“Promise me something.”

I had to say something back. “Depends on what it is.”

“Don’t go into the Pit without me. I think that thing is fixated on you. I don’t like it.”

“I promise.”

“What was it like?”

“Like looking into a nebula. Stars suspended in luminescent dust, each point of light an extension of a central consciousness. It was aware.”

“Could you kill its mind?”

“I wouldn’t know where to start. I don’t know if anyone would. It worries me.”

He rubbed his thumb on my hand and squeezed again. He wouldn’t say it, but I knew. It worried him too.

Alessandro delivered me to the house. I got out of the car and watched him get into his Spider and drive out. Then I made my way through security, parked Rhino in its designated spot, and got out. A drone passed above me, one of Patricia’s. I waved at it, took the canvas bag with the rings from the constructs out of the back, and walked past our building to a smaller structure.

Walking was rather difficult. I hadn’t realized just how much the antivenom, the fight, and the recharging took out of me. My face felt heavy, like I was wearing an iron mask. My hip and side ached. The thirty-second walk kicked my ass.

Before Connor purchased it, the squat ugly building that now served as the Tafts’ home housed a company selling mysterious “Texas Products.” It came as a bonus when we bought our current place for one dollar from Connor. We remodeled it, and now Patricia and Regina used the building as their temporary residence until all of us moved somewhere better.

I rapped my knuckles on the door.

“Come in,” Regina called.

I let myself in and tracked her down to her workshop in the back. It used to be a dark garage, but Regina had replaced the steel bay doors with glass ones, painted the walls a warm shade of white, and now it was a light and airy space. Plants grew from colorful pots in the corners. A drink fridge offered cold water and Gatorade in a dozen neon colors. Next to it, a kitchenette with a sink and counter supported a teapot and a Keurig. Rocking chairs waited here and there. If it wasn’t for the floor, painted with chalkboard paint to a solid black and streaked with chalk dust, this could be a Florida room in any upscale home.

Regina stood in the middle of the floor, tapping a piece of chalk to her lips and pondering a half-finished arcane circle by her feet. Of average height, Regina was neither slender nor curvy. Her flowing maxi dress with yellow sunflowers set off the golden tone in her brown skin. She dyed her hair bright tomato red, and it floated around her head in a cloud of happy spirals. A pair of thin glasses perched on her nose.

A feline creature padded out from behind the counter. Sleek and long, made of black steel and plastic, she moved on rubber-coated paws, bound together with magic into the shape of a house cat. Nobody would mistake her for one though. She was the size of a border collie.

The cat construct sat in front of me, blocking my way, flicked her tail, and smiled. Her mouth bristled with inch-long steel fangs.

“Hi, Cinder.”

The construct stared at me with glowing green eyes.

“Place,” Regina said, still studying the circle.

Cinder rose off her haunches. Wicked metal claws shot out of her paws, a little warning in case I decided to try anything. She turned around and padded to a rocking chair in the corner. She leaped into it, curled up, and closed her eyes.

Had I not met Cinder, Cheryl’s “if-then” explanation would be a lot easier to swallow. Cinder behaved too much like a real cat with a mind of her own.

“Can I buy an hour of your time?” I asked.

Regina glanced at me. “You’re not asking me to breach our contract, are you?”

“No. This is a strictly off-the-books consultation.”

“In that case, you don’t need to pay me for it.”

“Are you sure?”

Regina nodded. “It’s better not to leave a trail.”

When we hired Patricia, she insisted on anonymity. The Tafts weren’t exactly hiding, but they made efforts to stay off the radar. They had good reasons to do so. Their contract specified that Regina could not be compelled to work for our agency in any capacity. She would never testify in any cases, and her name would never appear on any official paperwork. Patricia didn’t even claim Regina on her taxes, although they were legally married. All of Regina’s purchases were made online and tied to Patricia’s accounts. She rarely left our grounds. When she did, it was usually because she and Patricia were going somewhere together. They had a romantic dinner out at least once a week, but Patricia always made sure to do her homework to minimize the risk.

We all knew that one day staying under the radar would no longer work, and we’d made preparations, but until then we abided by the contract’s terms.

I sat in one of the rocking chairs. Sitting was so underrated. “Why is Saito’s Threshold unreachable?”

Regina laughed. “And here I thought you were going to ask something complicated.”

“I just need to understand in broad terms.”

“The animation is a multistep process.”

Regina walked to the cabinet under the kitchen counter, took out something, and set it on the floor. It looked like a scaled metal egg about six inches long.

Regina crouched and drew a circle with practiced ease. She drew a smaller one inside it and wrote a sequence of glyphs between the two.

“The first step is the design of the construct. A lot of times, the constructs look random, like someone piling metal or plastic debris together. In reality, every piece that goes into a persistent construct is carefully calculated. You do see some disorganized constructs, but that usually happens when the mage’s life is in danger and they animate the first available components in self-defense. In those cases, the mage animates without a circle with pure magic and must maintain mental control over the construct the entire time.”

She picked up the egg and set it in the circle.

“Once the design is determined, the mage moves on to the animation stage. This is the point where the components are bound together by magic into a whole.”

Power sparked from her. The circle flashed with magenta. Purple lightning snapped from the boundary of the inner circle and licked the egg.

“Very dramatic,” Regina said. “Very Frankenstein.”

The egg rose four inches off the floor and hung suspended.

“We call this the spark stage, for obvious reasons. The construct is technically animated. It is now an entity, not just a collection of parts. Bigger constructs take more magic to spark, smaller constructs take less.”

“So is it alive?”

“Not exactly. It exists. Life is more complicated.” Regina pulled a bottle of blue Gatorade out and showed it to me. “Drink?”

“Yes, please.” I was parched.

She tossed the bottle to me, got another one, opened it, and drank. “At the spark stage, the construct exists but it can’t do anything. Or rather, it can do everything, because it has no limitations, and therefore does nothing. To make a construct useful, we have to give it a set of instructions. Do this. Don’t do that. If a condition is met, react like this.”

“If-then?”

She pointed the bottle at me. “Exactly. To imprint these conditions onto the construct, the animator has to imagine them and actively mentally write them into the construct’s magic matrix. For example, I’m going to program the construct to assume the ready position when it hears the word ready.”

She concentrated. The magenta lightning stretched to the egg, binding it into a web. A moment passed. Another.

“Ready,” Regina said.

The egg unfurled into a tiny metal dragon.

“This is called the teaching stage. This is the most difficult stage of animation.”

“So if I wanted a construct with complicated patterns of behavior, I would have to imagine different scenarios and write them into the construct’s mind?”

“Matrix,” Regina corrected. “Living things have minds. Animated things have matrixes. But you’re right in principle. This is why the teaching stage is the most difficult part of the process and takes the longest. An animator mage is limited by their imagination. For example, if you’re making something that transports goods from one point to another, you have to imagine running on pavement, running on dirt, through grass, through snow. What happens if there’s water? Or an obstruction, like a fallen tree? What happens if a rock falls on it? What happens if it comes to train tracks? There is an almost endless variety of conditions. That’s why most constructs are highly specialized.”

Regina took another swallow. “Now we come to a grey area. Higher ranking animators are able to produce constructs that sometimes react to unforeseen circumstances. For example, a few years ago a construct guarding a house close to a river detected a child who fell into the water, jumped in to retrieve him, and handed the boy back to his mother. The media blew it up. There were great debates on whether or not the construct had developed the ability for independent thinking.”

“Did it?”

Regina smiled. “No. The construct was originally made to guard the docks. It was taught that if cargo falls in the water, it should retrieve it and return it to its owner. There’s quite a bit of difference between a cargo container and a four-year-old boy, but the original teaching must’ve been broad enough for both to meet the criteria of ‘unexpected object in the water.’ Of course, none of the animator mages waded into the debate. The mystique of our magic must be maintained.”