The Conservation of Magic Read online

  His mind bounced between concern for Mona and the additional guilt of wanting to see the friendly technician again. He couldn’t help himself, even when Mona was in a coma right down the hall. He liked Mona so much, but there was just something missing—something that he felt like he had to keep looking for.

  About forty-five minutes later, a husky male intern called Merrick’s name and handed him an oversized manila envelope stuffed with large sheets of black film.

  Merrick wondered where the female technician had gone as the nurse pushed him back to the emergency room. Entering through the automatic glass doors he was engulfed again by the swarm of frenetic activity. The doctor spotted him and directed the nurse to deposit him in a dimly lit side office with a light board mounted on the wall. The nurse left them and closed the door behind her. The jumble of noise hushed to a murmur.

  The doctor opened the envelope and slapped the pieces of film up on the light board as if dealing floppy, oversized cards. He hummed as he looked over a printed report from the radiologist. He leaned closer to the translucent black squares and nodded his head a few times.

  “No concussion,” the doctor said, looking back and forth between two of the X-rays. The doctor moved his face closer to one of the soft white images and furrowed his eyebrows.

  “How’s your throat feel?”

  “A little hoarse from all the talking tonight, but that’s all.”

  The doctor cleared his throat.

  “How about your balance?”

  “I’m not sure, since no one will let me out of this wheelchair.”

  The doctor motioned impatiently for him to stand up.

  “Balance feels fine. Does something look wrong?”

  “Just some blurring probably. You may have moved a little when they took the film, but I don’t see a reason to run another series right now. Make sure you come back if you feel anything strange in the next few days.”

  “When can I see Mona?”

  “The police officers want to ask you a few questions about tonight. When you’re done, have a seat in the waiting room and I’ll give you an update in a little while—maybe let you in to see her for a minute or two.”

  The doctor motioned for Merrick to leave the room with him, closing the door as the two stepped into the emergency room. Merrick turned around to thank the doctor for his help, but the doctor was already gone.

  Merrick wove through the turmoil of people until he stood outside Mona’s room. He moved the curtains just an inch and saw she was alone. His heartbeat sped up as he prepared to do whatever he could do to help her. A young couple with a screaming baby jostled past him on their way into the curtained room next door.

  Merrick slipped into Mona’s room and eased the curtain into place behind him. There she was, tube down her throat, tethered by wires to the monitoring device at the side of her bed. She looked like a piece of hospital equipment more than a human.

  He brushed his fingertips across her shoulder. As their flesh met, a tingle ran through his body—like a weakened dose of the energy from the alley. He jerked his hand away, and the sensation abated. He reached out to touch her again. This time he did not move his hand away as the electrical current pulsed between them.

  He closed his eyes and focused on what he had felt like the moment right before the explosion in the alley—remembered how his insides had vibrated, had usurped his body. Gradually, he felt the same power swell inside him again. He envisioned Mona wide awake and out of her coma. Nothing happened. Desperate to not lose touch with the energy he had re-summoned, he remembered the rage and pain he had felt earlier. He nurtured his anger for Mona’s attacker—remembered the burning hatred that had seized his chest when he had so desperately wished that the mugger would stop.

  In an instant, Merrick’s mouth flew open almost unhinging his jaw as an impossibly low tone filled the space around him—inaudible except through its vibrations. Everything around him shook uncontrollably. He fell to his knees. His head arched back as he looked around frantically. He had once again unleashed a fury of sound over which he had no control.

  He held the note longer than humanly possible—and then the vibration grew in strength and split again and again until the room was saturated with electric static like several channels signing off for the night hissing through the air. The noises oscillated against each other, in and out of the range of human hearing, coming closer and closer together until they slammed into one another, converging on a new discordant chord that made Merrick’s teeth ache and his eyes clench.

  The room exploded in a flash of hot white light. A deafening clap of thunder immediately followed. Merrick jerked free of Mona’s shoulder and sank to the floor. The chaotic rhythm outside the room shifted—confusion tinted the shouts and moans of the terrified herd of people with no frame of reference or explanation for what they had just experienced. Within the shelter of Mona’s room, air swished in and out of her respirator as her monitoring device beeped steadily. Merrick slid back from Mona’s bed, still on the floor and staring blankly at Mona, exhausted, waiting for any sign of movement. He touched the stone hanging around his neck and jerked his hand back, surprised that the stone was not only warm, but seemed to be undulating, moving as if alive.

  He looked down at the stone, but the shrill tone of a flat line jarred his attention.

  Mona’s monitor still showed her heartbeat. The high note of death was coming from the next room over—the same one that the couple with the baby had entered in such a hurry just moments before. The curtain that separated the two rooms did little to dampen the combination of shouting and crying. Above it all, a baby wailed.

  Merrick heard retching sounds and turned his attention back to Mona. She was sitting up, awake, glaring at him and tugging at the tube threaded down her throat. She ripped out the thin plastic hose and gagged. Her chest rose and fell with her labored breathing, as she stared at Merrick who was still sitting on the floor. He started to get up, but she screamed and scrambled away from him. Her bare feet slipped as she tried to gain traction on the slick bed sheets. Merrick stood up and reached for her, but she threw herself onto the concrete floor as far away from Merrick as she could be in the room.

  “Get away from me!” she screamed as she backed herself into the curtain wall and clutched the heavy fabric.

  “Mona, it’s me. You’re going to be okay now. I’m going to get the doctor. Just stay there.”

  She dove past him and bolted from the room. Loose tubes and wires trailed behind her. Before he could follow, she was brought back, limbs flailing as she tried to escape the grip of a muscular male nurse. Merrick’s own nurse followed behind them and frowned at him as she helped force the frantic Mona back into bed.

  A doctor burst through the curtains and breezed past Merrick to Mona’s bed. The nurses held her down as best they could while the doctor injected something into Mona’s arm. Almost instantaneously, she began to calm down and was soon lying back on the bed, her chest heaving and her eyes blinking rapidly as she fought to stay conscious. The doctor and the nurses turned to look at Merrick, all of them sweating and breathing heavily. They looked at him, not as Mona’s savior, but as if he had committed some horrible crime. Merrick closed his eyes and wished that he were gone. He gripped the stone hanging from his neck and tried to force the power to take him away—anywhere but here—but there was no tingle, no sound, nothing. When he opened his eyes, he was still in Mona’s room.

  The male nurse stood at the corner of Mona’s bed, crossing his arms in front of him.

  Mona was still fighting the drugs, her eyelids fluttering with her effort.

  “Go away,” she rasped.

  Why was she telling him to leave? He had just saved her life. He knew that she must be in shock, but he couldn’t help but feel rejected by Mona and hurt. That she was somehow mad at or disappointed in him.

  “Mona…” he pleaded.

  “Not again, please,” she whispered.

  Quietly, he stood up, slip
ped outside of the curtained room, and walked towards the exit. The doctor followed closely behind him and then hurried over to the police officers who were talking on their radios and with each other, trying to make sense of the recent explosion. They looked perturbed at first when the doctor interrupted, but their faces turned serious as the doctor gestured toward him.

  The police would listen to the doctor’s version of what had happened or at least what the doctor thought had occurred. He couldn’t blame them. It was obvious that Mona was terrified of him. Maybe after she had some time to think, she’d realize that he had never meant to hurt her, that it was all a mistake, and that he was the one who had saved her in the end.

  Merrick ambled through the sliding glass doors of the emergency room, leaving the clatter behind. He stood under the awning, stuffed his hands into his pants pockets and shivered as he watched the rain falling down in sheets just beyond his reach. He sniffed the moldy air and turned his left ear toward the din of the rain. He had never noticed before, but the energy of falling water, the magnitude of power in the roar of the countless drops of rain was incredible.

  His shadow stretched ahead of him across the neon-lit asphalt as he tucked his stone pendant under his shirt and stepped off the curb. He trudged through ankle deep water, following his shadow into the darkness. Behind him, through the curtain of sound from the rain, a man called out his name. Merrick kept walking.

  #

  By the time they arrived at the hospital, Brad’s mother had been in the emergency room for an hour. She was in critical condition, but the doctor had given her a high probability of survival, even at her age.

  Everything was going as well as could be expected until an explosion shook the room. At first, he couldn’t hear anything, temporarily deafened by the blast. Then came the ringing in his ears, and gradually, the flat tone that signaled the cessation of his mother’s heart.

  Even with the ensuing confusion, the doctors and nurses had been quick to respond and had tried their best, but there was no coming back for his mother.

  Brad straightened his posture as his mother always had taught. He held his wife close with his left arm and their screaming baby boy with his right. His wife cried for the loss of Brad’s mother, but her tears were not from anguish alone. He knew that she wept also with relief and joy that their baby boy had survived the car accident that Brad’s elderly mother had not.

  CHAPTER 3

  ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FEET below the ground-level Rune Corp lobby, Cara slouched in her sleek black ergonomic chair, clicking her boot heel against the hard plastic floor like a jittery second hand on a watch. At the other end of the oval worktable, Chris and Melanie sat oblivious to the noise. Their chins were tucked close to their chests, heads bowed as if immersed in prayer. On the table in front of each of them was a fist-sized cube of polished black stone that glowed and pulsed with veins of crimson and greens. The light from the cubes painted their faces with flickering swatches of color. A drop of sweat fell from the back of Chris’s left ear onto his warm neck.

  Cara yawned and stretched her arms above her head. This was going to take forever. Despite their stillness, she knew that Chris and Melanie were straining mentally to bridge the gap between the way their brains operated and the way the cubes transformed energy into stored information.

  For humans, they were adept at working the cubes, but…well, they were still only human. They couldn’t vocalize even the simplest of creation names stored in the cubes without the enunciation collars and the hearing boosters that she had invented. She may have been born half-Drayoom, but she was blessed with all of the perks of a full-blood. Her extra vocal folds allowed her to vocalize four tones simultaneously, and her superior inner ear intuitively distinguished the densely overlapped sounds stored in the cubes.

  Without the advantages of being Drayoom, Chris and Melanie had no hope of creating a better interface to the cubes than the one she herself had built three years ago.

  That, however, was an argument that Cara was not going to win with her boss, the great Ohman, who also happened to be her father. After a Rune Corp employee had died last month experimenting with a newly discovered creation name, her father decreed that a new cube interface be built—one that a human could easily grasp and more safely operate. Ohman believed that if humans were using the cubes, one of them had to design the interface no matter how difficult the task and regardless of the cost. For the last four weeks, she had worked with Chris and Melanie non-stop trying to carry out her father’s wishes while also trying to keep the two of them sane…and alive.

  With an impatient huff, she swiveled in her chair and looked up at the rack of enormous pulsing cubes that lined the wall behind her. Data from Melanie and Chris’s cubes whizzed across two large flat screens hanging from the ceiling. Their thoughts along with the information from their cubes flickered past, captured in a series of symbols that served as a four-layered, phonetic alphabet for the creation names, the building blocks of all the dragon languages.

  Her stomach suddenly twitched, filling her with a rising sense of nausea. She stopped tapping her foot as an invisible force rolled through her like concentric circles on the surface of a pond. Chris and Melanie were still working, either too focused on their work or unable to register the disturbance. The feeling was gone as quickly as it had appeared, leaving in its wake a vague aftertaste of unrest. She hoped that whatever she had felt had not emanated from the tests that Chris and Melanie were running.

  Reconstructing the languages of the dragons was hazardous work. Since dragon tongues had no syntax, patterns, or consistency, there was no way of knowing exactly what a new name or combination of names would conjure without speaking them out loud and hoping for the best. That was why they conducted all testing of new words below ground in what was essentially a plastic bunker encased in solid stone—granite and amphibolite hand-selected by her father to isolate and insulate the testing chamber. Any repercussions would supposedly be contained and dampened before they could reach the human population above.

  Theoretically, the process worked both ways, keeping any hazardous energy above from making its way into the lab as well. Cara was bothered because she had sensed an unknown spike of power as if she had been walking unprotected on the street. Whatever it was must have been stronger than anything she had experienced before, especially this far away from other Drayoom. Maybe her father was experimenting on his own upstairs. Regardless, she needed to talk to him about what she had just felt.

  She opened her mouth to tell Chris and Melanie to pack it up for the night, when one of the data screens above her suddenly went black. Turning around, she saw Chris walking into the containment area marked off by bright yellow paint on the floor. He stopped in the center of the area, wearing the standard headset gear and adjusting an enunciator collar around his throat. In his right hand, he held his cube.

  She called to him, but a thick sheet of translucent plastic dropped from the ceiling, sliding into place behind him, separating him from the rest of the room. A second later, a translucent cylinder rose from the floor and thudded firmly into a circular groove in the ceiling, encasing him in an airtight, soundproof chamber.

  Beyond him, dozens of recessed lights flared to life, illuminating the far reaches of the testing lab stretching as far as a football field in the underground distance. All types of natural earthen materials were either mounted on the walls and floor or hanging from the ceiling. Pieces and parts of different types of wood, stone, and plants shared the space with shelves of petri dishes containing soil samples and any other organic material of substance the employees and her father had been able to collect over the years.

  She watched as his cube glowed a brighter green, and one of the pieces of wood hanging from the ceiling some twenty yards away exploded into a cloud of sawdust. This was not the time for him to be blowing off steam. She had to get up top as soon as possible and find her father.

  Before she could hit the intercom button to yell a
t Chris, his cube pulsed again. The floating particles of sawdust swarmed together and reformed back into the original piece of wood. Cara stopped breathing as the chunk of wood fell to the floor.

  It was always easy to move an object toward entropy. Destruction was relatively simple, but restoring order from chaos was another matter altogether. In fact, she had never seen someone use a cube to restore an object to its original state of energy. It was impossible, but Chris’s new interface must have worked. The force she had felt just moments before must have emanated, not from above, but from his cube. Her shoulders dropped as she exhaled.

  Across the lab, Chris turned to face her and Melanie. He removed his headset and smiled. Melanie slumped down in her chair as the two protective barriers retracted, and he approached. Cara noted that he looked somewhat older since arriving for work—one of the side effects of working so intensely with the cubes.

  “That was impressive,” she said.

  Chris looked down at his feet, his face turning a deep shade of crimson.

  “I want to take a look at the names you used to perform your little trick before we celebrate. Right now.”

  “Me too,” he said with a cough as he removed the enunciator from around his neck and placed his cube back into the square indentation carved into the table. As the cube uploaded its information, two strings of phonetic symbols along with sound wave patterns and explanatory text appeared on the screen.

  “I don’t recognize the first combination of names or the second,” Cara said. “Testing out this many new names at once was stupid, Chris. You know the rules—only one new name at a time or it’s impossible to figure out their separate functions. Only one variable at a time. Basic scientific procedure. With all these new names introduced simultaneously, your experiment as it stands is useless. And you’re lucky you didn’t blow us all up as well.”