by Chloe Garner
Dark.
It radiated dark, and she could feel it.
This surprised her perhaps more than anything.
She could feel it.
“What do you want?” the man asked, a suggestion that she keep moving.
“The beads,” Valerie said, taking a step forward and reaching up toward them where they hung. “What are they?”
He sneered.
“If you have to ask, you don’t want them.”
Valerie smiled, her fingers itching to touch the pearlescent greenblue surface. They weren’t organic, and she didn’t think they were glass…
“Valerie,” Sasha said quietly. “Please?”
“How much are they?” Valerie asked.
He shook his head.
“Not for sale. Not to you.”
She shrugged, seeing the way the rest of the men were repositioning, closing in around them from behind.
Valerie shrugged.
“Oh, well. They’re pretty.”
The seller sneered again, and Valerie set off once more, swinging her arms. Sasha skittered alongside, continuously looking back.
There were voices, languages Valerie couldn’t make sense of. It was reminiscent of the way the demons had spoken in the hallway when they’d attacked the school the first time, but Valerie didn’t think it was the same.
“They’re following us,” Sasha whispered, anxious to the point of hysteria. “Valerie, they’re following us.”
“So?” Valerie asked. “You could take every one of them out, if you actually chose to.”
“No I couldn’t,” Sasha said. “I didn’t bring any of my stuff.”
“You have your hands,” Valerie said, turning to look at the vendors. “And you have your voice.”
She walked backwards for several more steps, then stopped.
The men were making up ground on her, walking faster, pairing and grouping in threes.
She’d expected them to look hungry, the way the boys on the streets did, but this was much more pragmatic. More transactional.
Dead.
They were all but dead.
There was a flicker of motion, like a bit of cloth caught in a sudden breeze, and Valerie straightened.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“You shouldn’t be here,” one of the men said. “It’s a dangerous place.”
“I like those,” Valerie answered. “They’re the most interesting.”
There was a jostling as one of the men who might have just been warning her got elbowed out of the way by a man who had a knife out in his hand.
Sasha’s fingers dug into Valerie’s elbow hard enough that they were going to leave bruises.
The explosion was… well, it might have been the coolest thing Valerie had ever seen.
There was a shock wave of electric blue that tore through all of the tents like a blade, and then a rolling pink fire that followed it out. After that, she was pretty sure that all of the smaller explosions and fireworks were the ingredients there in the market burning, but it was spectacular.
The men turned back, and Valerie jerked her elbow to get Sasha’s attention.
They started running.
Half the men, more, took off toward the market, hoping to rescue some portion of their wares, but a few of the men turned back again, then ran after Valerie and Sasha.
Sasha screamed and sped up - the girl was actually faster than Valerie by a good margin - but Valerie slowed, looking back at them.
And then slowing more, planting her feet and putting out both hands.
The first two men slowed, waiting, but the third of them kept running, his teeth bared and a knife poised over his head.
Valerie didn’t think.
She didn’t have time.
She just spoke three words, formed a fist, and punched.
He was still two strides away; she was punching air, but there was a direct line of force from her fist to his throat, and he grabbed his neck, dropping the knife and staggering back.
The rest of the men hesitated further, then one of them began to cast back.
Valerie waited, listening to make sure that Sasha’s footsteps were getting further and further away, and when the man cast at her, she held her hands out, wrist to wrist, and she bounced the cast back at the man.
There was nothing visual about it - not like the fireballs her father had had her practicing with - but he was unprepared and didn’t get a defense up fast enough.
The men’s eyes moved, and then they ran.
Valerie watched them for a moment longer, then turned her head to find her mother standing just down the path from her.
“Are you showing off or stretching your legs?” Susan Blake asked, and Valerie shrugged.
“They weren’t following us at first,” she said. “Do they know you?”
“A couple of them,” Susan said. “Good enough that they didn’t see your father, but I want to be gone before anyone important finds out that I was here.”
“The explosion,” Valerie said, and Susan smiled.
“Thing of art, isn’t it? I’d forgotten how much I like working with your dad on that kind of thing. He’s so creative.”
Susan put out an arm, and Valerie walked under it, letting her mom’s arm settle across her shoulders as they walked.
“Is this what it’s like, doing what you do?” Valerie asked, and Susan shook her head with a laugh.
“No, it’s nowhere near this much fun,” she answered. “Mostly it’s boring, biding your time until it’s time to move another inch or two. But it makes great stories, doesn’t it?”
“Is Gemma going to be okay?” Valerie asked, and Susan shrugged, looking back at the men once more.
“This is a market that the Pure use a lot. It traffics in a lot of stuff you can’t really get anywhere else. I expect there’ll be a lot of activity today, trying to figure out who attacked the market and why… If she needs to slip away, we gave her her best shot.”
“Should I have done something different, to keep them from seeing you?” Valerie asked. “Is she going to be in trouble because they knew you were here?”
Susan scoffed.
“They’ve known I’m around and active from the day you left me. That’s not going to tell them anything useful at all. That I’ve got you with me? If they don’t already know about it - which I expect they do know you’re missing - now they know. So what? No plan ever goes simply. You have to trust that everyone involved is good enough to hold up their piece, no matter how things turn out.”
“But you took Sasha so that no one would know where you went,” Valerie said, and Susan shook her head.
“That would be their excuse, without a doubt, but they’d be asking a lot of other questions. We just didn’t want anyone who knew anything alone in a room with Merck Trent when he’s got an idea that they might know something interesting. Lady Harrington will keep her students out of that, mostly, but with you missing? She has to let them come look for you, on the off chance that something bad happened. It’s a lot about a pretext to interrogate a student.”
“Ethan grew up with that,” Valerie said after a moment, and Susan nodded somberly.
“He did.”
“And he’s a nice guy, Mom. He is. I like him a lot.”
Susan smiled.
“I’m glad. And I believe in you. I know if he screws up, you won’t hesitate to walk away. If it turns out you’re wrong, you won’t have so much emotion and ego tied up in it that you can’t break it off. So I hope nothing but the best for you.”
“Oh,” Valerie said. She’d been meaning to tell her mom, but she hadn’t had a moment to do it. “Hanson.”
“Yes?” Susan asked.
“He was spying on me for his mom.”
“I thought as much.”
“And then when he went home, his mom wasn’t there. The Council called her back up again and… she just left him. Abandoned him. Lady Harrington took him in at Survival School, so he’s
… there now. And he and Sasha are kind of… a thing.”
“What?” Susan asked. “He’s… and she’s…”
She put one hand up over her head and another at chest height, and Valerie nodded.
“Hasn’t escaped us that she’s a convenient elbow rest to him.”
“I’m sorry,” Susan said, and Valerie nodded.
“I hated him for like a minute,” she said. “But he’s my best friend.”
“I know,” Susan said. “You still have to be careful of him, though. You know that. Anything you say to him or do around him, she could take back… The Council, you said?”
Valerie nodded.
“How do you know that?” Susan asked. “I couldn’t be certain she hadn’t changed sides after school. Thought she might have been spying for The Pure, though why they would have held off coming after us, I couldn’t figure.”
“Yeah, Lady Harrington said that she could confirm that Mrs. Cox had been called up for Council work.”
Susan nodded slowly.
“Well, she wouldn’t get that wrong,” she said. “Does explain how they found us. I thought my magic was pretty sound, keeping us hidden.”
“Mom…” Valerie said, then stopped. She didn’t know what she intended to say. Susan nodded.
“I wish we could go back,” her mother said. “I wish it every day. I… It was a good time, as much as I missed your father and as much as I missed magic… But the idea that you were going to get to graduate high school and just go on to have a normal life? It was the best thing I could have imagined for you.”
Valerie nodded.
“I wouldn’t give up magic, either, but… I don’t like the politics. Everyone spying on everyone else and everyone lying all the time, and everyone’s lives being in danger all the time…”
“I don’t mind the danger,” Susan said. “I just wish it was more straightforward.”
Valerie nodded, unable to contain a smile.
Sasha was already back in the car, and Grant was behind the wheel.
“You were really good, back there,” Susan said. “I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks, mom,” Valerie answered, and Susan winked.
“You’re my daughter. Wouldn’t have expected anything else. But it doesn’t stop me from being proud.”
Valerie walked around to the far side of the car and got in.
Happy.
They’d just destroyed a market and men had come after her for reasons she shuddered to even imagine, and yet.
She was quite, quite happy.
She was good at this, like finding a glove that fit her to the skin.
She was happy.
Valerie had been here.
That’s what his mom said.
Hanson wandered around the inside of the abandoned warehouse, standing in the dim blue of dusk, beams of light pouring down through thick dust and barely reaching the floor.
It was a gross place, full of the remnants of human industry and human despair, but Martha Cox was certain, and Hanson didn’t question his mom when she was certain.
“There’s magic here,” the woman said, coming out of one of the offices, just over that way. “There’s magic here that I don’t know. They cleaned it up well, so I’m not getting a lot of it, but Susan Blake was here, and I guarantee you that if Susan was here, her daughter was with her.”
“Mom, what if someone took Valerie, and her mom is looking for her, too? Shouldn’t we be looking for Valerie, not chasing around after Susan?”
Martha shook her head, going to pick up something that looked like a burnt flier, but that could have been any number of other things. Hanson had stopped picking things up several minutes ago.
“Susan Blake is not the type to lose track of her daughter. And the Council doesn’t care about Valerie. They need to get Susan back on the leash again, and that’s the only reason I’m here.”
“She loved you, Mom,” Hanson said. Martha looked over at him.
“I know,” she said, her voice softer. “And I really was affectionate to her, as well. It was a long time, just living our lives. I’d forgotten how important the Council’s work is, in that time. It wasn’t until they called me in that I remembered. We have to find Susan and the Council has to find a way to put her back to work where she isn’t going to just run off again the minute she gets out of sight. Hanson, the longer she’s out here, the worse it’s going to be, trying to earn back the Council’s trust. They have to know that she’s going to work for them or else…”
“Or else what?” Hanson asked.
“Or else they can’t risk letting her out again,” Martha said.
“You’re talking about caging a woman who was your friend,” Hanson said.
“No, I’m not,” Martha said. It took several moments for Hanson to figure out what she meant by that.
“They’d kill her,” he said.
“If they think she’s not working in their interests,” Martha said. “War is always won by narrow margins, here and there, where people made hard decisions. And Susan Blake is key to all of this. We need her.”
“You’re still talking about them killing her,” Hanson said.
Martha nodded, picking up something else and putting her tongue to it. He looked away.
“Without Susan Blake, we will almost certainly lose this war,” Martha said. “With Susan Blake against us? We already have lost this war.”
“How can one woman be so important?” Hanson asked. “I mean… Just… I just came from an entire school full of people who are really good at magic. Is she so important?”
“Yes,” Martha said. “Because no one sees conflict the way that she does, and no one sees solutions to conflict the way that she does. I was a housewife the entire time you were growing up. Do you remember?”
“Of course I do, Mom,” Hanson answered, looking up at the blue light forming beams through the dust over his head.
“And what do you think I did with my time, once you started going to school?”
“Um,” Hanson said. He wanted to say ‘clean the apartment’, but it was glaringly untrue. Cluttered had been a kind way of describing their home, and while he’d never felt like the place was unclean, it hadn’t ever really had a thorough straightening done to it.
“I studied Susan Blake,” Martha supplied before he could get himself into trouble. “The Council gave me her war records when they sent me after her, and I spent your entire life studying her. I am the best known expert on that woman. I got to see what she was like outside of war, when she didn’t think that everyone was spying on her or trying to kill her. I went to lunch with her once a week and we talked about your school and the neighborhood. I know how unusual her way of coming at things is. And what she does, when she’s out of touch, off on a mission? It’s art. I can’t emphasize strongly enough how talented she is.”
“Then why are you hunting her?” Hanson asked. “Why not let her do whatever she thinks is right?”
“Because if she’s working against the Council, the Council is going to lose this war, son. And if they lose this war, the entire human population of the planet - every civilian man, woman, and child you have ever known - is going to die.”
“You think she would actually work against a group that was trying to rescue the world’s population?” Hanson asked, and Martha laughed.
“I think she always works against everyone. She never sees anything but her own agenda, and she thinks that her perspective is the only one that could possibly be true. She is talented, but she has an ego the size of this room, and, yes, she would absolutely gamble the population of the planet on her being right.”
Hanson crossed his arms, watching his mother work.
He didn’t have anything to argue against that.
It was possible that his mom was right.
He was just having a hard time giving her the benefit of the doubt, after the last few months.
Susan Blake hadn’t abandoned her daughter.
“
They were here,” Martha said again. “I’m regretting not teaching you any magic, because I need you to check and see if Sasha Mills is still with them, or if this magic is from someone else.”
“You think Sasha might have been here, too?” Hanson asked, and Martha looked up at him.
“Where else would she be? From everything you’ve told me, the two girls are inseparable.”
She was actually betting that he was right.
That felt strange.
He’d only been around them a few days, in all…
It had only been a few days that he’d spent with Sasha.
And still.
And still, he felt funny thinking about her, like he had to make sure he didn’t start smiling, like if he didn’t watch close, his feet might drift up off the floor.
“We need to keep moving,” Martha said. “This was a good find, but they’re ahead of us. It’s been days since they stopped here. If they keep moving, I’m never going to catch up.”
She started for the door, and Hanson looked up at the ceiling again.
He hoped they kept moving.
They were in a cottage on a beach.
It didn’t matter to Valerie that the cottage didn’t have power and that it looked an awful lot like it had been mostly formed by the last major storm.
The waves were audible from inside the house.
She and Sasha were sharing a room again, but they’d spent an entire day out sitting on the sand, talking and watching the waves. Inside, Susan and Grant were up to stuff, but neither of Valerie’s parents were interested in giving a tutorial on what they were doing, and frankly Sasha had had as much as she could take of the war effort, at just that moment, so Valerie let her friend talk her into going out and avoiding the casting from the early morning on through to the sunset.
Grant had come out with lunch, and Susan had brought them dinner, and it had been easy and nice and… Valerie was shocked that Sasha hadn’t wanted to be sitting at the table, watching every move her parents made, but she wasn’t going to question it.
Sasha had gone through a lot, these last couple of days, and the market had been the end of it.
Finally, as the sun went down and the air began to cool, Sasha stood.
“When do we go back to school, Valerie?” Sasha asked.