"Are we going to talk about the same thing we just talked about? Because I don't think—"

"No." Jason grimaced. "This is about the job. Kira, one time when you were telling me about Mages, you said they could make things disappear, like making part of a wall disappear so they could walk through. That's what happened on the boat last night, right, when the boom disappeared for a while?"

"Not exactly," Kira said. "What the Mage does is overlay an illusion of an opening on the illusion of a wall. The part of the wall that goes away for the duration of the spell doesn't disappear. It never was. Until the spell is over, and then it is again. But only as part of a larger illusion."

Jason looked at her, frowning. "I'm not even going to try to understand that. Can Mage Alera do it?"

Alera shook her head. "This one's only talent is creating Swift."

"What about you, Kira?"

Kira almost said "no," then thought about it. "I never have, and I don't know if I can, but it's possible. Father told me a lot about how it's done. I've just never tried and I don't know if I have the ability. Why are you asking about this?"

Jason reached into the top of his shirt and pulled out the object he had taken from the ship, looking down at it as he spoke. "I know a little bit about Invictus Drives because I did a report on them. What's inside this case is sort of a big crystal, like a diamond, but artificial and a lot harder. When data is downloaded into it, parts of a matrix inside the crystal reforms and fixes in place. When the drive is full, or set to read-only, the entire matrix inside the crystal is fixed. That's really simplified, but—"

"All I could understand?" Kira asked sharply.

"No! That's about all anyone can understand. There are maybe a hundred people among the billions on Earth who get this. I only get the really simplified version myself." Jason stopped and licked his lips nervously. "To destroy the data, the crystal has to be broken. That's why the data is almost impossible to destroy, because breaking that crystal takes tremendous amounts of energy. But if the crystal is broken, the matrix inside is, uh, it's sort of like yanking the foundation out from under a building. Even if it's a really strong building, all the pieces fall and break apart."

Kira gazed at Jason. "You think that if a Mage could overlay the illusion that part of that drive isn't there, the crystal would act as if it had been broken?"