The woman standing on the work floor felt familiar. I’d definitely seen her before. And she seemed to think she knew me—or at least something I had. It took me a moment before it clicked. My first impulse was to talk to her, even though she’d broken into my Voltsmith’s Laboratory. “You’re the…”

  Before I could finish, my voice trailed off. Something about her was wrong. Unnatural. She had an aura around her, an aura that screamed negation. There was no resonance, only emptiness.

  Instead of finishing my sentence, I shifted my feet. Instead of offering a hand to shake, I readied the Trip-Hammer. “You owned the SUV, right?”

  “Correct. And I’m here to take it back,” the woman said.

  I nodded slowly. “It won’t run for you.”

  “It will. I’ll make you fix it so it does.”

  “You’ll try.”

  She drew the curved sword at her waist; it flashed out of its sheath, and the empty feeling redoubled. “You can’t stop me.”

  I focused in on the intense emptiness, and the feeling of wrongness. But that focus almost cost me my life; the woman moved, and I barely reacted in time. The Trip-Hammer revved, blocking her sword strike, but not the dagger that jammed into my shoulder. She was fast. Faster than anyone I’d fought so far, and definitely faster than me. But the dagger hadn’t punched too deep, even though I wasn’t armored.

  I spun the Trip-Hammer around, clearing space around me. As she backpedaled to avoid the blow, she stumbled a little, and a look of confusion flashed across her face.

  Why was she so confused? I didn’t know, and a moment later, I didn’t care. A flurry of blows came in, and I focused on blocking what I could and counterattacking when I had windows—which were rare. The woman’s gray-blonde hair blurred as she piled on her speed. I could hardly follow her.

  The Trip-Hammer slammed into the concrete, cracking it slightly, and I realized I’d moved all the way across the lab. My opponent backpedaled again as my hammer parted the air where her head had been. As she did, I took a second to breathe.

  That same sense of wrongness—of emptiness—filled the air again. The spare magical items I hadn’t scrapped for parts yet flickered in the storage bins I’d shoved them into. Then they shut down. All of them. All at once. The aura the woman had been maintaining exploded outward, and every scrap of magic in the room stopped.

  She smiled widely. “You see? You can’t stop me.”

  The Trip-Hammer revved, and I rushed her again.

  Tori was halfway to the River Walk Raid, a Tier-Two dungeon tucked across the way from downtown Chicago, when her magic cut off.

  She panicked immediately, but Carol didn’t. She calmly slammed her spear into the Concrete Falcon they were fighting, and it died thrashing on the street.

  “Something wrong?” Carol asked.

  Tori shook her head. “No.” Carol was too cool, too awesome, for Tori to risk blowing their chance to do something together on a simple magical malfunction. Besides, this wasn’t a big deal. It couldn’t be. They weren’t far from Museumtown and only a block or so from Cindy’s Garage; there shouldn’t be anything this close to town that could—

  “You’re lying to me again, Tori,” Carol said. She grinned. “You’re really bad at it. What’s going on?”

  “Okay, fine.” Tori focused on the Concrete Falcon’s stony body and cast Crush.

  Or tried to. It didn’t fire. It didn’t even pretend to fire. The magic seemed to almost fizzle inside of her, like something was suppressing it.

  “I see,” Carol said. Tori watched as she pulled her magic armor off and tested it. “It’s not just you. It’s my items, too.”

  “Well, uh, I guess we’re all screwed?” Tori asked.

  “Nah, that’s not right. We’ve got to figure this out, though. We can’t go dungeon-crawling if your power’s going to cut off and my gear’s going to stop working. How about we go see Hal?”

  Tori groaned. She’d been looking forward to hanging out with Carol. Their relationship had really been moving in Tori’s favor, and grabbing Hal felt exactly like it did whenever Carol insisted that Zane tag along with them.

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  But Carol was right. She was always right. They needed to get to the bottom of this, and they needed to do it quickly. And Hal was the best person in Museumtown to talk to. After all, he didn’t have any magic at all.

  I was winning.

  If I’d wanted to kill the owner of the Ford Explorer, I’d have had plenty of chances to do it. With her aura pushed out, she’d slowed down until I could keep up with her easily, and she couldn’t seem to adjust to that fact. Plus, my bomb-making drones were getting into the fight. That only confused her more.

  “What’s going…I don’t understand,” she said. Her sword flicked out and cut one of the drones in half; it hissed and sparked as Charge poured out of it.

  I used the moment to attack, hammer tripping and firing into her side—or where her side would have been if I’d put a little more juice into the swing. “What don’t you understand? Put your weapons down, and we can talk this through.”

  Instead, she turned and fled, crashing through the doorway and into the office. As she did, the items in their storage bins all popped back to life.

  And someone yelled from outside.

  I pushed through the office; whoever she’d been, she’d upended the old tire-and-rim display into the waiting room, toppled the busted old computers as she jumped the counter, and cut through an older advertisement for Cindy’s Garage that the place’s deceased owner had kept taped to the wall.

  And then she’d vanished, leaving behind chaos—and two confused-looking girls—in her wake.

  “Who the hell was that?” Tori asked. “We were passing by toward the River Walk, but something cut off my magic, so I came here.”

  “I don’t remember her name,” I said, breathing heavily. I reached out to help Carol back to her feet. “She was a client at Cindy’s Garage—the one who brought the Explorer in for transmission work. The boss used to keep physical records of every vehicle that came in. Maybe I can figure out who she is from that.”

  “Uh, Hal,” Tori said, “it sounds like you’re thinking about her as someone to negotiate with. That’s a bad idea.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because.” Tori paused, then looked around to the left and right. “She’s an anti-mage. She can probably beat anyone in a one-on-one fight just by shutting down their class’s magic and magic gear. She knocked my power out from a hundred yards away—maybe more.”

  “Definitely more,” Carol agreed. “She got my gear, too.”

  “So she’s an anti-mage? Does that mean I shouldn’t talk to her?”

  “No.” Tori shook her head. Then she nodded. “I mean, yes, you should not talk to her. One simple reason. Anti-mages are universally broken in PvP in every game I play that has them. There’s not a class in any of the games with as many advantages. Ever since they made rogues’ Stealth effects magical or supernatural, Anti-Mage counters them, too. They beat everyone.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “But I just survived her attack, and it wasn’t a struggle.”

  “Really?” Carol asked. Tori looked at her, then back at me.

  “Really. The Trip-Hammer kept running the whole time.” I walked back into the lab. A few craters were punched into the concrete floor, but the various machines were all running—including the Explorer, which idled in the bay, fueled by the lab’s Charge. I slid the Autoplate Pauldron on and strapped it into place, then headed back to Cindy’s office. “Is your magic back?”

  Tori shrugged, then pointed a hand at the wall. Force shoved against it for a moment as she Pushed something. Then she nodded. “Yes.”

  “Alright. You two keep doing what you were doing. The River Walk, right? I’ll check it out in an hour or two to make sure you’re okay, once I’ve finished up—“

  “Nah, don’t worry about us. We can take care of ourselves,” Tori said. “Anti-Mages are great duelists, but two against one, we should be safe. Well, safe-ish. Carol will be, anyway. She can protect me.”

  I raised an eyebrow, but let Tori go. Carol nodded at me as she left. “Stay safe, Hal. If someone wants you dead, you’re in more danger than we are.”

  “No, I don’t think I am. She doesn’t want me dead.” I settled into Cindy’s office chair and started thumbing through her records. “She wants me to fix what’s hers, and then she wants to go to Wyoming.”

  Her name, it turned out, was Erika. Erika Samson. Cindy didn’t usually write much in her records: Name, date, make and model, main problem, subsidiary problems, service given, and cost. In Erika Samson’s case, there was a little more. She’d been in six times in the last five years. I’d only seen the SUV once, but it had been in for a steering problem, four-wheel-drive issues, a routine check-up, new shocks, and brake work before I’d gotten it for the unsolvable transmission problem.

  That made Erika a regular, and regulars got more notes so Cindy could remember who they were when they came in. So, after skimming through her file, I knew that Erika had two kids, and that—somehow—both of them had ended up at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. The older was a senior, and he was studying history. The younger was a sophomore. She was a musician.

  I thought of Mom—and of my sister. Beth was out there somewhere, and the Charge-powered SUV wasn’t just a gimmick. If it was, I wouldn’t be trying to make it more efficient with the gigantic, quarter-built Heart on the table.

  If I could get it running, I could get back to Cozad, Nebraska, and see my parents. If I could get there, I could figure out where Beth had gone, and I could go after her. Maybe not in the middle of Phase Two of Integration, but when there was less pressure on Museumtown.

  But unlike me, Erika Samson didn’t have obligations in Chicago. She’d been trying to nurse the Explorer all the way across the country before the apocalypse. If she believed it was up and running again, it made sense that she’d keep trying.

  I closed Cindy’s records and slid them back into the once-locked drawer in her desk. Then I stood up.

  If I wanted to be ready for Erika the next time she showed up, I’d need to lead her to me in the conditions I wanted. And that meant shutting down the shop for the day.

  The Heart went first; I locked the half-finished device in one of the large storage bins, making sure the whole thing was drained of Charge. Then I drained the Explorer, too, and followed it up with every Charge-based device I’d created for the shop. I didn’t want a single thing running while I was gone.

  Then I clicked a pen open and scribbled a quick note, tucked it onto the truck’s open dash, and locked up for the day.

  The trap was baited. All I could do was hope that Erika Samson would step into it.