Caster

by Elsie Chapman

  Never mind that Rudy would rather be left alone, saying that he wants to focus on running his apothecary. Or that he says my personality is the very opposite of Shire’s, that he actually liked having her around. Or that when I beg him to show me new magic, I always somehow just end up helping out around the shop instead. I’ve stocked shelves, pestle and mortared, filled jars, plus other way more mundane chores I don’t even have to do at the teahouse anymore—and I still can’t figure out how Rudy gets me to work for him when it’s supposed to be the other way around.

  He owes me.

  I also still haven’t decided if I even like him, considering the circumstances.

  He was there when Shire died. He was the one unable to save her. He was the one to make her think she could use the amount of power that killed her.

  Also, I know of no other caster of full magic. There’s no one else but Rudy Shen.

  His apothecary is in the Tobacco Sector, which lies west of Tower, two sectors over. It’s summer, but Lotusland summers are still cold and full of rain, seeing that we hug the Pacifik on the whole west side. Breezes that blow off its surface hit you in the face with damp and salt, and you remember all over again how it’s the coldest ocean in the world.

  Normally I walk everywhere because I like being able to choose where I go as much as I can. I like imagining I can disappear if I feel like it, for my face to blend into the myriads of shades of skin—gold like mine, but also white, black, brown—that are the people of Lotusland.

  But I’m not in the mood for crowds today, or for the rain that’s starting to fall. Not for the gray air that never fully leaves, either, so that half the city wears smog masks that cover their noses and mouths while outside. And my head still hurts a bit. My rider’s pass still has enough marks on it for a final trip, so I decide to chance the train and hop on a westbound one.

  The city can never keep up with system repairs, meaning there are usually lots of detours and stoppages around broken-up asphalt and parts of the track undergoing construction. Or the passenger cars just die on you because the city hasn’t upgraded them for years, and you end up somewhere you don’t want to be. Or someone has cast real magic nearby, and the earth deflates a bit more.

  I only have to glance out the windows to hear Coral’s words all over again.

  The air and oceans and forests, ruined because of casters like me. No more blues and greens but smog and rust and dull gray concrete. All true. Lakes and rivers carry mutant fish that ate up all the normal fish, and wildfires keep burning up forests all over the world because of freak weather. Every time a caster uses full magic, we are cracking open the earth that much more.

  We’re considered earth’s biggest threat.

  Still, real magic has been dying out more and more with each generation. Five hundred years ago, every person alive could heal or mind wipe. Now we’re just a fraction.

  The train motors along, and we’re still in the Government Sector when the engine gives out and an announcement comes on, telling us to get off and catch a different westbound train. But the rain’s stopped now, as well as my headache, so I decide to walk the rest of the way over. I know this part of the city well, since it borders the Tea Sector, which is home. And the Tobacco Sector is no more than ten blocks away, then Rudy’s shop another five more heading south.

  I’ve just reached the outer edge of Tea when I spot him. Half a block away, standing on the corner. He’s wearing one of his perpetual black suits and bright white sneakers, a combination I see now in my nightmares.

  Jihen.

  I can tell by the way he’s waiting that he spotted me first.

  I freeze, my heartbeat a dull thud in my ears, debating for a handful of wild, desperate seconds if I can run fast enough to escape for another day. Or if I’ve recovered enough yet from the effects of casting the mind wipe to safely cast more magic to escape that way.

  It’d be a temporary reprieve, though—anyone who lives in the Tea Sector is never entirely free of Jihen and the rest of his gang. Jihen works for Saint Willow, and it’s Saint Willow who runs the area. It’s been like this since the sectors were first formed.

  The only person who really owns property in Tea is Saint Willow—the rest of us just pay to stay here. The world might call it “rent,” but people in the sectors know it as paying honor marks. If not for his protection, other gangs would move in, and then where would it all be? Saint Willow promises we don’t want to know. The gangs have always had their own say about how the sectors are run, and cops who sometimes forget this end up disappearing as a reminder.

  As though Jihen can read my frozen mind about trying to slip away, he moves first, closing the gap between us as quick as the oiled snake I know him to be.

  “Hello, Aza,” he says, smiling greasily. More than half of Tea’s population is Chinese, and this includes Jihen, and so his skin is as gold as mine. He’s also nearly as short as I am, but thick as a barrel through the middle.

  Not that his heft matters either way. His being a distant cousin of Saint Willow’s is all that’s needed to give him power. It’s why he got assigned the job of watching the lagging Wu family. Of dogging me to make sure we pay up as everyone else in Tea has to.

  Without the marks Shire was bringing in, our honor debt is only growing, day by day.

  “Jihen,” I say.

  “You have our marks?” He pats at his waxed black hair. The movement lifts his jacket. I can’t miss his knife, tucked into his side. It’s mostly for show—Saint Willow usually deals with problems more creatively—but the threat remains.

  “I just paid you a bunch of marks two days ago.” Jihen’s what we call a squeezer, the person Saint Willow employs to chase down debts still owed to him.

  “Two days ago was two days ago. Your family’s debt continues to grow. Must we go through this each time we meet?”

  “We wouldn’t meet so much if you gave me room to work.”

  Jihen smiles. “Just as you must work, so must I.”

  “Running a teahouse is work—stealing from its profits is just robbery.”

  “Yet both are enterprises, and enterprises have deadlines. Your family’s year is nearly up, Aza.”

  Stories in the sector are that Saint Willow has a principle about money owed—that a year is all he chooses to tolerate. He even has a calendar to mark down the day. One year. That’s when he gets creative about getting him what is owed, if creativity means choosing between methods of torture.

  “I have one more week,” I say defiantly.

  We managed eight months of stalling after Shire died. She was steady in paying Wu Teas’s honor marks through her casting secretly for years before her death. Then it was two months of Jihen being assigned to come around the tea shop, “observing” the business until we couldn’t put off paying any longer. Finally, I lied. To keep him away from my parents and the teahouse, I told him he was wasting his time because I was the one in charge of my family’s finances.

  He’s been shadowing me ever since. Two months now.

  “It’s been awhile since I’ve said hello to your fou-mou.” His voice goes silky over the Chinese word for parents. “Perhaps I need to pay a visit to your mama and baba at the teahouse, to stay and nem cha.”

  The marks I made from the mind wipe are still in my pocket. I’ll have to give them over because the mention of Jihen dropping by for tea makes any other choice futile. But anger flows anyway, hot and thick in my chest. I spin on my heel, just needing a second to reclaim my own space.

  His hand whips out and grasps my arm, stopping me. “Aza, beauty”—Jihen’s still smiling and it makes my skin prickle with cold—“let’s not do anything drastic. Saint Willow won’t be pleased.”

  His calling me beauty is a joke. Shire was the pretty one. She and I had the same bones beneath because we’re sisters, but it’s like a great sculptor spent extra time polishing her face while I never got fully finished. She dressed in colorful and showy things, but it wouldn’t have mattered if th
ey’d been as drab as the sky—if they’d all been as pink as the scar on her cheek—because she looked the way she did.

  I try to turn again, but Jihen’s grip is still firm on my arm. “I’ll pay you, all right?” I say to him. “Just … not right here.”

  “Where are we going?”

  I start walking as an answer, heading deeper into Tea while still keeping away from the teahouse. I want to head toward the Tobacco Sector, but I don’t want him to start thinking too hard about where else in the city I go. Tea is safe because it’s what he expects. He already knows to look for me around home, always somewhere nearby, waiting and following and making sure I pay whatever I have on me.

  This can’t go on much longer.

  I have to think of something to save us.

  Because the truth looms, and it comes at me in stabs:

  The growing shadow of Saint Willow. The jobs where my magic felt like a stranger’s. Advice Rudy doles out like it hurts him to talk. The faces of my parents, miserable because our family legacy now rests entirely on me.

  Jihen sighs deeply. His fingers squeeze my arm as we walk. We’re still blocks from the teahouse, but the whole area smells deeply of tea anyway. Wu Teas is just one of dozens of teahouses in the sector, hence the sector’s name. Housing and supply businesses and restaurants fill the spaces in between, but one sniff and there’s no doubt which part of Lotusland you’re in.

  “This whole sector has sure gone downhill, that’s for sure,” Jihen says conversationally. Like we’re close to friends. “This economy has gone to si, been that way for decades now. It’s too bad Wu Teas has gone down right along with it.”

  “No other teahouse is any different. Demand’s down, while supply remains.”

  “Good thing you are able to find work. Tea might never be needed the way you Wus would like it to be, but there’s always going to be a need for teachers. Leftover magic can only do so much.”

  “Tutor, not teacher,” I mutter, fighting a grim temptation to cast full magic on Jihen as I yank a leaf from a boxwood hedge along the sidewalk. Starters work on the things they create, so a leaf works on paper, fabric, skin—because just as trees are of the earth, casters are of the earth, too. And I want him to stop talking, even if it would only last for a moment, and even if most skin spells could never pass for leftover magic.

  Being a tutor is the lie I had to tell Jihen to cover for my not being at the teahouse all day long and somehow still making marks. Shire was able to hide the marks she made from magic by claiming they were a part of the shop’s profits. And Jihen hadn’t been watching her. Saint Willow hadn’t needed to send anyone then. Honor marks from Wu Teas were still coming in as scheduled.

  “Tutor, not teacher, my mistake,” he says. “Math?”

  I drop the leaf. “A bit of everything,” I lie again.

  “See, I watch you, Aza. I stay in Tea because I know you’ll always have to come back. But I see you come and go at all times, all over the city, in all the sectors. I know you’re getting jobs. I know you’re making marks. My job, on behalf of Saint Willow, is to get those marks into our hands more regularly, and in larger amounts.”

  “I can’t control who decides to hire me.”

  He plucks a plum from a tree as we pass. It’s unripe, as green as a lime. He casts leftover magic, huffing a warm breath into his palm.

  The plum turns a deep purple.

  There’s another story that goes around the sector having to do with Saint Willow, and it’s one about magic. How the gang leader might have marks and power and everyone’s fear, but he’ll never have what he wants most, which is full magic.

  The whispers say that over the years he’s tried to keep full magic casters under his employ, but is so overly demanding with their casting that they never last. Some have died, some quit, and some have even wiped themselves from Saint Willow’s mind, if you believe the rumors.

  If Saint Willow had any clue he had a caster of full magic already squirming right beneath his thumb, I bet I’d be even more chained to him than I already am.

  Jihen bites into the ripened plum. “I still remember the stories our grandparents would tell us about Wu Teas. Stories their grandparents told them. How emperors and empresses from overseas served your ancestors’ teas to their royal guests. How they would pay with bars of gold and nuggets of silver—all for your family’s tea.”

  “Don’t forget about castles and temples,” I add, my voice stiff as I keep walking. “They stocked our blends, too.”

  “Now look at you Wus, with your emperors and empresses and fancy gilded palaces, castles, and temples all long gone. Swallowed up by quakes, drowned out by floods. Then other teahouses moving in, so you have to lower your prices more and more. Your family, begging for diners and shops to carry a blend or two, for handfuls of marks instead of armfuls of riches.” He sighs again, a parody of sympathy for my family’s troubles. “Ah, business is so mah-fung, no?”

  I run my finger along a shop windowsill and sweep the small shard of broken ceramic into my palm before Jihen notices. Ceramic starter. Good for a bone spell. Rage is a hot fist in my chest as I imagine all the horrific full magic spells I could cast on him, ones I could never do without giving my secret away.

  Each of his limbs twisted into the shape of a pretzel.

  Bones turned to putty inside his body.

  His skull turned inside out.

  “The marks, Aza,” Jihen says now, tucking the plum pit into his chest pocket. I’ve seen him keep other starters there, ones like rocks and leaves, dirt pellets and water capsules. My guess is that carrying a weapon on his side leaves little room for a starter bag. His fingers squeeze my arm until it hurts. “Hand them over.”

  I tell myself I’m not scared.

  The truth is, Saint Willow and I have actually entered into a strange kind of partnership. Deep down, he doesn’t really want to see Wu Teas gone—our teas might not be served to royalty anymore, but visitors to Tea still make a point of coming to his sector just for our teahouse.

  Another family could take us over, but then it would not be Wu Teas.

  And as for me, Saint Willow knows I would do almost anything to save my family’s legacy, business, and home, and milking desperation is always more profitable than a family that has given up.

  “Your boss still requiring everyone in the sector to pay honor marks isn’t helping anyone’s business,” I say to Jihen, slowing down. We’re less than three blocks from the teahouse now, from our apartment that makes up its rear, and I don’t want to bring Jihen any closer to my parents.

  “Saint Willow is running a business, too,” he says. “A business that has even deeper roots here in Lotusland than Wu Teas. Our family’s marks are why your family—why all the families running businesses here—got the chance to make marks of their own. Aza, beauty—”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “—you owe us.”

  His words are an echo of my own, the way I think about Rudy, and I tug at my arm to get away, sickened that I could have anything in common with a man like Saint Willow.

  I dig out coins from my pocket and thrust out my hand. “This is all that I have.”

  Finally my arm is free as he lets go to take the marks. He counts, once, twice. “You really want me to go back to Saint Willow with this?” Fury turns him red. “Have you forgotten I can walk into your family’s teahouse anytime I want? I don’t need to ask.”

  I look away. “Please don’t. I’ll have more tomorrow.”

  “Any family would be happy to live in your apartment. To be given a teahouse with a nice legacy to run. It doesn’t have to be yours, Aza. Not at all.”

  Dread’s a lump in my throat as I try to stay convinced it’s nothing but talk. I push the faces of my parents out of my head. “I said I’ll pay you tomorrow.”

  Now he leans close, his smile overly kind, and whiffs of tea and hair wax and aftershave cloud my nose.

  “You Wus were so much better at paying when your
sister was alive,” Jihen says softly. “On time, in full amounts. It was all so pleasant. Your sister, so much better than you at keeping the teahouse going. If only she were still alive, then maybe your family wouldn’t be in such trouble.”

  I shove my hands into my pockets to find some kind of warmth, suddenly cold all over despite the midday sun. Inside the pocket where I kept the marks, my fingers hit something sharp. The corner of a mark I missed.

  “Such a sad accident, falling from a balcony the way she did,” Jihen says. “Twenty stories, wasn’t it?”

  I yank out the mark and cast. Copper coin for a copper starter. Good for a bone spell, even if it has to be a minor one. Good for painless leftover magic, because no one’s supposed to know what kind of caster I really am.

  I toss the mark at Jihen—I almost want to keep it; rigid starters can be used again, and it’s a mark; but there’s something about hurling it at his head that just feels so good—and run.

  “Aza, I’m not done yet! Get over—!”

  A yell as my magic makes his knee give out and he topples to the pavement.

  I get within sight of Shen Apothecary, keeping up running at first before letting myself slow to a half-rushed walk. My hair and clothes and even my skin smell like smoke by the time I hit the corner of his block. The Tobacco Sector is really a mix of scents—from ash to tobacco to moss—but put together the overwhelming one is simply smoke. Only having the breezy Pacifik as its west side border does anything to make a difference. And each time I leave here for home in Tea, I take the roundabout way. I head west until I hit the shore, hoping the spray from the salty ocean will wash away the smoke scent. My parents haven’t forgotten where Rudy works.

  I’m nearing the entrance to the apothecary when I notice the guy in a baseball cap across the street. I notice him because of two reasons.

  One is, he’s trying so hard to not be obvious how he’s scoping out a place that he’s nothing but obvious. He’s standing near the curb, skin white beneath the cap, checking his phone every fifteen seconds or so, like he’s expecting someone and they’re late. But in between checking his phone, he lifts his head and stares into the front window of Rudy’s shop.