The night-time landscape raced past beneath the broomstick. Below me the world was a blur – trees, fields, the odd country cottage, the lone muggle drivers winding their way down lonely lanes. I was practically invisible from sheer speed, learning into the broomstick, trying to reduce wind resistance. My eyes were watering from the speed and the cold. I hadn't had time to find any flight goggles, barely even a chance to remember where I'd left my travelling cloak.
"Come on, come on!" I muttered to myself, urging the broomstick through the sky like I'd laid money on it in a race. In a way, I had.
I had sent owls ahead of me, carrying the same news I was, but who knew how long those feathery bastards would take, whether they'd ever get through at all. I myself might not get there in time, and I'd been pulling every string and taking a bunch of risks. I'd even taken the Floo network some of the way!
You can't help but make a few enemies in my line of work, and some of those enemies would have been watching the Floo network just in case I tried to use it one day. Eluding them had been difficult and dangerous but I'd succeeded, racing ahead of them, driven by my mission. I buzzed over the corner of an airport carelessly, probably making some poor muggle shit his pants. But going around it would have taken too long, and in case you hadn't guessed, time was against me. I even ignored the bug that I felt splat against my forehead.
Going so fast, I wondered if this was how lightning felt. Finally I could see my destination ahead of me. Non-magical people wouldn't have been able to, I knew, because something this big and obvious would have a lot of spells cast over it to make it invisible. In fact, the procedures used to hide this immense structure were not normally seen outside of the Quidditch World Cup.
The large, ridiculously ornate mansion that despite all its grandeur was still dwarfed by a nearby towering construction that looked a lot like a vertical bird's nest. It was a system of thick girders, interwoven with pipes and ducts, with cogs and drive-shafts and axles all spinning and twisting slowly inside. Spotlights shone up onto the gigantic contraption as the tiny figures of technician-wizards still moved through it. The base of the tower was made of stone with elaborate Arithmancy carvings. Something glinted deep within it the body of the tower like a giant crystal. Sitting atop the whole complicated arrangement was a massive pod made of gleaming gold and copper – it was half as big as the mansion but so much more impressive.
I swore to myself. Don't get me wrong, I was amazed at what had been built here. When I had last seen this mansion, it was crumbling and collapsing. Now it was a massive hub, the centre of attention for most of the wizarding world. Of course I had heard stories, seen pictures, even helped recruit and supply the thing sometimes. The whole project was the brainchild of one of my oldest friends, Joshua Grey – how could I not help out occasionally? But I had never seen the finished structure in person, and it was daunting. I had never done anything like this before. I preferred to remain in the shadows, dealing in gossip and rumours and secrets. But if there is one thing I've learnt it's that some things are too important to be left to owls.
As I flew closer to the structure, two wizards on broomsticks flew up alongside me. I had been expecting this. I had heard the security around this place was phenomenal, and had never intended to try and sneak in.
"Please descend slowly towards the ground and dismount your broom, you are in restricted airspace," one of the MLEP wizards bellowed at me, his voice magically amplified. I started to descend, but the voice continued, "If you do not descend we will assume you are hostile!"
"I bloody am descending!" I yelled back, my voice lost behind me as I sped through the night air, gradually slowing down. Eventually I landed just before the front gates to the grounds, the two MLEP men landing behind me seconds later. I didn't give them a chance to start talking before I span around and said,
"Hi, I wonder if you could help me?" I said. From what I'd heard, I was worried enough not to talk to anyone besides Josh himself. The few ghosts or magical portraits I totally trusted were all on another errand, one that would only be useful if I could deliver my message in time.
"Alright, calm down. What's all this about?" said the first Magical Law Enforcement Patroller, lowering his hood and revealing a bald head and tiny, piggy eyes.
"Well, it's a bit embarrassing really," I said, lying, "I was invited to watch the launch but I appear to have lost my invitation. Could you tell Mr Grey I'm here?" I asked them, all haughty.
I was reasonably upset by not being invited at all!
"Yeah, right," said the bald, piggy MLEP. The other one was now lowering his hood too, and I recognised his face,
"Smith! You have to get me in there."
"Sorry, Lucia," he replied, tenderly, "You know how paranoid everyone is about this place."
"Listen, just send a Patronus or something, tell him I'm here, alright? You can call it repayment for that favour I did you."
"What does she mean?" asked the bald wizard.
"Nothing," said Smith quickly, "It was just a little thing."
"The way I remember it, it was several big things," I said, tempted to smile.
"Alright, blimey, we'll let you in," said Smith, and the bald man spluttered his objections before falling silent under Smith's embarrassed, intense stare.
"Could you show me the way?" I asked them, haughty once more. Smith agreed to, leading me into the mansion grounds, skulking beneath the scarily tall, incredibly intimidating tower of magical machinery. It was some distance away, behind the large house itself, but I could hear the distant gears grinding.
Smith led me up the driveway, free of the weeds and moss that I had seen on my only other visit to this place. That was long before this project had ever become a reality. Even though I was familiar with the old layout of the building, much had clearly changed. The glass in the windows had been replaced and strange aerials and satellites were sticking out of the rooftops, wrapped around the chimneys. Metal construction sheds had been erected next to the east wing, and a great copper observatory had been built into the top floor of the westerly one. The tower that had been crumbling dangerously had been rebuilt, reinforced, and now there was a large glass balcony atop it, unseen lights sparkling and twinkling inside. The whole building looked remarkably like an industrious, over-wrought, clockwork Christmas tree.
I was led into the main entrance, through the entrance hall. I was entertained to notice that the portraits had all been replaced. The walls were now decorated with noted scientists and wizards, from Dumbledore to Rowena Ravenclaw, all down the ages. There were even a few centaurs, pawing at the ground in their portraits, pictured against starlit skies, various phases of the moon, or in a dark glade, holding open a scroll with a deep look of concentration. The statue of armour was still there though, and it saluted me once more. I wondered if it remembered me. A house-elf appeared,
"May I take your coat and broomstick miss?"
"Yeah, sure," I said uncertainly, not wanting to insist on keeping them, even though I felt I should. "Listen, can you tell Josh that I'm here?"
"Oh no, miss, that would be quite impossible. The Director has given very specific instructions not to be disturbed."
"The Director?"
"Director Grey, miss," she said. I rolled my eyes.
"Yes, that's the man. Please tell him I'm here."
"I'm afraid I cannot, miss," said the house-elf crisply, "May I show you through into the viewing gallery?"
"Um, yes, fine. How long until launch?" I said, irritated by the officious little elf.
"About forty minutes," he said, and remained silent. I followed him up a set of red-carpeted stairs, looking up at the portraits in case I saw anyone I knew. I noticed an old ministry department head with whom I had shared many good conversations when he was alive, who looked at me strangely, apparently sensing my anxiety. I winked at him, and he seemed mollified.
As I was led into a room full of people I noticed the current Minister of Magic, several department heads, and other noted magical brainiacs. There were also a few celebrities that I recognised. Several famous ghosts were floating around the room, looking very regal and snooty. In the corner were a clutch of goblins, standing closely together, talking softly and throwing dirty looks over their shoulders at the wizards towering over them. There were two centaurs wearing their version of formal clothing, one even wearing a thin silver crown. Several of the classier, snootier, more racist-seeming wizards were giving them dirty looks, whilst ignoring the goblins entirely. I thought I recognised a few of them from my school days at Hogwarts, in Slytherin. Champagne and canapés were being served on trays by other house-elves.
This was clearly the holding area for people who contributed nothing more than money and public support. It was glamorously lit, sumptuously decorated, there was even a buffet table with what looked like very rich food. This was not where I wanted to be. I nodded a greeting to the few people I knew, seeking someone who could help me. Frustrated, I could see no way of discreetly letting Josh know that everyone was in serious danger. Then a house-elf wondered past with a tray of champagne and I took one, drinking almost all of it in one go, and I had an idea.
"Excuse me," I said to the elf with the tray, "I wonder if you could tell me something."
"Yes miss?" she said eagerly, looking up at me with big brown eyes.
"I'm looking for a very specific house elf."
"Is something wrong miss?" she asked, her bottom lip quivering.
"No, no. But she belongs to a friend of mine. It's very important that I find her. Her name is Hoppy," I told the elf quietly, determined not to glance around the room furtively. Paranoia was slowly getting the better of me, I'll admit.
The house-elf quickly disappeared and I looked out of the window while I waited. We did have a fantastic view through the tall windows, I had to admit. The tower was more and more impressive the closer I got. I could see the last of the technician wizards climbing carefully down long ladders, a few of them flying off from the upper tiers on short, ugly-looking broomsticks.
"Impressive, isn't it?" said a man behind me, and I turned, hoping to see Josh, instead seeing a blonde man with a handlebar moustache and a monocle. I turned back to the window,
"I've always thought it's very masculine," I commented softly, finishing my champagne.
"Eh? I said it's very impressive!" he repeated loudly, hardly seeming to hear her, "A testament to wizardly willpower! To the ingenuity of our kind."
"I thought it would be bigger," I said, hiding my smirk.
"It's actually even less big than it looks," said the obnoxious man, pointing out the technicians, "See those little figures? They look so tiny because they're actually house-elves."
"What?" I said, peering through the window.
"Yes! What with their tiny fingers, they can do all the fiddly bits. And they're much more suited to the… mundane aspects of the work," he said, gesturing generously, nearly knocking a tray that a house elf was carrying.
"So when you say… what was it? A testament to the ingenuity of our kind?"
"Well, yes, the house-elves helped," he said, put out.
"I heard the centaurs were really helpful, too. They know more about the stars than anyone, after all," I said, purposefully sounding naïve.
"Well, yes. They also helped. But it was wizardly innovation that put it all together. Director Grey is a genius," he said, recovering his poise.
"Amongst other things," I muttered, trying to drink from an empty glass.
"He's a close personal friend of mine," the man told me.
"I'm sure," I said coldly.
"Henderson," he replied, extending his hand, "Vincent Henderson. How do you do."
"Lucia Baker," I told him, and did not shake his hand.
"Oh, I think I've heard the name," he said, frowning, his hand still extended.
"Very probably," I agreed, "How long until it launches?" I asked him, looking back nervously at the window.
"Should be any time in the next half hour, if I'm keeping track correctly. So tell me, Lucinda, what are you doing afterwards?"
We were thankfully interrupted by Hoppy the house-elf arriving just in time. She tugged at my sleeve,
"I was told someone wanted to see me, but I didn't think you were coming this evening. I am sorry I took so long. If I'd have known-"
"What do you want?" sneered Henderson. Hoppy ignored him – she's always had a bit of an attitude, which I think is why Josh likes her so much.
"Director Grey would like to see you," she said.
"Oh really!" exclaimed Henderson happily.
"What? No, not you. Who are you? I was talking to Mistress Baker here. Mistress Baker, Director Grey will of course see you. He is never too busy for you. I'm only sorry you have to wade through this riff-raff," she said, rolling her r's noisily and sneering at Henderson. I smirked as I followed Hoppy out of the room.
Hoppy led me back down the staircase and into a long corridor. She was chatting happily as she trotted along beside me, "I don't hold with him being called Director. It sounds… pretentious. It wasn't his idea. He's not too happy with it himself, as you can imagine. Then again, as I have to point out to him time after time, if he didn't have the title, all of these Ministry people would just walk all over him. If he wants the project done his way, he has to be more assertive, I tell him."
"Hoppy, where is he? It's really urgent that I speak with him. Something is very wrong with the machine."
"Something wrong with the machine? Of course," said Hoppy, who immediately doubled her pace. "He should be in the main control room. You have to go through the eastern wing to get there these days, the stairs have all been remodelled."
She led me through what had once been a massive dining room. Now it was a maze of steel shelves, covered in more pipes and cables and ducts, hundreds of dials and switches and little glass tubes marked with gauges, full of fluid and light. The spindly lights, odd sparks and shifting shadows made the room seem a lot darker than it really was. Tiny silvery cogs span in their casings, cloaked in shadows and hidden behind the faces of the equipment. Needles were quivering on dials, pressure gauges, wobbling wildly on energy-meters. Dozens of wizards were checking the readings against books, or scurrying around waving paper and clipboards, shouting massively technical things at each other,
"There's a point five variance stuck in lens-rod number seventeen!"
"Just oscillate the enchantment rods!"
"I'm reading a leak in the alpha atmosphere pipe."
"Get those technicians off the prism drive-shaft! We need to adjust the output aperture by minus point nought one degree!"
"Switching to beta-pipe for atmosphere fuelling!"
"Bloody hell," I muttered as I scuttled closely behind Hoppy, negotiating the cables and pipes that coiled like snakes over the floor. A pile of papers floated past me, enchanted, headed somewhere purposefully.
After the chaos of the first room we entered, the second was the opposite of the bustling chamber of magical measurements and near-scientific instruments. This room was silent and bright, with only the rustle of papers and the scratch of a quill. The light came from a giant globe on the ceiling, onto which the view from the telescope on the roof was projected, brightened and magnified. The moon shone in the centre of the globe, the stars around it, with a series of lines, equations and diagrams superimposed over it, in spidery white handwriting. It changed as the aspects of the navigation were checked for the hundredth time. Wizards and centaurs both frowned in concentration, glancing up at the globe and then back down to their shallow desks, scribbling something down. Then they would silently flick some beads on an abacus, or flip through a massive textbook.
"Seriously? Abacuses? They're going to fly to the moon, and they're using abacuses to work it all out?" I commented to Hoppy, as she led me through. I was shushed immediately by someone nearby, and silently shrugged an apology. Hoppy led me out of the room, into another corridor, and up some stairs. She commented,
"Yes, abacuses. You know how centaurs hate all this modern stuff," she waved her hand around, indicating everything, "It's a miracle that you even managed to get any of them to help us!" she said.
"Well, you just have to know who to ask," I said humbly. Of course I knew who to ask – I always know who to ask. "How long until launch, now?" I asked Hoppy. She merely shrugged,
"About… half an hour? Twenty minutes?"
We reached the top of the stairs and another corridor, passing the doorway of another room of people scribbling in scrolls. Finally we came to a large double-door that Hoppy pushed open confidently, and I saw the interior of the control tower. It was made of cold stone, almost sweating in the muted yellow lighting. She led me up the spiral staircase to Josh in his absolute element. He was well-groomed; his beard neat, his long hair trimmed, his eye patch a sensible, matt black. He had lost the eye years ago to an attacker with a cursed knife, that I had been partially responsible for.
He was puffing thoughtfully on his pipe. A dozen other wizards were rushing around the room too, but he was standing in the middle, watching it all, his brow creased deeply in thought. On either side of him stood two men in dark suits, two more behind them, and a fifth was inspecting one of the dials. I immediately understood these were Ministry representatives – too scrawny to be thugs, too confused-looking to be competent wizards, too devious and ferrety to be any friends of his. In other words, they were people I couldn't trust. I needed to get him away from them.
As I glanced out of the windows I nearly stopped in my tracks. They were made of enchanted stained glass that swirled and moved, highlighting technical elements of the gigantic tower, magnified in the magical window. A light flashed as I passed it, a cog hissed, and the windows moved their focus, zooming in on a house-elf somewhere inside the gigantic tower who was tightening a bolt with a wrench. Josh tutted, wrote down a note, and flicked a switch that sent the magical window into a whirl, eventually settling on one of the tall ladders. He looked a bit bored, despite his concentration, and then he noticed me. His face went through a massive change; the silent, brooding expression vanishing and a wide smile appearing. His furtive, distracted, hunched-over demeanour remained, however, and I could tell that his mind was still working on problems and lists of problems in his head.
"Lucinda!" he exclaimed, twitching awkwardly, pausing as he walked towards me, shouting a command over his shoulder, "What's happened to the output aperture?" greeting me with a hug. My arms were pinned to my side, and I sighed uncomfortably.
"Josh, there's something very wrong and very secret. And I need to tell you about it immediately. We're all in danger," I told him, whispering into his ear.
"Isn't it wonderful!" he said, not listening, sweeping his arm across the desks full of controls and switches and displays. I became annoyed that he wasn't listening to me.
"Yes, lovely. Josh, this is really important. Something's wrong with your machine," I whispered, seizing him by the shoulder. He looked at me strangely, my words finally penetrating the swirl of his thoughts.
"Something wrong?"
"Very, very wrong," I told him quietly, and then whispered even softer still, "Sabotage."
"What?" he asked again, derailed. I looked for Hoppy, but she had disappeared.
"Come with me," I told him, pulling him towards the stairs out of the control tower. Everyone looked up, alarmed and panicked by his removal from the centre of the room, like he was the lynch-pin of the whole endeavour.
"I'll be back soon," he told them, "I'll be back in… four minutes and thirteen seconds. Don't worry," he said, not taking his eyes off me as he followed me. Halfway down the stairs and out of earshot of everyone in the room, he explained, "Sorry, it makes them feel better if I'm very specific with times. It's weird, the more specific I get, the less worried they seem. Silly, if you ask me," he rambled, looking up warily at the stairway before whispering, "Okay, no one is listening."
"Someone working for this project has planted a bomb on your… look, what do you call that bloody great thing?"
"The Spectro-Purveyance Origin Tower. Or 'SPOT', for short."
"I'm not calling it that," I said, despite myself, "I'm not saying someone has planted a bomb on your SPOT."
"We're also calling it the Tower."
"The tower?"
"Yes, Tower. Capital T. The pod on top is called the Pot, because it'll land at the end of the rainbow, and it's made partly of gold. It helps with the anti-corrosion charms," he rambled, then suddenly shook his head, clearing his mind, "Look, what the fuck? A bomb? Seriously? We'd have detected it by now. Every inch of SPOT is covered in very sensitive equipment."
"Then it'll be someone high up in your technical team. Someone who knows what they're doing. Trust me, the bomb is there. You also can't trust anyone in this whole project anymore. Any one of them could be the saboteur."
"How do you know?" he asked. I could have slapped him it was such a stupid question. He should know me better than to ever ask where I get my information.
"If you've ever trusted me, Josh, then listen to me. You can't trust anyone, and there is a bomb in your machine."
"I trusted you once," he said, sadly.
"Then trust me now!" I exclaimed far too loudly. My voice echoed around the stairwell. Josh looked at me very seriously, and I felt a little intimidated suddenly. The man who had built the colossal machine outside, who had redesigned this massive mansion, who had (with more than a little bit of my help) put this entire project together was now regarding me with the full force of his attention for once. I'd always known Josh was a dreamer with potent magical powers, but now I got the distinct impression that he could see right through me. The moment stretched out and I felt an urgent need to kiss him, and feel his skin.
"Okay," he said, and I blinked, almost betraying my surprise.
"Okay?" I said, my voice catching.
"Okay. I'll trust you. What does the bomb look like?"
"Oh…" I gulped, breathed, and refocused, "It could look like anything. There are rumours going around of very powerful enchantments. Magic that most wizards haven't even dreamt of, they say."
"That could be a problem," he mused, "But we haven't got long. I need this launch to be on time. Everyone here is under a lot of pressure!"
"Everyone here might be dead unless we find it," I exclaimed as Josh started sprinting back up into the control tower.
He returned, and one of the young-looking wizards with glasses glanced up, showing him his pocket watch,
"That wasn't four minutes and thirteen seconds," he observed, and Josh replied,
"No, I know, Cyril. Now listen, everyone! I need to go and check on something! If anyone should need me, my house-elf will be here. Only if it's a genuine emergency, alright?" he shouted to the room. Everyone exchanged very worried looks while Josh took a deep breath and bellowed, "Hoppy!"
She had appeared almost before Josh had finished saying her name,
"What! What is it! Oh, this infernal machine, it's no good for my nerves-" she began but he interrupted her,
"Hoppy, stay here. Find me if there's another emergency, alright?"
"Another emergency?"
"Yes. Another emergency. How long until launch?" he asked the wizard with the glasses. He meekly replied,
"Sixteen minutes."
"Good! Plenty of time!" he exclaimed, slightly manically. "Lucinda, follow me," he ordered, and was already leaping down the stairs again. I followed him as quickly as I could.
We sprinted through the whole building. Josh was sending out house-elf help ahead of him whenever he ran into one of the little creatures, to organise other elements of the very sudden, incredibly urgent search. When we burst out into what had once been the garden, I saw a marquis erected in the centre, around what had been a very inappropriate fountain. I followed him as he raced through it, gathering swift details of the astronauts getting into their specially designed suits, covered with leather, rubber, copper tubing, pressure dials, and helmets with glass faces. We ran past Healers doing last-minute health checks. We burst out of the marquis, met on the other side by a small army of house-elves, each of them dressed in tiny white dungarees and workmen's hats. One or two were still carrying their tools, but most of them were carrying long, golden sticks with a bulb of red glass on the bottom.
"You've given them wands? Clothes was one thing, but wands?" I exclaimed. He shushed me without turning around,
"Guys, we've got an unidentified explosive device. We think it might be somewhere in the Tower, but it could be on the Pot. We have-" he checked his own silver pocket watch "-fourteen minutes before launch. I want you to find that bomb. It could be disguised as anything. When you find it, come and tell me, alright? Don't try and remove it yourselves. I don't want any last-minute heroics. We don't know who planted it. And don't tell anyone, no matter who asks. Just tell them you're under my direct orders," he told them sternly. They listened diligently, intelligently, and then each vanished in a puff of smoke.
We were standing at the start of a long metallic walkway that led to a thick iron ladder at the base of the Tower. The ladder was set irregularly, swerving around the carvings in the stone. It led to another metal walkway, dizzyingly high, that disappeared like a worm into the workings of the machine. I could see the discrete shapes of the technicians
Josh let out a deep sigh, taking out his pipe and chewing on the end without lighting it. He swirled his wand, making an idle light-pattern.
"They weren't carrying wands," he said to me as we waited with baited breath, "They were just detectors. Those particular ones are… well, let's call them Danger Detectors. I haven't built many of them. We've never needed very many, for a start."
"The house-elves know how to use them? You can trust them?"
"Yeah. Of course. Those were my best and brightest assistants. They've worked on this project just as hard as I have. Harder, really."
"I heard people calling them technicians," I said as Josh started pacing back and forth.
"Really? Well, it's fitting," he commented wryly, and a house-elf appeared next to him with a bang, and Josh was so nervous that the pipe fell out of his mouth.
"I think I've found it."
"Show me."
The elf started hurrying down the metallic walkway, Josh striding after him quickly. For a fraction of a second I was tempted not to join them. I had warned him, and my job was done. My duty discharged. I had done what I needed to. Yet my feet were moving and I was already pursuing them down the walkway before I realised what was happening.
The house-elf led us up the tower slowly. It seemed like the minutes were streaming past as we climbed the ladder, negotiating the weird angles, shivering in the cold night wind. I was nearly blinded by the brightness of one spotlight as I looked down, my vision blurring and swimming in front of me.
"Lucinda! Are you okay?" Josh asked from above, and I nodded and continued climbing stubbornly, stupidly.
We scrambled up into the walkway, being led deep into the workings of the humongous device. The noise was a cacophony – grinding gears, rattling chains, hissing pipes and creaking ducts. Next to a complicated arrangement of an axle as thick as my body, a cog twice my size and a set of lever-like controls, the elf stopped. Josh looked where it was pointing at a bundle of wires, a glowing green ball and a tiny, complicated, copper mechanism. Josh sighed sadly, exhausted, coughing and out of breath,
"That's the spin-stabiliser for the dorsal-flank prism-angling drive."
"Oh!" said the house-elf, suddenly ashamed.
"Pass me your KD3," ordered Josh, holding out his hand, having to shout above the machinery. The little elf, quaking with sadness and fear, gave him the rod that Josh had called a 'danger detector'. Josh examined it at a glance,
"Yeah, you had it on the wrong setting, Nail! Damn it!"
"I'm so sorry sir!" Nail the elf exclaimed.
"Listen, I know it's nearly launch time," said Josh, putting his hand on the elf's shoulder, "And we both know that if we don't find the bomb, everything we've worked for is lost. But I need you to keep a cool head. Now get back to your search."
"Yes, Mister Director! Sorry sir! I'll do better!"
"Well, go on then," said Josh sternly. The elf disappeared.
"Fuck!" I said, looking around me in desperation. "You're too soft on these things!"
"I disagree," muttered Josh, just loud enough for me to hear, also looking around him, up and down and all around, increasingly agitated.
Another elf appeared, and we were off again, sprinting through the bowels of the machine. We had to climb a ladder, rising out of the huge boulder-sized gears and into a slightly quieter level. It was a gigantic prism, glowing white with its own dense enchantments, surrounded by more pipes and ducts and steel supports. It was mounted in a series of braces that were slowly shifting on their gears and cogs, the creak of the metal under stress intensely unsettling as the prism was angled perfectly. This was the prism through which tremendous, enchanted light would be shone, producing the rainbow to lift the capsule. Four comparatively smaller prisms surrounded it, each also being tweaked and twisted by far-off controllers.
We clambered to the top of the prism, where a thick, steel-rimmed lens was held by a similar arrangement of shifting, adjusting supports and clamps and braces. The house elf pointed out to the side of the lens and there, dangling above and left of a prism from a thin pipe held up by a metal cable, was a bundle of straw and moss and matted wool. It held twigs and vines, even some fragments of dried leaves, looking like it would blow into pieces. But there was a strange impression of the wind somehow blowing around it. There were two yards between us and the object – neither of us could reach.
"What the hell is that?" Josh asked me. The elf replied first,
"It's registering a four point six on the Helio scale but almost nothing on Aquarius or Gamma."
"What does that mean?" I demanded from below.
"It means it's really weird shit! Do you think I should try and move it?" Josh shouted down, almost laughing.
"How long left until the launch?" I asked.
"About… five and a half minutes," said the elf.
"Well, I don't know, then. I don't think you should leave it there! It's probably enchanted to go off when the launch happens, not when someone discovers it. Otherwise we'd probably already be dead I guess," I reasoned, "But there could be a fail-safe-"
"Lucia, if we're still on the Tower when the launch happens, the light will blind us! Incredibly magical light! Incurably blind," he told me in sound-bytes, pointing his wand at his eye patch. He'd lost his eye to a knife, but there are some wounds that no Healer can heal.
"Fuck! Get rid of it!" I exclaimed.
"Check if it's the only one," Josh told the elf, who disappeared anxiously.
Josh pulled out his wand, hooking one elbow around the ladder. He pointed it at the small bundle of weird materials, whispering and muttering enchantments. His frown deepened as the lack of results grew. I could recognise a few of the spells he was using – he was into deep magical territory now, and still the little bundle was blowing innocently from the copper pipe. At least that confirmed it was definitely magical, and definitely sinister, if nothing else.
I was counting down in my head, and a minute had ticked past.
"Josh?" I asked hesitantly.
"It's not moving!" he shouted, distraught.
"Oh for fucks sake," I said, and drew my own wand. I silently summoned up a short, incredibly hot flame from the end of it, burning out one of the rungs above me in the metal ladder with two bright flashes. Even though my eyes were tightly shut, my eyelids glowed red and I could hardly see. I caught it before it fell but lost my wand, which tumbled away from me into the deep gulf of cogs and machinery. No time for that now, though: I threw my metal bar, the ends still glowing hot, towards the creepy little bundle. In my experience, magic is all very well, but sometimes wizards get too caught up with it. Sometimes they ignore the obvious, brute force option.
The thing was surprisingly fragile – it burst apart energetically. There was a tiny flash of energy, potentially caused when the moss ignited from the red-hot metal. And then it was gone.
"Two minutes until launch! We need to get off the tower!"
"Do something!" I told Josh as I started climbing down.
"We just need to bloody move!" he shouted back at me.
We climbed dangerously quickly. As we were running past the place that Nail the elf had mistaken for the bomb, Josh was surprised by the appearance of Hoppy, who shouting something incomprehensible in French.
"What?" he asked her, not breaking stride.
"There is an emergency," said Hoppy, having massive difficulty keeping up with him, "Everyone wants to know where the fuck you've been! The pilots have been loaded into the Pot, the Lumos charm is about to be cast, everything is ready except bloody YOU!"
"Tell them to go ahead with the launch, we'll be safe by then," panted Josh.
I was feeling cramps in my legs and stomach, but until Josh stopped running, I wouldn't either. We clambered down the weirdly shaped stone ladder recklessly, and I nearly lost my grip once more. As we reached the bottom of the ladder, Josh sprinted back down the last noisome path, his shoes clanging as he put his feet down heavily. I followed him, desperate for breath. Behind us, I was suddenly aware of a bright light, without any heat, but an incredibly loud whistling noise. I dared not turn around. The light was growing brighter and brighter.
"Where's safe?" I tried to shout to Josh, but my breath had run out. I followed anyway, and we collapsed back inside the marquis that the astronauts had been getting dressed in. We had made it, and as the light and noise grew outside, I figured we had made it just in time.
The light was painfully bright. I shut my eyes. Even so, the light was still so bright it hurt. I could hear Josh keening in pain, trying to shout something. Even through my tightly shut eyelids, burrowing my head into my arms, I could see the colours changing. It was red at first, then it was green, purple, blue, and then orange. A wildly changing spectrum of colours splashed across the back of my eyeballs. Combined with the noise I felt like I would be completely burnt away.
When it was over the silence rang in my ears and it took several minutes for my sight to return, but return it did. I looked over at Josh, and his one good eye was red and watering, but still working. He grinned at me, and I couldn't help but smile back.
"So, is that it? Is that your thingy launched?" I asked him, and I could barely hear my own voice, my eardrums still ringing.
"Eh?" shouted Josh, who was clearly suffering the same.
"I said is it over?"
"No, there's a charm on the windows of the house," he explained, clearly not hearing me right, "It would have protected everyone inside from the worst of the light."
After we had recovered, we slowly returned to the control tower. I had borrowed a bottle of champagne off a passing house-elf, who had taken one look at my face and relinquished it happily. Everyone was cheering, in all the technical and navigation rooms. I saw a goblin running down the corridor hollering celebration at the top of his tiny lungs. I saw two centaurs do a high-five! When we finally returned to the control tower, the staff and the men from the Ministry all looked at us with mixtures of surprise, anger and suspicion.
"Where the hell have you been?" demanded a stern man in a suit.
"Dude, you missed everything!" a wizard exclaimed, wiping his glasses on this uniform-like robe and beaming.
"No, he was right there for it," I said, dryly, swigging from the bottle.
"I'll check all the readouts and data later, Cyril, thanks. Did they get up alright?"
"Everything went off without a hitch, boss!" someone in a party hat responded.
"Well, not entirely. Mister Carver," Josh softly addressed a different suited man, "Something very interesting and very, very bad has happened."
He explained everything to Carver, about the bomb and its weird appearance, about how it must have been someone highly placed in the project staff. Carver's face, that had been one of restrained jubilation, became stonily serious once more.
"Is there any way you can find out who did this?" Carver asked Josh, who shrugged,
"I was hoping you'd be able to."
"Well, as it happens, I've had people doing just that since before I arrived here," I interrupted, and drank from the bottle again.
"Is she with you?" Carver asked Josh.
"No," he said, and before I could get upset he continued, "I'm with her." I couldn't help but smile slightly. "So you do know who it is?" Josh asked me, and I shook my head,
"Not yet. I've had people on it, like I said. They'll hopefully turn up a result at some point, but I wouldn't hold my-" I was interrupted by Hoppy appearing right in front of me. I jumped, the bottle dropping from my hand and smashing on the floor.
"Damn it," I sighed at the loss of my drink.
"Mistress!" she said, weirdly somehow managing to get right in my face despite her lack of height. "Madame Melanie has returned. She says she needs to see you. It's urgent," she said, a slight trace of sarcasm in her weary voice.
"I'll meet her on the stairwell," I told her. Josh and Carver followed me, greeting Melanie as she floated up through the floor.
"Melanie, this is Mister Carver. He's with the Ministry. Madame Melanie was the previous owner of this house," I explained. The poor ghostly lady has never had an easy time meeting new people because of the clothes she had died in – sexy lingerie and a tight leather collar, the collar itself having been her undoing. During her life she had run a brothel in the mansion. None of the Ministry officials were keen on keeping her in the house during an internationally high-profile event like the one that had just happened, so for some time now she had been haunting me instead.
"Lucinda, can we trust him?" Madame Melanie asked. I shrugged, looking to Josh, who nodded to me. "Good," said the ghost, "And may I also say how good it is to see you two together again? It stirs up so many old memories," she purred, running the chain of her collar through her hand. I had to suppress a giggle, but Josh was blushing.
"Do you have any relevant information, Madame?" Carver interjected.
"Oh, call me Melanie, Mister Carver," she turned her alluring eyes on him, who also started to turn red.
"Um, yes. And you can call me Bert, I'm sure. But in the meantime, uh, Melanie, would you mind…?"
"What? Oh! Oh yes. It was a centaur named Gawain. He was working with a man named Chester. But I mean, does it really matter now?" she asked, as Carver immediately charged through her, leaping down the stairs, pulling out his wand, "I mean, the golden blob thing has been launched! They failed! You've won!"
"Gawain and Chester?" Josh was asking, visibly shocked. "But why?"
"Well, everyone knows a lot of the centaurs have hated this project from the very beginning," I mused, mainly pondering where I could get another bottle of champagne. "I guess Gawain just did it for the money."
"Yeah, yeah. Centaurs hate everything new. They've never stopped the muggles going into space though," Josh said.
"Muggles are more professional about it," I said, motioning to the mansion around me – a hodge-podge cocktail of magical disciplines that had somehow created a rainbow big enough to ride straight to the moon. Josh made a disgusted noise, sitting disconsolately on a step of the stairs.
"Oh come on," said Melanie, floating out into the stairwell, "I hate to see you sad. You had a successful launch, after all. You'll be famous! Even if you did have to completely ruin my beautiful house."
"We've been over this," said Josh wearily.
"Yes, yes, I know. What needs to be done, blah blah blah. But you made your dream come true!"
"It worked," I agreed with the ghostly woman, sitting down next to Josh.
"Yeah, but…"
"What?" I asked him.
"Well, it's got a bit… boring. I'll wait for the space-wizards to get back safely, then I think I'll put someone else in charge of this whole… thing," he said, weariness and apathy creeping into his voice.
"It's just the adrenaline withdrawal talking," I said, trying to comfort him but actually growing increasingly desperate for champagne or wine. Hell, I'd have killed for even a terrible pint of ale.
"No. This is all but over now. I want to move on."
I sighed. Josh's talents were in direct, opposite proportion to his attention span.
"What'll you do next?" asked Madam Melanie.
"I don't know…" he said, miserably. His eyebrows twitched, his nose wrinkled, and he frowned. Then he looked up suddenly, asking thoughtfully, "How small do you think they can make clockwork?"