Anthony slips back into my life seamlessly. A stuttering reintroduction occurs, followed by gentle teasing, after which I invite him to stay with me if he hasn't found other lodgings in Santa Rosa. He hesitates for only a second before smiling shyly and nodding his assent ( Read more... )

The girl looks like she could be sleeping were it not for tubes and wires and blinking displays and a buzzing light above her head that is enough to drive anyone awake to distraction, let alone someone like me with a head full of metal. A thought, a bare touch of Forces, and it stops buzzing. ( A Conversation, the first in an eventual series of downtime actions. )

Asclepius reminds me of a diamond: hard, brilliant and with perfect clarity of purpose. When I show him my head with the remains of Grommet’s work, he doesn’t blink, but examines the wires, looks past to see the Gordian knot their twists and turns make inside my brain. When he offers to fix the most immediate, pressing problem, the headaches that ( Read more... )

Grommet has been dismantling his lab under Sieg’s watchful eyes. Right now, however, Grommet is out and Sieg is watching the path of the hurricane as it is tracked across the internet, those same eyes flicking back and forth across the laptop screen ( Read more... )

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if the circumstances had been different ( Read more... )

Joule falls in love with the bay area almost as soon as she arrives in San Francisco. Her trip through the North Bay consillium (with the unfortunately pretentious name of "Five Moons Theosophical Society") is fraught with tension as she meets other mages. Tommy is there, however, and he makes her feel comfortable while she meets a number of ( Read more... )

MIT is new ground for me. It's as unlike Oxford as I could imagine, and simply being in a new place is uncomfortable. But here, it doesn't matter if my father was a mechanic. No one looks askance at a slender Brit so long as she knows her maths, and I am absurdly grateful for it. With that in mind, I wind up in a study group with four other ( Read more... )

The days before Christmas pass quickly. I stay mostly ensconced in my tiny kitchen and cook, making liberal use of Anthony's vegetable chopping and stirring abilities. He keeps a watchful eye on me and makes paper ornaments from colored paper that I know didn't come from the warehouse. He is surprisingly deft with the paper and hangs his ornaments ( Read more... )

Through a clever combination of ingredients, patience and magic, I am certain that I can make a proper Christmas pudding in less than a week. The trick of this, of course, will be in the brandy ( Read more... )

Anthony usually wakes before I do, but this morning is different. Rather than waking to the sound of Anthony's careful stretching on the floor, or to his puttering in the kitchen, he is nowhere to be seen, but I can hear one half of a muffled conversation. After straining to hear, I resist the urge to eavesdrop magically and simply pull the covers ( Read more... )