“Okay, I’ll see if Arjenie can do anything with that.” She turned to Rule. “I need to ask Cullen some more questions before we get to the airport. Want to read that file now?”
No. “Yes.”
She bent and dug a folder out of the case that held her laptop. It would have been easier to send the material to his iPad, but that left an electronic trail. Technically Lily had the authority to share information with a consultant; technically Rule could be called a consultant. But there was always the chance that someone would decide to make an issue of it.
He accepted the folder and opened it. The first page was a brief bio.Jasper Frederick MachekBorn: San Francisco, California
Two years and nine months after she handed me to my father and walked away and never looked back…Father: Frederick Alan Machek; b. 12/7/1929Mother: Celeste Marie Machek, nee Babineaux; b. 9/27/1928 d. 3/11/ 2006
Rule stared at the page, his eyes dry and unseeing, his mind blank save for one thought.
Dead. She was dead.
SIXTEEN
LILY did not watch Rule read the file she’d handed him. She wanted to, but she was pretty sure that was a bad idea. When you’re raw you don’t want people studying your reactions, even if you’ve convinced yourself you’re just fine.
Maybe especially then. She leaned forward and pulled her notebook and pen out of her purse. “Okay, Cullen, I need you to tell me more about the prototype. You’re not the only one working on the problem—everyone from mega-corporations to individual practitioners are giving it a shot. But this is the first really promising device for shielding tech from magic, right?”
“Wrong.”
“You said it worked. You said that several times. That isn’t promising?”
“I mean that it’s not a shield.”
“But it’s supposed to protect tech from magic.”
He nodded. “Naturally you think ‘protect’ equals ‘shield.’ I did, too, at first. So has everyone else. The problem is, the only way to absolutely, positively shield against every type of magic is to be you.”
She blinked. “Ah—be a touch sensitive, you mean?” Able to feel magic, but impervious to it.
“Right. The first thing you need to know is that no substance shields really well against raw magic. Earth comes closer than most, but it’s too varied to shield predictably. And it takes a lot of dirt to do much good.”
“Raw magic is what comes from nodes.”
“Right. Ambient magic is at least ninety percent raw. A small percentage is elemental, but the vast majority is raw—unless you’re in an old forest, of course, but that’s a special case, and there’s not much tech deep in the Sequoia National Forest, so it doesn’t matter. Now, some substances do offer minimal shielding, like the silk case you use for your phone, but they’re ineffective near a node, a ley line, or even the ocean. Or if there’s even a small surge. We don’t get the kind of power blasts we did when the Turning hit,” he added, “but there are frequent small surges, and the level of ambient magic continues to rise.”
Rule looked up from the folder. He was on the second page, she noted. “A company came up with a polymer that showed promise initially, but they can’t make it work longer than…what was it, thirty minutes?”
“Thirty max,” Cullen agreed. “Theory suggests that no substance can shield well against raw magic for long because matter is, by definition, not magically inert.”
Lily’s eyebrows went up. “By definition? No, wait—don’t explain that.” Once Cullen got going on theory it was hard to shut him up.
His grin flashed. “I’ll spare you. Mind, not everyone agrees with that theory, but most do, which is why most everyone is looking to combine some type of natural shielding with shaped magic. Charms, in other words. I won’t go into all the reasons that’s so hard to do, but one big problem is that tech isn’t very useful if it lacks input and output. You can build an underground bunker and shield the hell out of it and be pretty sure the computer inside is protected, but as soon as you hook that computer up to something else—even if it’s a wireless connection—you’ve breached the shield.”
“But you’re not going to go into that.” Her hand moved automatically, jotting down notes that would help her remember later: even wireless = shield breach.
“Right. Because the real drawback to creating a shield isn’t the difficulty, though that’s huge. It’s that even if you succeed, all you’ve done is deflect the magic. Say you’re Delta Airlines and the shielding on your big 747 deflected the hell out of a magic surge, but that deflected power hit the cell tower you were flying over and now the phone company’s suing you. Or maybe it hit a small plane that couldn’t afford fancy shielding, and that plane crashed.” He shook his head. “Shields are not the answer.”
“You found another answer.” Shields = deflected magic = collateral damage.
“Damn straight. Based on you and dragons.”
Her forehead wrinkled. Dragons were magical sponges. So was she, to a much lesser degree. “You want to soak up the magic instead of deflecting it?”
“Soak it up and store it…that’s the way to go. We do know something about storing magic. Not as much as the sidhe, but something. Enough to get me started, but I wasn’t making much headway until I started playing around with truth charms. You know that Arjenie burns them out?”
“That’s what you said, yeah. Something about her Gift overloads them.” Benedict’s new Chosen had a rare Gift, a variant of the sidhe ability to cast illusions that let her go undetected. It wasn’t true invisibility. It was better, because it also baffled hearing, scent, and most wards.
“I was curious about that, and so was she, so we experimented a bit. We figured it out, too. Her Gift is essentially the ability to lie to the mind. Even when she isn’t actively lying, the kind of magic she uses overloads any truth charm touching her.”
“That makes sense.” Arj. magic mental lie—overloads trth charms, her pen noted. She snuck a glance at Rule. He was on the last page, but she wasn’t sure he was reading it. He seemed to be off in some private world, staring at the words without seeing them.
“But the cool part is what that meant. It meant the charms were soaking up some of her magic. They had to be, or they wouldn’t burn out. Only a teensy trace, sure, but when I looked into it, I found that truth charms sample a trace of whatever magic is around—including raw magic.”
Trth charms sampl magic. “No one knew this?”
He shrugged. “No reason to. They’re designed to work on nulls as well as Gifted, so why would they sample magic? Plus the amount of power they sample is so tiny…it took a lot of tinkering with my magnify spell before I could see it, but I did see it. That was the first time I’d seen any formed magic work at all the way your Gift does—by sampling a smidge of magic—so I knew I was onto something. After a godawful amount of trial and error, I made a charm that does more than sample. It acts as a funnel, sending all the magic it comes in contact with into an array of lemon quartz crystals.”
“Why lemon quartz?”
“Trees are too big and diamonds cost too damn much.”
“Okaaaay.”
“If I explained about trees, you’d yell at me for getting sidetracked. As for diamonds, they are the best portable way to store raw magic, no question about it. But they don’t provide a great matrix for elemental magic, and the power the charm funnels is…you might say it’s predisposed toward becoming mind-magic. It’s not there yet, but the potentialities have been changed by the charm, giving it an affinity for Air, which is the element for mind-magic. Mind, all this classifying by element type is as imprecise as most generalizations. We’re really talking about how the magic gets shaped by whatever absorbs then releases it, so—”