Jake's Women (Wizards) by John Booth

this room must have hated sharp corners, because everything was smooth.
    Climbing thirty five feet straight up was no fun, mainly because there a strong possibility of going thirty five feet straight down. I had climbed above the walkway, which was a U shaped open topped tube, but there was no way to get to it. It hung unsupported ten feet away from the nearest pipe. There was no point in hesitating. I jumped towards it and tried to hop the rest of the way. The walkway flew past, or more accurately I dropped below it before I had the energy needed to hop.
    I fell hard onto the walkway and it was as if a marching band arrived in my head. Magic flowed into me from all directions and stayed there. I felt dizzy and tired. Using magic was tiring, I’d always known that. What I hadn’t known was how much absorbing it took out of me. I had to find somewhere to rest.
    I used the energy absorbed to make myself invisible, or nearly so. Essentially I projected an image of the wall and floor of the walkway, as I made my way along it in a crouch. This might have been a waste of time, but without rest I wasn’t going to be able to hop any significant distance, like home.
    After about a quarter of a mile, one side of the walkway merged with a wall and I came across something that looked like a storage cabinet. It was five foot high and had two doors. There were no handles as such, just two slightly whiter rectangles in the smooth surface at about the right place for handles. A quick scan with my magical sight revealed a force field holding the doors closed. Force fields are easier than locks because all you have to do to open what they hold together to disrupt it. The doors swung silently open.
    There was a shelf at floor level and one halfway up. Incomprehensible gadgets sat on both of them, but hardly tightly packed together. It was the work of a moment to move the things on the bottom shelf up to the top and the top shelf still didn’t looked packed. I slid onto the bottom shelf and shut the doors.
    Creating the illusion that my shelf would look like the top one was equally easy. Once I was sure I had that magic firmly imprinted so I could sleep, I relaxed and let tiredness overwhelm me.
     
    I woke to sudden light as the doors opened. I shielded my eyes from glowing green and blue figures. Even in magic sight the shapes were obscure. About human size was the best I could tell from what I could see.
    “He’s not here,” ‘Blue’ said wearily. “As if he would be.”
    “He has to be somewhere,” Green replied equally wearily.
    “Can’t we wait until his tracer shows up, instead of conducting this stupid search?”
    “Be quiet. What if he overheard you?”
    “Yeah, right. That’s likely. He has no knowledge of our language,” Blue made a laughing sound as he finished.
    “We are on Conference and this whole world is one big translation field,” Green snapped back.
    The doors closed and I heard Blue say, “I forgot,” as they moved away.
    I was feeling great, top of the world and brimming with power. It would be easy to hop to Wales or Salice, but now I had to stay until I found and eliminated the tracer they had mentioned.
    It certainly explained a lot. How they were able to hop us to this place, for example. It also confirmed my opinion the Progenitors were far from gods. They just had a series of well-rehearsed stage magic tricks.
    I had more than enough magic stored to search my body for a device. Bones, teeth and nails were the most obvious locations, but were empty of anything foreign. I search bowels, stomach and blood vessels next. Equally clean. This was beginning to get difficult. Muscles, skin, and body fat were next on my list and came up equally clean. The Progenitors were not playing fair.
    I made myself more comfortable on my shelf and tried to reason it out. What might a tracer look like? What properties did it have?
    It had to have one specific property. It had to be to be radiating something that could