“Try and figure out how to disarm them,” Jillian said. “Or at least get them far away from my family. I would want to keep them safe.”
“Yes! He went to Earth and did experiments! Hundreds and hundreds of experiments. That’s what the Codex is. It’s his findings of-of-of…” Louise fumbled as she scanned over her memories of the work. “He’s trying to figure out how certain spells work. Exactly — as in down to the decimal point — how effective they are.”
“Okay.” Jillian squinted at Louise. “Where are you going with this?”
“Unbounded had a plan,” Louise felt sure of this. “We would have had a plan. Run away to someplace safe. Use our time in hiding to figure out how to get around the bad guys. Go back and blow them all to pieces. Right?”
Jillian threw up her hands. “We’ve both read the Codex cover to cover. Well — skimmed it at least. There’s no storyboard or outline or even a project management flowchart.”
Louise picked up her tablet and opened up the Codex. “The first thing he does is figure out a way to ‘clean’ magic. Earth and Elfhome are mirrors of each other, except Earth doesn’t have magic. Unbounded Brilliance realizes if he goes to the same location on Earth where there is a powerful natural spring of magic on Elfhome, there will be some spillover onto Earth. It’s the same reason that Desmarais had a mansion in New York.”
Jillian sighed. She pulled up a notepad on her tablet and started to make notes. “Okay. You think if we work through the logic of what Dufae did, we can figure out what his ultimate plan was. He camps on top of a powerful source of magic, only to discover the magic is too incoherent to use. The crossing between worlds seems to affect the angular momentum of magic the same as throwing a disco ball into a beam of light. If you don’t know about quantum mechanics, ‘dirty’ would be one way to describe it.”
“The evil elves at the Desmarais’ mansion said something along the same lines,” Louise said. “The magic was too dirty to allow Desmarais to do major spells.”
Jillian consulted her own copy of the Codex. “So the first spell we have in the Codex is the cleaning one, which basically funnels in power and gives it all one alignment and funnels it out to the storage system that he invented. Then he has the initiation spell the one that sets up a connection between a domana and the Spell Stones so they can do magic.”
“He has some success with it. It needs to channel magic between worlds and the same diffusion process happens. He charts out the successes and fails.”
“Yes, and then we have all these shield spells.” Jillian flipped rapidly through the hundreds of pages that followed. “So many shield spells.”
“Shields only.” Louise noted as she slowly paged forward. “If the Spell Stones operate the way we think they do, then he’s writing these out these from memory. I think that’s why they’re in the order that they’re in — the easiest to remember to the hardest.”
Jillian flipped backward. “Yeah, I think you’re right. The first is the sekasha shield spell; even we can do that from memory. Hm, he has these weird pages of numbers and such after each shield. It appears that he was testing them to see how much damage they could absorb or something.”
“Maybe he wanted a shield that could protect against the doomsday device.” Louise’s guess was based on the evidence.
“Ewww,” Jillian said. “That’s bad.”
“What? Why?”
“If he found one then he would have stopped. The only reason to keep going and going was because none of them could shield against it. These are all the shields that the elves are going to use to protect themselves when the shit hits the fan.”
“Oh,” Louise said. “Oh, that is bad.”
“But…” Jillian started and then stopped.
“But what?” Louise asked.
“The only way that he could know that each shield failed is if he knows what he needed to block,” Jillian started to flip back and forth, looking for the clue.
“Oh! Yes! If we know what we’re blocking, then we could use our knowledge of quantum mechanics—” Louise said.
“And magic,” Jillian added.
“And magic to figure it out.”
4: WILLIAM FREAKING PENN
When Tommy Chang had left the half-oni warren to find Jewel Tear, he’d told his cousin Bingo to shift their family to someplace else. He hadn’t been able to give detailed instructions as they were whispering to each other under the gaze of the elves. Tommy thought he could trust his cousin to pick someplace safe and reasonable.
He was wrong.
Tommy had meant someplace in a deserted part of town, big enough to take them all, but easily defended. It needed electricity, running water, sewage, and enough heat that they wouldn’t freeze come winter. Pittsburgh was filled with hundreds of empty warehouses and industrial parks. Any one of them would have worked.
Bingo had moved them into the William freaking Penn Hotel.
Nor was it just their family in the twenty-story hotel. Somehow while Tommy had been tracking down Jewel Tear, saving Oilcan, and finding Tinker, Bingo had taken in three other families made homeless by the fighting on the South Side. It doubled the size of their warren to over a hundred people, but most of them were under the age of twenty.
“We need to get out of this shithole.” Tommy had been woken up by a phone call from Oilcan. He’d promised to drive out to Oakland as soon as he could get dressed. He would need to trust Bingo — again — to move their warren. This time, he was going to give detailed instructions.
“What? Don’t you like your room?” Bingo gazed about Tommy’s suite. It looked like something out of a movie. “It was a real circus getting everyone settled in, what with us having so many little ones. I let Mokoto figure it all out and then me and Babe made sure people went where they were supposed to go. I think Mokoto did a swell job. There are apartments upstairs with two bedrooms and a little mini kitchen. He put my mom, Aunt Amy and Aunt Flo in those so that all the babies could be with them. Some of the rooms have a door connecting it to the room beside it. Motoko put four little ones on one side and then two teens on one other side to be built-in babysitters. He made sure that almost everyone doubled so we only take up two or three floors instead of scattering throughout the hotel. Just you, me, and Mokoto have our own place. Mokoto calls them ‘sweets’ like candy. I think it’s a great room.”
Sweets. Tommy shook his head. They were suites, as in having separate sitting rooms. All the colors in Tommy’s — from the subtle gold-printed wallpaper to the ornate carpet in blends of mute reds to the fancy umber curtains — worked together to say “money.” The bedroom had a massive bed with more pillows than any five people could use piled on it. The sitting room had two matching armchairs and a coffee table of gleaming perfection. Between the two areas was a bathroom that looked too nice to pee in.
“It’s a hotel in the middle of Downtown!” Tommy’s family had shifted all his belongs to his new room. Someone had washed, folded, and neatly put everything away, but Tommy couldn’t figure out how they decided where to put what. He opened the top drawer of the dresser and found it filled with underwear. He had boxers on, so he closed it and tried the next drawer.
“Yeah — it’s a hotel,” Bingo said slowly, his brain obviously overheating as he tried to figure out why Tommy was upset. He became Tommy’s lieutenant by default of birth order and size. He was the biggest and strongest member of their family. He wasn’t, however, very smart. It came as no surprise that he let older and smarter Mokoto deal with the circus of assigning rooms. “This place was being renovated when the first Startup happened. The oni worked some deal Stateside and took it over. Aunt Flo says that the greater bloods lived here the first year or two — all quiet like — before they disappeared into the woodwork.”