“Wha—where . . . ?” I tried, not sure where I was or how long I’d been gone. I couldn’t feel him touching me now. . . .
“Still here. Basement. Had to shock you. Only thing I could think of to make you stop. I think you lost a couple of minutes there. Are you . . . all right?”
I couldn’t answer that. It wasn’t just that I was messed up—I was more than that—but that the flow of the grid had risen over me in a rapid swarm of flickering light and awesome silence. The same whirring, pale-blue energy that had settled on me as I’d escaped from Wygan’s lair under the broadcast tower clothed me and moved me up to my knees. Then forward, lurching a bit as my limbs tried to coordinate the signals of this power with the familiar firing of my nerves.
Without any desire for it, I pushed myself out of Quinton’s embrace and sprawled across the rug, bringing my face closer to the gap I’d made between the carpet and the wall. My vision should have been weak from the electric shock but it was sharp as a sniper’s, and I stared into the complexity of the spell that painted its light up the wall with a terrifying, alien understanding. I could see which of the loops and whorls acted like a retainer or cage for the angry spirit of the dog, which held the eye that had been separated from the animal, and which was the subroutine that connected the card reader to the spell. I’d have to cut that out of the magical circuit and push the guardian aside so it wouldn’t take a bite out of me or Quinton on general principle. The eye was no threat alone, so I could ignore it and reinforce the cage or rip it out altogether, but I didn’t care to at that moment. Just didn’t care, didn’t feel the emotional coil and turmoil of being human. I knew I could simply . . . change it, move whatever I didn’t like aside. For now.
So, this was what Carlos meant by an ability to warp the fabric of magic—my ability for the moment. I could have this all the time if I stopped resisting the changes happening to me and just . . . took them in. I’d held back so long that, this time at least, touching the power lines and shapes of the Grey would be agonizing. This I simply knew.
I started to slip deeper into the Grey, closer to the grid that flared and sang, reaching for me as if I’d been lost such a long time . . .
“Harper?”
I paused, balancing between the normal and the paranormal, glancing over my shoulder at Quinton. He was chewing his bottom lip and trying not to look frightened, but the energy around his head had gone a solid, unhappy shade of orange with jagged sparks of bile-green, a combination I’d always thought of as “scared sick.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, my voice echoing up from a distance well below me, filled with the chorus of the grid. The hollow look Quinton returned should have sent a pang through me, but I felt nothing beyond the necessity of rearranging the elegant abomination around the doors. Some distant, silly creature said I’d have to deal with the consequences and his distress later, but that was later and somewhere else. Not here, in the fine-lined world of the grid that spread in all visible directions and outward past what any puny human eyes could see.
The whole world was a fiery network of colored lines in the darkness, so thick and numerous that they cooked the air white. It sang the voices of nymphs and selkies in the vast ocean of luminous mist. I focused past the distracting beauty of it, closing my eyes to all but the gyre of the spells and the thick, blue stream they sprang from.
Cristoffer had picked a strong line of neutral blue that turned red only as it entered the coils of her spell, the influence of blood. This was the first time I’d ever studied the structure of a constant, dynamic spell. Most of the ones I’d seen before were static things, powered by their creator’s personal energy or some stolen energy and doomed to eventually fade and die out. This was live, drawing power continuously to keep it up and active, ready to respond to whatever happened near it. The lines of the spell split into four parts: the main circuit that sustained the slaughtered animal, a second heavy line that composed the restraints and camouflage over its furious remains, a third thread not much wider than an eyelash and very slightly blue-tinged by the mundane electrical connection of the card reader, and a fourth bloody-red strand that fed the unblinking eye above the card plate—the magical half of the recognition system. With the brightness of the three red lines that coiled around and over it, the thin, orchid-red line was hard to discern. Even with the right key card in hand, the wrong hand holding it would still be bitten—or even ripped right off—by the fury of the guard dog embedded in the wall. The baroque loops of the three other lines made it nearly impossible to reach for the card pad’s line without touching one of them. It was very clever and would have been difficult to dismantle, or even bypass, without injury. But that wasn’t going to be a problem for me. Not now.
Standing up, I looked for a place well above the pad and eye, where the card reader’s line was exposed and found a tiny loop near the upper hinge plate. I could tear it all apart if I liked, but there was that other person, Quinton, to think of. He needed the pad to work without worrying about the teeth of the door’s guardian. I’d have to shunt the beast and its support aside but leave the rest, and the wards, intact.
I puzzled over it for a minute. I just needed to pull the unwanted bits away, as the mage had done to power her spell and much the same way I had teased Simondson’s thread up from the ground. It was convenient that I was tall and could reach the loop without standing in front of the spell itself. I pushed both hands into the wall, feeling invisible resistance from the material things that composed it, finding the action more difficult than I’d anticipated. It should have been easier . . . but I wasn’t familiar with this power yet. I knew I could do much more and with very little effort once I was truly part of the grid, but for now, I’d have to try something more limited.
I remembered the way the edges of the hole around the Hardy Tree in the old London churchyard had torn at my touch and whirled off into tiny vortices. I could tear the edges of something exposed and ragged. It seemed to me that the tap Cristoffer had pulled up must have a ragged edge to it somewhere, like a rough spot where it had come away from another feeder line.
I reached below the red color of the spell and closed my fingers on the blue line of magic. My seeming-distant body twitched involuntarily as the power line seared into my fingertips, sending pain and electrical shock into the nerves of my hand and up my arm. I bit my lips against an impulse to scream. I concentrated and pushed the feeling aside. The hot pain dropped down to a lower intensity, still burning and miserable but no longer of concern. I pulled steadily until a strand of cool blue energy spooled out from under my fingers, about two feet long.
I pinched the free end and stood, pulling a longer filament of energy free. I knew the loop wouldn’t last long once I pulled it away from the feeder line it came from. If it withered and died, I’d have to start again. I’d have to make the connection quickly so I could let go as soon as possible. The pain was growing, and holding two live ends simultaneously might be more than the body could bear.
I snapped the energetic thread off, like breaking the yarn on a raveling sleeve. For a moment, it pulsed; then it began fading. I knew I had very little time. I pinched the nearest end onto the lowest part of the card reader’s red thread. Then, from below the gaze of the disembodied eye, I shoved the fiery container of the dead dog aside a few feet with one hand before I rose and pinched the second end on at the loop above the hinge. The watchdog snapped at nothing as I passed its eye, reached, and turned the small, unblinking organ to see only the emptiness of the space inside the wall. Then the dog fell quiet.
The new strand slowly flushed red while the strand it bridged paled to lavender. I reached out and snapped off the original line just above the floor. Shock jolted through me as the line faded to pale blue, then withered and vanished.