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Idris frowned at me. “I know it sounds crazy, but I’m sure I can use it to track him.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Obviously it’s going to take more work than I’d hoped.”
I crouched beside him. “You’re serious.”
“Dead serious,” he said. “Mzatal didn’t strip the mark which means Katashi carries the resonance.” He ran his finger over the parchment-thin skin and its intricate sigil. “Feel it.”
“Ew.” I made a face. “No thank you.”
He rolled his eyes. “Seriously?” He didn’t actually say You’re a total weenie but he might as well have.
“Ugh. Fine.” I brushed the mark with my fingers and caught my breath when a tingle shimmied up my arm. More Mzatal than Katashi in its feel. Emboldened, I laid my palm over it, smiling at the vivid sense of Mzatal’s presence. Yet beyond it a background vibration thrummed. Katashi. “That’s cool. And creepy.” I pulled my hand away, then wiped it on Idris’s shirt in the guise of patting him on the shoulder.
“I’ll find a way to use it.” Idris wrapped the arm in the silk and tucked the bundle into his messenger bag. “But first I need to assess the local valves.”
“Speaking of valves, there’s new info we all need to discuss.”
“I’m sorry I was so rude earlier,” he said quietly.
“It’s cool. Let’s go see if Jill left any cookies in the house.”
• • •
Jill had, indeed, left cookies in the house—white chocolate chip with macadamia nuts. The three of us sat at the kitchen table and munched cookies while I brought the guys up to speed on the latest Earthside events, including the blurry photo, Zack’s condition, Szerain’s antics, the pond valve instability, and Jill’s inexplicable actions on said valve.
Bryce’s eyes narrowed with worry as I related the last item. “She’s all right?”
I gave him a reassuring smile. “Right as rain, and the bean is still kicking up a storm.” Then I sobered. “I don’t know what happened out there, but I do know that if we hadn’t stabilized the valve, it could have been really bad. It’s why I asked Mzatal for help.” I snatched another cookie off the plate, grimaced. “The thing is, I have only a vague idea of how the valve system works. I know where a handful of valves are, and a little about stabilizing. I get that the Mraztur want to use the valve system as their personal highway to Earth, but that’s pretty much it.”
Idris jerked his shoulders up in a dismissive shrug. “All you need to know are the basics, and I can brief you on those,” he said. “You—I mean summoners in general—don’t have the skills to alter the valves.”
It wasn’t quite an insult, especially since I suspected he was correct. “But Katashi does,” I said. “And you do.”
“I don’t have a tenth of his knowledge, but I understand what he’s doing.”
“All right, I’ll leave the tricky bits to you,” I said then gave him a cheeky smile. “So, what does lowly little me need to know?”
Bryce snorted, but Idris merely frowned a My sense of humor is temporarily out of order frown. “The problems started when Rhyzkahl came through the plantation node before it was ready,” he said, leaning forward. “Like a man trying to cross a suspension bridge that only has five cables attached out of twenty.”
“Oh, I get it!” I said. “Those five cables aren’t enough to handle the stress, so crap starts breaking and swaying, which makes more things break, and so on.”
“Exactly. It damaged the node, and instability cascaded throughout all the valves, particularly in this area.” He snagged a cookie and began to break pieces off.
Bryce frowned. “But why have a valve system in the first place if it’s so damn touchy?”
Idris looked as shocked as if he’d suggested doing away with all the pesky wet stuff on the surface of the Earth. “Because the demon realm would destroy itself without it!”
“How?” I asked. “Why?”
“I don’t know details, but it’s as if the demon realm—the planet—has a generator at its core, and without an outlet it’ll overload and tear itself to pieces.” Idris crumbled the remaining cookie in his hand for emphasis. “The whole valve system bleeds excess potency off the demon realm and dumps it on Earth.”
“Is that what causes the valve node emissions that you and Katashi were tracking in Colorado and Texas?” I asked.
“Those are part of it, yes,” he said. “There’s a steady flow of potency to Earth along with occasional bigger bursts. Node emissions normally follow a regular pattern, whereas unpredictable emergency overloads surge through the whole system and disperse via both nodes and valves.” He scowled at the crumbs before him and swept them into a pile with sharp movements. “The problem is that instability screws up the distribution. Instead of an even spread, one valve gets an overload for the duration of the burst. Too much for too long, and it creates a situation like you had at the pond with the potential for a lot of damage.”
“How is a node different from a valve?” I asked. “Apart from size, I mean.”
“There’s not much difference on the Earth side,” he said. “Nodes are more robust than valves, like a branch compared to a twig. Functionally though, they’re the interdimensional conduits between the demon realm and Earth, which is how the potency actually gets from there to here.”
“Like an oil pipeline,” Bryce put in.
