A/N: In which Ral and Emmara search, Jace is lost, and Maree's plan comes to fruition.

Chapter Eighteen

"Well, that was unpleasant," Emmara said from behind Ral. He grunted, spat out some mud, then grunted again, before resisting the urge to make an obscene gesture in the direction of Nivix.

"Clearly, Beleren isn't in there," he said, trying to suppress a coughing fit and failing miserably.

"Agreed," said Emmara, wringing out her dress. "Let's try the next location."

Ral glanced across at her. Her face was set and determined even beneath the smears of mud. Despite the now-draggled nature of her hair and clothes, she was still ethereally lovely. He was suddenly, absurdly conscious of his own half-week's growth of beard and how bloodshot his eyes must be, thanks to running on nothing but coffee and naps for the past three days. Lightning crackled around him for a moment, sputtering out mainly because of the safeguards on his belt rather than an actual, conscious effort on his part to suppress it.

"Are you all right?" Emmara asked, her voice sounding vaguely concerned.

"Hm? Yes," Ral answered, shaking his head. Damn emotions. It was the lack of sleep getting to him, nothing more. He looked up at Nivix, gathered mana, and let loose a single bolt of white lightning into the sky, then waited. Mere seconds later, a new location appeared on his gauntlet. At least the Firemind was efficient, even if Lightning Bug was currently leaving something to be desired.

Which was, of course, yet another thing that was Ral's fault. Squelching along in his muddy boots, he kicked frustratedly at the ground. It felt as if the mud were slowly soaking up from the insides of his soles through his legs and into his stomach. Jace had been taken from inside his office, along with all the information necessary to build another flux machine. While Ral was sleeping there. And now, Lightning Bug was doing a piss-poor job at finding him again, even with the Guildpact's actual brain patterns to use as a homing mechanism.

The Selesnyan elementals grew out of the ground as Emmara gestured, picking Ral up as he walked forward. If it weren't for them, Ral thought mulishly, he wouldn't even be moving at a reasonable pace. Even so, it would take them a solid five or ten minutes to reach the new location.

Ral's mouth opened and words fell out. "How do you know Jace?" That hadn't been what he'd intended to say.

There was a pause, but Emmara answered quite levelly, "I've known him since he was a child—well, a teenager."

How old was she? "Were you two ever—" Ral needed to close his mouth and keep it shut.

There was a tense pause. "Ever what?" Emmara prompted.

Fuck. "Um. You know. Involved."

"He's not really my type," she said lightly. "Why?"

Ral grunted something. He probably should have been relieved, but he had seen the way Jace had looked at Emmara during the Implicit Maze. If they hadn't been a couple, it meant the mind mage might not be over her. Competing with a dream might actually be worse than the alternative. "Dunno, just interested," Ral muttered eventually.

Emmara, perhaps out of politeness, didn't speak again, and Ral managed to keep himself from vomiting up more word bile until they reached their destination. This turned out to be a huge, empty building that had probably been used as an Izzet lecture hall at some point, but was now dark and forbidding. A huge chain on the door was stamped with the Simic crest.

Ral glanced upward. The storm overhead was raging, and he could feel the knot of mana coalescing, but it was weaker than it should be. Lightning Bug might be a prototype, but it shouldn't be this shitty. This was their fourth stop, and at each one, the signal had been too damn weak. Ral ground his teeth. Any moment now, the Firemind was going to contact him and tell him he'd failed and someone else was being put on the project. What the hell was going on?

He stared at the readings on his belt, chewing on his lip. Bad match. The equations could not be wrong—they could not be wrong, dammit! He'd barely changed anything. Had he input something wrong this time? Screwed up the boundary conditions?

"Are we going to check this or just stand around?" Emmara asked, sounding sharper than she had yet.

"Let me think," snarled Ral, reaching up a hand to yank at his hair in frustration. The first—and strongest—signal had run them into a group of Azorius arresters, including Lavinia, who had given them a tired nod. As they'd left, they had passed the crippled Orzhov envoy, surrounded by thrulls. The second had taken them to outside one of the smaller Simic laboratories, and Ral had been somewhat more hopeful, but there was absolutely no sign of anything like a kidnapped Guildpact. The third signal had been the one above the entrance to the Undercity, where they had nearly drowned in mud before being rescued by some Golgari, who were surprisingly polite.

And every single damn time the signal had peaked when Ral and Emmara arrived.

He stared up at the sky. What was this—wishful thinking? Desire for Jace didn't equal Jace's actual brain patterns. What if he hadn't fucked anything up? If he had, this was entirely useless. Ral tapped angrily at his equipment. Much as he hated to admit it, the Firemind should have caught any obvious errors, and Niv-Mizzet had as much stake as he did in the safe return of the Guildpact—though Ral felt he had something more of a stake in the safe return of Jace Beleren.

So what if the reason he couldn't find a match wasn't because there was anything wrong with the thing doing the matching, but because there was something wrong with the thing he was trying to match?

That was it. That was the idea he'd needed. He felt the clouds lift from his mind, heard the external storm intensify as his thoughts began to speed up. Lavinia—himself, Emmara—the Orzhov maze runner—someone from the Simic, the Golgari—the signals they were chasing were the Maze-runners themselves. Not the original Jace, just the echoes of his mind left from the forging of the Guildpact.

But Jace himself should be resonating more strongly than any of them were—unless—

A sudden pain in his hand kicked him away from that line of reasoning. They would know if the Guildpact were broken. They would know if Jace were—

But then how? How could Jace's own brain patterns not be matching with the patterns he had left in the flux machine? Unless they were being suppressed, rewritten, the equations that Jace himself had helped create turned backwards and used against him—

"Ral?" He gasped sharply.

"Yeah. Just. Okay. Give me a minute. I need to—tune in."

"Tune in?" Emmara echoed, but her voice was a faint whisper in the back of his mind as Ral turned his brain inward and reached for the Firemind itself. It sizzled burning across his awareness, and he flinched slightly, shaking himself in irritation. Ral did not like the sensation and would not have used it had he not needed to speak to Niv-Mizzet rather badly.

What is it, Zarek? Do you know where the Guildpact is?

In his head, the dragon's voice was even louder than it was in person. Ral winced. I know how to find him. We have to stop looking at the individual signals and triangulate them. There should be ten stronger signals and an eleventh that matches each of them. That's where he is.

There was a waiting, considering sort of pause. Hm, rumbled the Firemind. You'd better be right about this.

Would I have signaled you if I weren't?

The dragon did not respond, but after a moment, Ral felt the heat of Niv-Mizzet's attention turn away from him, as it focused once again onto the storm above the city.

"What's going on?" Emmara asked.

Ral stared at her. Wasn't it obvious? No, she seemed genuinely confused. "The Maze-runners," he said.

"What?"

Oh. Of course. She hadn't been privy to his conversation with Niv. "I just spoke with the Firemind," he said impatiently. "Project Lightning Bug keeps finding the Maze-runners instead of Jace. He drew all our minds together. We still retain an imprint of his mental patterns."

"But surely that should be fainter than his own mind?"

"Yes," Ral agreed grimly. "It should. But it isn't."

His gauntlet beeped once and another location flashed across the screen, one which Ral himself recognized. It was an old tower at the edge of the Tenth District that the Izzet had used for their experiments until a dispute over jurisdiction came up and it was confiscated by the Azorius.

"Come on, let's go," he told Emmara, flashing the location over to her. She nodded tersely, and the elementals rose at her command.

colors fire and brimstone elements raging heat lightning

fallingFALLINGfalling

pain in his chest pain in his mind pain and companion missing gone

lightning on his tail and chasing it gone hands on thighs and sighs on lips dragon above dragon below

a bright red thread of pain holding and directing, a puppet dancing on the puppeteer's instruction

The old tower looked just as deserted as it had the last time Ral had come here, sneaking down in the middle of the night to do some quick skyline testing. It hadn't required much stealth, either, once he realized the Azorius guards had given up and gone home at sundown. Now, however, despite the boarded-up windows and the rounded, crumbling stones that made it up, there was something different about it. Ral could feel it in the air—a sharp, alive humming that made the cobblestones sing beneath his feet.

Above them, the storm clouds whirled in a tightening spiral. "Tandris," Ral said.

"Yes?"

"Do you think you can distract whoever's in there?"

"Is there anyone in there?" He gave her a brief, irritated glance, and she held up her hands. "All right. If you're that certain this is the right place, then I'm sure my elementals and I can draw their attention."

"Wonderful," Ral said. "I'll be going then."

"You're not signaling the dragon?"

"I'm sure he'll be here soon enough," shrugged Ral. And if I don't tell him, maybe I can go in and get Jace out before he notices.

"All right," Emmara said. "Give me a few minutes to get their attention."

Ral nearly said, "You need more than one?" but decided that there was no point delaying the rescue effort for a single snarky comment. Instead, he merely nodded and headed round to the back of the building, shifting impatiently from foot to foot. When the inevitable angry pounding and generally crashing and ripping noises had been going on for what he judged sufficiently long, he drew down the storm winds and floated himself up to about the third floor. Good thing he'd gone over all the building plans when he was trying to get in the first time.

The section of thin metal wall he hadn't needed to use to enter the last time was there when he tapped at it, and it only took a few minutes with one of his more powerful tools to melt a hole right into the tower and vault in. Good. Now he just needed to find Jace.

Ral cracked his neck and drew a small pouch from his belt. Time to test out another one of his experiments, this one something he had working on since the last disastrous time he lost Jace. He opened the pouch, let the powder inside spill out, and then sent a tiny spark forward to prime it. There was a moment of stillness as the glittering particles hung in the air, and then they exploded outward, tracing along the walls in bright little spirals as they followed the currents of mana in the building. They paused for a moment at a fork in the passage, and then twisted away upwards along the stairs.

Ral heard a shout of surprise from further along the passage, shrugged, and flexed his gauntleted hand with a grim smile. He'd been subtle enough about making his way in here. Subtlety was overrated anyway, and he could feel the storm beating inside him, begging to be let out.

Lightning erupted from the air around him as he began to run down the passageway. This was where they had taken Jace. Ral knew the feeling of being right, and he knew the feeling of dancing along a precipice. And right now both of them were rising inside him.

Rounding the corner, he ran into a group of goblins in Izzet outfits, who had a variety of weapons leveled at him. "Really?" he said aloud, and it was the electricity that answered. The goblins didn't even have a chance to cry out before the lightning surged through all of them, whipping their bodies back into painful bowed arches. Ral stared at their writhing forms coolly, letting the lightning continue for longer than might have been strictly necessary. The odor of cooked flesh followed him as he hurried on down the passage.

Emmara seemed to have done her work well, as he encountered only one further party of guards—easily dispatched—before arriving at a door glowing and swarming with the motes he had released from his pouch. Just one more—

Fuck it. The storm boiled up from behind him where it had been waiting. The screaming winds tore past him and caught at the door—and it belled inward with a creak, straining against its hinges. For a heartbeat longer, it tried to stand against him, but Ral knew that Jace was on the other side of it, and it was just a door. He blew into the room surrounded by gales and crackling clouds.

The storm died as soon as he saw what was inside. One wall of the room was hidden completely beneath a larger version of the flux machine, mountains of blinking lights and manalines hanging from it, tied in neat bundles. And on his knees before it, shirtless, with at least five wires running from his body to the machine, was Jace Beleren. His eyes were shut, his body slumping loosely forward, but the lightning-wound on his chest and his tattoos were glowing a murky red.

"Jace," Ral said hoarsely, hurrying to his side. Most of the manalines were attached via the same plastic disks Ral himself had used, but the thickest ran directly into the base of the Guildpact's spine, the flesh around the entry point puckered and red, weeping clear fluid. "Mother of rains."

His fingers shaking, he detached the disks from Jace's flesh, and each came away with a sickening popping noise. The dim glow surrounding Jace's form did not abate.

"Jace," Ral said again. "Can you hear me?"

The eyes snapped open, and Ral had to slide his eyes away from the bright, scarlet light.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" demanded a familiar voice from behind Ral.

"Evening, Maree," he answered carelessly, not bothering to turn. "Didn't think you had it in you to betray the League."

She made an angry noise. "You fucking asshole. I'm not betraying the League, I'm trying to save it."

"Save it," Ral responded incredulously. "Because kidnapping the Guildpact is definitely the best way to ensure the longevity of your organization."

"I didn't mean to!" Maree protested angrily. "If you hadn't randomly been fucking him, Zarek—I'm just trying to get the League away from that damn lizard! You can help me, or you can fight me. Don't think you'll enjoy it, though."

"You want to do this?" Ral asked, finally rising to his feet and turning around. "You sure?" A single spark sprang from his fingers at his call, hanging in the air for a moment before dissipating.

"I don't need to kill you myself," Maree said in a flat voice. "Beleren, kill him."

"What—" Ral started, and then the pain hit. Lines of color splintered the world in front of his eyes, dragging him into darkness. A hand reached into his chest and cupped around his heart, then slid up through his throat and caught his head as well and squeezed. A sense of pressure and the ringing silence in the air after a thunderclap, but the silence pounded in a staccato arrhythmic pattern, fluttering in his chest like a dozen lightning bugs trying to break free. The hand was in his chest, squeezing, ripping, tearing him apart as he drowned in a strange red mist.

Ral was on the floor, gasping for breath, both hands on his throat. His vision snapped violently back into focus with a twinge of pain in both eyes, heart beating desperately against his chest. The roaring in his ears was still there, and it took him a long moment to realize that it wasn't just in his ears. The storm was raging around him, wind and lightning and rain pelting the platform where he lay, and as he looked up wearily, he saw that the entire roof of the building was gone. The Firemind had arrived.

Maree spat curses in between yelling instructions to Jace, who was floating on a billowing curtain of mana, outlined by the glittering dust that still wafted through the air. The remaining cord had stretched and uncoiled and now swayed gently, tethering him to the machine, which remained intact. Jace still glowed a dull red, and the light reflected off the nearby clouds, turning them the dirty color of old blood.

Ral spat blood and pulled himself wearily to his feet. "Hey Maree!" he shouted. "Do you know what ripping the insides out of your favorite project felt like?" He grinned as she turned to him. "Easy."

The ex-chamberlain's face turned flat and emotionless beneath her lens. "Zarek," she said, and the corners of her mouth turned up very slightly. "Do you know what ripping the mind out of your lover felt like?"

The air itself broke apart and rearranged as Ral's hand went up, but Maree's hand went to her belt, and the lightning bolt fizzled out before it reached her. "Liberating," she grinned, and crimson arced and curled around Ral again.

"Zarek!" roared Niv-Mizzet, and his voice sounded thick and slurred. "Turn off the machine!" Ral glanced upward for a second to see that both of Jace's hands were outstretched, and, outlined in thick, bright dust, there was a tight, swirling coil of mana reaching from them to the dragon's head.

"Ah, fuck," Ral muttered. There was no way Jace was strong enough to take on the Firemind—and yet—the dragon's wingbeats were starting to stutter as he lost altitude, and Ral's dust swirled thicker and darker around the machine and the greedy umbilical cord connecting it and Jace. Ral turned toward the machine—and a heavy blow caught him across the side of his face, snapping his head back and throwing him to the ground.

He cried out in pain, red clouding his vision along one side, but managed to scrabble out of the way as one of Maree's weirds raised its fist to attack again. "Shit fuck balls," Ral spat eloquently. Every muscle in his body was hurting suddenly, and pain was rising behind his eyes even through the adrenaline.

"Give up, Zarek!" Maree called. "The League will rise to true power without the interference of those who followed the dragon!"

"Oh shut up," Ral groaned, sending a burst of lightning at the weird attacking him, but it burst across the skin and sizzled ineffectually. Ral had to roll hastily to the side again as it swung.

"Zarek!" the Firemind called again, his roar clouded and clotted with pain, and Ral ground his teeth together and tried another bolt. Maybe if he just used more lightning, he could overload its sensors and—

The weird paused for an instant, and Ral felt a moment of hope, and then it stooped forward, the electricity still running across it in little waves, and closed its enormous hand around his throat.

"Hold him still!" Maree called gleefully. "Let him watch like I had to when he destroyed my life's work!"

Ral choked, dragging ineffectually at the hand on his throat. "You're throwing one hell of a tantrum about a weird and one fucking project," he managed.

"You were able to do anything you wanted," she responded calmly. "The dragon never cared. You destroyed my project and then you sabotaged Lightning Bug. And you stole the flux project from me and gave it to the fucking dragon."

"I never—ghhhk—sabotaged—"

"I know you did. You did it to protect Beleren, didn't you? Well, fine. See if you can protect him now."

The clouds were so red they were almost burning, and Niv-Mizzet's roar of pain was dwindling into something closer to a shriek, as the dust swirled thicker and faster than ever. Electricity burst around Ral again, so blindingly white he couldn't even see, but it was no good. The weird's grip didn't even falter. He was done. Crushed. Failed. Scratch off one Zarek, unless he—unless he walked.

He could leave. It wouldn't help Jace or Niv, but Ral would survive. He could come back and eliminate Maree. With the element of surprise, he could probably deal with her. He could take the League from her. It could be his.

In that moment, the Eternities lay open before him, and he stared into them for the space of one—two—three heartbeats. Then he sighed, looked up at Jace's thin, hovering form, the scars that he could see as white blurs through the rain, and swore, letting the sudden feeling ebb away. This ended here, or not at all.

A rope of something green and viney appeared in Ral's peripheral vision, and suddenly, the weird was torn away violently backward. Ral coughed and rolled to the side again, then pulled himself to his hands and knees and scrabbled toward the flux machine. He slipped and slid on the wet platform, but he kept going.

Five steps—at each one, he expected to be pulled down and stopped again, but he wasn't. It was almost disappointing how easy it was to reach the machine—which was, of course, when Ral realized that he had no idea how to turn it off safely. It was giving off both mana and heat in thrumming, periodic waves. Just putting his hand near it told him this was a poor choice for the prospects of anyone nearby.

Ral looked at it critically for another moment, then reached out with a grimace and caught at the one remaining line tying it to Jace. Pain seared his hand even through the gauntlet, but he ignored it and tugged. For a moment, it resisted, and then there was a soft pop as the wires parted. The end of the cord hung in the wind and then floated gently toward the earth.

Staring upward, Ral watched as the line of mana between Jace and Niv-Mizzet started to thin and fray, strands of mana snapping off like the threads of a rope. Ral felt his weariness rising up to take him, and he staggered slightly—and the twisting, lazily-moving current of mana running from the machine to Jace increased in speed. More and more threads broke off from the main channel, and there was not enough dust to trace where it was going.

A jolt of pain struck Ral in the forehead, and he felt his vision shiver again, as the sudden ringing silence returned. "Jace—goddammit—no," he got out through gritted teeth. The pressure was less intense this time, but still enough to force Ral downwards to the wet ground, his knees striking hard enough that there should have been pain, but he couldn't feel it.

Through the rain and the wind and the fragmentation of his vision, he saw Maree stagger across the platform toward him, her hands clutched to her head. Ral managed a grim chuckle as she slipped and fell to the ground. "How does it feel, Maree?" he called out through the pound of blood in his ears. "If I'm going to die, at least I get the pleasure of watching Jace crush your mind first."

There was another figure on the roof, white-clad, also staggering beneath the sudden mental assault. Emmara's elementals were supporting her, but she was bent nearly double as she attempted to make it across the roof. She stopped, throwing her head back, and Ral saw her mouth form the word, 'Jace'. Her voice echoed softly in his ears, clearer than the howling of the thunder and the rain, somehow dropping out of the strange, oppressive silence.

Jace's mouth was open in a silent scream, mana streaming from him in all directions. Ral's eyes flicked to Emmara, then over to Maree, whose voice he heard faintly still repeating, "fucking dragon", then up to Jace.

All right, Ral told his aching body. Just one more thing, and then you can collapse. Fuck this. His right arm was heavy and tingling with pins and needles, and the first time he tried to move it, nothing happened. A second try got the fingers to flex. Finally, shutting his eyes and thinking about nothing else brought it up to head level, and then it was easy. There was mana writhing in the air everywhere, and if there was one thing Ral was good at—

Lightning arced from his fingertips up the trailing current to Jace's back, crawling up the Guildpact's spine and ending in his brain. Ral's body arced back as if he were the one being shocked, lips tugged back in a grimace from around his mouth.

The silence was replaced by soft repetition, one phrase, over and over again, overriding Emmara's voice and Maree's voice and the dragon's roar and the murmur of the voices of the people all around—kill them.

The lightning drew Ral further inward, as he searched frantically for any touch, any hint, any last little sigh of Jace Beleren. He was teetering, losing his footing, on the brink of falling in and losing himself entirely, and still there was nothing but a momentary, fleeting touch of blue, as one small puzzle piece of his mind searched for the matching edge.

He moved by instinct, not by logic, his left hand twitching upward and twisting a second arc of lightning toward Emmara, and he felt a second puzzle piece shudder to life, slotting into place, carrying with it—

-a young boy, bedraggled and confused, staring up at an opening door. With a strange double vision, he could see both the boy, as he looked out of the door, and the white-clad elf, as he looked into it—

-a young man, stinking of alcohol and hopelessness, who slurred and swayed his way to Emmara for her help—

-the memory of the memory of Emmara in bed with another elf, and a whispered confession of love—

His fingertips brushed the cloth of Jace's cloak, and for a moment, he saw the pattern igniting in fire in front of his eyes, the same pattern his instruments had recorded, the same pattern Lightning Bug had followed here, but fragmented and broken and full of holes. "Get the Maze-runners!" he shouted, and though he hadn't taken in the breath to shout, he felt Emmara's understanding blossom inside his head as if it were his own.

Lightning grew almost gently from her fingertips, and it was no longer really lightning, but the mana current arced up and then down and bounced down the side of the building where it crashed into—

-a suspect in a blue cloak and an Azorius arrester, suspiciously eying one another as they both tried to solve a deadly mystery—

-a serial killer who left little presents posed in stone and made both of them cringe over their coffee as they realized sleep would be fleeting for the next few days—

-laughing over some of the daily plaintiffs, also over coffee—

Ral smiled at that one, and Lavinia sent the lightning onward. The strange double memories cascaded through the links, too many and too strong to keep count of anymore, from the hot close mess that was the Rakdos club to the ferociousness of the Gruul playing through Jace's head, even to the pinpricks of pain in his throat and the feeling of his memories beginning to soak out through his blood and into the mouth of the angry vampire. It was the web that had formed the Guildpact, reconstructed in mana and lightning.

The pattern filled in, and Ral pushed through the pulsing anger of kill them, pushed and pushed and pushed, because there was one last memory, one safe space, one thing that Maree might not have been able to touch. With the pattern still sizzling through him, he reached out one last time and into a place that no one else could sense.

In the meaningless chaos that was the echo of the Blind Eternities, Ral's hand caught someone else's. Come back, he whispered. Jace. Then, after a pause. For us. For me.

Another memory. Looking at himself through Jace's eyes, his hair tousled, eyes groggy with sleep, their minds suddenly a strange, mixed-up soup. Jace was him and he was Jace and for one long instant there was nothing but the sudden respite from the nightmares, the calm quiet in the wake of fear and anger. And then he was looking back at the mind mage, whose blue eyes were heartbreakingly empty.

Jace looked at him, the dark forest of the strange plane at his back, and his eyes cleared, and he smiled.

Ral's eyes snapped open in time to see the red light flicker to blue and die, in time to see Niv-Mizzet turn tail and flee. Jace hung for another heartbeat in the air, and then he began to fall. Ral caught at the last fleeing dregs of the mana and Jace's fall slowed as the storm winds swirled around him and then deposited him gently in Ral's arms.

He'd lost weight again. When Jace had disappeared, he had been getting a little soft around the edges, had, in fact, occasionally reminded Ral that he needed to eat. Now his ribs protruded over his shrunken stomach and even his cheekbones were sharp beneath the flesh of his cheeks.

"Goddammit, Jace," Ral said.

Jace's eyelashes fluttered, and his lips curved into something that was almost a smile. "Sorry," he murmured. "Maybe you shouldn't have slept through me being kidnapped." His head slid to the side as his eyes closed, ending up pillowed against Ral's shoulder, and his breathing softened as he slipped into sleep.

Ral slumped over him, pressing his forehead into Jace's. Someone else could deal with—everything else that needed to be dealt with now. Whatever. Fuck it.

Fuck it.