Carlos stumbled into his bedroom, feeling like there wasn't quite enough air. Cecil was in the spare room, sleeping peacefully, blissfully unaware of what Carlos had just discovered.
"It must be wrong," Carlos muttered to himself, raking his fingers through his hair. "It must be."
But he had the scans right in front of him, multiple ones, that all showed the same thing.
Cecil's larynx was crushed.
Somehow, he could still breathe normally. Thank God for small miracles and all that. But speaking didn't seem likely, ever. Carlos didn't know what to do.
With a choked sigh, Carlos leaned against the door and sank down to the floor. Cecil would never speak again. How could Carlos tell him that? How could he do it? Cecil would be crushed, no pun intended. And Carlos would have to be the cause of it.
There was a knock on the door. "Carlos?" Dana called. She must have come over to visit. "Carlos, what's wrong?"
"Nothing," Carlos choked out. Dana jiggled the doorknob. Carlos was glad he had locked it.
"Carlos, what is it?" Dana sounded worried. "Let me in!"
"Go away, Dana," Carlos called, his voice cracking on the last syllable.
"Is this about the tests?" Dana asked suddenly, her voice anxious. Carlos's breathing hitched.
"Yes," he whispered. He could hear Dana sitting on the other side of the door.
"What do they show?" she asked. Carlos sighed, leaning his head back.
"His larynx is crushed," he whispered. "His voice box. Which means his vocal cords won't work, which means he can't speak." Dana gasped.
"And there's nothing..."
"I don't think so."
"Can I see the scans?" Dana asked. Carlos stuffed them under the door, unwilling to go through the effort of standing up and opening the door. He could hear Dana flipping the pages.
"This isn't natural," she muttered. Carlos frowned.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, look at it. The voice box... It's like something's constricting it. Like someone's got their hands around it and squeezing."
"What do you mean?" Carlos asked. Dana slid one of the scans back under the door.
"Look at this. It looks like someone's squeezing his voice box."
Carlos looked. He had to admit, Dana was right. "But that's not possible," he replied automatically.
"Well, it's certainly not legal," she corrected. "Especially if you do it to the Voice. With a normal citizen, you might be able to get away with it, depending on who you curse and what spell you use. But being the Voice means that you have your own laws, and any sort of spell that interferes with the Voice's ability to speak is strictly illegal. Whoever this is, they clearly don't care about any legal repercussions."
"But it is possible?" Carlos asked. Dana sighed.
"Looks like a curse to me. I don't know what curse it is, though. Cecil might. He knows more about that than I do."
"Should we tell him?" Carlos asked, studying the scan. "I mean, what if we're wrong? I don't want to give him false hope."
"Well, we have to figure out more about this curse somehow," Dana replied. "I think it probably is a curse. It looks like one to me. But if you don't want to ask Cecil, we can find someone else."
"Who knows a lot about curses?" Carlos asked.
"My grandmother does," Dana replied. "We can talk to her and her angels that definitely don't exist."
"When should we do it?" Carlos asked. He could hear Dana standing on the other side of the door.
"No time like the present," she replied. "Let's go now."
"But Cecil's sleeping," Carlos protested. "I don't want to leave him here alone."
"He'll be fine," Dana replied. "Remember, you've got five Secret Police officers outside your house, and you've been outfitted with a new lock on your door. Plus, you've got a lock on Cecil's door for extra precaution. It'll be fine."
"I don't want anything else to happen to him," Carlos replied, even as he unlocked the door. Dana smiled wryly at him as he opened it.
"Look at it this way," she replied. "If you stay, you can't stop anything from happening to Cecil. If you go, you can fix this. Your choice."
"I hate that you're right," Carlos groaned, grabbing his lab coat and pulling it on. He'd noticed that residents disliked it when he didn't wear the lab coat; they seemed disconcerted. To make things easier, he just always wore it.
"Let's go," Dana urged, striding out of the house. Carlos followed her.
"Officer Marcel!" he called as they left. His usual Secret Police officer stepped out from behind a trash can.
"Yes, Mr. Scientist?" he asked, inclining his head slightly.
"Dana and I are going to visit Old Woman Josie, so the only inhabitant of the house is Cecil. We should be back before too long."
"We'll be extra careful," Officer Marcel promised. Carlos nodded once, then Dana grabbed his hand and pulled him away. They climbed into Carlos's car and drove off.
"So what do you think your grandmother can do for Cecil?" Carlos asked. Dana shrugged.
"I don't know, but she and her not-real angels know a lot." Carlos wondered why everyone was so quick to disclaim that the angels weren't real when they clearly were. Then again, he had never been through reeducation, so he didn't know what would happen if he proclaimed the angels to be real. Perhaps the disclaimer was a good idea.
Dana and Carlos were silent through the rest of the drive to Old Woman Josie's. When they pulled up, she was waiting outside.
"Officer Jackson told me you two were coming," she explained. "Is this about Cecil?"
"Yes," Dana replied. "Look at these." She held out the scans as they entered the house. Old Woman Josie raised an eyebrow.
"A constriction curse?" she asked. Dana frowned.
"Maybe, but it seems more specified. A constriction curse would affect the whole area, but this is centralized. It's just affecting the voice box."
"I have an idea." Old Woman Josie grabbed a book off her shelf. Carlos watched with wide eyes as she flipped through it, revealing pictures and chapter titles that made him glad Old Woman Josie seemed to like him. Finally, she stopped, smoothing the pages open.
"Look," she told Dana, whose eyes went wide.
"Really?" she gasped. "You think..."
"It fits the symptoms," Old Woman Josie replied. "It's difficult, but not impossible."
"What is it?" Carlos asked. Dana and Old Woman Josie both turned to look at him.
"A silencing spell," Old Woman Josie told him. "A powerful one, too, that works physically instead of mentally."
"Okay," Carlos replied, a little lost. "Then why are you so surprised?"
"Because this spell's been lost for decades," Dana replied. "No one's done it since The Incident in 1937." Carlos decided not to ask for details. "When that happened, the information on the spell was removed from all books and placed in a special vault in the library. Even this book just says it exists, and the rest of the information is now a recipe for marinated chicken."
"It's a good recipe," Old Woman Josie added. "I've made it a few times. A little too dry for my tastes, but not bad."
"So what do we do about the spell?" Carlos asked, wanting to get the conversation back on track. As much as he wanted to know about the spell, he knew it wasn't safe to go to the library.
Dana grinned widely, pulling out her cellphone. "I'm gonna get my cousin."
