Blue Magic (12 page)

“What’s with the grenades?” Will asked under his breath.

“They’re models,” Astrid said. “Mark used to collect them. We found his house in the forest, practically intact.”

“And military toys fit with the general theme of the Octagon?”

“They’re his grenades, this is his project.” Astrid’s face held that listening look. “It’s handy, Will … you use the Bramblegate grenade to bluff … someone?”

“Astrid, I need a break from the futuretalk,” he said.

Jupiter’s voice thrummed through a bass guitar hung over the blackjack table. “I’ve caught five incendiaries and parked ’em at the old fairgrounds. Where are we sending them?”

“Astrid?” Mark asked. “You spacing out, or what?”

“Empty out the bomb casings and fill them with vitagua,” she said. “We’ll leave them in a big leaky pile somewhere on our next run.”

“You’re doing another run?” Mark said.

“If we move faster, we might catch the kids.… Will, are you ready to try again?”

Was he? He could do one more run with the strike team, Will thought. If he got the kids back, he could go back to Wendover and throw himself on Arthur’s mercy.

Fantasy or not, the idea that he might yet step back from this madness steadied him. Speaking to his tuning fork, Will called the seers. “Do we have a location on my children yet?”

“Saskatoon, Will,” came the reply. “They’re in Saskatoon.”

CHAPTER NINE

DURING THE ST. LOUIS RAID,
Astrid and her strike crew had freed about four dozen of the Roused from the glacier. Ev spent that night in the unreal drying clumped, icy vitagua out of their fur before turning them over to Patience, who was spinning up rose hip tea and strong black coffee. From there, the rescuees moved on to one of the few truly warm places in the unreal—a marble-lined pool filled with heated water.

It was crucial to warm them as fast as possible; having been frozen within iced vitagua for centuries, the newly Roused were at risk of hypothermia.

Centuries ago during the magical war, the Fyremen had laid a curse on vitagua, making it a contaminant. Anyone who came into contact with the raw magic got Frog Princed into an animal, usually losing their mind in the process. Astrid had found a way to reverse the effect, by taking a magical object and embedding it directly into the person. Embedded chantments drew contamination into themselves. It was a treatment, not a cure—like giving insulin to a diabetic.

A dime thus embedded in Ev’s hand had arrested his devolution into a goat. The coin also let him turn people into whoever they might truly be, regardless of the body that nature had given them at birth. Gendermorphing, Mark had dubbed it.

Most of the Roused had opted to wait on getting a chantment embedded in them. They didn’t consider themselves mad.

It had been something of a relief, as far as Ev was concerned—Astrid had more than enough demands on her time, and even though she was making chantments by the hundreds, they were precious, rare, and needed in the real.

He was helping the newly awakened—and struggling to keep himself from mooning too obviously over Patience—when a nude man, seven feet tall, red of skin, with shaggy black hair and no visible signs of Frog Princing, pulled himself onto the glacier.

Ev stepped forward with a towel.

The newcomer whisked it out of his hand, drying himself efficiently. “Who are you supposed to be?”

“Ev Lethewood,” he replied.

“Ah, father of the Savior. Our very own Virgin Harry.”

Ev tried not to bristle. “Astrid is my daughter, yes.”

“She send you to spy on us?”

“No.”

“What, then? A show of good faith? Hey folks, I trust you—here’s my mama.”

Ev had not gotten used enough to being male to appreciate being reminded that he’d spent fifty-five years as a woman. But he was here as a diplomat, so … “You got a name?”

“Call me Teoquan,” the newcomer said.

“Tay oh kwan,” Ev repeated, trying to get the odd vowels right. Judging from the contempt on Teoquan’s face, he’d messed it up. “There’s tea over there, and hot baths.…”

“Yeahyeahyeah. Tell your brat that if she’s expecting gratitude, she’ll have to do better than drinks and a pool party.” With that, he strode over to Patience, kissing her hand. She laughed, tipping a curtsy.

Ten hours passed before the last rescuee was out of the Pit. As the effort wound down, Patience brought Ev a cup of tea. Everyone was drooping. The raccoon granny, Eliza, curled around a cedar branch poked above the level of the ice. Her open eyes were glazed with exhaustion.

“We’ll ask about seeing Jacks once everyone’s rested,” Patience murmured.

“Think they’ll say yes?”

“We’ve earned some goodwill by pitching in,” she said. “What you figure, Ev? Fifty people tonight?”

“Yeah. Fifty new mouths to feed. There’s no resources here: Astrid was right about their needing a letrico mill,” Ev said.

“I’ll talk to Eliza,” she said, yawning.

“She can free up some bodies, I have other ideas on—”

“Please, Ev, rein in the Lethewood work ethic until I’ve had some sleep,” Patience said. “They’ll be just as impressed—or not—tomorrow.”

Feeling his face warming, he took refuge in a gruff nod.

She raised her voice: “Where’d our stuff end up?”

A field mouse with glossy black hair piped at them. Rather than translate, Patience just gestured:
Follow me.

Ev fell into step beside her, tracking the mouse up through hollow, bamboo-textured stems that served as corridors, to a suite of egg-shaped rooms halfway up the honeycombed skyscraper. Their things had been unpacked into silk hammocks that hung from the ceilings. The walls were gold wax, and mattresses of moss lay on the floor of each room.

Ev fished out his old dulcimer and plucked a string, dictating a quick report for Astrid: Arrived safe, Jacks won’t go free until everyone else is loose. He struggled to summarize what the cricket had told them about the unreal being key to how Bramblegate worked. He wrapped that up with: “Maybe Katarina could send someone to talk to them about it?”

With that, he staggered to bed.

“Night, Ev,” Patience’s voice wafted from the next room.

“Good night,” he echoed, falling into dreams of turtle girls and winged boys and an endless glare of blue light.

CHAPTER TEN

CHASING WILL’S KIDS WOULD
have to wait until after the bombing raid was over, so Astrid decided to try distracting him.

One of her volunteers was a TV actor. He’d opened up his apartment in Los Angeles to anyone who wanted a comfortable place to wait out the bombing raids.

She and Will arrived to find a dozen volunteers in the home theater, watching Sahara’s trial. They sprawled on the couches, enjoying the air-conditioning, munching chips, and following the coverage while waiting for Mark to declare an all clear.

“Defense lawyers promised the Alchemites would behave if they could come back in the courtroom,” a volunteer explained. The prisoners were filing in now. Sahara was last, accompanied as always by the woman who seemed to be her personal guard.

“What do you know about that marshal?” Astrid asked Will.

“Why, boss? Got a crush?” Pike crooned.

“I know I do,” someone said. “Sista looks like a cross between a flamenco dancer and Buffy.”

“I’d do her,” one of the engineers agreed.

“I don’t have a crush,” Astrid protested, her face warming.

“A woman like you should be using her power to get laid, lass,” Pike said.

“I’m ignoring you all,” she said. “Will? The marshal?”

“Juanita? Army brat, from a big family. She was handpicked by the judge, I think; they’re both from Nevada Federal Court. Are you thinking of recruiting her?”

“Would it work?”

“I doubt it. She’s loyal to Skagway.”

She filed away the information. Juanita Corazón was important, a piece of the puzzle.

Sahara was on-screen now, pursing her lips at the camera,
smooch-smooch-smooch.
Acting insane, Astrid thought. There had to be something, even now, didn’t there? Some core, buried deep, that could be touched by reason or compassion?

The camera panned the defense table, homing in on Caro Forest. Will flinched slightly.

Astrid slipped out to the patio, looking out at the Pacific Ocean and listening for the grumbles. She could hear Will’s children, somewhere up after the Small Bang, laughing.

She should never have told Will that they’d become lovers. It sounded deranged.

The thing was, she did like him. He’d always been so kind to her, so gentle and fair.

That was just his job,
argued one of her interior voices. It was the nasty one, the voice of doubt.
Getting you to trust him was something he did for Roche. It was an interrogation, remember?

No, it was more. He was decent.

Yeah. Decent. That’s sexy.

She pushed away the whirl of skepticism. Taking out a rubber stamp and some letrico, she pressed the stamp repeatedly against the wall. Each impression created a glowing white outline of a caterpillar. They moved, nibbling at the letrico, forming chrysalises, then breaking out a minute later, as real-looking butterflies—mourning cloaks.

Astrid cupped her hand, allowing vitagua to well from the piercing in the web of her thumb. The magical butterflies lapped tiny drops of the vitagua, then fluttered off. They would lodge in trees, land in gardens, or get eaten by birds and spiders. Each would transmit a microscopic bit of enchantment.

She worked for an hour, hoping the whole while that Will would join her, maybe say something to ease the awkwardness.

What’s keeping you from going to find him?

“I’d just make matters worse,” she said aloud.

You want him to believe you care for him? You gotta show it.

Maybe it would be easier if she just shelved the romance idea. He wasn’t wrong: The grumbles had misled her before.

Someone tapped at the patio door—Pike. “Mark says it’s safe to go home. Want to come check out the damage?”

“Coming,” she said, rejoining the group as they filed through Bramblegate.

It was the first time the napalm had gotten close. Rainwater poured in through an ugly burn in the canopy, and there was a scorched-looking crater in one of the islands of rubble. Dense lilac-scented smoke hung in the air. Singed remnants of a silk tent blew to and fro.

Astrid said: “Mark’s right. They’re fighting magic with magic now.”

“Arthur’s got a new consultant,” Will said. “A Fyreman. Guy seemed to understand that you’re a bigger threat than Sahara.”

She felt a thrill of fear. “And I guess Roche is angry that you defected.”

“Yes. I’m sure my desertion hurt him.”

Broken friendships. She sighed. “At least everyone’s okay.”

“They aren’t,” Will said.

She turned, following his gaze. A body was lying just under the sawdust-and-vitagua surface of the lagoon.

Parting the vitagua, she exposed the corpse: a girl of maybe sixteen years. She had the features of a fox, and her red-furred face was slack, almost serene. She might have been sleeping, but for the torn clothes and the deep gash in her leg.

“She must’ve been hiding in the forest.” That was Olive; she had appeared beside them, holding Jacks’s card-sized black-and-white portrait of the girl.

Astrid took the body’s still-warm hand.
Jacks bled out,
she thought, fighting tears.

“Is it too late to save her?” Olive asked.

“Yes, she’s gone.” She was crying now.

A grumble whispered:
Red blood, blue magic—

“You didn’t kill her,” Will said, drowning out whatever it might have said. “You’re trying to minimize the carnage.”

“So many planes, all those explosives, only one death…”

“Exactly.”

It didn’t help. “Poor kid. She must have been so scared.”

“So what do we do?” Olive’s voice was harsh.

“Clean up, get everyone back to work?” She wiped at her face.

“Not enough.” Olive jerked off her cardigan, covering the body.

Will let out an odd, incredulous bark of laughter. “Are you accusing Astrid of slacking?”

There’s that fairness again.
Will might be angry with her, but he was defending her anyway.

She had the weight of the world on her shoulders, so many people expecting her to be politician, priest, big sister, boss. Olive furious about every death, Roche and his bombers, a Fyreman involved now, and the Roused pushing her to speed up the contamination. She thought of the Ballroom, the room full of pictures of people she hadn’t yet saved … or lost. Small wonder the volunteers had taken to calling it Limbo.

“Pike?” she said.

“Aye, boss?”

“Have the medics set space aside in the hospital for a morgue, and schedule a funeral.”

“Done.”

“Olive, find out who she was, get her cleaned and dressed, see if she has family.” Standing, she took in the crowd of Springers forming around the body. “Okay. Time we started dispersing the vitagua faster. Suggestions?”

“Freeze it in chunks and tuck it into glaciers?”

“What’s your name?”

“Dorrie.”

She said, “Put a crew together, Dorrie, get on it.”

Thunder coughed. “There’s a new guy, Ilya, on the letrico crew. He thinks we can build a pipeline underground.”

“How would that work?”

“He’s a coal miner, geologist … something. Says if we dig an underground river, we can tunnel out of the contaminated zone. Vitagua can flow through the shafts. Digging’s energy intensive, but there’d be no air release, comparatively few contaminated animals. Magic could just seep into the stratum.”

“Tunneling—that’s a lot of displaced rock,” Astrid said.

“We’ll find a use for it.”