The Peacemakers - pg9

          Taggart’s happy gyrations suddenly became jammed. “Huh? Why!? That’s not fair!”
          His father sighed. “I’m sorry Chris. It’s a research station with no luxuries and sparse amenities.”
          Taggart harrumphed. “I can handle it,” he shot back.
          “We know,” his mom said. “But it’s not really an appropriate place for a fourteen year old. Besides, you’d be bored.”
          Taggart felt as though he’d been punched. “I’d be fine,” he grumbled. “I would you know.” Deep down, though, he had his doubts, remembering when his father took him to see one of his most proud accomplishments.  He had expected an ethereal glow or pulsing light tendrils licking the air, but it was just a burp on a monitor followed by cheers and much back-slapping among the other scientists as if they’d invented magic.
          “But it is magic, Chris,” his father had said. “Just not the kind you can understand yet.”
          Taggart understood now, though. Magic took long hours of hard work and usually came in dribs and drabs. Then it struck him. If he wasn’t going with his parents, where was he going? He grimaced. “You’re not sending me to Aunt Betty’s, right?” he said. When they visited her last year in her tiny tenement in the grimy Detroit Metropolis, she went to bed at sun-down and babbled on about the coming apocalypse. No luxuries and sparse amenities,