Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women (26 page)

“Missy’s fine,” I say. “Not a scratch on her.”

“Good,” Concorde says. “Good.”

He’s quiet for the rest of the flight.

Dr. Quentin greets us at the Quantum Compound landing pad, and a tepid greeting it is. “The lab is ready,” she says. “Let’s dispense with this farce quickly, hm?”

“Fine by me,” Astrid says, and a chilly stare-down between the two women ensues.

“Ladies, gentlemen, our common room is open to you,” Dr. Quentin says to us, turning on her heel. Concorde and Astrid fall in line behind her, as does Matt.

“Whoa, where do you think you’re going?” Concorde says.

“With you guys,” Matt says. “This was my idea, remember?”

“Young man,” Dr. Quentin says, enunciating as only the truly incensed can, “Concorde and I are two of the most brilliant minds on the planet. I have an IQ that literally cannot be measured, I hold four doctorates in a range of disciplines, I’ve lectured at the most prestigious universities across the globe, MIT named an entire wing of a building after me, and I am on the president’s speed dial as a scientific consultant. What could
you
possibly contribute to this exercise?”

Without missing a beat, Matt says, “Explain how magic works,” and Dr. Quentin’s eyes narrow to dark slits. Oh, well, not like we’ve never been asked in forceful terms to leave a super-hero team’s headquarters before.

Dr. Quentin says, through gritted teeth, “Do. Not. Touch. My. Computers.

Dr. Quentin’s fingers dance across a touchscreen keyboard with countless extra keys, many of them bearing symbols Matt cannot identify as either mathematical or scientific in nature. Down in the dungeon, a mechanical arm rises from the floor, rearing up before Astrid like a cobra preparing to strike. Its scanner array awakens with a nearly imperceptible electric whine.

“Cute toy,” Astrid says. “What am I supposed to do, exactly?”

“I need you to generate magical energy,” Dr. Quentin says. “Something you can sustain for an extended period of time — and that won’t destroy my lab.”

Astrid takes a breath, closes her eyes, turns her palms toward the ceiling.

A minute passes. Two.

“Any time now,” Dr. Quentin prompts.

“I’m doing what you asked,” Astrid says.

Matt leans in, discreetly, to get a better look at a series of screens — readouts for the sensor array as it scans for heat, light, radio waves, electromagnetic energy, microwaves, X-rays, ultraviolet radiation, gamma radiation. Each and every screen insists there is nothing to be measured.

“Nothing at all,” Dr. Quentin says.

“I think you’re doing it wrong,” Matt says.

Dr. Quentin spins in her seat, glowers at him. “Oh, do tell.”

“You’re scanning specifically for known forms of energy.”

“Yes. And?”

“You’re trying to measure and define an
unknown
form of energy, something so out of the ordinary it doesn’t resemble anything you’re familiar with. Can you put the scanners on some kind of base-zero setting, tell them to ignore any standard compare-and-contrast functions?”

“We might as well try it,” Concorde says. “Open up the scanners.”

“Yes, let’s waste more of my day,” Dr. Quentin mutters.

“I’d like to try it, Gwendolyn. Please.”

With a pained sigh, Dr. Quentin resets the sensor array, instructs the system to ignore all the profiles in the database. With a deliberate touch of melodramatic flair, she twirls a finger in the air before pressing the button that activates the sensors.

“And away we go.”

The readouts remain dead. Glowing lines on one screen, which reminds Matt vaguely of an EKG monitor, run flat. On another screen, a series of bars in rainbow colors lie dead. A third bears digital renderings of dials, like a quartet of speedometers, all of them stuck at zero.

“Useless,” Dr. Quentin says.

“Give it time,” Concorde says.

A lengthy silence settles on the control room.

“There,” Matt says, thrusting a finger at the not-an-EKG screen as one of the lines, once straight and flat and perfect, quivers like a plucked guitar string.

“Enigma,” Dr. Quentin says, “whatever you’re doing, increase the power.”

A second later, the quiver becomes a small quake. Another line spasms once, twice. A yellow bar on the second screen grows slowly, painfully.

“I’ll be damned. We’re getting readings,” Concorde says with an excited, anxious laugh.

“But of what?” Dr. Quentin says. “None of these make any sense.”

“We’ll make sense of it later.”

“And when you do,” Matt says, “I expect many lavish thank-yous in your Nobel Prize acceptance speeches.”

TWENTY-SIX

I check my phone. The big brains — and Matt — have been in the dungeon a little over an hour.

Fortunately, the rest of the Quentin clan is exceptionally pleasant company. Joe is happy to chat with us while letting little Farley climb him up and down. Meg is a fine hostess, commiserating with us on the highs and lows of high school whenever she’s not asking us if we need more coffee, another soda, another snack. Even Kilroy, when he’s not flirting with the ladies of the Hero Squad, is — okay, he actually has yet to stop flirting with us, but it feels less creepy and more
Aw, isn’t he cute with his awkwardly charming desperation
.

“Is everything okay?” Missy says. “I know science stuff takes a long time, but I don’t know if this is too long or the right amount of time or what, and we would have heard an explosion if something had gone wrong, wouldn’t we? Or does magic not explode?”

I can’t help but smile. It’s oddly comforting to hear Missy speaking in semi-coherent run-on sentences again.

“‘There is no schedule for science,’ that’s what Gwen always says,” Joe says. “It’s not unusual for her to be tucked away in the lab for hours at a time. She takes her work seriously.”

“If you don’t mind me asking,” I say, “what do
you
do for a living? Aside from super-heroing.”

“I used to be head of security at MIT. That’s where I met Gwen. Nowadays, I mostly make public appearances at fundraisers for non-profits. People never get tired of paying good money to see a giant rock guy,” Joe chuckles.

I may be a little in love with this man. I can understand why Dr. Quentin, someone so very different from Joe, could fall for him, and how she can so easily look past his appearance. If only some of that humility and common man charm would rub off on his son. He’d be downright tolerable.

Not that Kilroy is a bad kid, certainly. He seems nice enough, and when he’s not trying so hard, I bet he’s actually a good guy. I can’t imagine the Kilroy apple falling that far from the Joe Quentin tree. And, for the record, I readily admit he’s easy on the eyes.

No, I’m stopping there. I am not shopping around for a new romantic interest. I will not let Matt’s nonsense about the difficulties of “dating outside the business” get to me. Screw him. If Nina can do it, I can do it.

Ah, saved from my own runaway train of thought! Team Science returns, but I can’t tell by anyone’s expression how it went.

Farley leaps off of Joe, and runs over to his mother. She kneels down, greeting him with a big smile.

“Hello there, my little man,” she says. “Have you been a good host for our guests?”

“Uh-huh,” Farley says. “Are you done spearmintin’ now?”

“Yes, Farley, I’m all done experimenting now. May I have a hug? I’ve been studying magic all morning, and you know how cranky I get when I have to deal with magic.”

“Magic’s dumb,” Farley says, throwing himself into Dr. Quentin’s arms. Astrid, to her credit, presses her lips together, trying not to laugh.

“Yes, sweetie, magic is dumb.”

“I think it’s more accurate to say, magic makes us feel dumb,” Concorde says, “but we’re all a little wiser on the subject now.”

“It went well, then?” Mindforce says.

“Surprisingly so. Gwendolyn and I have a lot of follow-up research to do, but for our immediate purposes? I think we have something.”

“We’ve uploaded the data to the satellite,” Dr. Quentin says. “NASA is making the necessary adjustments to direct the satellite’s sweep pattern over Massachusetts, so we could have some preliminary data within the hour.”

More waiting. Hooray.

Turns out, we aren’t waiting long. Soon after our little super-hero pizza party wraps up, Dr. Quentin’s tablet starts beeping.

“Ah. Here we are,” she says, tapping the screen. “Let’s see what we have.”

“Bear in mind, everyone, this is a first pass, so the data is likely to be rough,” Concorde says.

“If we have any data at all,” Dr. Quentin adds. “I, for one, shall not be holding my breath.”

Through her tablet, Dr. Quentin turns on the common room’s TV, an IMAXy monster of a thing, and brings up a satellite image of the East Coast from mid-Maine down to Rhode Island. On this screen, it’s practically life-sized.

“What are those?” Nina says, pointing out several glowing white lines crisscrossing the image.

“Ley lines — veins of raw magical energy that cover the planet,” Astrid says. “Think of them as high-tension power lines for sorcerers. We use our own life energy to initiate a spell, like a car battery providing the spark to fire up an engine, but the nearest ley line provides the power after that.”

A few of the lines enter the frame as solid white, but fade as they pass through Massachusetts — specifically, as they get close to the general Boston area. Astrid notices this too; she presses her face up to the screen, then indicates a spot where several of these ley line thingies converge.

“Hey, Quentin, tighten up on this area.” Dr. Quentin, with a soft snort of indignation, does as asked. The map zooms in on Massachusetts, centering on Boston. “
Ohhhh
,” she breathes, “why didn’t you see this, you stupid, stupid woman...”

“I beg your pardon?” Dr. Quentin says, bristling.

“Not you, me. Can you overlay town lines?” Dr. Quentin taps her tablet, calling up the outlines. “Now, label Newburyport, Gloucester, and Lexington.”

Finally, a hint of some rhyme or reason: ley lines run through each of the towns, entering as solid white, leaving as ghosts.

“Enigma,” Concorde says, “what, exactly, are we looking at?”

“Exactly? I can’t say, but it’s big and it’s ambitious, whatever it is. Obviously, these three towns,” Astrid says, indicating each of them, “were chosen for the summoning rituals because of the ley lines. In damaging the barrier between worlds at these precise points, it disrupted the ley lines, weakening them. They’ll repair themselves eventually, but not for two, three weeks at least.”

“Is that relevant?”

“It gives us a rough deadline, but the more important thing is what’s happening here,” Astrid says, tapping a point where several ley lines overlap. “That’s Salem.”

“For real?” I say.

“Witches congregate there for a reason,” Astrid says, straight-faced. “Salem has long been a center of power in the world, because of this convergence — which has now been compromised.”

“To what end?” Mindforce asks.

“I can’t say for certain, but in theory, by keeping some of these lines intact but damaging others, you’d have excellent conditions for certain rituals with catastrophic potential. The barrier between realities would be weakened to the point you could even bring forth a Great Ancient.”

I’m not going to ask. My brain is too full of weirdness as it is.

“You can’t say for certain? In theory? My God,” Dr. Quentin scoffs, “you’re supposed to be the world’s foremost authority on all things supernatural, and yet, you can do nothing but guess at what we might be facing.”

“And you’re supposed to be the greatest scientific mind in the world,” Astrid shoots back, “but whenever magic’s part of the equation, you throw up your hands and piss all over it instead of trying to understand it. You know: like a scientist would?”

“Could you two possibly put this stupid rivalry of yours on the back burner for five minutes?” Concorde says. “God, you sound like a couple of teenage girls fighting over whose boyfriend is cuter.”

“Excuse me?” Astrid says.

“I beg your pardon. We do
not
sound like that,” Dr. Quentin says.

I almost hate to stir the pot when they’re finally agreeing on something, but, “Uh, hi. I’m a teenage girl, and yeah, that is totally what you sound like.”

Well, that was dumb; now Doctors Quentin and Enigma are glaring at me, arms folded, jaws set. You know what? Screw them. It’s time to double down in the grand Carrie Hauser tradition.

“I’m not apologizing,” I say. “We’re facing — to use your words, Astrid — a potentially catastrophic situation, and you two are getting ready to catfight because you think your way of doing things is awesome, and the other person’s sucks.”

And, I realize, because they’re both strong, stubborn, intelligent-to-a-fault women with more in common than either of them would ever admit. Hello there, irony, it’s been a while.

“Here’s the plan,” Concorde says, getting us back on track (thank God). “Gwendolyn, do what you can to fine-tune the satellite scans, try to establish some baseline data, keep an eye on the ley lines that haven’t been corrupted, and on the convergence in Salem. If you see anything that suggests a growing power surge, you let me know.”