Work out if the Nazis hid a clockwork robot army somewhere in England. Just another everyday assignment at MI37. I wish I’d made a bigger coffee. In its absence I go with massaging my skull and trying to crack my neck. When that doesn’t work, I just study my hands.
“OK,” I say, working my way through it. “So two leads. Joseph Lang, and a Scottish pub. Front end and back end of the problem. Front end is located 1935—Lang conceives of this thing and draws up some plans. Back end is yesterday one of the bastards emerging from the ground up in Scotland. So trace the dots forward and back until they join up in the middle. That means two teams—”
I hear muttering and look up. Kayla has leaned across the table and is showing her phone to Tabitha.
She notices the silence and looks up. “What?”
“Yeah,” says Tabitha, still staring at the phone and ignoring both of us. “He looks OK.”
My eyes narrow. But given the conceivable array of scenarios that could have led to that statement, I decide that I really don’t want to know.
“Who looks OK?”
Damn you, Clyde. Damn you.
Tabitha grabs Kayla’s wrist and angles the phone toward Clyde. “Potential genetic material,” she says.
Clyde’s eyes narrow too. I think he’s just realized the course he’s steered us onto.
“Don’t ask,” I say. “Please for the love of all that is good and kind in this world, do not ask.”
Hannah looks around the room. “This still isn’t a hazing ritual, right?”
Felicity seems to be resisting the urge to facepalm.
Watching her struggle through her disappointment in us, her desire for us to, just once, behave like professionals, allows me to slough off one more layer of my hangover.
“This is the kid’s thing, isn’t it?” I say to Kayla. “If I were to look at that phone, I would see a man you are thinking of trying to coerce into sleeping with you.”
Tabitha’s hand twitches.
“Do NOT show me,” I say. “I just want to say two things, and then move rapidly on. One, I still think it is a staggeringly bad idea for you to retread the path of parenthood. Two, assuming this isn’t really relevant to the whole tracking down hidden clockwork robots thing, and that the young man on your phone is not the great grandson of a prominent Nazi thaumatophysicist, then can it please wait until later?”
Kayla grinds her teeth. Close enough to a yes.
“So,” I say, trying to smudge out the last of my headache with a palm to my temple. “Two teams. One heads up to Scotland, digs beneath the pub and sees what they can find. The other digs into Joseph Lang, see what we can learn about him.”
“Done.” Tabitha releases Kayla’s phone and grabs a manilla folder off the table. She slides it toward me. “All here.”
All right then, so we have a few more breadcrumbs than I’d assumed. I slip a smile over at Felicity. That seems a lot like professionalism.
“So,” I say, “do we have any idea where his belongings ended up? Anything not go with him back to Germany?”
Hannah stirs again beside me. “Well, if they kicked the bugger out,” she says, “they’re bound to have confiscated his research. Least, as much of it as they could lay their grubby fingers on, right?”
Tabitha’s expression lies somewhere between grin and grimace. “His whole apartment,” she says. “Confiscated his home. How we have the schematics. But most stuff is still on site.”
“On site?” I lean forward. “But he was kicked out in 1938. His apartment can’t still be—”
Tabitha stabs a finger at the folder. “Can be. Is. Bloody read that.”
“You literally just gave it to me.” The words escape my lips before I remember we’re trying to be professionals. “I mean, I will as soon as this briefing is over.” From Felicity’s expression that was too little, a little too late.
“It’s actually a rather interesting legal loophole,” Clyde starts before anyone can stop him. “You see early thoughts on magic resembled a lot of current popular fears about radiation. There were all these worries about extra-reality contamination around sites of magic. Sullivan’s Polluted Ether Theorem of ’36 to give it a name, though by any other name it would still be as awfully wrong as it is under that one. There’s not even such a thing as ether. The man barely deserves the name thaumaturgist, to be honest, and his Latin was laughable. Not that I want to brag about my own handling of a dead language, but if one commits to the path of tearing reality open, one might as well have the decency to learn one’s tools, I always say. Well not always. Just in this one case really. But if I were to talk about it more often, I would say it more often. Because it really is true. Just common decency really.
“Anyway,” Clyde continues, somehow failing to pause for breath, “because of that, there were a lot of concerns that the apartments of early government-sponsored thaumaturgists were horribly contaminated and would basically cause anyone who entered them to turn into mutated gloop. So they waited for the contamination to become more diffuse. Except no one knew when that was going to be. Well, not until Barkman got around to refuting Sullivan’s theory in ’76, though at that point it was basically common knowledge and Barkman was just a glory hound who managed to swing writing the actual paper. But at that point, no one really gave a damn about these old apartments. They were far more interested in creating something that would actually cause inter-reality contamination and turn people into mutant gloop. Really, the cold war was a very odd time for thaumaturgy.
“So the apartments basically stayed protected by these outdated laws that no one’s got around to repealing. There’s about eighty of them scattered around the country. Mostly in London really. Though there’s a concentration up in York too. Big hotbed of thaumaturgy in the late forties up in York, as it happens.”
And finally the breath happens.
“So,” I jump in as fast as I can, “basically you’re agreeing with Tabitha’s initial statement of, ‘yes.’”
Clyde thinks about that for a moment, opens his mouth, closes it again, then says, “Yes.”
“OK,” I nod, “so basically we can go there and clean out the rest of his stuff, right?”
Another pause. “Yes,” Clyde says. He opens his mouth again, checks my expression, closes it.
“All right then,” I say, “let’s head over there.”
We all stand. All except Hannah. “Wait,” she says. “Us?”
I nod. I think I was pretty clear about the whole thing. Hannah turns to Felicity. “You don’t have civil servants to…” She hesitates. “Wait. Is this the hazing thing?”
Felicity smiles a little sadly. “This, I am afraid,” she says, “is it. The entire staff of MI37. We are not quite as grand as you may be used to. Everyone chips in here.”
Hannah shakes her head. “Fucking hell.”
I look at her again. And there is nothing in particular about her to dislike. But she feels like a stumble in our gearwork. I just hope this case is small enough to allow us to work around it. So she can do her rotation, or penance here, or whatever reason she’s turned up, and move on, and we can get back to normal, to stability.
We stand. Kayla flips her phone at Tabitha again. “What about this one?”
“You’d break him like a twig.”
A sound makes me glance at Felicity. And she actually did facepalm on that one.