Caster

by Elsie Chapman

  First, a minor quake in the Paper Sector. Then a landslide in the High Shore Mountains that wiped out a bunch of houses in the north end of Spice. The unexplained overnight death of hundreds of crows in Culture, their raven corpses scattered throughout the streets like spilled coal.

  Then finally another quake, this one in the Tower Sector. It leveled an apartment building. People died.

  They were the cost of Shire and Finch fighting on the roof of that building in the final tournament battle—those people, that wedge of earth. They paid for the Guild of Now insisting on casting full magic just as the Guild of Then once got to. Shire paid.

  But how has Finch paid? How has Embry paid, or any of the other members of the new guild? I thought entering the tournament—winning it—would fix all my problems. And maybe it will, still. But who’s going to pay my cost?

  I put on my smog mask and leave the kitchen. I slip out of the teahouse, glad that my father is serving a customer at the till and that my mother is putting together a tray of tea and cakes for one of the tables. So that they’re too busy to see me leave, guilt ablaze all over me like I’m fire itself.

  It’s late afternoon as I head toward the Tobacco Sector, half looking out for Jihen as I make my way out of Tea. Going to Rudy’s apothecary means more healing meds and getting to fight unhurt, while Piper’s in Textile means getting to fight in the first place. But Tobacco is closer, with no backtracking, and midnight isn’t that far away.

  I wish it were the other way around. It shouldn’t make sense to have to go back to the place where Rudy died. Where I left him lying on the floor, cold and alone.

  The scents of fire and ash thicken the deeper I get into the sector, and soon there are the barest hints of camphor and mint in the air—the apothecary is close. I wait at the corner for the light to change, shifting on my legs, unable to keep still. It’s starting to rain and I wipe my wet face. The need to hurry presses, an ache of its own kind. A mantra plays itself over and over in my head: healing meds—Piper’s shop—tonight’s location, healing meds—Piper’s shop—tonight’s location, healing meds—Piper’s—

  “Aza Wu?”

  My heart trips in my chest, and it’s like the world slows down as I look up and see the cop standing in front of me.

  Rudy’s cop. Baseball Cap.

  I haven’t thought about him all day. In between the loss of the till money and getting ready for round two, the possibility of the cop finally showing up to ask about Shire slipped through.

  My own foolishness keeps me speechless as he waits for me to respond.

  Baseball Cap is younger than I first thought, late twenties max. He must be new to being a cop, which explains the doggedness and the carelessness. Maybe I should have called him Puppy instead of Baseball Cap.

  “Are you Aza Wu?”

  I don’t want to be, not to you. “Why?”

  He gestures to his silver armband, now in full view, to show he’s a cop. “My name is Cormac.” Then he smiles, blue eyes crinkling at the corners, and the smile is so earnest and proud that in some bizarre parallel world I might even want to help him. “Well, not just police, but a Scout, actually.”

  The world slows down even more. My stomach crawls into my throat and sits there, a fist. “Oh?”

  He nods. His intent to help the city—no, the world—beams from him. He shines like a little kid who’s just cast his first leftover magic.

  I shiver and it’s not from the cold rain. A Scout. Right here, within arm’s reach. A destroyer of full magic casters, someone who makes his living hunting down people like me.

  “So, you’re Aza Wu, aren’t you?” He gestures to his chin. “Mind taking off your mask for a second? I have your picture on file.”

  I slowly slip off my smog mask. “File?” I’m only capable of useless answers because the word Scout is blaring too loudly in my head and swallowing everything else up.

  “Yes, the file on your sister, Shire. I’ve been meaning to come and talk to you and your parents, actually. About Shire’s death last year and some discrepancies …”

  His voice fades, becomes a hollow rush.

  Parents. Questions about Shire. Discrepancies.

  I’ve been worried about this scenario ever since seeing Baseball Cap, ever since Rudy mentioned it with his dying breath.

  But hearing the cop say it now fills me with fresh dread.

  He can’t question my parents about Shire and the details of how she died. He can’t question my parents, period. They loved Shire and they love me, but they also hate full magic, and that conflict would spill from their faces like tea from a cracked pot.

  The secret of my magic suddenly feels newly raw, a fresh wound.

  “What do you mean by discrepancies?” I finally manage. “We saw the medical report. It explained everything.”

  Cormac shakes his head. The rain’s coming down harder and the shoulders of his jacket are starting to darken. “As it turns out, the medical report is the problem. The medical examiner who signed off on it had been under investigation for falsifying reports. After he disappeared two weeks ago, investigators looked closely at all the reports he’s ever signed off on; your sister’s is just one of them that has turned up with issues that need to be resolved. Now I’m just following procedure and trying to reach those who can tell me more about how Shire died. I’ve already spoken to a Rudy Shen—him being the one to find her—but he was surprisingly unhelpful. Unfortunately he’s also just passed away, so …”

  For a second I can’t decide if I should already know that Rudy’s dead. I don’t think I should because it was just yesterday and his ties to us on record should look thin. But I also know I’m no actor. “I … heard. He had a weak heart. He—it was just a matter of time.”

  “Oh, so you already know?”

  I nod.

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure how well your family knew him, or if he’d been friends with just Shire …”

  His voice trails off, waiting for me to add more, but I just nod again. He doesn’t need more than what’s already in the file—Rudy was there that night, present when Shire fell. The rain pours.

  “Well, I’d like to come speak to you and your parents together as soon as possible,” he says. “Perhaps tonight?”

  “Why you?” I hope my voice isn’t as shaky as I feel. “Why a Scout on this? A medical report with holes—shouldn’t that just be reviewed by Lotusland’s coroner system or something like that?”

  “Typically, yes. But certain wounds don’t match up with how she died, and how they don’t match up—well, it was decided the file should be passed on to a different depart—” Cormac’s gaze seems to sharpen as he watches my face and he frowns. “I’m sorry, but I really do need to speak to your parents about this, so if tonight sounds—”

  “Wait. There’s—” My hands clench. If only I could cast full magic right now. Just rip from his mind the existence of Shire’s report, Shire herself. Rip from his mind who he even is—I’ve already cast into his mind once before, why not again?

  But he’s a Scout. If I tried anything in front of him, he would stop me before I could even grab a starter from my bag. And then there’s the tournament tonight—casting a mind wipe so close to starting time would leave me useless. Goodbye, chance at two hundred thousand marks.

  “There’s something I think you need to know about Shire that might change your mind about this investigation,” I tell him.

  I have no clue what I’m saying. The words are meaningless as they spill from my mouth. All I know is I have to say something to stop him from going to see my parents. My mind whirls even as it goes blank, telling me I’m making a mistake.

  Cormac’s face lights up. Boyish eagerness flows even as his eyes stay sharp. “Tell me over coffee? I know a good breakfast-all-day diner just down the street.”

  We get seated at the same window table I saw Cormac at last time. Through the rain, Rudy’s apothecary across the street is a blur of glass and stone. The blinds of t
he windows of the shop are pulled, probably by whoever discovered Rudy’s body. There’s no sign on the door to say why the shop’s closed and I wonder what’s going to happen to it. Rudy never talked about family, and I never felt like asking, and maybe that’s another difference between Shire and me. Because I bet she would have asked.

  The healing meds that I still need inside seem very far away.

  “So you have information about Shire you think I should know?”

  I watch Cormac stir sugar into his coffee and my own stomach churns. The smells wafting from his loaded plate aren’t helping. I pick at my dry toast, needing something to keep me from throwing up.

  “I have information,” I say, starting my act now. “But I need a guarantee before I tell you.”

  “A guarantee?” His brows pull together slightly. “I don’t know if I can do that. Not if it keeps me from doing my job.”

  “This information will help you do your job. The guarantee is actually for me—so I can do mine.”

  You have a job to do with this? I read the question in his puzzled gaze. “What’s the guarantee you need?”

  “This stays between us for now. So you can’t go to your bosses and you can’t talk to my parents. You asking about Shire is just going to upset them, and they won’t be able to help you anyway because they don’t know anything else but what they were told last year by the medical examiner.”

  “I’m listening. I can’t promise anything, but—”

  “No, it’s the guarantee or nothing. Go to your higher-ups and my whole setup’s collapsed. Talk to my parents, who won’t be able to help you, and I won’t help after that, either. So I won’t talk without the guarantee. It’s the only way.”

  Cormac smiles. That there’s as much sympathy in it as condescension reminds me how new he is to this job—Scouts are supposed to be ruthless in their casework.

  “Look, I know this is your sister we’re talking about and that you’re only trying to help, but this is now official Scout business.”

  “And you’re a new Scout, trying to make an impression,” I say. “Trying to clear up an old case before the full year hits and it gets filed against your department’s annual performance. How is it going to look later when it ends up you just ignored someone who offered to practically spoon-feed you your answers?”

  He takes a sip of coffee. “Tell me how working with you is going to get me what I want.”

  “This obviously goes deeper than clearing up some discrepancies on a medical report, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. The discrepancies are just the symptoms of a bigger problem. We think the medical examiner has connections to full magic, whether he was getting paid to cover for casters of full magic or was a caster of it himself.”

  Goose bumps lift. His suspicions fill the air between us at the table, as strongly as if he’d said them out loud anyway.

  That Rudy and Shire had something to do with full magic, too.

  “Rudy and Shire had nothing to do with full magic.” My fingers spin my glass of orange juice, over and over again. Nerves prickle in my throat so that I have to clear it. “But if you’re looking to take down some full magic casters, the information I have might be the lead you need.”

  Cormac leans forward, waiting. All around us diners are eating, the sound of cutlery on plates almost surreally normal.

  “First the guarantee,” I say.

  He exhales. Ten seconds later: “Fine. This stays between us, for now. So talk.”

  I take a small bite of toast and chew slowly, working myself up to being able to meet his eyes. My web of lies trembles with me struggling to stay balanced on top of it, as I begin to weave it more tightly.

  “Rudy and Shire were both undercover cops,” I begin, lowering my voice. “Undercover undercover—only Rudy’s immediate boss knew. Rudy had been undercover for years, secretly working on growing intel about the gangs that run Lotusland.”

  Cormac’s mouth twists the slightest at this. A single glance at his face and I get the skepticism. He’s new to being a cop, still full of bravado, still learning how things really work around the city. He’s likely based in a sector where its gang keeps a lower-key profile than Saint Willow does in Tea, than Earl Kingston does in Tobacco. A sector like Tower or Culture, one that’s filled with more people who look like him than people who look like me.

  And it’s people who look like me who first formed the city’s dozen sectors into empires to run as their own. Which means families like mine are the ones who best understand how the city’s gangs work, the sectors that are still mostly ours where a certain kind of culture is unspoken truth. My parents and I have never disputed the payment of honor marks, but people like Cormac probably half doubt they actually exist.

  “Two years ago, information started going the wrong way,” I continue, “with one of the gangs gathering cop intel. Rudy figured out the gang must have planted a mole in the cops. So Rudy enlisted Shire to be his mole, planting her as a member to uncover from the inside who the gang’s mole was.”

  Cormac is rapt. “Which gang?”

  “Saint Willow’s.”

  He barely reacts to the name, which is what I’d been more or less expecting. To someone like Cormac, it’s just another easy stereotype, the idea of what a gang is. A faceless entity he doesn’t understand should scare him, but he’s too cocky for his own good.

  “Okay, go on,” he says.

  “Then last year, Shire was killed. Rudy got the medical examiner to sign off on the altered medical report to hide how she died, to make it seem like she’d just fallen off that building. And not mention what had happened before that, so it wouldn’t break her cover. But he believed it was the gang’s mole in the cops who had her killed up there. That it was only a matter of time before he was also found out.”

  “And so he was.”

  I nod. “Yesterday.”

  The Scout sits back in the booth and looks at me for a long minute. “So let’s say I believe that Rudy and Shire had nothing to do with full magic. How they just had the bad luck of choosing a medical examiner sloppy enough to give away his own corruption, whether it’s through magic or not. How is this information going to lead me to casters I can take down?”

  “I’ve been secretly working as an informant with Rudy since Shire died, trying to figure out who the mole is in Saint Willow’s gang. Now that they’ve killed Rudy, too, I can’t just leave it. It means they knew he was close, which makes me close. People with information about the gangs—they aren’t as tight-lipped around someone who looks like me as they are with someone who looks like you. I still have my leads, good ones that aren’t just about the mole, but about potentially much more.”

  “Casters of full magic.”

  “Yes. We think the gang may have been using one to clean up their messes.”

  “A full-magic hitman?” Cormac sounds alarmed.

  I nod. “But you can’t get involved now or everything I’ve worked on is going to fall apart. Try to get to Saint Willow on your own and they’ll make sure you never see light again. So I need more time before you can move in. After I get the mole, then you can have your casters. Deal?”

  Cormac’s eyes glow with the need to do what’s right, to do his best as a Scout. Whatever he might see in mine, I hope it’s not the truth.

  He asks, “How much time do you need?”

  “A month.” I’ll know in a week if I’ve saved Wu Teas from Saint Willow or sunk us. If I’ve saved us, then this ridiculous lie I’ve just laid out to get rid of Cormac might actually work out for me. Our debt to Saint Willow will be paid. A cop poking around Saint Willow’s gang won’t be enough for them to kill him; even Saint Willow will think twice about starting a war with the Scouts, but his influence will be able to scare Cormac off for good.

  And if I can’t pull this off, I might still have enough time afterward to figure out another way to get rid of him.

  “No way,” he says, frowning. “I can’t buy a month’s time from the
department. I can try pushing for … let’s say a week. But that’s all I can do. After that, I’ll have to go back to procedure, talk to your parents, see if they can come up with leads of their own once they know what Shire had really been up to.”

  A week. Of course it has to be a week.

  “Fine,” I say, while my head screams that it’s not enough.

  “I’ll find a motel close to the teahouse—the department will expect that.”

  “You can’t let my parents see you,” I remind him in a rush, hating the panic that leaks into my voice. Just stay away from them, you damn Scout. “Your guarantee, remember?”

  “They won’t see me. But I’ll have to make a show of tracking you, even if actually I’m giving you room to work.”

  I nod, though the idea leaves me cold all over. Two people tailing me, one of them a gangster and the other a Scout—and somehow I’m supposed to make it to a secret tournament where I’ll be fighting with illegal magic without tipping anyone off.

  I chug some of my orange juice, feeling light-headed.

  “Can I admit to being a bit blindsided by Shire and Rudy working undercover this whole time?” Cormac shakes his head, thoughtful. “All of that just comes from nowhere—I really had no clue.”

  Maybe if you’d ever seen a Pearl of the Orient drama called Liar’s Lair, I think, you would have recognized the plot.

  But I was counting on Cormac’s not knowing a story full of people as Chinese as the city’s gangs, a story as Chinese as the person who’s telling it to him.

  “One week, Aza.” He holds up his coffee mug in some kind of toast. “Here’s to taking down some casters.”

  I lift up my glass, smile weakly, and will myself to not throw up.

  I escape a minute later with the excuse of having to help out at the teahouse. I pull my mask back on and take off at a run once I’m out of sight of the diner, trying not to think about the healing meds I can’t get to, how I feel like my web has me more trapped now than anything else.