Page 99 of No Charm Done

Danny gestured toward a heavy door to their left. “This way. Fair warning, it’s gonna be loud and cold. Hope you brought a jacket.” To open the door, the young guard had to swipe his badge through a small box and then press his thumb to the surface.

Hold on, is that for fingerprinting?! They have machines for that now?! He had a flash of gratitude that he wouldn’t be spending long as a professional criminal in the twenty-first century.

As he passed through the door, the cold hit first. No polite chill, this. This was the kind of cold that carried a grudge. His breath fogged. His ears stung. Elias had once spent the night trapped in a meat locker when a con went wrong, but that was a beach vacation compared to this. His bones made unhappy little comments.

Then the noise.

It wasn’t just about volume. It was pressure. A wall of sound shoved at him from every direction, like standing too close to the elevated train when it screamed past.

Danny shouted something cheerful over the din, but Shaw didn’t catch it. He followed the guard through a corridor into an enormous hall. Hundreds of metal cabinets stood in rigid rows, fading toward a distant wall. In the darkness, countless green and blue lights blinked in no sensible rhythm.

A city of machines.

Everything looked the same—cabinets, lights, aisles repeating into darkness. Like a train yard in fog: rows of identical cars fading into the murk until you were on top of one.

Elias tried to keep his face composed and failed miserably.

“First time in a data center?” Danny yelled, grinning. “A little overwhelming, huh?”

“Little bit,” Elias admitted, which was like saying a hurricane was a touch windy.

They walked on. Something Danny described as a cold aisle on the left, with air blasting like winter wind tunneling through a Chicago alley. Then a hot aisle on the right, where air shimmered like the stretch of road outside Joliet where the asphalt melted every August. Cages interrupted the rows—chain-link enclosures with stenciled numbers: 4A, 4B, 5A . . .

They stopped at 7B.

Danny unlocked the cage. It swung open with a metallic groan that at least made sense to Elias’s ears.

“You need me to stick around?” Danny asked.

“You’ve been incredibly helpful,” Elias said, which meant get out before you see something that turns your hair white.

Danny saluted and disappeared down the aisle.

As Elias stepped inside the cage, the door clanged shut behind him. He stood very still, surrounded by humming metal, trying to reconstruct how he’d gotten here. As he’d followed Danny down the aisles, he’d tried to mentally record the path they’d taken to this particular cage, just in case he had to lam it and return later. But he couldn’t find a single distinguishing mark; everything looked the same as everything else. One wrong turn, he’d be lost in here until the next century.

Best leave some breadcrumbs, then.

He loosened his tie—the last civilized relic of his wardrobe—and looped it around the handle of the central cabinet. The one humming just a shade differently. The one with cables as thick and busy as the wiring backstage in a vaudeville house. His tie hung there like a little burgundy flag. Good. At least he wouldn’t die muttering which blasted cabinet was it?

The next task was to find the sigils. What he’d do about them once he found them, Shaw wasn’t certain. The racks were labeled with alphanumeric codes that meant nothing to him. Cables snaked between them in organized chaos. Everything blinked and hummed and radiated heat. And somewhere in this mess of technology and magic, Burke had hidden his wards.

He carefully examined the frame. At first he saw nothing worth noting, just cold inscrutable metal. Then, catching the light at an angle . . . there. Sigils. Burke’s unmistakable brand of nastiness. Etched fine as scratches, hidden until you knew to look. But the malice coming off them was undeniable. These weren’t protective wards. They were the magical equivalent of bear traps, waiting beneath the leaves for some pretty fool to put a foot wrong.

Shaw focused on one of the simpler markings, the tiny outline of what appeared to be a bird. He took several deep breaths, in and out, hoping to summon whatever meager powers had enabled him to start digging an escape tunnel back in the Void. If he could move that wall, even one speck at a time, then surely he could do this.

A light overhead flickered—not the clean electronic wink he’d seen on the walk in, but something obstructed. Shadowed. Wrong.

Elias froze.

The heat shimmer thickened, pulled itself together, and shaped itself into something tall. Human-like, but too thin. The proportions were off, as if someone had carved a person-shape out of shadow. Another figure appeared. And another. Three. Four. Their forms wavered like smoke trying to remember how to be a person. Their faces blurred. But their eyes . . . Their eyes knew exactly what he was.

“Aw, nuts . . .”

“You do not belong here,” the figure said. The voice echoed strangely, as if spoken down a long tunnel.

He raised his hands slowly. Not in surrender, which he’d never been good at. More in a gambler’s attempt to buy a few more seconds. “Fellas. I realize this looks⁠—”

“You reek of the Void.” The sentinel stepped closer. “You are an intruder.”