The smart Hunters began to jabber excitedly. Cody gave Edward his knife back. “Ah ha! Matter organization at the origination site! That narrows down the possibilities.” He uncapped his marker and went back to his board. “If the pocket dimension—”

“It ain’t no pocket dimension,” Tanya cut in, putting her hands on her hips. “Duh.”

“What do you mean?”

“They gotta have a focal point to anchor on Earth. They can’t just pop up. It takes days to stick one on. And I looked all over that blown-up room, and there ain’t no focal point nowhere.”

“How do you know?” asked the Englishman, eyeing her suspiciously.

Tanya was trailer-park elf royalty and proud. She snorted, indignant to be questioned by commoners. “I don’t need fancy schooling to know about magic.” She went up to the board and snatched Cody’s marker away. “Now this is what it looks like when you connect an eskarthi-dor, which is the right name for it. Y’all have been saying it wrong.” She drew some quick symbols. “See? That’s what the anchor looks like. That thing that popped up before wasn’t no eskarthi-dor, but I can probably figure up what it was fast enough.” She looked at Cody’s equation, shook her head disapprovingly and rubbed out a number with her thumb and replaced it with a triangle. “People just don’t understand magic right. Wish I could call momma. She’d know what this was, no problem. Ed, be a love and fetch me a Mountain Dew. I need to do some figuring.”

Ed looked at me, shrugged, and then wandered off to find her a Mountain Dew.

“Diet, Ed!” Tanya shouted, not looking away from the board. “Gotta watch my figure.”

Cody tilted his head to the side and studied the interloper as she continued writing strange Elvish symbols. “And you must be Tanya.”

“Yup. The one and only greatest wizard that’s ever lived.”

“I believe that,” Cody muttered to me, then raised his voice. “Well, you do know some magic, which means you know more than the rest of us. Welcome to the smart team, Tanya…Now give me my marker back. You have to earn your own dry-erase marker.”

Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Trip and I went on patrol. We were one of ten different teams out looking for early signs of trouble. Most of those had a casino employee or two with them to keep them from getting lost in the confusing place. Earl had directed the two of us to the camera room to try to coordinate some more help.

It had been an hour since the quarantine had started, but the Feds still hadn’t tried to communicate with us. Phones, radio, and internet were all down. Cable TV still worked, and as we passed a big screen above one of the bars, I spotted the front of the Last Dragon. “Hey, that’s about us.”