“Little distracted. Sorry.” I rose to my feet, checking the futures. Only a minute or so left. “Sonder? One last thing. The jinn that weren’t bound into items. Can they still be summoned?”
Sonder nodded. “By the higher-order jinn, yes. That’s how jinn-possession subjects can pull off summoning rituals so easily.”
“So could the sultan resummon any other jinn of lesser rank than him? Including those ifrit?”
“I hope not.” Sonder looked worried. “It’s bad enough dealing with one of them.”
“Yeah,” I said. The futures clicked. Somewhere in a Council facility, the Keepers hunting me had just learned my exact location. “Well, time to go. Thanks for the help.”
Sonder tensed, probably wondering what I was going to do. I gave him a nod and walked out.
I shut the door of the flat behind me and started down the stairs. Mentally, I was cataloguing futures, calculating the Keeper team’s next move. Right now, they’d be cross-referencing my location with GPS data and their own records and learning that I was at Sonder’s flat. Next, they’d ping Sonder’s locator and confirm that he was there as well. From that point they had two choices. They could decide that Sonder was now an additional suspect and needed to be brought in. In that case, they’d call in more reinforcements, deploy teams to surround the area, get ready to move in with maximum force.
The other possibility was that they’d decide that Sonder was innocent and that I was an intruder, in which case the first thing they’d do would be to contact him directly. When he told them that I’d just left, they’d be faced with a dilemma. They could pull the trigger, gate in, and scramble to try to catch me before I got away, but they’d have little chance of catching me and they knew it. That just left them with one last option for tracking me before I got out of range . . .
From above me, I heard Sonder’s door, followed by the sound of feet hurriedly descending the stairs.
I sighed inwardly. They could get Sonder to slow me down. Sometimes knowing the future isn’t much fun.
Sonder came racing around the last flight of steps and caught himself as he saw me standing at the bottom. “Is there a problem?” I asked.
“Uh . . . ,” Sonder said.
I looked at him, eyebrows raised.
Sonder had just started to open his mouth to speak when there was a shift in the futures and he paused, the movement so slight that you wouldn’t have noticed unless you were watching for it. It wasn’t a long pause. Just long enough for someone speaking into his ear over a concealed link to suggest a cover story. “Don’t use the front door,” Sonder said. “The Council are monitoring it.”
“I have to go out somewhere.”
“You can go through the courtyard.” He hesitated for just an instant. “There’s a back way. I’ll show you.”
I looked up at Sonder. He shifted uncomfortably, and I felt a flash of disappointment. It wasn’t the fact that Sonder had gone along with the Keepers—I’d always known his loyalty was to the Council. It was that he’d done it so damn fast. “Okay, but hurry up.”
Sonder led me the other way along an internal corridor, where a pair of double doors led outside. Or not exactly outside; high walls rose up all around us. Sonder had called it a “courtyard,” but it was more of an internal park, with flats rising up in a rectangle on four sides, and a neatly tended stretch of grass and trees criss-crossed by stone paths. It was a gated community and looked very exclusive and cosy. “So how’s the war been going?” I asked.
“Pretty well.”
“You mean apart from Sal Sarque and his entire retinue getting killed?”
“Drakh took losses too,” Sonder said. “And we destroyed their base in that shadow realm they were using to launch attacks.”
Sonder sounded distracted, as you’d expect from someone trying to follow two conversations at once. “Everyone seems to think you’re losing,” I told him.
“We’re not losing,” Sonder said quickly. “The war’s in a stalemate due to . . .”
I listened with half an ear. The Keeper team were getting ready to gate in at multiple locations. Multiple simultaneous locations—how were they managing that? There should be too much variation in the gate timings for—ah. They had a space mage. In fact, it was someone I’d met a while ago. Her name was Symmaris, and she’d provided the transport for a Keeper hit team who’d burned down my old shop. They were planning to have her open several gates at once and surround me.
“. . . which is why they’re making a mistake,” Sonder finished.
“Uh-huh,” I said. Sonder was leading me diagonally across the courtyard. The Keepers were planning to launch their attack once I got out into the street, but they were still setting it up, and if I forced them to move early they’d have to go with their emergency plan, which was to gate right into the courtyard. I changed my focus to look at Sonder. They were probably talking to him through an earpiece—yup, earpiece communicator. I carry a dispel focus that looks like a long silver needle. Without breaking stride, I slid it out of my pocket, brought it up to just behind and to one side of Sonder’s ear, and discharged it in the air.
There was a faint, tinny shriek as the communicator overloaded, and Sonder yelped, putting a hand to his head. He backed away from me, eyes flicking down to my hand and up again. “What are you . . . ?”
“Shh,” I said, returning the focus to my pocket and watching the futures intently. They were swirling as the Keepers tried to figure out what to do. I pushed delicately with the fateweaver. Not too hard, we don’t want to tip them off . . . there. I turned around and started walking back across the courtyard.
“What are you doing?” Sonder called.
“I’m going this way.”
“The way out’s—”
“No, I’ve got a good feeling about this way.”
The futures flickered briefly as Sonder considered his options. I kept an eye on them while I paid most of my attention to the futures of the Keeper team. Let’s see, visual angle is there, firing angle is there. I stopped, changed direction, walked ten paces, and stopped.
Sonder came up behind me cautiously. “Um . . . what are you doing?”
“Do you know what’s special about this spot?” I asked Sonder.
“. . . No?”
I pointed at the pathway ahead, where it curved towards the doorway that we’d come out of. “That point is midway between where I was when you met me at the foot of the stairs, and where I was when we turned around. If you were searching for someone you suspected of doubling back, it’s where you’d start. Of course, it’s not very good from a tactical perspective, because anyone could come up behind you.” I turned and pointed to the left, where a grassy bed near the wall of the flats was lined with flowers. “If you wanted a good tactical position, you’d take that spot, right in front of the flowerbed. It’s at the centre of the wall so it gives you a view straight down the courtyard, and it’s between the windows of the ground-floor flat, so your back isn’t exposed. If you were a Keeper and you had to pick a landing spot, that’s where you’d go.”