“What will you do—about work, I mean?”
Martinelli, sinking deeper into his chair, gave a long groan. “I don’t know. What would you do? No, scratch that, I know whatyouwould do, but what do you thinkIshould do? They’ve just promised me your job.”
What he needed Martinelli to do was stay. Stay, have no idea how to fix the weapon once the spells degraded, and buy him time to develop a defense.
Martinelli would take the blame. Martinelli deserved far better.
“Get the fuck out of there,” he said so forcefully his former deputy blinked in surprise. “I mean it. It’s a mess, and you don’t want to be there when the whole thing blows up—metaphorically speaking, though I’m afraid also literally. This weapon can be usedanywhere.This isn’t like a missile or a warhead. It’s radically different, and I’ll never forgive myself for making it, but at least give me the satisfaction of knowing that I didn’t ruin your life into the bargain.”
Martinelli gazed at the wine in his glass. Peter held his breath, wanting him to agree, wanting him to disagree.
“Yeah,” Martinelli said finally. “Yeah, I’m going to quit.”
Relief and dread fought it out in Peter’s chest. It was the right thing to do, and he should have said it months ago, but now the Army might find a dangerously inventive head of R&D.
“Do me a favor, and please distract me from that distraction,” Martinelli said. “Jesus Christ, my wifeandmy job.”
It wasn’t funny—it shouldn’t have been, anyway. But Martinelli started to laugh, and that swept Peter in like an inexorable river. It felt sogoodto have his friend back. Then he remembered that he still didn’t know where he would be tomorrow when the police arrived.
Distraction—they both needed a distraction. It wasn’t hard to think of another subject. He cleared his throat and asked, “What else did you learn about Vows?”
“Well.You can have all sorts of unintended consequences. That, plus their general ickiness, is why the federal government doesn’t use them. An agency that shall remain nameless did a pilot in the ’80s, you know. ‘Tell no one outside the agency about the work you’re doing,’ etc. etc. The Vows interpreted that to mean people outside the agency when the Vow was taken, so the guinea pigs couldn’t have any substantive discussions with staffers who joined afterward, but theycouldblab all they wanted to coworkers who left post-Vow.”
Peter snorted.
“Also, since you have to Vowtosomeone, not a faceless bureaucracy, you run into problems when that someone leaves. So the agency tried layering on new Vows every time that happened. One poor schlub took five in the course of nine years.”
This was no laughing matter. Peter drained his cup and braced himself. “What happened to him?”
“Ended up in a dementia ward. At forty-eight.”
Peter tipped his head back and stared at the ceiling. He would ask himself what on earth he’d been thinking to play around with magic he knew so little about, except the answer was that hehadn’tbeen thinking, and he’d forced Beatrix along for the ride.
“I tracked down ten of the wizards who took the agency’s Vow multiple times,” Martinelli said. “Eight of them had neurological problems.”
What if it had already started? How would he know?
He grasped at the one sparkling bit of hope. “Wait—you said this wasn’t your first Vow. Why would you take another one?”
Martinelli poured himself a refill. “It’s not about the number of Vows—it’s about revowing. Taking the same Vow again and again. There’s something about it that the brain can’t handle. I talked to several dozen wizards who took multiple different Vows, and they didn’t develop the same symptoms.”
He’d twice made the same Vow to Beatrix, the very same down to punctuation. They’d burned up the first, the only way to free her from her Vow promising to obey him in all matters, and then he took his again. Her Vows—the first one to him, the second that replaced it and the needless third pressed on her by Miss Knight—were all different. Decidedly so.
“Did any of the ill wizards make the same Vow just twice?” He realized how avid he sounded, modulated his voice and added, “Or was third time the charm?”
“Yeah, they’d all revowed at least three times. The magical three.”
Peter tried to make himself relax, but he was too logical to see that as reassuring. “How many people did you interview who’d Vowed the same thing twice?”
“None. There weren’t any in that agency’s pilot, and I never found wizards who’d done it on their own.” Martinelli sighed.“Pleasetell me you didn’t.”
He couldn’t pretend to himself that he didn’t want Martinelli to know. He took a bracing gulp of wine and said, “I did. I took them last year, about two months apart.”
“Jesus.” Martinelli set his glass down and leaned toward him. “Itoldthem we needed to publish my findings—needed to honest-to-God publicize them—but they classified my whole damn dissertation and simply put out the word that wizards should not make Vows. When you tell people not to do something but don’t give them the fecking reason, what do youthinkwill happen?”
Peter stared hollowly at the wall.
“Why did you take the same exact Vow? Surely the Pentagram?—”
