The Unskillful Thaumaturge

XXIII

"Okay..." Daria trailed off.

"And that means stop speculating!" Lillian grinned.

❧☙

Dakota was, for once, diligently grading papers in his office when he heard a knock on his door. "I have scheduled office hours," he muttered to himself.

"Dakota?" someone said outside. "Please open the door."

"I'm grading. Office hours are Tuesday and Thursday. Today's Saturday."

"Open the door."

Dakota clenched his teeth and looked back at the paper he had been grading, but he couldn't seem to concentrate anymore. He took a few seconds attempting to recall the answer to the third question, then, exasperated, gave up and walked over to the file cabinet, turning the key in the bottom cupboard and opening the door onto the screen. Before he was able to even turn it on, something unusual happened.

His eye twitched.

Immediately he put a hand to it, wondering if it was just the effect of stress, lack of sleep, or a combination of the two, but the fact that it had only happened once, coupled with the sound that followed, cleared all doubt in favor of the true cause. The lock clicked and Dakota heard the creak of the door as it eased open. Immediately he spun around, instinctively shielding the file cabinet, and stared at the figure silhouetted in the doorway. The hall lights flickered slightly.

"Who do you think you are, an embassy?"

"Don't you think an embassy would use thaumaturgy?" a young voice asked, and the figure stepped further into the room. Dakota realized that his visitor was not nearly as intimidating as he had expected, but merely a short young boy, gazing at him intently.

"What family are you from?" Dakota said, quickly and quietly.

"Neither you nor I have the time for you to be a dingbat." The boy shrugged. "I may not have been what you expected, but here I am, doing my job."

"Who-"

"I'm Rory Dunman, your new correspondent. Now I really can't make it any clearer, can I?"

Dakota's tense expression was washed over by a wave of confusion followed quickly by interest. "Why do I need a new correspondent?"

"Think about it for a minute. You were just in a cell and the DIAO still wants you for questioning. Ashley is busy evading questions herself and had extraneous responsibilities even while she was here."

"What about Mira?" Dakota responded somewhat harshly.

"We've all been telling you, Mira's busy."

"I know, but she hasn't talked to me at all."

"You should expect that." Rory leaned against the wall. "Her top concern right now is trying to avoid suspicion."

Dakota just sighed. "I miss her."

"After all of this, I promise, you'll have a chance to reconnect."

"She's the only family I have left."

"I wouldn't be so sure about that," Rory responded sharply, shooting an annoyed glance at Dakota, who looked away guiltily. He stepped over to Dakota's desk and began clearing away papers with sweeps of his arm. "Do you have a mirror somewhere here?"

"No-" Dakota began, but stopped when Rory's annoyed gaze traveled once more toward his face. "Well, I do, but they're in use."

"How many?"

"Two. It really doesn't matter, though, since I'm using them for something else."

"Are you telling me I need to go out on a Saturday morning and buy a mirror?"

"There's one coming in the mail, but it won't be here for another couple of weeks. Why do you need a mirror anyway?"

"I don't have anyone to stay with," Rory replied icily.

"Don't you live here?"

"I live in Portland. I came as soon as I knew you'd escaped."

"Well, in that case, there's a little bit of cash in the drawer- you can take that if you need to get anything."

"I don't need it." Rory shook his head and walked out of the room, the door slamming behind him. Dakota sighed and pulled a granola bar out from under his desk, tearing the wrapper and biting into the chewy surface.

As an extra precaution, he walked over to the front of his office and locked the door.

❧☙

"So can you explain Fifth Wheel again?" Galena asked, tilting her head perplexedly.

"Basically, it's a branch of thaumaturgy that's independent from barriers and tracing, so that type of thing just doesn't work on it. You can do pretty much anything with it."

"Including knock people out?"

"That's essentially just using telekinesis to mess with the brain, and since it's independent from barriers, you can do things to people."

"Even if this guy does have a high efficacy, you have to keep in mind that we don't have a clear enough picture of the brain to be able to do telekinesis that specifically, right?"

Rolf fidgeted in his seat. "Given that he already knows enough to be able to use Fifth Wheel, he probably knows a lot more than we do about other things, too."

"I don't understand what your point is."

"Fifth Wheel thaumaturgy hasn't officially been discovered yet," Rolf replied. "Maybe he is using it to learn about things we don't know about."

Galena nodded along, but on the inside, she didn't trust the idea.

"Hey, I just remembered what I wanted to tell you guys." Evan's voice floated into the conference room, followed quickly by his head appearing in the doorway. "You know that hand mirror case? I did the fingerprint test and the results came out the same as the key." Galena took a moment to reflect on the simultaneous, unspoken agreement that she and five of her coworkers had created to be able to further discuss the mystery on a Saturday.

"With or without the cut?" Diane responded immediately.

"Uh, with."

Rolf nodded. "That's what we expected, thank you." He turned away from the door.

"No it's not." Four pairs of eyes swiveled to stare at Galena. She looked down nervously. "If they buried it with him, then the last fingerprints should either have been rubbed off by gloves or those of whoever was the last person to touch it, like one of the police officers. The fact that we found the dead kid's prints means that he was the last one to touch it."

Diane opened her mouth slightly. "So what you're saying is that..."

"From the fingerprints? No, I'm not entirely sure they ever took that mirror case away. He was buried with it."

"Why would they do that?"

"Of course, it's possible that they could have used tweezers or something to pick it up, but..." Galena came to a sudden realization. "And just to make sure there's nothing else going on, I'll need the fingerprints of everyone here."

"You think it was me?" Evan wondered nervously.

"Not necessarily you. I just want to verify that we're not being tricked and misled again. I don't know how right now, but we need to eliminate everything before we start walking around adding this information to our files. We need to ask more people who actually know about these things before we jump to any conclusions. Essentially, we need to rule everything out that makes more sense before we veer onto the conspiracy theory track."

"Isn't this already a conspiracy theory?" Rolf muttered.

"Only if we tell ourselves that. We're here to gather evidence, not make up a story. The same thing goes for Fifth Wheel. Sure, it's a hypothesis, but we need to get proof before we accept anything that makes no sense."