Worldweavers: Cybermage by Alma Alexander

preserve it. To keep it safe. Yes. You said he came back from Colorado different.”
    “But if one died, what happened to the rest of them?” Magpie said. “Where are the other three pigeons?”
    “A Kaschei maneuver that went wrong,” Ben said. “He thought he could keep the part of himself that he treasured most safe—in whatever way—but then something went awry and one of the four was permanently lost. The other three disappeared while he was still too distraught with the death of the first one to deal with the rest, and then he was stranded.”
    “Do you think that’s why he kept feeding the pigeons, the rest of his life?” Tess said. “When he got back to New York, I mean?”
    “So what you’re saying is that all we have to do is find a couple of specific pigeons in New York City?” Rafe said, his hands in the pockets of his chinos. “Very funny. I come from New York. Do you have any idea how many pigeons we’ve got per square inch there?”
    “But surely the original pigeons are long dead already,” Ben objected.
    “If Thea’s right, they aren’t regular pigeons anymore. They’re, I don’t know, Elemental pigeons—they can live forever, or certainly for many times a normal mortal pigeon’s lifespan,” Terry said.
    “But even given that Tesla’s Elemental pigeons may still be flapping around this world, what possible use would finding them be now, even if they were findable? Tesla—the real Tesla—has been dead for fifty years!” Ben said obstinately.
    “Maybe not,” Thea said. “If he really is alive in some sense, inside that cube—”
    “ Wait a minute,” Ben said. “It’s an Elemental cube. You said he was a quad-Element mage. It took all of us to break the seal. That cube was madewhen he had all his powers. But we saw him as an old man, and that means he didn’t transfer into here until right at the end of his life. He must have had his powers to make the cube, to make the transfer—but if his Elements were scattered to the four winds, literally…”
    “Make the cube, yes, but not necessarily the transfer,” Terry said. “That’s pure mechanics.”
    “And you should know…” Humphrey began, then stopped. He sighed. “You may remember, the first time I came to the Academy, back in the early days of the spellspams, I told you that there had been three Nexus computers. That one had been lost.”
    “I remember,” Terry said.
    “The first one…was around a long time before the others. It was very, very primitive—in fact, it was something that you, Terry, would probably not have called a computer at all. But it was a harbinger, and it was Tesla’s work. He, if anyone, would have known exactly how to do this. He might have made this cube long before he conceived of transferring his Element powers into birds, but in the end, if he set it up right, the mechanics of the thing were not…Elemental in nature.”
    “You might call it software,” Terry said. “Theprocess. It wasn’t something he did, but a method of getting him to where he wanted to be.”
    Humphrey blinked. “I didn’t think of it in those terms, but you’re right,” he said. “The magic needed for the transfer itself was minuscule, and even without the Elemental base, Tesla would have had enough knowledge and power to have achieved this.”
    “But maybe we found the pigeons,” Magpie said doggedly, her attention with the animals and focused on neither the hardware nor the people. “We all dreamed him. Maybe we found them, and got them back to him, and it was in time to trigger that transfer—”
    “But if we did, then why did we see him mourning the dead one?” Tess said. “And even if we found all the rest, that fourth one—wouldn’t that loss have mattered?”
    “Even a tri-Element mage is very powerful,” Ben said.
    “And what about that bird that we all dreamed about?” Magpie said. “Could that have been the fourth one?”
    “The dead one?” Ben said, perplexed.