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The man blinked at Roger, like he wasn’t quite sure what Roger was asking. “Excuse me?” he finally said.
“If I sent one person through and this happened, would it be safer for the rest?”
“Maybe. I haven’t tested it that way, since it would involve my own death, and that would make it difficult for me to report the results.”
“What if I found a subject for you?”
The man and I exchanged a horrified glance, but Roger was already on his way out the door. Who was he going to sacrifice to test it? I hoped not one of his frogs. I started to run after him, thinking he was heading back to the office, but he just stood on the sidewalk, watching the street with his hands on his hips, like he was evaluating what he saw.
Two teenagers came by. They probably should have been in school, and when they saw Roger, they took on the furtive appearance of people trying not to be caught doing something they weren’t supposed to do. He did look like he could be some kind of official.
He smiled at them, and it might even have looked like a friendly smile if I hadn’t known him. “Hey, kids, how’d you like to earn some money?” he said. I thought he couldn’t have sounded fishier if he’d invited them into his plain white van with promises of candy, but their eyes lit up.
From behind Roger, I shook my head at them and gave them a warding-off signal, hoping they’d pick up on the danger, but he’d said the magic word, “money,” and they were hooked. “What do you need?” one of them asked.
“I need you to help me with something, both of you, inside this house.”
They were apparently street-savvy enough to question this, for they exchanged a glance with each other. “You can’t do it out here?” the kid responded.
“No, sorry.”
The kids resumed walking. “Sorry, nope.”
But by walking on, they moved closer to Roger, and he waved his hand when they neared him. Both of them froze, and their eyes went blank. A twitch of his finger made them follow him up the steps and into the house.
“You can’t do that!” I protested. “They’re just kids!” I could stand by and watch people be turned into frogs, since I knew that the spell could be reversed, but this could kill them, and I didn’t care if I was breaking cover. Any reasonable human being who wasn’t a sociopath would protest.
He whirled on me. “I can’t? It’s not up to you to tell me what I can’t do. Why should they matter to you? They’re nobody, and they’re not even magical. They’ll never know what happened to them.”
The magical scientist, or whatever he was, was equally appalled. “I can’t test this on people,” he said.
“You’ll do what I say,” Roger snarled. “Now, here are your subjects. Send the first one through, then see what happens to the second one.”
The scientist led us to a back room that looked a lot like Owen’s lab might if it were in someone’s house. It was full of old books and arcane equipment. Twitching like he was distinctly unhappy, the man fiddled with some things on one piece of equipment. I could tell that the use of magic in the room was surging, even though it didn’t affect me.
I realized that they were testing a new version of the beaming spell, designed to get past the MSI defenses. Roger grabbed one of the entranced kids by the shoulders, and I called out, “Wait! Will it work the same way if he’s not casting the spell?”
“She has a good point,” the scientist said. “Whoever goes through has to cast the spell for himself.” The look he gave me told me that it wasn’t necessarily true, but that he’d jump at the excuse.
“Fine,” Roger snarled. At a gesture from him, the kids walked, zombielike, toward the front door.
I followed to make sure they were okay. When they hit the sidewalk, they went back to going on their way, seemingly unaffected. I allowed myself a sigh of relief. And then the harpy appeared.
When she swooped down out of the sky, my instinct was to duck for cover, but she ignored me. She landed on the sidewalk and went up the steps, just as a second harpy joined her. It seemed that Roger had called in other test subjects. These didn’t count as innocents, but I still wasn’t comfortable with the situation.
“He’s going to use you to carry out a dangerous test,” I hissed to them as I followed them to the back room. I couldn’t tell if they heard me or if they were ignoring me.
“You summoned us,” one of the harpies said to Roger in a voice like nails on a chalkboard.
“Yes, I have a duty for you.” He handed her a sheet of paper and a small pebble. “Do this spell.”
She didn’t even question him. She read the spell, apparently internalizing it, handed the page back to him, clutched the pebble, closed her eyes, and murmured a few words. I instinctively flinched when she disappeared in a burst of light, then I was afraid to look at the results. She lay on the other side of the room, more or less in one piece. I couldn’t tell whether or not she was alive, and she’d been such a mess to begin with that it was hard to tell how much she’d been altered. She didn’t get up. I wanted to run to her to make sure she was okay, since the barrier wouldn’t affect me, but I wasn’t sure what I could do for her, and I wasn’t sure she’d be grateful for the help. Right now, I was safer on this side of the magical test barrier.
Roger turned to the other harpy. “Now you. It should be easier for you if my theory is correct.”
She looked at him like he was crazy—if you can shock a harpy, you’re really bad news—and moved as though to run for it, but he held up a hand, using magic to hold her still.
“If you won’t do the job, you won’t get paid,” he said, his tone perfectly polite, like he was only asking her to rinse out her coffee mug.
