Chapter 22
Peter told him. Not everything—not that he’d taken the actual weapon, or that the copy he’d left would be less effective as time wore on, or what he’d done to Beatrix.
But he told Martinelli how the Army was getting those explosions.
Why stop at pigs and primates when you could drain the life force out of humans?
Why stop with a weapon that could kill thousands when you could make it kill tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands instead?
Martinelli listened without interrupting, other than muttered groans and quiet expletives. When the story was done, he said nothing for a while, head in his hands. Then he muttered, “I’m going to need another drink. In fact, bring me the whole bottle.”
Peter returned with the rest of the scotch and handed it to Martinelli. He poured wine for himself.
“How did you know I’m not getting paid here?” he asked, setting the bottle on the side table between them.
“What?” Martinelli focused and frowned. “Oh! Mercer said something about that. Right after he came here to chew you out last year.”
Ah. Right. Peter had forgotten that Mercer had asked him point blank and he’d told the man. That felt like a very long time ago.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am. I wanted to tell you from the start, but I’m clearly not supposed to know it and I was afraid I couldn’t trust you.
Then you began coming around all the time, and God, I needed a friend, but I thought you were a spy.
I mean, you’re married—you have better things to do with your weekends than pal around with me. ”
Martinelli gave a hollow laugh. “Mae left me.”
Peter almost dropped his glass. “What?”
“She moved back with her mother last month.” He downed the rest of his scotch and poured wine into his tumbler.
“We can’t have kids. She said she didn’t know what the point was, a marriage with no kids.
What’s the point? I love you, isn’t that enough of a point?
” Martinelli closed his eyes. “But it wasn’t for her.
Everyone on our street has children, all the couples we see socially, all the wives she visits … ” He trailed off.
“Salt in the wound,” Peter murmured.
Martinelli sighed.
Peter struggled for something to say and finally settled on, “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Distract me.”
“You don’t want to talk about it?”
“Lord love a duck, no.”
“What will you do—about work, I mean?”
Martinelli, sinking deeper into his chair, gave a long groan. “I don’t know. What would you do? No, scratch that, I know what you would do, but what do you think I should do? They’ve just promised me your job.”
What he needed Martinelli to do was stay. Stay, have no idea how to fix the weapon once the spells degraded, and buy him time to develop a defense.
Martinelli would take the blame. Martinelli deserved far better.
“Get the fuck out of there,” he said so forcefully his former deputy blinked in surprise.
“I mean it. It’s a mess, and you don’t want to be there when the whole thing blows up—metaphorically speaking, though I’m afraid also literally.
This weapon can be used anywhere. This isn’t like a missile or a warhead.
It’s radically different, and I’ll never forgive myself for making it, but at least give me the satisfaction of knowing that I didn’t ruin your life into the bargain. ”
Martinelli gazed at the wine in his glass. Peter held his breath, wanting him to agree, wanting him to disagree.
“Yeah,” Martinelli said finally. “Yeah, I’m going to quit.”
Relief and dread fought it out in Peter’s chest. It was the right thing to do, and he should have said it months ago, but now the Army might find a dangerously inventive head of R&D.
“Do me a favor, and please distract me from that distraction,” Martinelli said. “Jesus Christ, my wife and my job.”
It wasn’t funny—it shouldn’t have been, anyway. But Martinelli started to laugh, and that swept Peter in like an inexorable river. It felt so good to have his friend back. Then he remembered that he still didn’t know where he would be tomorrow when the police arrived.
Distraction—they both needed a distraction. It wasn’t hard to think of another subject. He cleared his throat and asked, “What else did you learn about Vows?”
“Well. You can have all sorts of unintended consequences. That, plus their general ickiness, is why the federal government doesn’t use them.
An agency that shall remain nameless did a pilot in the ’80s, you know.
‘Tell no one outside the agency about the work you’re doing,’ etc.
etc. The Vows interpreted that to mean people outside the agency when the Vow was taken, so the guinea pigs couldn’t have any substantive discussions with staffers who joined afterward, but they could blab all they wanted to coworkers who left post-Vow. ”
Peter snorted.
“Also, since you have to Vow to someone, not a faceless bureaucracy, you run into problems when that someone leaves. So the agency tried layering on new Vows every time that happened. One poor schlub took five in the course of nine years.”
This was no laughing matter. Peter drained his cup and braced himself. “What happened to him?”
“Ended up in a dementia ward. At forty-eight.”
Peter tipped his head back and stared at the ceiling. He would ask himself what on earth he’d been thinking to play around with magic he knew so little about, except the answer was that he hadn’t been thinking, and he’d forced Beatrix along for the ride.
“I tracked down ten of the wizards who took the agency’s Vow multiple times,” Martinelli said. “Eight of them had neurological problems.”
What if it had already started? How would he know?
He grasped at the one sparkling bit of hope. “Wait—you said this wasn’t your first Vow. Why would you take another one?”
Martinelli poured himself a refill. “It’s not about the number of Vows—it’s about revowing. Taking the same Vow again and again. There’s something about it that the brain can’t handle. I talked to several dozen wizards who took multiple different Vows, and they didn’t develop the same symptoms.”
He’d twice made the same Vow to Beatrix, the very same down to punctuation.
They’d burned up the first, the only way to free her from her Vow promising to obey him in all matters, and then he took his again.
Her Vows—the first one to him, the second that replaced it and the needless third pressed on her by Miss Knight—were all different. Decidedly so.
“Did any of the ill wizards make the same Vow just twice?” He realized how avid he sounded, modulated his voice and added, “Or was third time the charm?”
“Yeah, they’d all revowed at least three times. The magical three.”
Peter tried to make himself relax, but he was too logical to see that as reassuring. “How many people did you interview who’d Vowed the same thing twice?”
“None. There weren’t any in that agency’s pilot, and I never found wizards who’d done it on their own.” Martinelli sighed. “Please tell me you didn’t.”
He couldn’t pretend to himself that he didn’t want Martinelli to know. He took a bracing gulp of wine and said, “I did. I took them last year, about two months apart.”
“Jesus.” Martinelli set his glass down and leaned toward him.
“I told them we needed to publish my findings—needed to honest-to-God publicize them—but they classified my whole damn dissertation and simply put out the word that wizards should not make Vows. When you tell people not to do something but don’t give them the fecking reason, what do you think will happen? ”
Peter stared hollowly at the wall.
“Why did you take the same exact Vow? Surely the Pentagram—”
“No. Not for work.” Peter considered how much to reveal—Martinelli might be under a Vow, but as he himself said, Vows were slippery. “I had to destroy the first one and ended up replacing it with the second.”
Martinelli let out a whooshing breath of obvious relief. “That’s far better. Those other wizards layered one identical Vow on top of the other. Listen, I really think you’ll be OK. How do you feel?”
Peter gave a bitter laugh. “Like I’m losing it. But that might not have anything to do with it. You see, I made those Vows to someone who also made Vows to me.”
Martinelli’s eyes went wide. “At the same time?”
“Yes.”
“Twice?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, boss.”
“So you know. You know what happens with simultaneous Vows.”
“I only know two pairs who did—it’s not a statistically significant sample.” Martinelli paused, then shook his head. “But they had very similar experiences.”
“Dreams?”
“Yes. The first pair each Vowed once, and they started to have these shared Technichroma dreams, dreams pulled from their actual lives. So did the other pair, but then they Vowed a second time—”
“—and their dreams became like an extension of real life, except it was just the two of them?”
“Yes.”
“Did they Vow a third time? One to the other, or each to each?”
“No! Holy shit—what the hell happens after a third time?”
“You can’t undo the Vows. They fuse. They’re permanent.”
For a second or two, Martinelli simply stared at him. “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Peter muttered.
“No, I mean—it probably hasn’t happened yet, or you’re not willing to admit it to yourself, but the two of you are going to feel as if you’re falling in love with each other.”
Peter gasped. “What?”