Chapter 21
The university’s lockup had no windows, making it both stuffy and warm.
Depressed, I sat on the edge of the cot with my back hunched and my elbows on my knees.
After months of Pluck’s presence and opinions bumping up against mine, it felt decidedly odd not having him fizzing through my thoughts.
I didn’t like that our new reach had limits, and I missed him.
My view from the three cinder-block walls was of the empty, room-long cell across the hall, but there was another smaller cell next to mine.
It, too, was empty. I had a suspicion that they’d cleared the small cellblock for me, either not wanting to risk me obtaining a drift of dross or, more likely, not wanting me talking to another detainee and possibly starting a sympathy campaign.
I might be on the outs with most of the campus right now, but there’d been a time when everyone was glad to see Petra Grady the sweeper.
The silence was relieved only by the garbled band scanner and the occasional comment from the front office. It had gotten quieter after eight, when half the staff had gone home.
Earlier tonight, I had entertained a sporadic parade of stern faces and terse questions from both the university cops and a few board members.
Most wanted to know what Pluck and I had been doing at the hospital, where Pluck was now, whether I knew where the marshal, Lev, and Marty were.
That Lev and Cameron were at large was a relief. That Marty was alone was not.
When I realized they weren’t actually listening but looking for discrepancies to point to and say “liar,” I quit talking to them. That had been hours ago.
I stood and stretched, bored out of my mind as I recapped my empty water bottle. Putting my arm through the bars, I tossed it to the nearby trash can. “Two points, yay!” I said sourly when it landed and went in.
Frustrated, I leaned against the bars to look at the window set in the door leading to the front offices.
It was frosted, so I couldn’t see anything, but I could tell by listening that it was almost empty out there.
The university’s holding facility wasn’t actually a jail.
Jail would have more amenities and adhere to the basics of lawful restraint.
I’d gotten no phone call, no official declaration as to why I was being detained.
There was, however, a toilet and a sink half-hidden behind a partition, which I was extremely grateful for.
The cell was set up for a comfortable two or a crowded six.
But it did have something a regular jail didn’t, which was why I was here and not at the city lockup: no-dross protocols.
Thanks a hell of a lot, Dana. She’d seen me turn a drift of dross into dark matter and crack the sidewalk. Now it would be harder to escape—but I was going to have to.
Peeved, I leaned against the bars, arms around my middle.
Being stuck here was bad, but not knowing how everyone else fared was the real punishment.
I was worried about Herm, who had tackled Dana.
I was worried about Ryan, who I knew would call in all his favors for me and then some.
I was worried about Marty, and I was really worried about Cameron and Lev, who I had sent to hide under the city with a mercurial shadow who hated mages to the point of blindness.
And I was worried about Benedict, who was likely still in some hospital office for having snuck me in.
Mostly, though, I was worried about Pluck. Which was odd. Of everyone, he could likely take care of himself the best, having been a loner for the last handful of centuries. Now, though, he had something to fight for. He’d take risks—foolish ones. If they caught him…
I pushed the ugly thought away and went to sit down, bringing one foot up to rub my ankle when the memory of getting stuck in asphalt lifted through me.
It was shortly followed by the image of Pluck facing down Dana.
Fear and anger had tripped him back to the terrifying beast that I’d first encountered, right down to the broken bone protruding from half-decayed flesh and the dark matter dripping like pus to burn and crack stone.
Had it been Pluck’s idea or Dana’s fear that had made him so? I wasn’t sure which would be worse.
And why, I wondered as I drew my other foot up, does he want to be a dog when he could be so much more? Something like…Kahu?
Sitting cross-legged on the cot, I brought my palms together and apart as if I were making a field.
As before, it was all weft and no weave—the chime of the universe immediately dissolving into a messy tangle of energy threads without my own echo to give it form.
Pluck maintained that he liked being a dog because no one expected anything of him and everyone already had a framework of wary trust when it came to dogs—the perfect attitude for dealing with a shadow.
It made sense, but people had to be treated with that same suspicion as well. Why not be a person?
Like Thoth?
A burst of noise from the front drew my attention, and the tangle of threads between my hands broke along with my concentration, fragmenting into nothing.
Someone had come in, but they were staying up front, so I conjured a new tangle of threads between my hands, feeling the energy pull tight like a cat’s cradle between my fingers.
Pluck tuned dross dust that plagued him into a usable energy, storing it in a moldavite lodestone.
I’d done the same thing in the parking lot with an entire drift, using the energy to crack the sidewalk.
Clearly being a weaver allowed me to handle more dross than a shadow could—that is, if it didn’t break or burn me while I was doing it. Deep in thought, I brought my hands together, shivering at the rising tingling chill cramping my fingers.
A mocking laugh sounded through the heavy door, drawing my attention when the muffled conversation grew louder.
They were processing someone, by the sounds of it, and I went back to the threads of dark matter tangled about my fingers with the cold of space.
It was as if I could feel the energy shift from a lower shell to a higher as I wiggled my fingers, a hint of spiderweb, a brush of butterfly wing, the cold found on the far side of the moon: it was all an expression of energy.
I wonder, I mused as I shook my hands and felt nearly all the threads fall from me to leave a singular chill that was somehow more defined, stronger now that it wasn’t competing with untold others.
My breath was a cool mist as I focused on the single thread of dark matter, wondering if I could do anything with it.
Pluck used dark matter straight from shadows.
It was only weavers who had to use the tuned stuff they left behind in moldavite—the energy found in dross dust stored there as a matter of convenience.
I closed my eyes, shivering as the full sensation of the chiming universe flowed to the forefront of my awareness.
The slow rise and fall was the echo from the big bang, pushing the edges of reality out in an ever-growing space.
The phenomenon was there all the time now, ringing between my ears, but if I focused, the energy tingling in my hands seemed to mimic it.
Exhaling, I pinched the single thread between my fingers and my thumbs, pulling it taut.
The gossamer thread of dark energy was too tiny to see, and yet I knew it was there, slowly deadening my fingertips with an aching cold.
Hold up. The sound changes when I stretch it, I thought as the thrum shifted to a high-pitched whine.
My eyes flashed open and my lips parted.
There, between my pinched blue fingers, was a glowing light.
I was freakin’ making a light. Though the thread of dark matter stretched between them was invisible, a sphere of light had blossomed from it, and when I squinted, I could see an impossibly thin trace of a more certain glow, like the filament in a glass bulb.
“Wow,” I whispered as I made the glow brighten and fade by drawing my hands apart and closer together. Breath held, I pulled tight, tighter…tighter…
An ache began to thrum between my ears as the singular sound began to split into two, a half note apart—until I reached the limits of its capabilities and a burst of light flared and was gone.
I jerked, my muffled yelp of surprise huffing from me in a cold mist. “Shadow spit,” I whispered, glancing at the door as I held my now-frozen hands to my middle to try to warm them.
I’d been too excited to care, but stressing the thread of dark matter into glowing had left my fingertips blue with a cold that was quickly spreading up my arms, settling in me to feel as if I’d spent the night sleeping on a rock.
There was probably a way to use the dark matter threads to do magic directly, but I didn’t know it.
I needed dross. The stuff right from the universe was too unwieldy. And cold.
“Hey!” I yelled in the general direction of the door as I awkwardly tugged the thin blanket from the cot and wrapped it around me. “Can I have another blanket?”
No one answered, and I slid from the cot to stand at the bars. “I know you can hear me,” I said, almost to myself, as I thunked my forehead against the gate. Okay, I had told Pluck it was only a box and no one was going to hurt me, but how was I going to get out of here?
I exhaled, brow furrowing at the new, unexpected flush of cold rushing to my head like an ice cream headache. “Ow…” I whispered as I put a hand to my forehead. What good was being able to make a light from nothing if it froze you solid and gave you a headache?
“Put him in the box,” someone said from the front room with a cruel bitterness.