Page 40

In the center of the small room is the ancient runebook Dad’s kept from his college days, a clunky old machine made with steel and insides clunking with gears and spellwork that still works, finely tuned from Dad’s careful maintenance.

It’s huge compared to today’s models, and mana storage alone for the machine and all the shop’s functions take up most of the back room.

I can hear the mana swirling away with a steady rush of power inside its container, thumping rhythmically.

Other than Dad checking in once every few months, there’s no reason for anyone to come in here. I bet Dad hasn’t updated the matrix in forever, and all the keys are the same for our family’s personal otherspaces.

I take off my shoes and step onto the center conduit engraved with the spell anchors.

I draw the open rune in the air, completing the semicircle with three quick dashes and then my own namekey, making sure every gesture is within the conduit’s perimeters.

It must have taken forever to program spells back in the day before you could swipe your runes directly onto a screen.

The system recognizes me and then new runes float into the air around me, glowing and pulsing with energy, a map of all the otherspaces and working spells stored inside this runebook.

I use my hands to slowly pick the threads of complicated spellwork apart, careful not to disturb any of them; one wrong movement or accidentally opening a rune could unlock all the doors, or turn off the iceboxes, or change the temperature of the stove or the ovens.

The otherspace keys are here; there’s Dad’s personal one, Mom’s personal one, and their shared account.

I copy them all to my runebook and then make the sweeping gesture for close with my hands.

The visible framework of spells in the air disappears, and the tang of magic seems almost disappointed as I step off the center conduit.

Mana wants to be active, to flow and to change, to do .

It isn’t meant to be stored artificially.

It feels almost bored, trapped here and running the same cooling and heating spells over and over again.

“Sorry,” I say to the waiting energy presence in the air. “I’ll do something big soon, I promise.”

With my parents’ keys now programmed into my own runebook, I can see the faint glow of runes on the door—that must be where they programmed the entrance to their otherspaces.

I pull up the new keys and pause on Dad’s. The long string of runes and letters and numbers is complex in the way that most spellkeys are, but I recognize a familiar date plugged in as the shorthand for access—my birthday.

Oh, Dad.

I push the guilt aside as a new wave of determination rushes through me. This isn’t just about Brenda. Mom knew something about the other world, too, and maybe it was tied up with the Ritual somehow. She must have had something big planned for that phoenix down feather.

The magic in the air seems to pulse, waiting, as if intrigued. I pull up Mom’s key on my runebook and press my hand to the door.

The door whispers and opens, and I step inside her space with my heart pounding in trepidation.

Inside, it is cool and dusty, like no one has been here in ages.

I let my eyes adjust. Her office space feels cozy and well-used, and I remember she used to spend hours doing her research here instead of her office at the university.

Mom’s bookshelves are full of neatly organized books by genre and author, and her spellcraft area is carefully organized, various spell diagrams rolled up for future use and ingredients labeled and shelved.

There’s a scarf hanging on the wall and a jacket over the chair like she just flung them there and could pick them back up at a moment’s notice.

Her purse is sitting on the floor next to her desk, which is cluttered with notes and papers, like she had been in the middle of a project. My heart catches.

There’s something off about the space, though, something that doesn’t quite smell like Mom—roses, I think—it must be coming from the coffeeshop, since sound and scent can travel through wherever you’ve anchored.

Probably leftover from one of Dad’s recipes—he has been trying to make petits fours and experimenting with rosewater lately.

My eyes wander across Mom’s desk when I notice something unusual amid clutter for her regular archival research.

The copy of the spell matrix is old and almost falling apart, inked in Mom’s careful hand, her symbols rounded and looped like she does when she’s paying attention.

I wonder if she worked on this manually to prevent losing it, or if she just liked the feel of pen to paper.

It would have been easier to use a runebook, but I think about Mom’s office at the university and how every step of her research would have been monitored and reviewed.

She did this here, in her private otherspace, because she was investigating something she didn’t want the council to know about.

I can usually figure out a spell’s purpose from the matrix pretty quickly, but this one is so complex I can barely figure out it has something to do with mana itself.

I see Mom’s notes throughout it, various things about life force potential, and then finally on the last page, in fearful, rushed loops: The Ritual isn’t working.

I look up at Mom’s workboard in front of the desk; her handwriting is so small and detailed I’d dismissed this as more of her regular work stuff, but now I read her notes carefully. There’s a timeline going all the way back to the year the first time this spell was cast in 1909.

The Ritual.

Mom was studying it.

What did she figure out? What did she know?

On the far side of the workboard is the prophecy, written out in its entirety. Mom’s marked this up with notes, too.

With fresh eyes, I see the piles of paperwork anew—Mom’s painstaking secret research away from the eyes of the council—all investigating the prophecy and the Ritual.

Where to start? What to read first? I slump back in the chair, overwhelmed.

I leaf through the piles, trying to get a sense of what each one is about before I decide where to start. As I look through them, I get frustrated, and then confused. Mom’s desk notes aren’t organized at all; there are notes about cornerstones here mixed in with memory restoration, like…

Like someone else has been through here.

A chill runs through me. I’d broken in and gotten the otherspace key—what’s to prevent someone else from doing so?

It must have been right before or after the last Ritual; there’s enough dust here that it’s clear no one has disturbed Mom’s space in a long time.

But who?

I see a sliver of Mom’s notes sticking out from one of the piles— they call themselves the Order of the Crossings.

I seize the page, my heart pounding.

This page looks like it fell out of a notebook—one of Mom’s journals.

I glance around the office and think about what it looked like last time I was here: Mom’s jacket and purse, her work organized on the table, an open spell matrix in the air.

Her bookshelf full of textbooks and her journals all neatly numbered and dated.

She would always buy the same plain blue notebooks and scribble in them constantly, her thoughts and musings, day-to-day brainstorming for work, memories about me and Dad.

I remember her encouraging me to journal, too, but I never picked up the habit.

Her journals—that would make this process so much easier, to have a step-by-step account of what she was looking at.

The office compared to my memory is almost the same, except the cluttered desk.

A chill runs through me as I search Mom’s bookshelf. There’s also an empty place where her journals used to be. Whoever went through her office must have taken them.

I read the page again and my pulse jumps when I spot a familiar name.

Mom found a discrepancy in department funding that didn’t match up with the research projects they published over the years, so she started paying close attention to her colleague Rebecca Johnson after she started taking lavish vacations and wearing designer clothes and jewelry even on a scant professor salary.

The page ends with Mom’s discovery of the Order.

I sigh, and try to organize what’s left.

It takes a while, but I sort the pages by topic and get them mostly in order.

Luckily Mom’s so detail-oriented, she numbered each of her looseleaf notes for her experiments, so I can pick up her sketches on the Ritual’s spell matrix and some of her diagram work.

The thief also didn’t take the time to go through the scattered notes on the desk, or the huge spell diagrams. I wonder if they would have thought to come back, so I take a look at the security logs.

I don’t see anything strange; Mom hung out here all the time, either doing her own work or taking meetings with her colleagues and friends.

I recognize the namekeys for me, Dad, and other family friends repeated a couple times.

There are a few namekeys I don’t know, but Mom is always with them, so they must be guests—none of them were here on their own.

I sigh. The thief might have erased it, or maybe only had access once. They must have thought it would be too suspicious to take everything, or maybe they knew we would come here after Mom died. Maybe they just took the research that was damning to them in particular.

The notes left are on a variety of observations, everything from statistics on number of pixie swarms to wyvern breeding patterns to earth tremors.

Symptoms of mana overflow.

The surges.

Mom must have been looking at the effects every time the Ritual had been cast.

I dig through the spell diagrams with new vigor; she’s written out the entire matrix of the Ritual each time it has been cast, all the way back to the second one in 1919.

That one was created by Richard Mayfield, based on the one he and Jìngyi created together to stave off the effects of the catastrophic 1909 earthquake.

I scan each of the matrices carefully; nothing has changed in the complicated spell from what I can tell, just the cornerstones that stand for the anchors of the spell itself.

Why wouldn’t it be working?

I look for signs in Mom’s notes; she has questions about why certain issues such as rising pixie swarms or lower crop yields or torrential storms weren’t addressed if they knew about them. Why weren’t changes made, if you could have customized it?

Maybe the council didn’t want to upset something that was working to keep the balance of so many precious lives in check.

I flip to the very first diagram at the bottom. 1919.

I don’t understand all the runes exactly; they’re much older than what are used now. I’d have to sit down and translate them carefully, but I can see where Mom’s circled the areas about connecting energy and breaking energy. Find the original is written in a hurried scrawl.

My heart pounds.

Without the journals, I’m not sure what to do next. I don’t know her exact process, I just have pieces of what she had left.

I look at the board. There’s a whole area marked with cryptic notes, with the names of council members and their photos, and other people as well, including some of Mom’s colleagues, like Johnson. Suspected members of the Order, probably.

On the other side is just a long list of names and photos.

Cornerstones.

The first set of notes under each cornerstone gives me chills; Mom was documenting the effects of the Ritual afterward.

Emmett Soliz: life force drained, died immediately.

Gravery Kirkpatrick: life force mostly drained, appeared to have aged to the equivalent of a ninety-year-old man. Was twenty-seven at the time of the Ritual.

If she knew all this, why did she agree to be a cornerstone? Why would she take this path, knowing it would mean she would never see us again?

What was the alternative?

My head spins. I know what happened. Ten years after the first Ritual, a horrific mana surge killed crops all across California.

They didn’t know what they were doing then or that they’d have to repeat the first Ritual, and the Great Depression followed not too long after.

Then the great fires of San Francisco, and a mana surge that knocked out all the food preservation spells for the entirety of the state.

There’s a chilling pattern. Sometimes the Ritual takes; sometimes it doesn’t. It’s hard to know. There’s no clear correlation between when there’s peace afterward and when the mana surges actually increase and disaster occurs.

In the center of the board is the prophecy.

The full text of it is written out, and Mom’s notes here are even more cryptic. She’s circled the word Woo , our family name, and above it in her small hand is the word Intention .

I freeze. I know exactly where I’ve seen that note before.

The phoenix down feather.

I leave Mom’s otherspace, my blood pounding in my ears.

The sounds of the coffeeshop echo around me, and Jordan’s chirpy voice barks out a customer order.

Coffee is being poured. Lives are being lived, and no one knows that something bigger than themselves is brewing, that a huge breakthrough was made here, just a few breaths from where they were.

I race through the portal home and almost lose my balance when it spits me out into the living room. I barely catch my breath, taking the stairs two at a time until I get to my room. I shove aside the debris of shoes in my closet and find the box I rescued from my parents’ otherspace.

The spelling supplies.

I leaf through everything carefully now, hope fluttering through my fingertips.

I unroll a scroll and check the date. This was what Mom was working on last. It’s a spell matrix of her own design, more complicated than anything I’ve ever attempted. I’m overwhelmed just looking at the focus objects required; it looks like it takes an immense amount of power.

Three phoenix down feathers. I gulp, reading the list of the rest of the rare ingredients and what the spell required.

There’s a note about Uncle Chau’s next shipment.

The date is for a week after Mom died. If there is one feather here, she either was waiting for the other two and the rest of the ingredients, or she already cast the spell once and had been planning to cast it again.

Or maybe the shipment was a reminder, a fail-safe to stock up on more ingredients.

I reread the matrix again, trying to understand what Mom was trying to do.

This is a spell for time travel.