by Dakota Rusk
15
“Just relax,” said Olwen. “It’s a similar process to what you experienced previously.”
“Is it?” I asked, as the vapors and fumes swarmed around my head. “Really?”
“Yes—in the respect that your complete submission is required. You’re meant to give yourself over to the forces which will transport you where you wish to be taken.”
I let my head sink deeper into the pillow and readjusted myself on the couch. Olwen stroked my arm as she coaxed me into relaxation. Her voice was very soothing; I hadn’t remembered that from the first time—possibly because I’d felt so nervous and guilty, seeking her out behind my friends’ backs.
I’d certainly never expected to be in her makeshift parlor again, with its candles and curtains, tchotchkes and talismans. (Her ancient cat glared out at me from beneath a footstool. I had to wonder whether Olwen had picked it up since settling on campus, or whether she’d actually smuggled it over from Parallel 17.) Even in the first stunned moments after hearing Rowella trumpet my name at the assembly, I never thought I’d actually end up here.
My first thought, in fact—once I’d accepted that she really had pronounced me the winner—was that there’d be some kind of mass protest; that the other students would erupt into indignation that someone they already regarded as a privileged member of the student body was getting yet another golden opportunity. And I welcomed the prospect; it would save me from having to refuse the honor.
But in fact just the opposite happened. Everyone cheered—in fact, after a few moments, their enthusiasm brought them to their feet. Soon I was the only one still seated in the whole auditorium, so that Donald and Ntombi had to physically yank me up by my armpits and eject me out into the aisle, where I made my way up to the stage with people beaming smiles at me and clapping my back and congratulating me. It was then that I realized, for the first time, that I wasn’t merely well-known, but well-liked. I wasn’t sure what I’d done to deserve it; in fact, I was pretty sure I didn’t deserve it. But this wasn’t the best time to try to get people to see that.
When I reached the podium Rowella and Jocasta shook my hand, and I said—apparently loudly enough so that it carried over the mic—“This can’t be happening; something’s wrong. I didn’t submit my name. I didn’t enter.”
Jocasta laughed—it was like the jangle of tiny silver bells—and said, “Apparently someone did, on your behalf. Or you wouldn’t be here now.”
“But,” I said pleadingly, turning towards the microphone and addressing the other students, “my parallel isn’t even there anymore.”
“Well,” said Jocasta, elbowing me slightly aside to get nearer the mic, “we’ll just see about that.” Wild applause.
“No, it’s true,” I insisted. “It was wiped out by the Terminus Engine. Everyone knows that.”
“Everyone thinks they know that,” she said. Then she took my hand—but very theatrically; this was as much for the house’s benefit as for mine—and said, “There’s just one thing I need to ask you, my dear child.”
I waited for her to say; but it quickly became clear she was prompting me to inquire. “What?” I asked, hating her for turning me into her puppet.
She leaned in, and in the most seductive tones imaginable—tones that rippled through the auditorium like a gentle breeze—said, “Do you believe in magic?”
It was perhaps the last thing I’d ever expected anyone to ask me, point blank. I stood there, slack-jawed, without any idea how to respond.
It was just a moment before someone—and I’ll swear it was Donald, though he later denied it—called out, “Believe!” And then almost everyone else took it up as well. “Believe! Believe! Believe!”
It was like being accosted; except I could handle myself against a physical assault. How was I to get out of this? I could say out loud that I believed in magic; and that would put a permanent wedge between me and my oldest friends—which is no doubt what Jocasta wanted. Which made me wonder whether she was the one who arranged for me to win this drawing, whether I entered it or not.
But that wasn’t my immediate problem—which was how to calm this wild crowd, which kept exhorting me ever more passionately to “Believe! Believe!” In the end, I just smiled and raised my hand—the one Jocasta was still holding—and that simple victory gesture seemed to do the trick. Everyone burst into a sustained applause, and Jocasta’s smile wilted a bit; I’d outmaneuvered her. I’d said nothing on the record.
Except, afterwards—once the assembly broke up and I was backstage with her and Rowella and some other witches—she seemed just as buoyant as I was downcast.
“Well!” she said, almost bubbling with pleasure. “I must say, this has worked out better than I’d hoped. I only agreed to this lottery to avert an impending crisis here on campus, but with you as the winner, it might turn out to be a net positive—a public relations coup rather than just a bandage over an open wound.” She grinned at me, and I could see no guile at all in her. “I always knew, Fabia Terentia, that you’d be an asset to our cause—in spite of yourself though it now seems to be.”
So she apparently hadn’t fixed the drawing in my favor. Someone else had done that; but who? And why?
As soon as I could get away I tried to track down the drum with all the entries in it. I wanted to examine it; I had an idea that maybe every slip of paper read FABIA TERENTIA, which would give me proof that there was a conspiracy at work. But the drum was gone, and no one I asked seemed to know where, or could understand why I cared.
I headed back to the dorm; where else could I go? I dreaded facing Merri, but she was my roommate. There was no avoiding her.
In fact she wasn’t alone when I arrived; Gerrid and Darius were with her as well.
“What the hell?” was the first thing she said—before I’d even come all the way in.
I shut the door behind me. “Don’t give me that tone,” I said. “It’s insane. I didn’t enter that lottery—wouldn’t have. What would be the point?”
“Well, someone obviously thought there was one,” said Darius.
I sat down in the first available chair—a poor choice because it was directly opposite them, so they looked like they were detectives interrogating a suspect in some police TV show. Actually, though, that’s how it felt.
“Is this some trick by the witches?” Gerrid asked.
I shook my head. “That was my first thought. But Jocasta Foxglove seemed as surprised as anybody.”
Merri shook her head angrily. “This doesn’t make sense. Either someone’s trying to get rid of you—in which case, why do it so publicly, in a manner that’s at least as likely to backfire on them as well—or someone’s trying to help you; but how is it helping you, entering you in a lottery where the prize is something you can’t have?”
There was a tense, sullen silence; and then I realized I had to finally come clean.
“Actually,” I said in a low voice, “it’s possible that some people think I can have it.”
All three of them made the same gesture at the same time—a sort of sitting-upright, head-snapping-to-attention move. They were so in synch lately, these three; I felt more estranged from them than ever. And once I told them what I had to say, that estrangement would be very real.
I explained my initial visit to Olwen, and the vision of my parallel she’d given me—through my mother’s eyes. I told them how real it seemed, how difficult it had been to shake it, and how my head knew it was impossible, but my heart kept hoping.
“I know it was stupid,” I said. “Yet…I can’t regret doing it.” I boldly met their eyes, daring them to disapprove.
Merri was the first to speak…though it took her almost half a minute. “You—you’ve been hiding this, all this time?”
I felt my face burn. “I knew what you’d say.”
Gerrid threw his hands in the air. “Well, then. No reason to tell us, if you already knew. Just keep pretending to be our friend.”
“I am yo
ur friend,” I protested.
“No,” said Merri, her eyes narrowed; it was a look of sheer disdain I’d seen her turn on other people, but never me. “Your new little clique—they’re your friends. The princess and the Scotsman. And Rowella.” She scowled. “You told them, didn’t you?”
“I told Ntombi and Donald,” I said, amazed that Merri had even been aware I’d made friends beyond our original fellowship; when had she had time to notice? “I’ve barely spoken to Rowella at all.”
“You rescued her from Gunther,” she shot back.
“Darius and I both did,” I said, getting angry. “I guess we shouldn’t have, is that it? It would’ve been better to let him beat her to a pulp? Or worse—do what Serge wanted to do with you?”
For a moment I thought Gerrid was going to leap on me; but Darius got up and stood in the space between us. “Let’s just rein in the passions for a moment, here,” he said—though he seemed to be having a little trouble doing so himself. He really was evolving into an actual, emotional human. “What’s critical right now is that Fabia has won this lottery to be returned to her home parallel. We don’t know who arranged it, or why; but we do know she can’t go along with it.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“You just said it yourself,” he said. “Your parallel’s not there.”
“Unless she thinks it is,” Merri growled.
Darius shot her a sharp look—I saw Gerrid notice this, and a flicker of pleasure crossed his face; even at a moment as heated as this, he drew hope from any sign of tension between Darius and Merri.
“Of course I have to accept,” I said. “If I don’t, they’ll just re-do the lottery, and some new student will be chosen and sent back to his or her parallel.”
“Except they won’t be,” Merri said. “Because the witches can’t do that.”
“Not by magic, anyway,” Gerrid said.
“Exactly. So the fact that they’re going along with all this…what does that mean?”
Darius slapped his forehead. “She’s right! I should’ve realized! I’m the one who’s been saying since the beginning that they’ve got something up their sleeves. The whole idea has been to find out what. And who better than Fabia to do that? She’s—what did Eddie call us? Just before we shut down the Terminus Engine?”
“Superheroes,” Merri said. “He called us superheroes.”
Darius nodded. “And he had names for us, didn’t he? Fabia was ‘Warrior Nun.’ Well, we’re right on the brink of discovering what the witches are up to with this whole business—we’re on the point of getting a good look behind the curtain. It all comes down to Warrior Nun.”
“But…she’d be in danger,” Gerrid said.
I gave a little dismissive grunt. “My specialty,” I said.
Even Merri had to smile at that. “Our specialty,” she corrected me.
And just like that, we were a foursome again. Valery showed up five minutes later, looking even more flustered and disheveled than usual, and filled with questions and concerns; but he found us united in our resolve. Our plan—limited thought it might be—was as follows:
According to the terms of the lottery, a member of the witches’ delegation would be traveling with me to record my homecoming. The video would then be uploaded to the university’s website so that everyone could see proof that the witches really could cross the Veil.
We weren’t certain how Jocasta intended to produce this video; we could only assume it would involve some kind of trickery, and some coercion to get me to play along. (“I’d like to see them try,” I said when this was brought up, but everyone encouraged me not to be too cocky.) Accordingly we came up with a verbal cue: if I encountered any kind of trouble or deception after I turned myself over to the witches, I’d use the word “walls” somewhere in the video, which would mean I was in trouble and the witches weren’t to be trusted.
Valery approved this idea in theory. “But,” he said, “what if she doesn’t encounter trouble or deception?”
“Fat chance of that,” said Merri, scoffing.
“If that’s how you feel, why even ask for a code word to confirm it?” He was a rumpled old ashtray of a man, true; but his mind was sharp and his instincts were keen. “It makes no sense to have a code word for trouble when you don’t have one for its opposite. Let’s allow for every contingency, here.”
So it was decided that if—unlikely as the case might be—everything was on the level and I was in no danger of any kind, and I’d actually, honestly been taken home to my parallel—I’d use the word “window” in my video address.
“ ‘Window’ for openness, clarity,” Darius said. “ ‘Walls’ for containment, entrapment. Easy to remember.”
“I’m not an idiot,” I told him.
He gave me a smile that reassured me he thought anything but.
Valery harrumphed a bit, because he still didn’t like the idea of my being the guinea pig in this “frightful experiment,” as he called it; even so, he recognized that I was a better test subject than anyone else.It wasn’t until almost an hour later that I got a text from Donald: Didn’t I say you deserved it? How does it feel?
And just like that, I knew; I had another of those uncanny hunches Darius was so in awe of.
Donald, I thought. He’s the one who did this.
I texted him back, asking if we could meet for a celebratory drink. He agreed.“How?” was my first question, as soon as we’d sat down with our beers in the commissary bar.
He grinned wickedly. “How what?”
“Don’t be coy. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
He put on an obviously phony look of deep hurt. “How can you say that? And to such an innocent face!” He gestured at his bearded, smirking visage.
“All the most successful criminals look innocent,” I said, trying to keep my anger under control. “Just tell me how you did it, or I’ll break your arm in three places. You know I can.”
He made an exaggerated gesture of fear, then took a long drink from his glass—the foam from his beer rimed his mustache before he wiped it away with his wrist—and said, “Well, now, a gentleman’s got to have his secrets.”
“I’m sure a gentleman does,” I said. “What’s that got to do with you?”
He roared in laughter, which melted my fury a little bit. “I like a colleen whose bark’s as bad as her bite,” he said.
“Then you’re going to love me by the time we’re finished here,” I said. And by the sort of moony, expectant look he gave back—a kind of, Oh, really, then?—I knew that was the wrong thing to say. So I quickly plunged in. “Was it bribery? Did you pay all of your friends to put my name on their ballots instead of their own? Was that it?”
He chuckled. “I only wish I had that many friends! Or that much dosh. No; you’re thinkin’ too linearly. You’ve got to approach the problem from an angle.”
I considered this for a moment. If he hadn’t subverted the vote itself—admittedly, as he said, an epic undertaking—he’d have had to rig the delivery system; yes, that was it. Much simpler, much more elegant.
“You fixed the computer program,” I said. “You hacked into it and changed all the entries to my name. Like Daimon Seed.” And for a second, I wondered whether our friend Eddie—who’d actually been the famous hacker who’d made freshman year hell for the administration—was back on the scene again, working through Donald, of all people.
But Donald dashed that hope by shaking his head. “Again, too ambitious for a lazy lout like yours truly. And not where my real talents lie. Plus,” he added, “the university was on the watch for that kind of thing, and counted every incoming text manually.”
“Then what? How?”
But he wouldn’t tell me—even under threat of physical violence, which I suspect he knew I’d never carry out. All he’d say was, “I’ll tell you another time, when you’ll be less cross with me for it than you are now. As it is, I’m loath to pour gas on the grill.”
I sa
t back, defeated—still mad at him, but in a crazy sort of way where I also wanted to grab him and punish him with kisses. But really, how could I not feel that way about the kind of guy who’d say—and do—the things he did? And all for me?
“You’re a champion, Fabia Terentia,” he told me. “You’re a hero, and a savior. And you’ve got nothin’ for it in return but to be gawked at like a circus animal by people too awestruck or envious to actually talk to you. Well, it’s time you got your reward. Of course you’re goin’ home. I wouldn’t let anyone else have this opportunity but you. And even though I knew you wouldn’t approve of me cheatin’ on your behalf, I couldn’t help myself. It was a compulsion, as sure as anythin’ I’ve ever done. And it’s against my own selfish interests as well. Because I like havin’ you here, my dear. Promise me you’ll come back, now. Don’t make me regret havin’ acted on my finer impulses. You just promise me. Promise.”
And the force of that entreaty joined by the shouts of “Believe” from a few hours earlier to echo in my head, forming a kind of chorus of affection and bafflement, a disorienting sense of having no foot to stand on, and no ground beneath it even if I did.Recalling all of this from the overly warm confines of Olwen’s cluttered room, I felt a suddenly like I was going to be sick. I lurched up, rolled over so that I was on my knees, and held my stomach while a world of colors and textures played bumper pool before my eyes.
“Is she all right?” someone asked. It was stranger’s voice—and there was something unusual about it.
“She’s very well, thank you,” said another voice, this one familiar. Olwen, I realized. But…something different about her speech, as well. What?
The wave of nausea passed, and I shook my head to clear away the staticky bursts of light and noise. When my sight returned, I found myself seated on the ground, beneath a tree. Olwen stood protectively over me, a maternal smile on her face.
“How’d we get outside?” I asked.
“We’ve gotten considerably farther than that, child,” she said.
Suddenly I realized what had struck me as unusual about the voices of the stranger who’d inquired about my health, and Olwen’s in reply: