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They’d set up in the House’s fancy barbecue, an enormous brick structure that was as much outdoor kitchen as grill. I recognized Mallory’s crucible, the slightly pitted and char-marked surface. It had survived the trip back to Wicker Park. I wondered if Margot’s snacks had fared as well.
Paige stood in front of the brick counter, looking at a book open beside the crucible, a basket on the brick patio at her feet.
Ethan and Malik stood a few yards away, presumably out of the danger zone. Both had their arms crossed as they watched the proceedings warily.
“What’s going on, exactly?” I asked as I joined them, and Mallory joined Paige in front of the barbecue.
“We’ve picked out a testable portion of the alchemy,” Paige said, putting drops of clear liquid in the crucible with a dropper.
“And why are you testing it here?”
“Because it needs testing,” Mallory said. “And we don’t want to burn down Wicker Park.”
I glanced at Ethan. “So you’re going to let her burn down Cadogan House?”
“I’m not going to burn anything down,” Mallory said, looking back with a grin. “It’s just, the houses in Wicker Park are really close together, so if anything did go wrong—which it won’t—it would spread quickly. Here, there’s plenty of room. Besides, I have Paige as my partner in crime.”
“I don’t have nearly as much practical experience,” she said. “More of the book stuff. So this is good practice for me.”
“I’m not sure that inspires confidence,” Ethan murmured.
“No, it does not,” Malik agreed.
“And what, exactly, will you be doing?” I asked.
“We’re increasing the resonance of rosemary,” Paige said, holding the crucible still as Mallory glopped green paste into it, stirred it with a wooden spoon.
“Elaborate, please,” Malik said.
“Alchemists were really committed to the idea that everything in its basic form was a little bit crappy,” Paige said. “But if you worked hard enough, you could raise something to its true potential.”
“Like all the work we’ve put into Merit over the last year?” Malik asked with a wink.
“Like that,” Mallory said, with an answering grin. “Pretty much anything organic—especially plants and people—have that quality. A lot of alchemy is about distilling things down to their essence—to the purity inside them. And if you can do that, if you can get, I don’t know, rosemary, down to its true, unadulterated essence, its resonance changes, and it develops these healing properties. You ingest those, and you get closer to your own real essence, spiritually and physically, to a change in your own resonance.”
“Alchemy is really weird,” I said.
“Completely bonkers,” Paige agreed.
“How does resonance—this test of it—relate to the symbols we’ve found?” Ethan asked.
“This is what we’re calling a ‘pattern test,’” Mallory said. “The actual equations are set up in phrases that, so far, don’t stand on their own. In order words, we haven’t been able to find one excerpt that we can run as an experiment. It would be like mixing one part of a recipe—let’s say baking soda and flour—and expecting to get cookies out of it. That one step is useless on its own.”
“We’re looking for confirmation we’re translating correctly,” Paige said. “Even if we can’t yet translate the entire thing, we’ll know we’ve translated correctly certain parts of it.”
Mallory nodded. “It will help me calibrate the machine. We want to find this alchemy. I need to be certain I’m looking for this alchemy. Otherwise we’re going to end up with a machine that tags, I don’t know, coffee drinkers in Chicago or something.”
“Which would be useless,” I said. “Especially in the Loop.”
“And Wicker Park!” Mallory said. “There’s a whole-bean, shade-grown, cage-free coffeehouse on every corner now.”
“I didn’t realize beans required cages,” Ethan said.
“Neither did I,” Mallory said. “Now hush and let me work.”
“I guess she’s giving you orders now,” I said to Ethan with a smile.
“I guess she is,” Ethan said as they turned to their work, putting material in the crucible, arranging components on the top of the patio.
