would not like it,” Erszebet said. And this was the first time I ever got the sense from her that she actually cared whether someone else would or wouldn’t like a thing. She considered Fuggers—or Fuckers, as she pronounced the name—people to be reckoned with.
“Let’s try a different example, if you don’t like gold,” Tristan said. “I’m going to show my cards a little bit more than I usually do.” And he pocketed his phone, which he’d been looking at under the table, and laid both hands on the table’s upper surface—as if literally showing his cards. “To hell with gold. Could you produce enriched uranium?”
She considered it. “The stuff they use in bombs?”
“The stuff they use in bombs.”
She shook her head. “Certainly not. This would cause too much change too quickly, and bad things happen when magic is used that way.”
“What bad things?”
“Bad things,” she said with finality. “Worse than your ‘nukes.’ We don’t even have words to describe them. So we don’t do that.”
“Then there are rules,” I said, opening the laptop to take notes. “Not changing things too quickly is a rule. What are some other rules?”
“There is no rule,” she said. “We just don’t do it. Is there a rule telling you not to jump off a cliff? No. But you don’t do it.”
“What else don’t you do?” asked Tristan.
“What a ridiculous question,” she said. To me: “He only asks ridiculous questions. I hope he is not your lover, because he is not worthy.”
“Why is it a ridiculous question?” pressed Tristan.
“Can you tell me all the things you would not do? No. You only know what not to do when you’re faced with the prospect of doing it. It’s like that with everything, including magic.”
“Can you give me some examples?” he asked with exaggerated patience.
She looked thoughtful, and for a happily deluded moment, we both thought she was going to be cooperative. “I am tired of doing all the giving,” she said. “So. Your turn to give me something. You will give me a cat.”
After a confused pause, I asked, “As a pet?”
“No, as a cat,” she said.
“A live cat?” asked Tristan.
“Of course a live cat! What would I do with a dead cat?”
“Okay, you can have a cat,” said Tristan indulgently. “We’ll get you a cat next week, as soon as you’ve done something we can show the brass.”
“I will show the brass something after you give me a cat,” she corrected triumphantly.
“Erszebet,” I said in a friendly, intimate tone. “We have no time to go fetch you a cat, or a litterbox, or any of the other stuff a cat needs. But if you would like to be employed again by powerful people, who can give you as many cats as you like, then please cooperate with us for the next few days.”
She pursed her lips and glanced between the two of us. “Put me with those people you speak of. Why am I wasting my time doing stupid tricks for minions?”
“Because these minions have an ODEC,” said Tristan abruptly and openly irritated. “Without this ODEC, you are nothing. And this ODEC is ours. So play nice.”
She gave him a furious, disgusted look. “I want to be very clear with you about something,” she said in a warning tone. “There are many novels in which there is a handsome man and a beautiful woman and they argue all the time and are at odds and constantly clash and it is because secretly they want to make passionate love to each other. That is not the case here.”
At this, Tristan let out a huge guffaw, a rumbling, raucous belly laugh, head thrown back.
“I am serious,” she protested hotly.
“I’m so glad you clarified that,” he said, huffing with laughter. “Because I gotta tell you, with General Schneider breathing down my neck to learn what your magic is good for, with my spending every free waking moment trying to convince him and his bosses that this is useful even if you haven’t already materialized enriched uranium for them, I gotta tell you, when I am so totally preoccupied with your being seen as a valued commodity that the time it takes me to shave feels like a personal overindulgence, I love knowing that your number one priority is devaluing me even more than my bosses want to devalue you. That’s awesome. You’re the best. I’ll be so fucking devastated when they pull the plug on this and you end up in the street without even a nursing home to take care of you.” He stood up and stormed to the far side of the room, his hands at his temples. “Jesus.”
Then he turned back toward us and said, from a distance, “I apologize. That was totally uncalled for and I should have more control over myself. It’s been a tough week.”
“They want to pull the plug?” said Erszebet, scandalized.
“How long has that been true?” I asked, shocked.
He ran his hands through his short hair a few times roughly, and then returned to sit by us again. “Almost from the word go,” he confessed, pained. “General Schneider was excited for about thirty minutes and then he and Dr. Rudge wanted immediate gratification. They wanted her to start manifesting stealth bombers, or teleport invisibly to Syria, that sort of thing.”
This was the first time he had mentioned names. Until then, Tristan had maintained impeccable secrecy concerning his chain of command. Either he really was at the end of his rope, or else he thought he could gain Erszebet’s trust by personalizing the discussion.
If so, it wasn’t working. “And instead you had me turning sweaters inside out?” demanded Erszebet in disgust. “And you wonder why they do not value me? You are more of an idiot even than I thought.”
“Every task I gave you was a beta test for something else that would have obvious military use. They want you to turn a person inside out. Obviously I have to test that on a sweater and not a person, or even on a lab rat. And of course I’ll fulfill their agenda, but ideally I’d like to exceed it. I’ve got more scruples than they do, so I’d like to present you to them—brand you, so to speak—as being useful for something other than turning a person inside out.”
“Such as?”
“Turning lead into gold would be pretty awesome,” he said, sounding wistful.
She shook her head.
“Why don’t you suggest something, then,” he said to her. “Given that you can only work your magic inside the ODEC, you’re a little limited, you realize that?”
“She can turn rats into newts,” I reminded him.
“So can your average kids’-birthday-party magician.”
“Not for real. Anyhow, what about a person?” I said. “What if I let her turn me into a newt?”
“I would not turn a person inside out, probably,”
