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He caught my eye. “Where are we?”
“Somewhere in Faerie. Svarestri lands, I think.”
“Oh.”
“What chance?” Zheng was demanding. “Unless you can collapse a bunch of portals on the fly—”
“Well, yeah.”
“What?”
“Closing a portal is easy,” Ray said impatiently. “It’s cutting it to begin with that’s hard. But that won’t do no good, because if we close ’em, they’ll just open more. They gotta have the people here to do that, given how many—”
“Pardon,” Louis-Cesare interrupted politely. “But you did say Faerie?”
“What’s wrong with him?” Zheng demanded.
I sighed. “He’s brain-fried. He shouldn’t even be here.”
“That makes two of us.” Zheng looked at Ray. “Get to the point.”
“I’m trying! Look, destroying the portals won’t work, ’cause then they’ll know something’s up and just cut more. But what if we reroute ’em?”
“Reroute them how?”
“With this. I—”
Zheng snatched the little device Ray had just pulled out of his wallet. “What’s this?”
“My own invention,” Ray said, snatching it back. “I use it to cut into portals. And to link them.”
“Holy shit,” I said, catching up.
The little thing didn’t look like much. Just a basic charm, like the kind people used for everything from opening warded doors to hanging around their necks for a quick glamourie: flat, gold, vaguely roundish, like an old-fashioned watch fob. Only this one had a couple metal prongs sticking out of it.
Ray was looking smug. “I cut into the Senate’s line, remember? To link up some of my portals. So it’s in my network, so to speak.”
“So you’re going to do what?” I asked, wanting to be sure I got this.
“The same thing Olga does when she wants to make more than one stop on the same line,” Ray explained. “You gotta tell the portal which destination you want, don’t you? Or you could end up at any gate along the line.”
“So you’re going to use that thing to tell the fey’s portals to let out…somewhere else?”
He nodded.
“Like where?”
“Do you care? Somewhere that isn’t Earth, okay? I got a lot of locations preset—”
“Wait,” Zheng said, his forehead knitting. I didn’t think it was from lack of intelligence; he’d always struck me as fairly bright. But it didn’t look like portals were his thing any more than they were mine. “You’re saying you can link the fey’s portals…and then…reroute their army somewhere else?”
Ray sighed. “For like the third time. Yes, that is what I’m saying.”
Zheng looked skeptical, but he nodded. “Okay. Go for it.”
“Well, I can’t do it from here,” Ray said, as if it was obvious.
“Why not?”
