Cinza and Ruby were allowed to go after a brief talk by the sheriff. Having single-handedly ending the riot before it could really escalate, without injuring a single person, Jackie had commended her on her quick action. Cinza looked reasonably pleased and promised to be in touch. With a quick look at Rachel to confirm that their plans were still on for the night, she disappeared with a dazed Ruby at her heels. Jackie had offered to give them a ride, but Cinza steadfastly refused.

  Rachel and Smith were herded into the back of the cruiser and whisked off to the mayor's office.

  "What the hell happened?" Rowan asked, pacing behind his desk. The reverend was holding an ice pack to his face, while Rachel simply stood to the side.

  "The town is getting uneasy."

  "No kidding," he said dryly. "Please tell me you have something."

  Rachel hesitated. "We're still searching."

  "Rachel, come on." Rowan groaned as the phone on his desk lit up again. "Do you see what I've got to deal with here?"

  "You need to get control of your people," Rachel said. He stopped, anger flaring up in his face.

  "My people?"

  "You asked me to treat you like an equal, Rowan. Your people came close to a riot today, and it was only thanks to Cinza's quick thinking that we made it out without any injuries."

  "Excuse me," said Smith.

  "Any serious injuries," she amended, and he winked.

  "She's right, sir," Jackie added. "You've only got me and Preston. We're fine when the town's normal, but this is a goddamn siege. We can't keep the peace in a siege."

  Rowan sat down heavily, picking up a glass of water and draining it. "Doctor, I appreciate you trying to protect your neighbors, but would you please not go punching a hysterical crowd again?"

  "I've learned my lesson," Smith answered cheerfully.

  "Thank you."

  "What's the word on supplies?" Jackie asked.

  "We're fine for a while, unless we have a sudden uptick of medical needs," Rowan said, glancing pointedly at the doctor. "I'd be more comfortable if we could call in support—"

  "Absolutely not," Smith cut in, and Rachel was grateful. If it had been her, she doubted Rowan would take the demand as anything but selfish. "This town must be kept isolated. We've been given a blessing the world is not yet ready for. We must nurture it and understand it first before we can present it to the world."

  "That's an interestin' claim from a preacher," Jackie said.

  "I'm an interesting man."

  "If we keep everyone trapped here, things are only going to get worse," Rowan said.

  "They are," Rachel agreed. "You need to start putting in measures to keep things from escalating."

  "Isn't that why I started a curfew?"

  She shook her head. "Curfews aren't really effective. In normal circumstances they don't really do anything to reduce crime according to most studies. In emergencies they can be temporarily useful, but you need the manpower to actually enforce them, and somewhere to actually put the violators. We don't have either."

  "So what do you suggest I do?" Rowan asked sardonically. Rachel didn't appreciate his tone when she was trying to help, but she did her best to ignore it.

  "Close the bar and restrict alcohol flow for a while. As long as it comes from you it'll get some discontent but it won't set people off too much. They have their own drinks at home, sure, but with fewer places to gather and drink it's less likely to set off another incident."

  "You're going to set off a riot with just that announcement!"

  "I'm with her," Jackie said. "There's enough folks here that don't drink anyway, they won't care. The worst were all in the street today, and they just saw a real demonstration of what they're up against. They're gonna be more scared n' pissed than ever. We can keep them under control if they don' get too rowdy, and a bar lets them get too rowdy."

  "Fine! We'll do it your way," Rowan said exasperatedly. "You've got to handle something for me though, Rachel. I have a half-dozen calls from the east end saying something bizarre is going on. They're accusing your people of being responsible."

  "Something bizarre?" Rachel asked skeptically.

  "Well, I have reports of anything from shapes floating through the air to monsters roaming the streets and eating people's cats, so the hell if I know," Rowan snapped. "Just deal with it, would you?"

  Rachel's heart fell. It was Julian, she had no doubt. He was finally going ahead with his ritual plan. It had been council-approved, but she assumed he wasn't stupid enough to enact it anyway under their present circumstances.

  Evidently she'd severely overestimated his intelligence.

  "I'll handle it."

----------------------------------------

  The outer lights of Hector's grocery had just flickered on when Rachel arrived. She hurried inside, where thankfully the shop was devoid of customers. The shelves were beginning to look a little empty, though, as they lost their suppliers one by one due to the closed roads and rails.

  "Hector?" she called.

  "I'm here," came a call from the back room behind the register. Hector bustled out, carrying an armful of bananas. "Oh, hi Rachel."

  "Hi. I'm sorry to drop in unannounced, but I need your help with something."

  "What happened?" he asked in a slight panic.

  She shook her head. "It's not bad, yet." She briefly explained the reports the mayor had been receiving.

  "And you think Julian's doing something?" he asked, setting the bananas down and looking pensive.

  "Has to be. With how the town is right now, we can't afford this sort of widespread chaos. I need to go talk to him, but I don't have anyone to back me up." She glanced around briefly. "I know you're busy, but I'd feel a lot better if I had you with me on this one."

  Hector nodded. Rachel felt a twinge of guilt, but pushed it away. She did need him. "Just let me close down, it'll only take a few minutes."

  "Thanks."

  As promised, only a few minutes later they were already on a swift walk towards the eastern portion of town and away from the rapidly descending sunlight. As they turned a corner, Rachel reached for the connections in her mind and found the one she'd been watching grow bit by bit ever since she'd visited their camp in the morning. There was the line drawing her to Cinza. It was a bold twisting river of emotion, flowing much more fiercely in one direction than the other. Rachel tried not to think about the implications as she grasped it with her will and plucked it like a string.

  The reverberations would flow down the line to the girl. In most cases, it would feel like a chill on one's spine if it even registered at all. Rachel had briefly explained to Cinza how to recognize the signal more clearly, without telling her precisely how it was formed or about the actual connections it relied upon. Cinza would recognize the unique sensation that grabbed at her mind, as Rachel and Will could feel it.

  Rachel hadn't wanted to reveal their secret, but she saw no other way to signal the girl while being totally assured no one would be able to spot it. A text message or call right before the theft would be logged, and Will was no longer the only one watching the phone and internet traffic (having become overwhelmed by the sheer amount). Physical signals could easily be spotted if Rachel was careless, and she simply didn't have the time to spare. So she'd trusted the girl, and Cinza had sworn not to reveal the technique—not even to Ruby.

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  "Um, Rachel?" Hector asked, pointing. Rachel looked up, having been lost in thought about the various riots and civil unrest scenarios she'd been researching lately. In front of them was an empty shipping box, casually floating through mid-air without a care in the world, as if gravity was simply no longer a concern.

  That can't be good.

  "What do we do?" he asked.

  "We find Julian," she growled, pulling out her phone and dialing Will. After a few minutes of strain and effort, he was able to get her a more exact location on whomever had cast the ritual. They set off once again.

  Other oddities began to pop up. There was a mailbox that had floated out of its stake in the ground and was hovering across the street like a drifting kite, and a couple more shipping boxes beside. Rachel felt like she was entering some sort of fairytale land, except for the vague unpleasant smell wafting through the air.

  "It doesn't touch us," he noted aloud.

  Rachel nodded. Mason's Law was still in effect. Furthermore, it didn't seem to be affecting anything besides the containers themselves. "He'd been talking about something to do with making moving boxes around easier. Apparently he succeeded."

  The next street down, they found him. Julian and one of his companions were nestled just inside a copse of trees off the road, where they'd drawn out a large symbol in chalk on the grass. Julian was flat on the ground in the center, his eyes glazed and looking at nothing in particular, while his friend was simply unconscious. Rachel hurried forward, but stopped before she crossed the chalk lines, just in case.

  "Julian?"

  He looked around. "I did it."

  "Did what?"

  "Made it easier."

  "You mean you actually did want to just make it easier to move boxes around?"

  "Yeah?"

  Rachel burst into a fit of giggles. She'd assumed he had some deeper plan than that—but no, Julian Black was legitimately trying to ease his job delivering boxes to people with magic. It was so… mundane. "I think you went overboard," she added, still giggling.

  Hector had caught up and looked thoroughly confused. "You okay, Rachel?"

  "Yeah." She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief from her bag. "Julian, we need to reverse this, or reduce it to a more specific target. It's disturbing people."

  He nodded. "Didn't really know wha' was gonna happen." With a great deal of effort he managed to pull himself to his feet. "Not really sure how to stop it either."

  Rachel knelt in the grass just outside the circle, composing herself. Using a technique she'd been developing, she tried to view how the magic and the man in the center were connected. It was an offshoot of their usual method to view links and associations between people, but combined with Will's method of finding where magic was being used. Rachel didn't have the strength or talent to get any sort of range with the spell, but she could at least focus down on magic happening in close proximity. She let her mind drift between the split where she could see the links between people and the mental state of drawing magical energy into herself, where she could feel its source and connect it to what she could see in front of her.

  It took a great deal of concentration. Almost immediately she began to feel a headache brewing in her skull. Rachel pushed through it. She saw the lines drawing between Julian and his associate, the ritual circle in the ground, and then a burst of three lines reaching out in a triangle to various points throughout the east half of town. Julian had done a combined ritual that covered the entire area—that much she'd already known from his proposal to the council. But what had they affected specifically?

  The lines became more distinct, connecting to the cardboard and the metal of mailboxes. Rachel saw a strange translucence in the air as if the boxes had become indistinct. They had the appearance of boxes, but not the properties or consistency. Simply by entering the area, they changed and took on new properties. This was new magic… or was it?

  "You based this on Hector's electricity-disabling fields," Rachel realized aloud, releasing her mind.

  "Yeah," Julian coughed. "I figger if he could make a zone where stuff enters and gets disabled, not just what's there when he makes the thing, I could do the same to boxes."

  "So you target all the boxes and then… what?" Hector could reverse the ritual for them since he understood that half, but to do so he needed to know what changes Julian had done to the environment.

  "Well, I thought I needed to make them lighter, and what's super light? So I made them all more like that gas."

  Rachel felt a spike of panic. "You did what?"

  "You know, made 'em all floaty by making them more like helium."

  "But…" Rachel burst through some quick calculations. "Helium doesn't have that great of a lifting force. It's about five grams for a balloon's worth." She stared at a box currently floating around nearby them. "And it doesn't really seem like there's helium everywhere."

  "Nah, not helium then. Hydrogen."

  Rachel started. "You filled them all with hydrogen?"

  "Yeah? So?"

  "Ever heard of the Hindenberg?" she snapped. She stood up. "Hector, every single one of those boxes is highly flammable."

  She had a dozen more questions—like how the hydrogen wasn't simply diffusing through the boxes, or how each box had enough to maintain lift, or where it had even come from—but she wasn't about to start interrogating Julian with the potential danger in front of them. "We need to get them all together and drain them somehow."

  "Okay," Hector said. He looked confident, which was immeasurably reassuring to Rachel. As nervous as Hector could get around people, he was in his element dealing with magic on a large scale. Rachel had seen him perform feats impossible for even the strongest amongst them many times, often on par with the Gods themselves. He grasped something in his pocket that Rachel couldn't see, and immediately the nearest boxes were neatly assembling into a floating pile of cardboard.

  Rachel's phone began buzzing. She glanced down at the screen, but Julian's groaning distracted her. "What?"

  "Really took it out of me," he coughed.

  "You loaded a dozen large boxes with flammable gas and started throwing them all over town. I'm not surprised," Rachel admonished. "You really should run these by me before you do something else so ridiculous and dangerous."

  She picked up her phone, but it had already gone to voicemail. With a sigh, Rachel pocketed it again. It had been Rika, but Rachel doubted she had much to say besides complaints. While Rachel didn't exactly want her arrested, she had too many pressing matters on her mind. Cinza's covert mission of the night was weighing most heavily, and Rachel hoped she'd managed to break into the safe already and escape.

  She had no idea how the girl planned to get in, but Cinza had requested at least an hour of time, if not more. Rachel was determined to keep Hector out as long as possible.

  Luckily, Julian's insane plan had already given them plenty to clean up without any false excuses needed. Rachel was glad she hadn't had to lie to Hector. She really couldn't do this without him.

  Her phone rang again. It wasn't Rika this time. It was a number she didn't recognize. She stared at it for the first couple of rings, confused. She never got unknown numbers. Thanks to Will, her phone blocked virtually every spam call network in existence, and her number was private otherwise. For any public contact she preferred email, since she could process those quickly and easily at any time.

  At the third ring, she finally answered.

  "Hello?"

  "About fucking time!" a voice exploded in her ear. Rachel nearly dropped the phone.

  "Rika?"

  "No, bitch, it's the goddamn NSA. Yes, it's me."

  "I've been trying to call you."

  "And I've been a little fucking busy with the cops you sent after me—what the fuck, Za—"

  Rachel listened to rustling for a few moments. "Hello?"

  "Hi," said a younger male voice. He was nervous, but like he was trying to act confident and cool. The end result was someone who sounded entirely fake, though his tone was urgent enough that Rachel gave him her full attention. "Rachel, right?"

  "You're the guy who's been following Rika around?" Zack flashed through her mind briefly. A boy just out of high school, with short brown hair and freckles. Not particularly tall, nor was he good looking or strong. He didn't really stand out in any way, besides his choice of company.

  "I, err… yes. That's me." He sounded embarrassed.

  "I'm sorry, but I'm really busy right now. Why did you call?"

  "We found out who killed those people. It wasn't Rika."

  She took a few steps away from Julian and Hector, lowering her voice. "I know it wasn't. It was Omega."

  "What? No. Well, yeah, in part I guess. But it was also a guy named Brian. We heard him say it."

  "Brian who? Heard where?" Rachel asked, while her mind began rifling through every single Brian she knew, trying to link them up with the murders.

  "We were at the doctor's place, he stopped by to talk to him as a priest or whatever."

  "Just now?" Rachel asked, dread beginning to seep into her bones. She knew something terrible was coming, though she couldn't explain why. A bitter taste was filling her mouth.

  "Maybe an hour ago? Brian said he had met someone in the woods and done something terrible. Then after he heard the doctor wanted to go meet with you tonight, he threatened you and him."

  Rachel narrowed it down. It had to be a local, then, if he was meeting with the doctor to confess. There were only two Brians in town. One was Bryan Selnik, the painter, but he'd been out of town until he'd returned with his boyfriend Mason from a trip to Seattle just a few days ago. He couldn't be the murderer. The other…

  "Put Rika on."

  There was a shuffle of static and thumping noises. "What now?"

  "It's Brian Hendricks. Natalie's dad."

  "...Shit. You sure?"

  "Has to be, there's no other Brians. And he's been missing."

  "Why the fuck is he trying to kill people?"

  "I don't know," Rachel said, her heart racing. Apparently he'd threatened her directly, and the reverend for daring to associate with her. Brian knew where she lived. He was her landlord. "He threatened to kill me?"

  "Yeah, apparently. I wasn't there," Rika said, and her voice had dropped in hostility. Somewhere there was still a kernel of loyalty from their childhood, however buried it might be behind layers of bitterness.

  "I… well I guess I should have expected something like this." The idea of a personal threat against her life for being a public figure had crossed her mind before, but always as a well-removed hypothetical. Nothing like this, and definitely not from someone she knew. Rachel felt confused as much as she felt afraid. "Something's wrong. Doesn't add up."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Your friend said he threatened to hurt the doctor and me when we met… tonight?"

  After a brief aside, Rika came back on the phone. "Yeah."

  "But, we already met. This afternoon, in broad daylight."

  "Hang on," Rika said. Rachel could hear her muffled shout through the phone. "Hey, Alzack! Did he call out Rachel by name?" She came back. "You weren't mentioned… Maybe he meant someone else?"

  Rachel's blood turned to ice. "He meant Cinza. The doctor wanted to meet at their home in the woods. He must have gone there tonight."