Blood Rock (14 page)

A great chasm of asphalt cuts across the heart of Atlanta—river-wide, canyon-deep, and filled with a current of cars faster than any rapids: the Downtown Connector. The Connector had contained Georgia Tech’s growth for decades, until finally a spray of new buildings had burst over the recently completed 5
^th
Street Bridge.

As I crossed the bridge, I saw Tech shift from shiny glass towers to aging red brick. Winding through the campus was like traveling back in architectural time, from the 90s to the 80s to the 70s … next stop, the 1950s, and one of the oldest buildings on the campus: the Georgia Tech Nuclear Research Center.

The NRC was two cubical buildings guarding a squat ribbed tower, ugly and alien, that once housed the reactor. Now decommissioned, the NRC held something different, and perhaps more dangerous: the very first laboratory in the country studying the Physics of Magic.

In a pebble-floored, low-chaired lobby, I signed in an ancient log book that looked like it really did date from the 1950s. As I put the pen back into its tiny, conical holder, Annette, the lab secretary, asked, “Is everything all right, Kotie? You look flushed.”

I frowned, trying not to take it out on her: Annette was all pink hair and bubblegum, so sickeningly sweet you wanted to punch her in the nose—but she really was the nice sort, even though she dressed in poufy florals that even Catherine Fremont would have punked up a bit.

“I just had an argument,” I said. “Nothing important.”

“Sorry to hear it,” she said, picking up the phone. “Don’t worry, you’ll find someone.”

“How did you … ” I began. “Am I really that transparent?”

“Yes, she’s here,” Annette said, hitting the buzzer. “Doug and Jinx are in the tower.”

“I remember the way,” I said, opening the heavy metal door. “And thanks.”

“Remember, there are lots of fish in the sea,” she chimed sweetly.

“Thanks,” I said, as the door clanged shut behind me.

The chilled, dark metal corridor felt cramped as a submarine, but soon opened into a cavernous vault big enough to hold a house. I wondered the chamber had held in its heyday, when these idiots had thought to contain nuclear death smack dab in the middle of a crowded college campus at the center of the Southeast’s largest city. But now the vault was almost hollow, a birdcage of cranes and catwalks over a huge single-cut slab of polished marble inscribed with the largest magic circle in the country.

A darkhaired, cleancut man in a Georgia Tech sweatshirt was adjusting some equipment in the center of the circle. At a console outside the ring, a young, gothy, bonneted woman in an exaggerated Victorian outfit read numbers out loud to the thin air. Doug and Jinx.

Doug saw me and smiled, a wicked twinkle belying his clean cut look—which didn’t fool me anyway: the first time I’d met him, he’d been wearing leather puppy gear. Jinx, on the other hand, never changed her style to suit the circumstances. I don’t think I’d seen her wear anything less elaborate since … before she went blind. Today, however, she had a new accessory.

“Dakota?” she asked of the air, even as she turned towards me, eyes hidden behind her dark glasses. Her hand shot out, delicate black lace glove now adorned with a new sparkle—a gleaming diamond ring. “Guess what? We’re getting married!”

Oh, how wonderful for them.
“That’s great,” I said, with forced cheeriness, reaching to take her hand. It wasn’t a large rock, since they were both graduate students, but still—how wonderful for them. Really.

“Dakota?” Jinx said—and pulled down her glasses slightly. I looked up, expecting her spooky geode eyes—and saw instead spooky black snowflakes gleaming within her formerly clouded marbles. “Oh, Dakota, what’s wrong?”

Damnit. I had forgotten she could partially see now, some positive fallout from a magical injury last year. I forced a smile. “Nothing, just a bad day,” I said, casting about for something else to talk about. “Look, I’m sorry I haven’t coughed up your fee from the tattooing contest … ”

“When the Valentine Foundation pays you, you can pay me, but,
really
, Dakota,” she said reprovingly. “That’s the worst attempt to change the subject ever. All I can see is a blurry spot, but even I can tell that smile is fake. It’s not just a bad day. What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing,” I said. And then I remembered what I had come for, and forgot all about Philip. “Actually, you’re right,” I said gently. “It is something. Jinx, I have some bad news.”

Doug and Jinx sat in shock at the break table as I told them about Revy, about the attack on Tully, and about the other vampire disappearances that were almost certainly connected. Jinx, the best graphomancer I knew, agreed to tackle the graffiti without a second thought.

“I know the literature on decorative marks quite well,” she said primly. “But I’ll need more than a description to build a model of how it’s working. I need good digital photographs, and hopefully video, thirty seconds or a full sequence if your camera will last that long.”

“I know,” I said, speaking up to compensate for the sudden whine of the air conditioning. “I’m supposed to take pictures tomorrow at the werehouse when I go pick up Cinnamon.”

“Why is Cinnamon at the werehouse?” Jinx asked, brow furrowing. She didn’t bother to speak up at all. “I thought you were trying to rescue her out of there.”

“It’s a long story,” I said. And potentially embarrassing. My daughter might not want her mother telling people she had trouble controlling her changes. “I’ll let her tell it, if she wants to. But I have a question for you, Doug. The first tag was powerful, but didn’t do anything I haven’t seen a tattoo or any normal spell do. The second one, however, did something unusual—”

A crack like thunder rang through the dome, and I flinched back from a flash like controlled lightning. “Jeez!” I said, raising an arm, seeing goose bumps ripple up as stray mana flooded out through the room. “What the hell are you guys
doing?
”

“Testing a theory of magical capacitance,” Doug said. “Lenora, give us some warning next time!”

“Why? Nothing is going to happen,” said a brown-haired woman, stepping out of a control booth—and then blithely stepping over the glowing outer ring of the magic circle as if the sea of energies it contained couldn’t turn her into a pumpkin. She used tongs to extract a metal disc from the equipment at the center of the circle, stomped back over to us, and tossed the disc on the desk. “Yet another failure.”

Inside the metal ring was a pinkish membrane with a gridlike test pattern at its center. I stared at it with growing horror. “Don’t tell me that’s real
human
skin.
”

“Of course it’s
real
,” Lenora said, “you can see it with your own two eyes—”

“Down, Lenora,” Doug said, holding the membrane up to the light. “Yes, Dakota, it’s human skin, but not
from
a human. It’s grown on a synthetic matrix in the Biotech building—they’re hoping to use it on burn patients. Dang—it looks exactly like it did before.”

“My point exactly,” Lenora replied. “I don’t care what mana flux you use, you’re not going to get any accumulation in a single layer. There’s no such thing as ‘tattoo magic.’”

I raised an eyebrow. “So what is it that
I
do for a living then, chop liver?”

“Oh, so
you’re
the Dakota Frost that got him on this wild goose chase,” Lenora said. “It was bad enough when he started dating the witch and eating granola—”

“Lenora!” Jinx said, putting her gloved fingers to her breast in mock shock. “After all the wonderful spells I’ve shown you … ”

“Which are supposed to do what, exactly?” Lenora asked, smirking.

“I don’t know in particular,
Scully
,” I said, cracking my neck, “but if you can’t get them to work, don’t blame Jinx. Start closer to home, like with
yourself.
”

“Down, Dakota. I need a Scully to keep me honest,” Doug said, handing the disc back to her. “Please photograph it and run another control. So, Dakota,” Doug said, pulling out a tan gridded notebook and writing a few lines, “what did the graffiti do that was so unusual?”

I stared at him: as his smile faded he was left calm, like that little discussion hadn’t just happened, and he was actually taking notes. He hadn’t taken it personally, like I had. Doug was going to be a good scientist someday. Maybe he’d be open enough to listen.

“Tully was trapped against it, and while I was pulling him out it got a really good grip on us,” I said. “It’s really weird, but it felt like … it was sucking us
inside
. Not just pulling us against the wall, but
into
it, like the graffiti had made a doorway into a space beyond.”

Lenora, walking past with a fresh disc rolled her eyes. “Oh, for the love of—”

“This time I agree with her,” Doug said. “That sounds impossible.”

“If you’re that susceptible to new age mysticism,” Lenora said, “maybe I should loan you some back issues of the
Skeptical Inquirer
—”

“Whoa!” I said, holding up my tattooed hands. “I am simply reporting an experience and asking you to help me interpret it. I’m the
last
person to go in for cosmic woo-hooery.”

“You supposedly have magic tattoos,” Lenora said. “What are we supposed to think?”

I glared at her. “
Fine
,” I said, and flexed my hand.

I have large tattoos—vines, snakes, tribal patterns—but small ones too: flowers and jewels and butterflies. The littlest ones are easy to tattoo. I can do them in one sitting—so I’m not above using them to make a point.

My skin glowed. Lenora’s eyes widened. And then a pretty little honeybee I’d tattooed on one of my vines came to life, buzzing up into the air. Lenora cried out in delight, and Doug laughed. Only Jinx seemed nonplussed. With a gentle wave of my hand, I guided the sparkling bee over the test membrane, and it gently settled down and became two dimensional again.

“You can pretend that’s a yellow jacket,” I said—the Tech mascot—and folded my arms. “Look closely at the connections that make up the design, particularly the Euler circuits. Skin only holds essentially one layer of ink, so it’s the
design
that holds the magic. Using a grid pattern in your tester, you were almost guaranteed to fail, except maybe at the edges.”

“I
tried
to tell them that,” Jinx said, nudging Doug with her shoulder, “but my little scientist here kept going on about his need for proper controls.”

“Holy cow,” Lenora said, rubbing at the membrane. The bee stubbornly remained where it was and did not smudge off. “Holy cow. I can see why Doug had a bee in
his
bonnet.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said. “And for the record, I’ve subscribed to the
Skeptical Inquirer
for the last ten years.”

“Oh!” Lenora said. “That’s … uh … can I put this in the tester?”

“Knock yourself out,” I said, and Lenora took the membrane into the test chamber like she was carrying a baby made of gold. I looked at Doug. “How can she not see the evidence right before her eyes? I mean, isn’t that the point of science?”

“She’s come a long way,” Jinx said defensively. “You shouldn’t pick on her … ”

“But it’s so fun,” Doug said, ducking when she whapped him with her cane.

Lenora moved behind a sheet of glass, touched some controls, and then a rising whine started at the top of the tower. I’d heard it earlier—I’d thought it was an air conditioner—but now I could see it came from a big device far above the magic circle, like an upside-down glass jar wrapped in hundreds of sheets of metal: a massive magical capacitor. As it charged up, I could see a dance of light sparkling off a silver spear, pointing down out of the glass.

“So, now that we’ve established that I don’t make wild claims without
something
to back them up,” I said, “can you answer my question about how the graffiti bent space?”

“Sure. It didn’t. It had to be an illusion—you didn’t go anywhere, after all. There’s no way graffiti could affect the metric enough to change its topology.” At my baffled look, Doug tried again. “Look, it isn’t likely that
any
magic could bend space. It’s a matter of gravity.”

The rising whine reached its peak, and with another crack of thunder, a beam flashed down from the point of the spear. The test membrane flared with blue-white light, and the bee buzzed back to life. Doug looked back at it, amazed, as Lenora frantically took pictures of the moving tattoo. Then he shrugged and used what we’d just seen as his argument.

“That’s the largest magical capacitor on the East Coast,” Doug said. “Two hundred layers of infused papyrus and cold iron. When it fires, it puts out more mana than any magician in history—and
it
doesn’t affect gravity. If it can’t, then your graffiti can’t. It just can’t.”

“But it didn’t feel like the graffiti was affecting gravity,” I said. “Like you said, our feet were on the ground. The tag was … I don’t know what else to call it but bending space … ”

“But bent space
is
gravity,” Doug said. “Gravity is just … a kink in time that makes matter want to move together. It’s like setting two bowling balls down on a trampoline—first they’ll dent its surface. Then, slowly, the dents will come together.”

I squinted. “I’m … I’m not quite seeing it.”

“Don’t worry,” Doug said. “There are PhDs in physics that never get it. But the point is, bending space is so hard it takes the entire mass of the Earth just to keep our feet on the ground. And that’s just attraction, a dent in the trampoline. To make a tunnel from place to place—”

“You … couldn’t do that,” I said, starting to get it. “That’s not just bending space, it’s punching a hole—changing the topology, like you said. You can’t
stretch
a surface to make a hole—the trampoline would burst and the springs would snap back, going everywhere.”

“I’m not sure what that would mean in terms of my little example,” Doug said. “But either way, the amount of mass needed would be … astronomical.”

“But the tags aren’t using mass,” I said. “They’re using magic, and magic breaks all the rules. We don’t know how it works, or what its limits are.”

“And that’s why I hope you’re wrong,” Doug said. “Magic gravity would be completely new—and the last time that happened in physics was when we realized matter was energy. No one ever thought we’d be able to use that, but a few years later, we had atomic bombs.”

I felt my eyes widen.

“So that’s why we’re stuffed in this building,” Doug said. “We’re afraid magic can make nuclear weapons look like firecrackers. And if the graffiti can affect
gravity
—”

“If a tag on a wall,” I said, “can bend space harder than an entire planet—”

“—then graffiti magic,” Doug said, “is powerful enough to
crack open the planet.”