“We need to know what happened back there,” Occam said.
I frowned and blinked until I could look into his gold-flecked eyes. I managed a bare whisper. “Did you carry me out?”
“Yes. Nell? Are you okay?
“I . . . No. I have a headache big enough to drive a tractor into.”
He put something in my free hand. Two Tylenol. “Oh,” I murmured. “Magic pills. Goodie.” I set them on my tongue, finished the bottle of water, and gave him the empty.
Occam breathed out a shaky laugh. “What does she read?”
“Back to normal,” T. Laine said. “I think I’ll set it to default zero and not the fudged zero I started at.” At which point I realized that she had been reading me with the psy-meter 2.0 while I read the earth.
“Fudged zero?” Occam asked.
“With all the redlining, I set the background ambient zero as high as it would go. The way I’d set it if a small coven of witches were getting ready to do a working and I wanted to be able to read the energies of the spell itself over the energies of the witches.”
Occam hummed a note that reminded me of a purr. That had been the vibration at my back. Things were beginning to return to me, to make sense. Paka was sitting, front feet together, at my side. She was not purring, but was watching me with a cat stare, the kind a well-fed, bored cat gives a mouse. Alert, interested, but not ready to attack.
“What did I read when I was scanning the land?” I whispered. I looked at T. Laine and the movement of my head made the world swirl and nausea rise. There was a glare everywhere, and my eyeballs ached. I put my hands flat on the rock beneath me. And very deliberately did not allow myself to commune with the deep.
“You redlined,” she said shortly. “Even at the higher zero.”
Feeling more steady, I lifted my palms and studied them. My fingers were white and quivering, but there was no bleeding, no places where a knife had nicked me, cutting me free. The stitches were clean and neat, the flesh they held together looking far more healed than it should. The ground and the living things in it had attacked. I looked at my feet. No damage except a streak of red. I thought back to the questions Occam had asked me. “I’m okay. I think. Sick to the stomach. A little woozy.
“The smaller consciousness, the dancer . . . recognized me. From yesterday. It . . . didn’t grab me, exactly. I was probably only a few feet into the earth when it saw me. It wrapped around me. Yeah. Like a ribbon on my ankle. But not . . . not like it was taking me prisoner.” I touched my ankle. The skin was tender, but nothing had penetrated my flesh. “More like it was trying to get my attention. Trying to get me to see something.”
A flare of heat from a branding iron pierced through my brain. I breathed slowly, carefully, trying not to throw up. Or hurl, as I had learned in Spook School. I pressed a hand to my middle, to the rooty scars that marked me. Nothing felt different. That was good.
“I think . . . I think the dancer was trying to tell me something,” I said, “the same thing it told me yesterday. ‘Flows, flows, flows. Pools, pools, pools.’ But the last lines had changed. It was saying ‘Dead. All dead. All dead. Forever.’ It was singing the words, like bells. It was dancing in a loose, looped, figure-eight shape. It . . .” I stopped, trying to think what I wanted to say. “It’s almost as if it wants to communicate something.
“Then there was another presence. The woman, I think, human or witch. I didn’t sense magical energies, so I couldn’t tell. She grabbed me and pulled me down. Between them, they were smothering me. Dragging me deeper. The woman seemed to know I wasn’t human. So, two presences, one humanoid in its thought processes, one not. Not at all. I need to go back there.”
“Not happening,” Occam said.
“What cat man said. It took everything I had to Break you free.”
I squinted up at T. Laine. She flowed with the glare, like an aura surrounding her. Ah. I had a migraine. Auras came with migraines. The headache stabbed through my skull. “Owww.” I placed one hand to my head, and the stitches on my fingers shocked me. “Owwwie again.”
“Nell, sugar?”
“Headache is bad. Maybe a migraine? I never had anything like this before.” I squinted through the pain and asked T. Laine, “Was that the blue energies I saw? The Break?”
“You could see the energies?”
“Something blue cut straight down through the earth all around me in a circle. It cut through the dancer energies that were holding me. Cut me away from the woman. And I was free.”
“Go me.” But T. Laine sounded unhappy still and her face was set in a frown so deep it cut lines into her skin, and hair hung in black tangles around her face. She was staring at the small psy-meter in her hands.
Occam, still kneeling at my feet, handed me two things. They were soft and pink. Pretty. “Can you put them on?”
I examined them. Turned them over in my hands. “Oh. Socks.”
“Yes. Socks.” He sounded amused and improbably gentle. Paka hacked, laughter in the syllable.
“Sure. I can do socks.” With motions that sent spikes of pain through my eyeballs, I pulled the socks onto my feet and then pushed my feet into the boots Occam held out for me.
“How we doin’, Lainie?” he asked.
“So far, so good.”
“What’s going on?” I asked, knowing that something was wrong but not knowing what, other than the headache that speared me and the ache that was growing in my hips and knees and shoulders. I tried to unfold my limbs against the discomfort, but I didn’t want to move enough to complete the stretch.
“Remember the crabgrass-looking stuff that grew into you yesterday?” T. Laine asked. Before I could reply, she went on. “Well, about three minutes into your scan, we started to see the topsoil move. And at about four minutes, thirty seconds, shoots came up from the ground. Exact same moment the P 2.0 redlined. They wrapped around your ankle. I dropped the psy-meter and started my Break. The moment Break hit, Occam picked you up, I grabbed your things, and we hauled ass outta there.”
I was reading for only five minutes? That was all? That seemed important, but my headache was getting worse, and I closed my eyes instead of trying to put it all together. My stomach felt as if it would erupt with the slightest movement. “Did Paka sense anything?” I whispered.
“She’s shaking her head no,” T. Laine said.
The world swirled around me like I was being sucked down a drain.
“Nell? Nell, sugar?”
And then I heard nothing more at all.
* * *
I woke when Occam tried to maneuver me into the car. I heard the word ambulance.
“No. No ambulance,” I mumbled. I was cold and thought that if I started shivering I’d not survive the headache. “Just some aspirin and ibuprofen on top of the Tylenol, a blanket, and a candy bar. I think my sugar bottomed out.”
“Nell, you need—”
“I’m okay.” I lay my head against the seat back and took a bottle of water from T. Laine. Occam tucked my faded pink blanket around me. “I think . . .” I had to stop and lick my dry, cracked lips. “At Spook School,” I whispered, “there was a class on backlash from interrupted magical workings. The usual stuff: fire, explosion, death. But they also said something about physical reactions.”
“Backlash,” T. Laine said, sounding relieved. “With headaches. Bad ones. Sometimes with auras, both visual and audible. You seeing an aura?”
I mouthed the word yes.
The seat dipped, and I felt the presence of someone near. I identified Paka by the sound of her purring breath. She curled in the backseat, leaning against me, her heat like a furnace. As if she knew I was cold, she pressed against me, warming me like a hot fire in a stove. The threat of shivering eased away.
“I didn’t interrupt a working,” T. Laine said. “While you were getting ready, I drew a circle and prepared Break. But I didn’t hit you with it. I hit the ground with it.”
“I was in the ground,” I said, not knowing how to explain it any better now than I had in Spook School. I licked my lips again and said haltingly, “If something was full of psysitopes . . . or someone was being attacked by psysitopes . . . by a combative or offensive spell . . .” I breathed, hurting all over, trying to calm myself.
“You,” T. Laine said.
I splayed the fingers of my uninjured hand in a yes motion. “And I was in the ground, grounded, as it were, and the Break spell hit, Break being a defensive working, that could result in backlash.”
“Oh. Presumably yes,” T. Laine said, guilt lacing her words, “since the thing that had you was magical. Nell, I am so sorry.”
I waved the guilt away. “How about a consciousness or an artificial intelligence program that runs on magical energy?” I said. “Could it be hurt too? ’Cause I gotta tell you’uns. Them things act as if they’re alive.” The silence that followed was telling. It might have told me more had my eyes been able to focus more than a foot away, but I was doing the best I could.
“No ambulance?” T. Laine asked again.
“No ambulance,” I said. “Just OTCs.”
“Look at you all medical-talking. Over-the-counters. Nice,” T. Laine said. “Allow me to be your street-corner drug dealer. Here’s the aspirin and the ibuprofen. Take aspirin now and the ibuprofen in an hour.”
“Okay,” I said and popped the two aspirin with more water. I barely got them swallowed before I sank into sleep, to wake again only when the car braked at HQ. I swallowed two ibuprofens and tried to get out of the car, but I’d stiffened up and it took both Occam and T. Laine together to get me up the stairs, Paka leading the way. I let them help me because I didn’t want to throw up on the stairs. But about halfway up I retched again.
T. Laine said, “You barf on my shoes and I swear I’ll make you pay.”
“You can barf on my shoes, Nell, sugar.”
“No one could tell,” T. Laine said.
“True,” Occam said.
And then I was lying down on the couch in the break room I hadn’t even seen yet, and someone closed the blinds. I felt my blanket being tucked around me as I tunneled down toward sleep and whispered, “Am I getting paid to sleep?”
“Yes,” Rick said, his heated hand on my forehead. “Yes, you are.”
The last thing I remembered was Paka stretching out beside me on the couch, her leopard warmth so wonderful and amazing that I rolled a little and rested against her.
* * *
It was quitting time when I woke, pink sunlight slanting through the side of the blinds. My headache had reduced from a roaring inferno to a campfire suitable for browning marshmallows and roasting hot dogs. Paka was gone, and I was alone on the couch beneath the blanket.
I managed to slit open my eyes and get a fuzzy vision of a table and chairs and two forms sitting there before I took refuge behind my lids again. I had known Occam was in the room. I couldn’t say how I had known, but I had. T. Laine sat with him, silent. I also knew they were both feeling bad about letting me scan the earth.