Page 33 of Kings of Sherwood

“So, like Wi-Fi for magic?”

I laugh. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

I lean in, realizing too late that I have fully jumped into geek mode with both feet, talking a mile a minute and gesturing wildly. “And what’s wild is that these places—convergences, they’re called—turn up everywhere. Like...” I stop myself,pushing up my stupid glasses that have slid down my noseagain.

“Like?”

I sigh. Guess there’s no going back now. And if I was going to spend long enough on this stupid thing to get a crick in my neck and double vision, I might as well show it off.

“Here. I took the liberty of marking all the ley lines out, and...”

I smooth the map out fully, red Sharpie lines crisscrossing it like some conspiracy theory wall.

“...and I’m starting to realize this actually looks kind of insane,” I finish, leaning back and running a hand through my hair.

Cool. The other guys are out there in tactical gear and I’m in here with a stupid little treasure map. It feels like middle school all over again.

But Maren seems fascinated. She looks at the map, then up at me. “This is incredible. How did you...” Her eyes dart back and forth across the coordinates, the lines connecting them.

“Um.” I scratch the back of my head. “Do you really wanna know?”

“No, I’m just asking to be polite.” She rolls her eyes. Gives me a little smack. “Yes,I want to know.”

“Okay, okay!” I can’t help but smile. Then panic, inwardly, becauseI’mnot even sure how to explain what I did. “Um, okay. So...did you ever take differential calculus?”

Maren blinks at me. “At Nottingham Senior High School? We were lucky to get a functioning graphing calculator.”

“Right. Okay.” I blow out a breath, trying to think of the most beginner-friendly version of this. “How about this: do you know what a quant is?”

“It’s...a not very nice term for female anatomy?” she ventures.

Oh God. “No, no, no,quant.Like, a quantitative analyst. At a hedge fund or investment bank.”

“Oh.” She shakes her head. “I have no idea what that is.”

“That’s okay. No one does.” I barely could articulate my own job description to my family back when I’d had the one internship, and I hadn’t even used the wordsderivative securities. “A quant’s job basically involves taking a ton of data that seems completely unrelated and running it through advanced models to predict how the markets are going to move.”

There’s a pause, during which I hate myself for even bringing this up. But Maren doesn’t look...totallybored to tears. “I see,” she says, although her voice tells me she doesn’t. And definitely doesn’t understand what this has to do withmagic.“And they do this to...?”

“Well, make money, mostly.” I chew my lip. “But my theory is—okay. Let me put it this way. You know how ice cream sales go up in the summer? Because it gets hotter, right? You can pretty safely say that warmer temperatures equal more people buying cones.”

She nods.

“So...quant work is like that, but assuming that there are contributing factors that we don’t even know about and with effects in areas we may not realize are out there. Like how a slight fluctuation in relative humidity in southwestern Nebraska for three days can drive oil prices through the roof.”

Maren raises her eyebrows.

“Because...there’s a pipeline running down from Canada and the weather conditions in that area have an outsize effect on flow rate.” I close my eyes, hating myself for saying these words out loud to her and praying for sudden, painless death.

“Oh.” Maren frowns. “That’s actually kind of cool.”

It is. But not worth spending fourteen-hour days under fluorescent lighting. Or having to wear a tie to work.

“The point is, there’s all this stochastic modeling—er, modeling of things that happen, um, sort of randomly?” I glance at her. “That you can do to figure out underlying patterns of movement in big, chaotic systems.And this power—like the kind you can feel in ley lines—it’s a kind of energy. It moves, pools, reacts.”

I rub my forehead, because this is where it gets a little...weird.

“So I ran a Black-Scholes model—because basically my theory was that the channels of power might be forming in accordance with a kind of similar Wiener motion—”

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