“And what’s the alternative? Send her back to the werehouse?”
“We have safe houses,” Philip said thoughtfully. “Keep her safe from prying eyes—”
I let out a breath and glared at him. Maybe Banner was right. Philip was a spook with his very own black helicopter. What was he doing to me, making me lose my judgment like this? “You just met her and you’re already thinking of disappearing her?”
“I didn’t say that,” Philip said. “Just… I hate to see people get hurt.”
“Me too,” I said. “But you don’t know these people. They’ll barely listen to me. They sure won’t listen to you. We need a big splashy show that will make the threat clear.”
“Well, this will do it,” Philip said, nodding toward the box lid. “What’s wrong?”
“What’s Balducci saying?” I asked. Balducci was now reading from a document while Jinx worked, and she was responding— almost like he was interrogating her.
I threw the door open.
“And your employment?” Balducci was asking, taking notes on a form.
“I’m a teaching assistant at Emory University’s Harris School of Magic,” she said, leaning over the lid without touching it, glasses off, spooky geode eyes flickering back and forth over the tattoo. “I also do contract programming for Wolfram Research.”
“What’s with the fifth degree?” I asked. “Jinx is not a suspect—”
“Background check,” Balducci said, not looking up. “We gotta check her out before we release any evidence to her. It’s a requirement.”
“It’s all right, Dakota,” she said, leaning her right eye close and waving her head back and forth. “You two have fun in there?”
I reddened. “We, uh—”
“We were… negotiating,” Philip said.
“Mmm, hmm,” Jinx said, sitting back down. “Officer Balducci, I can roughly tell that this is a ‘vessel,’ a kind of magical capacitor but… I’m basically blind. It’s like looking at it through shower glass. To really give you answers, I need to scan it and run it through my software.”
Balducci flipped through the form briefly. “It’ll take a couple of days to get approval for that.”
“We are under some time pressure,” Phil said. “Any initial thoughts you may have can help. Couldn’t we scan it into one of the DEI computers so Jinx can ‘look’ at it there?”
“Not unless you’ve got Mathematica with the Emacspeak extensions installed,” Jinx said smugly. “And I very much doubt you have someone who could install that, much less—”
Balducci leaned back thoughtfully and then picked up the phone. “I.T? This is Balducci. Tell me, you still got Jack Conway still working back there?”
“Jack the jerk? Wonderful,” I said, letting out my breath. “I’ll go get Cinnamon,”
“I’ll escort you,” Philip said, leaning away from the wall.
And so Philip and I fetched Cinnamon, Spleen and Rand and brought them up to the observation room. We stood there behind the mirrored glass, watching the sandy-haired asshole I’d met in the elevator on my last visit helping Jinx set up a scanner and some other equipment.
“I won’t lie to you,” I said, putting my hands on Cinnamon’s shoulders. “This is nasty.”
“You gots nothing to scare me,” she said, half petulant, half eager. “I sees plenty of guts at the werehouse—and they crawls back to their owners. Can you tops that?”
“In gore, no,” I said. “In horror… yes.”
Cinnamon fell quiet. “Then why be showing it to me?”
“I need you to take a message to the Marquis,” I said, and she tensed. “And I need him to understand how important it is. He won’t trust me, but—”
“Oh, good luck getting him to listen to me,” she said, ears twitching. Phil’s nostrils twitched as well, looking at her, as if somehow her presence in his observation room was violating some commandment. But he said nothing, and eventually Cinnamon sighed. “Alright, I’ll do it. I can handle anything you squares shows me.”
Philip opened the door.
“No, I need version 6.1 of the Emacspeak extensions,” Jack was muttering into his cell phone, tapping a key on his giant slab of a laptop. “Put it in the ‘cygwin/opt’ folder. You know, if you had a real computer, girlie, we’d already have this done.”
“Don’t listen to the bad man, dear,” Jinx said, stroking her laptop, then pulling out a USB key and lifting it for Jack to take. “I think this key is yours. Hello, Dakota.”
“Oh, hey, chickie,” Jack said, taking the key and plugging it into his laptop. They’d set up a scanner and were clearly about to start work on the lid; best get this over with before they got started. “Thanks