Page 63 of Witch You Would
Tori ran over, looking grim. “What now?”
“An accident,” Penelope said, glaring at me.
At me? Hold up. “I didn’t—”
“How does this impact your spell?” Tori asked us, her face suggesting it had better not be a problem.
Penelope aimed her fake smile at Tori. “We’ll need a minute to figure it out.” She moved the wreath to the other end of ourstation, as far from me as she could get.
Meanwhile, Felicia held Doris by her elbow. “Are you okay?” she asked, in the most syrupy voice I’d heard from her since wemet.
“Yes, I’m fine, thank you.” Doris patted Felicia’s arm.
What the fuck?
Tori hustled the judges away before I could ask Doris what had happened. Had she fallen against the table? Had Felicia pushedher?
Would it matter? Not likely, after Isaac’s speech.
Time for damage control. I checked the wall clock. A little under six hours to go. Penelope had started putting the catalysttogether yesterday. No way would she have time to brew it up again. Unless...
When I finally finished cleaning the mess up, Penelope had retreated to an empty corner of the table with her notebook andwas furiously scribbling something.
“We have to shortcut the process,” I said. “There’s a way that should work, but...”
“But?”
“We have to watch it super carefully or it could cause a blowback.”
She stopped writing. “You want to use Papin’s thaumaturgical pression process. To pressure-cook it.”
Of course she’d know. “Yeah. That.”
Penelope choked the pencil, her skin losing color. “Have you... ever done it?”
“In college, when I had to pull a few all-nighters.” The first time, I’d been in a cold sweat, worrying that I’d get caughtby a TA and yelled at, or worse, wreck the lab. “Have you?”
“Once.” The way she whispered it made me wary.
“I can take lead if—”
“No,” she said. “No way. I swore I’d never do it again.”
She snapped the pencil in half and stared down at her hand in horror.
“Okay,” I said quietly. “I hear you. I’m just not sure how we can re-create that potion without it.”
“We can... do something else.” Penelope laid the broken pencil pieces on the table. “It won’t be as elaborate as we’d planned,but...”
“It’s a risk.” I smoothed down my mustache nervously. “We could lose the round like Quentin and Tanner did.”
“Well, maybe if you hadn’t spilled the potion, we wouldn’t have this problem.”
Wow. Even after our conversation last night, she still jumped to the worst possible conclusion. That felt fucking great.
I forced a derpy smile as I leaned closer. “We can talk about what really happened later, but for now, we have to keep pretendingwe like each other and fix this. If you don’t want to pressure-cook the spell, I respect that. What’s the backup plan?”
“Gassman’s one-pot fusion,” she said. “It bypasses the separation and purification steps.”
