The New Magic - The Revelation of Jonah McAllister by Landon Wark (free ebooks for android txt) 📕

as she thought about the consequences of having the attention of the authorities, or worse, actively challenging them. "We're not ready for anything like what you're talking about. We have to..." She swallowed. "Just keep doing what we're doing."

“And why should we listen to you?” Yuri said, loud enough that, were there anyone else in the café they would have had no trouble hearing. “You say... let me try to get the high and mighty tone correct: Anything is possible. But, do you really mean it? Or do you mean: Anything is possible as long as it doesn't piss off the assholes in charge?”

Pietro looked down at the table, flipping his fork over sheepishly. "He's not wrong. You've been here for months. You know what things are like. Unless you're purposefully not seeing it."

"I..." Her voice trailed off as she dropped her eyes to the table. She suddenly felt grotesque "I know what happens when you piss off the wrong assholes. And it's best that we just stay the course."

Yuri scoffed. "And I've seen what happens when you waste your life waiting."

"You're not in charge here, Yuri," Aegera’s voice became low and threatening in the dimness of the café.

"And neither are you," the man replied. "You've abdicated to the assholes."

"You're still going to take orders from me."

She had to believe that even Tom was a little unnerved by what she was saying, but the very idea that someone could be so ungrateful caused her ire to rise and her immense sense of disgust, though long since buried, to rise to the surface once again.

“Because your knowledge flows through me. And if you step out of line—” She glared at him. “You’re going to wind up learning it the hard way.”

She cringed as the sentence came out of her. It was a ham-fisted threat coming from a woman who was uncertain of exactly how she was supposed to keep anyone in line. It had been much easier back at the house. They had all known each other, lived together.

Yuri drummed his fingers on the table. He looked unimpressed by her threat, but surprised that she had said it. It was clear that he cared no more for lectures from a woman wearing eyeliner than from a man wearing it. Behind his eyes a calculation was running. He leaned across the table as he spoke.

His head bobbed quickly, perhaps nodding. “I have been threatened by much more powerful people than you. You tell the Great Jonah McAllister that I would trade all of his secrets for one night when my mother could sleep without worrying about where she would wake up in the morning, or if they would wake up in the morning. I would trade his secrets and I would trade my life. And if he is not willing to stick his own neck out, then there are those who would.”

Yuri shoved his chair away from the booth and stormed out of the café, disturbing the bells above the door violently as the exhausted waitress stared after him.

There were a few moments of quiet. Aegera took an angry sip from the new cup of coffee that had arrived and allowed a thin moment of satisfaction from the look on the waitress’s face as she cleared away the tip.

“He is right,” Tom said after she had gone. “We want people who need something to believe in. They need something to believe in because they have problems bigger than themselves. Food, shelter, all that stuff we can make out of thin air. But justice…”

Reactivity

Within the basement of the apartment complex that had been purchased by an organization called Acolyte Inc., beyond the large, post-Soviet boiler there was a door. It opened up onto what had once been a supply closet, but upon opening the door one would find that the back of the closet was gone, replaced by a man-sized, sphere-shaped void in the ground that lay beyond the outer wall of the building itself. This was followed by another void, slightly below, but joined against the boundary of the first. Beyond that was another and then another, each sinking slightly farther into the Earth, carefully avoiding sewers and cabling using maps that had since been posted haphazardly on the wall of the early spheres. Along the way the edges of each sphere became less jagged and more direct in their descent until a ladder had to be used to descend through the last several holes.

At the base of the ladder was a much larger sphere, the culmination of the sphere maker's art. Lit with strange blue lights made of the rock itself that, if one were to examine them closely, would be revealed to be the result of the rock being eaten slowly away, converted into light.

Within the large sphere, among the tables and diagrams and blue notebooks, head held in his hand as he went through the notes, sat Jonah McAllister.

His lips pursed as he traced a line along the schematic diagram laid out on the table and looked over at the clustering of parts lying on the rock floor of the cavern where he worked.

He was a second rate engineer and he knew it. The commercial-grade generator had been working when the delivery crew had brought it in and he could see no reason why he couldn't seem to put it back together into working condition after having stripped some of its component pieces. It was a headache in what he was fast regarding to be a doomed endeavour.

Money was all well and good, but the true currency of the modern world was electricity. And he could not find a way to reliably reproduce it using his own techniques.

Of course he had been able to summon it from the sky back at the house. And he could make gasoline to make the damn thing run. Hell, he