“Which is why he gets results,” the middle-aged man said. “Jon Pirolli. Nice to meet you.”
“How do you ever find anything in here?” the Asian man asked. He, too, was surveying the stacks, but where Osenbaugh had looked dismissive and maybe a little amused, he seemed genuinely amazed.
“We don’t,” I said. “That’s how the oracle works. We don’t know what’s in here—”
“So anything could be in here,” he said, concluding my sentence. “Amazing. I bet I could get this place to cough up the lost works of Shakespeare if I had three weeks and a couple of interferometers.”
“Um…”
He turned to look at me and grinned. “Scary thought, huh? Don’t worry, I don’t experiment on living creatures—that’s what Abernathy’s is, right?”
“Um…yes. As far as I can tell.”
He stuck out his hand. “Rick Jeong,” he said. “It’s actually Jeong Hak-Kun, but I got sick of people pronouncing my name to rhyme with ‘raccoon.’ And I’m a huge fan of Feynman.”
That made almost no sense, but I smiled and nodded anyway. “Mr. Wallach said you all would be coming to see this. Were you part of the experiment?”
“Darius based the experiment off my work in sympathetic magic,” Osenbaugh said. “I told him it was insane, but that only made it more appealing to him.”
“Rick and I did some of the hands-on work,” Pirolli said. “We built most of the anchors.”
“Not without a lot of arguing,” Jeong said. “What’s wrong with basic 3D modeling, I’d like to know?”
“3D modeling of a 5D system is—”
Jeong waved Pirolli off. “Yeah, yeah, insufficient parameters, I know, but—”
“Would you all like some water?” I said, sensing an imminent descent into irrelevancy.
They all accepted bottles of water, and silence fell. I had no idea what to say to three people who seemed every bit as eccentrically brilliant as Wallach. Judy drummed her fingers on the counter. I messed with the receipt book, flipping through the pages before putting it back beneath the counter.
Jeong idly capped his water bottle. “So, Ms. Campbell—”
“Please, call me Helena,” I said.
“Okay. Helena, what’s it like, working so closely with the kind of entity Abernathy’s is?”
“I—well, it’s…unusual. I guess that’s the obvious answer, right? But sometimes it feels like coming up against something unspeakably alien, and sometimes it’s like chatting with a friend. It doesn’t communicate easily, and half the time I don’t understand it, but there’s a closeness I can’t describe.”
“Nathaniel Briggs never saw it that way,” Pirolli said. “It was always just another job to him.”
“Did you know him?”
“As a casual acquaintance. We weren’t close friends.”
I remembered reading Mr. Briggs’ diary, how he’d written of the oracle as something he could control, and nodded. “I don’t think Mr. Briggs ever realized the oracle’s true nature.”
“So why you?” Osenbaugh asked, her eyes narrowed in thought.
“I don’t know. Maybe because I’m a genetic sport, or maybe because I was willing to do things no other custodian had.” I wasn’t going to tell them that the oracle had predicted my existence and chosen me for its next custodian. They seemed nice, but that was a private thing I shared with very few people.
“Interesting,” Osenbaugh said.
The bells jangled, and Wallach and Viv entered. Wallach held an oversized tablet in a translucent violet case, and Viv carried an ordinary red steel toolbox, hefting it with both hands like it was heavy. “Ah, you’re here,” Wallach said. “Ready to watch history be made?”
The other three laughed like he’d made a joke. I waited for Wallach to get upset at being mocked, but he didn’t react. Maybe it really was a joke, one I wasn’t privy to.
“One minute,” Wallach said. He set the tablet on the counter and headed off into the stacks without even a nod to me. After a startled moment, I followed him. I caught up to him when he’d reached the room’s center. Wallach stared up at the black gem. “Magnificent, isn’t it?”
I looked up. The black gem seemed no different than before, except—no. If I looked closely at its edges, I could see the faintest wavering in the air, like heat haze. It blurred the thing’s outline so it looked less like an insect’s glittering eye and more like a lump of glass. “I don’t know what it’s supposed to look like,” I said.
“It’s supposed to look like that. The fulcrum is now connected to the node and drawing energy nicely. All according to plan.” Wallach climbed up and awkwardly shifted the gem until it tilted precariously on the edge of the shelf. I hurried to stand beneath it, though if it fell and I tried to catch it, it might break my arm. Wallach, though, gave it a shove that made it rock, its swaying gradually increasing until it slipped and plummeted to the ground. I cried out as it struck the linoleum floor with a sharp crack.
“Sorry about the noise,” Wallach said. He crouched and wormed his arms beneath the stone, which appeared undamaged. “It’s lab-created black diamond,” he said when he saw my astonishment. “It would take more than a seven foot fall to damage it, particularly now it’s connected to the node.”
“Oh. It looks fragile. Like glass.”
Wallach hefted the stone and walked away. I hurried after him. I was starting to feel like a puppy chasing after a constantly moving red ball.
The others hadn’t moved in our absence, though Lucia was talking quietly on her phone. Wallach set the gem on the counter and stepped away. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “in a few minutes, we will make history.”
Lucia ended her call and turned to face him. “Let’s hope that’s true.”
Wallach picked up the tablet and turned it on so the screen glowed blue. “The principle is simple,” he said. I recognized the tone of voice: I’d gone to college for a few semesters, and this was exactly how most of my professors had sounded when they were about to deliver a lecture. “Thanks to Sarah’s work with sympathetic resonance, we were able to establish a connection between these physical models and the magic shaped by them.” He pointed at the sheeted Tinker Toy cat hanging on the wall like a cut-rate Halloween decoration. “The oracle identified the places within the city where reality hinges—places that are susceptible to being moved. The 5D models now located at each of these places, fueled by the magic of this node, will shift our reality around the fulcrum, cutting us off from the invaders’ reality.”
I raised my hand. It had been years since college, but that ingrained reaction hadn’t vanished. “Can it really shift our whole reality?”
Wallach smiled. “Think of a tablecloth spread over your dining room table,” he said. “Suppose you need to adjust it so it hangs down evenly on both sides. You tug on one side, shifting it, but wrinkles form, so you tug elsewhere until it lies smooth again. What I’ll do is similar to that, except those secondary ‘wrinkles’ smooth themselves out. Over the minutes after I initiate the process, the effect will spread throughout our reality. So it’s not instantaneous, but it is extremely fast.”