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  It's a future. Edward Hatt's Tanako's world. "This can't be Norfolk," Laura says. "You'd never build a spaceport at a latitude like Norfolk. It's too energetically unfavourable. You built this?"

  "We will build this," says Hatt, "and there's nothing stopping us launching from the North Pole, straight up. You've seen enough of the quantum physics by now. Magic violates laws. Big, big laws. There." He points.

  On the far side of the terminal building is another runway. A different spacebird of a much larger model takes off, using barely two hundred metres of 'asphalt'. Once airborne, it pulls up to an almost vertical attitude, and accelerates out of eyeshot. Laura loses track of it in less than thirty seconds. She can't tell if its trajectory is suborbital or not.

  She realises that the big spacebird had windows all the way along its hull. Passenger windows. In fact, it had about the same configuration as the one that just landed, which means no discarded components. No spent fuel tank. No fuel, aside from a gargantuan quantity of magic.

  "This is the Earth half of the dream," says Edward Hatt. "I don't know what's on the Moon yet, but there's definitely something there worth looking at."

  "Can you do this? Even theoretically, how much of this is possible?"

  "We're going to have to invent some theory," says Hatt. He says this with absolute confidence. It doesn't even appear to have occurred to him that the theory could be too difficult to invent. A fragment of paper whips past in the wind. He snatches it out of the sky.

  And they're back to the grey Norfolk day.

  "How did you do that?"

  "Somebody lost a boarding pass," Edward Hatt says to Laura, handing her the piece of paper. It has the texture of a banknote, and a barcode of a style Laura doesn't recognise. The date on it is thirty years from now. The flight is from here to Cape Town. Duration: two hours, eleven minutes.

  "You just had this in your pocket," Laura says.

  Hatt puts his hands in his pockets. "Are you in?"

  "That was the interview?"

  "We want your finished final project. The low-level thaumokinesis. If you can complete it to your own satisfaction, you'll have shown the level of skill we need. Finish the degree too if that makes it simpler for you."

  Laura holds Hatt's gaze for a while. "The thing you built in Tanako's world is no great trick," she says. "Anybody can dream that big. And I know wands cost a lot. But back there I saw mages in hard hats, doing things I actually don't understand. For a living."

  "Is that a yes?"

  "Send me the paperwork."

  The Seventh Impossible Thing

  Meditation is part of the workload of a professional mage. No employer wants to pay for its people to spend ten percent of the working day dozing off in the lotus position in quiet, well-lit, boringly-painted rooms which could be better used for office space; nor, despite appearances, is "dozing off" what happens in there. Meditation is mental exercise: heavily structured, exhausting, time-consuming, headache-inducing even under perfect circumstances and one hundred percent necessary. A mage whose brain is not properly aligned with the work is a mage unable to work.

  Laura is one of fifteen in Meditation 1 at Hatt Group that Monday morning, and has been sat down for barely two minutes when she has the revelation.

  It's a bad thing for a mage to have revelations while meditating. This is not a religious pursuit, and the achievement of enlightenment is not the aim of the game. Unbidden, distracting thoughts are a sign of a wandering mind, which is the exact opposite of what's supposed to be happening. Laura does what she's supposed to do, suppressing the enormous and life-re-routing fact which has flared up in her forebrain, filing it away for later. She hurriedly starts her meditation cycle over, flattening her mental processes out again in the prescribed way. After another three minutes, an automated chime rings, signalling everybody in the room to move on to the second stage in the fifty-minute cycle. Laura imagines a magnifying glass, held to give perfect focus. She is back on track.

  She isn't. There are too many dots connecting up.

  There was no final spell.

  There are fourteen other mages in the room, all men, of almost uniformly scattered ages between twenty and sixty-five. Laura's mind is reeling and she can't lock it down. She fights the instinct to bolt outside and find a white board and scrawl calculations. She needs to triple-check the Atlantis telemetry and, if at all possible, she needs to ingest something which'll warp her brain sufficiently to force herself through the damned dream again. But she can't move from her spot. It's eight oh five in the morning and everybody in the room has work to do. Everybody in the room is working. You don't break a mage's meditation. It's like sticking a tree branch through a bicycle's spokes.

  Laura is off track. She's not going to be able to think about anything else. Above her head, she conceives the Atlantis orbiter, upside-down, its nose pointed directly at her forehead. Above the orbiter and its tank she imagines green numbers on a cosmic seven-segment display. Minutes and seconds and decimal places. The decimals are rolling up and up. Five seventeen point nine nine. Five eighteen point zero zero.

  Laura believed that her incessantly repeating dream sequence cut out at the instant that the Atlantis External Tank exploded, five minutes and eighteen point nine seconds into the mission. She believed this because the mission timer was visible from her usual perspective in the seat of Mission Specialist Elaine Barry, and "00:00:05:18" was the last visible numerical readout before she woke up. She believed this despite always waking up without feeling the final explosion. She believed this despite never dreaming - or at least never remembering dreaming - the slightest foreshock of the vehicle's breakup.

  But what if she was wrong?

  What if she felt no foreshock because the dream ended a split second earlier? Eighteen point one, say.

  So why would that happen?

  Laura moves into hypothesis. By comparison with her regularly scheduled lucid session, this is a blobby child's watercolour, but coherent enough to link up the knowns. It would have happened incredibly quickly. When Rachel Ferno's shielding collapsed, she - along with Atlantis - was fifteen miles above the Atlantic Ocean and moving at Mach 1.41. Unprotected sudden exposure to moving air at such a speed was like being hit by a crowbar, and instantly fatal. Her body was blasted into the wake behind the vehicle's trio of shattered main engines, then pulled upward into the opaque stream of liquid oxygen and hydrogen pouring out into the vehicle's contrail. When the tank detonated, at T+5:18.9, she was atomised.

  Rachel Ferno is dead. This is not part of any dream. This is a real thing which Laura now knows must have happened. These are knowns which Laura has known the whole time. The real, serious question is what took her so long to put the picture together.

  There was no final spell. There wasn't supposed to be a final spell. She'd already done what she needed to do.

  The dream doesn't end because of the explosion. It ends because Mum ran out of mana.

  That was the plan.

  The chime chimes for stage three. In stage three, Laura works out her next six months.

  *

  Edward Hatt's alarm clock drives him out of bed like a lightning bolt. He hits it within the space of one beep, fast enough that his wife doesn't even twitch. He's a ludicrous man, one of those individuals with the ability to live without obvious sleep, with more interest in getting to work and making things happen than in honest human things like staying in bed and hibernating until noon. Elapsed time until he's out of the house is in the ten-minute range. He'll shower and change once he's cycled to work and he'll have breakfast after a few hours of work, if he actually remembers to eat.

  At this time of year his journey coincides with dawn. Even with gear, his fingers and ears are brittle with cold by the time he gets to the site. He's at work before there's anybody on reception. He eschews coffee. He gets the whole organisation to himself for a little while. He enjoys this.

  Once in his office, Hatt has two hours, plus or minus, of re
latively undisturbed silence. He has a substantial stack of files in his In tray and a substantial backlog of electronic mail. Minor distractions, signature jobs and one-off questions can wait until he has five minutes free between one meeting room and the next. He filters for what he calls the big fish: periodic production reports, financial performance analysis, short-, medium- and long-term strategy, international news with a direct or indirect bearing on supply chains. He selects for everything with substance to it. He spends the two hours, plus or minus, processing data without a break.

  The first shudder which passes through his office is mild enough that he doesn't consciously pick up on it. When his assistant arrives, just before nine, she knocks and enters and tells him (as she does every work day) that the canteen is open and that he should probably eat something. This fact, as it does most work days, registers as "small fish" and fails to connect. She then adds, "Did you feel that just now?"

  Hatt doesn't look up. "Feel what?"

  "A couple of minutes ago. I swear the whole place moved a little. I was coming up the stairs and they shook so hard I almost dropped my coffee."

  "Probably equipment being moved down in the factory," says Hatt, barely caring. "An early delivery. I pray they didn't drop something expensive."

  "It was a big one. I almost spilled my coffee," repeats his assistant, whose name is Sally.

  "You can drop as much coffee as you like as long as you're paying for it."

  "I will indeed as long as you're the one who pays the cleaners to clean it up."

  Hatt gives her a look which says "I am no longer paying attention to this conversation" - this is, in fact, the first time he's looked up at all - and immediately resumes reading. Outside, the rising Sun is blasting mist off the scenery. The view from Hatt's office is the best in the building but still little better than "boring": mostly runway, surrounded by flat green fields and the occasional tree and canal. The greenery is turning brown over the course of October. The view is best at this time of day, with blue sky and red sky ruffling and blending out to the east. But in the years since he built and then moved into this office, Edward Hatt has never once bothered to watch the sunrise. He keeps the Venetian blinds closed. Mainly, that's because the sunlight reflects off his computer monitor into his eyes. But another reason is that he rather prefers the view he invented.

  The building shakes again.

  "Sally?"

  Sally looks in.

  "Phone Chris Wester and find out what's the hell's going on."

  "I think he's on holiday."

  "Well, phone the duty manufacturing floor manager's phone and ask whoever answers."

  Time passes.

  Sally leans through again, with a phone muffled against her shoulder, and says, "He says he just opened the shop up and it's nothing to do with what they're doing."

  "Who is that?"

  "Chris Wester."

  Hatt does not care why it is that Sally thought, incorrectly, that Chris Wester was on holiday. "Chris," he shouts at Sally, "where's the noise coming from, relative to you?"

  Sally goes to relay the question, but the man on the other end of the phone is already answering. "Underground," she reports.

  "Fucking work it out, one of you?" Hatt pleads.

  Sally goes back to the phone. "Yeah, I think he's just trying to work," she says. "Can you get someone to check the basement circles or something? Okay? And call me back. Great. Thanks."

  Hatt closes the door. Sally goes back to her own work. Another few light tremors pass, at intervals of a few minutes each.

  A little before nine, nobody has called Sally back. The Big One makes her entire desk jump and does indeed spill what's left of her coffee. Sally has barely reacted before Hatt emerges from his office at a furious stride. "Someone's pulling my company down," he says as he passes.

  "You've got your first thing in fifteen minutes," Sally.

  Hatt hears her, but doesn't acknowledge her. He already knows, and is inclined to skip it. Bigger fish.

  *

  The most prominent feature of Hatt Group, when viewed from above, is the runway. The second most prominent is the manufacturing floor, which is bigger than the rest of the site's buildings combined, and large enough to have nominal buildings of its own inside it. After that, in descending order of size, are the car parks, office blocks and loading bays. Then come the circles.

  "Circle" is the least precise name. Different elements of the magical engineering community, depending on regional preference and source textbook, refer to them as pitches, gyms, circles, grids and mandalas. They are flat concrete expanses with dense, multicoloured geometric outlines painted on the ground and robust weather-resistant components sunk into intersections between the lines. Sometimes, instead of concrete, they are surfaced with asphalt or astroturf. Rarely, as long as it's flattened and manicured to the level of a professional cricket pitch, actual grass is used. The line patterns guide the placement of magical and mechanical equipment for the purposes of spells, enchantment operations, hardware tests, maintenance and, weather permitting, sports.

  The answer to any question about magic is almost always "it depends" and the reasoning behind the geometry of a magic circle is no exception. The very earliest circles resembled traditional Hindu Rangoli patterns and were laid down in India in the Seventies and early Eighties, long before numbers had been crunched and the actual necessary dimensional symmetries had been derived. Some of those, including the first one ever built by the Vidyasagar enclave, are still maintained, for historical and aesthetic value and occasional special demonstrations. But actual science got in the way of free-floating experimentation and creative freedom. Not much time passed before most of the interesting questions about pattern effectiveness were resolved to enough decimal places to end the discussion. New circles - those used for real-world magic with any kind of serious purpose - now invariably conform to the standards specified in ISO 31300, the "flower book", whose latest version lists eight basic designs of increasing scale and a hundred and five specialist variants. The designs, made entirely from circular arcs and straight lines, are dense, heavily interconnected and heavily annotated. Installation precision is a significant factor.

  Between Hatt Group buildings there are three C-class circles. Laid along the middle of the runway, big enough to test a rocket engine, is a full-sized, rarely-used A-2X. Inside the manufacturing floor are more circles, some of which are routinely blocked by machinery or stock, and therefore unusable. And there are three underground.

  The Hatt Group basement is rarely seen by customers and has a distinct "backstage" atmosphere to it. Fewer of the walls are painted, more of the pipe work is exposed. The fluorescent lighting is brighter to make up for the lack of natural light. Meditation 1 and Meditation 2 are down here. So are rooms D10A, D11A and D12A: private D-class circles. It's the third of these which Chris Wester and the site's security manager Adrian Middleton can't get into.

  "Of course you can't get in," says Hatt when he arrives behind them. "I'm the only one who has access."

  "Try it," suggests Middleton. He has a laptop computer plugged into the D12A electronic locking mechanism.

  Hatt pulls his ID card from his belt and waves it at the contactless reader. The three of them are rewarded with a red light and an irritable bleep.

  "You're already in there," Wester explains. "Adrian pulled up the logs a few minutes ago. You went in there late last night, there's been no activity since."

  "I didn't," says Hatt.

  "The system thinks you did," says Wester.

  "Somebody stole your card," says Middleton, working on the laptop.

  "This is my card," says Hatt.

  "Nope," says Middleton. He turns his screen around, showing them both the last line in the log, the failed entry attempt from fifteen seconds ago.

  Wester groans.

  Hatt says, "Fucking adds up."

  "She's a known problem?" Middleton asks.

  "She's fired," says Hatt. A momen
t's examination of the ID card in his hand reveals that there is sticker laid over its front face, trimmed to size and displaying his name and photograph. He would have noticed the alteration if he'd paid the slightest attention. But he doesn't pay the slightest attention to unimportant things as long as they work. He doesn't notice the card and most of the time he doesn't need the card. It's part of the wallpaper of his life, like his contact lenses and shoelaces and the rhenium kara he wears on one wrist.

  "She switched them," Middleton surmises. "It was too difficult to make a fake one, so she dolled up hers and gave it to you. When was the last time you used access permissions which she wouldn't have?"

  Hatt shakes his head. He doesn't remember.

  "Then she could have had it for days without you knowing," Middleton says.

  Another rumble shakes the floor. The epicentre is definitely inside D12A, and it's a rumble, not a shiver, not a shudder.

  "What's in there, anyway?" Wester asks.

  "A magic circle," Middleton says. "Says it right there on the door."

  "I know that," says Wester. "But what makes it special? Why can only Ed get into it? What else is in there?"

  "Can you get this open?" Hatt asks the security manager, ignoring Wester.

  "Can you prove you're Ed Hatt?" Middleton asks.

  "I'm Ed Hatt, Adrian. Look at me."

  Adrian Middleton says, "If somebody other than you used that tactic to try to convince me that they were them, and it worked, you'd sack me too. I don't care if this is a test or not."

  Hatt glares at him. "I own everything within eyeshot of here, including you."

  "Prove it," says Middleton, meeting Hatt's glare with a glare of his own which says, This is what you pay me for.

  Hatt breaks. Middleton is right. "Alright. What do you need?"

  Middleton crouches and brings up an application on his computer. "You can come with me to use the fingerprint machine in the security room behind reception. Or you can remember the password you gave me the day we set the system up." He shows Hatt the laptop screen. There's a password field.