Breach Read online

  “Not just guns,” Jim added.

  “A lot more than just guns,” Arthur said. “With fifty thousand civilians right in the middle. Civilians, I might add, who will be stupid and brave enough to force the issue.”

  “It’ll be another war,” Alec said, the first quiet words out of his mouth.

  “It’ll be the last war,” Arthur said. “We’re getting too good at killing each other not to do it right this time.”

  “What is the United States going to do?” Alec asked.

  “Ask Eisenhower. Ask the commandant in Zehlendorf,” Arthur said. “I just gather intel.”

  “Arthur . . .”

  “What do you want me to say? We’re going to prepare,” Arthur said. “Boys will start shining their combat boots, politicians will be polishing their sabers. The same dance with an updated tune.”

  “And what are you going to do?” Emile asked.

  Arthur sighed. “What else?” he said. “Figure out a way to keep the whole damn roof from falling in. Any of you all know anything about magic?”

  Jim tried not to laugh at the question. There weren’t many people out there who could help with magic on this scale. After the German invasion, British magicians were an all but extinct species. The French were hardly in a better position. No, this one would fall to the US of A, no matter how little Mom and Pop America would like it.

  “What about you, Jim?” Arthur said. “You went to school for this stuff. Can you offer any magical insight here?”

  Jim stood by the breach. It didn’t look much bigger than when he’d first seen it a day or two ago, but he didn’t doubt the measurements. “Sorry, Chief,” he said. “They kicked me out long before we covered magic like this.”

  He thought about St. Cyprian’s, and about the fireball blowing up in his face. He was pretty sure his eyebrows were a little burned. Carefully, Jim put a finger into the breach and felt only the cold. “I think we’re going to need to call in the experts for this one.”

  TWO

  “Whatever you do,” Karen said, “don’t move.”

  “Why can’t I move?”

  “You’re moving.”

  “I’m not moving.”

  “Your lips are moving.”

  “Why can’t my lips move?”

  “Because you’re scaring Bing.”

  “I think that might be the scalpel.”

  “No, not Bing,” Karen said. She stroked the rat’s white fur and he looked up at her expectantly, tiny nose twitching. “He’s proud to do his part for magical research. Now hold him steady.”

  Gerald held Bing in place while Karen made a shallow half-inch cut along the rat’s right leg. The blood was bright and quick, as if dropped on snow.

  “See? He didn’t even feel it.” Karen set the scalpel aside and reached for the first element of the spell: powdered goat’s horn.

  “Think this one will work?” Gerald asked.

  “No idea,” Karen said as she sprinkled the grayish powder.

  “But we’re trying it anyway?”

  “That’s why they call it research,” Karen said. She handed him the transcription Allison had typed up. “Here,” she said, “read this. Your pronunciation is better than mine.”

  “Come now,” Gerald said, taking the paper reluctantly. “Your magic runs circles around most of the people in this building.”

  Karen smiled at that, though she didn’t believe a word of it. “Go ahead,” she said. “I want you to do it.”

  With Gerald’s Midwestern accent droning two-thousand-year-old words in her ear, Karen set out the other prescribed magical reagents, making sure the dried hemlock didn’t touch the salt of an inland sea. She wanted to roll her eyes; these complicated spells never worked. The extra details always struck her as someone trying too hard. Good magic didn’t have to be so arcane.

  “Ready?” Gerald asked.

  “Let’s make history,” Karen replied.

  His voice rose as he began the last stanza, an uncharacteristic dramatic flair for the owl-eyed magician from Topeka. But when you might be on the verge of the greatest magical breakthrough in human history, Karen figured a little showmanship wasn’t a bad thing.

  There was some magic in the spell; Karen felt its familiar whisper starting in the back of her mind. Something was happening; she just wasn’t sure what. Neither, it seemed, was Bing, his round pink eyes darting about the room as unseen energy began to gather. Karen watched the cut, the blood already clotting, and willed it to close.

  And then Gerald was finished. The silence that invaded the room held them all captive for the longest a single moment could be stretched.

  And then the moment passed and the wound remained unchanged.

  Bing sniffed the air and stared at them, as if to say, What did you expect, a miracle?

  Gerald did not seemed surprised. “You know the old saying,” he said with a shrug. “‘You want to heal someone, call a doctor.’”

  “‘You want to kill someone, call a magician,’” she finished. She let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding in and found her research notebook. She had a dozen of these, each full of similar failures. She read the title off the cover. “Sorry, Quintilianus the Great,” she said, “but your spell ‘Quicken the Mending of Mortal Flesh’ would be better named ‘Wasten the Time of Overworked Magicians.’”

  “That’s why they call it research, right?” Gerald asked as he wrapped medical tape around Bing’s leg.

  “Right,” Karen said, forcing herself not to sigh. “If it were easy, everyone would be doing it, instead of just two of us.” She scooped up the bandaged Bing and held him nose to quivering nose. “Your country thanks you, Bing the Rat, for your service.” She carried him across the room to his cage, where his fellow rats were waiting. “Marlon, Bob, Jimmy, you leave Bing alone. He’s had a rough day.”

  The door to the cramped lab opened slightly and a blond-bobbed head peered in. “Is it over?” Allison asked.

  “The magic or the rat torture?” Gerald asked.

  “Yuck,” Allison said. “Both.”

  “It is safe to enter,” Gerald said as Karen watched the rats plow through fresh sawdust. It was, she thought, a painfully apt metaphor for magicians: a simple, caged life-form digging ignorantly through the leavings of some complex, unknowable mind, hoping to find a treat.

  “Miss O’Neil?” Allison said.

  “Karen,” she said, seemingly for the hundredth time. “Call me Karen.” Allison was only a couple years younger than her, after all; such formality made Karen feel old. But Allison was a hard worker and fiercely loyal, which was always welcome in a world haunted by government bureaucrats. Karen suspected family connections had gotten her the job in the OMRD to keep her out of trouble until she found a good husband, which, as Karen guessed from the lengthy gossip Allison often subjected her to, wouldn’t take long.

  “Karen, right,” Allison said, as if trying to commit the name to memory. “Karen, you’re late for your staff meeting.”

  Oh, hell. Speaking of bureaucrats.

  “Times like these,” Gerald said, not looking up from his notes, “I sure am glad you run this department, not me.”

  Karen thrust her notebooks into a drawer. “I keep showing up late to staff meetings and there might soon be an opening.”

  “No, thanks,” Gerald said. “Uncle Sam couldn’t pay me enough to sit in a conference room with the director.”

  “Dr. Haupt?” Karen said. “He’s a great magician.”

  Gerald snorted. “He’s terrifying.”

  “Not if you get to know him.”

  Gerald shook his head. “I think the more I knew, the more terrified I’d be.”

  “It isn’t the director I’m worried about,” Karen said. “It’s the rest of those blowhards.”

  Gerald adjusted
his glasses. “I won’t argue, but to be safe, I think I’ll stay here and let you deal with the lot of them.”

  “And they say that chivalry is dead,” Karen said. On her way out the door, she knelt down and put her face up against the wire bars of the rat cage. “Wish me luck, boys,” she said. “Time for me to get experimented on.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Though she was only a few minutes late, they hadn’t waited for her. She tried to slip into the wood-paneled conference room as quietly as possible, even wondering if they’d notice if she used a few discreet spells to hide her arrival. But as soon as she stepped inside, all eyes turned her way.

  “Nice of you to join us,” said Harold Wilkerson, the balding head of the Military Application Department. Harold seemed to barely tolerate her existence, but since he offered similar disdain to just about everyone at the OMRD she didn’t take it too personally.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said quietly as she hurried to her place at the long table.

  “Actually,” said Marvin Barth, an ample-girthed magician who ran the Environmental Magic Department, whatever that was, “since you’re up, you know what would be swell? If you could get us some coffee.”

  Karen paused in front of her chair. “I don’t drink coffee.”

  Barth hefted his jowls into a smile. “But the rest of us do. And it would be swell.”

  The rest of the room stared at her through the cigarette haze, a wall of unblinking masculine eyes, waiting for her to capitulate. Demanding her to.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, “but don’t go too far without me.” She hurried out into the hall. Before she closed the door, she heard someone say, “So where were we?”

  The break room wasn’t far. The disorganized cupboards stared back at her in silent mockery of her situation. You’ll get no help from us, they seemed to say to her. We’re on their side. Simple, immovable, and usually full of worthless junk: the cupboards did remind her of most of the men of the OMRD.

  Why let them boss you around? Why isn’t Fat Marvin in here making the coffee? Because he’s a man, obviously. Such domestic work would be beneath him.

  Karen mercilessly flung a few open until she found what she needed. Grabbing a metal pot, she filled it with water and set it on the counter. With a fingertip, she traced a symbol on the surface, and nothing happened.

  Of course, she thought. The enchantment had been used up and no one had bothered to reapply it. Why should they, after all, when they had a woman magician in the building? Isn’t that why God let women use magic, so they could power the household appliances? She should serve it to them cold. No, she should make it piping hot and pour it over their heads.

  Enchantments had never been her strength, not in school and not after. They could be useful tools, certainly, but there was something macabre about it to her, infusing an object with your own energy. Like leaving behind a lock of hair. Or a fingernail clipping. She sighed. The damn coffee wasn’t going to heat itself, so instead she touched the leather pouch around her neck, gripped the pot with her other hand, and whispered the necessary words. The power moved easily enough, bleeding from her palm into the metal, settling there comfortably. Karen shivered.

  The coffee grounds too were aligned with her foes. How much was she supposed to use? Did it matter which kind? If her mother knew she was twenty-six and still couldn’t brew a cup of coffee for her “handsome” coworkers, she’d probably have a heart attack. Who was she kidding? Her mother knew, but, as with everything else unpleasant in her world, just pretended not to.

  When finished, Karen eyed her handiwork: it smelled like an ashtray and looked like mud. Perfect.

  “. . . this report comes in from Sparks, Nevada, says they have a bona fide werewolf on the loose,” Karen heard as she reentered the meeting with the coffee on a tray. The speaker was Al Lambert, head of Public Inquiry, the group responsible for handling reports of errant magic anywhere in the US. They were the largest group in the OMRD, with more than two dozen magicians on staff, and always had the best stories.

  “So you tell them there’s no such thing as monsters?”

  Al leaned back in his chair and adjusted his tie. “Oh, we told them. Ten or fifteen times. But the local police were insistent. You know how people get. Want to blame everything on magic. They hate us until they think they need us. So we had to send out a team.”

  One of the others asked, “And what was it?”

  “A particularly cranky beagle.” Laughs all around.

  As they started to sip at her scalding-hot coffee, Karen did her best to hide a grin at their disgusted looks. Maybe they’d think twice before asking her to do it next time. After all, she didn’t remember seeing table service on her job description.

  “Alright,” Wilkerson said, “who’s next? I don’t have all day for this status meeting.”

  Just keep your head down, she thought. Don’t remind them you are crashing their good ol’ boys club and maybe you can get back to work faster.

  “I for one would be very curious to hear the latest from Theoretical Magic,” said George Cabott, deputy to Harold over in Military.

  Ugh, so much for keeping her head down.

  “Thank you, George,” Karen said. He smiled. Allison would have swooned; just about every woman who worked at OMRD headquarters would have. But Karen knew George’s dark secret: he was unbearable. She didn’t really blame him, though, as human empathy had been bred out of his Manhattan-dwelling family generations ago. She just wished she had known all that before she slept with him back in college.

  “Yes, great idea,” Barth said, straightening up a bit in his groaning chair. “We’ve heard enough about actually useful magic for one day.”

  Karen turned to face him. “I’m sorry, Marvin, did you have some compelling breakthrough to share with us instead? Some wonderful achievement from the third floor to justify your bloated”—she paused for just a fraction of a moment before finishing—“budget?”

  Barth choked on his coffee. See, this was why she usually kept quiet. She had plenty to say, but it never came out quite as nicely as these old men wanted it.

  “As I’ve mentioned before,” she began before Barth could recover, noting then ignoring the rolled eyes from some of the assembled, “we have a number of exciting research projects ongoing. We were running tests this morning on healing magic, and then there is our continuing work on Universal Expression Theory—”

  “Is this getting somewhere, honey?” Al Lambert asked. He’d lived in DC for twenty years but still sounded like he’d just walked off the ranch in Plano.

  “I need resources,” she said flatly. There were groans all around. “My whole department is two magicians and one secretary. You talk about the public hating magicians. What if we could finally learn how to heal people? And what if we didn’t have to rely on spells, but could control magic directly—”

  “And what if I had a unicorn that pissed gold dust?” Lambert said. “There are, what, a few thousand people in the whole country who can do decent magic? We can’t waste them all on chasing fairy tales. Listen here, honey—”

  “Yes, sweetheart?” This stopped the old Texan cold. Stopped the whole room, actually. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Karen said, “I thought we were being familiar. My mistake.” There was part of her that hated herself for stooping to their level. But if you wanted to be heard by men, you had to act like a man: rude, entitled, and not afraid to make enemies. “Your team is chasing beagles. My team is trying to change the world. All I’m asking for is a few more people to help.”

  “Young lady, I think—” Lambert never had the chance to finish his reply. The door to the meeting room swung open and the director of the Office of Magical Research and Deployment stood in the doorway.

  Dr. Max Haupt was a small man, stooped by age and bent by war, with silver hair and a silver-tipped cane. He he
ld the cane in front of him with his hands folded atop each other. His face wore his sixty years hard, the scars and wrinkles becoming nearly indistinguishable. His eyes narrowed behind his ever-thickening glasses and slowly interrogated each magician in the room.

  “I trust,” he said, his German accent clipping every word, “that I am not interrupting anything.”

  “No, sir,” Wilkerson said, standing. “We were just finishing here.”

  “Good.” His gaze settled on Lambert, who did not return it. “Mr. Cabott and Miss O’Neil, I would speak with you in my office.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Between the massive cherry-wood monolith that functioned as Dr. Haupt’s desk and the cascade of books that threatened to overwhelm even the sturdy shelves along every wall, the director’s office had little room for visitors. It was drafty and austere and smelled of old paper, and Karen loved it. Though she was curious about why they had been invited in, she really could only think about the weight of the old magic lingering in the Teutonic texts surrounding them.

  Dr. Haupt sat behind his desk and for a moment said nothing. Karen had known him since her second year at St. Cyprian’s when she’d taken his class on Magical Source Theory, despite having been warned by older students to avoid him. During the lectures, he rarely interacted with his students other than to rap his silver cane on the desk of anyone starting to nod off. But when she’d visited his office, one significantly smaller than his current one, he had been delighted. He had mentored her for the following years until receiving the summons from President Eisenhower to head up the newly formed Office of Magical Research and Deployment. Karen hadn’t even bothered to apply anywhere else after graduation; she knew who she wanted to work for.

  “Thank you both for coming,” he said softly. He sounded tired. Karen imagined the responsibilities of OMRD director were far weightier than shepherding magical sophomores through their required coursework, but Dr. Haupt rarely showed any sign of strain. He was constant, immutable, like the laws of the universe, from his cane to his suits to his endless supply of books. Karen had known him for years now, but knew nothing of his life outside of work. They had made bets back in school to see if anyone could find an old picture of Dr. Haupt, or even one where he wasn’t scowling. None had ever surfaced.