Convergence - The Last Science #2.1 - In Plain Sight

B2: Chapter 2 - The Goddess of Kent - III

  Josh sat down on one of the benches Rufus had built around Yusuf's flower garden, while Hailey took the opposite. Jessica saw them return and joined her, bringing a warm blanket from the generator and wrapping it around them snug in the cool night air. Josh sighed and leaned back, pressing his hands to his face. "I'm going crazy out here, Hales."

  "It won't be forever," said Hailey, putting her arm around Jessica. She sniffed the air and grimaced. "Ugh. Jess, you really should have let me shower before we left."

  Josh's face twisted in an odd way, like he wasn't sure how to react to that. He eventually settled on ignoring it. "How's everything going back home?"

  "Boring as usual," Hailey sighed. "I'm talking to Boris about maybe finding a way to get myself signed up for online classes somewhere. Even though it'll be under a fake identity. Just so I have something to start progressing toward, you know? Something I can use eventually."

  "Thought this wasn't gonna be for forever," Josh pointed out.

  "Well, I figure they can just merge the credits back to my real name, right?" Hailey grinned. "Special circumstances on account of being a living goddess."

  "Oh God, you're gonna let that get to your head."

  "Too late," Hailey laughed. "I need to start using my powers for good though. Is there something I can get you? Maybe make it a bit easier out here?"

  "Better TV? I wanted to watch the Laker game but the broadcast signal out here sucks balls and all the streams get shut down way too fast." Josh shrugged. "But seriously, I'm just getting exhausted spending time with all these guys. I'm the only one out here who wears normal-ass clothes."

  "Hey, those robes can look pretty cool."

  He smirked. "If you want to look straight out of a high school play."

  Hailey laughed. "Come on, at least the ones Ruby's worked on are pretty good."

  "Look, they're good for some white people wizarding shit. That's just not my thing." Josh shrugged again. "They do their ritual every night and they all follow Cinza's word without question like damn robots. It's something else."

  Something about his tone bothered her. "You don't think it's... something she's doing?"

  Josh looked shocked. "What? No. Hell no. Even if I thought something was off, they'd all be protected by Mason's Law. You can't do something like that to another person."

  "But the Law was broken once already," Hailey said uneasily. "When they used the spell to slow down Jackson so Rachel could shoot him. Plus the Law didn't make a whole lot of sense with the pocket dimensions either, right? I mean, if you can't use magic on people, but people can still go inside magic, then what's the actual limitation?"

  Josh leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. "I don't know, but it scares the shit out of me. I'm working on some theories, but it's a lot harder without Mason."

  "He was really important to the group, wasn't he?" she said softly.

  "Yeah," Josh said. "Mason really figured a lot of the basics out for us." Josh smiled slightly. "Shit, he would have loved the new one I'm working on."

  "Wanna bounce it off me?" Hailey offered. "I'm not a future rocket scientist like he was, but maybe that'll just help you get some ideas out?"

  "Sure, I guess." Josh leaned back again, staring up at the sky. A hole had opened in the cloud layer, and they could see a few stars peeking out through the sheet of black as it rolled over them. "So magic's all about intention, right? Nothing happens without someone intending it to happen, directly or inversely."

  "Inversely... you're talking about backfiring, right? Like, rituals going wrong?"

  "Not just rituals. The accident out in the R.V. was a backfiring spell, not a ritual, if what Robert said was right. It still burned the guy up, but it came out of his intention. He tried to make fire to burn someone, he lost control of it, and the fire fucked him up. There's always intention though. Even all the way back to everyone awakening. No one awakens without really wanting to, right?"

  "I guess so," Hailey agreed, a bit uncomfortably. Her own awakening didn't break his theory, but it was a lot different than the usual process he knew. Then again, so was everything else about the way she did magic. Even amongst the awakened, she was still the exception to the rules—along with the other few who shared her circumstances of course. Like the warm mass of compassion and fierce protectiveness curled up next to her. Hailey pulled the blanket back into place around Jessica's neck while Josh kept talking.

  "At least as far as we know. But I'm pretty sure if you shoved a Scrap in front of someone's face and held their eyeballs open, it wouldn't do anything. You have to actually intend to read it. Not that the first few of us knew what was going to happen, but still. You wanted to read it and find out, right? No reluctance?"

  "Nope. None at all. But I'm crazy," Hailey said, smirking.

  "Yeah, for sure. But here's where this shit gets real. The stuff that happened in that R.V. seems to break Mason's Law too, right? Alex tries to summon a pocket dimension, it carves him up and everything nearby. So far so good... except that it also blows through a little girl close enough to be in the blast radius."

  "And she didn't cast the spell," Hailey filled in.

  "Okay, actually, I didn't think of that, but I really doubt Jenny Wilson was awakened and also tried to make a pocket dimension in the same room while Alex was doing it too." Josh shook his head. "What's weird is his intention was carried out, like usual, and the backfire carried out the reverse of his intention, also like usual. But the backfire can hit anything it wants, ignoring the rules."

  "Like how some people died outright from the magnetic ritual we cast," Hailey said quietly.

  "Actually, no again," Josh said. "You guys didn't kill anyone directly. Cinza explained how that one works a bit more to me. Even when she and Ruby used it 'directly' on Paul Wilson, it didn't break Mason's Law because it never directly affected him. They charged up an area of particles near him and amplified how attractive they were to iron specifically somehow. I don't understand the specifics because it's fucking magic, but point is, the magnetic spell still doesn't hit people directly. More importantly, the big one wasn't a backfire."

  "But we were interrupted," Hailey said, as the painful memory of Jackson bursting into their circle at breakneck speed and laying Cinza out flat resurfaced in her mind. "That should have caused it to backfire."

  "Cinza managed to get the ritual off in time, she just had to move the target as far away as she could." Josh glanced over at her cabin as he spoke. "That girl is fucking amazing, to be honest. In that split second between Jackson showing up and decking her, she shifted her target halfway across town and released it so that the backfire wouldn't just straight kill you all. She gambled on you guys being able to hold off Jackson long enough to get him to retreat, and it worked."

  "But the target area was so much bigger than what we planned."

  "Yeah, she didn't have time to figure out if the place she was hitting was clear, so she just made it as wide as possible hoping no one would die just from the ritual. Mitigation by dispersal." Josh shrugged. "We've talked a lot about it. Post-mortem shit. It's been really helpful in figuring out how rituals and targeting works. The point is though, when we have a real backfire like the stuff in the R.V., it can apparently do anything to anyone."

  "That's horrible."

  "No shit. But it's not as bad as it looks. Magic's all about intention, right? So no one can intend to backfire a spell. You can't fool magic." He sighed. "I'm not afraid of bringing in new people. What we really need to be scared of is all the people who don't have a fucking clue what they're doing, who've got no control, and start trying the really dangerous shit. In public." Josh looked Hailey in the eye, grim-faced. "It's gonna be a fucking massacre."