Mary Quirk and the Secret of Umbrum Hall by Anna St. Vincent

Author:Anna St. Vincent [Vincent, Anna St.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781393515814
Published: 2021-11-02T12:40:45+00:00

Monday evening, Mitchell comes by our room to double check his calculus homework with me. We’re into the chapter on limits now, and the notation is starting to get insane. Nomen explained the notation as similar to notations that express the limitations of a spell. That had all the P3s nodding because they start Magical Theory in their year. Unfortunately, Mitchell and I aren’t P3s, so we’re just nodding because we’ve read it in the textbook.

But limits are nitpicky work, so we’re double-checking each other’s notation. Number seventeen is a nasty piecewise function—don’t ask—so we quibble over the notation for that monster for a bit. Once we’ve finally agreed on the answers, he takes his work and heads out. I shut the room’s door and get ready to go to bed.

Later, when the lights are off and I can hear Isla breathing softly across the room, I lay there thinking about the physics in that book on portalists. The math part, I can do. The science part is what I don’t quite get. There’s two ways I can see gates working. Either the wormhole of the gate is long and stretchy, like a tube connecting one place to another, or it’s essentially folding reality and is infinitely short. So if I imagine that I’m holding my hands a foot apart with a piece of string between them, I can either travel between the two ends of the string by some route—I’ll call that a long-distance wormhole—or I can bring my hands together and just jump from one end of the string to the other. I’ll call that a jump.

The jump is a far better idea, because unless the long-distance wormhole follows the path of the string exactly, it could be infinitely long.

So if Daniel had wanted to be somewhere else, he would probably have just used his talent to jump from one place to another. Most of the math in that book had been about establishing permanent wormholes, though, like the ones to the farmhouse and the freight gate. Almost like writing an equation for a complicated function in math.

Because if the gatemakers make permanent gates, too, the gates would have to be able to exist on their own. It’s a little like setting up a ward and walking away. It has to be self-sustaining.

I mull over that for a while. That’s why there’s all that physics. If the gate has any weakness, then it will break. You have to make it right the first time. But if you’re not making a permanent gate, if you’re fine with it collapsing like the one in the Moorish Hall did last month, you can just use your talent to jump.

I wonder if that’s what happened with Daniel the first time. Did he just get annoyed with someone and find himself in another place? Did he will himself into another place? The first time I lit something on fire with my talent, I did it unthinkingly. I did it because I was angry.

There were times that I wished Daniel and I were closer in age.

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