electromagnetic field

"Do you want to hang on to this?" he said in the same tone. He stepped over to me and offered me the little slip of plastic.
"No!" I snapped, and took two steps back. "Butters, get that the hell away from me."
He froze in place, staring at me, his expression somewhere between confused and wounded. "I'm sorry."
I took in a deep breath. Where the hell was my concentration? This was no time to start spacing out on trains of thought, no matter how relevant to the circumstances. "Don't be," I said. "Look, that thing doesn't have any moving parts, right? Electronic storage?"
"Yeah."
"Then I don't dare touch it," I said. "Remember how messed up my X-rays were?"
He nodded. "You're saying that the data on here could get messed up the same way."
"I couldn't ever have cassette tapes after I started working magic," I said. "They'd just fade away into static after a while. The magnetic strips on my credit cards stopped working in a day or two."
Butters chewed on his lip and nodded slowly. "The data on the jump drive would be even more fragile than a magnetic strip. It might make sense if it was some kind of erratic electromagnetic field around you. Every human body gives off a unique field of electromagnetic energy. It could be like with your cell replication, that your field is more-"
"Butters," I said, "no time for that now. The important thing is that I don't dare touch that toy." I frowned, thinking out loud. "Or take it back to my place, either. The wards keep magic out, but they keep it in, too. It would probably fry it to hang around in there for too long. Even working any heavy energy around it could be dangerous."
"Well, that's stupid," Butters said. "I mean, storing important wizard information on something that getting close to a wizard would destroy."
"It's not stupid if you want to sell it to a wizard and you're worried the buyer might off you instead of dealing in good faith," I said.
Butters looked at the corpse and then back at me. "You think Grevane killed Bony Tony?"
"Yeah," I said. "But Grevane knew that he couldn't get to the information on that jump drive on his own."
Butters swallowed. "Which explains why he needed me."


Dead Beat Chapter 15, Page 136-137