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I put off talking to Owen for as long as I could. I went back to my office, answered e-mails, did some paperwork, and made a pro/con list about my plan, outlining bullet points to show why this was our best possible hope and coming up with arguments to counter any objections I anticipated.
When all hands in the sales department were called to the Wacky Winter Warm-up party, I decided that facing Owen was the lesser of two evils and headed up to his lab.
He and his assistant, Jake, were standing in front of a whiteboard, arguing about some fine point of something written on the board. It was in a language I didn’t recognize, and I’d learned to recognize a lot of languages from hanging around with Owen. Both of them held markers and were writing things above the words written on the board, going back and forth, each crossing out what the other had written and writing in something else. It was getting pretty heated.
Since Owen so seldom argued about much of anything, and him even raising his voice was a rare occurrence, I thought that this was the worst possible time to tell him I needed to pretend to break our engagement and quit the company in a huff of anger so I could go on a dangerous and potentially unproductive undercover mission. But before I could slip out of the lab, he noticed me.
“Katie! Is something wrong?” he asked.
“What? No! Why?” I wanted to kick myself because I couldn’t have sounded guiltier if I’d tried.
“You look, well, frazzled.”
“I barely escaped from a Sales party. It was pretty harrowing. What’s going on here?”
“We’re having a slight difference of opinion,” Jake said. “And I still think you’re reading that one rune the wrong way.”
“This isn’t an album cover, Jake.”
“I know you’ve got all those fancy degrees and read this kind of stuff for fun, but that also means you’ve got some preconceived notions that keep you from seeing what’s really there.”
“But the spell doesn’t make sense that way.”
“Unless the spell’s not meant to be about silence at all.”
I boosted myself up to sit on the end of the lab table so I could watch the debate. It was too bad I didn’t have any popcorn handy. “Silence?” I asked.
“Depending on how you interpret the runes, this could be a spell for dampening sound and creating silence,” Owen said.
“Or it could be a direction to chant the spell internally, not making a sound,” Jake said.
“Could it be both?” I asked. “It would make sense that you’d want to do a spell about silence quietly. If you need to dampen the sound you’re making, it wouldn’t do you much good if you had to chant a spell.”
They looked at each other, both of them raising their eyebrows, then turned to face the board. “Maybe that’s why we’re reading it both ways,” Owen said. “It’s meant to mean both things. Look, that mark here is what changes the meaning.”
“Yeah, that’s why I thought it was a direction,” Jake said. “So, a silent silence spell. Makes sense to me.”
They turned back to face me, both smiling now, all traces of their earlier conflict gone. “I’m glad you came by,” Owen said. “Sometimes it helps to get an outside perspective.”
“That’s me, having the common sense,” I said. In my head, the words of the mystery recruiter echoed. She’d said that about me, too. “I guess everyone has a superpower.”
“Did you need something other than a hiding place?” Owen asked.
Now that he was in a good mood again, I didn’t have an excuse not to talk to him. “I need to check in with you about that thing we’ve been working on.”
“I thought you were keeping me out of it.”
“I wanted to run something by you.”
“I’ll keep working on this,” Jake said, turning to write on the board.
I jumped off the table, and Owen escorted me to his office, then shut the door behind us and waved a hand to activate the privacy wards. “So, what is it?” he asked.
I’d spent enough time in the sales department to know you had to lay the groundwork for something like this. You couldn’t just jump into the hard part. “Did you hear about Sylvia?” I asked.
“What about her?”
