A notebook, slightly stained with coffee rings on its red cover. Inside, notes scrawled in blank ink, in handwriting she didn’t recognize, but turns of phrase and little scrawled doodles that she did.
Her breath caught a little. Glory’s notes. Everything they had learned, everything she was working on when the Farm was overrun, put somewhere safe, so someone could find them later. Jan’s throat tightened, and she wished it was an asthma attack, that there was something that would ease the pain. Glory wasn’t here, wasn’t anywhere. They hadn’t found anything to bury, AJ said. Nothing at all, just...gone.
It was her fault that Glory had gotten caught up in this. Hers—and the Huntsman’s, for bringing her to the Farm, but Jan’s at the very start.
Because it was there, because Glory had written it, Jan tried to make out the words, squinting in the firelight. At the top of one page, chosen randomly: “Not multiple universes: one overlapping over and over again?” There were other comments about strings and theology, and strings of code Jan couldn’t decipher, and the letters LHC over and over again, often underlined. And then one word: cool.
Jan stared at it. Strings. Large Hadron Collider. Multiple universes. She wasn’t a scientist, but she was a geek, and she had New Scientist and NASA on her Twitter feed, once upon a time, just like every other geek. Cool. “Seriously, Glor?”
She could almost hear her friend’s laughter, her face alive with an imp of mischief, ready to leap into some new rabbit hole, just because it was there.
Jan’s responsibility for bringing her into it, but Glory would have been pissed as hell if she’d been kept out of this, all this, the exciting and the terrifying. Maybe the Huntsman had known that somehow. And that she would have gone down swinging, to the very end.
Jan set her jaw and flipped to the last pages with writing on them. “Binary thinking. Set patterns. Zero is the key? Sixteen could be scary. Do not let them form sixteen. Or, bloody hell, anything higher.” There were more formulas, crosshatched and scribbled out, and then, the last thing Glory had written: “We need a damned physicist, not code monkeys. Put that on shopping list for when Jan gets back: one damned physicist.”
“So, that’s what happened,” Jan said quietly, almost to herself, caught between wonder and fear. “We poked at the universe, and poked all the way damn through, somehow. And Nalith caught at the threads and rewove them.”
“Does it make sense to you now?” the Huntsman asked
“No. But I don’t think it’s supposed to.” She closed the notebook, rested it on her lap, thought about the sixteen humans in a circle around the portal, sixteen given to the uncertain mercies of the preter queen.
Even a lab of actual rocket scientists might not be enough to fix this. You couldn’t undo, undiscover science, any more than you could undo magic. Like getting on Martin’s back, you had to ride or die.
“What do you think happened to her?” she asked out of the blue. “To them?” Glory and the dryad who’d tried to save her.
The fire snapped and sparked, barely enough to read by, but didn’t do much to illuminate the shape next to her, his face still in shadow. “What do you think?”
“I think she’s okay,” Jan said, still hearing that faint laughter in her ears. “I don’t know why, but I think she’s somewhere safe. That she grabbed a thread, somehow, and... It’s foolish, wish-fulfillment thinking, but—”
“The universe is a funny, tricky thing,” he said, his voice thoughtful. “If there’s no body, there’s...chance.”
Jan let her hand rest on the notebook, looked up at the unknown star formations that wheeled and shone over the Center, and nodded. She had seen too much to discount chance.
“So, what now?” she asked. “I’ve got no job, no home, no—” she started to say no friends, but that wasn’t true. That wasn’t true at all.
The Huntsman chuckled, as though hearing her thoughts.
You couldn’t undiscover. You could only keep discovering.
“I think I’d like to go home now,” she said.
* * *
“Back where it all started, are you?”
Jan scattered the rest of her muffin on the ground, watching the pigeons peck at it. She didn’t look up when AJ sat down on the bench next to her.
“You can’t go back. You can only go forward. Isn’t that right?”
It had been this bench, in the Green, where AJ and Martin had first broken the news to her, about Tyler being elf-napped, about supernaturals and preternaturals, about what it would take to get him home. Everything that had happened had started here.
“If I’d known then...” The lupin hesitated.
“You’d have done exactly the same.”
“Yeah. I would have.”
She wanted to hate him, blame him. Instead, she wiped her hands on her jeans and watched the pigeons.
A hand touched her shoulder, fingers cool, bringing just the hint of green water and brine to her nose. She reached up and let her fingers cover Martin’s, acknowledging him there without turning to look.
Her best friend was a homicidal serial killer who occasionally had another form, and her other best friend was...missing, presumed having an adventure.
“Tyler’s left,” she said. “Taken a job in California.”
“I’m sorry.”
She wanted to say that it was okay, but it wasn’t. There was a gaping hole inside her heart, worse even than the first time, when she’d thought he’d walked out on her, that he’d run off with another woman. Knowing that the man she loved, loved her but couldn’t be with her...that was an entirely different kind of pain. She wasn’t strong enough to wish him well, either.
“I’ll survive,” she said instead.
“Yes.” AJ was smiling, she thought, although she didn’t look sideways to check. “Yes, you will.”
* * * * *
“Do you believe in magic?
You will when Gilman’s done with you.”
—New York Times bestselling author Dana Stabenow
“Readers will love the Mythbusters-style fun of smart, sassy people solving mysteries through experimentation, failure and blowing stuff up.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Hard Magic
“Layers of mystery, science, politics, romance, and old-fashioned investigative work mixed with high-tech spellcraft.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Pack of Lies
“Innovative world building coupled with rich characterization continues to improve as we enter the third book of this series.”
—Smexy Books Romance Reviews on Tricks of the Trade
“Gilman spends a good deal of time exploring—and subverting—the trope of the fated-to-happen relationship.
Readers will find this to be an engaging and fast-paced read.”
—RT Book Reviews on Dragon Justice
“Gilman delivers an exciting, fast-paced, unpredictable story that never lets up until the very end. There’s just enough twists and turns to keep even a jaded reader guessing.”
—SF Site on Staying Dead
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Soul of Fire tp-2 Page 27