Spell Robbers Read Online Free PDF

stretch of the room she’d cleared of all wires and computers. Little pieces of blue tape marked the distance stretching away from him. “Let’s keep doing ice,” she said, “since your mind is primed for it.”
    “Okay.”
    She handed him the gun. It was heavier than Ben expected, much heavier than the plastic toy it had started out as. He aimed it, looking down the barrel, through the metal ring.
    “Let’s see the base range without any attempt on your part to control it. Just look through the ring, and actuate a few snowflakes.”
    “Okay.” Ben closed his eyes and, as with rain clouds, he imagined the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in the air coming together. But then he imagined the temperature around the water molecules dropping. That’s all he had to do. Lower and lower, to the point of freezing. The water molecules grew very still, and quietly began building themselves into crystalline spears, daggers, arches, petals, and planes. The architecture of ice.
    Beside him, Dr. Hughes whispered, “It works.”
    He opened his eyes. A few feet in front of them, a little pocket of snowflakes floated in the air. Dr. Hughes walked toward it with a clipboard, took some measurements on the floor, and then came back to him.
    “Okay, go ahead and melt those. Let’s repeat the experiment and see what we get.”
    Ben was always a little sad about this part. He imagined the temperature rising, and the delicate structure of the snowflakes shattered and collapsed. But then he closed his eyes and actuated the conditions for them to rebuild themselves, which they did. Dr. Hughes took some more measurements, and then he melted them again. They repeated this several times.
    “This was an excellent neutral test.” Dr. Hughes scanned her notes. “But just for fun, let’s try the range on it.”
    “How do I do that?”
    “You’ll try to project through the ring, aiming for a distant point. Like raising your voice.”
    Project .
    “Okay. Let me try that.”
    So he did. He looked through the ring, formed the same thoughts that had been actuating snow for the last thirty minutes, and tried to shout them down the range. Nothing happened. Dr. Hughes offered an encouraging bob of her head, and Ben tried again. He raised his inner voice, yelling his thoughts. His eyes started to water. A quivering started in his shoulders and moved up his neck. Again, nothing.
    He lowered the gun, frustrated. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I can’t get it to work.”
    “No need to apologize. I only wish I knew how to give you directions.”
    “I’m making my thoughts as loud as I can.”
    Dr. Hughes clicked her pen. “Perhaps it’s not about volume,” she finally said. “Perhaps it’s about tone. And clarity.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Imagine you’re in a stadium. A football game. The roar of the crowd is deafening, and it’s impossible to hear a single voice through it all. Right?”
    “Right.”
    “That’s the entanglement all around us, filling the universe. There is so much noise, it’s impossible for a single voice to be heard. That’s the reason actuation isn’t happening all the time, with everyone. My technology works by shutting out that noise, isolating and magnifying your individual thoughts.”
    “So how do I make my thoughts louder than the rest?”
    “Not louder. Different. The way a referee’s whistle can be heard above the stadium noise.”
    Ben gripped the gun handle. Not louder. Different . “Let me try again.”
    He raised the barrel, and aimed through the ring, down to the last strip of tape on the floor. He closed his eyes and went through the thoughts to actuate snow. But he stopped screaming them in his head. Instead, he tried to make his thoughts more focused. More clear. Honed like a knife, able to slice through the roaring stadium of entanglement all around him. But he held his thoughts in, like the referee taking a breath before he blew on his whistle.
    Then, when he felt ready, Ben opened his