Free Worldweavers: Cybermage by Alma Alexander Page B

destroyed,” Tesla said, his voice quiet. Quenched. “I have no means of rebuilding most of the things that were in that laboratory. It was irreplaceable.”
    “I’m so sorry,” Thea said.
    Tesla glanced down at her. “Have we met?”
    “Not yet,” Thea said, without thinking.
    Tesla frowned delicately. “Not…yet?”
    “It’s complicated,” Thea said helplessly.
    “Indeed,” Tesla murmured. “Most things are. However, your face is very familiar—as though I remember it from a long time ago.”
    “I’m fifteen,” Thea said.
    “Quite,” Tesla said after a moment. “That would make it…unlikely.”
    He stared at her for a moment longer, his brow furrowed as though he was astonished or puzzled. Thea instinctively glanced down, belatedly realizingthat she might have been standing in the middle of the New York street wearing just the T-shirt she had worn to bed, but her subconscious or some aspect of her gift that she had not yet figured out had taken care of that detail. Partly, anyway. She was not dressed in period clothes, but in something nondescript and dark that resembled a tracksuit.
    Or at least that’s what she saw herself as wearing. Her companion might have been seeing precisely what he expected to see.
    “What will you do now?” she said, rather abruptly.
    “I am not certain. I will have to consider my options carefully.” He sighed, contemplating the façade that concealed his personal tragedy. “There should have been a plan. I should have done something…something exceptional, to protect what was worth protecting. I should have remembered Kaschei’s needle.”
    “What’s a Kaschei needle?” Thea asked.
    “Not a Kaschei needle. The Kaschei needle. There was only one,” Tesla said, correcting her. “Kaschei is the evil sorcerer from the Russian fairy tales. You have never heard of him?”
    Thea shook her head, every instinct aquiver. Thiswas somehow very important, though she could not for the life of her figure out why.
    “Tell me,” she said.
    Tesla cast another long, mournful look at the building. “It isn’t as though I have anything else to do right now,” he said. “Kaschei…was immortal, or was reputed to be. Until Prince Ivan found out that he could be killed, if a certain needle was pressed into his forehead between his eyes.”
    “He’d hardly let someone just walk up and do that,” Thea said. “If he were really an evil sorcerer—”
    “Oh, that would not have been the problem,” Tesla said, frowning up at the brightening sky as though the imminent presence of sunlight spilling down the streets of New York City left him distinctly uneasy. “The problem, you see, was finding the needle. Because the needle was inside an egg. The egg was inside a duck. The duck was inside a rabbit. The rabbit was inside a wooden chest. The wooden chest was buried at the foot of an oak tree. And the oak tree was on an island that was impossible to get to. In order to get Kaschei’s needle, you would have had to find the island, find a way to go there, dig up the chest, catch the rabbit, whichwould escape when you opened the chest, catch the duck, which would escape if you caught and killed the rabbit, and catch the egg that would roll out of the duck and away from you if you managed to catch and kill the duck—and only then could you get the needle. Then you could find Kaschei as he slept, and push the needle home between his eyes. But you had to get the needle first. And it was in a safe place—a place where no harm could come to it.”
    “But your lab isn’t a needle,” Thea said, glancing up at the smoke still wafting out of the window. “You could hardly hide all that inside an egg on an island.”
    “Ah, you don’t understand, child,” Tesla murmured, and then shook himself. “I must go. It will soon be full day, and I have always found the sun intolerable if I am out in it unprotected for long. Good day to you.”
    “Good luck,” Thea said, but she already