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The little bio on the station’s website didn’t tell me much, other than where she went to school and where she’d worked before. She was relatively new to this station from a smaller city, and she seemed young to have made it to the New York market. That meant she was both really good and really ambitious. The ambition was a possible cause for concern.
On the other hand, if she wanted to be taken seriously in her field, she’d have to have absolute proof of magic, something normal people could see that they were sure wasn’t special effects. An ambitious person with no ethics might be willing to fudge a few details to get a hot story on something serious like politics or business, but someone who wanted to be known as a top reporter would have to be extremely careful about claiming to have proof of magic. As she’d said, she’d be laughed out of town—and probably the business—if there was the slightest doubt.
Of course, deciding that she was super ambitious was a big call to make from reading between the lines of a website bio. I did a search on her and came up with a few articles. She’d spoken at some school career days, and it looked like one of them was her alma mater, an inner-city high school where she’d encouraged the kids to work hard to achieve their dreams, no matter what the odds looked like. She did a fair amount of community outreach through the station. I thought that was a positive sign that she was trying to be a good role model, but it still didn’t tell me whether she’d be willing to sit on news of the existence of magic.
On the other hand, she’d shown persistence in overcoming the odds against her, which told me she wouldn’t stop digging until she got an answer. Wouldn’t it be better to give her an answer and be able to frame it properly before she found it for herself?
Before I went through official channels, I decided to talk to Owen. I waited until that evening, when we were at his place, having dinner. That made it feel less official, more like idle chat about work than me actually running an idea by him. “I’ve been looking into that reporter,” I said.
“The one who’s been covering those magical events?”
“Yeah, the one who may be immune. I’m worried that she’s going to keep digging until she finds something, and there seem to be a lot of people out there who want her to find something.”
“You’re not suggesting we do something about her, are you?”
“I’m thinking it might be better to just tell her the truth.”
“Tell an outsider?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Tell an immune. You do that all the time. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.”
“You weren’t a TV reporter. I don’t think we’d have much of a pitch to recruit her to MSI. If she’s an honest reporter, she wouldn’t be up for working for our tabloid, considering that we use it to bury the news. We only tell immunes we want to recruit.”
“So everyone you can’t use is out of luck, just having to go through life thinking they’re crazy?”
“Immunes are fairly rare, so it doesn’t come up often,” he said, but he didn’t meet my eyes, and his cheeks flushed with pink. “Besides, you don’t know for sure that she’s immune.”
“Then we should test her.”
“Testing her would mean exposing her to magic. If she’s immune, that might make her even more curious. We want to steer her away, not intrigue her even more.”
“I don’t like lying to her,” I said. “I know she’s right, that she’s seeing what she thinks she’s seeing. It seems wrong to tell her she’s not seeing something that I know is true.”
“Then maybe it would be best for you to stay away from her.”
“It’s not as though I’m seeking her out. We just seem to keep showing up at the same places, since we’re researching the same thing. And don’t say that someone else should take the assignment. No matter who does it, they’re going to end up having to lie to keep the secret.”
“But it may be longer before they have to lie because she won’t recognize anyone else the way she now recognizes you.”
“I guess so,” I said, twining spaghetti around my fork. But I wasn’t yet ready to back out.
10
I’d thought it would be terrible to lie to Carmen, but keeping things
from Owen was even worse. We were about to be married, which meant we should share just about everything and certainly not keep secrets or go behind each other’s backs. But I was doing this to help him. As long as there was a risk of magic being exposed, Owen was in danger, and we wouldn’t be able to live anything resembling a normal life together.
I wouldn’t let my parents dictate whom I married, but I could just hear them if they knew about magic and knew Owen was involved. Even my mother, who was a magical immune utterly oblivious to magic, was likely to get a clue once the secret was out, and there was no telling what that would lead to.
No, we had to stop this before it went any further, and I wasn’t about to hand the work over to anyone else. I was already working with Trish, and I could back off on the more public aspects of the job, like going to anti-magic meetings, but I wasn’t quitting entirely.
Maybe this fell into the category of a white lie by omission. I wouldn’t tell him I was off the case, but I wouldn’t tell him what I was working on. It was splitting hairs, but that was the best my conscience was going to get.
Fortunately, Owen was deep into some research project, so I didn’t see much of him for the rest of the week. That made it easier to go about my business without feeling like I was deceiving him. Not that there was much for me to do, just monitoring online chatter and looking out for potential trouble spots. The group that had staged the “arrest” stunt didn’t seem to have achieved what they’d hoped, and they soon announced the release of their spokesman, which validated my belief that it had been a stunt.
I took his photo from the article on the website to Sam. “I don’t suppose you know this guy, do you?” I asked.
“Never seen him before,” he confirmed.
