To Be Determined

Chapter Fourteen: The Engineer

I awoke to a loud crash, my eyes snapped open to see Ben on the ground. Asha effortlessly and gracefully pulls himself through the window, unlike Ben presumably did seconds before. Iliad is sitting upright asleep next to me. I sit up a little, careful not to disturb him. My head pounds and I hardly remember anything that has happened since the two had departed to investigate my lab.

"You know that they have doors in this place right? I get that there's some sort of magician code where everything that you do has to be so extra all the time but I promise that it is okay to chill every once in a while."

"Yeah, yeah, we get it, you are on bed rest because you just spent the last three years in a coma. That's old news, Do you wanna know what we found or what?" Asha drops down to the floor next to Ben and they stare up at me.

"Well yeah I do, tell me everything."

Asha silently closes the door and shuts the blinds with small hand movements. He then reaches into his bag and like a magic trick, he pulls out a small cage with one of the prairie rats that I have been observing. He looks awfully proud of himself as he inspects the cage, turning it in his hands.

My pulse quicks a little and I sit forward, whispering harshly. "Ashara Saris, you thought it was a good idea bringing a plague rat into the hospital?!?"

"Well, where else would we bring it?" He whispered harshly back.

Iliad stirs, jumping at my sudden movement. "What's wrong Liv? Oh, you again?" He returns to his resting position and bangs his head against the wall a little.

"I love you too, dear brother-in-law. Anyways, there is an insane amount of energy coming off of this one. It isn't your magic either, it is completely foreign to me. The way I figure there are two possibilities and neither of them is optimal. The first being that someone who practices magic has been poking around in your lab recently and hates this one rat in particular. The second being that wild prairie rats are being exposed to some very potent magic and that is causing them to contract the plague or something similar enough to it."

I look over to Iliad. He is still leaning his head back, halfway dozing still. Asha and Ben are still in the dark about his involvement in the plague and I am not going to be the one to rat on him.

"Okay, let's jump to the worst one first. How would they be exposed to that much magic? Could there be a natural hotspot where they walk through and contract it or is there some estranged magician out there hexing prairie rats left and right?"

"It's likely going to be the latter. This doesn't feel like natural energy, it feels very rudimentary. It's like someone who does not truly know magic is casting it, it's muddled. I don't know how to explain it... It's almost like the magic is secondhand."

"So what, there's some sort of whimsical Tee-shirt that lets people bring about the end of the freckled world?" Olyvia runs a hand through her hair.

"Secondhand magic is when someone, often a normal person, draws their power from another person, often someone who has been actively practicing magic," Ben says, breaking him from his pace around the room. "Whatever is going on here, it's far more complex than one guy with a personal vendetta against the palace."

I tense my jaw, looking back at Iliad who is asleep again. I'm the only one who knows about Iliad's involvement in the case apart from his co-conspirators. I fear that if anyone else finds out it will end in a length of rope.

"What do you suppose we do now Olive? It's your investigation."

I swallow hard and suppress nausea that I have grown accustomed to. "We ultimately need to find the source right? I assume that would require finding the engineer first. Then figure out who else is involved."