Inyanga's Star and Other Constellations

Part II. Maia's Star

That night would be impossible to forget. Why didn't people understand? Men are dangerous. Maia was only doing her job.

The call came in, a 109, and these days the guardia had the work force power to respond to package theft fast. Not like in the old days.

A surveillance link went back in time to show the man tailing a couple, two women, inside their building.

Certainly, in a building with dozens of units, a few tenants were men. He could have been a tenant, a neighbor, and they were being polite, holding the secure door for him, so he wouldn't have to wait for it to close, and unlock it again.

The man, the perp, let them get ahead on the stairwell, Maia watched through the link that followed him. When they were gone he doubled back down the stairs to the linked mail collection space.

Packages and mail could be linked right inside customers' apartments, for a fee, but most little units in a place like this wouldn't have a designated link coordinate reception area inside, and without one, a large package or a long one could land over a fish tank or smash down on a glass coffee table. For a fee, one could get a link right outside the door, or even right inside the door.

In this barrio, most tenants would pick up packages from the mail room. No extra fee.

Only this building, like so many in this barrio, didn't have a mail room so much as a side of the hall on the ground floor before the stairs, where packages piled up against the wall. A gold mine for a package thief who had made it past the fingerprint lock doors.

There had been something so creepy about watching the man through that surveillance link. Watching a strange man creep around, looking like he didn't belong there, while dozens of tenants were home, many asnooze in their beds. He crept with the body language of knowing he wasn't suppose to be there, of someone who didn't live in that place, of violation, a known violation, penetrating someone else's residence. At times Maia wanted to look away.

The perpetrator had a black market magic connection, and he pulled out his matte black gnomon wand. Contraband gnomons could not be made of the same material as the real thing; the knockoffs couldn't get the material transmitted directly from the stars. Only a gnomon stolen from a magician right after mortality would be the genuine article. As the man stood over the packages with his knockoff, one by one they disappeared off somewhere.

No portal needed. Packages straight up vanished. Maia made a note. Not only did he have illegal magic access, a true magician would have needed to teach him Constellation schemas for direct linking without a portal — faster, less work, and a huge breach of the law, for both parties.

That had been eleven minutes ago; the next tenants to come in noticed the mail pile was missing, and called the guardia on a link. Time travel magic could be used to watch a perp, but code prevented the use of a temporal link to go get him eleven minutes in the past. For a minor felony, they had to go get him in the present.

If they had taken the time, gone back in time to give themselves a little more of it, maybe the bloodshed could have been avoided.

But the schlucks up top considered it too costly for the budget.

"I was just doing my job," she would say again and again. "By the book."

Linking together straight to the address, Maia and her partner Ura looked up at the gray highrise, most light in the windows off, and Ura took a victim statement from the woman who had made the report. Ura would only be a link away, as Maia cast a foot traffic tracing spell tied to the time stamp at the moment of the theft, and slinked off after the suspect's footsteps.