Chapter 30
When he finished, Martinelli’s response was a simple, “I see.” No inflection.
“So, to recap,” Peter said, “I tried to fix a mess I caused, and instead I made it far, far worse.”
“That about sums it up.”
Peter tipped his head back, leaning it against the wall. “If I’d left well enough alone, Draden’s people wouldn’t have kidnapped you.”
“Probably.”
“You’ll never forgive me, and I deserve it.”
Martinelli sighed. “Well—we don’t always get what we deserve, do we.”
He suddenly wished he could see Martinelli’s expression. How did he mean that? “Uh …” he said.
“Look—you screwed up. You really screwed up. You’re also my best friend, and life’s too short, and anyway, we need to move on to the problem-solving stage of this disaster, so … whaddaya got?”
Beatrix gave a rueful laugh. “I like him.”
“Me too,” Peter said over a lump in his throat. “Very much.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Martinelli said. “Well? What do we do?”
“Frankly, should we be doing anything I come up with?” Peter muttered.
“Don’t wallow. Think.”
Solid advice. He frowned. “Do you know if they’ve made a duplicate transmitter?”
“Not as far as I know. I didn’t, after you left.”
Peter leaned forward. “Then we ought to steal it, destroy it and get the hell out of here.”
“Yes,” Beatrix said.
“That’ll buy us some time, at least,” he added. “They won’t be able to make another right away, and maybe we could convince someone to stop them.”
“OK,” Martinelli said, “but how are we going to steal it?”
“Do you know where the transmitter is?” Beatrix asked.
“No,” Peter admitted. “They’ve got it tucked away somewhere, but we could …
” He trailed off as an unfortunate thought occurred to him.
Draden’s men clearly had some way to create an opening in the shielding around the complex without setting off the alarms—that must have been how Morse teleported directly into the lower basement with him.
The transmitter might not be stored in the building at all. It could, in fact, be anywhere.
Martinelli cleared his throat. “We could … what?”
Another unfortunate thought came to him—the way they could, without a doubt, get their hands on it.
He hated the idea.
He said it out loud, and Martinelli hated it even more.
“I think we have to do it, though—don’t you?” Beatrix murmured. “All those people—could be hundreds of thousands …”
Peter winced. “Look, I want to get you home to your wife,” he said to Martinelli.
“Yeah,” Martinelli said heavily, “but I’ve got to be able to live with myself.”
That was how the two of them ended up back in the chute thirty minutes later, visible again. Stomach churning, he lowered himself down, followed by Martinelli, both of them heading to the prison they’d worked so hard to escape.
This time, though, Beatrix—still invisible—was with them.
The room was dark, quiet and empty. It didn’t appear that anyone had noticed the earlier getaway, but the long wait until morning gave Beatrix plenty of time to consider grim possibilities and every manner of other upsetting thoughts.
When the lights flickered on at five-thirty, it was a relief to finally be on the verge of doing something.
The wizard in the red coat brought Peter and Martinelli their breakfast. After they’d wolfed it down, the wizard returned to collect their plates—dropping the transmitter off on the way.
This was it. Peter and Martinelli knelt by it, Peter holding on to the transmitter with both hands. “Does the spellwork feel off to you right here?” Peter asked as she crept up behind them.
“Hmm.” Martinelli put his hand on it. “Yeah, I see what you mean …”
She sank to her knees, gripping Peter’s right arm and Martinelli’s left. Laboratory, old, unused, no equipment, no tables, stale air, faded white paint on the walls—
The door opened. Peter’s muscles tensed under her fingers. Morse—Morse striding toward them.
“Tell me how to fix the problem you found yesterday,” he growled.
“Uh,” Peter said, “we just have a few more—”
“Now,” Morse hissed.
“We’re not quite ready,” Martinelli said.
Morse grabbed him by the front of his shirt and hauled him to his feet. “Perhaps I should separate the two of you to focus your minds on the task at hand.”
What could she do?
Peter stood. “No, that would be counterproductive.” He sounded almost calm. “I need him to help me diagnose the last of the … Damkohler dissipations. It looks like a runic problem, and he’s the runes expert, not me.”
“And I can’t work on it alone—he’s the genius, not me,” Martinelli said, voice shaking.
Her heart raced. She stared at Morse as he stared at Peter.
“One hour,” Morse said, still holding on to Martinelli.
Peter nodded. “I think we can do that.”
“You will.”
“Yes.”
Morse let go of Martinelli, spelled up a chair and sat a yard from them, arms crossed, mouth a grim line.
Peter and Martinelli knelt by the transmitter again, holding onto it, murmuring about “inverted displacement” and “invariant mass” as she gripped their arms and tried not to be hopelessly rattled by the man watching them.
She’d teleported under duress to save her sister.
She’d teleported with a payload stone that was about to explode. Why did this seem so much harder?
She knew the answer as soon as she’d asked herself the question. Morse killed Rosemarie. He’d almost killed Lydia. He was trying to kill far more people for reasons she couldn’t fathom, and on top of that, he was a virtuoso trap-setter, an expert secret-finder, a relentless and terrifying foe.
His attention was fixed on Peter and Martinelli. She was right behind them. She could feel the reds against her chest with every breath, but she couldn’t use one to try to speed up the process because she had to stay absolutely silent. If she gave herself away—if he found her here, now …
She closed her eyes. The laboratory. How large was it?
She bit her lip, thinking. Easily four times the size of their new brewing room, maybe five.
High ceiling. Hardwood floors with nasty stains where chemicals must have dropped years earlier.
She could almost see where the tables must have been, the rows of beakers, the scientists muttering over their experiments, the pungent odor—
The magic caught. Her eyes flew open in that second before they would fully dematerialize and—disaster, Morse was on his feet, hand extended toward them, a spell blasting from it—
But he was too late. The basement, Morse and his spell disappeared. The lab snapped into focus. They were still kneeling around the transmitter, Beatrix gasping in relief that lasted for just a few seconds before she remembered they were not out of the woods yet.
“Get back from it,” she cried out, grabbing leaves as she scrambled to her feet. “Fordēst!”
Her attack hit the protective spells woven around the transmitter with a clang. She heard Martinelli throw up a shield spell on the room, and time ticked by, cold sweat dripping down her cheek.
With a hiss, the protection failed. The transmitter shattered. Martinelli cast another spell on the pieces and vaporized them in a swirl of black smoke.
They’d done it. She leaned against Peter, overwhelmed.
“Oh my God,” he said, voice shaking. “I thought we were sunk.”
Martinelli wore such a pained expression that she expected a telling off for convincing them to go through with a plan so crazy that even the man who’d thought of it didn’t want to do it. Instead, he began to shake with laughter, little snorts escaping his nose. “Damkohler dissipations? Damkohler?”
Peter’s lips twisted into a sheepish grin. “The first thing I could think of.”
“Mrs. Blackwell,” Martinelli said, “I’ll have you know that there is no form of magical-wave dissipation named after a Damkohler, but there is a rather crude joke among magicists involving a man by that name and other sorts of dissipation.
We should all thank our lucky stars that bastard hasn’t heard it. ”
“My mind has this odd habit of going blank when I see him,” Peter said. “Can’t imagine why.”
Martinelli threw an arm around him. “In all seriousness, boss, what you did was amazing. I mean it. You too, Mrs. Blackwell—even when everything is quiet and calm, I have a hard time teleporting. As certain whippersnappers here like to point out.”
“I certainly agree that Mrs. Blackwell was amazing,” Peter said, making her laugh, giddy with relief as she was.
Then she thought of Morse finding them and instantly sobered. “We have to get out.”
“Right.” Peter bit his lip. “How did you get in? Can we do that?”
“No—long story. What about teleporting? Can we get our hands on one of those devices that makes a hole in the shielding?”
“A can opener?” He shook his head. “They’re kept under constant guard.”
“Then we’re stuck,” Martinelli said hollowly.
Beatrix had been giving it a lot of thought since the previous afternoon. “I think the trick is to invisibly fly in over the head of someone going into the checkpoint, wait through the rigmarole, and fly out the other side when the guards open it up.”
Martinelli shook his head. “They check for invisibility, and there isn’t a flying spell that actually works.”
“I’m not going to use a spell,” she said.
Martinelli gaped during Beatrix’s entire explanation of “knitting”—how powerful it was, how she suspected that most if not all women could do it if taught—and Peter’s own mouth fell open when she noted that it was undetectable magic. He’d had no idea.
“And you’re OK?” he murmured. “It’s not making you feel …”
He trailed off, not sure how to put it with Martinelli standing there.
“Yes, I’m all right.” She hesitated. “I was mistaken. The knitting wasn’t to blame—it was the Vows.”
He didn’t know why that hadn’t once occurred to him. It made a terrible sort of sense.
“So … so let me get this straight,” Martinelli said. “You can do magic without any sort of fuel.”
“Here, hold my hands,” she said to Martinelli. “No leaves, right?”
“Yep.”