Southwest Days (Semiautomatic Sorceress Book 2) Kal Aaron (read along books txt) 📖

could be a ridiculously dangerous Sorcerer and a huge horde of monsters. I’ll sleep well tonight.”

Lyssa crouched near the hole and peered inside the body. She wasn’t a biologist when it came to normal animals, and she was all but clueless as to what she was looking for in a sorcery-enhanced creature. Dissection via thorough application of bullets was her scientific exploration strategy, but her analysis needed work.

At least she could verify she didn’t feel anything resembling active sorcery. The lack of a Sorcerer at the end of the incident would be helpful, but she needed to be sure. Unfortunately, not feeling it didn’t prove anything.

“I don’t get it.” Lyssa jumped off the body. “Was the plan to just breed an army of monsters and wait until they killed someone? That seems sloppy. They got their one kill, and now I’ve cleared out this whole horde. If a Torch got killed, the Society would send in a big group to guarantee this nest got wiped out.”

“You previously suggested this might be terrorism,” Jofi said. “Doesn’t that suggest the requirements are different?”

Lyssa nodded. “Yes, but terrorism works best when it’s planned and pointed at a high-profile target. When things go off at random, you mess everything up, and it isn’t scary. Nobody’s going to be that afraid of monsters that were discovered in an old hole and promptly cleaned up. Right now, the EAA could bury this incident with almost nobody hearing about it.”

“But a man has died.”

“Sure, but I know how people think. They’ll tell themselves Jake could have avoided trouble by not poking around an abandoned mine. They’ll say that if he stayed in LA, he wouldn’t have ended up dead.”

“That’s true,” Jofi said. “Both those actions led directly to his encounter with the creatures.”

“I know all that, but that’s my point,” Lyssa said. “He probably shouldn’t have been poking around in an old mine, but that’s why this doesn’t work as terrorism. Most people aren’t going to be poking around in old mines. Effective terrorism relies on everyone believing it might and could happen to them no matter what they’re doing. Anything that smacks of bringing it on yourself doesn’t work.”

Lyssa craned her neck up to look into the higher tunnels. The roofs of the hatchery and the queen’s room chamber were both smooth.

She frowned. Those roofs were also much higher than the queen’s maximum height. The smaller monsters could climb the side walls. That might explain how they’d carved out the space, but the more she considered that, the more unlikely it seemed.

Creature hives, regardless of species, tended to be functional. Extra space meant wasted energy, but two chambers had been blessed with huge voids overhead. The monsters might have gotten lucky, but a Sorcerer also might have carved out the space for them.

“My time with you suggests the average criminal lacks foresight,” Jofi said. “Even in situations involving more serious intentions than petty crime, foresight is a key problem. The criminal shard users you killed recently were a good demonstration of that. They should have anticipated that the heavy use of shards would lead to their deaths.”

“The average criminal isn’t so bright, sure, but the average rogue Sorcerer?” Lyssa replied. “And someone who could pull this off is far from the average rogue. I’m ninety to ninety-five percent sure a rogue’s involved. They might be long gone, though.”

She moved back to the wall and ran her hands over it, feeling for anything odd. There was no way she was going to take her gloves off. It was bad enough she could feel all the water and grime that’d made it in from the bottom and pooled in her gloves.

Something caught her eye, and she knelt. It was half a driver’s license covered in filth and grime. The picture was gone, but the name Jake Colmes was legible.

Lyssa pulled it out of the mud near the edge of the pool. It’d been bitten in half. She shook her head and tucked it into a pocket.

“This isn’t a small operation.” Lyssa stopped at what looked like a handle protruding from the wall. She squatted and realized it was nothing more than a rock that’d cracked and been chipped away. “Even if that queen was plopping those things out, somebody had to get her in here to begin with. And that had to happen without anyone noticing.”

“Could a smaller creature have been grown inside here?” Jofi asked.

“Possibly.” Lyssa blew out a breath. “I don’t know the reproduction cycle. There are too many unknowns in this whole thing.”

“Illuminated population density is low enough that it wouldn’t be likely for another Sorcerer to stumble upon an operation away from a population center,” Jofi replied. “This is a remote location, from what you’ve said.”

“Sure. I’m not saying I’d expected Samuel or me to come strolling along and sense a bunch of sorcery.” Lyssa chuckled at the image of the white-suited Elder wandering the Arizona desert, hunting slimy monsters. “But using sorcery to do something big might be detected by Shadow tech. They’ve got all sorts of sensors and gizmos looking around, and not always for what you think. Seismographs, cameras, drones. It’s hard to hide, even for Sorcerers. That’s allegedly one of the reasons the Tribunal had us come out of the top hat after M-Day.”

“The EAA didn’t have more information than they provided,” Jofi said. “That implies there was nothing unusual to detect, or whatever was done was done in a way that it put it beyond their means of detection.”

“That’s a good point.” Lyssa nodded. “But you know what Damien is always saying, they are underfunded and understaffed. It’s a theory anyway, and it’s heavily dependent on what kind of sorcery they used. It doesn’t do me any good to run around shaking down every scientist or government employee in Arizona, asking them questions if I don’t even know if I’m asking them the right ones.”

“I imagine Elder Samuel would take a dim view of such a plan,” Jofi said.

“Probably.