by Chloe Garner
“I don’t know,” Valerie said. “I’d just been thinking we were along for the ride, right now.”
“I don’t know why we’re here,” Sasha said. “Is it so that we can see things how they actually are or because the Council is spying on you or because The Pure are hunting you, or because your teachers aren’t good enough to teach you actual magic…? It feels like it’s all of them and none of them, and like your parents don’t even really want us here…”
She sighed, dropping her hands, and Valerie stood.
“I’m sorry,” Valerie said. “I know this is hard. And you were excited for a second about seeing how things actually were, and… Yesterday was hard. I know it was.”
“No you don’t,” Sasha said. “You don’t. You had a great time. You punched a guy in the throat with magic.”
“You saw that?” Valerie asked, and Sasha sighed, her shoulders falling.
“I was feeling wretched that I’d run off and left you to defend yourself on your own from all those men, and then I saw it, and I saw how they looked at you.”
“They were looking at my mom,” Valerie said. “She’s the scary one.”
“You’re scary,” Sasha said. “They don’t have any idea, back at school. They still call you The Remedial.”
“They do,” Valerie said. That had stopped stinging about a month ago.
“Ethan…” Sasha said, then shook her head.
“What about him?” Valerie asked.
“He thinks he’s going to be head of the new Council. He just assumes it, and so does Shack. But it’s you. You’re going to be more powerful than he is.”
Valerie blinked.
“Um. No. I would rather hang myself with a poisonous snake.”
Sasha looked out at the water.
“I’m not saying it’s a meritocracy,” the redhead said. “I’m not saying that. It’s just… I don’t think he’s going to take it well, when he finds out who you really are.”
“He knows who I am,” Valerie said dismissively. “I mean. We just met a few months ago, so… it’s not like Hanson. But he knows me. It isn’t going to matter.”
“Your parents are really neat,” Sasha said.
“Okay,” Valerie answered. She was still unnerved by how close Susan and Grant were. She could handle how much unknown they had to them, as individuals, but you put them together and it was like she’d never met either one of them at all.
“You ever wonder how your dad puts up with your mom being the important one all the time?”
“I don’t see that he’s putting up with anything,” Valerie said. “She’s not that important, and it’s not like she’s more important than he is. He was just dead this whole time.”
“Everyone talks about what she did in the war, last time,” Sasha said. “I knew who she was.”
“Everyone knows who he is, too,” Valerie said, feeling awkward. Her parents were rock stars, and she’d never had an inkling. “And no one knows what she did. They keep going on about… I don’t know, her… but no one can say what she did.”
Sasha sighed again.
“I think your dad is really cool for how he doesn’t care that your mom is Susan Blake.”
Valerie remembered something, tipping her head.
“No one knows what they did,” she said. “It’s all rumors and speculation and hype.”
“I’m not saying…” Sasha said, but Valerie was already walking.
She went into the kitchen of the tiny little hut and she sat down on one of the chairs.
“The Shadows,” Valerie said. “Real or not?”
“What?” Susan asked, looking at her.
“Real or not?” Valerie asked.
“Real,” Grant said without looking up.
“Grant,” Susan scolded, and he shrugged.
“I won’t lie to her.”
“I will,” Susan said. “If it means not talking about the deep dark secrets.”
“Who were they?” Valerie asked. Sasha slipped in and went to sit down against a wall, listening but trying to stay invisible.
“I can’t tell you that,” Susan said. “It would put lives in danger.”
“Are they still active?” Valerie asked.
“Is your mother dead?” Grant answered. Susan gave him another sharp look.
“Did you kill the scientist who was making progress at taking away people’s magic abilities?” Valerie asked.
Grant lifted his head, interested in this.
Susan gave him an extremely exasperated look, then turned her face to Valerie.
“If you know these things, you are in danger,” she said. “I’m still trying to keep you safe from my past.”
“Am I in any more danger than I already am?” Valerie asked, and Grant chuckled.
“She’s got you there.”
“Yes,” Susan said. “Some of the people involved would kill you, just to keep the secrets from getting out. Even if we were all on the same side, back then.”
“You think some of the Shadows have changed sides?” Valerie asked. “What are they?”
Grant raised his eyebrows.
“If you don’t tell her, I will, and I doubt you’re going to like the details I throw in.”
Susan put her hands down flat on the table, glaring one more time at Grant, then closed her eyes.
“The Shadows,” she said. “It was the result of a long night of drinking after a longer night of fighting. It was stupid and it was cool, and the cool overpowered the stupid.”
“That’s not how I remember it, but as I recall, I was blackout drunk that night.”
“Oh, you were decidedly on the side of stupid that night,” Susan said.
Grant laughed.
“Sounds like me.”
Susan shook her head.
“The Shadows were a group of covert fighters. We all had our favorite tactics, and some of them had nothing to do with each other, but for reasons I am not going to go into tonight, we were all in the same bar after having been in the same fight. We’d won, but it was one of those moments where we realized that we were the only ones who could have won. The strike forces and the fighters and every last blessed graduate of Light School would have walked into a wall and died that night. It was just us…”
“The Shadows,” Grant said dramatically, derailing Susan for just a moment.
“We had the knowledge and the information and the skills, among us, to do some really remarkable things. Gemma was there that night, actually.”
“Was she?” Grant asked. “I didn’t remember that.”
Susan nodded.
“She won the bet on how many drinks you’d put down before you threw up. Guessed it on the nose.”
“She was good at things like that, back then,” Grant said. Susan shook her head.
“Anyway, we started talking and everyone was half drunk… it was one of those kinds of fights. I don’t…” Susan licked her lips, sliding her hand along the table toward Valerie. “I ran away because I never wanted you to experience the kind of fight that drives you to drink and laugh too loud afterward. I wanted you to graduate with honors and go to college and study something just boring enough to pay well for the rest of your life. Not that. I really, really didn’t want that for you.”
“I didn’t either,” Grant muttered, then shook his head.
“It was one of those kinds of nights, though, and everyone was laughing too loud and we were talking about how we were the ones who hid in the shadows and saw everything and actually got it… And then someone said that we were the shadows, and we started calling ourselves that…”
She glanced at Grant, and he shrugged.
“You tell her what you want,” he said. Susan nodded, then glanced back at Sasha.
“I’m about to say something that, if you were ever to repeat it to someone who cared and had power, they would absolutely end up killing people who don’t deserve it. So if you don’t want to be burdened with that kind of knowledge…”
/> Sasha hugged her knees to her chest.
“I think I accepted it the minute I walked out of the room,” Valerie said and Susan shrugged.
“That fight went sideways,” she said. “There were a lot of just plain magic warriors on both sides, killing each other for no reason but that they were on opposite sides, and… something changed that night. We all kind of saw each other, realized that the sides weren’t nearly as clean-cut as either of us wanted to believe… The people at the table were on both sides of the war. The Council thinks that it’s some jockish way that their people in the field refer to themselves, and boy did they latch hold of it and start shipping some whoppers, after they caught the name, but they don’t know. The Shadows know that if you’re working whole-heartedly for either side, you’re supporting the wrong. And we came to realize that the right was going to need a new direction.”
Valerie realized she had stopped breathing.
“You’re rebels,” she said.
Susan nodded.
“We are. And there aren’t that many of us. We can’t go up against our leadership directly…”
She paused.
“Susan,” Grant said slowly. “I never asked because I assumed if you wanted to tell me, you would, but it’s time. What happened when Lan died?”
Susan looked over at him, then pressed her lips.
“I would have told you, if I’d known that it was going to hit her. I’m sorry.”
He nodded, glancing at Valerie, then settling back in his chair a fraction. Susan nodded.
“There’s another of the Shadows, a man that your dad knows, but who I won’t name. It’s that dangerous. He was in Lan’s inner circle, and Lan… Well, it doesn’t matter now what he did that finally set the final fuse, but the Shadows came to the decision that if Lan continued to head The Pure, they were going to make a mistake and kill everyone. Lan just wasn’t worried about it enough, and he was pushing his people so hard… I was there. It’s true I was there. I was fighting Lan’s people - including the other Shadow - and trying to stop this thing that was happening, and the Shadow killed him.
“It was a knife in the back event, but Lan was strong enough to send a final curse at me that reverberated through to the Council. I don’t know if that was how he aimed it, but that’s what happened. The Shadow heard the curse and figured out what it was, and while Lan was still casting it, the Shadow cast magic over top of it. Strong aligning magic. Magic that… when you mix what Lan was casting, I still don’t know what to expect out of it. But it all hit me at once and I blacked out, and when I came to, Lan was dead and the room was empty. I ran away and… I found out I was pregnant a few weeks later.”
“How did the story get out?” Sasha asked. “If you were the only one to tell it?”
Susan nodded, glancing back at Valerie’s friend.
“I had to tell the Council that they’d been cursed. So I did, but I never did tell them the rest of the story. I went back out again and disappeared, and… They’ve never liked how easily I do that. They’ve always wanted to find a way to force me to do things their way. It’s just a long history of me not going along, and I don’t think that anyone has guessed how big a secret is hiding there.”
Susan turned her attention back to Valerie once more.
“The Shadow who cast the aligning magic that settled on you… He knows about you. I told him. So if you are ever in a corner, you have at least one ally up high within the Pure who isn’t your aunt.”
“She hates me,” Valerie said, and Susan shrugged.
“It’s not personal. It’s because you’re my daughter.”
“What happened?” Valerie asked, and Susan shook her head.
“That’s a story for another day. We need to get cleaned up and packed up and ready to head out at first light.”
“Why?” Valerie asked. “Why can’t we stay here a couple days?”
“Because this isn’t a vacation,” Grant said. “There’s work to do, and if we don’t do it, no one will.”
“You spent two weeks training me,” Valerie said. “Wasn’t there work to do, then?”
“I made sacrifices to do that,” Grant said. “And things weren’t as high-pitch as they are now. You’ve seen the two schools, and that was the real goal. Now…” Susan looked at him, and he shrugged. “There’s so much for her to learn.”
“I know,” Susan said. “I let my hope get the best of me.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Grant said. “She has to know it, so she will. There’s no other way.”
“What about the curse, though?” Sasha asked.
“What about it?” Susan replied.
“What does it mean? What are we supposed to do about it?”
“We?” Susan asked. “No. Grant and I will keep going at them the way we always have, you two will absorb everything you hear, everything you see, and everything you learn, and with any luck at all, by the time you graduate, you’ll be ready to come at this war with the perspective that we need for you to finish it. There is no winning for the Council. Just knocking back the most belligerent of The Pure, for them to grow right back up again. We have to fight a different fight and go after different goals.”
“But the Council brats,” Sasha said. “They’re important, right?”
Susan sighed, sitting back in her chair.
“Honestly? I’d rather forget about the whole thing. I’m grateful that Lan didn’t manage to get a full, hard cast on every one of the Council’s kids, because the civil war that would happen at the transition of leadership would wreck the magic community, but… I’d rather just leave it there. It’s not worth my time or energy trying to convince someone else’s kids that the world isn’t the way everyone has made it out to be all this time. Especially not when they’ve grown up knowing, more than anyone else, that the Council is the end-all, be-all of truth arbitration. Hard enough to get my own kid straight on what’s going on out here.”
“Mom,” Valerie said. “Ethan will listen to me.”
Susan gave her a tight-lipped smile and nodded.
“I hope so. Maybe you do have an ally and I’m underestimating both of you. But… Just be careful, okay? It’s so easy for it to look simpler than it is, and when you dig in, you realize that nothing was what you thought it was.”
“You mean like both my best friend from childhood and the first person to be nice to me at school, outside of Sasha, both spying on me to the same leadership group?” Valerie asked. “Yeah, I’m getting that. I hate it.”
“So do I,” Susan sighed, and Grant shook his head.
“If you guys want to see cloak and dagger, try hanging out with The Pure for a while. I hate the Council as much as the next guy, but The Pure have got subterfuge down to an art.”
“I’m not going to have the whose-leaders-are-worse fight with you again,” Susan said.
“They aren’t his leaders,” Valerie said. “They aren’t. Why do you guys keep acting like it wouldn’t be a big deal if they were?”
Susan looked at her, and then at Grant.
“You have to tell her,” she said. “It’s going to come out eventually, and you’re going to wish she’d heard it from you.”
“You’re not one of them, are you?” Valerie asked her father. He narrowed his eyes at Susan, then shook his head and sighed.
“Lan,” he said after a moment. “He was a tight-fisted leader, and The Pure were a cult of personality. Passions run deep, over there, but he was the one who started it.”
“Okay,” Valerie said.
“When he died, there was a huge fight over who was going to take over. A lot of power factions rose up and fought each other for the soul of The Pure, but in the end, it was his first lieutenant who managed to take over. His name is Fact Alexander.”
“That’s made up, right?” Valerie asked.
“He took Fact as his first name a long time ago, but Alexander is his given last name,” Grant said.
Grant looked at Susan once more, then
shook his head.
“I had a teacher at school, Mr. Blake, who was really kind to me and encouraged me to think about things however I wanted to. It was just civilian public school, but he knew that I didn’t like my parents’ politics - he thought they were hippies - and he was really supportive. I used to sit with him at lunch a couple of times a month and just talk about… I don’t know. Philosophy, I guess. He was a math teacher, but I really liked the way he thought, and he challenged me to look hard at how I came to my decisions about what I believed… Anyway, when I applied at Light School, I changed my name to Blake.”
Valerie put her hands over her mouth.
“I’m named for your math teacher?” she asked, and he closed his eyes, laughing.
“Yes, daughter. You are named for my math teacher.”
“You’re the son of the head of the Superiors,” Sasha said, standing.
“Thank you, Miss Mills,” Susan said.
Valerie looked hard at Grant.
“That’s why Gemma is the way she is,” she said, and he shrugged.
“Everyone knows that she’s an Alexander, but no one really points it out. It would be insulting to her to imply that she doesn’t deserve every bit of confidence she gets, but it would also make Fact very angry if someone mistreated her. And he has a legendary temper.”
“You’re fighting him,” Sasha said.
“I’m fighting everyone,” Grant said, testy. He stood and started clearing off the table. “And we need to move again. I’ve got irons in the fire that I need to check on. Had enough problems the last time I went off grid for more than a day or two.”
“But we’re working together now,” Susan answered. “We’ve got this.”
He looked at her, then softened, nodding.
“I know. But people are going to die.”
“People are always going to die,” Susan said. “It’s war.”
He frowned, then returned his attention to the table. Valerie stood, grabbing Sasha.
“We’ll go get packed up.”
“Get what packed up?” Sasha asked.
They’d stopped at a thrift shop after Ground School and bought a few sets of clothes, but everything Valerie had to her name just now fit into a grocery store bag.
“Valerie,” Sasha hissed as they got back to the room the two of them were sharing. “Are you sure he’s on our side?”