Alex Verus 5: Hidden by Benedict Jacka

worlds. It’s a dangerous place and I’ve tried to avoid it in the past year—too many narrow escapes—but right now it was the best chance I had. I undressed, switched off the lights, and lay in bed staring up at the ceiling, searching through the futures to see if a visit to Elsewhere would find Anne.
    It didn’t work. I lay awake in bed for a long time, searching back and forth through the hours of the night, but every time I came up dry. Either Anne wasn’t asleep, or there was some other reason I couldn’t reach her. At last exhaustion caught up with me and I fell into restless dreams where I was lost in an endless maze of corridors, trying to reach someone whom I could hear calling but who never seemed to come any closer. There was somebody following me but I couldn’t see who it was, and every time I turned on them their footsteps would fade into silence and I was left alone.

chapter 4
    I t was early next morning.
    Sonder’s flat is in St. John’s Wood, a London borough just northwest of the city centre. It’s famous for Lord’s Cricket Ground and for being one of the most expensive places to live in all of Britain, if not Europe. I used to come by often, but it had been nearly a year since my last visit.
    The inside of the flat was a mess; it didn’t look as though Sonder had tidied up since the last time I’d been here. Dust-covered computer equipment competed for shelf space with stacks of books; the books tended to win the argument, leaving cables and electronics to be pushed with old piles of paper into the corners. A new and well-cared-for PC sat on the desk, along with piles of notes and empty glasses. Caldera, Variam, Luna, and I were spaced around the room on whatever seating arrangements we could get, while Sonder was in front of the desk balancing a whiteboard on a stand. He’d brought a set of markers and was testing them on the board to see if they worked.
    “What’s with the board?” Variam said. He’d come down to London instantly upon Luna’s call and she’d caught him up on what had happened.
    “Maybe it’s Lupus,” Luna suggested with a grin.
    “Nah,” Variam said. “It’s never Lupus.”
    Sonder shot a slightly harassed look at them. “What?”
    “Now is not the time,” Caldera said, and Luna’s and Variam’s grins vanished. There was an uncomfortable silence for a moment, then Caldera gave Sonder a go-ahead nod.
    “Right,” Sonder said nervously, fiddling with a board marker. “Um. Okay. We need to find out where Anne is and what’s happened to her, and get her back.”
    “Then why are we sitting here?” Variam said.
    “We need to figure out what to do,” Sonder said. “We don’t know who’s behind this, so—”
    “Yes, we do. His name’s Sagash.”
    “That hasn’t been proved. Crystal has a more recent record of—”
    “Sagash kidnapped Anne once already,” Variam snapped. “How much more proof do you need?”
    “We can’t just go—”
    “Variam,” Caldera said. “Do you have evidence that Sagash was behind the attack?”
    “All we have to do is go to his shadow realm and—”
    “Do you have
evidence
that Sagash was behind the attack?”
    Variam glowered.
    “I don’t know what your master’s been teaching you,” Caldera said, “but Keepers do not get to kick a mage’s door down and go in shooting just because they
might
have done something.”
    “I’ve seen Keepers do a lot more than that.”
    “With evidence,” Caldera said. “So far we have nothing linking the two suspects to Sagash. Unless there’s something you’re keeping from us?”
    Variam was silent. Caldera nodded again to Sonder. “Go on.”
    “Okay,” Sonder said, sounding slightly annoyed. “So, um . . . First we have the two mages who carried out the attack.” He wrote
ATTACKERS
on the top right of the whiteboard in blue marker and drew a circle around the word. “We don’t have very much information on them, but I’ve put what we do know on these