by Sam Hughes
"No."
Devi blinks. "Natalie. Natalie Ferno. Laura didn't say you were identical twins."
"We aren't identical."
"That's why."
"Go home," Natalie tells him. "If I find her, I'll tell her to call you." She moves around Devi, producing a spare key, and goes to unlock the door.
"Did she tell you why she was fired?" Devi asks.
"Maybe."
"Did she tell you she was trying to resurrect your mother?"
Natalie stops on the threshold.
She says, carefully, "I was wondering how much you people knew. Yes, word got around. But it didn't work, obviously. Otherwise you'd never have fired her."
"It worked," Devi says.
Natalie's eyes widen.
"Sort of," Devi adds, hurriedly.
*
Inside, Devi tells the story.
"The lab says it's dead meat," he says. "Real meat, dead but formerly living. Real DNA from a completely unknown taxon. Maybe some proto-hominid which evolved in a radioactive wasteland for a few hundred thousand years. And that, in itself, is a bloody significant mystery."
"Maybe it was intelligently designed," Natalie suggests.
Devi shrugs. "Number of biologists in this conversation, zero. But the real point is: she brought it back. Real mass, comparable with a human. From a place which strictly doesn't exist. We've got no idea how she did it using essentially no mana, but we sure as hell need to know. Hint: mass-energy conservation is over."
"Death is over," Natalie says.
"Yeah," Devi says. "Death is potentially over. You see why I pushed this into emergency territory."
"I see why you got permission to violate some NDAs," Natalie says.
"We heard you were a professional mage too," Devi says. "It turns out we approached you in university at the same time as Laura. All things considered, Ed Hatt thought it was worth cutting you in."
"Alright," Natalie says. "We're on the same page."
"Where is Laura?" Devi asks.
Natalie shares what she's worked out so far. "All Laura's magical equipment is missing. No sign of a break-in, which means Laura took it all with her. Laura's daily carry is enough that she clatters when she moves, but her whole collection weighs a lot and is worth a lot more. She owns one-of-a-kind pieces which she built with her own hands. She'd never fly with it. Forget cameras and lenses, that is the kind of valuable property which mysteriously vanishes from hold luggage. Contradiction."
"So let's say they're still in this country," Devi surmises. "When was the last time you spoke to her?"
"Just after she was fired." Natalie recalls a despairing and unhappy Laura Ferno in search of a source of limitless magical energy, named Ra. "I called her an idiot. ...You know what the real puzzle here is? Nick's missing as well."
"Nick...?"
"Laughon. Her boyfriend. Laura's a bad scientist. You were right to fire her. Recklessness, unsafe experimentation. The drawing of rash conclusions heavily influenced by personal feelings. For Laura to disappear for weeks on a quest to do something bizarre and misguided isn't remotely out of character.
"But Nick's missing too. He's the grounded half of the relationship. He should have talked her down. He'd be the one to bring her—"
Oh.
"—back... to... reality."
Oh no.
"She's summoned a demon into the body of her boyfriend," Natalie announces.
Devi does not have a coherent immediate response to this. Demons are not a standard component of the magical engineering canon.
"What kind of demon?" he eventually manages.
"A demon! A malevolent spirit. 'Ra'."
"I'm sorry. What kind of mage are you?"
"Theoretical thaumic physicist."
Devi changes gear.
Terminology has become somewhat confused in recent decades. Technically speaking, magical engineers are supposed to refer to themselves exclusively as "mages", because of the abbreviation, MagE. "Wizard", "witch", "warlock" and "sorcerer" are generally associated with fictional characters or crazy people; "magician" and "conjuror" are reserved for stage performers. All of this is perfectly clear from the perspective of those working in the magical community. Unfortunately, on the outside, it's fuzzier. There's no trademark or law to prevent non-mages from calling themselves mages. It's not even a title which requires a certain qualification, like "doctor".
There are "psychics" who call themselves mages. These people cheerfully lift choice terms from magical engineering, craft them into something that's obviously nonsense to anybody with a day's experience with the real topic, and dupe saps for cash. The popular quantum mechanics books have become almost impressive in their creative meaninglessness.
One could very easily get to the end of such a book and consider oneself a "theoretical thaumic physicist".
"Why do you think Laura would summon a demon?" Devi asks.
Natalie's reasoning is apparently effortless. "She's going to try her experiment again. To do that, she needs a ridiculous amount of mana, more than she can generate in years by herself. Ra has that power."
Devi chooses each word carefully, as if stepping forward across ice. "Is... is 'Ra' dangerous?"
Ra was last seen trying to liberate enough geological mana to blow up Iceland.
"Yes," says Natalie.
"Does Laura know this?"
"Oh, my, yes," Natalie says.
"Is Laura really stupid enough to trust this... being?"
"Entirely the wrong question," Natalie says. "You should be asking if she's stupid enough to think she can control it. And she is. She is actually, in her own way, a pretty formidable human being. Up to a point."
Devi doesn't want to ask the last question. He does anyway.
"What does Ra want?"
Natalie's expression darkens, but she doesn't answer.
*
The computer room.
Natalie knows Laura's password. She shoulder-surfed it a year or two ago, never mentioned it, and Laura's never changed it. Natalie would feel guilt, if there was time.
She pulls up the browser cache. Last activity, weeks ago. Printed directions to a particular postcode in the West Country, an isolated compound in a forest in the back of beyond. A private magical research laboratory called the Chedbury Bridge Institute.
"What kind of magic do you do?" Devi asks casually, hovering behind her. Natalie assumes that he has shoulder-surfed Laura's password in turn. She makes a mental note to change it once he isn't looking.
"Mmm? I know eset," Natalie says.
"Anything else?"
"No."
"You only know one spell?"
"Yup."
"You don't know uum?"
"Why would I learn a spell which does nothing?"
Devi solidifies his conclusion about Natalie Ferno: layperson. Laura, he thinks, is the brains of the family. Natalie is a neo-pagan imitator of her sister, a chanter of nonsense-spells at summer solstice near particular rocks. Natalie is interpreting the evil of pedestrian humans in the most meaningful terms she's familiar with. Natalie is a 'witch' - which is to say, a crazy person.
Devi asks, "What's the postcode?"
Natalie reads it out.
"Noted," says Devi. He goes to leave. "I'm calling the police."
"Wait!"
"'Wait'?" asks Devi, loading as much scepticism and frank disgust into this word as possible.
"What will you tell them?"
"'Laura Ferno's been abducted by her boyfriend, Nick Laughon.'"
"Nick Laughon hasn't done anything! There's no sign of forced abduction. Laura's being manipulated!"
"Do I care? Do the police care? Two people are missing, and we have reason to believe one's in danger from the other. So magic is involved. Is magic a separate legal jurisdiction?"
"I think we can straighten this out without getting the police involved—" Natalie begins.
"Let's get Nick Laughon's body in a jail cell," Devi says, "and, if you r
eally think it's going to make a difference, you can attempt an 'exorcism'. Grind some herbs, draw runes in chalk and mouse blood or whatever it is you do."
"What?"
"I don't buy 'demon'," Devi says. "I'm veering strongly towards 'scumbag'. And I don't think you know what thaumic physics even is."
Nobody can find the biological component of magic. Nobody knows which cells in the human body register magical activity, or why it takes a year-plus of training before they work. It's mythical and inconsistent and inexplicable. Maybe it's a system of signals which is always there, but the human brain needs to be tuned before they can be unscrambled into something detectable. Like language acquisition.
It doesn't matter.
Natalie Ferno and Anil Devi both sense the reaction starting in the living room. Their heads turn almost simultaneously to look at the same unseen point on the other side of the wall.
Devi dashes back through.
The weapon resembles a silver, mechanical lotus flower. It is a sophisticated, nest-like fan of magic rings and nodules, engineered like a pop-up book, probably small enough when flat to fit into a breast pocket. The density of mana flux at its focal point is so bright in the thaumic spectrum that standing in its presence is physically painful. There's heat radiating off it too, and curls of invisible chemical vapour, the precursor to a thaumically-accelerated bomb.
Nobody has built a magic-based bomb before, and not for lack of trying. Devi and Natalie know this. They're looking at something delicate and brand new and unique, like a Fabergé egg. It is a compact packet of hugely inventive destructive power. It sits on a mundane coffee table in the cramped living room of a beige house, almost too beautiful to be allowed to detonate.
For a split second, neither of them can look away from it.
"How did that get in here?" Nat says.
"Run!" Devi screams, physically pushing Nat towards the door.
"Wait," Nat says.
Devi is, again, aghast at Natalie's suggestion. "What are you doing?"
"Wait!" Nat twists past him, lunges for a cupboard and pulls out the one piece of equipment which Laura didn't take with her: a one-point-eight-metre oaken bo.
Nat didn't hear a door move. Nat has sixty percent of the theory of invisibility laid down. The rest is just boring practical problems, like fitting the spell into fewer than ten human minds and a piece of machinery which weighs less than a tonne. The short title is "Fast-adapting Bezier-controlled duplex oracles". The only major question marks are around wavelength assignment—
She hasn't heard the door move, which means the invisible man must still be here. He must have been here the entire time they were in the house. Hovering, silently. Listening in.
Surely he left time for a getaway. Surely that's enough time to find him and wring the abort code out of him.
Nat closes her eyes for one second. In any other situation, she'd be searching, with extreme difficulty, for a volume of empty air which was detectably consuming magic. Like a poltergeist. But the house is saturated with thaumic radiation. So instead she hunts for the shadow.
It's in the hall. Nat keeps her eyes screwed up, it's the only way to find the thing reliably. Lacking room to swing, she propels the bo end-first, directly into the shadow's midsection.
Transmuting light into invisible chi particles and back is one thing. Blocking a heavy impact from a physical object is an entirely different engineering problem. The trespasser's cloak shuts off with a snap like a mousetrap. The man behind the cloak crumples up, gasping. He is a nobody, his entire image is cultivated to project "nondescript". A shirt, some shoes, hair, an age.
Natalie hits him again with the bo, bloodying his nose— a technique which bojutsu strictly outlaws, as Natalie would know if she'd ever studied it. She catches his wrist and hurls him back into the living room, directly at the bomb. The man scrambles to avoid falling into it, and ends up crashing into the coffee table and injuring his knee quite badly.
"Jesus Christ!" is Anil Devi's reaction.
"Turn the bomb off or die," Natalie tells the trespasser. She is almost having to shout over the machine now. She holds the bo in front of her, defensively, and circles around to cover Devi. "You know you have time!" Without turning around, she adds, "Devi, don't move!"
Devi doesn't move.
"Like I care," says the man, sneering. "Like I'm singular! Elth ra mukhth entana daneda."
It's the last exotic ingredient. The syllables spill from the man's lips like virulent red muck dripping from a test tube into the cauldron. And like witches and wizards, psychics and media, all three mages feel a figurative foreshock of the imminent future.
Natalie grabs Devi's hand. "Anh zero EPTRO zui—"
*
There is a small discontinuity.
Over the street from Laura Ferno's address is - not unexpectedly - another row of houses. The house directly opposite has an immaculate garden in front of it. Millimetre-long grass, raked pebbles, perfect red and blue poinsettias. It takes Devi a moment to realise that this is where he has landed.
He is upright, splayed against the back of the garden and the wall beneath the house's shattered front bay window, with one arm hooked over into the house itself. The wall he's lying against is broken, as if hit by a roughly Devi-shaped truck. Devi is strewn with tiny pieces of broken double glazing, and it takes him another moment to realise that they are still being held a few centimetres away from his skin by Natalie Ferno's force field.
He recognises the bird bath. He is looking at it from the opposite angle.
"Ferno?" he shouts, and hears nothing. His organs and bones judder. The field obviously absorbed a huge percentage of the shock.
Over the road at the epicentre, there isn't a house anymore, just a blackened pit. The blast has been impressively precise, barely scorching the houses on either side. Pieces are still falling from the sky; a hard rain of roof tiles and frame. It's unreal.
".........." says a voice.
"What?" Devi shouts, looking around. He feels like a three-dimensional bruise.
Natalie has landed inside, on the other side of the same wall. In fact, she has landed on a sofa, and they are therefore seated back to back. They are still joined, through the broken window. She is holding on to his wrist, latched to it like a hawk's talon.
"I said I changed my mind," Nat says, louder. "You should call the police."
As Natalie releases her grip, the shield closes down, and both of them are now covered in fresh glass and rubble and dust, like a parsley garnish.
They never place the call, but miraculously the police appear all by themselves.
*
The sun has gone down. There are dozens of vehicles and seemingly hundreds of police. The street is filled with flashing lights and high visibility vests.
Natalie has learned her lesson. Speaking to the shadow-chinned, unflappable layperson officer who takes her statement, she avoids raising hypotheses of consciousness displacement, or of megalomaniacal minds invading from other planes of magical existence. She structures her words factually.
"My sister is missing since four weeks ago, and her boyfriend is too. Either he's abducted her, or both of them are in the hands of some third party. A man named Ra just blew up their house to stop me from tracking them, but he failed, and I know where they are. I think Laura's involved in something really dangerous, and we need to find her right now, and by 'we' I mean you and me and that guy there." She points at Anil Devi, who is in the middle of giving his own statement, and who looks up for a second, confused.
"Why you?" the officer asks, calmly, scribbling notes. Anachronism? But the scene is far too noisy to record audio.
Nat says, "Because Laura always carries a particular collection of magical equipment with her. With a high-powered eset spell and a bit of trigonometry I can find her behind a kilometre of steel. In any case, this is a magic problem. Laura's a mage, I'm a mage, Anil's a mage, the bomber was a mage. Do you have mages on the force?"
"No," says the officer.
"Magic is real," Natalie says. "Magic crime has been real since 1998. Magic terrorism has just this hour become real. You need expert outside consultation.
"And I think—" And Natalie stops for a second, because this last thought hasn't come from the right place in her mind. Natalie Ferno is a thinker who starts from a collection of facts and turns the handle until they extrude a conclusion. But this idea is from her imagination, inflammatory, fabricated to get the police's attention. And yet, it may almost add up.
"I think," she says, "my sister might have been radicalised."
*
Time is a factor.
They won't let them go.
Natalie Ferno and Anil Devi are kept around for hours, hours, having information dragged out of them. Descriptions of the late, lamented bomber, whose description is entirely irrelevant. Descriptions of the structure of the magic bomb, a breed of device that every military organisation in the world has been trying to build. (Both Natalie and Devi, despite being questioned separately, instinctively play it cagey. In truth, given a few days to compare notes, they could produce blueprints and operating instructions in multiple languages.) How do you think the bomb worked? Well, largely, by magic. How do you think he got into the house? A spare key, possibly stolen from a fake rock in the garden, or maybe even given to him by Laura herself. How did you know there was someone in the house? Magic. How did you survive the explosion? Magic, idiots!
Injuries to people in nearby houses, damaged hearing, property damage, vehicular damage, falling rubble, forensic analysis, fingerprints, insurance, thousands of flash photographs.
This is a race against time, Natalie Ferno tells them outright, over and over again. The bomb was planted just at the instant that she and Devi discovered the next link in the trail. If that information wasn't critically time-sensitive, the house would not have blown up. Laura's involved in this thing right now.
"We're taking this very seriously. We're doing everything we can to find your sister as soon as possible."
It takes Natalie several hours to realise that this isn't incompetence, some bloated civil machine that takes time to get up to speed. The police have been playing the information hygiene game for much longer than she has. Information goes into an investigation, and it doesn't come out. And she's on the wrong side of the wall.