Blue Magic (8 page)

“Astrid has her own reasons to want the job done,” Ev said.

“The Fyrechild.”

“Jacks Glade, that’s right. Is he alive?”

“After a fashion,” the raccoon said. “When all the others are freed,
all,
he will go.”

The glacier trembled. Ice melted, sending liquid magic down the chasm wall. The cat-girl tumbled free, twisting in midair as she fell. A wolf spider with human eyes skipped up and over the edge of the pit, into a waiting blanket.

Cries, human and animal, rose from below.

The dragonfly appeared, laboring under the weight of the cat girl. Dropping her, he chattered at Eliza before power-diving back down.

“What’s happened?” Patience asked.

“A large melt,” the raccoon replied. Roused were rushing out of the city, hurrying to the pit.

“St. Louis,” Patience said. “Astrid and the others must already be there.”

Ev asked: “Can we help?”

“Dry people off as we bring them up.” The raccoon pointed at a pile of blankets, then rushed downward with the others, vanishing into the impenetrable blue light.

CHAPTER SIX

VOLUNTEERS SET UP A
banquet in Indigo Springs that night, amid the silk tents and vitagua lanterns of the Bigtop. They spun picnic hampers laden with baked squash, poached trout and salmon, curried chickpeas and eggplant, and cranberry custard. The food was served on scavenged glassware, a motley collection of bowls and plates. Cups of a light mead were passed round.

Afterwards, a steel drum band set up on the giant blue stump of one of the mulched trees, playing fast-paced Caribbean music while the feasters danced.

Astrid’s gaze kept returning to Will Forest. He was on the fringe of the crowd, observing, taking everything in. He seemed calm, but he must be eager to get going.

She made her way to his side, passing a pair of volunteers bent over a small video player. On its palm-sized screen, the former editor of the
Indigo Springs Dispatch,
Aran Tantou, was giving evidence. “Before the magical disaster, I’d been working on an article on the ten worst polluters in Oregon.” The player’s small speaker made Aran’s voice tinny. “Afterwards, Sahara came to me. She wanted my research; she wanted to go after the companies and their executives.”

“Did she say why?”

“She was going to reveal their inner monsters.”

“Contaminate them, in other words,” said the prosecutor.

“Yes.”

“Did you give it to her?”

“Of course he did,” one of the viewers muttered.

“Weasel,” added another: Aran had been unpopular in town. In trying to please everyone, he’d come off as mealy-mouthed.

“I had everything on a flash drive; the Alchemites took it,” Aran said. He looked nervous. The camera angle switched: Sahara was giving him her shark smile.

Astrid put her hand over the player. “Give the newscast a rest for a night, guys. Join the dance?”

“Too tired.” One, a pixie-faced kindergarten teacher from the team of seers, pocketed the player. “I spent all day in Marseilles, trying to figure out what’ll go wrong there when Boomsday comes. Now I just wanna kick back with a little TV.”

“Couldn’t you find a good show?”

The pixie’s medic boyfriend smirked. “Trial’s got the best ratings in America—it must be good.”

“If you say so.” She left them to it, moving through the crowd to Will. “Want to say a few words?”

“Me?” He frowned. “Surely that’s your job.”

“I’m terrible at speechmaking.”

“Comes with the job, Astrid. You may not like that they call you boss, but it’s you they need to hear from.”

“Stand up with me.”

“My mind’s far away, Astrid,” he said. His tone was gentle. “Maybe after St. Louis, okay?”

Feeling absurdly crushed, she turned away, climbing up beside the band.

The murmur of conversation didn’t wane. She hadn’t developed Sahara’s knack for getting everyone’s attention. Finally Mark started banging a couple wooden bowls together, breaking into the chatter.

Where to start? “I want you all to remember this isn’t an attack. We’re not going to St. Louis to hurt anyone.”

The words had a sobering effect.

“We’re going to make things better,” she continued. “Yes, we’re going to leave vitagua there, but we’re also going to leave behind water weavers, food spinners. We’ll cool the air, clean up garbage, patch up busted houses. The government will call it terrorism, but people will see the magic improved things.”

“They’ll all live happily ever after!” someone shouted.

“Yes.” She raised her cup. “Um, to the Happy After.”

“The more, the merrier,” replied the group, raising glasses. Will looked perplexed; she’d have to explain the toast to him.

Right now, what he needed was a successful mission. She walked to the Chimney, with its dripping rills of vitagua.

Astrid had been reluctant to shoulder this burden. Her father taught her to chant when she was a child, but when she realized how much responsibility it meant, she wimped out. She’d made a chantment that wiped out all her knowledge of magic.

Then Dad was murdered. Astrid inherited the magical well—and thanks to her self-inflicted amnesia, she got Jacks killed and let Sahara run mad.

“Stop,” she murmured aloud, as she always did when her thoughts started running this track. “No regrets.”

The world had been in trouble before the well ever broke open, she reminded herself. The goal now was to steer everyone to that happy ending the grumbles kept talking about.

Happy endings. Her and Will. Could she have misunderstood? The idea had a certain allure; he had Jacks’s steadiness, and he was so fair, so kind.…

The vitagua pool in the ravine was glass smooth. A slow trickle lipped its edge, leaking into the swamp surrounding the camp, saturating the forest floor.

Under Astrid’s direction, the blue magic roiled. She warmed it into mist, gallons of it, raising a blue fog above her head. As much as she dared, as much as she could hang on to … she all but emptied the lagoon surrounding the Chimney.

Fluid gushed out from the gap between worlds. It would fill up fast.

Drawing the magic around her like a cloak, Astrid took Bramblegate to the plaza.

A cluster of volunteers was waiting, debating who should break a champagne bottle over the front bumper of the trolley.

“Who’s newest here?” Astrid asked.

“Amber,” Pike said.

A young woman stepped up, reaching for the bottle. She christened the trolley
Overlord:
Clancy’s choice, in honor of all his dead Normandy invasion buddies. More warspeak, Astrid thought. Excitement crackled through the gathering.

Mark punched the air. “Kick ass and take names!”

Olive frowned. “The gentle path.”

To Astrid’s relief, most of the volunteers echoed Olive.

The others were waiting. She could delay no longer.

She pulled vitagua into herself, into the empty spaces within.

Voices assailed her. Grumbles, she called them, the voices of the frozen people of the unreal, with all their opinions, resentments, their knowledge of past and future.

They spoke of the future, of Sahara escaping, of Alchemites committing atrocities. Or maybe she’d misheard—without Sahara, the Alchemites were relatively harmless. Astrid had seen to that.

The grumbles mumbled about her first-grade graduation ceremony, Dad’s death, the night she lost her virginity.

She reeled, dizzy and disoriented. When was now?

Flames licking skin, smell of burned hair …

“She’s spacing out,” a voice said. Someone caught her before she could step off the trolley.

“Jacks?” Jacks was the one who always caught her. She burst into tears: his blood was on her skirt. Her fault. Was that now?

“Go, Clancy,” Will said. It was him holding her steady, not Jacks. She felt the gut-deep pain of his children’s absence, his gnawing fear they’d be harmed, the exhausting effort of holding it together.…

“St. Louis,” Clancy said, driving into the glow. Hot, syrupy air lolled over them as they rolled out into nighttime.

“Where are we?” Astrid said.

“Missouri,” Will said.

“I think it goes well here,” she said.

Car alarms were blaring—their arrival had displaced a shock of air. People were going to their windows.

Janet raised a tin watering can, spilling water onto the street. As it pattered on the pavement, people shrugged, closing their curtains. The alarms quieted.

Aquino crossed himself quickly, then raised an elaborately painted lampshade over his head. Letrico flickered up his arms and hands, and countless twinkles of light boiled from the lampshade, swarming out into the city like fireflies. “Invitations to new volunteers are away.”

“And here goes nothing.” Igme held out a plastic turkey baster filled with vitagua. Soap bubbles blew from its tip, each the size of a tennis ball, each containing a trace of liquid magic. Some drifted upward; others rolled in the street, vessels of microcontamination that would spread enchantment when they broke.

“Boss? Boss?”

Astrid twisted the barbell pierced into the web of her hand, breaking the skin so blue magic could steam out. Leaning out of a trolley window, she looked for objects—tricycles, dog toys, laundry, anything that could hold a benevolent charm.

“Will—your children?”

The magical well would be vulnerable until she had a successor, and the grumbles said it would be Will. But he wouldn’t do it if she couldn’t produce the kids.

He will bend, he will see…,
the grumbles murmured. They told the truth, but they laid traps with it; you couldn’t entirely trust them. Would he really love her one day?
Could
he—could anyone—love someone who was destroying the world?

She had chanted him a spinner from a kid’s game, a plastic compass whose needle pointed east. “Turn left, Clancy,” he said.

Astrid kept chanting. Their route took them past a derelict shopping mall that had been turned into a temporary camp for evacuees from Oregon. FEMA trailers lined its parking lot. Astrid made food spinners for the refugees, healing chantments, items that would mend broken tools and teach new skills. It wouldn’t be long before the camp realized they had magical items on their hands.

Igme kept sending out vitagua-contaminated bubbles, using the baster.

Astrid was chanting hundreds of things at once now: a rain barrel that purified water, a stuffed crab that cured cholera, air scrubbers, hole diggers, roof patchers, a shoemaker enchantment, a fireworks generator—anything a person might use to help, supply, even entertain others.…

A snap—one of the vitagua-contaminated bubbles had broken on a nearby willow. The tree wasn’t shooting skyward like the vitagua-drenched trees at home. Its leaves were stirring, and one of its spreading roots had broken through a nearby sidewalk.

“Trace contamination, just a little growth,” she murmured. The world would end up like this, covered in magically tinged vegetation. People had to learn how to coexist with enchantment.

They turned onto Market Street, and an inhuman cry rose around them. Starlings blanketed the roofs all around the buildings, cheeping and trilling so loudly, her teeth buzzed.

“They’re here!” Will said. Clancy brought the trolley to an abrupt halt in front of a yarn store.

“So much for catching them by surprise.” Aquino went into action, handing out chantments. He slapped a grocery pricer, disturbingly gun shaped, into Astrid’s palm.

Igme dropped the turkey baster, tightened his grip on a hunk of letrico, and cranked a pepper mill. The yarn store shivered, then blew away in a cloud of fine dust. In the space where it had been, a circle of men, women, and children was murmuring, as if in prayer.

“Carson!” Will’s kids were here, all right. “Eleanor!”

Chilly air gusted toward them—a heat draw. Four of the Alchemites broke ranks, putting themselves between the children and their father. Chunks of rock pelted the trolley.

Clancy yanked on a dog toy on the dashboard, squeaking it, and the missiles bounced away. Janet threw a hula hoop over one of the women. The hoop contracted, pinning her arms. She fell on her rump, dazed but unharmed.

Little Ellie Forest spotted her father.

She began to scream.

Carson Forest had stepped toward the trolley, but now his sister clutched at him, visibly panicked. The boy turned, the frown on his face so like his father’s.

The cold was spreading.

“They’re drawing power for something big,” Clancy said.

“On it,” Igme said, but the Alchemites were raising their faces to the sky. One had a whistle in her teeth.

Will sprinted toward the children, ignoring the flying knitting needles, batting aside a net thrown by a barrel-chested Alchemite. A chunk of letrico in his left hand powered his ring.

Astrid grabbed a set of carved wooden salad spoons.
Open up a path,
she thought, chanting the spoons and then sweeping them outward. The Alchemite circle broke, adults tumbling aside, clearing the space between Will and his children.

One of the defenders threw a beanbag at Will’s feet. A pit of muck opened up in front of him. Quicksand? Will stumbled, arms pinwheeling. The ring kept him from plunging in.

The children turned into starlings.

Now the Alchemites were all birds, shrieking in triumph as they flapped up to join the flock above. Thousands strong, it swirled upward.

Astrid scooped up an old purse, thinking of nets—

There was a boom and all the birds were gone.

Will let out a frustrated cry as he recovered his balance. He whirled, grabbing the Alchemite Janet had entangled. “Where are they going?”

The woman thrashed, straining to escape.

“Nobody’s going to hurt you,” Astrid said.

“Filthwitch!” she shouted.

“It’s okay, Will. We’ll get the truth out of her.” Snatching a small wooden turtle, a toy, out of the crumbled remains of the store, Astrid chanted it swiftly, thinking of truth serums and lie detectors. Drawing letrico, she held it to the woman’s face.