Page 85 of Junk Magic

“When was this?”

“A couple hours ago. I . . .” he paused, but he didn’t lie to me. He obviously wanted to, but his mom had raised him right. “I freaked out,” he admitted. “Just turned around and ran back to my room, and didn’t tell anybody for, like, fifteen minutes; I don’t know why. But then ma came in to tell me that dinner was almost ready and . . .”

“It’s okay,” I said, because the Adam’s apple had gone back to work.

“I lost my lunch,” he admitted. “She was worried until she found out why, then ran off to raise the alarm. I know I should have already done it, but—”

“That was enough to rattle anyone. What happened after your mother alerted the clans?”

“It got crazy. Like completely batshit. People were running and yelling—I think half of them thought we were being attacked—and the rest headed for the arena to see for themselves. Ma made everyone get out of there, something about not disturbing the crime scene, only some of them already had. But she cleared them out and called the bardric, and he showed up a little while later. I don’t remember exactly when.”

Probably not long. If anything would make Sebastian burn rubber out of Vegas, this would be it. Only something didn’t add up.

“Those bodies had been there longer than a couple of hours,” I said. “Maybe a lot longer. Didn’t anybody notice? See anything, hear anything?”

“It’s hard to hear thorough the tunnels,” he said, repeating what I already knew. “They twist and turn and sound fades out. And nobody is supposed to go into the arena itself. But I thought a few minutes wouldn’t hurt, just to make sure the drone worked okay—”

“I get it.” Or, rather, I got his point, but not how a massacre had happened and nobody noticed. Especially in a facility populated by beings with super senses. “You didn’t smell anything, either?”

“Smell?”

“From back there,” I gestured into the labyrinth where I guessed the makeshift town had been set up. “Nobody noticed the blood, the viscera, the—” spilled shit, I didn’t say, because battlefields are ugly in so many ways, and I didn’t want to remind him.

But all he did was blink at me. “Who could smell anything from all the way back there?”

I didn’t answer, but my senses suddenly woke up to do it for me. I could feel those little tree roots shooting outward, crawling around the space, mapping it without the need for eyes. Informing me of what each small dwelling had been cooking for dinner, including one whose pot of rabbit stew had been spilt on the floor in the confusion.

Its scent mingled with the dust on the floor and some rat droppings somebody hadn’t found under a sink. The sink had a leak, which was dampening the drywall and loosening the wallpaper glue on the other side of the wall, in the same room where somebody was hiding a bottle of booze under his bed. He’d spilled some around the shape of the bottle; I could see it in my mind’s eye, a blank patch in the middle of the field of sharpness. Like I could see the open bottle of glue on a desk in the house next door, where a kid had been assembling a model airplane on a desk—

I blinked, and things snapped back to normal.

But it suddenly occurred to me that maybe my new senses weren’t Were standard, after all.

* * *

“Mage Jenkins,” I told the Corps’ operator a few minutes later. I’d taken a moment to make a call, after sending Jake off with a task to keep him busy. He was a smart kid; I was pretty sure he knew what I was doing, but he hadn’t argued.

Maybe he wanted something to occupy his mind, too.

As a result, he was currently assembling the other kids into the community kitchen/cafeteria that was used for tribal get togethers, and seeing to it that they all got fed. One of the first things I’d learned in this job was that, no matter how upsetting the situation, always offer food and drink. People find it difficult to panic and eat at the same time, and witnessing death usually makes them want to do something life affirming, so they typically don’t argue.

The result: they feel better, and you get a calmer, more rational bunch to deal with.

In this case, it also had the bonus of getting the kids out from underfoot, along with some of the adults who’d gone to help. And I needed the space. Because I was about to do something that would not improve with witnesses.

Assuming that anybody ever answered the damned phone, that was. I had to listen to a terrible light jazz rendition of “Poker Face” three and a half times before Jenkins, AKA the Mole Rat, AKA the four-foot-tall, glasses-wearing, cryptid enthusiast I’d met with Hargroves what felt like a lifetime ago, finally came on the line. And was just as charming as the Corps’ functionaries tend to be.

“What?”

“Jenkins?”

“Isn’t that who you asked for?” he demanded.

“Yes, I need—”

“Which took me by surprise, since I’ve left you half a dozen messages today and you’ve responded to exactly none of them. But my shift ends in ten minutes, so of course you finally decide to—”

“What messages?”

---