Freedom, Humanity, and Other Delusions (Death's Handmaiden Book 3) by Niall Teasdale (best summer reads txt) 📕

of given up, I think. She says there’s insufficient evidence for her to agree with my belief but cannot find sufficient evidence to disprove it either.’

‘She certainly seems to be wise for someone of her apparent age. I think I’d like to meet her.’

‘She’s pretty shy. As far as I know, I’m the only person to ever see her.’

‘That’s quite possibly true. I do have a few tricks up my sleeve unavailable to the majority of people, however.’

~~~

236/1/18.

Nava stood in what was approximately the centre of the school, between the teaching buildings. More precisely, in the space between the teaching buildings used by the first four years; the buildings for the fifth and sixth years were generally smaller, but they had a pair of slightly larger structures for the more specialised and intensive studies which were a little away from the other ones to the south.

‘What are you going to do when you find her?’ Mitsuko asked. Mitsuko and Melissa had come out to see the start of Nava’s Harbinger hunt, even if Nava had suggested it was going to be boring and they should just leave her to it.

‘Talk to her,’ Nava replied. ‘Well, I believe Trudy to be benevolent, or at least not malevolent, so I’d like to talk to her. If that turns out to be wishful thinking, Carina is going to be short an invisible friend and I’ll deal with that if it happens.’

‘If Trudy is responsible for Carina’s delusions–’

‘I don’t believe she is. I may be wrong.’

‘From what you said,’ Melissa said, ‘I think you’re right. Trudy appears to be discouraging Carina from this Key to Darkness belief.’

‘A skilled manipulator could appear to do just that while really encouraging it,’ Mitsuko countered. ‘If Trudy is a Harbinger, she’s probably had a couple of hundred thousand years to learn to manipulate people.’

Nava shook her head. ‘A couple of hundred. Not that that isn’t plenty of time, but the colony on Grimalkin is about two hundred years old. I doubt Trudy would have encountered humans prior to that. It seems unlikely that the psychology of the two species would be closely related. Applying techniques from Harbingers to humans would likely result in less than perfect results.’

‘That’s just being pedantic. If you’re going to talk to her, be careful.’

‘Have you ever known me to be careless?’

‘Be more careful then.’

‘I’ll try.’ Nava focused her mind on the schema for the Sense Spirits spell Rochester and Hoshi had originally created to hunt for a ghost. Quintessence flowed, expanded, returned… ‘Nothing,’ Nava said. ‘To be expected. She could be anywhere and it’s a big campus.’

‘So, what now?’ Melissa asked.

‘Now I go to the area where Carina’s living and try again.’

‘This could take hours. Days!’

‘I did say it would be boring to follow me around.’

~~~

It was boring and also lacking in results. By lunchtime, Nava had nothing to report. She had lost Mitsuko and Melissa after about thirty minutes, but she had continued walking around the campus and setting off pings every so often to no effect. There was Flight Club in the afternoon, and the sky was clear, and Nava was seriously contemplating dropping the matter to try again tomorrow.

Still, Flight Club was not now, so Nava walked back to the teaching buildings and tried again. She set her mind to the spell, sent out energy to act as a sensor pulse, and… To the east, a single target. Nava turned on her heel and began marching in that direction.

After five hundred metres, she fired off another pulse. Same direction. She continued walking. By now, she was walking through the residential areas. She was, if she was remembering right, heading straight for Carina’s apartment building. Maybe Trudy had been elsewhere this morning but was checking in on Carina this afternoon.

She checked again after another three hundred metres and got the same result. She was fairly sure she was getting closer, but the spell did not provide that kind of information well. You got a direction and an indication of numbers. She tried a deeper analysis of the returning signal and got an impression of form. That form seemed to be similar to the Harbinger she had encountered before, but then she had never used this spell on that Harbinger, so it was hard to tell for sure.

After another hundred metres, Nava changed course slightly to follow the direct line to her target. She was close, she was sure of it. And she was heading straight for Carina’s building, maybe even straight for her apartment if Nava was remembering the position right.

She stopped walking and looked around. The Ascend spell she was about to use had one significant drawback: you could not take anything with you when you jumped into the Q-field. That included clothes, which were left behind when the spell was cast. Nava had personal experience of this, having left her clothes in the middle of a nightclub the first time she had used it. Mitsuko and Courtney had been with her that time, so they had collected her outfit for her. Now she was alone, which was, in retrospect, something of a mistake.

Selecting an area behind some bushes at the side of the walkway that happened to be reasonably close to the wall of one of the buildings, Nava crouched down under some cover. If someone found her uniform while she was in another reality, things were likely to get interesting, but she would hopefully find them where she left them. And then she would have to get dressed while hiding behind bushes that barely reached her hips, but she would solve that problem when she got to it.

One last time, she cast Sense Spirits and got the answer she expected. Then she spent a second pushing her mind into the right shape for Ascend, forced quintessence into the spell, and found herself looking at a muted, weird landscape. She also found herself looking at her clothes as they dropped to the ground through her insubstantial body, but it