny—Pieter’s former head of security—was the only other person who might be able to lead her to Pieter. Until now, she thought he’d drowned in a sealed water tank on Cirrus. She crossed her arms, letting Angel know he’d have to give her more.

“Pieter sent me back to Earth to find Danny. He wanted revenge.” Angel painted a picture of a man tormented, irrational, quick to anger, suffering from insomnia: symptoms Priya recognized as the mental decay associated with too much portal travel. “And not just with Danny. He was obsessed with that kid, Jack, and magic.” He said the word like it tasted foul. “I haven’t seen Danny, but I know how to find him.”

“Tell me.”

“I want something in exchange.”

“What?”

“A letter of recommendation.”

“You’re applying for a job?”

“No, I want to go to Dawn, but … I’ve got a record.”

“Seriously? You’re a henchman for the worst corporate villain in history. The man who engineered Newton. The man who destroyed a billion portals.”

“Was. You said yourself, Pieter’s not coming back.”

“You need a lawyer. I can’t help you.”

“Actually, you can. I’ve never committed a felony. All I did—”

“Never committed a felony? I could recommend you for a dozen firearms offences.”

“Okay, I’ve never been convicted. All I did for Pieter was act a part. I’ve only ever been charged with a misdemeanor; I borrowed my father’s car when I left home at fifteen. A juvenile offence doesn’t bar me from emigrating, but I need an official letter just to submit an application.”

Priya didn’t want to argue with Angel, who seemed to think that not getting caught was the same as not guilty. “Why do you want to go to Dawn?”

“Why wouldn’t I? Clean air. Clean water. Plenty of food. A fresh start. A chance to have a real life. Earth is done. Cirrus is done.” Angel met her eyes with a determined gaze. “Why aren’t you going?”

Priya didn’t answer right away. After enduring seven months of blackouts and water shortages while searching in vain for Pieter, she’d been asking herself that same question.

When humans discovered the distant planet, one of the first things they did was go to war over it. But the time to traverse an unanchored wormhole was variable, meaning arriving warships often met vessels that had left Earth weeks later with more time to prepare. It didn’t take long for the combatants to work out that they’d destroy the newfound world before settling it. So, for the first time in history, opposing forces peacefully divided the new territory among themselves without having set foot on it. With only a single ocean straddling its equator, Dawn had three times as much land area as Earth, enough to separate warring factions by a hemisphere.

Priya couldn’t deny the appeal of a pristine world whose infrastructure had been prepared over twenty years by armies of self-replicating robots. “Tell me where Danny is.”

“There’s a notebook in the bag beside my bed. It was Simon’s before ...” Angel paused, genuinely remorseful. “I made sure he got on that shuttle, even though I thought he’d had some sort of breakdown. I told myself I was just following orders … I should have stopped him.”

Priya knew exactly what state Simon’s mind was in, and let Angel wallow in guilt. Simon had been virtually enslaved by Pieter’s mind-control technology. But, at the end, he’d found a way to defeat Pieter while still following orders. She retrieved the notebook, wondering what else Pieter’s chief engineer had discovered before sacrificing his life.

Angel continued as she examined the writing. “It’s all math and strange symbols except for the addresses he wrote on the last page. One of those is where Danny’s portal is.”

“You’re sure?”

“The guy who gave me it to me used to do small jobs for Danny.”

“Who was that?”

“Don’t know his name. Native American. Slim build.”

Paul. Priya unfolded a mugshot she’d been carrying in her pocket. “Is this him?”

“Yeah. Who is he?”

She tucked the page away. “The same guy who told me where to find you.”

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