“You did impress me. But that shouldn’t be enough.”
Ellsbeth put her wineglass down. “Oh? A ritual for a form of arcane mechanicals that until this point had existed as an urban legend? Inless than a semester? That’s not enough?”
Rawlins sipped deeply from his wine, and then held it up to the light, watching the blood-red legs of the liquid slide down the glass. “Well,promisingas your ritual is, its effect is very limited in practice. It would work only as long as the compounding clay is actually touching the target. After that…”
Ellsbeth answered fast. “You could put the ritual on a delay. Thirty seconds. Adding cadmium. Although—” She shifted her weight and moved her legs under her. “Then there’s another problem. The ritual itself lasts so long. If you suggest something to someone underobscuration, they’lldoit, but only until the ritual wears off. How do you change someone’s mind over a longer period of time? So that you can tell someone to do something, and they’ll still feel the impulse to do it over the next few days or weeks?” Her mind felt as fizzy as a shaken can of sparkling seltzer. She tried to visualize the ritual in her head, hoping the final piece would appear behind her closed eyes.
“Hmmm,” Rawlins said. “It’s an interesting problem. Lingering mental effects. Not that it even matters, of course. Because this is all academic.”
And then the answer came to her. Simple as if she had been squinting through a dirty window, and she finally realized she could openit.
“Time dilation,” she said.
Rawlins didn’t respond. He kept his eyes closed for so long that Ellsbeth worried for a moment that he had fallen asleep. “How would slowing down time—”
“Not for the person, for the ritual itself,” Ellsbeth said quickly. “Give the magic a…slow release. Like a cold medicine pill.”
Rawlins blinked. “It’s compounding a ritual onto another ritual, using magiconmagic.”
“Very meta,” Ellsbeth said. “I don’t know how you’d actually go aboutdoingit, but—”
Rawlins sat forward, getting excited. “Do you have a pencil?” he asked.
Ellsbeth brought back a pen and a pad of paper, and Rawlins began writing quickly. “It could work,” he said. “And in theory, the effects could linger for…weeks, at least, if you set the metrics slow enough. Obviously, the mathematics would be incredibly complicated—”
Ellsbeth was reading over his shoulder while he wrote.
“—but it would definitely be possible.”
Rawlins scribbled for ten minutes straight, Ellsbeth watching him in silence, and when he finished, he collapsed back onto the couch. Ellsbeth continued staring at what he had written.
“I feel like I need a cigarette,” Rawlins said. “I haven’t thought about mechanicals this way sinceIwas a grad student.”
“You need a cigarette afterthat?”
“You’re right. I deserve two cigarettes.” He pulled her in by the waist and kissed her. “You’re very, very pretty. Did you know that?”
“I think you’re biased because this robe hanging open gives you a very good view of my tits.”
“I’m an arcane mechanist. Very empirical. Absolutely no bias. And I say, with all of the authority of mynumerousacademic accomplishments: You’re stunning.”
Ellsbeth ran her hand through his hair and pressed her face into his neck. “I like you,” she said, hoping that his skin would swallow her words before he could hear them. He wrapped an arm around her, and she got a fresh smell of his cologne. She burrowed deeper inside the crook of his elbow. She still wasn’t sure if he had heard her or not.
He finally got dressed to leave at one in the morning. “I would invite you to stay the night,” Ellsbeth said, “But I’m afraid that would cross the line when it came to the this-is-just-sex thing.”
Rawlins straightened the sleeve of his T-shirt where the hem had folded up. “You have a seminar at nine in the morning. I consider it a good deed to leave now and let you get all of the sleep you can manage. Because if I stayed, you would be getting very, very little sleep.” He kissed her again, on the lips, and then his eyes caught the paper he’d written his new formula on. “I should take that. Don’t want to leave any evidence lying around that could get you hauled in front of an academic tribunal. Or the police.” He stuffed the paper into his pocket.
“God knows the legal system would love another juicy case of arcane mechanicals gone bad—corruption and disgrace among the God-hating liberal academic elite who twist nature to their will. It’s been, what, ten years since the tabloids got to sink their teeth into the Maxwell Keene case?”
“Seven years,” Rawlins said stiffly. “Since the trial.”
“Oh,” Ellsbeth said. “Sure, yeah.”
His demeanor changed; his posture straightened, and he pulled open the door to let himself out. “Thank you for a lovely and inspiring evening.”
“Good night,” Ellsbeth said.
As soon as the door shut, Ellsbeth returned to the pad of paper on the table and replicated what Rawlins had written. It didn’t matter that he had taken his work with him—she had memorized it in an instant.
