For a moment, the narrow boy standing in the center of the other pentacle doesn't answer her. He's remarkably quiet, mutely studying the lines of the chalked pentagram under the thin soles of his shoes, and utterly still except for the absent flexing of the hand with the rift shard buried in it. The dull green glow of it shifts between the fingers, a sickly flicker here and there in the low light of the let room. The boy's jaw sets. A muscle jumps in his cheek.

Then the blank quality of his expression clears. He straightens, all off the cuff as he dusts his hands. "Ah well. Can't blame me for trying, eh?"

With a lazy dash of his heel, Bartimaeus smears a wide streak through the center of the meticulously drawn pentacle. He wants to do it twice. A well-angled Detonation would sear a black mark across the whole floor, he thinks. But more than anything, he wants Kitty Jones to stop looking at him like that. So with an ambivalent flick of his fingers toward her pentacle-- "Well don't just stand there. That mess isn't going to clear itself away."