A Tapestry of Fire (Applied Topology Book 4) by Margaret Ball

Author:Margaret Ball [Ball, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-11T22:00:00+00:00

12. Loaded for grackle

Austin, Thursday

We were swept into a darkness shot through with jewel-tone colors: glowing lines, surfaces, points of light. We had time – the three of us who were topologists, anyway – for a good long look at the in-between. Too much time, really. The SCI building was less than ten miles away; we should have blinked out of the restroom and blinked into Shani Chayyaputra’s private rooms without more than a split-second glimpse of the in-between. Instead we were poised here, static, gazing at an unmoving display of lights.

Reflexively I opened my hand and poured more stars into the transformation. I could “see” Ingrid and Colton doing the same thing; they were shadowy, insubstantial figures to my sight here, but their stars were twisting funnels of moving lights.

Then, with a bump, we were back on the tiled floor of the restroom in the Student Union. The transition was anything but gentle. I sat down on the floor, hard. Annelise grabbed Colton’s arm and, instead of steadying herself, made him lose his balance so that the two of them hit the tiles a moment after me. Ingrid was the only one of us who kept her feet and her dignity.

Naturally. It would be Ingrid, wouldn’t it?

“What happened?” Annelise demanded as soon as she scrambled to her feet.

I got up a little more slowly. I’d whacked my tailbone on those tiles. “Remind you of anything?” I asked Ingrid.

She nodded, more slowly still. “That time when we were…” She swallowed hard and went on. “In… 1957. And we couldn’t jump back to our own time.”

Colton nodded. “Like that, only different. That was a kind of… squishy resistance. This felt more like bouncing off something hard and being knocked back to our starting place.”

Mr. M. raised his head a few inches. “It would appear that the Master of Ravens has learned something from the Center for Applied Topology.”

“What?”

“Is it not obvious? Just as you have hardened the shields around your office and your homes so that no unauthorized person can teleport into them, so has he hardened the shields on his apartment inside the building.”

“Oh.” He’d learned from us, dammit. I hadn’t considered that possibility. “What can we do about that?”

“Short of sending someone to enter the apartment by normal physical means and remove the protections, nothing. And even then, he would have to find the tokens. Chayyaputra may well have disguised them.”

“That would be a suicide mission,” said Colton.

“Yes, very likely.” Mr. M. didn’t seem fazed by the notion. But then, given that Meadow had never gotten around to equipping his snake body with retractable hands, he could be pretty sure that he wouldn’t be the one sent on the mission.

There was a hammering on the door and several soprano voices demanded to know if we were through yet.

“Repairs,” Colton shouted. “There’s been a sewage backup.”

“Eeew!” The girls moved on, presumably to use a different restroom; the building had several, and if we’d been thinking clearly we would have assembled in a less accessible one.

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