“Are they a cure?” I asked.
“They would counteract the spell,” Owen said. “But there’s something else there.” He gestured toward the line of Spellworks charms he’d been analyzing. “Even though each of these is supposed to protect against a different kind of spell, there’s a bit of magic that shows up in all of them. It was so minor I missed it in the charms, but it’s strong enough in these amulets to be obvious, and once I knew what I was looking for, I found it in the charms. Now I need to isolate it and figure out what it is. I’m certain that’s the important part—the reason they’ve created the situations to make people want to buy these.”
I leaned on the table and watched as he held his hands above the various charms. “They must have a timetable—something big planned that needs as many people as possible to have these things,” I mused out loud. “That would be the reason for the flu. It affected absolutely everyone who’s magical, even inside MSI. Before, probably only people who’d been directly affected by the magical crime or who were prone to paranoia would have bought protective charms. This way, they get a lot more people, all at once.”
Owen frowned, closed his eyes for a moment, then shook his head. “I think there’s a conduit here. It’s hard to tell because nothing’s being transmitted right now.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
He looked up from the charms and faced me. “Most of the time, affecting someone magically requires either line-of-sight contact or possession of something belonging to the subject. These things—if they’re what I think they are—work like having something belonging to the subject, only in reverse. The person who created these things would be able to magically affect anyone in possession of one. They form a link between the creator and the holder.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
Owen called to Jake, “I need containment chambers, right away.”
“On it, boss.”
Owen turned back to me. “I can set these up to monitor anything they receive without it affecting us. Then I may be able to do something to feed back into the system and cancel any spell that’s sent out. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to do much until they use the link, and then I’ll have to act quickly.”
“In the meantime, you’d better make a company-wide announcement about getting rid of these,” I said. “We don’t want our people to be affected.”
“I’ll get Sam on it.”
He sounded so discouraged, I patted him on the shoulder and said, “Look on the bright side. Us shutting off the flu spell may have helped. If people who didn’t buy them immediately felt better anyway, fewer people may have bought them, and that means fewer people will be affected by anything else they do with these.”
“We can only hope,” he said with a weak attempt at a weary smile as he headed into his office to call Sam.
While he was gone, I watched Jake place glass domes over the charms and amulets and tried to think like a magical megalomaniac. I didn’t know if I was flattering myself by amplifying the importance of my conference, but that was something coming up quickly that might have influenced the timetable for getting those conduit charms into the hands of as many people as possible. If someone wanted to bring MSI down, that would be a great place to hit.
Owen came back into the lab. “Sam’s making a company-wide announcement that these things are a security risk, and people are supposed to turn them in or they’ll be confiscated.”
“Good,” I said with a nod, then I asked, “When you get your bursts of foresight, how does it feel?”
He frowned in thought. “It’s an odd sensation, like a shiver and a brief bout of queasiness. Why?”
“It’s probably too late to call the whole thing off, but I suddenly have a very bad feeling about the conference, like it’s all going to go horribly wrong.”
“That’s not precognition. That’s logic. I don’t see how they’ll be able to resist hitting the conference, and that could be good for us. That may be what flushes the person behind all this out into the open so we can deal with whomever it is.”
I tried to hide my growing sense of unease with a smile that probably looked maniacal. “Well, that’s certainly a new way to think about it. The best-case scenario is that everything will go horribly wrong.” With a sigh, I added, “And now I’d better get back to planning the final details of the maiden voyage of the Titanic. I need to make sure we hit that iceberg.”
