Codex Born by Jim C. Hines Page B

my legs, and I forced myself to stop drumming my heels on the floor. “Lena has been worried about you. She says you’re not sleeping well, and when you do, you have nightmares.”
    I shoved the laptop away and rubbed my eyes. “What other things has she shared?”
    “That Doctor Karim has prescribed stronger pills to help you sleep, and you’ve gone through two refills already.” She sighed. “Are you surprised that Lena and I talk about you, Isaac?”
    I was, a little. My relationship with Lena had brought Nidhi Shah into my life in a new and unexpected way, but I found it easier not to think about that when I was with Lena. “What else does she say?”
    “That you’ve been cutting back on your work at the library, and you spend hours locked away in your office. She says you and Gutenberg haven’t had the smoothest time working together. No surprise there. Anyone with his centuries of experience willhave trouble making allowances for those of us with mere decades.”
    “I am but an egg,” I said ruefully. She just stared at me. “Don’t tell me you’ve never read
Stranger in a Strange Land
?”
    “Heinlein?” She made a sour face. “No thank you.”
    I had reread several Heinlein titles earlier this summer, trying to get a better framework for our three-way relationship. Unfortunately, the free love fantasies of Heinlein’s work hadn’t provided much insight into making such a relationship work in the real world. I had tracked down a few nonfiction titles that were more useful, though my boss had given me a very odd look when she saw my interlibrary loan request go through.
    “Those computer chips have to be important,” Nidhi said. “Could you use an EMP to wipe them clean? Even a strong enough magnet—”
    “Magnets won’t touch a boson chip.” I jumped up and began to pace. “Those things can survive a nuclear blast at close range. We need to lure the bugs out of the tree and destroy them all at once, and we need to do it quickly. You’ve known Lena longer than I have. How much time do you think she has before she has to return to her tree?”
    “When her oak is healthy, she can stay away for up to a week if she absolutely has to. But with these things weakening her, I’m not sure.”
    I glared at the laptop “Why the hell would Victor make something like this?”
    “The same reason you keep drawing up plans for magic-based space exploration. Victor loved his toys. He loved to create, but he wasn’t always good at thinking through the consequences.”
    I thought back to what we had seen that afternoon. “The man we saw was wearing metal armor of some sort.” I picked up the decapitated ladybug. “Imagine a swarm of these things clinging to you.”
    “They could serve as armor and weapons both,” Nidhi said, nodding. “We thought the wendigo’s wounds had been madeby bullets, but they were roughly the size of the holes these insects drilled through your door and ceiling.”
    I shivered, remembering the insects landing on my body, biting into my skin. I imagined them burrowing deeper, through flesh and bone. “He’s got to be controlling them. When we showed up in Tamarack and began snooping around, he sent his insects to attack Lena’s tree.”
    “How did he know where to find it?” Nidhi asked.
    “One question at a time.” I steepled my fingers and tapped them against my chin. “Instead of destroying them, what if we overrode their orders?”
    “How?”
    I grabbed the phone and dialed the line for Jeneta Aboderin’s camp. I spent the next five minutes explaining that I was her internship supervisor, and yes, this really was a crisis.
    The counselor on the other end sounded about fifteen. “It’s eleven o’clock. Curfew was an hour ago. Everyone is supposed to stay in their cabins until reveille.”
    “Dammit, man, this is an emergency. We’ve got a burst water pipe here, and more than two thousand books that have to be bagged and frozen