Leon had two settings: sarcastic and excited. This new sad Leon was puzzling.

I sighed and sat down in my recliner. The chair was a necessity. I ended up taking work into my bed way too much, and my last laptop had leaped to its death in protest when I fell asleep and it slipped off my bed. From that point on, bed was strictly for TV watching, reading, sleeping, and having frustrating thoughts about certain telekinetics. Work was done in a recliner chair. It was comfortable like a cloud but it still made me feel like an old lady.

I studied the nebula. “Tell me about it.”

“This is a computer model of the Smirnoff rubber band theory,” he droned out.

“Your enthusiasm is overwhelming. What does the theory say?”

“It says that a space-time continuum is acted upon by many different factors. The influence of these factors is too great for any small change to affect the state of a continuum. It says that our reality is like a tangle of rubber bands. If you pull one out, the state of the tangle isn’t significantly affected. So if you went back in time and shot Alexei I, for example, World War II would still happen. Instead of Imperial Russia invading Poland in the 1940s, somebody else would’ve invaded, like France or Germany. Concentration camps and anti-Jewish ethnic cleansing would still happen. The rubber band theory is the complete opposite of the chain-link theory, which says that events are directly precipitated by each other, so if you go back in time and kill a mosquito, we’d all evolve gills or something.”

Good enough. “And your assignment is?”

“Prove or disprove rubber band theory as it relates to the introduction of the Osiris serum.” Leon pantomimed throwing up and pointed at the model on the screen. “Okay, so I know it should change. There is no way it wouldn’t change. If there was a huge plague, the world wouldn’t stay the same, right? Magic is like a plague. It’s affecting everything, so the events wouldn’t be the same. It’s too big of a factor. But I can’t make it work. Okay, so let’s say everything that glows blue is magic, right? I tried to pull all of the threads of the same color out to make a nonmagic model and nothing. Look, I let it run for ten years. Look.”

Leon clicked some keys. The screen split in two. On the left side the original nebula glowed with a rainbow of colors. On the right a new nebula formed. All of the blue threads vanished from it, but the shape of the new nebula remained the same.

“You’re ninety percent there,” I told him. “It’s a space-time continuum, Leon.”

“I know that.”

“So what are you forgetting?”

“I have no idea. Nevada, just help me, please. Please.”

I typed in new parameters. “You’re forgetting to take your time.”

On the screen the time counter rolled forward, dashing through decades. The nebula on the left remained unchanged, but the one on the right stretched, turned, evolving into a new odd shape. The counter clicked. One hundred years. Two hundred years. Five hundred. It came to a stop at a thousand. Leon stared at a completely different constellation of threads.

“You didn’t run it long enough,” I told him. “It’s like two roads branching from each other. At first they are close and going almost in the same direction, but the farther you go, the more they split. In the beginning magic didn’t change much. But with each generation it transforms our world more and more. Think about it. Without the magic we wouldn’t have Houses or Primes. Some things would probably stay the same, because some strings remained relatively untouched for a short while, but others would be completely different. Inevitably all strings will be affected, and the further we go, the more different the world will be.”

He landed on the bed. “How long did it take you?”

“Three days. I was frustrated and tried different things one by one, until I realized how it works.”

“Two weeks,” he said. “I’ve been doing it two weeks. Do you know how long it took Bern?”

“I have no idea.”

“Four minutes. I checked the school log. He holds the record.”

I sighed. “Leon, Bernard is a Magister Examplaria. He recognizes patterns. Code and encryption talk to him the way tanks talk to Grandma Frida. He probably figured it out within the first thirty seconds and then spent the next three and half minutes trying to find alternative solutions for fun.”

“I can’t do it.” Leon slumped, deflated. “I tried to do what Bern does and I just can’t. I’m a dudomancer.”

Not this again. “You’re not a dud.”

“I have no magic.”

Magic was a funny thing. What Catalina did and what I did was somewhat in the same area, but Arabella’s magic didn’t just come out of left field, it came out of the grass on the other side of the fence of the left field. Everybody in our family had magic, except for my dad, but Leon wasn’t directly related to him. His mom was my mother’s sister. All indications said that Leon had magic as well. It just was taking its sweet time demonstrating itself.

“Your talent will show up,” I said.

“When, Nevada? At first it was all ‘when he turns seven or eight,’ then ‘when he passes puberty.’ Well, I’m past puberty. Where the hell is my magic?”

I sighed. “I can’t answer that, Leon.”

“Life sucks.” He took his laptop. “Thanks for the help.”

“You’re welcome.”

“About Mad Rogan . . .”

“Out!”

“But—”

“Out, Leon!”

He stomped out. Poor kid. Leon so desperately wanted to be special. He wasn’t strong and large like his brother. He didn’t have Bern’s magic talent. He didn’t excel academically like Bern did. Bern was a wrestling star in high school and a lot of people had come to his matches. Leon ran track. Nobody cared about track except for people who did it. Some people in his place would’ve hated their older brother, but Leon loved Bern with an almost puppylike devotion. When Bern succeeded at something, Leon nearly burst with pride.

When he was little, I used to read baby books to him. One of them was about a puppy lost in the forest, with a picture of a small golden puppy among tall dark trees. Both Leon and Arabella inevitably bawled when we came to that part. Behind all of that sarcasm, he was still that little sensitive kid with big eyes. I just wished his magic would show up already.

Chapter 7

I sat in near absolute darkness. Around me the cave stretched on, deep, deep into the black. Watching me. Breathing cold that seeped into my bones. The jungle waited around the bend of the brown wall. Something stalked within it, something with long vicious teeth. I couldn’t see it or hear it, but I knew it was there, waiting. Other shapes rested next to me, swathes of deeper blackness. They knew it too.

The cave breathed. Something was biting my legs and I knew it was ticks and I should pick them off, but moving seemed too hard. I was too tired.

The sniffers were out there, waiting for the faintest splash of magic. Desperation had passed. Emotions too. We were numb animals now, trying to get from point A to point B. Animals who didn’t speak, who communicated with glances, and who moved as one.

A watery green light to the left announced someone had sacrificed a glowstick. The shapes around me shifted, drawn like moths to this pathetic ghost of a real fire, starved, filthy, stretching hands to each other looking for some human touch in the nightmare.

A smaller shape scuttled to the side and fell under someone’s knife. Another squeaked and died. Rats. At least we’d eat tonight . . .

I sat upright in my bed. The shreds of the nightmare floated around me, melting. I groped for the lamp on the night table and flicked it on with trembling fingers. The welcome electric glow flared into life. My phone next to it told me it was almost two in the morning.

I wasn’t in a horrible cave. I was in my bedroom.

I felt clammy all over. I’d had nightmares before, but this was different. Oppressive, chilling, and hopeless. My room didn’t seem real, but the cave was. It was very real and it waited for me just beyond these walls. I was trapped.

I shuddered.

Pulling the blanket to my chest and clenching it didn’t seem to fix my freak-out.