Wood Sprites (12 page)

Louise couldn’t shake the feeling of impending disaster all the next day. While she crawled through the Internet, looking for some hint that someone had created a magic generator, Jillian worked on translating the Dufae Codex.

To their dismay, the first few pages of the codex were incomprehensible. The author seemed to be making shorthand notes with only the minimum explanations. It was only when she reached the sixth page that she found a solid piece of translatable text.

“Finally!” Jillian cried. “I should have just skipped ahead to this.”

“Another dead end. Literally.” Louise stared at the police report detailing the death of the scientist she’d been researching. Or at least, the police were assuming he’d been murdered, as they hadn’t found enough of him to verify it.

“This is what page six says.” Jillian scrolled back to read her translated text.

“My theories are correct and incorrect. Yes, because the landmasses are identical on both worlds, finding the mirror site of our most powerful
fiutana
was as simple as following a map. Yes, power does leak through fissures between worlds at sites of
fiutana
. It is impossible, however, to set up a reliable resonance to the Spell Stones, which leaves me woefully unprotected. Also the magic seems, for lack of a better word, dirty. Even fairly simple spells have unpredictable results. Three different sites have produced the same failures. If I’m to stay on Earth, I will have to find a way to purify the magic. If I fail, I will need to return home. I should plan carefully, though, before returning. Who can I trust with this? How do I protect those I love when I do not know who is friend and who is foe?”

It was a disquieting echo to Louise’s findings. “So the first five pages are test results?”

Jillian scrolled back through the original text. “Yeah, I think you’re right. He says here that ‘three different sites have produced the same failures.’ Each of these pages has mystery words that don’t repeat, and three words that do. I’m betting the repeated words are the locations, and the nonrepeating are the spells he’s measuring. The numbers under them indicate the variation in the results.”

“So this codex is a record of his experiments in magic.”

Jillian flicked the digital pages. “I wonder how many years he was here on Earth before he was killed. There are hundreds of pages here.”

Louise considered her own research. “If we could find one of these fissures, then we wouldn’t need a generator. The way he said ‘three different sites’ seems to indicate they’re fairly common. I wonder if he included a map.”

“I’ll check.” Jillian started to scan quickly through the pages.

Almost immediately, though, Louise realized the mistake in her logic. “Dufae was in France and he died in 1792. Windwolf didn’t colonize Westernlands until 1930. That’s the whole point of him being the viceroy; he was the only
domana
on the continent when Pittsburgh was first transported to Elfhome. Dufae’s map would only show the
fiutana
in Easternlands.”

“Yeah, but there could be fissures here in North America. If they were common in Europe, they’re probably common all over the world. If we figure out the conditions that form the fissures by studying Dufae’s European map, we might be able to predict where they would appear in the United States.”

“Dufae said the magic is dirty.”

“One.” Jillian held up a finger. “There are a thousand more pages to his codex.” She held up a second finger. “Two. He didn’t go back to Elfhome.”

“So he figured out how to clean the magic?”

“I’m figuring that’s what this is all about.” Jillian held up her tablet and showed off a sketch of some odd-looking device. “This is page twelve.”

* * *

Louise continued to wade through a flood of information on Leonardo’s hyperphase gate. Every time she thought she was getting close to an answer, the information trail would stop. The last one filled her with so much uneasiness that she got up to pace.

“What?” Jillian asked.

“I have a weird feeling,” Louise said. “Like we’re doing something bad.”

Jillian snorted. “We’re always doing something that other people think is bad. Everyone wants us to ‘be good,’ and what they really mean is ‘make it easy for them’ and has nothing to do with ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Like talking in the library. If no one is trying to get work done, why is it still bad? Because Miss Jenkins believes in learned behavior instead of rational thought. What we should be taught is compassionate response.”

Louise growled as Jillian veered totally off subject. “That’s not the point. Besides I can’t blame them. Learned behavior is a fairly simple punishment-and-reward system. I wouldn’t even know how to start to teach compassionate response.”

“We’re not animals. They wonder what is wrong with our country, but isn’t it fairly obvious that if children are being treated like animals instead of rational beings, as adults they’ll respond like monkeys?”

“Shut up or I’m going to fling poo at you!”

Jillian frowned as she realized that Louise was angry. “What’s wrong?”

“I—I don’t know. It’s just this weird feeling. Here, look. See this?” Louise pulled up the last data trail she’d followed. “It’s a micro blog post from three years ago.”

“The Dufae gate uses magic!!!” Jillian read. “You were right; someone figured it out.”

Louise impatiently waved her to wait. “The guy that posted this was an M.I.T. student by the name of Michael Kensbock. This is his posting history. He put out something on average every ten minutes. Two months later, his stream stops. This is his last post.”

The message said: “Eureka! I haz magic. Nobel iz mine! Party time!”

“He made one!” Jillian cried excitedly.

“Yes, right before he disappeared.” Louise pulled up the page that his family had put together in an attempt to find him. “He was at a bar with friends and went to the bathroom and never came back. Here’s the weird thing. Right after he disappeared, someone took down all his content. His vlogs, his e-mails—everything that could be erased—was. His micro blog posts are the only thing not erased, although I’m finding evidence that this service had undergone a massive virus attack at that time.”

“Maybe his disappearance didn’t have anything to do with the generator.”

“And his entire web presence erased?”

Jillian sighed and changed the subject. “Did you find a copy of the magic-generator thing?”

“It took some digging.” Louise pulled up the site. “I noticed that he liked to use a cartoon icon of himself. So I did a pattern-recognition search on the image and a few of the most basic spell symbols, assuming that he would need a spell to test the generator.”

“So you could hit anything that a normal search would miss?”

Louise nodded. “He obviously was going to publish the page to announce his work, but he didn’t want it found until he’d verified his findings, so he carefully didn’t use any words that would point a search at his page.”

The page had everything needed to create a generator with a high-end 3D printer. It looked simple: a molded plastic box with two power ports. One was a normal male 220 plug, which would indicate that the generator required power on the level of a clothes dryer. The second set of connectors was mere thin wires coated with plastic with flat tabs at the end. They didn’t look like anything that Louise knew, and they were identified as “magic connectors,” which normally would have made her giggle. There were complete schematics on building a matrix of parallel Casimir plates a few micrometers apart and detailed explanations of how the electricity was turned into magic. It was complicated, but Louise could understand it.

After building the generator and running careful studies on its output, he’d used it to cast a simple detection spell designed to map out ley lines.

“I’m worried,” Louise said. “This was his super-secret personal site he had stashed in the cloud. He had three public sites, but they’re all toast. Someone did a very good job of worming into even cache copies of his sites and making them unreadable.”

“Who knows what else he might have been doing that pissed someone off?”

“The thing is, he’s not the only one.” Louise flicked open windows of earlier dead ends. “Torbjorn Pettersen was a Norwegian who disappeared two years ago after publishing an article in
Scientific American
on field manipulation using quantum particles in an attempt to explain how Leonardo’s gate moved Pittsburgh to Elfhome. After him, there was a scientist named Lisa Sutterland who was doing similar work and was killed when someone tried to kidnap her six months later. Marcus Shipman published work on the gate, and he’s also missing. And Harry Russell. He went missing while he was under house arrest. He had a GPS microchip implanted on him as part of his punishment. Police should have been able to find him using that, but they couldn’t until two months ago. The chip turned up inside a fish in St. Louis.”

“As in the fish ate part of him? Eeewww!”

“That’s what they think. Everyone I’ve found that has come close to figuring out how Leonardo’s gate works has either disappeared mysteriously or been killed.”

“Well, we’re not going to tell anyone what we figure out. You were careful and made sure you couldn’t be traced?”

“Of course I was!” Louise said. “After the first two guys turned up missing, I went into silent-running mode.”

“Good. Let’s copy the source and then not hit this site again.”

They copied everything. Once they were safely isolated from the original site, they studied the plans.

“We’ll need a very high-end 3D printer,” Louise pointed out. “Our printer can’t build at the nanoscale level that this is going to need.”

“We could buy one.” Jillian pointed out that they now had money.

Louise snorted. “It would eat up a huge chunk of our funds, and how would we hide it? We couldn’t even carry it out of the foyer.”

Jillian sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. Forget about it. There’s one in the technology annex to the art rooms that the high school kids use for Mr. Kessler’s robotics and computer-design classes.” Mr. Kessler taught their computer literacy class.

“We need to be careful to cover our tracks,” Louise stressed.

“We’ll be like ninjas.”

Their plan started to go wrong two blocks from school. They had intended to arrive early and go straight to the art rooms. As they stepped off the subway train, however, they literally ran into Iggy.

“Hi!” He grinned brightly as he patted Tesla’s head. “Today is the big day!”

They gazed at him, mystified for a full minute.

“The play meeting!” he cried. “Don’t tell me you went to that girly party and Elle sucked your brains out or something.”

They’d totally forgotten about the joint-class play meeting, even with Elle’s party. They’d spent all of Sunday researching magic.

“We have other things going on,” Jillian said.

“Finishing the newest video?” Iggy asked. “I saw the filler you put up on Friday.”

Strange how it was easier to lie to strangers than to people who might remotely be their friend. Could Iggy be considered that? Having gone through the process so few times—say never—Louise wasn’t totally sure of the steps. It seemed for something so important there should be some ritual—a declaration of intent or a solemn vow or at least a handshake. How could people keep track otherwise?

“Yes, another video,” Jillian lied, but added truthfully, “The girls at the party kept asking what the next one was about.”

“We—we had an accident in our studio,” Louise countered to explain why they weren’t going to be producing said video anytime soon.

Jillian made a face but after a moment of thought nodded. “We kind of burned it down.”

“Kind of?”

“Well, we blew it up first, and then it burned down,” Louise said.

Iggy giggled. “Blast it all?”

“Yeah, exactly!” Louise said. It felt good to admit that much of the truth. “So we’re trying to figure out how to finish the project.”

Louise started them toward the school. Jillian could keep Iggy distracted while she went to the art rooms alone. On Mondays, Mr. Kessler had hall duty on the first floor. Mr. Kessler unlocked the art rooms and left them open on the expectation that Miss Gray would arrive shortly. Since Miss Gray didn’t have a class until second period, though, she tended to arrive at school at the last possible moment. It was a habit that the twins were counting heavily on.