We all sat on the floor and gathered round.
A button flap closed the sack. Carefully, I unfastened it, opened it, and reached inside. Nothing snapped at me, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had. My hand touched a rectangle of cool stone, which I drew out and set on the cloth.
It was a rough tablet of polished jade, pale swirling white and gray in its depths. A half dozen Chinese characters were carved into the flat surface. Beautiful, it would have been at home in a museum display. It seemed so innocuous.
“That’s it?” I said. I didn’t mean to sound disappointed.
“You weren’t expecting an actual pearl, were you?” Grace said.
I shrugged. “You know, maybe, yeah.”
Cormac moved closer to study it. “It’s not a thing, it’s a spell, isn’t it? Worked into the stone, made permanent.” He was stroking his chin, as if he was getting ideas. Amelia was probably loving this.
“Does it really work?” I said.
“I’m thinking it does,” Cormac said. “You notice the coin Henry was wearing?”
“I noticed he was wearing one,” Ben said.
“I’m thinking he already made himself a batch of the things,” Cormac said.
If only I had a few dollars in my pocket, or maybe a granola bar. My stomach growled, still hungry despite tea and cakes with the goddess. It must have been close to breakfast.
I said, “Does anyone have something to eat? Granola bar maybe?”
“Don’t tell me you’re hungry,” Cormac said.
“No. I want to try something.”
He pulled a Power Bar from an inside breast pocket of his leather jacket—a jacket with very deep and infinite pockets, apparently—and tossed it to me. I managed to catch it without fumbling. Small victories …
I put the jade tablet back into the bag, along with the Power Bar, and closed the flap.
“What are you doing?” Grace asked.
“I just want to see if this is worth all the effort we’ve spent on it,” I said.
“You can’t—” she said, horrified. I stopped her with a glare.
“So. How long does it take to work?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I have no idea how it’s supposed to work.”
“What do you know about it?”
“The magic that made it is lost. That’s why everyone wants it so badly.”
Too curious to wait and unable to keep my hands off it, I lifted the flap of the bag. Which was filled with Power Bars. I scooped them out, all of them, at least a dozen, which made an impressive pile on the floor. Then I just stared at them, afraid to touch them, because they couldn’t be real, could they?
“Okay, that’s weird,” Ben said. “Isn’t there something in the law of physics that says this should be impossible?”
“Yeah,” I murmured.
Cormac said, “Might be some kind of dimensional door or
pocket. It got the mass for it from somewhere.”
“Huh,” I said. “Anyone have a twenty? A fifty?”