Bernie, hovering nearby, said, “Do you need anything? More water?”
She shook her head. “Why don’t you let me watchyoupractice.”
“Okay, but it gets dull fast. And it takes a while.”
“Just thirteen minutes, right?”
“Actually,” he said, “I can do the wild-goose routine for twice as long in here, give or take. But that’s not a fair measure. It’s easier to use magic in this room because there’s so much of it.”
“Pulling magic to you, this takes energy,” Willi said. “It is tiring.”
“Wait,” she said, squinting at them. “How could you possibly know you can wild-goose for only half as long outside this room?”
“I’ve done in-versus-out tests, ones that stayed under the radar,” Hartgrave said.
“And I got my baseball cap only half as far off the ground when I walked out of here the first time and tried to levitate it again,” Bernie said. “To prove I hadn’t just had the hallucination to end all hallucinations, of course ...”
He grinned. Emily reciprocated. Then it occurred to her that this would have been the death of him, hadHartgrave not intervened, and she was no longer amused.
“All right,” Bernie said, nodding to Hartgrave and pushing up his sleeves. “Shall we?”
He disappeared with a sound like a soft hiss, reappearing halfway across the room.
“Five,” Hartgrave called out. Like a warning. “Four. Three ...”
Bernie screwed up his face in concentration, palms outstretched. Hartgrave finished the countdown—with “now” in place of “zero”—and Bernie disappeared.
The moment after, Hartgrave materialized almost exactly where Bernie had been. And started a new countdown.
So he was playing the role of an Organization wizard, trying to overtake Bernie but forced to wait for the man’s aura to register on the tracking system between jumps. Five seconds, he had said. It took five seconds.
Equally unsettled and engrossed, she craned her neck to look for Bernie. He was just behind her chair, and he winked at her.
But after he teleported several hundred more times, he wasn’t in any shape for fooling around. His face glistened; the hair under his pork pie hat was damp. He gasped for air like an out-of-shape man in the last stretches of a marathon.
“Uncle, uncle,” he wheezed as Hartgrave finally overtook him.
Hartgrave crossed his arms. “If they catch you,don’tsay that.”
“Well, obviously.” Bernie weaved unsteadily toward her and leaned against the high-backed chair. “I’ll ask for directions to London Bridge.”
Aha, so Hartgrave used his icy stare of death on other people, too. He cracked his knuckles and said, “If you can’t take this seriously—”
“You’ll find someone else?” Bernie rolled his eyes. “How’d I do, Willi?”
“Twenty-five minutes, fifty-nine seconds.”
Bernie gave a whoop. “More-or-less good enough!” He jabbed a finger at Hartgrave. “Hah, hah and another hah!”
His entire arm wobbled.
“Like to sit?” she whispered.
“Yes, would you mind?” he said under his breath, a bit desperately.
No wonder Hartgrave was so worried about this part of the plan. She gave up her seat and walked over to him, glad her legs could once again hold her weight.
“Is the chase really necessary?” she asked in an undertone, not wanting to hurt Bernie’s feelings. “Why not lie in wait until they’re all out running errands or kicking puppies?”
