“I was a bit tardy in locating you in San Francisco and, by the time I had identified your, ah, residence, you had departed in Mr. Begay’s panzer. How unfortunate that the feathered worm found him first. But fortune is fickle, and she let me find you before those mercenaries did. They would surely have taken you to Mr. Drake, if they didn’t kill you on the spot.

“So now, once you’ve recovered a bit more, you and I will travel to Quebec. I’m taking you to meet my boss.”

“I look forward to it,” Sam said with a smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “But for now, you got any water?”

She fetched a canteen and held his head up to drink. “Not too much at once,” she cautioned.

He was quiet then for some time, but still quite awake, She debated giving him a sedative to make the travel easier, Finally, his eyelids began to droop as he succumbed to exhaustion.

“You going to do your healing song again?” His worth were soft and slurred.

“If necessary.”

“I want to be awake when you do.”

“Yuh, sure.”

He grunted his satisfaction with her answer, then closed his eyes and slept.

That was just as well, for he needed rest. It would be another day before it was safe to move him to the chopper. Besides, she wasn’t sure she wanted him to hear her healing song.

While doing her magic, Jaq had gotten an inkling of Sam’s power. His aura was strong, reacting and shifting defensively during her ministrations. But she sensed that the activity was instinctive and as yet unfocused. The discovery tickled her curiosity because neither the dossier nor the Renraku records she had mentioned him being magically active. More curious still was that he carried a case with instruction chips designed for someone following the path of a hermetic mage. Her sensing of his potential seemed to indicate more a tendency to her own shamanic path.

Satisfied that he was deeply asleep, she gave him another shot, a tranquilizer. She didn’t want him awake until they reached their destination. After making sure he was well-covered, she walked to the edge of the mesa and stared out over the badlands. She wanted to think about this.

She stripped off the bogus speech synthesizer, scratching at the itch the adhesive raised, then groomed her mane smooth. From her satchel, she took the bundle of pics that had been bound to Verner’s chip case. The old photographs were stained and warped from their exposure to storm and mud, but the newer pics on their plastic film were still in good shape. The images were mostly snapshots, with a few formal portraits of varying vintages. They seemed to be ordinary family pictures, a chronicle of people and events that had been part of Verner’s life. They would, of course, have to be analyzed for hidden data.

Stuffing the pics away, she took out the chip case and turned it over in her hands. It too would be analyzed, but she suspected that, as with the pics, nothing of note would be found. At least nothing hidden. Among the instructional chips there was a Bible. Most magicians, whatever their magical tradition, had little to do with organized religion.

Then there was the Narcoject, a pacifist’s weapon. Not a common choice among shadowrunners, but then this one was new to the underside. He was a curious fellow, full of contradictions. Such a personality was rarely predictable or reliably controlled. Verner hardly seemed a suitable pawn for her master’s game.

37

The note had said, “Go to the doors at the end and wait.” Sam walked in the direction the nurse had pointed, the corridor empty and quiet. With its dim lighting and rough, dark cement floor, the place looked far from high-tech. He passed a few doors, most of them large enough to admit a truck though a few were the size of his cell-like recovery room. All the doors were unmarked and the watchful cameras hanging from the ceiling in clear plastic globes discouraged him from trying to open any. His footsteps echoed off the widely spaced walls, marking a steady rhythm. If his pace was slower than usual, it was because his side was still stiff and the muscles weak from lack of use. The rough fabric of the new clothes chafed, and his leg muscles felt mushy. His ankle no longer pained him, but he had walked little in the last few days.

While he lay recovering from his ordeal, Sam’s only visitors had been a doctor and a pair of nurses. He had learned little from them, for they spoke only French and seemed not to understand his English or Japanese. The only sign of Jacqueline had been a note from her bidding him to be patient and recover. Had the words not been on paper, he might have thought her a part of his strange dreams on the mesa.

The first thing he had done on awakening was to get out of bed to try the door controls. That they were inoperable distressed him, but he was too weak to attempt running away. Where would he have gone? Sam didn’t even know where he was. And the only clothing in the room was a hospital gown hardly suitable for traveling.

The doctor and nurses had been efficient and solicitous, but uninformative. Their language was circumstantial evidence that he was in Quebec, but far from definitive. They hadn’t even twitched when he had mentioned Quebec or Genomics, both words that would have been understandable even if all the rest were not. Had Jacqueline lied when saying she would take him to Genomics, claiming it was her employer? Wherever he was, the medical equipment in the room and the attention he received were top-notch. He had rapidly regained his strength.

Sometime during the second day, one of the nurses, brought a tray with a datareader and the few belongings Sam had carried with him in the Little Eagle. These included the Narcoject, which had been cleaned and oiled. The ammunition had been removed. It was distressing to see how poorly his old photographs had fared, but when all this was over he would try to get them restored.

Nothing was missing from the chip case, whose contents were the only alternative to staring at the walls. He reread Bible passages that had comforted him in the past, but now he saw odd interpretations for them and caught himself wondering what Dog would think of them. Thoughts of Dog had turned to thoughts of magic and so he had begun to scan the professor’s instructional chips.

Some descriptions of the astral experience awakened disturbing memories of his dream on the mesa. Cautiously, dreading success, he had tried the exercises for astral projection. His first attempt had brought on an airy feeling while the colors in the room shifted, much as the colors had done on the mesa. From the texts, he expected to be able to pass beyond the walls of the room, but he stayed right there on the bed, unable to move.

In the midst of one exercise, the doctor had entered the room. She had seemed full of a green light that, except for a dimness on her right index finger, glowed brightly through her skin. The apparition had startled Sam back to wakefulness, where he saw that her finger was bandaged. He had husbanded his strength and practiced further, but never again achieved that state while another person was in the room.