The New Magic - The Revelation of Jonah McAllister Landon Wark (free e books to read .txt) 📖

eternity, the silence might have overwhelmed Carmen were she not an hour or so from crawling into a hole and dying. Clay looked like he might jump clean out of his skin if something didn't happen right away.

"Where is ever—" he started just before the large figure of Sandy appeared from out of the kitchen, a clump of papers clamped messily in her hand.

"All right," she interrupted Clay with a tone that felt like she was a professor addressing a class of psychology students. "This isn't going to take very long. We just need to get you guys making some money."

"Ahhh. There it is," Carmen pulled out her chair and started to push through the vertigo of standing up. "What are you going to have them do? Call relatives and tell them they're being held for ransom?"

"What?"

"I'm assuming that you've got yourself a nice little cult here, Sandy," she said as she tried to wiggle her way out from behind the fat man. "I don't blame you. This shit happens during depressions. Thanks but no thanks, guys. I may be a—" She swallowed. "A borderline addict, but the only thing more pathetic than an addict is an addict in a cult."

"We're not a cult." Sandy's brow crinkled into what looked like white tree bark.

"Yeah? How charismatic is your leader?"

"Umm, not very?"

Carmen stopped just before breaking clear of the table.

Maybe you're being a bit too hasty.

There might be a bit of a story here, a little slice of life in the depression. A short draft of a premier of a serialized report took form in her mind before it morphed into an enter non-fiction, a study of religious desperation in the heartland. But it was pretty far from the things she needed. If she could just get into the city once every couple of days maybe... Cult leaders liked having the ear of the world, so, yeah, maybe.

No. It wasn't worth it.

"Tell you what; put it in a pamphlet and mail it to me."

"But," the thin woman spoke up with restrained enthusiasm, "We've all seen what she can do. What they can do."

"Um," Clay raised his hand. "I haven't seen it."

Carmen furrowed her brow as the rest of the assembled sallow-eyed monkeys seemed to ratchet up their excitement. Her left eye narrowed as the idea that there was something out here that she could maybe get a couple of pieces—decent ones that might break back into some more mainstream media outlets—returned.

"Yeah..." she said warily as she looked them over as Sandy produced three rolls of quarters. "Me neither."

The migraine that had been playing havoc behind Carmen's eyes had been shoved to the rear of her consciousness. It was still there, to be sure, but... The nature of her reality had shifted in such a way that it didn't seem to matter anymore. She was uncertain if anything mattered after what she had just seen.

The world just shuddered! was all that she could think. Shuddered.

Why shuddered and not split or broke, she could not say for certain. Maybe it was the fact that nothing had physically moved, at least not much. Maybe it was because that was the actual visual effect of the single pile of quarters that seemed to diverge into two.

It was a damn good trick the first time when Sandy had done it. It was goddamn shuddering staring at her own small pile of quarters, even the strange imperfect ones on the tops of the four piles, stuck together like pancakes poured too close together. The effect was something like what she would have expected for not getting whatever words she was supposed to say right.

"They... mitosed," Clay whispered into the silence that gripped the table.

"Why is the table singed?" Jenny asked.

"We'll use a metal table next time," Sandy said sheepishly.

Carmen ran her fingers around her face, trying to open her eyes as wide as possible. She had done whatever she could to try to foul the trick: Moving the piles from the place where Sandy had placed them. Splitting the piles and restacking them. In the midst of all of it, she was certain that it was still a trick. Her fingers trembled as she picked two of the coins, the ones stuck together, from the piles.

The fat man next to her started laughing.

"So-so-so," Paul stammered for a moment. "What does this mean?" He looked around them all. "What does it mean?"

"The six of us just need to keep doing this to make enough money to keep this place running while Jonah does his research."

"Uh, so, counterfeiting?" Clay raised his hand again.

Sandy looked at them. "The future is not going to be one where counterfeiting is an actual thing."

For some reason Carmen got the feeling that this was something that she had been practising for some time. The earmarks of justification were laced tightly into her voice. It was a good justification to be certain. It evoked in her the same feelings as someone telling her that pirating a movie was not a crime in an era when binary data flowed freely. It was a damn good justification. You wouldn't download a quarter, would you?

"Is this my letter to Hogwarts?" Carmen asked dumbly.

"Yeah. 'cause their American campus is a teal house in the middle of some mouse infested farm fields," Clay muttered.

"But, like... Are we going to learn—like—sorcery?"

"They don't know that much," the woman, Jenny, said with authority. "There's more, but this, Jonah, is just feeling his way around. What was it? Doing research?"

Sandy looked almost embarrassed as she addressed them. "Yeah. There's making the money this way and a couple of other things he's shown me. Other than that, we still don't know a whole lot. We're..." She struggled. "Still writing the ancient magics."

Carmen felt a thrill run down her