Summoned to Tourney by Mercedes Lackey; Ellen Guon Page A

peacenik friends aren’t doing their annual blockade of the Labs until next month.” Her teeth bared in something less like a smile than a snarl. “Unless you want to start early. You could spend the next month in jail, until the rest of them arrive.”
    He shook his head, not understanding the woman’s strange speech. “No, I am not wanting to go to jail. I’m here looking for a friend of mine. I believe she is inside this place.”
    “Hmmmph. Should have said so.” The woman gave him an odd look, but softened her frown a little. “You look so much like one of those hippie-activists, I figured you were here to make trouble.”
    “No, no trouble,” Kory said earnestly. “I just want to find my friend.”
    “What’s your friend’s name?” she asked, consulting a printed list.
    Now he was getting somewhere. “Beth. Bethany Margaret Kentraine.”
    The woman shook her head. “Sorry, she’s not on the cleared list. Maybe she’s working back at the University? A lot of the interns get switched back and forth between the various labs…“
    The sense of Bethness was even stronger now. Why was this woman claiming that Beth was not there? “I know she is here,” he protested. “Down there—” he pointed off in the distance.
    The woman’s expression hardened. “Sorry. If she’s not on my list, she’s not here. You’d better move along, now.”
    “But I have to find Beth,” he told her stubbornly. He turned away from her and began walking through the tall metal gates.
    “Hey, kid!” The woman called from behind him. He heard the sound of sirens going off, a shrill wailing noise. Kory kept walking.
    The next sound he couldn’t ignore, a loud blast of noise from directly behind him. He turned…
    … and found that he was looking down the twin barrels of a shotgun.
    “Back through the gate, kid,” the security guard gestured with the shotgun. “No one goes into the Labs without clearance. You seem like a nice boy, but you can’t go any further.”
    He looked over the gun into the woman’s eyes, pleadingly, trying to trap her gaze. “Please, I have to find Beth. I promise I won’t damage anything here—” He caught her eyes; held them with his own. Touched her mind.
    :Please… just let me walk through.:
    The woman nodded, slowly, her eyes blank and unseeing, and Kory turned away, satisfied that she would no longer impede him. He continued down the road toward one of the square, squat buildings. Several people with drawn guns ran past him, heading for the gate-house. Movies and television he had seen suggested that they were answering the alarms the woman had triggered—but the same shows also told him that if he acted as if he belonged here, rather than as an intruder, they would ignore him without the intervention of magic.
    He let himself in through the double glass doors of the largest building, looking around curiously. Another human in a similar uniform to the woman was seated behind a large desk. Before the man could respond to the door opening, Kory touched his mind as well; he glanced at Kory, then back at a screen on the table, ignoring the presence of a stranger. A bright red light was flashing on his desk; he paid no more attention to it than he did to Kory.
    Kory crossed the sterile, white-painted entry-hall, stopped in front of a large row of elevators, and pressed the button. He looked up as another team of blue-jumpsuited humans ran to the double glass doors, taking up odd positions near the glass. It reminded him of another one of the movies he and Eric had watched on the television, with the policemen moving in pretty, dance-like patterns through rooms and stairways, hunting for an enemy. These humans seemed to be running in the same patterns, one dashing forward and then stopping behind a desk or a potted plant, and then another running past the first one, to stop at another desk or potted plant. It would probably be a good idea to leave the area as quickly as he could. The