A Disease of Magic

Leo was waiting for me in the kitchen the next morning.

“I’m all out of party tricks,” I greeted grumpily. “So don’t ask.”

“I’m not going to,” he promised. “Coffee?” I nodded, and he pressed the buttons to make the machine start. My favorite mug already sat in place. If he was trying for a peace offering, this wouldn’t cut it.

I eyed him suspiciously as we waited in silence for my coffee to brew, the machine running quietly. He didn’t meet my gaze, instead focusing on something on the tablet in front of him. After a few more awkward moments my coffee finished brewing, and I busied my hands with adding cinnamon and my creaming when I asked, “So, what did you find out?”

“I…I don’t know.”

I glanced over my shoulder at him, but his gaze was still focused downward. Holding my warm mug between my chilled fingers, I stepped up to him and looked at his screen. A plethora of stats was displayed there in different colors.

“What do you mean?” I finally asked.

“I don’t know what happened. Or, I do know what happened. I just don’t know why.”

“But there’s a scientific explanation for what happened.” There had to be, even if it was something we hadn’t discovered yet. And by we, I mean Leo.

“Absolutely. Problem is, I can’t figure it out.”

I took a sip of my coffee. Perfect. “Did you pull my stats?”

“Not yet. I wanted to ask first. I know I pushed you too far last night. And for that I owe you an apology. Again. But I had a suspicion that you’d have to get mad again for it to work, like you did the first time with the table. But if I told you what I was doing—”

“It wouldn’t have worked,” I finished for him. I let out a long sigh, trying to let my lingering anger dissipate with it. I was partially successful.

“I’m sure anger isn’t the only trigger,” he continued, “but it was the only one that I knew worked. But, with your permission, I’d like to take a look at what your bio-screen picked up on, and compare it to mine.”

I held out my arm in invitation, and he picked up his tablet to hold over my screen. They linked, and Leo downloaded the information that he wanted.

“You don’t have to do it that way to get my data, right?” I asked, curious.

“No. But it’s the easiest. Plus, this way it’s not being uploaded to the internet. These screens are just a monitoring device, and not used for any formal diagnosis yet. So that means that the data is uploaded to the company server just once a month. And...” He paused for a moment, bringing the tablet close to my arm again. “Not that I want to keep this from my father’s own company, but I think it would be best for right now if you and I are the only ones who know about this little secret.”

“Probably,” I agreed warily. I started considering what that could mean, if this information was relayed to people who would consider making me live in a lab. I shuddered with a chill.

“I fudged your stats, and put normal ones in place of what happened last night. Since you had an incident right before you ended up in the hospital last week, I’m leaving that one alone. I can guarantee they already have that information from the doctor. Though what they’ll do with it, if anything, I’m not sure. My mods are better for this sort of thing, and they can’t see them.” He seemed pretty smug about that. It made me wonder again what the falling out between him and his father had been years ago. Leo had alluded to it plenty, but I hadn’t pried. It wasn’t my business, and seemed like a touchy subject. If Leo wanted to tell me, then he would..

“Well, science man, let me know if you find anything interesting.”

Leo just nodded, completely absorbed in his work.

I made breakfast for both of us, as a sort of acceptance of his earlier apology. He could be a bit abrasive or rude at times in his single-minded pursuit for information, though I vowed for it not to become a habit with me. I’d hold him accountable and call his ass out each and every time.

An hour later, and half his breakfast mindlessly picked at, Leo dropped his head to the countertop and groaned.

My heart sank. What did he find out? It clearly wasn’t good news. Unless it was right in front of his face the entire time, and he was just mad at himself?

“Leo?” I asked cautiously from my place on the couch. “You okay over there?”

“Fuck, I’m just too stupid.”

“Okay, that’s not true. Like, at all. Bring it over here.” I patted the cushion next to me. “Explain it.”

Leo muttered to himself under his breath as he came over, though I couldn’t make out what he said. He handed me the tablet, which I took gingerly in both hands—it was expensive tech, based on the brand name, and I didn’t want to mess up what Leo had been doing by accidentally touching the wrong buttons—and looked down at the numbers.

My bio-screen’s stats were pulled up alongside his, thankfully labelled with our names. I compared the two, noting individual differences like heart rate, oxygen, and a number of other stats. The ones in red, Leo’s mods, were the most interesting.

His gamma radiation levels were significantly lower than mine. Where mine spiked high very quickly before dropping, his lasted just a couple or a few seconds longer.

“Huh.” What else could I say? That I totally didn’t see the significance of this information? Because I didn’t. Nothing else was…

Carefully, I scrolled back up to the top, comparing my stats to themselves both before and after the gamma spike. Some things, like my heart rate, stayed elevated for a few moments, but others, like my blood pressure, dropped. It didn’t go low in a dangerous way, but it looked…healthier? That was the best way I could describe it. I was used to hearing my blood pressure was a bit on the high side from all my appointments leading up to my diagnosis, but that one looked…good.

I searched through the others, seeing if I noticed a similar, or opposite trend. My blood oxygen level increased from 99% to a whopping 100%, too small a change to be significant, but some others improved slightly. Not a lot, to be sure, but…there was the slightest difference.

Looking at Leo’s stats, I didn’t notice any changes.

I handed the tablet back to him, considering it all. When he finally spoke, it startled me a little bit.

“You see it?” he asked.

“I saw a few things. Our gamma spikes were different, which means something. And some of my stats got better afterwards. Yours didn’t,” I summarized.

“That’s what I found. But there’s nothing that I’ve found that tells me where the gamma spike came from, or why it helped you but not me.”

“Well, there’s a reason for it. We just haven’t found it yet.” I was aiming for reassuring, but Leo just looked more troubled.

“I think this is going to take longer than I hoped to figure out.”

“Why do you think that?”

He sighed, leaning back against the couch and letting his head fall back. “Because I think more of those weird instances need to happen first.”

“You mean breaking the glass?” I asked hesitantly. I wanted him to say no, though his response wasn’t exactly what I hoped for.

“Not necessarily. I think there’s probably other things that can happen besides glass breaking. We just haven’t seen it yet. And I have no idea how to get it to happen again, either. I’m not going to just try to get you mad all the time. I also wonder if it’s a you thing. Or is it a LaShoul’s thing? Is it something else?” He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I just don’t know Callie. It’s killing me.”

“Oh, is it, now?” I teased. Morbid jokes about our impending deaths were usually more creative than that, but it’s all I had at the moment.

I watched his eyes roll. “Yes. This might kill me first.”

“So what do we do?”

He shrugged. “We wait. Either you'll have another weird phenomenon, or maybe next time it will be me, or it won’t happen again at all and we’ll be back at the beginning.”

“Because we have all the time in the world to wait,” I said dryly.