Free Worldweavers: Cybermage by Alma Alexander Page A

there, on the windowsill, sat the shape of a luminous white pigeon, glowing with a strange inner fire.
    Thea woke with a start.
    Her roommates were sound asleep, faces buried in soft pillows. Magpie was snoring gently. Thea briefly considered waking them, and then thought better of it. It would be better if she didn’t drag anyone else into it.
    She reached out to her bedside table for the wrist keyboard gadget that Humphrey had given her, grimacing at the thought of his inevitable reaction when she eventually had to confess that she had gone off on her own again. She pulled the keypad back under the covers with her as she toggled the on-switch, and the screen filled the blanket tent with a soft greenish luminescence. It reminded her forcefully of the light with which Diego de los Reyes had filled his world in an attempt to trap her there, as well as the light she had used to weave herself an escape route, the light that she then walled in with him when she turned the mirrors in on him and buried him alive in the world of his own illusions. She felt queasy at the memory. But this wasn’t the same, and she firmly told herself to pull herself together.
    Somewhere in the memory of this little machine she had saved a few phrases she had typed in when the five of them had been inside the cube. Heroriginal idea had been to weave herself back to that place, but as she stared at her tiny screen, she frowned in indecision.
    It had taken all five of them to get the white mists to dissipate enough for something to actually happen. Thea hesitated at the thought of being stuck in the mists by herself. There was the Barefoot Road, which had taken her to hard-to-get places before, but this time she didn’t think she had anything specific enough to give the Road as a pointer to where she wanted to be.
    Which left only the computer-linked worldweaving: the purely creative effort of re-creating the space she required through sheer force of will and imagination.
    Space and time .
    If she needed to talk to Tesla, if there was a trace or remnant of the real Tesla left behind at all in the cube-universe, it would have to be a time-weave. The last time she had tried that, she had gone back only a few moments to reverse the immediate effects of a spellspam. This time she would have to go back years, and she would have to be extremely specific about it. Failure could mean becoming unstuck in time, much like Tesla himself might have been trapped—andthere was nobody at all to send after her.
    “I’ll just have to take the risk,” she muttered to herself, strapping the keypad to her wrist. She could barely make out the keys in the green-tinged gloom underneath her bedclothes, and she had to type slowly and carefully and then double-check what she had written, because computers were literal and unforgiving and she might find herself transported to some screwy part of the universe with no clue how to get back.
    Maybe I should have left a note for the others….
    The thought was there and gone, even as her index finger touched the ENTER key and she felt the room begin to dissolve around her. Just before it all winked out, she thought she heard a small voice, very far away, that might have been Magpie’s.
    “Thea? Thea, you okay? What are you doing?”
    And then it was gone. She was standing in a city street, in the cold light of early morning, staring up at a brownstone. A tendril of black smoke curled out of one of the windows. Fire. Or the aftermath of one.
    Beside her, bareheaded, his long-fingered hands hanging by his side in a manner that spoke far more eloquently of his devastation than any anguishedhand-wringing might have done, stood a man who could only have been Nikola Tesla. His hair was dark, and his features smooth; Thea judged him to be somewhere in his thirties at this point. This was the famous New York fire, the one that had driven Tesla from the city and into the mountains of Colorado.
    “That’s half a lifetime’s work