Morse grabbed him by the front of his shirt and hauled him to his feet. “Perhaps I should separate the two of you to focus your minds on the task at hand.”
What could she do?
Peter stood. “No, that would be counterproductive.” He sounded almost calm. “I need him to help me diagnose thelast of the … Damköhler dissipations. It looks like a runic problem, and he’s the runes expert, not me.”
“And I can’t work on it alone—he’sthe genius, not me,” Martinelli said, voice shaking.
Her heart raced. She stared at Morse as he stared at Peter.
“One hour,” Morse said, still holding on to Martinelli.
Peter nodded. “I think we can do that.”
“Youwill.”
“Yes.”
Morse let go of Martinelli, spelled up a chair and sat a yard from them, arms crossed, mouth a grim line. Peter and Martinelli knelt by the transmitter again, holding onto it, murmuring about “inverted displacement” and “invariant mass” as she gripped their arms and tried not to be hopelessly rattled by the man watching them. She’d teleported under duress to save her sister. She’d teleported with a payload stone that was about to explode. Why did this seem so much harder?
She knew the answer as soon as she’d asked herself the question. Morse killed Rosemarie. He’d almost killed Lydia. He was trying to kill far more people for reasons she couldn’t fathom, and on top of that, he was a virtuoso trap-setter, an expert secret-finder, a relentless and terrifying foe.
His attention was fixed on Peter and Martinelli. She was right behind them. She could feel the reds against her chest with every breath, but she couldn’t use one to try to speed up the process because she had to stay absolutely silent. If she gave herself away—if he found her here, now…
She closed her eyes. The laboratory. How large was it? She bit her lip, thinking. Easily four times the size of their new brewing room, maybe five. High ceiling. Hardwood floors with nasty stains where chemicals must have dropped years earlier. She could almost see where the tables must have been, the rows of beakers, the scientists muttering over their experiments, the pungent odor?—
The magic caught. Her eyes flew open in that second before they would fully dematerialize and—disaster,Morse was on his feet, hand extended toward them, a spell blasting from it?—
But he was too late. The basement, Morse and his spell disappeared. The lab snapped into focus. They were still kneeling around the transmitter, Beatrix gasping in relief that lasted for just a few seconds before she remembered they were not out of the woods yet.
“Get back from it,” she cried out, grabbing leaves as she scrambled to her feet.“Fordest!”
Her attack hit the protective spells woven around the transmitter with a clang. She heard Martinelli throw up a shield spell on the room, and time ticked by, cold sweat dripping down her cheek.
With a hiss, the protection failed. The transmitter shattered. Martinelli cast another spell on the pieces and vaporized them in a swirl of black smoke.
They’d done it. She leaned against Peter, overwhelmed.
“Oh my God,” he said, voice shaking. “I thought we were sunk.”
Martinelli wore such a pained expression that she expected a telling off for convincing them to go through with a plan so crazy that even the man who’d thought of it didn’t want to do it. Instead, he began to shake with laughter, little snorts escaping his nose. “Damköhler dissipations?Damköhler?”
Peter’s lips twisted into a sheepish grin. “The first thing I could think of.”
“Mrs. Blackwell,” Martinelli said, “I’ll have you know that there is no form of magical-wave dissipation named after a Damköhler, but there is a rather crude joke among magicists involving a man by that name andothersorts of dissipation. We should all thank our lucky stars that bastard hasn’t heard it.”
“My mind has this odd habit of going blank when I see him,” Peter said. “Can’t imagine why.”
Martinelli threw an arm around him. “In all seriousness, boss, what you did was amazing. I mean it. You too, Mrs. Blackwell—even when everything is quiet and calm, I have a hard time teleporting. As certain whippersnappers here like to point out.”
“I certainly agree that Mrs. Blackwell was amazing,” Peter said, making her laugh, giddy with relief as she was.
Then she thought of Morse finding them and instantly sobered. “We have to get out.”
“Right.” Peter bit his lip. “How did you get in? Can we do that?”
“No—long story. What about teleporting? Can we get our hands on one of those devices that makes a hole in the shielding?”
“A can opener?” He shook his head. “They’re kept under constant guard.”
