You blink and are back in the placement testing room. Darcy has cleared the chairs away from the end near the door. Bright blue painter's tape criss-crosses the concrete floor, forming a triangular pattern.
"Pretty clever, huh?" Darcy says. "I was going to use pattern paper so the magical energy would shred the evidence, but it's too large for me to do that easily. The painter's tape crisps up like bacon when you channel magic through it, so it's almost as good."
You eye the pattern. Darcy used varying thicknesses of tape to form whorls. In places, she used a box cutter to shave the tape down even further. "You sure you got this right?" you ask.
"Used a laser distance meter and a protractor and an engineer's scale ruler and an adjustable triangle and really everything but a shadow-checking groundhog. The pattern's perfect."
"I'm still not sure—" Static drowns out Manish. The headache stabs through you again. When it clears, you're in position at one vertex of the triangular pattern. Manish and Darcy are at the others.
A roll of painter's tape is in your hand.
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