Free The Wizard's Daughters: Twin Magic: Book 1 by Michael Dalton Page A

think anymore until I have gotten some sleep.”
    ♦ ♦
    But Walther could not get back to sleep.
    The mystery of the exploding resonance cube gnawed at him until he could stand it no longer. He went back to the study and began picking through the shattered pieces. The shell of the cube, which remained on the table, had been peeled back like a flower by the explosion. A few melted wires and brackets remained, along with a few charred pieces of . . . something.
    As he examined it, he thought he could see what had happened.
    The resonance cube had a sort of brain, but the crystal functioned differently from his self-directed automata like Temperance and the rat-catcher. Rather than controlling anything, the crystal merged the flows that came in through the rings and cables. The knobs were used to adjust the crystal’s position within the flow. Turned all the way to the left, the crystal was completely out of the flow, and the cube was essentially off, as Ariel had believed.
    It was the crystal that had exploded. The melted bracket in the center was where it had been mounted, and from the shape of it now, the explosion had clearly begun at that point within the cube.
    Looking more closely, Walther realized that the charred bits scattered about the wreckage of the cube, indeed all over the table and much of the room, were the remains of the crystal. It had been blasted into sand. But it had taken him a few moments to realize this because the sand was not clear as he would have expected. Picking up one of the larger chunks, maybe half the size of a pea, the mystery of the blue light became more clear.
    The small piece of crystal, along with the rest of it, had turned deep blue.
    Not purple as with Temperance’s worn-out brain, nor smoky, as was more common with smaller automata that ran down, nor yellow or even green as sometimes occurred. Deep, sapphire blue. It was nothing he had ever seen before. And from what Walther knew of how quartz behaved in response to the Flow, it should have been impossible. Corundum could turn blue from the Flow, but quartz did not.
    Even more strangely, the resonance cube was less than a year old, and he had not used it that many times. Perhaps a dozen. No more than twenty. The crystal should still have been clear with so little use.
    Whatever Ariel had done had turned it blue. Somehow.
    Walther understood well—or thought he did, until now—what made the cube do what it did. The shape of a person’s flow was determined by many things: their personality, their character, their intelligence. For mages, their talent for controlling it as well. That shape would evolve somewhat through life, but for the most part, it was set at birth.
    The cube measured disturbances in the flows it detected through the cables. Deliberate falsehoods caused a disturbance in one’s flow, and that was why it also worked as a truth detector. But he had designed it to measure the shape of Ariel’s and Astrid’s flows and how close they were. With flows detected through both sets of cables, a resonance would be created inside the crystal, and that resonance would generate a reaction—a sound.
    It should not have created light. He could see no way that could have happened, even though it clearly had.
    The answer had to lie in why the crystal had turned blue. Somehow or another, there must have been an absolute torrent of energy moving through it. The crystal had exploded when Ariel had turned the knobs all the way right, putting the crystal directly between their flows with nothing to limit the resonance.
    But Ariel was not that powerful a mage. She was greatly talented, to be sure, but her skills were still limited. And Erich had no talent at all. They could not have created such energy together.
    At least, not intentionally. Could there, after all, been some sort of match between them? No, that was simply impossible. A talent for controlling the Flow shaped one’s personal flow in ways no non-mage could ever match.