***
An hour later, we had LuseCo locked down, the VIPs spitting mad, the employees from the top guy down demanding lawyers, and a certain feeling that we were about to break the case wide-open. I was mostly watching from outside, but the people in charge of LuseCo were brash and angry and seemed perfectly guilty to me.
The entire unit was assembled, deputies at both parking lots and the drive, and Rick and Soul were both on premises and in charge. Everyone was wearing P3E unis, even the LuseCo employees, though theirs were company issued and a silvery gray. Rick had an earbud in one ear, the other hanging down his shirt, the faintest strains of antimagic music audible as he walked up.
“What did your read indicate?” he asked as he crossed the lawn to me.
I had been thinking about how I was going to phrase my report, and how I was going to defend my claim when it was challenged to my face. “We’re standing on the epicenter of the activity.” I liked the termepicenter. It implied energy and destruction and mayhem and specificity. I wanted every single word I used to indicate all that. “If it isn’t a deliberate release, then they have a low-level leakage of something hazardous about twenty feet below the surface. The output appears stable, and my scan is backed up by repeated P 2.0 readings and handheld psy-meter readings. Everything we’ve seen in the surrounding community reflects this crisis.”Crisiswas a good word too. One of my trainers at Spook School had said,“Spin is everything.”I rather considered thatcontextwas everything, but I hadn’t argued at the time. “Why? What does the company say?” I asked.
“Kurt Daluege and his CFO, Makayla Lin, finally admitted that they had a problem earlier in the week, but they say they have it under control.”
“Problem?” I let the disbelief into my voice.
Rick didn’t smile and adjusted the earbud in his ear. “They were using a full coven and a special laser to test part of the collider theory, and the working ‘got away’ from them. ‘Got away’ was Kurt’s word choice. T. Laine has never heard of paranormal energies ‘getting away’ from a closed circle.”
“Me neither,” I said.
“Normally when a company is involved in energy R&D, no paranormals are allowed anywhere near, because mundane energies and psysitopes have been known to either cancel each other out or make them more volatile.”
“Explosiveis a better term,” T. Laine said, coming up behind me, her white uni swishing too, “but I’ll go withvolatile.” Behind her, Tandy nodded, agreeing.
Rick shielded his eyes from the overhead sun and studied the grounds. “All employees at LuseCo were human until a few months past, when they hired over two dozen witches and got them to form two covens of twelve and sync their energies.” Before T. Laine or I could remind him that was not the way covens were formed, he went on. “Money talked and they got two smaller covens to combine. The witches agreed because there’s a crossing of two ley lines directly beneath us.”
“I don’t feel any ley lines...” I stopped and started again. “I don’t feel any ley lines anywhere,” I said. “I didn’t sense them... Oh. No. Whatever they did wiped out the ley lines below Knoxville.”
T. Laine said, “That’swhat I’ve been feeling. I’d have known it if I had tried any big workings, but... And that explains why the Knoxville coven leader, Taryn Lee Faust, keeps putting off meeting with me. She stood up our meeting this morning. Son of a witch on a switch! She knows what’s happened to the ley lines and doesn’t want to admit it.”
Wryly Rick said, “Faust is the leader of the conjoined covens and my money’s on them trying to fix it by themselves, off-site and quietly. They haven’t been in to work in forty-eight hours.”
“That sounds bad,” T. Laine said, worried about the repercussions should witches be responsible for this situation. She was always worried about her species, with good reasons. Witch haters were everywhere.
“The energy testing was going according to plan and expectations with each test,” Rick said, “on workings that attemptedto replicate the particle theory research. But then there was an ‘accidental dispersal of the energies’—their words—while raising a working. The testing lab is underground and the witches and the LuseCo techs thought the particles would be simply dispersed into the earth. But there was something different about this working, and by morning, the lab was redlining psysitopes.
“Interpreting their words, reading between the lines, I’d say they shot a fused magical/energy beam into the ground during a working and it didn’t dissolve. Instead it evolved and stabilized and is now acting outside of testing parameters. They never expected to need a P 2.0, so all the testing they’ve done has been on the P 1.0. Lainie, when we finish here, find the head of security and do a reading of the lab.”
“Gladly. Idiots. Them, not you,” she added.
I extended the P 2.0 to her and watched as she entered the front door, merged with the other people in unis, and disappeared down an elevator.
I said, “The infinity loop dancer belowground talked to me. Either it’s using the words of the original spell itself—like Rick’s idea of a working that can develop on its own within strict parameters—or it’s developed and exhibited some form of intelligence.”
“That first one is more likely,” Tandy said, his odd reddish eyes sparking with excitement. “The words of the working got caught up in it and took on a life on their own.”
That theory made sense to them because it fit into their worldview. But I had seen sentience below the earth—sleeping, powerful sentience. I knew it was possible. “Whatever it was before the testing ‘got away’ from the combined coven, that dancing thing is the result, whether it noticed the particle and took it for itself, or the particle brought the thing awake and gave it power. I’m now calling it the infinity creature.”
Rick looked over my shoulder, into the distance, thinking. The termcreaturechanged things from a discovery inquiry to a criminal investigation. It meant that we might have to discover and determine sentience and guilt. His face was drawn and tight, the skin crinkled around his black eyes. Faster-than-normal healing was a standard upgrade for were-creatures, but his inability to shift was aging him. Hurting him. In the background, the moon music played, heard from the dangling earbud.
“Its creation may have been an accident, or something a witch and a LuseCo experimental physicist did on purpose,” I said. “But however it was started, the result is a mutation, an evolution. Whatever it was originally has now changed and, on some level, might be aware of its surroundings, and possibly aware of other things around it.” Like what I had done with the tree. Mutated it. Changed it. “This could indicate just a very high-level working, or a sign of evolving intelligence.”
“Are you suggesting that we protect it?” Rick asked.
I almost nodded but stopped. We killed mosquitoes and termites and roaches and mice as pests, and they had brains and instinct and purpose, far more than this thing might. The infinity might be defined as a pest too. But I didn’t want to let it go. What if it was a magical creature? The churchmen wanted to burn me at the stake for being a magical creature. “Ummm. Yes?”
“And how do we do that, Nell?” Rick sounded interested. Maybe a little too polite, which, with senior agents, meant they were feeling anything except polite. “People, humans, are dying. How am I supposed to protect something only you can sense?”
The roots in my belly writhed. “I...” I had no way to explain or to bring attention to what I knew in my gut—literally—to be a potential major problem. “I got no idea,” I said.
Rick shook his head, dismissing me. My face burned with embarrassment. I had a flash to being a child and seeing the older girls turn away in scorn at ball playing or sewing, because I was such a strange little girl. I hadn’t thought about that in ages. My belly ached, and I kneaded the scars there, rolling the hard tissue against my fingers.
