The good news was that Dyna’s arm had not broken. Dislocated, yes, but not broken. The doctors reset it. It still hurt like hell and had swelled up a bit, but at least she didn’t have weeks or months of sitting in a cast to look forward to.

Which was more than could be said for poor Hematite. Dyna still wasn’t sure what had happened there. With her luck and the stories Dyna had heard about the precog, she figured Hematite should be able to walk away from anything unscathed. But perhaps her precognitive luck manipulation decided to take the lesser of two options: lose her arm or lose her life. Dyna wasn’t sure how one precluded the other, but she wasn’t a precog herself, so it was probably going to be one of those unsolved mysteries of psionic potential.

“Did we change your premonition?”

Hematite didn’t look like she was in much of a position to answer. Resting on an ambulance gurney, getting hooked up to a few intravenous blood bags while doctors tried to better secure her arm, would have been bad enough. But they had also given her some drugs to deal with the pain. Anesthetics, presumably. They hadn’t induced unconsciousness, but Hematite was definitely half out of touch with reality at the moment.

She didn’t answer. The EMT personnel loaded her up into one of the ambulances shortly after, slamming the doors and driving off.

Dyna wasn’t sure if that was the drugs or if she didn’t have an answer. Mind-affecting substances also had a tendency to affect psychic powers, so it could be that her precognition wasn’t working at all at the moment.

It felt like they were out of danger. At least, immediate danger. The mountain man had been secured and taken away. He definitely felt like the thing that could have killed all of them. With him gone, Dyna felt she could breathe easy. Easier.

Her breaths did come with a bit of pain down her side and chest. Aches and pains sprung up all over the place, covering nearly her entire body rather than just her leg and arm. She had likely been too injured or too hopped up on adrenaline to notice it all. Medical doctors were fussing over both her and Walter, who had a number of contusions on his face, chest, and arms, but was otherwise moving around like he wasn’t hurt much at all.

There was no sign of additional attackers coming after them. Dyna’s mirror was back to its normal reflective self, indicating nobody was nearby with a grudge against her.

And yet… There was still at least one hostile element out there. The one who had grabbed the Ouija board and made off with it. Dyna doubted he would be coming back given he was carrying a valuable artifact-like object that his superiors presumably wanted. A powerful one at that. Dyna hadn’t managed to figure out the rules in the short time it had been in her possession; it had a hard time answering some questions and she wasn’t sure if its problems with future predictions had been a conflict with Hematite’s precognition or a result of giving information that Dyna had intended to use to change the future. Even still, its ability to reveal information could not be understated.

Which was why, despite the pain she was in, Dyna found herself antsy.

Report was that her apartment had apparently been trashed. In retrospect, that didn’t seem all that surprising. That old woman taking photographs had probably been a spy or scout of some sort. Hematite’s ill-timed appearance made her forget about it completely. But nothing in her apartment was actually an artifact. Nothing there had demonstrated unusual properties the way the Ouija board had. The voodoo doll and such might be slightly more valuable as a research subject than when she had purchased it, but it wasn’t special.

The hobby shop had more voodoo dolls or wolf statues if she wanted to try again with those. But the Ouija board?

She needed to get back out there.

Standing up, favoring one leg, Dyna stepped out of her ambulance. She wasn’t going to be able to sneak away no matter how hard she tried, so she didn’t bother. Sure enough, her medical technician immediately tried to stop her, only for Dyna to wave him off. “I’m just going to talk to Walter,” she said.

Walter stood outside another ambulance, leaning against it while a doctor stitched up a large gash on his shoulder that he must have received in the fight. He didn’t have a shirt on at all, at the moment. Dyna wasn’t sure how old he was; Walter often gave off the feeling of someone experienced, maybe in their late thirties or forties. Old enough that, while Dyna liked him, she didn’t find herself attracted to him. And yet, right now, Dyna couldn’t help but note just how good of shape he kept his body in.

He noted her approach, but with a phone pressed to his ear, he didn’t acknowledge her with anything more than a raised finger asking for a moment of pause.

Dyna shifted where she stood, glancing up and down the street, glancing at her mirror—whose lenses had survived those cannon blasts—and then she glanced over at a security camera on the side of a building. Its glass lens had not survived, but it still had a little red light on one corner. Was it still hooked up? Could Beatrice extrapolate from whatever data it was sending?

Had Beatrice managed to locate the Ouija board?

If anyone could do it, it would be her. Especially with her permissions elevated to their fullest.

She didn’t have a phone or any other way of contacting Beatrice to find out. The ambulances probably had a radio and other people had phones, Walter included. She could ask, but…

Walter, without saying anything to whoever was on the other side of his call, lowered the phone and looked to Dyna.

She suppressed a wince.

Was the whole night her fault? She should have remembered that old woman taking photographs of her apartment. Reporting that might have given the institute a head’s up. But she had forgotten. Hematite had distracted her. She probably shouldn’t have been trying to make artifacts outside the institute’s walls. But Doctor Cross said that the administrators had rejected any related experiments. She wanted to explore her power more, but… well, that wasn’t much of an excuse. Even the actual excuses felt… flimsy. They weren’t good reasons.

Of course, not everything could be placed on her shoulders. Hematite running off on her own might have made sense from her precognitive perspective, but who could say how things would have turned out differently if she had worked with Dyna and the institute. Just calling in reinforcements five minutes earlier might have saved her arm…

Or might have wound up with all of them dead. That was the problem with precogs.

“Are you alright?” Walter asked, deep voice sounding more exhausted than usual.

Dyna gave a curt nod of her head. “We… Did Beatrice tell you about the Ouija board?”

“An artifact capable of answering a myriad of questions,” Walter said, nodding his head. “Currently in the hands of our opposing force. The airport is shut down and guards are posted; this will not be another Grafton situation. In addition, we have personnel and local police at all major roads out of the city.”

“There have to be hundreds of little back farm roads and other ways around the roadblocks.”

“Not much we can do aside from having our psychics trying to narrow down possible routes.”

“Beatrice?”

“Is searching as well. However, it seems about a quarter of the city has lost power. Sabotage of a substation, targeted at surveillance, most likely. We have people working on it. It is not something you need to worry about, there are people—”

“It’s my fault. I lost the Ouija board. I created it in the first place. I can’t just sit around.” Besides that, it was her Ouija board. Her artifact. She hadn’t protested when Mel started using the fog machine, but Mel was a friend and worked for the Carroll Institute. This was an enemy whose companions had literally tried to murder her. Letting someone make off with her artifact was…

Unacceptable.

She didn’t say that out loud, however. Dyna could recognize that her inner thoughts were beyond selfish, especially considering the situation.

“I need to do something to make this right!” she said.

“You’ve done enough.”

This time, Dyna could not suppress her wince. With a grimace, she turned aside.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Walter said. “You are injured and stressed, but you managed to save Hematite. Were it not for your actions, she might very well have died. The Think Tank believes that our rather large captive had a way—likely psychic power—of partially negating her abilities. Both psychic and artifact. I confirmed that in combat with him. My own abilities failed.”

Dyna blinked, looking back. “Hematite saw Ruby dying as well.”

“Think Tank says it was most likely a result of his presence. He is being brought to Sapphire to find out exactly how and why. We’ll likely find out other details about who he is through Sapphire as well.”

“But Ruby didn’t die. Beatrice said you managed to extract her.”

Walter nodded his head. “The psychic pulled back; temporarily, it seems. Beatrice’s analysis of the timeline of events puts his initial withdrawal roughly when the Ouija board was stolen. She suggests that acquiring the artifact sent orders for him to defend its extraction.”

“Then why was he here?”

“You and Hematite were after the Ouija board. The carrier moved this direction to regroup with him. He covered the carrier’s retreat. The scene of the fight between him and Ruby made a logical ambush point, assuming you and Hematite stopped to investigate.”

Dyna frowned to herself, wondering if they would have bypassed him completely if they had just powered on by or if he would still have popped out and shot them in the back, leading to the same outcome. She shoved the thought from her mind, however. The conversation was getting off track. After they got back, there would be a full debriefing. Dyna had been through a few of those kinds of meetings so far. They would list everything that went wrong, right, and what could have been done at every step of the way to improve the situation.

Those kinds of meetings always felt bad. Yes, she had likely made a plethora of mistakes. It was easy to point them all out in hindsight; debriefing meetings weren’t filled with all the stress, adrenaline, and uncertainty.

But all that regarded the past. At the moment, Dyna was more interested in the future. Specifically, the future of the Ouija board.

Beatrice was having problems with the power outage, but she would still have a better idea than most. Before being ambushed, she had said that the thief appeared on camera, thus narrowing down a number of possible routes and confirming that he had moved north. They might have caught him had the mountain man not appeared—which was distressingly good planning on his part—but now that he was gone…

“We should still be able to catch him.”

“Dyna…”

“Aren’t I supposed to be Onyx?” All that talk of code names to keep her real name off the records and they just went and ignored it whenever they wanted. “Standing around talking is just letting him get further and further away.”

Walter opened his mouth, lower lip a bit puffy and bruised, but paused as his phone rang. He lifted it up to his ear immediately and listened without speaking. After a moment, his brow furrowed. “Is that the wisest course of action?”

Whatever was said, Walter didn’t seem to like it. His lips pressed downward. He nodded to nobody, then turned back to Dyna and held out the phone.

“It’s for you.”

Blinking, Dyna took the phone. “Beatrice?”

“Not as such, no,” a voice even deeper than Walter’s responded. “This is Theta. Administrator Theta. We had a brief meeting some time ago where we discussed an operation involving the Tartarus organization, if you recall.”

“I remember.” It was a bit difficult to forget the lanky man.

“Ah. Good. Good,” he said, voice momentarily distant as if he were looking away from the phone for a moment. “I imagine that operation will be put on hold for the time being. At least until the current crisis is resolved.”

Dyna pressed her lips together, biting back a sardonic retort. Although she wanted to go after the Ouija board, she was in no state to try to call up Tartarus and pretend she actually liked any of them. It was nice that the administrator recognized that, but at the same time… “There is a thief making off with a powerful artifact-like object at the moment and—”

“Yes, the wee-gee board,” he said, pronouncing it slightly off. “I have been informed. It is the opinion of the administration board that such an object cannot be left in hostile hands.”

“Oh. Then we’re going after him?”

“Not quite.”

Dyna’s momentarily uplifted hope stalled. “No?”

“Rather, analysis of the situation had the board putting it to a vote. Two votes, actually. The first to keep Beatrice at an elevated operational status. It passed with an eleven of thirteen majority vote.”

“Good.”

“Yes, I am aware of your opinions on Beatrice,” he said, sounding… disgruntled? It made Dyna wonder if he had been one of the two dissenting members. “But the second vote is more pertinent to you. Seven of thirteen members of the administrator council wish to use your abilities to resolve the situation in a decisive manner.”

“My… abilities?”

“We are aware of your actions in Idaho Falls. Your attempts to create artifacts.”

“You are?” Dyna asked, not sure how to feel at the moment. On one hand, it was a bit of an invasion of privacy. And while expecting that invasion lessened the blow somewhat, she almost found it more annoying that she had wasted time and money traveling back and forth and renting the apartment.

On the other hand… It was a relief in some small way. If the Carroll Institute knew what she had been doing and allowed it to continue, there was some diffusion of responsibility for the cause of this incident. It wasn’t all her fault. Some of it, for sure, but some was on the shoulders of the administrators.

“In consultation with Doctor Cross, Doctor Livermore, Sapphire, et al. Various experts in the subjects of artifacts, psionic resonance, and effectively everything we know about psionics in general,” Administrator Theta said, continuing. “You represent an anomaly. An artificer may bind with multiple artifacts, but the resonance typically interferes, resulting in reduced effectiveness or no effects at all. You have created these… gadgets and have made use of several in conjunction with your mirror. We believe you possess the capacity to use multiple artifacts simultaneously.”

“So how does that help us now? You want me to try making an artifact that can catch the thief?”

“If you believe you can, then yes. However, we are sending you an alternate solution. A pair of artifacts. A proper one, not these gadgets you have been making. The truck is currently en route and should arrive within ten minutes.”

Dyna couldn’t help her widening eyes. They were sending out unbound artifacts? That went against… a lot of protocols. The administrators must have been more worried about the situation than even she was. Though she did find it somewhat amusing that they had not offered any level of support when the Aztec calendar had been stolen despite that being a ‘portent of apocalypse’ rather than just a somewhat unreliable ‘gadget’ as Theta was terming the Ouija board. “What do the artifacts do?”

“As you are aware, artifacts do something different depending on their wielders. It is the themes we are interested in. Namely, tracking and capture. I do not wish to further color your expectations, so I shall say no more.”

“I understand,” Dyna said. There were no concrete theories regarding the manifestation of artifact abilities simply due to a lack of sample size, but Dyna had read some of Doctor Cross’s papers on the subject. He posited that the artificer’s expectations of the artifact shaped it abilities in much the same way its themes and history did.

If Theta explained too much, Dyna might find the artifact too limiting to be able to help in this situation. Instead, if she went into it thinking that it would assist no matter what it was, then there was a very real chance that it would simply assist.

“If you are unable to make use of the artifacts, do not fret. We are investigating alternate solutions to this issue, as demonstrated by Beatrice’s continued elevated status,” he said, once again sounding disgruntled. “There are other plans in motion to secure the wee-gee board.”

“Ouija.”

“Hm?”

“Nothing… just… Wait for the artifacts, use them to capture the thief. I can do it. I won’t… I won’t fail again.”

“As I said, do not stress. How are your injuries?”

Dyna, thinking about it, flinched slightly. “Fine. Bit of swelling in my shoulder, but I’m mitigating it with an ice pack. Some scrapes and bruises too. The doctors sprayed me down with some antibiotics. I can still move. I can do this.”

“Excellent, excellent. I look forward to seeing what you can do. Theta out.”

The call disconnected as he spoke. Dyna pulled the phone away from her ear and handed it back over to Walter, who had stood by watching with a faint frown on his face the entire time.

He accepted the phone, glanced at the screen to see the disconnected call, then looked back to Dyna. “Whatever he asked, you are not required under any contract to comply with. If you’re not feeling well—”

“I’m fine,” Dyna said. Maybe if she said it enough times… “I’m fine. Thank you for worrying about me, but I need to do this.”

Walter pressed his lips together, but gave a curt nod. “Very well. I will support you.”

“You’re injured.”

“You should have seen the other guy.”

Dyna let out a small snort before an ill feeling welled up in her stomach as she remembered the way that man just snapped backward. Shuddering, she glanced back to the alleyway where a pair of silver-suited men were carefully picking up the pieces of the broken Operation game. They placed each piece into a separate silver bag before placing the bags into a larger security box. The kind used for storing artifacts.

It wasn’t long before a heavy-duty security van rolled up through the street. One of those vans with thick metal walls and doors, used to transport cash and other valuables. Except, while those were normally painted a dull gray, this van was black with gold highlights. The Carroll Institute logo on its side gleamed in the flashing ambulance lights.

The artifact had arrived.