The Edge of Ruin

by Melinda Snodgrass

  “Because, you fool, we have a paladin. If we also have the sword we can kill competitors.” Jack flinched. “Now go, and get this done.” Madoc sat down on a bench and stared at the paintings again.

  Neither of them spoke until they were walking down the Mall toward the gleaming white spire of the Washington Monument.

  “So, what’s with the art connoisseur? The past three times I’ve met with him, it’s been in art galleries or museums,” Jack said. The sound of his voice sent a trio of crows flapping up into the sky like animated apostrophes. “Or is he just planning which ones he’s going to steal after the great monster conquest?”

  “They don’t get creativity. Music’s alien to them, too. They don’t even like to hear it.” The dried winter grass crunched beneath the soles of her boots. There was a brisk wind whipping the hem of her sable coat around her ankles. It smelled of impending snow.

  “Huh. I wonder what that means.”

  “That they’re alien,” Rhiana said shortly.

  Once again silence stretched between them; then Jack said, “So, it sounds like it’s not all Universal Monster Brotherhood.” He tried to keep it light, but the worry crept in. “I thought I was safe because I was on your team, only now I find out there’s an NFL and an AFL. Did I pick the wrong team?”

  “I don’t know, Jack, you want to try getting traded?”

  Her long hair, caught by the wind, snaked across her mouth and eyes. She clawed it back and held it in a mock ponytail as she said, “You need to call Sandringham. He’s got to get this done.”

  “He will,” Jack said. “He’s a smart, methodical guy. He’s not going to rush this and blow it. He knows these people. For years. He’ll play it right.”

  “But we need to rush. If the others learn we have a paladin and we’re after the sword, they’re going to gang up on us. We need the sword to protect us,” Rhiana said, and it gave her a perverse pleasure to watch Jack’s expression go from worried to outright sick.

  “Great, I’m in a fucking shark cage.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m in it, too! I’m the one who said I could get him.”

  Jack stopped walking, stepped in front of her, and put his hands on her shoulders; they were warm and heavy. “Rhiana.”

  But she didn’t see Jack or hear his voice. Instead she heard and saw Richard. He had said her name. And then he held out his hand to her and said, And I choose you.

  If only that had been true.

  Emboldened by her silence, Jack slipped an arm around her shoulders. “Hey, at least it won’t be so lonely with two in the cage,” and she felt his lips against her forehead. She yanked away from him.

  “Don’t! Just don’t. I don’t want you.”

  * * *

  Rudi had picked them up at the private airstrip in Maryland, and Pamela was surprised to find Richard had ridden out with him. Eddie and Richard’s first meeting had been chaotic because the young scientist was trying to explain what he’d seen in Indonesia and what had happened during the flight, and terror was making him nearly incoherent.

  Richard had laid a hand on Eddie’s shoulder and given it a hard squeeze. “You’ve been incredibly brave and very smart to get away.” Then Richard surprised her by adding, “But maybe we should let Pamela explain. She’s very good with words.”

  Pamela had recounted what she had learned from Eddie about the events at the lab, but when she got to a description of what she’d seen beneath the wings of the other airplane, she was having trouble keeping her voice level and her hands from shaking.

  “It saw me, Richard. It looked right at me. It will know me if it sees me again. It wants to hurt me.”

  And Richard put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a tight hug. “I won’t let it,” he’d said, and she was surprised when she felt gratitude welling up like a warm bubble into her chest, and even more surprised when she realized she believed him and felt safer.

  Before they left the plane, Richard unlimbered the sword and made his request. Pamela had expected Eddie to refuse, but he had been fascinated by the sword blade that appeared out of nowhere. He was muttering about “pocket universes” even as the blade touched his shoulder. It hadn’t hurt him as much as it had others, which supported Richard’s theories that a grounding in math, science, and music seemed to reduce a person’s quotient of magic. Which was contrary to conventional wisdom—creativity was supposed to be magical.

  During the ride to the condo Richard gave Eddie a crash course on the world according to Lumina, and Pamela turned on her phone and checked her messages. She had three from Amelia. Only the final one told Pamela what was on her older sister’s mind.

  “Hey, Pammie, I know you’re with Richard and I know he’s really busy, but could you please get him to call Brent back? My husband’s about ready to kill our brother, and I’m in the middle, which is not a good place to be. Thanks. Love ya.”

  Pamela looked over at her brother, but Richard was deep into the explanation and she hesitated to interrupt. Then when they reached the condo Angela took one look at their wan faces and ordered everyone into the kitchen, saying, “As my abuela always said, when people are stressed, scared, and tired you feed them.”

  Their father held Richard back. The judge had his glasses perched on his nose, and he was frowning down at a piece of paper. “I have a list of legislators we need to visit. Not one of them is as powerful as Aldo, but perhaps a coalition can be formed.”

  Richard had stepped away. “Not now.”

  “This needs to be—”

  “I said, not now.” And Richard walked away.

  Pamela’s stomach became a small aching ball when she watched her father’s face twist with pure rage. The judge stormed away, and Pamela dithered between running after him or joining the others in the kitchen. Richard shouldn’t have been rude, she thought as she tried to catch her breath. But Papa keeps bemoaning the fact that Richard is so biddable. There had been plenty of times when he snapped at Richard for not taking control of his life, making decisions and living with his choices.

  But the one time Richard did, the big choice when he became a policeman, Papa was furious.

  Pamela didn’t like that thought. She put it aside and decided to wait to talk to her father. She entered the kitchen; Angela handed her a wooden spoon and set her to sautéing meat. Joseph stood at another burner toasting fresh garlic to go on the bread. The blade of a knife clacked against the wood cutting board like a rhythm-impaired flamenco dancer as Dagmar chopped the ingredients for an enormous salad. Angela was dropping lasagna noodles into a pot of boiling water, and Sam was grating cheese.

  For a moment Pamela considered the biological or societal pressures that had a lawyer, a doctor, an FBI agent, and the COO of a major international company attending to the traditional female role of cooking while most of the men sat at the table and talked. But perhaps that was more a testament to the actual superiority of the female sex. Men talked and posed and blustered, but women got the job done—they kept bodies and souls together.

  Pamela looked back over her shoulder to where Richard sat at the head of the table with the young scientist, Eddie Tanaka, on his left, and Grenier on Richard’s right, idly spinning a wineglass by its stem. Syd was farther down the table, topping off his glass from a bottle of Chianti. The bottle headed back up the table. As usual Richard wasn’t drinking, satisfying himself with a glass of cranberry juice.

  Eddie had his chair pulled around until he was actually sitting at the corner of the table rather than on the side so he could be closer to Richard. Pamela had noticed that as they moved from plane to car, and car to condo, and around the condo, Tanaka had walked directly next to Richard, his arm often brushing against Richard’s shoulder. Pamela wondered how Richard liked having a duckling.

  But right now Tanaka’s focus was on the screen of a laptop. He had his elbows on the table and his chin cupped in his hands, watching satellite images from the gate. Pamela respected, and resented, his ability to look at th
e pictures with interest rather than terror.

  “Rhiana called it slow glass,” Richard offered as Eddie continued to watch and didn’t respond.

  Angela’s hands jerked and she tore a noodle, and Pamela realized that even hearing the girl’s name infuriated the older woman.

  “She must not be very bright. That term was used in a really great science fiction story, ‘Light of Other Days’ by Bob Shaw, but the technical term,”—Eddie leaned back in his chair and gestured at the computer—“is a Bose-Einstein condensate. But this doesn’t look like a condensate.” Eddie suddenly jerked his head around to look at where Joseph spun the handle on the Mouli, grating Parmesan cheese over the garlic-and-butter-drenched bread. “Oh, gross,” Eddie said. “Cheese on garlic bread is gross.”

  There was an almost audible sound as everyone tried to shift gears mentally. Joseph looked down at the skinny young scientist.

  “So, don’t eat any. We all like it with cheese.”

  Eddie got a funny look on his face, and his lips moved as if he were repeating something to himself. “I’m sorry,” he said formally to Joseph. “That was rude of me.”

  Richard took control. “So, if it’s not a condensate, what is it?”

  “I think it’s a spin glass,” Eddie said.

  “And what’s that when it’s at home?” Syd asked.

  “It’s a way to slow or even freeze light so you can study its properties,” Eddie answered.

  “Why the fuck would you want to do that?” Sam asked as she washed her hands.

  “Because it’s really cool, but here’s an explanation even you might get,” Eddie said. “It’s got economic applications. It’s a way to build a quantum computer that would be screamingly fast. Whoever succeeds gets really, really rich.”

  “But how does this trap Kenntnis?” Dagmar asked before Sam could blow.

  “And these things are real?” Syd’s question tripped over the COO’s.

  Eddie started with Syd’s question. “Yeah. They’ve been created in the laboratory. Cornell, Wieman, and Ketterle won the Nobel back in 2001. But they don’t withstand contact with the real world, so this thing”—he gestured at the computer screen—“shouldn’t exist. Of course, who the hell knows what’s real anymore. And it certainly can’t trap a person.” He laid a pencil against the screen. “It looks to be only a few centimeters wide.”

  Richard cleared his throat, a nervous little sound, and he looked from Eddie to Bob to Syd to Sam to Dagmar, then cast his eyes upward. “Well, actually I don’t think … in fact, I’m pretty sure that Kenntnis isn’t human.”

  Dagmar sank into a chair. “Oh, dear, I was coping so well, and now you add this.”

  “We’re talking about my employer. The man I worked for for seven years?” Joseph asked.

  “’Fraid so,” Richard said.

  “Rhiana said …” Richard closed his eyes trying to recall. “Slow glass traps light, and she said that’s all Kenntnis was—just light.”

  Eddie leaned into the computer screen again, narrowing his eyes. A few clicks of the mouse enlarged the image.

  Eddie leaned back in his chair. “Okay, let’s assume for a minute that I’m not crazy and something that you thought was a person was actually just a stream of photons. And you wanted to trap it. The experiments have shown that you can store light’s information in the form of an atomic ‘spin wave.’ Atoms spin like tops, so they sort of act like little bar magnets. So, what you do is introduce the light signal—a probe laser, but in our case it’s this guy, Kenntnis—into the glass. At the same time you use another laser, a pump or control laser, to create electromagnetically induced transparency. Then the light interacts with the atoms, which changes the atoms’ spin states coherently, and that creates a joint atom-photon system, and that’s called a polariton.”

  “Help,” Dagmar said, and the word was a plaintive squeak.

  “I guess another part of being such a big genius is you can’t put anything in simple English,” Sam remarked to the room, indulging in a little payback.

  Eddie looked up at the young agent. “Yeah, I guess you’d need it simple.”

  Sam leaned down and held up two fingers. “That’s two. One more and I’m gonna punch you real hard in the stomach.” Eddie looked alarmed, Sam looked satisfied, and Richard looked pissed.

  “Stop it. I don’t have time for this kind of childish bullshit.”

  “Hey,” Sam squawked. “That’s one to you.”

  “I mean it.” Pamela had never heard that tone in her brother’s voice before, and she realized she didn’t want to hear it directed at her. “Go on,” he ordered Eddie.

  “Okay, well, what that means is that it weighs down the massless photons and continues to slow down the pulse’s speed. You keep adding mass and eventually the light pulse stops moving, and the information that the pulse carried is stored in the atomic spin wave. It can be released again as a light pulse, and it’s virtually identical to the frozen pulse.” Then the young scientist realized that everyone was staring at him in varying degrees of desperate concentration. “You’re taking this seriously?” he asked feebly.

  Richard turned until he faced the young scientist full on. “Yes. We really are.”

  “But this isn’t real,” Eddie protested feebly.

  Grenier spoke up for the first time. “You said yourself, son, you don’t know what’s real anymore. Your scientific principles still apply, but they’re being affected, warped, by the magic.”

  “Magic isn’t real,” Eddie said. The frown and tightly compressed lips showed the level of his denial.

  “It is. And getting more real by the minute,” Grenier countered. His voice was thick with amused enjoyment.

  “That’s enough for him right now.” Richard stood up. “Dr. Tanaka, you’re tired, you need to process what I told you about the Lumina and the multiverses, and you need to come up with a plan to break Kenntnis free. How did you put it? Release the pulse. But right now I’ve got other things, mundane but pressing, that I have to do.”

  Eddie looked up at Angela. “You won’t let me sleep through dinner?”

  She laughed. “We’ll ring the dinner bell real loud.”

  “I’d like to study that sword thing,” Eddie mumbled as he headed out of the kitchen. “But if it won’t stay in phase unless he’s holding it, how do …”

  Distance reduced the words to a baritone hum, and then they were gone with the shutting of a bedroom door.

  THIRTY

  RICHARD

  It was like feeling eyes or tasting a change in the air. Someone was in the bedroom with me. I opened my eyes to the barest slit. Fortunately there was enough city glare leaking around the folds of the drapes to make out shapes. A shadow within the shadows hovered at the side of the bed. My stomach gave a lurch, and suddenly my decision to keep my guards outside the condo seemed beyond stupid. These were people who could travel across the continent using a tear in a wall.

  I dropped a hand off the side of the mattress, and my fingers touched the textured edge of the pistol’s grip hidden beneath the bed. Once I had the gun firmly in hand, I shot my right hand up and grabbed the material at the person’s throat, dragging him down toward me. At the same time, I brought up the pistol and jammed the barrel deep in under the intruder’s short ribs.

  There was came a woof as the air was driven out of his lungs and a strangled squeak of fear. My eyes had adjusted to the gloom, and I found myself face-to-face with Eddie Tanaka. The young scientist’s breath, blowing across my face, was unpleasantly sour. The small amount of lasagna I had managed to choke down was threatening to make a return.

  “What do you want? What are you doing in here?” I demanded, and Eddie recoiled. I realized the words had emerged in a harsh, tense whisper.

  “I had a question.” The words emerged as a croak because I had the material twisted tight against his larynx.

  I checked the clock and tried to process that. “You came into my bedroom at three in the morning t
o ask me a question?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It couldn’t wait until morning?”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” came the disingenuous answer.

  “Well, I could.”

  Not that it had been easy. Watching the red sauce bubbling had taken me back to the house on Quincy, and Aldo’s death had left me feeling like this entire excursion had been a waste of time and fucking dangerous as well. I truly didn’t have a clue about what to do next. And added to all this there was Rhiana. I had spotted her BMW ineptly following our limo as we returned from the airport. Since it was no secret where we were going I just let her follow, but it was scary and confusing. When I had three seconds to myself I needed to analyze her behavior and try to figure it out.

  Tanaka frowned. “Oh, yeah. Didn’t think about that. Do … do you think you could take the gun out of my side? And then answer my question.”

  I sighed and released him, and set the Starfire back under the bed. “Okay.”

  “You always keep a gun with you?” Tanaka asked.

  “That was the question?”

  “Uh. No. But do you always keep a gun with you?”

  I was suddenly wavering between screaming annoyance and laughter. I thought back on my psychology classes in college. Asperger’s. It had to be Asperger’s syndrome.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because people keep trying to kill me.”

  Tanaka’s eyes widened. “Wow. Really?”

  “Yes, really. Can we get to the question?” I prodded.

  The scientist sat down on the mattress. His hip was pressed against my thigh. Fortunately it wasn’t my right leg. “I’ve never seen anybody die before … before … Indonesia,” the young man said. “When my grandma was dying I wouldn’t go in the hospital room until it was all over. And I get the shakes just thinking about … what happened.”

  “Dr. Tanaka, forgive me, but it’s late and I’m tired. Is that question at least on approach? Will it be arriving soon?”