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of my preprogrammed search spiders. I had customized more than a hundred automatic searches, monitoring the web for any information about the Porters, the students of Bi Sheng, or Jeneta Aboderin.
    I found two more reports of people digging up the sites of old Porter archives, working from the information in Bi Wei’s letter, but in both cases the excavations turned up nothing. The Porters must have either cleared out the contents or found a way to trick the searchers into forgetting what they found.
    Lena settled onto the couch beside me and studied the screen. “What are you looking for?”
    “Anything I can find.” Almost as bad as losing my magic was being shut out of that community, cut off from every reliable source of information and gossip. I might have been sent to the sidelines, but I still wanted to know what was happening in the game, dammit.
    I switched to a report from South Africa. “A lightning storm two weeks ago fried every electronic device in a five-mile radius near the edge of Polokwane. That sounds like a magical EMP, one of the tricks the Porters use to avoid being recorded. But I have no idea what they might have been doing there.”
    I was more certain about the next thing I showed her, an e-mail from one of six publishing-related lists I was on. I opened the attached press release and read, “‘Rose Hoffman takes over as CEO at one of the top UK publishing houses.’ I don’t know the name, but the photo is familiar. I’m pretty sure I met her three years ago. She’s a Porter researcher. She was trying to prove the existence of magical resonance between different translations of the same books. Her findings suggested there could be some minimal resonance, but it wasn’t conclusive, and she wasn’t able to point to the mechanism that would explain it.”
    Lena’s smile made me realize I was beginning to ramble.
    “Sorry. The point is, she’s almost certainly a plant.” The Porters had always had people in New York and other publishinghubs, but it sounded like they were working to take more control of what books—and what potential magic—got into readers’ hands. How many books made the bestseller lists not because they were particularly original or well written, but because they included something the Porters wanted to use?
    Another open folder contained copies of scholarly articles I had downloaded for review, primarily about the development of printing technology in Asia. Gutenberg’s press and the invention of libriomancy had launched a new era in magic, at least in Europe, but China had been working with book magic for centuries before Gutenberg came along. If I could uncover more of that history, I might find clues as to where Bi Wei and her fellow students had disappeared to. If the Porters wouldn’t help me, maybe they would.
    “Time for emergency measures.” Lena bounced to her feet and grabbed the remotes. A minute later, the opening notes of Christopher Franke’s
Babylon 5
soundtrack blasted from the television speakers, making me jump.
    Lena yanked the laptop away from me, set it on the coffee table, and plopped down beside me. She turned sideways, leaning her body against mine and crossing her legs on the arm of the couch.
    Annoyance and amusement fought it out and decided to call it a draw. That alone should have been enough to make me realize how far gone I was. When a bright, fun, beautiful woman resting against me was a source of frustration, I had a problem.
    I wrapped my arm around her and tried to relax, to ignore the part of my brain that refused to stop obsessing. We were five minutes into the episode when I realized how tightly Lena was holding my arm. With my other hand, I combed the thick, black hair from her face.
    She caught my hand and kissed my palm, never taking her eyes from the show.
    I ended up drifting off about halfway through the episode. But I jolted awake when Lena switched off the TV and set the remote on the table.
    “Damn,” she