Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #15 June 2015 | Página 46

Shawna Reppert is an award-winning
author of fantasy and steampunk who
keeps her readers up all night and makes
them miss work deadlines. Her fiction
asks questions for which there are no
easy answers while taking readers on a
fine adventure that grips them heart and
soul. You can find her work on Amazon
and follow her blog on her website (www.
Shawna-Reppert.com). You can friend
her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter, where she posts an amazing array of
geekery. Shawna can also sometimes be
found in medieval garb on a caparisoned
horse, throwing javelins into innocent hay
bales that never did anything to her.
“So, Cass, did your sweetums figure out how the
oriental cartel is getting the jaguar parts through the
detection wards?” Chuckie asked her as she crossed
the threshold into their shared office.
As always, Chuckie had folded his gangly scarecrow
limbs into an odd arrangement in his wooden chair,
and as was often the case, had tipped said chair back
against the wall at a dangerous angle. Cass shook her
head, as much for his casual disregard of physics,
gravity, and workplace safety as for what she imagined Raven’s reaction would be should he ever hear
himself referred to as anyone’s ‘sweetums.’
Chuckie’s pale brown hair hung over his forehead; he
seldom bothered with it unless it obscured his view
of his computer screen. Chuckie, with his too-thin
build and his obsession with Mundane electronics,
hardly presented the standard image of a Guardian
International Investigations agent. Barely twenty-two,
and looking much younger than that, still he was an
internationally renowned expert in magical-cyber
interfaces.
Before his recruitment to GII, he had been the youthful mastermind behind the magical hack of the Mun-

dane central security computer, a hack that had caused
days of nationwide panic and years of strained relationships between the Mundane, Art, and Craft communities. And he’d done it on a dare.
She crossed over to his desk and handed him the
brown bag from which wafted warm scents of cinnamon and chocolate. The grease stains had just begun
to render translucent the smiling sun of the Sunshine
Bakery logo. Chuckie let the chair thump down to rest
properly on all four legs and dug through the bag in
search of the oversized chocolate chip cookie he preferred to the scones she’d bought for herself.
Though the white walls of the office could be glaring
in strong sunlight, that was seldom an inconvenience
in Oregon. Today the room seemed gray as the paint
picked up the dreary colors outside the window.
Chuckie’s framed posters of galaxies and nebulas and
her own recently purchased print of a Mount Hood
sunrise in rose and purple watercolor could do little to
brighten the day.
She made an ineffective attempt to smooth the frizz
the dampness always brought out in her hair, then
hung her coat on the rack by the door of their shared
office and finally answered his question. “He’s figured
out where they’re unraveling the ward, but not how.
Not yet.”
A hand fell on her shoulder, a small hand, but strong,
smelling slightly of imported pipe tobacco. Cass
turned to her supervisor, standing in the doorway behind her. Though the woman’s given name was Abigail Andrews, everyone in the unit called her Sherlock,
as much for her Angla accent and her odd pipe habit as
her admittedly impressive investigative ability. Some
of the more senior members of the unit swore that
Sherlock’s fondness for tweed was a later affectation,
playing up to the moniker.
Word was, back in Angla, she had earned another
nickname, one that had sent her to exile in the New
World in order to escape her history.
“Perhaps if he finally took a position with us and
worked on it full time.” Sherlock’s tone, though light,

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