Apocalypse to Go Read Online Free PDF Page A

officer came trotting down the steps. I heard the cop saying, “… get a tech out here if you want.”
    “I’ll dust for any prints,” Ari said. “But I’m assuming he was wearing gloves.”
    “Yeah, probably so,” the officer said. “If there’s any more trouble, Nathan, call us.”
    “I will, and thank you.”
    The officers returned to their squad car and drove off. Ari glanced my way.
    “Is it safe to put the car in the garage?” I said.
    “Yes,” Ari said. “When the officers turned onto 48th, they saw someone hurrying down the front steps. He had a motorcycle in the side drive. He took off up Moraga before they even reached the building. They had no real grounds for pursuit.”
    “Okay.” I paused to look up at the top floor. “Let me run a quick SM:L.”
    The search mode turned up nothing of interest in the top flat. “The front door into the bottom flat,” I said, “has had its Chaos wards erased. The guy knew what he was doing when it came to that kind of surveillance. Not so much with electronics, huh?”
    “No. I take it he was no ordinary thief.”
    “No, ’fraid not. He must have sensed your alarm going off. I can’t tell if he felt it psychically or if he had a gadget.”
    “Did he get inside?”
    “I doubt if he could have opened the door before he sensed the alarm. Erasing a Chaos ward takes time.”
    We did a second thorough check of the building and the garages in the rear before I drove the car in. Ari held the leftovers, my notebooks, and the photo album while I stood under the porch light and placed new Chaos wards on the downstairs door. He watched my hands as I did.
    “Would someone have to touch the wards to erase them?” Ari said.
    “Nope. It’s all done with Qi.”
    “Then I wonder what set off the alarm.”
    “The Qi, probably. It’s a biomagnetic force. If you know how to use it, you can set up an energy field or channel it into something approaching a beam. How sensitive is the system?”
    “Very. It can respond to a listening device aimed its way, for instance. Qi, is it? I’ll take that under advisement.”
    Before we went in, Ari reset the alarm on the lower floor by pressing buttons on his cell phone, which was not, as you’ve probably guessed by now, a standard issue model. When we arrived upstairs, I turned on a few extra lights. The idea that some Chaos operative had been hanging around my home base left me nervous. We searched the flat but found nothing disturbed. We both settled down to check our inboxes, Ari on his laptop, me at my desktop in the corner of the living room. I’d received nothing from AOS14, but while we’d been at Aunt Eileen’s, Y had answered my question.
    “Before you turn the flash drive over to Spare,” Y said, “vet him and get back to me.”
    His caution made perfect sense. Neither of us wantedBelial, that murdering Chaotic cephalopod, turned loose into the multiverse by an accomplice.
    “Nola?” Ari said.
    “Yes?” I left the trance state and turned in my chair to look at him. He was sitting more or less upright on the couch with his laptop on his lap.
    “I was just checking the records for the security system,” Ari said. “It says that an energy release by an unknown device triggered the alarm.”
    “Okay. It was the Qi discharge, then, I bet, when he erased the wards. Say, while you’re there, would you see if that cat-person apparition left a trace? It was around one o’clock when she appeared.”
    Ari nodded and clicked on a few icons. “Yes,” he said. “Unknown device energy discharge at thirteen dot oh four o’clock, security node seven.” He frowned at the screen. “Accompanied by a one second spike in ambient level of background radiation.”
    “A big spike?”
    “No, just a blip.” He glanced at me. “Nothing dangerous, I’m glad to report.”
    All of this data told me that the apparition had been produced by some sort of device rather than being a purely psychic phenomenon. Yet Ari had