“Just pointing things out,” I said as I turned the page to a map of the dead lines in Arizona. A second map showed where the author thought they’d been before they’d been shoved together. Quen was right. There might be something here. It was all theory, but theory based on fact and observation.

Seeing me intently quiet, Quen asked, “Do you want something to drink? Eat?”

“No-o-o,” I drawled, feeling like I was close to something.

Hesitating, Quen shifted his chair forward. “I’d like to go out with you the next time you look at the Loveland ley line.”

I thought of his sluggish left leg. He probably couldn’t tap a line yet either. I said nothing, embarrassed. He wasn’t ready to battle demons again. Maybe next week. But next week would be too late.

Quen frowned at my silence, knowing what it meant. Clearly frustrated, he leaned closer until I could smell his aftershave over the characteristic woodsy wine-and-cinnamon scent. “I think I know how Ku’Sox made that event horizon.”

I paused in my reading and looked up. “Event horizon?” Jenks asked, but that was what Al had called it, too.

“The purple line within a line sucking everything in,” he stated, and I shuddered. No wonder I’d felt squished, even if it had only been my mind. Al was lucky to be alive. That the collective had something for him to pattern himself on was probably how he had survived.

Quen carefully lifted the book toward him, his eyes on the yellowed pages. “I think Ku’Sox made it by gathering up the small imbalances that already existed in the other lines, concentrating them in the leaking line you made,” he said, carefully flipping back to the paragraph where the author mentioned the possibility of small line imbalances having no effect if the individual lines were spaced out enough and aligned to the polar forces of nearby lines.

I scooted my chair closer to Quen’s and read the first passage again. “Al did say that the lines were balanced to within safe parameters, implying they all leaked to some degree.”

“Must have been small leaks,” Jenks said, hands on his hips as he hovered over it all, his dust bringing the print back to a new-edged brightness.

“That’s just it,” Quen said, his thick fingers tapping the table. “They don’t add up to what’s in the Loveland ley line.”

“They would if they acted on each other exponentially,” I said.

Quen’s expression twisted in doubt. “Why would they do that?”