Chapter 27 #2
I slide the scalpel blade onto its handle and wait for Conall to finish prepping the skin. “We think that maybe someone is trying to sabotage Magecorp—and maybe Linksphere. And those tethers that Magecorp use to hold open the portals…”
Conall gives the cat’s skin a final swipe. “You said they’re not what we thought, right?
I lower my voice further. “We think that whoever is causing the surges is opening extra portals…using people as tethers.”
Conall, still holding the final swab, gapes at me. “Using people?” He claps his hand over his mouth and darts a glance at the closest door. Fortunately, we’re still alone.
“There have been a few deaths,” Heloise murmurs, marking the cat’s heart rate, respiratory rate, and blood pressure down on the chart.
Conall takes a spray bottle and spritzes the cat liberally with metho. “Do…we think it’s the MLO? It’s what they want, right? The surges would mean more magic flows to us from the Void.”
“I guess so, but…” I let out a long sigh. “We don’t know if the MLO’s involved just yet.”
Of course, if you asked any random granny on the street, they’d swear up and down that it absolutely, definitely is the Magical Liberation Organization.
From the outset, the media has already acted judge and jury, blaming the MLO for both the gala explosion and the one at Magecorp.
I feel a slight twang of guilt at the latter, since that explosion was caused by me, but at the same time…
I’m not about to turn myself in. Clearly, the MLO can look after itself.
But despite an extensive investigation by the police, no links between the MLO and the explosions have been found—yet.
I start incising the cat’s skin. The capsule of the abscess is thickened, and it comes apart in layers, so it’s as though I’m slicing slowly through an onion. Conall is wearing a distinct look of disgust on his face, and I don’t think it’s because I’m about to cut into a semisolid mass of pus.
“I started looking more into the tethers, and what they could possibly be,” Conall says, after a short period of silence, his nose still wrinkled. “Just…scientific curiosity, you know?”
I do know what that’s like, so I remain quiet, encouraging him to continue.
“And I discovered something interesting.” Now no longer preoccupied with prepping the cat for the procedure, Conall starts tapping away on his strap.
“There are mentions throughout history of a recurrent object—in our language, it’s called the Source.
But in other cultures it’s known as various things: the Coming, the Salvation, the Hand of the Gods…
It was said to have crashed into our world sometime back in the Dark Ages. ”
“Oh?” Heloise and I dart glances at each other again, and I return my focus to the abscess. The skin is extraordinarily thickened, more so than a run-of-the-mill cat fight wound, and even with all this cutting I’m still not through the capsule.
Conall does that fancy projecting thing, from his strap into midair, and I really should ask him how to do it now that I can channel enough extra magic to try.
But now’s not the time; he’s already flipping through various websites that depict photos of all sorts: leaves taken from dusty, crumbling books; pictures of ancient rock paintings; sculptures displayed in museums around the world.
And they’re all of a roughly circular structure, with a honeycomb appearance to its surface, much like—
“The circular room!” I gasp out. The pictures are all depicting something that looks precisely like what I’d caught glimpses of in the center of the Magecorp vault.
Before Darghan Briggs chased me and stunned me unconscious, of course.
Then, because Heli and Conall are both staring at me, confused, I elaborate: “Magecorp were keeping one of these…Source things, did you call it? In the locked vault at the top of the tower.”
Conall takes a while to close his gaping mouth, and when he does, he slowly turns his attention back to the projected pictures in the air.
“Well, according to some very old scriptures, a rock just like this came crashing down to Earth some thousand or so years ago. There are old myths and legends from all around the world, referencing an object that sounds like a meteor…and it’s known in every culture as being something that once, long ago, brought magic to the people of Earth. ”
“Like a sign from the gods?” asks Heloise.
Conall frowns. “Yeah, something like that. But what if it wasn’t from the gods? What if it was—”
“—from the Void!” I finish Conall’s sentence for him, excitement unfurling in my chest. “Someone must have figured out that they could use it to tether open the portals and harvest magic that humans could use.” I chew on my lip, thinking.
It still doesn’t explain how the saboteurs are using people instead of the Source.
But at least we have a lead, now. “Magecorp must have somehow got hold of it—or part of it, if Linksphere also uses the same.”
“Maybe whoever’s opening the illegal portals somehow managed to steal some of this Source,” Heli adds as she casually feeds more magic into the anesthesia machine. “Do we need to look into who has access? Find out if there have been any breaches of Magecorp security?”
I ponder this for a moment. Percy had said Nathaniel Price’s mansion had been broken into, too.
If some of the rock was stolen, it might not have even been from Magecorp HQ; besides, I really don’t want the authorities to start poking around Magecorp’s security records.
That might implicate me, and I definitely don’t want to get done for it.
“Maybe we should start by profiling the victims. We could see if any of them have anything special about them…Like suspected ties to the MLO, or something.”
Figuring that I’ll dissect this information later, when I don’t have an anesthetized cat in front of me and can therefore properly concentrate, I turn my attention back to my task. “Conall, you’re brilliant, by the way. How did you find all this?”
Looking sheepish, he turns bright red. “I’ve spent the whole week trawling through the library archives. It’s in none of the modern textbooks. I had to search right back to old editions, and look up some really obscure references.”
“Wow. You’re amazing.” Heloise’s praise is completely genuine, and wholly justified.
“Like I said, I was just really fascinated by the Magecorp blueprints and wanted to get to the bottom of how they do it.” Conall shifts on his feet, clearly uncomfortable with the praise. “How they actually harvest magic, I mean. I should have been studying for exams, but…” He shrugs.
I think about the stack of IDs in Darghan Briggs’s drawer. The deaths recorded on Nora Chapman’s lists. The qílín foal that Harrisford and I saved with my hands (and his body).
And mostly…Mostly I think about Gary the guinea pig: his stiff little legs and Conall’s palpable grief as he cried over his friend.
“No.” Finally, I manage to stab through the outside of the abscess with the blade. A torrent of foul-smelling, partially inspissated pus pours out, and we all gag.
Ugh, says Percy, from a distance. That is disgusting. This is followed by the marked sound of him retching up his breakfast. I don’t know what he’s vomiting on, but I’m willing to bet it’s my freshly washed laundry—or something roughly equivalent.
I frown. You’re not even here, Percy.
True, he replies. But remember: I feel everything that you feel, Hairless One.
This is true; I can feel everything he feels too. It’s unsettling, since I’ve always kept my emotions so walled off: behind my mask, inside my chest, in the cuts I make on my skin.
I shake my head to clear my thoughts, focusing on the trapped magic that is unfurling from the cat’s incision.
It hits me at once—the potent swell of too much magic, combined with a gangrenous stench.
The magic has been trapped for so long that it’s turned all black, so concentrated it is actually noxious.
“This,” I say to Conall, voicing words that I never ever thought would come out of my own mouth, “is way more important than a bunch of bloody exams.”
Later, Heloise and I lounge on her bed with glasses of red wine and an array of expensive cheeses arranged artfully on a cheese board. Percy is present too—now that I’ve finally told Heli about him, I thought he’d appreciate a change of scenery.
Heloise’s dorm room is in the east wing, which is not quite as fancy as the truly posh south wing, but still much nicer than mine. (Agreed, says Percy, his tail flicking back and forth. She has far better taste than you.)
I scowl. Kind Percy is gone and Snarky Percy is back, apparently.
It’s a bright, comfortable, cozy room, which Heloise has decorated in a multicolored riot of varying patterns and textures. Technically, it should clash—but somehow it just works. It’s the exact type of room you’d expect Heloise to have, given her personality.
We’re trawling through Heli’s mother’s lists, our laptops propped open—mine old and clunky, hers new and sleek.
The aim is to research as many of the dead people as possible and see if we can turn up any clues.
Any patterns. Absolutely anything whatsoever.
I’ve been feeling crushed by the weight of frustration since leaving the gala; it’s as though the information we need is dancing just beyond our reach, and only dribbling through in tiny increments that don’t give us the full picture.
I draw in a deep breath. It’s no different to working up a case, Gwen. You just have to take each little bit of information and put it together to formulate a diagnosis. Then, letting my sigh whoosh out of me, I type the next name into my browser’s search bar.
“It was the surges, wasn’t it?” Heloise says suddenly, fixing her gaze on me.
“What was the surges?” I mumble, preoccupied with clicking through the dozens of listings the search engine has on Benjamin Purcell.
“The reason you agreed to go to the gala with Harrisford Briggs.”
My head snaps up. Hearing his name spill from Heloise’s wine-stained lips makes me so irrationally angry. “Yes,” I say, indignant. “We were trying to look for tethers. We figured there might be some remnant of one where the last big explosion happened—”
“I knew it!” she says, slapping my shoulder. “I knew you’d never agree to go anywhere with that prick voluntarily.”
“Of course I wouldn’t.” My mood has abruptly soured, thinking about how Harrisford had abandoned me midkiss. “He’s an arrogant arsehole and I want nothing more to do with him. Ever, ever again.”
Heloise gives me a sly half smile. “Don’t know if he would say the same thing, G.”
I fix her with my most withering glare. “Yes, he would. I hate him. He hates me. We only agreed to work together because we’re both trying to come first.”
And I’m going to beat him, I add silently.
Even if it kills me, I’m going to wipe the floor with Harrisford-fucking-Briggs. I’m still four points ahead of him; I gained an additional two points for successfully treating the magiphilic cat’s abscess, and he gained two points for something I don’t know, and don’t care at all, about.
“Mmm-hmmm.” Heli takes a sip of her wine, that infernal smile still on her lips.
“Anyway,” I say, distressed by the unpleasant turn our conversation has suddenly taken. “Have you found out anything interesting about the dead folk?”
After placing her glass carefully onto her bedside table, Heloise tugs her computer further up her lap. She screws her face up in disgust, then looks up. “There’ve been more deaths.”
“Shit,” I say. “More?”
Her eyes are glued on her screen. “Three in the past two days. This is getting bad, G.” Her fingers fly across the touchpad as she scrolls, squinting at the social media profiles she’s pulled up on the screen.
“Got ’em.” She stops scrolling and swivels the computer to face me. She’s enlarged pictures of three different people: two women and a man.
“Who are they?” I ask her, staring at their grim expressions. Clearly, they are mug shots.
“These three,” Heli says, tapping the edge of the screen with one finger, “are all allegedly connected with the MLO in some way.”
I lean forward to squint at the screen. In some ways, the Magical Liberation Organization would be the simplest explanation.
Their stated purpose was always to help magic reach the masses.
To distribute it equally and increase its accessibility.
It’s very plausible that they’d make a concerted effort to sabotage Magecorp.
For the MLO to rip open multiple portals that increase the flow of magic into our world would be consistent with their cause.
Never mind that they staunchly deny any involvement. Never mind the fact that at least three of their own have been actually killed. History has shown us that they’re A-OK with sacrificing themselves—and members of the public—in order to achieve their ends.
Yes. It could definitely be the MLO. Sometimes I need to remember that a stone is just a stone, a horse just a horse.
One of the first things you ever learn at vet school is not to make things more complex than they outwardly seem.
When you hear the sound of hooves, one of our first-year lecturers had said, assume it is a horse, not a Pegasus.
It means: Always go for the simplest explanation first—the most common.
Horses are common. Even unicorns are. But, being both shy and extremely rare, Pegasuses are almost never seen, even by the most experienced myth.creat vets in the world.
This looks like the MLO. It smells like the MLO. Logically, it probably is the MLO.
“I suppose that’s our next step, then,” I say, gripping the stem of my wineglass.
I have no idea how, and no idea when, but we’re going to have to sneak into one of the MLO’s super-top-secret meetings.