Sirens Unbound

by Laura Engelhardt

  “It doesn’t matter what I think,” Ted replied tersely. “The only thing that matters is what the elders think.”

  “Your tone tells me they don’t think it was a success,” Amy responded.

  “Nothing short of perfect would ever be a success for Elder Simon. But others are calling it a qualified success,” Ted said before he sucked down the last of his drink. He looked like he was considering chewing the ice. Amy sipped her martini.

  “Elder Simon was the man who brought Barry to the hospital, right?” Amy asked, though she knew he was.

  “Yeah. Simon is Barry’s father. He’s been an elder for centuries, and acts like he owns the Danjou. He makes everyone’s life a living hell. Barry probably volunteered for the operation just to get out from under Simon’s roof.” Ted waved the bartender over and gestured for a refill.

  It was hard to believe they’d been working together for over a year now. The first time they went out for drinks, Ted expressed surprise at the presence of wait staff. Apparently, at enclave establishments you ordered via bespelled menus, and the drinks arrived by auto-piloted, miniature flying carpets.

  “Are you happy to be out of the enclave, Ted?” Amy asked. “It’s been an adjustment.” It occurred to her that Ted might view her in the same way she did him: a safe confidante. He certainly seemed a lot more forthcoming tonight than he typically did at the hospital.

  “It’s been interesting. You mundanes have such a different approach. I know you all think we have no freedom, that we’re in some kind of cult. But I had a lot of independence in the enclave. I’m a Riccie, but my clan has pretty much left me to my own pursuits. Project Hathor is the only time they’ve actually ordered me to do anything. I’ve never spent so much time outside the enclave, but I can’t say I’ve been unhappy with the assignment. The way you and the other doctors work is fascinating.” Ted chuckled.

  “What?” Amy asked.

  “You just worry about such different things. It makes me think there’s something to living without magick.”

  Ted wasn’t slurring his words, but their conversation seemed to be veering into the kind of late-night intimacies typically only shared when you’re drunk. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “You care so much about your patients. You worry about them. And not just you — even Commander Thompson and the rest of the DoD. You mundanes were so horrified by what the Djinn Dictator did to Gerhard Hass, we didn’t even suggest repeating it to get a subject for this project.” Ted had lowered his voice, and Amy had to lean closer to hear him over the noise of the crowded bar.

  Despite herself, Amy was shocked. “The enclave would have eliminated a mage’s sight just to have a subject for this project?” Gerhard Hass was a mage spy who had been caught by Amir Khalid a few years back. The Arabian dictator had surgically eliminated his ability to perceive and use magick, but his mundane eyesight was not affected. He eventually escaped, but died during the operation to repair his mage sight.

  The Danjou claimed that the Amir’s treatment of Hass was the impetus behind their participation in the project, but Amy had her doubts; something about her partners’ reasons for participating in such a novel joint venture didn’t ring true to her. Amy herself had jumped at the opportunity to lead such groundbreaking research, and tried to avoid dwelling on everyone else’s motivations.

  “Surgically blinding someone isn’t that different, really, from our normal method of handling criminals. We don’t have the kind of massive prison system you mundanes do. We just blind our criminals magically so they can’t cast spells, and send them back into the care of their clans. Until our preliminary meetings with you, we honestly didn’t see performing a surgery to blind one of them as such a big difference from our normal process.”

  “Haven’t you heard of the Tuscaloosa experiments? Or what the Nazis did to prisoners in the concentration camps? No ethical doctor would ever be willing to perform such an operation!” Amy couldn’t keep the shock from her voice.

  “See?” Ted raised his glass to her. “You mundanes care so much. No mage would think anything of operating on a prisoner to reverse-engineer the magical lobotomy the Dictator’s doctors invented. You fret endlessly about consent, but even Elder Simon would be confused if you asked for his consent. Mundanes care about everyone.”

  “Well, not all mundanes,” Amy had to admit. “That’s why we have medical ethics in the first place. But even though we’re all Americans, you mages don’t seem to value individuals the same way we do.”

  “We’re all Americans, all right, but different,” Ted agreed. “You mundanes talk about your ‘rights’ as citizens and such. It’s a marvelous philosophy to see such value in each person. To actually care what a person might want, and think they have any right to object to what your leaders demand ‘for the good of the many.’” Ted sighed. “Regardless, I wouldn’t give up my magick just for that. Not for anything.”

  “I wouldn’t give up my independence, let alone my safety, just to get magick. It seems like way too high a price to pay. The elders order you to go somewhere, you go. They tell you to submit to an operation, you submit. It’s worse than being in the army,” Amy said. She gestured to the bartender for a second cocktail.

  “Amy, you can’t understand what you’re missing,” Ted’s pitch had risen. This was the first time Amy had really heard any strong emotion from him. “A man blind from birth doesn’t know the beauty of a rainbow. Mundanes are handicapped. You just don’t realize it.” Ted’s face flushed, and he looked at her with trepidation.

  Was he a closet mage supremacist? Well, Amy had more or less assumed all mages were, and was honestly amused by the idea that she — and almost ninety-nine percent of the human population — were handicapped.

  “Seriously, Ted? You consider mundanes disabled because we can’t see magick? I mean, my brother is fluent in four languages — does that mean I’m disabled because I only speak one? Or what about my older sister, who has perfect pitch? You know, my younger sister can hold her breath underwater for almost five minutes. By your way of thinking, I’m the black sheep of my family.”

  “Those are just different levels of ability. I’m talking about a whole sense that you mundanes lack. You’re literally lacking a sense. You can see, but you don’t see the full spectrum.” Ted spoke earnestly, and focused with a drunken intent on picking his words.

  But Amy scoffed. “Butterflies have ultraviolet perception. Snakes see infrared. Are humans handicapped in comparison? Do we need to figure out a procedure to get us those senses?”

  Amy wondered whether Ted really thought he was better than her because of his magical ability. Mages were rumored to believe they were better than mundanes, and a lot of mundanes treated them like they were. When a mage condescended to speak to you or seek your advice, you were supposed to feel flattered. What bothered Amy, if she were being truly honest with herself, was that she did feel flattered by Ted’s attention.

  “I don’t know. But I wish you could see what I do.” As Amy heard the sincerity in Ted’s voice, her flare of resentment faded, and she stopped to look into his earnest face for a moment. Amy propped her head on her hand and gazed deeply into Ted’s eyes.

  “What do you see? What is it like?” she asked with sincere curiosity.

  “It’s so hard to explain; I’m not even sure where to start.” Ted paused, thinking. “Well, there’s this old poem. So few mages create any art; but there was this French mage who wrote poetry, and one of her poems captured it. At least for me. Let me find it.” Ted fumbled with his phone and started typing and scrolling.

  “Ah, here it is. It’s translated, but I think the original was in verse. ‘A glow that erupts from the sun and slides off the moon / Hovering around the candle, linking life in love / All colors and none. Sound mixed with taste and touch and smell / Blended into an overload of purity to cleanse the soul / But what is light? Merely chains that tether spirit to flesh.’”

  Amy was struck by the oddity of
the moment. The romance of poetry in a noisy bar was so twenties, and she was almost fifty. Still, she felt a pulse in her middle.

  Ted paused. “That was Jehanne Mahoult. I don’t know how to explain it better. I don’t know how to describe the way light becomes patterns. Sometimes with a feeling; sometimes with a sound. Some mundanes have been diagnosed with synesthesia, where they hear a chord, then see colors, or taste a food and feel an impression on their skin. Mage sight is like that, and not like that.” Ted sighed. “It’s so hard. What is a rainbow to a blind man? And why try to explain it, when he can never experience its beauty?”

  “Is that what mage sight reveals?” Amy asked, “Beauty?”

  “Oh, yes,” Ted breathed, and Amy felt the hair on her arms rise at his beatific expression. “Even when put to an utterly evil purpose. How can a spell so cruel, so evil, be so very beautiful? But it is. The world is beautiful when seen through mage eyes. We see every link, every pulse of life—”

  “But what about death and the dying?” Amy was fascinated, despite her best effort to maintain a professional distance.

  “The soul radiates through. You won’t find an atheist among the mages, much as we’ve been reviled by most world religions.”

  If Ted was telling the truth, that was ironic. There were more atheists than believers among mundanes in Europe and North America now. After being hunted down by mundanes for centuries based on flawed interpretation of scripture, how peculiar that mages were now the most faithful of humans.

  “Well, I’m Catholic, Ted. And we believe that magick performed in furtherance of God’s will is moral. We’re a lot more liberal on magick than sex, though.” Amy had to laugh a little. The Boston Globe had just splashed yet another front-page story about a Boston priest who had been defrocked for an affair with a parishioner.

  “Excuse me.” The hostess arrived with two menus. “Amy? Table for two?”

  Amy nodded.

  “Your table is ready. If you’ll follow me,” the hostess said, gesturing back towards the restaurant area. As they walked to the back of the room, Amy took in the candlelit atmosphere, where each table was set with low vases of fresh flowers on white tablecloths. She started to wonder if she’d perhaps misled Ted with her choice of restaurant.

  Amy liked Ted as a friend and colleague. Until his unexpected foray into poetry recitation, she had never thought of him in any kind of romantic capacity. Time to nip the vibe in the bud, before it could lead to something they might regret. Amy was determined to spend the rest of the evening talking about Patient B. She needed Ted too much to risk losing his focus on something as ridiculous as romance.

  While the first mage wars predated the creation of sirens, the Atlantics were active combatants in the Third Mage War, and the Pacifics’ transport of Asian mages to South America in the thirteenth century is widely believed to have precipitated the Fourth. However, siren actions have also averted war. For example, by protecting the silica-salt trade during the Middle Ages, the Mediterraneans prevented several mage battles for the Sahara. Most recently, war was averted in the mid-nineteenth century when the Indians acquiesced to the Cabal’s Australian exodus, while the Pacifics refused to grant the Asian enclaves safe passage.

  – Sirens: An Overview for the Newly-Transitioned, 3rd ed. (2015), by Mira Bant de Atlantic, p. 148.

  Chapter 2

  Amy swiftly led her surgical team into the conference room where Eli waited with their DoD partners for their first post-op briefing. While she knew their team was still the best for the project, she had to wonder whether the DoD wanted to make any changes, or whether, like the Danjou, they viewed the operation on Patient B to be a “qualified success.”

  Dr. Graham Litner was her protégé. He had gotten his medical degree and doctorate at Harvard before turning thirty, and she considered him among the best neurosurgeons she had ever worked with. His dexterity and stamina were remarkable. At this point, Amy had to admit, he was probably a better surgeon than she was. Instead of feeling threatened by that knowledge, Amy actually felt proud.

  This must be something of what Eli felt when he looked at his department. She had trained Graham as a resident, ensuring he had gotten the right kind of experience to develop his skills. While Graham was as arrogant and ambitious as they came, he respected her. More importantly, he needed her: for all his skill on the table, he lacked the creativity that would truly make him a world-renowned doctor. Amy could get him there.

  The third member of their team, Dr. Arnold Tucker, was older than Graham. He had already started losing his hair, which he disguised under a deep comb-over. Arnie had been part of the Gerhard Hass surgical team, and it was through his connections that they had gotten so much information about that botched surgery.

  “Amy, I’d like to introduce you to Dr. Stephen Villar, Director of DARPA.” Eli rounded the corner of the board table when Amy walked in, flanked by Graham and Arnie.

  The two men accompanying Eli practically reeked of the military. Commander Thompson was in uniform, as usual; a solidly-built white man in his mid-fifties, Thompson seemed more relaxed than Amy would have thought, given the fact that Dr. Villar was here. Villar was taller and older than Thompson, with blue eyes and a rounded chin. He looked like an aging football player, but his soft facial features made him seem less intimidating than his bulk would otherwise suggest.

  “Dr. Villar, this is Dr. Amy Bant, our lead surgeon on Project Hathor.”

  “I’m so pleased to meet you in person,” Stephen Villar said, shaking Amy’s hand.

  “Likewise,” she replied. At least his handshake wasn’t too competitive. Amy could never remember exactly what DARPA stood for, but it was a big deal for the Agency Director to come to their lab. Most of their interactions were with Commander Thompson, the program manager overseeing their research for the Joint Chiefs.

  Since they had begun actively preparing for the operation, Eli had been spending a lot of time in D.C. Actually, he was the one who managed all their contacts with Washington — it had been months since Amy had spoken to any of them. The problem was that everyone who worked at DARPA, the agency co-sponsoring the project, had an engineering or physics background, and the nuances of a magical medical research project were almost impossible for them to understand

  “And of course, you remember Commander Thompson,” Eli continued as the program manager reached out to shake Amy’s hand. Thompson was fairly new to the R&E division of the Department of Defense. He was a Navy surgeon who had been seconded, or “reassigned” as he put it, due to the DoD’s serious concerns about the Arabian threat. Thompson actually visited the lab at least once a quarter, and had enough of a medical background to understand their terminology. It would have been better had he been a neurologist or ophthalmologist, but he was a lot easier to work with than the rest of the DoD.

  Villar was a retired Army captain, but unlike Thomson, his doctor title came from a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. His whole DoD experience had been in the Air Force Research Laboratory working with airplanes. He tried to analogize the procedure they had developed with his past work on airplane exhaust systems, but it was a poor fit, and Amy worried that Villar still didn’t understand what they were doing.

  Project Hathor was new for everyone, really. The mages had never partnered with mundane doctors before, so they didn’t understand medical practice, and neither Amy nor anyone else on the team understood how magick was actually perceived or manipulated. The DoD’s contribution had mainly been in the form of financing, as well as the project’s name. In addition to confusing enemies and allies alike with endless acronyms, the DoD seemed to like fanciful project designations and had named the project after the mythical Egyptian goddess who had restored Horus’ sight after Set destroyed it.

  Before proceeding with the operation on Patient B, Ted and Amy had spent almost a year developing the detailed anatomical analysis that mapped differences between mundane and mage brains. As highly educated as the DoD team was, they just d
idn’t have enough background to understand how truly experimental and cutting-edge their research was. Even the preliminary anatomical work they’d done would advance the field exponentially.

  Amy completed the introductions for the rest of her team, and hoped Ted would get there soon so they could start. She wanted to leave enough time for Eli to take Villar on a tour of their facilities before his planned visit with Patient B.

  “Congratulations, Dr. Bant. Eli came down in person to report on your remarkable success,” Villar said with a smile.

  Eli was so relentlessly positive, Amy worried for a moment that he’d misled the DoD. But surely he would have explained the side-effects, she thought. Maybe Dr. Villar was simply flattering them.

  “We believe Project Hathor is vital to our efforts to secure lasting peace with Arabia,” Villar continued, looking at her team. “So we are extremely grateful for all of your dedication. From what I gather, the operation has been an amazing success, and I’m glad to finally meet you all in person.”

  “Thank you so much, Dr. Villar,” Amy said. “We’ve made significant progress since the project started. It’s a real honor that you made the trip up here.”

  “Of course. Eli has been phenomenal about keeping us all apprised of your work, but at this stage of the endeavor, I felt it was important to meet the team in person, and to see Patient B before he was discharged back to his family.”

  Amy was taken aback, but kept her expression neutral. She wasn’t aware that Barry Riccie was being discharged any time soon. Certainly, he had healed enough that he could have left the hospital last week, but having him here in Boston instead of out in Hesperia, where the Riccies’ estate was located, definitely made it easier to continue her observations.

  Ted walked into the boardroom just in time to catch Dr. Villar’s statement. “Yes, Elder Simon has requested that his son return to the enclave, so arrangements are being made for his flight. I just found out yesterday.” Ted’s voice rumbled with a hint of apology.