“Tr-Trinity,” Zeke sputtered. “Hey, uh… how’re they hanging?”
“At a crossroads, by the entrails,” she said. She snapped her phone shut. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?”
“Just… I was just… making some inquiries for a friend,” Zeke said.
“A friend with some reality he wants to get rid of?” Trinity asked.
“It’s more of a scholarly thing,” Zeke said. “Professional curiosity, all that jazz.”
“Curiosity killed the crab.”
“Lobster,” Zeke said.
“They boil up the same,” Trinity said.
“Look, this is all very intimidating, but I’ve got no delusions… I’m a small-time charms peddler. Do you really have nothing better to do than listen to my phone calls and wait to find something to bust me on?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Trinity said. “I’m not listening to your phone calls, I’m listening to the dentist’s… but I would have gotten to you anyway, since I’ve got a trace spell running on the subject. If somebody with an ounce of talent or power starts asking around, it’ll get back to me. We keep a tight lid on those kinds of magics… a tight lid. Whatever Dr. Shadow knows on the subject, he’s just smart enough not to talk to someone like you about it.”
“Yeah? So who’s asked about it recently?” Zeke asked. “Except for me.”
“No one,” Trinity said. “I wouldn’t tell you, but I want you to understand how serious this is. No one else has been that stupid.”
“What about in the last year?”
“Zeke, no one’s made serious inquiries in decades,” she said. “We keep this shit buried. ‘Abracadabra’ is just so much cartoon nonsense to most people… casual dabblers never think to look any deeper than that, and by the time most serious practitioners have enough knowledge and power to matter, they know better. We did have a false alarm in the nineties, an Englishwoman with latent talent doing background research…”
“Yeah, I think I heard something about that,” Zeke said. “I kind of thought you dropped the ball there… how come she got a pass but you’re here riding my shell?”
“I let it through because the birth of the information age meant it was inevitable that the more serious implications of the words would get found out and spread around,” she said. “If it happened in a children’s book, as fantasy magic? That’s pretty much the best-case scenario.”
“But other than that, you haven’t had a blip in ages?” Zeke asked.
“I haven’t had a ‘blip’ since before the word ‘blip’ entered the parlance,” Trinity said.
“That explains why you’re so tense,” Zeke mutttered.
“What?” Trinity asked. Her phone rang. “Hold on, I have to take this.” She flipped it back open, turning her face away from Zeke. “Agent One. I’m a little busy… what? I’m actually busy with that. How’d… I’m taking care of it. This isn’t your concern.” She snapped the phone shut and turned back to Zeke. “You have attracted some dangerous attention, Mr. the Lobster. If you have any doubts when I tell you that no one has been stupid enough to sniff around after the proper use of the words of unmaking, banish them from your mind. Too many powerful people are working to keep them under wraps.”
“So, with all this effort to watch for people learning how to use the words, who’s watching to see if anybody actually is doing it?” Zeke asked.
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