.

you, Melisande, thank you for bringing me here.” And back her attention went to the ODEC door.

      “Hang on,” said Tristan as she approached it. “Let me explain what happens when it’s activated.” He opened the door with an oven mitt and gestured inside—we could all hear her expressions of surprise—and then he leaned in close to her, voice calm and businesslike, detailing what was to come.

      The Odas, the Maxes, and I looked round at each other with various facial expressions, all of which were a way of saying, in silence, Holy shit. “This is really happening,” I said, my pulse dancing. Seeing Tristan and a witch standing at the ODEC door suddenly made my heart thrill. But for him, I at this moment would be grading worksheets on syntax.

      I sashayed over to them. “Should we put her in the ski suit?” I asked Tristan.

      “I need no protection from the forces that restore my magic to me,” Erszebet scoffed.

      “But it will be cold in there, like Siberia—”

      “Pft,” she said. “It will be invigorating.”

      “It might invigorate you to death,” warned Tristan.

      She made a face that had already, in the last forty minutes, become her signature look: a dismissive pout with contemptuously knitted brows, head tilted slightly to one side, and a brief subtle eye roll. I suppose on another sort of face—a sexy villainess from a silent movie, perhaps—it would have had a sultry quality, but on a centenarian it just looked silly.

      “I am strong in ways you do not know,” she assured him.

      Tristan and I exchanged looks. I felt myself increasingly thrilled that this was happening, and impressed with Tristan’s unflappable calm (although it is true his face was proverbially shining with excitement). “Stokes, suit up and be in here with her, will you?”

      “Do not call her Stokes, that is disrespectful.” Erszebet scowled. “You are a disrespectful man. You called me a liar before. Do not get on my bad side. You will regret it. But”—and here she turned to me with a smile no less fierce than her scowl—“I agree for Melisande to be with me for the first spell. It is fitting. She was the cause of the last spell.”

      Tristan and I exchanged confused looks, without commentary.

      “Tell us about this first spell of yours,” Tristan requested.

      She shrugged offhandedly as she set her bag on the console and riffled through it. “It is nothing, it is very simple. I must simply undo an earlier spell, that’s all. Then I can begin doing what you ask of me. Hurry, Melisande.”

      I left the chamber to find the snowsuit, donned it, and re-entered the ODEC pulling on the oxygen mask. Erszebet regarded me, appalled. She was fidgeting with something I could not see well—through the shield of the mask it looked like she was massaging a mop head. Before I had a chance to ask her about it, she was onto Tristan again:

      “You make her dress like that?” she said to him. “I don’t like you at all.”

      “It’s for her own protection,” he said tersely. He had stopped calling her “ma’am.”

      Erszebet (in her outsized vintage cocktail dress) and I (in my snowsuit, balaclava, and oxygen mask) stood beside each other as Tristan, just outside the ODEC, raised his thumb and closed the door on us. There was a brief wait as Oda and the Maxes and Vladimirs went through their checklists. I glanced at the old lady across from me and felt an extraordinary combination of sentiments all at once—excitement, disbelief, anticipation, confusion, fear, hope. Had anyone told me this would be how my spring were to unfold, I’d have laughed my ass off at them scoffed. Seriously.

      I remember what happened for about the next quarter second: the dim sound of the Klaxon outside, the hair standing up on the back of my neck, the lights going out. In that precise moment, a lovely aroma both floral and musky overwhelmed me, and then—as before—I lost all clarity, and the next thing I was aware of was somebody peeling a balaclava off my head. I was lying supine in a vaguely familiar office, my back propped up against that somebody’s knees.

      “Stokes? You okay?”

      I took a moment to think about this. Only the fellow from the shadowy government entity called me Stokes, so this must be him. His name was something from a medieval romance. Percival? Lancelot?

      “Tristan,” he corrected, grinning down at me. “But I get the Lancelot thing a lot.” He roughed up my hair. “Come on, sit up. Meet our new witch.”

      Memory came flooding back. “Yes,” I said unsteadily. “Erszebet. I’ve met her.”

      “No.” He chuckled. “You haven’t. Take a look.” He propped me farther up so I could look across the room.

      About twenty feet away from me, near the control console, stood a stunningly beautiful young woman, hardly more than a girl, wearing Erszebet’s dress. The garment now curved and clung to an exaggeratedly shapely physique, almost perfectly hourglass. Her hair was shoulder-length, thick and full and dark, her eyes a deep green. She mesmerized us all by simply standing there, with a gleeful, impertinent smirk tugging the perfect curve of her mouth to one side.

      With Tristan’s assistance, I rose to my feet terribly awkwardly, the snowsuit making synthetic slithery noises as I moved. I felt like a yeti in the presence of a gazelle.

      “Meet Erszebet Karpathy,” said Tristan, beaming. “She’s our witch.”

      Diachronicle

      DAY 294 (CONTD.)

      In which every little thing she does is magic

      EVERYONE IN THE ROOM WAS staring at her—Oda-sensei, Rebecca, the Maxes. The gleeful impertinent smirk fixed on Tristan.

      Tristan started to laugh in a breathy way, trying but failing to suppress glee. “Wow,” he said. Against my upper back, his torso shifted slightly. “We did it.” He sounded giddy. Everyone applauded, looking rapt.

      “I did it,” she corrected him. The accent, which had made her sound crabby when she was nearly two hundred years old, now made her exotic, adding to the glimmer of her beauty. “I warned you do not want to get on my bad side.”

      “Doesn’t look like you have a bad side,” I said, so that Tristan wouldn’t.

      Her attention turned to me, and she grew more serious. “Do I look more familiar now?” she asked. “This is how I appeared when we first met. I was only nineteen, but I was a prodigy. You were lucky that I was the one you found.”

      “I’m sorry, but we really have never met before,” I said. And then to Tristan, almost under my breath: “I . . . I’d like to get out of this thing, please.” It was foolish to feel so self-consciously lumbering just because there was another young female in the room who happened to be crazy-gorgeous. I was not used to being fawned on by anyone—Tristan treated me like an extension of himself—but suddenly I felt somewhat gruesome.

      Tristan, eyes glued to Erszebet’s face (and curves, I am sure), released me so I could unzip myself from the snowsuit. But even wearing civvies, I felt doltish while this elegant creature held us all entranced. Entranced is not the right word, though—that conjures a sense of a doe-eyed fairy-tale princess, and Erszebet was not that. She was fierce. Not deliberately, not like the Alpha Girl in a high school clique . . . it was effortless on her part, elemental. And she seemed amused by how her transformation distracted the rest of us.

      “The experience was very pleasant,” she continued to Tristan, in a so-there tone. “Do not presume to tell me what is good for me or not. Ever again.”

      “Got it,” he said almost meekly. His eyes kept sinking toward her boobs breasts bosom, as if lead weights were attached to them; then, with visible effort, he would wrench them back to her face.

      There was a long pause