Body Surfing

diaphragm and a little bag of pot fell out.
    “The fact that she keeps those two things together…”
    Jasper chuckled. “You really think you’re gonna put Leo in that? And, like, why this one anyway? Why not one of those vases I saw downstairs?”
    “One, because those vases downstairs are seven-hundred-year-old Japanese porcelain. Some of them are worth more than your house. And two, a lot of glazes have metal in them. Just traces, but I don’t want anything that can even remotely work as a conductor.” Q. shrugged. “It’s all guesswork at this point. But it’s not like we have anything to lose.”
    Jasper thumped the vase’s unglazed side. “Let’s start with how.”
    “It’s easier to show you, I think.” Q. led Jasper to the kitchen, told him to wait. For the next twenty minutes he puttered back and forth between the garage and the basement, dropped bits of wire and small pairs of pliers on the counter, something that looked a lot like a light switch.
    Don’t just sit there , Michaela said. Make him a sandwich or something .
    “I thought I possessed Michaela Szarko, girl-punk pioneer of Dearborn Academy, not June Cleaver.”
    Look, Van Arsdale, I’m trying to maintain something like autonomy here. It’s a little frustrating being a spectator to your own body. To hear someone else say things with your mouth and watch him touch things with your hands. To feel an itch, and have to wait for him to scratch it .
    “Fuck, Michaela, I’m sorry. I’ll be out soon.”
    Michaela’s reaction was so violent that her body shuddered. Yeah. By having sex with—by making me have sex with Leo .
    “Fuck,” Jasper said again.
    The pun is killing me, Van Arsdale. Killing me dead .
    Just then Q. came back to the room.
    “I need a circuit board. I guess I could rip open one of the phones or something, but I don’t know if they can handle the voltage.”
    It was Michaela who had the thought; Jasper just relayed it.
    “There’ll be one in the car.”
    “In—”
    “The Porsche.”
    Q. made a face. “I guess that makes sense.” He grabbed some tools and a flashlight, headed for the front door. As they walked back outside, Jasper asked him again what he was making.
    “I don’t really know,” Q. said. “A sort of cross between a lightning rod, a homemade EEG, and a box trap.”
    The clouds had thickened considerably, Jasper noted, making the night that much darker. There was a bit of a breeze too, rustling the branches that cast the Qusays’ front yard even deeper into shadow. Jasper peered into the gloom, but didn’t see or hear anything suspicious.
    “A box trap?”
    Q.’s feet dragged on the gravel driveway. He left his flashlight off, apparently forgetting that Jasper didn’t know his property as well as he did, or else assuming his Mogran senses could see in the night as well as the day. He seemed more leery of the wreck by the fence than what might be on the other side of it.
    “You know, when we were kids and we’d prop up a box with a stick tied to a string and wait for a rabbit or a squirrel to go under it?”
    “I never made one of those.”
    Movement flickered in Jasper’s peripheral vision. He whipped his head to the left but didn’t see anything.
    What was that? Michaela said inside him.
    Probably nothing , Jasper answered silently.
    “Yeah, I only ever tried it once,” Q. went on. “Believe it or not, a little bunny rabbit never did hop underneath a cardboard box with a ten-year-old boy lying twenty feet away. Why I think I can get a demon to jump into one is a complete mystery.”
    Another flash. This time Michaela saw it too.
    It ducked behind that tree!
    I know , Jasper said. He noticed Michaela’s hands were twitching. Stay calm. We don’t want to scare Q .
    Why not? He’s got the gun .
    That’s why .
    “Come on, Q.,” he said out loud. “Let’s get what we need and go back inside.”
    Instead of proceeding, however, Q. stopped in his tracks. “Jesus Christ, what am I thinking?”
    “Q.?” Jasper kept his eyes peeled on the tree where whatever he’d glimpsed had disappeared.
    “The Mogran have been moving in and out of people for thousands of years. What the hell makes me think I’ve discovered the secret to stopping them?”
    “But you said the doctor had the same thought. He just needed a Mogran to test it on.”
    “Yeah, well, the doctor is a little crazy. I’m not sure how much of what he says is worth believing.”
    Jasper decided he’d get the