“Jane, this was a terrible idea,” said Kevin.
“Shut it, kid,” said the large man with the automatic rifle. “Just drop that helmet on the ground and walk slowly and quietly towards the hill.”
Turns out that in the middle of a field, most of our powers weren’t actually very useful, tinfoil hats or not. No doors for Marie to open. Kevin didn’t know the guard, so he didn’t sense him coming. No technology for Jane to tinker with. And none of us were bullet-proof.
The hill had a kind of bunker built into it. The entrance was at an angle into the hill and screened behind a couple of trees. From a distance, you’d never spot it.
There wasn’t a door on the entrance, I noticed. Inside the entrance was a kind of security booth with a transparent screen in front of it – bullet-proof glass, I had to assume. No door there, either. To get into the booth you had to go through a full-height turnstile in an alcove on the right-hand end, and it was clearly controlled from inside. There was another guard there, watching a security monitor.
We were ushered down a short, doorless, concrete-lined tunnel into an old-style prison area with metal bars across the otherwise open fronts of three cells. Two were empty, but the middle one held a rather pretty but very rumpled girl with black hair and long eyelashes. In contrast to skinny Jane and tiny Marie, she was noticeably girl-shaped.
On a rickety table sat a device of some kind, which buzzed gently. An outdoor extension cable, the kind that builders use, led from it off up the tunnel, back towards the guard station, and a workshop lantern plugged into the same power supply gave a harsh light. A security camera with a red light showing was fixed to the wall above the table, and its cable also led back to the guard station.
The guard gestured Kevin into the left-hand cell. I followed, and he locked us in. He unlocked the middle cell and put Jane and Marie in there with the other girl. The cells had concrete walls between them, so we could no longer see each other, but we would be able to talk.
Kevin was clutching his head and looking haunted and disoriented. I guessed that the buzzing thing was the power damper.
The guard checked the doors again, and left.
The girls immediately began talking. It quickly emerged that the pretty girl was Karen, and that she had been here for a day or two, she thought. Mr Brown had shown up at her school in Sydney and abducted and drugged her, and the light stayed on all the time, so she was a bit hazy on exact times. My guess was that he had headed on to Sydney when he failed to pick us up in Auckland.
“He was so weird?,” she said, in a pinched Australian accent. “Not like a real person somehow?” She had the habit which some girls have of making statements sound like questions by lifting the pitch of her voice at the end of her sentences. “And I thought he was going to kill me, or, you know… hurt me? But he just brought me here.”
“Do you know where this is?” asked Jane.
There was a pause, and I imagined Karen staring at Jane, flummoxed. “How did you get here?” she asked.
“We came – a different way. We didn’t see where it was.”
“The guard sounded like he was from the US,” Kevin said. “The South, I think, but I only know American accents from TV.”
“That’s Kevin,” said Jane. “He’s from your part of the world. New Zealand.”
Kevin let that pass – we New Zealanders hate to be lumped in with Australians – and asked, “Do the guards come round, or do they just watch the monitor?”
“They feed me now and then,” she said. “Did that Mr Brown guy get you too?”
“Uh, no,” said Jane. “Actually, we were coming here to rescue you.”
“You knew I was here?”
“We were pretty sure someone was here – one of… our kind of people.”
“You mean you can…”
Jane hushed her. “Don’t let’s talk about it where the guards can hear. I don’t know if our enemies know exactly what we can do, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
While they were talking, I fumbled one of Jane’s devices out of my belt. She’d made the belt, too. It was a belt for hiding things. The guard, being shorthanded, hadn’t searched us, but if he had, we were prepared.
“There aren’t any proper doors here,” said Marie, apparently irrelevantly unless you knew. “Glass doors and anywhere I can see the other side – it doesn’t work.”
“Kevin, will you take your coat off? You’re the biggest,” Jane said, no doubt equally mysteriously to anyone who was listening, including me in this case.
We normally would have locked gazes at this point and shared our puzzlement, but he looked around the cell somewhat vaguely. His eyes slid past me – the tinfoil hat was still working, which I’d guessed from the fact that the guard hadn’t made me take it off. He began to take off the long coat he was wearing. I walked over to the door.
“The Centre will want to know about this place,” Jane pattered on. “Marie, do you think they’ve been set up long, or only since the Incident?”
While the guards were, hopefully, focussing on her and the now intentionally nonsensical information she was “leaking”, I eased the device into the lock and gently clicked it open. I read a lot of the kind of books where picking locks is a thing, so I know how lockpicks work, though not how to actually use them. You have several different little tools, and you have to fiddle with them for a while to get the lock open. This was a Jane lockpick, though. It worked the way she thought it should work: you stuck it in the lock and turned.
The cell was fairly new, and the lock moved easily. I swung the door slowly open and slipped through, quietly pushing it to behind me. I wasn’t sure how good the don’t-notice-me power was, tinfoil hat or not.
There wasn’t much space between the cell door and the table, which is why I hadn’t just stayed outside the cell – I was afraid the guard would bump into me.
“Kevin,” said Jane, “how’s that coat? You want to hang it across the door of your cell?”
Clever Jane. If Marie’s power only worked when she couldn’t see the other side of the door, the answer was to set it up so that she couldn’t.
I strolled casually and, I hoped, unseen across the short distance to the humming box and pulled the cable.
Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks series (steampunk/magepunk), the Hand of the Trickster series (sword-and-sorcery heist capers), and short stories which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.
