Jess was thinking about the risks all the way through the visitor security checkpoint the next morning. The risks of enchanting yourself, versus the risks of someone using your corpse to summon a monster.
Maybe Becky had a point when she said that an enchantment to make no changes would cause no changes. It did fit the rules that way. An enchantment intended to do nothing and where the symbols controlled it to do nothing should, in fact, do nothing, until that intend and symbolism changed.
The trigger part was easy enough. She'd tested the command word as soon as she'd gotten home, modifying the candle lighting spell that been her first deliberate spell. It had been 'one at done' at first, until she replaced the runes for 'when' with an 'every time,' at which point it has worked until she deliberately broke the circle.
The more she thought about carrying a book full of armed spells in her pocket, though, the more concerned she got. To her, a circle on a page never represented a flat circle. It always meant a cylinder or a sphere. And that meant that any trigger in the book would trigger some or all of every other spell in the book, and that sounded like a recipe for disaster.
As she made her way down a nearly-empty hallway, her phone chirped. She checked it. Barbara Thompson.
Babs? But she was in Ecuador, and that was too expensive for a casual phone call. Especially since it was just as early there as it was in DC.
Jess glanced to her right; a small wood-paneled conference room was empty, its lights off. She stepped in and answered the call.
"Jess! Glad I caught you." Babs' voice was tense.
Jess's other self relaxed at the voice, but Jess herself tightened up. "What's wrong?"
"You remember why I came here?" Babs barely paused. "Well, it's getting worse, fast. It's already civil war in Colombia all over again. But these guys seem to be willing to get into it with Ecuador, too. I'm not sure who they are. At first they were just some kind of crazy death cult, but then they started making real inroads in the leftovers of the FARC, and then-"
Jess's heart jumped into her throat. "Are you okay? Are you safe?"
"I'm fine for now." Babs hesitated for a moment. "For now, anyway. They haven't gotten to this part of the country yet, and I'm not on the war beat, so we're flying back early."
Tension ratcheted back down to 'bad.' Jess let out a sigh of relief. "That's good. That's great, actually. I really missed you."
Babs gave a throaty chuckle. "I just bet you did." Then she sobered up. "But about the reason I called - do you remember that communications spell we whipped up?"
"I don't need to," Jess said. "I have my book right here."
"Perfect! I made a few contacts here, and I want to stay in touch with them without, you know, exposing them the way a cell phone would."
Jess slipped her book of spells out of the binder, then opened it to the page with the communications spell. She leaned it against the conference room's big whiteboard and uncapped a marker. "Three stanzas. Are you ready?"
There was a sound of paper rustling. "Okay, go."
Jess carefully pronounced the syllables of the arcane language, writing them as she did.
After a moment, the sound of a pen being retracted came over the phone. "Okay, that looks like how I remember it being." Babs thumped the pen against the pad she was writing on. "About interception. Is it possible?"
Jess took a few steps back to look at the completed spell. "I wouldn't think so. It doesn't transmit any waves or anything. Whatever is in the circle is bound to whatever else is in the circle. But I suppose a general interception spell might be able to catch it - I've never thought about that."
Babs' voice tightened. "I don't want to risk my friends. They both have kids."
Jess frowned. "Okay, okay. So tracing the spell should be impossible. No - I take that back, just impossible unless you have one of the endpoints. If you have more than one thing enchanted with the same spell, they're linked, and that means you can track one with the other. But it would have to be on the same casting, or they wouldn't be linked. So you'll want two or more castings, and as long as you have one endpoint, your friends can't be traced without the bad guys grabbing *you*. Which will be fine, since the bad guys will be in South America and you won't."
"I'm with you so far," Babs said.
"Now that only works for tracing. I don't know how to intercept a communication with this, but that doesn't mean it can't be done with the right spell. If they can be identified by voice or word, then we need to block that, too. But that's easy. Give me a second to find the cipher-lock." She flipped through the book. "Okay. Now, put this between the second and third stanzas, and then put a second circle around the third stanza." She pronounced the words of the cipher.
"Got it!" Babs' pen clicked closed again. "Hey, babe?"
"Yeah, babe?"
"Why am I spending international minutes when we have a communications spell?"
A little joy bubbled up from some part of Jess's chest. She grinned and shook her head as she said, "Because the spell can't ring. An endpoint is on or it's not, and there's no way to know if the other end is on without a response. Voice goes through one way, voice goes through the other way."
"Oh, right. Still, it's too bad. Especially with the cipher lock."
Jess frowned. "How so?"
Babs let out that throaty chuckle again. "Because we could have set up a time and talk dirty."
Heat flooded Jess's face. "Babe!"
"I'm just saying, missed opportunity." She sounded a little wistful. "Next time, maybe. Speaking of..."
Jess capped the marker and leaned on the table. "You already have another trip lined up?"
"Not yet, no. But how are you taking this one?"
Jess tried to get the right words lined up. Somehow, there was something she could say that would make Babs think-
"Based on what I'm not hearing, you're not fine."
Damnit. Jess sighed. "I really miss you. She misses you, too. Plus she hates crowds, strangers, and being alone, and so she's always kinda riled up, and that's draining. But I do have Becky and the kits, and there's John, and the Doc, and even when I'm at the Pentagon the commander's mostly here with me." She let out a wistful note. "But I'll be really glad when you're back."
"You know what would make you feel better?"
Jess could hear Babs' grin through the phone, and it was a very suspicious kind of grin. Jess narrowed her eyes. "What?"
"If we talk dirty right now."
Jess choked. "Babe! I am in the Pentagon right now, on a call to Latin America! If there is one cell phone in America being tapped, it's this one."
"But babe, we're both Americans," Babs said, a pleading note in her voice. "That's illegal."
"Yeah, well, you know that, I know that, and the NSA guy frantically mashing the delete button knows that, but the algorithm doesn't."
"Fine, fine." Babs' voice went serious. "You take care of yourself, okay? I'll be home in like a day or so."
"I can hold out, babe," Jess said. "I have to go. Love you, Babs."
"I love you too." Then the line disconnected.
A moment later, Jess's other self realized Babs' voice was gone and expressed her displeasure.
Jess sighed and rubbed her forehead. Then she straightened off the table. She did have a briefing to get to, after all.
Then someone stepped into the room.
Jess blanched and spun to face them, coming to attention almost automatically.
The newcomer was an older man, white, with gray hair and a slight paunch. He was wearing a black suit with an American flag pin at the lapel. He carried an attache case and looked at Jess with an expression of slight amusement. He also looked somewhat familiar.
"I'm sorry, sir," Jess said. "I needed to take a call and the room was empty."
The man smiled warmly. "Don't worry about it. I like being early, so you weren't interrupting anything."
"Yes, sir." Jess's answering smile was a lot more forced. "I'll just clean up and get out of your way."
"Of course." He set his case on the table at the far end, then looked at the whiteboard, his brow furrowed. "If you don't mind me asking, what is that?"
Jess gulped. "It's a communication spell," she said. "Well, sort of. Basically, the way it works is, you draw it on a flat surface. Then when you have two objects - I prefer paperclips - in the circle at the same time, they are connected and so whatever someone says when they're holding one can be heard by the person holding the other."
He blinked, taken aback. "Magic can do that?"
"Oh, definitely, sir." Jess nodded and picked up the eraser. "I don't know if anyone has cracked remote targeting yet, but binding objects, carrying them, all that works fine."
"So tell me, Sergeant, what kinds of spells have you made?"
Jess looked at her book. "Personally, sir? Well, the usual early spells, candle lighting, flame extinguishing, hovering an object. I've done a few basic transmutations and enchantments. I have a pen here that doesn't require ink and only writes on paper."
He nodded. "That's more in line with what I'd heard," he said, looking down at his paperwork.
Jess shrugged. "Well, that's what I'm comfortable working on in a civilian home, or putting in a book I carry on public transportation. Things I haven't really tried - dropping the mass of a bullet while it was in a firing chamber would increase the kinetic energy it had when it left the barrel. That would work for everything from pistols to railguns."
He dropped his pen and looked up at her, startled.
"Like I said, I haven't tested that exact scenario personally, but I have tested the theory with variations on hovering charms and it would definitely work." Jess pointed at the board. "A circle like this can change the fundamental properties of a space for a time. All kinds of physics can be manipulated. Unstable compounds can be rendered stable. For instance, there are chemicals they're working on in weapons labs that blow up before they can make a few molecules of them, which makes them useless. Do it in an enchanted beaker and they could be as safe to handle as water. Put them in an enchanted bomb and make the fuse break the enchantment. Boom."
He was frowning now. Someone else stepped into the room, but the man held up his hand to them.
Which was good, because Jess was on a roll. "I've made a cat invisible. The hardest part about doing that to a Predator - or a B-52 - would be drawing a circle large enough, and getting the symbols right at that scale. Reducing the weight of a plane would let it carry more armor, more weapons, more fuel, or all three. Going back to the physics of a volume, you can make a space incredibly hot, then push air into it, and you have a jet engine that never needs refueling."
A man in Army camouflage sat down to the right of the civilian. "Could you make a nuclear warhead?"
Jess glanced at his chest. Four stars. She gulped. But she gave the answer a few moments thought. "Honestly, sir, I don't think so."
He nodded and opened his mouth, but she continued.
"Nukes are fiendishly complex. I don't think I understand them well enough to duplicate one. Similarly, fissile materials are heavy. I could definitely make a spell that *should* make one, but I don't think I could get it to work. The belief hurdle is just too high. But..." She drew to a pause and gave the general a worried look. "Transmutation, though. I could make a spell that would turn depleted or unrefined uranium into weapons-grade uranium, possibly, or plutonium. Lead would be harder. I'm not sure I could manage to do it with a simple spell like this one, which of course means I couldn't. But if I took the time and energy and fast-talked myself in the right way, I would be able to come up with an alchemical process that turned lead into weapons-grade plutonium."
A faint, almost inaudible chirp sounded from Jess's purse, but another four-star was sitting down a few seats to the civilian's left. She was asking, "What infrastructure would you need? To do any of those."
Inside, Jess was screaming. Just what room had she walked into? Outside, however, she just gave the new general a sad smile. "Pen. Ink. A table. Unless I had existing infrastructure and wanted to improve it. Everything I've seen about how magic works says that it works fine with technology, but engineering is another matter. So is mass-production. Engineering involves double-checking, and triple-checking, and 'what if this doesn't work?' and that will make a spell fizzle every time."
The female general was nodding. "And mass production?"
Jess shrugged. "This spell behind me. Take a picture of it and you have a picture of a spell. No machine can duplicate it for anything but reference. Copy it by hand with the intent to cast, though, and it might work - especially if I told you what the words meant, and demonstrated it in front of you. No infrastructure required." Although...something about that was sending an alert in her brain.
Maybe it would gel if she gave it time.
But she didn't have time. She didn't even have time to look at her phone, which had chimed four more times.
"So demonstrations," said the civilian at the head of the table. "What else would reduce that...belief hurdle, Sergeant Dunbar?"
Well that made her feel guilty. He recognized her and she didn't recognize him. And he was senior to four-star generals.
But it was a good question. "Time, sir, and experience. There are some associations that help. Personally I've been actively practicing magic for over a month now. The spell behind me - I know it works, because I've tested it. I know how it works, I know why it works the way it does, and that means if I change something I can 'know' it will work. Language, scripting - if you think a spell should work, it's more likely to. Calligraphy etched in gold is more effective than something scrawled in pencil. I do have a certain advantage in that I'm reminded every second of every day of the powerful kinds of change that magic is capable of, but that's personal."
The male four-star frowned. "Could you use magic to make it easier to believe your spells would work?"
Jess shrugged. "In theory, sir, but it would have consequences. Trust me on that. The Air Force had a research project to improve athletic performance that wasn't intended to use magic. It did anyway." She waved at herself. "Nobody expected this. The human organism is a very complex piece of equipment, and the human brain is the part we understand the least. If you deliberately altered your ability to believe in magic, you'd probably also alter-"
The alarm bells were back in full force.
Her jaw fell, her eyes widened. Her heart was pounding in her chest. She forced herself to verbalize the thought as she worked her way through it. "You'd probably start to believe something else that's impossible, or close to it. Probably, though not necessarily, you'd go insane. But you'd be capable of powerful magic, and you could demonstrate it. So you'd gather followers who bought into the same belief..."
She turned and looked at the board, with the communications spell that she'd sent to Babs, who was probably in a lot more danger than they'd thought. "And now I'm wondering if that's what's happening in Colombia."
Or across the river.
She needed to talk to Rogers. For multiple reasons, since now third four-star was in the room, in Marine camo, and the Marines didn't have all that many four-stars.
She gulped again and looked at the civilian. She was pretty sure if he was the Secretary of Defense, she'd absolutely recognize him, and she didn't. "I'm sorry, sir, that was pure speculation on my part."
He smiled at her. "Perhaps, but germane to our discussion. You may go, Sergeant Dunbar. Chief Allen, I'm sorry I delayed the start of your briefing..."
Jess closed her binder around her book, pivoted and quick-marched out of the room, barely giving a glance to the woman in Navy khakis. As soon as she was into the corridor, she collapsed against the wall until she stopped hyperventilating.
Then she pulled her phone out to see four texts and one missed call from Colonel Rogers.