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“Well, no. I mean, I don’t know where all of them are. I know where mine is. You want to go see it?”
***
We did. We did want to go see it.
But first, we made Hugo eat and hydrate.
When he was steadier, we let him join us in the van, and Petra drove while he directed us to a short, squat building only half a block from the warehouse.
“Damn,” he said as we passed the damage Rosantine had done. “She’s really here, and it really activated.”
“Yeah,” Theo said. “Plenty of footage online if you want to see it.”
“Yeah. When I’m ready, I probably will.” He tapped his head. “I’m still kind of processing, you know?”
To have been the guardian of nearly two centuries of history and out of commission for the two hours the history happened had to be a punch.
We parked on the street and followed him around the building, all of us watching for Rosantine. She’d been looking for something in this neighborhood. Why not this?
“Insurance agency rents out the main building,” he said. “They’re good tenants.” He walked to an unassuming shed, maybe a few yards from the main building, pushed against a concrete wall that separated this lot from the one behind it.
“It’s in here,” he said. “We’ve replaced the shed a few times over the years, but this one’s been in place since my grandpa put it in. I added a few layers of security, though.”
He used a key to open a small box by the door, then pressed his thumbprint against a small screen inside it. He pulled out his personal screen, then entered a code there. “Triple authentication,”he said when whirring began to sound within the shed. The doors popped open, revealing a steel layer inside the wooden shell. A light flickered on, sending cool blue light across the only object inside it.
It was... a rock.
A big rock, sure, of a dotted stone I guessed was granite. The edges were rounded, and there were symbols etched into the surface that looked like the same language we’d seen on the machine. It sat on the dark earth, as it apparently had for nearly two centuries. And that was it.
Yeah, it was called a “Cornerstone,” but I guess I’d expected something more ornamental. Or larger. Or studded with crystals. I’d also have expected a giant magical rock to put some residual magic in the air. But there was nothing. It felt completely inert, and if Hugo hadn’t told me its purpose, I’d have assumed it was decorative.
Petra pulled out her screen, began snapping pictures.
“It’s kind of like a rune,” Theo said. “Or at least the ones I’ve seen inThe Revenge of Freja.”
“Such a great flick,” Hugo said. “And yeah, they do look similar.”
“Phenomenal flick,” Theo said.
“It doesn’t feel like magic,” I said.
“It was spelled to be neutral,” Hugo explained. “Designed so it doesn’t emit any magic as it does its thing.”
“So Sups can’t sniff out the Cornerstones and manipulate them.”
“That’s the theory,” Hugo agreed. He leaned forward, brushed away an invisible bit of dirt from the stone with obvious care and attention.
“The Cornerstones may be neutral,” I said, “but I don’t think the wards are. I think that’s how Rose figured out where the South Gate and the machine were.”
“Do you know what the symbols say?” Theo asked. “Or how the magic works?”
“No. They didn’t give us any of that information, at least as far as I was aware. Only how to clean and oil the machine. I had a schedule to follow, and I’ve only missed it twice. I broke my collarbone a few years ago, and it was a couple of weeks before I could really get in there. One year I had pneumonia, and I was down for nearly a month.”
Those both sounded like normal human things. Not demon interference or manipulation.
“Did anyone ever fill in for you?” I asked.
Hugo’s eyes widened with surprise. “Well, no. I couldn’t tell anyone else, so they couldn’t, like, show up and do it.”
