Iced - Moning Karen Marie (читать книги онлайн регистрации .txt) 📗

“Yep. I went to their optical analysis lab. Place is a dream. I wanted to know what was happening to the stuff that got iced on a molecular level. Why it was still cold. Why it felt wrong.”

I consider and discard the fire theory swiftly. Off the top of my head I can think of five scenes with no fire present. I dredge my memories, find the file where I put the reconstructed images of the scenes and slap them up on an imaginary screen inside my head. I flash through them as I listen, back and forth, breaking them down, analyzing. “What did you find?”

“Trinity was pretty much untouched. Seems people don’t pilfer things that don’t address immediate needs. I padlocked everything I wanted for myself before I left. They have ultrafast Femtosecond laser systems! The setup is sweet. Pretty much everything I ever wanted to play with is there. Dude, they’ve got an FT-IR connected to a Nicolet Continuum Infrared Microscope!”

“Dude,” I say appreciatively, though I have no idea what he just said. I look beyond my mental screen at the scene in front of me again, wondering if these folks saw it coming, too, like a lot of the others did. They must have. Beneath the ice their mouths are open, faces contorted. They were screaming at the end. Soundlessly but screaming all the same.

“With enough generators running, there’s no kind of spectroscopy I couldn’t perform,” Dancer says happily.

“What the hell is spectroscopy?” Christian says.

“The study of the interaction of matter and radiated energy,” Dancer says. “I wanted to excite molecules so I could study them.”

“How … exciting,” Ryodan says.

“I prefer to excite women,” Christian says.

“It excites the feck out of me,” I say. “Don’t make fun of Dancer. He can think circles around you. He could probably figure how to excite your molecules and short them out.”

“Excitation,” Dancer says, “can be accomplished by a number of means. I was specifically interested in temperature and velocity, curious about the kinetic energy of our ziplock detritus. I thought the base state of the atoms might tell me something.”

Got to love a dude that says things like “kinetic” and “detritus.”

“What’s kinetic energy?” Jo says.

“Everything vibrates, all the time. Nothing is motionless. Atoms and ions are constantly deviating from their equilibrium position,” Dancer explains. “Kinetic energy is the energy an object possesses due to its motion.”

“Sound is a type of kinetic energy,” I say. I’ve often wondered about the properties of my ability to freeze-frame, why I can use energy the way I can, where I get it from, how my body manufactures it but another person’s doesn’t. I’m fascinated by the different types of energy, what they can do, how everything around us is constantly in motion on some minuscule level. “When a guitar is strummed, molecules are disturbed and vibrate at whatever frequency they’ll vibrate at under those circumstances. Their kinetic energy creates sound.”

“Exactly,” Dancer says. “Another example of kinetic energy is when you crack a whip in one of several specific modes of motion, the sound it makes is because a portion of the whip is moving faster than the speed of sound, and it creates a small sonic boom.”

“I didn’t know that.” Now I’m jealous of a whip. The speed of sound is over seven hundred miles per hour! I don’t make sonic booms. I want a whip. I like the idea of walking around making sonic booms everywhere. I can’t believe he never told me this before.

“This better be going somewhere,” Ryodan says.

“It is,” I say. “Dancer doesn’t waste time.”

“He’s wasting mine.”

Something’s gnawing at the edge of my brain. I’m relieved to realize these folks died quickly and without suffering, because I just calculated the most likely trajectory of the Hoar Frost King’s path, from where I saw it disappear, and I was wrong about my first assumption. There’s no way these folks saw it coming. None of them were facing the direction it came from. They died instantly, with no awareness of what killed them. I’m relieved. Unlike me, most folks don’t seem to want to live their death in slow-mo. Mom always used to say she hoped she’d die in her sleep, easy and without pain. She didn’t.

“You’re never going to believe what I discovered,” Dancer says. “I was staring straight at the results and still refused to accept it. I kept checking, running different tests, testing different objects. I went back and grabbed more ziplocks and tested that stuff, too. The results were the same over and over. You know what absolute zero is, right, Mega?”

“Like, where the feck I’m standing?” I say, but I don’t mean it, because if it was, I wouldn’t standing here. I’d be dead. I frown, studying the scene, trying to make sense of something. If they didn’t see it coming, why were they screaming? Did they feel the same suffocating panic I felt at Dublin Castle before it arrived?

“Isn’t absolute zero theoretical?” Christian says.

“Technically, yes, because all energy can never be removed. Ground state energy still exists, although laser cooling has managed to produce temperatures less than a billionth of a Kelvin.”

“Again, what the hell is your point?” Ryodan says. “Are you saying these scenes are being cooled to absolute zero?”

“No. The only reason I brought that up was to illustrate the connection between extreme cold and molecular activity, and the fact that even at the most extreme cold possible, all objects still have energy of some type.”

“And?” Jo says.

“On a molecular level, the debris left by the Hoar Frost King has absolutely no energy. None.”

“That’s impossible!” I say.

“I know. I ran the tests over and over. I tested multiple samples from every scene. I went to Dublin Castle, dug pieces of Unseelie from the snow and tested them, too,” he says. “They’re inert, Mega. No energy. No vibrations. Nothing. They’re motionless. Deader than dead. The things I was testing can’t exist, yet there I was holding them in my hands! Physics as I know it is being reinvented. We’re standing in the doorway of a new world.”

“So, you think it’s drawn by energy, and eats it? Like fuel, maybe it uses it so it can move through dimensions?” Jo says.

Dancer shakes his head. “I don’t think it’s that simple. Most of the scenes it iced didn’t have an impressive stockpile of energy. If it was after energy, there are an infinite number of richer places to fuel up. I speculate the absence of energy when it vanishes is a secondary and perhaps a completely unintended effect of whatever it’s doing, tangential to its primary purpose.”

I got the same impression with my sidhe-seer senses at Dublin Castle, that it wasn’t malevolent or intentionally destructive. I sensed it was enormously intelligent and hunting for something.

“What is its primary purpose?” Ryodan says.

Dancer shrugs. “Wish I knew. I haven’t been able to figure that out. Yet. I’m working on it.”

“Well, what are we supposed to do?” Jo says, looking around. “There has to be something!”

“Stand around, hoping the bloody thing decides to appear while we’re looking, then hit it with whatever we’ve got handy in the two seconds it’s actually here in our world?” Christian says disgustedly. “At least I know what the Crimson Hag wants. Guts, preferably immortal ones.” He gives Ryodan a look. “And I know what to use for bait.”

“So do I,” Ryodan says.

“What are you talking about?” Jo says, looking between Christian and Ryodan. “What’s the Crimson Hag?”

I realize she hasn’t seen my Dani Daily. Nor does she know Ryodan was ever dead. She has no clue her “boyfriend” is immortal. I decide to save that bombshell for the perfect moment. I also decide I’m going to be spending a lot of time with Christian and Ryodan, hoping the Hag comes after them. I let her loose. I’m the one that has to send her back to hell.