Guild Boss (Ghost Hunters #14)(45)

“Look,” Lucy said. “The signs, the casinos, and the hotels. Everything is working again. The power company fixed the problem. Thank goodness. We won’t have to walk all the way back to my apartment.”

Car engines hummed. Headlights blinked back to life. The Alien Storm roller coaster lurched forward. The casinos blazed and sparkled in the night.

Gabriel dropped his pack on the floor of the car and surveyed the brilliantly illuminated Strip.

“This should take us off the front page of the Curtain tomorrow morning,” he said. “I’ll be interested to know what went wrong at the power station.”





CHAPTER NINETEEN





Lucy rezzed the lock of her front door, walked into the hall, and rezzed the lights. With a cheerful chortle, Otis bounced down to the floor and zipped into the living room. He stopped in front of the sliding glass doors that opened onto the balcony and chortled again.

Lucy opened the door for him. He bounded across the small balcony, hopped up onto the railing, and then disappeared over the side.

“Where is he going?” Gabriel said.

“Sometimes he takes off at night for a few hours. He often returns with a little chunk of quartz or amber. I think he hangs out with other dust bunnies in the ruins. When he’s finished partying, he’ll come home.”

“How does he get back inside your apartment? It’s two stories above the street. Please don’t tell me you leave the balcony doors open at night.”

“No, of course not. When he gets back he’ll show up on the balcony and let me know he’s home. Trust me, he’s not subtle about it.”

Gabriel looked around, contemplating her warmly lit apartment with a speculative expression. It wasn’t hard to guess what he was thinking.

“It’s kind of scary to realize that everything can suddenly stop functioning in a heartbeat, isn’t it?” she said.

“It’s an eye-opener, that’s for sure,” Gabriel said. “Makes me think about what it must have been like for the First Generation when they realized the Curtain had closed and they were stranded with Old World technology that was crumbling in front of them.”

She shivered. “Yes.”

She went back into the entry hall, set her pack on the floor, and slipped off her leather jacket.

Gabriel followed her and took off his own pack. His grim expression worried her.

“What?” she asked.

“I’m thinking that what happened tonight makes you realize we may have become too dependent on rez amber to operate everything from our cars to our refrigerators.” He shrugged out of his jacket. “The city-states need to consider developing alternative sources of power.”

Lucy sat down on the hall bench and went through the process of removing her boots. “Resonating amber has always been cheap, available, and nonpolluting. Pretty much the perfect energy source.”

“It’s also been extremely reliable. I’ve never heard of an incident like the one we witnessed tonight. Rez amber has to be tuned periodically. It can melt if you push enough energy through it, but a city’s power grid is fueled by thousands of expertly tuned amber bars. They’re designed and installed in an alternating sequence on a chain that makes it impossible for a large number of them to fail simultaneously.”

“You know what they say—there’s no such thing as impossible.”

“True.” He sat down beside her and unbuckled his scarred and scuffed boots.

“Are you wondering if this might be a problem that will require the Guild’s attention?” she asked.

He set one boot neatly under the bench and went to work on the other. “Yes.”

“Seems like a problem for engineers, not the Guild.”

“You said it yourself, Lucy. Something destroyed the Dead City eons ago. What if the mining operations down in the Ghost City have unleashed that force again?”

She sat back, lounging against the wall, and thought about all that had happened in the past twenty-four hours. “You know, we suddenly have a lot of mysteries tangled up here.”

“Yes, we do. And it strikes me that, viewed from a certain perspective, they all involve you.”

“Me?” She snapped to an upright position on the bench. “You think I’m to blame for the fact that someone tried to kidnap and murder you? And for the missing clockwork doll? And … and those guys who attacked us down in the Ghost City? And the lights going out on the Strip tonight?”

“No, I don’t think any of those things is your fault. I’m just saying that in one way or another you’ve been in the picture, starting with the kidnapping two months ago.”

She slanted a long glance at him. “I sense a conspiracy theory.”

“At this point it doesn’t amount to a theory, just an observation.”

“You can’t possibly connect me to that power outage tonight.”

Gabriel didn’t answer. He put the other boot under the bench, got to his feet, and went to the jacket he had hung up in the closet. Reaching into a pocket, he took out one of the two amber pendants he had confiscated from the men who had confronted them in the Ghost City. He studied it as if he was trying to read cryptic runes.

“Gabriel?” she said.

He looked up. “I have to find whoever tuned this amber. It’s the key.”