machine. Deprive it of power, interrupt whatever energy it required to run, and theoretically you should be able to disable it. It was possible no one on Genetrix had determined how because they were so focused on magic they had forgotten how to be practical, like Nero with his magically secured workshop door.
“You’re staring,” Mox said. His eyes were open, though he hadn’t moved. He looked at her through the veil of hair hanging over his forehead.
“Just . . . thinking,” she said. “About how to get that thing off you.”
“So, the central question of my life,” he said. “That or how to kill someone who can control you.”
She draped a leg over his back and pulled herself tight to his side so their faces were right next to each other.
“I was just thinking . . . it’s a machine,” she said. “And you can change the purpose of a machine by altering the way it runs.”
“What,” he said, touching his forehead to hers, “do you mean?”
“I mean, right now this thing channels magic,” she said. “Can you turn it into a haven-city siphon? Can you make it channel . . . anti-magic?”
“Then I wouldn’t be able to do anything.”
“Yeah, I know, but I’m not thinking of the spine siphon, actually.” She tweaked his forehead curl. “I’m thinking of that giant siphon in the floor of the Hall of Summons. If we could get it to disable all the magic, we could just kill Nero with our bare hands.”
Mox blinked at her a few times, then crushed his lips against hers, pressing her back into the mattress. She laughed into his mouth, and he moved down to kiss her throat.
“You . . .” he said. “Brilliant.”
“You’re telling me it . . . ah”—he was good at that—“literally never occurred to you that . . . okay, never mind.”
He rolled on top of her. He was heavy, but she liked the full embrace of the weight and the way the top of his feet pressed against the bottom of hers.
“I know siphons,” he said. “I fix mine, I fix Ziva’s. Everyone’s. And they break, you know, make you incapable of doing anything.”
She tucked his hair behind his ears and smiled. “So let’s break one on purpose,” she replied.
It was night when they drove back to the city, one of Sloane’s favorite times to drive through the Illinois prairie. It was just the highway and the twinkle of lights on the horizon: the runways of regional airports, farms in towns so small they didn’t appear on most maps, the glow of a McDonald’s arch next to a fueling station. Some towns had integrated magic into their everyday lives, Mox said, but for the most part, the residents of areas around haven cities were slow to adopt it, with the exception of the younger generation.
“That you could end the world with it doesn’t seem to occur to most people,” he remarked, tapping his fingers on the window.
Sloane smiled. “Most people lack ambition.”
Mox laughed at that and turned down the music. They had discovered a CD that Sloane recognized in the glove compartment: Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Mox had read through the names of some of the more recent albums, and not a single one was familiar to Sloane. Certainly not the band Unfathomable Cosmic Blackness, which had produced the first album made entirely by magic. If you sang the notes exactly as written in one of the songs, Mox said, you could make multicolored lights dance across your dashboard.
“I think I figured out your siphon problem,” Mox said. He kept flicking magical breaths at her every so often, trying to get her to laugh. She had threatened to take away his tooth whistle more than once, not that it would have made much of a difference.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. They probably talked to you about intent, right?”
Sloane rolled her eyes in answer.
“Right. Well, intent is important, but the essence of a magical act is—”
“Desire.” Sloane smirked. “I read that book.”
Mox raised an eyebrow at her. “You’ve read The Manifestation of Impossible Wants? Do they have that in your dimension?”
“No, it was in my room when I got here,” she said, “and I broke my ankle jumping out of your bedroom window. So I had a lot of free time.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Sorry for trying to kill you,” she said. “I mean, I know you turned my weapon into a very fine powder, but—still.”
“I admired the effort, actually,” he said. “Not everyone would be so gutsy.”