by Chloe Garner
Valerie looked over at the TV again, torn.
She didn’t get opportunities like this very often, anymore.
On the other hand.
“Why not?” she asked, standing.
They had fifteen minutes until the pizza was supposed to show up.
“You start in the kitchen; I’ll go through the main bedroom,” Valerie said, and Sasha nodded.
“Leave everything like it was,” Sasha said. “I’d be embarrassed if they knew we’d gone through it all.”
“I don’t expect anything I do to be secret anymore,” Valerie said, only half-joking. “Everyone is spying on me full-time. I may as well do something interesting to watch.”
“Are you going to burn handprints into the back of the door again?” Sasha asked. “Between your magic and your dad’s, I don’t think I’d be able to get in at all.”
“Maybe just to our door,” Valerie answered, mostly kidding.
Valerie looked under the bed in the master suite, then went into the bathroom, going through the two drawers and the cabinet there. She turned up some basic stuff, in the bottom drawer in the bathroom, but nothing that deserved to be called a ‘cache’. For all Valerie knew, it might have been used for personal grooming and nothing more.
“Here,” Sasha called, and Valerie carried the little basket back into the main room.
Sasha had a giant popcorn tin in her arms, but she was carrying it like it weighed a lot more.
“Top shelf in the pantry,” the redhead said, grinning, and Valerie grinned back.
“Let’s see what they’ve got in here,” she said, going to sit on the floor in front of the movie again.
Sasha opened the tin and started to unpack it. Valerie picked something up and Sasha gave her a sharp look.
“Can I… just… Please?”
“What?” Valerie asked.
“There’s an art to taking something apart so that you can put it back together exactly the way it was,” Sasha said. “And you’re messing with it.”
Valerie smiled, putting her hands in the air and simply watching as Sasha continued to unpack the tin.
There was an art to it, and Valerie was starting to get the hang of it by the time the pizza arrived. Valerie looked though the peep-hole, then opened the door and quickly exchanged the food for money and closed the door again, going to sit on the carpet once more.
“This thing is packed,” Sasha said, still working.
“I’m just gonna eat, so long as I’m sitting here not doing anything,” Valerie said, and Sasha waved at her.
“There’s stuff I don’t even know what it is,” she said.
“Shocker,” Valerie said, settling in to watch the movie.
If she watched Sasha work anymore, she was going to give in to the temptation to start touching stuff.
“Oh, cool,” Sasha said. “I didn’t know you could still get these.”
“I’m watching, here,” Valerie answered.
“Uh huh,” Sasha said. “You’re over there secretly plotting what you’re going to do with all of this stuff. I know you.”
“I don’t know what any of it is any better than you do,” Valerie said. “I’m just going to pick it up and throw it together and hope it doesn’t blow up.”
“Are not,” Sasha said dismissively. “Three months ago, maybe, but you’ve got your stuff under control, now. You could do anything you want to do.”
Valerie looked over her shoulder at the floor and shrugged.
It wasn’t untrue, but it wasn’t anywhere near as consistent a magic as Sasha liked to believe.
“Mrs. Reynolds says that magic is a constant learning process,” Valerie said.
“And you need to know what all of these things are,” Sasha said. “Just not to use them, apparently.”
Valerie shook her head and went back to eating.
Finally, Sasha finished, putting the tin up on the arm chair and scooting back.
Valerie only in that moment realized the volume and diversity of stuff her father had there.
And some of it was really dark.
She knew that the three-branches theory of magic didn’t really hold with the ‘very dark’ and ‘very light’ characterizations she’d been learning in school, but it was still really dark, if she was able to sense it.
“All right,” Valerie said, handing the box of pizza over and sitting up. “What do you want me to make?”
“An alarm system,” Sasha said without hesitation. “One that warns us if someone is using magic as they come up the stairs. And aren’t your parents.”
“Aren’t you choosey,” Valerie said, putting her hands out over the ingredients. “You know that that probably isn’t possible at all, not to mention with the stuff they’ve got here.”
“It’s possible,” Sasha said. “I think. I think Lady Harrington has that kind of stuff all over the school.”
Valerie sighed.
Of course it was possible.
She just didn’t have a clue how to do it.
Thing was, her hands did.
She started picking things up and setting them to the side. Sasha abandoned her pizza and came to sort the ingredients so that she could put them back where they came from after Valerie was done with them, but Valerie was in her cool, mechanical operating state, just working by touch and instinct.
“What do you need from me?” Sasha asked.
“A knife from the kitchen,” Valerie said. “Actually, an entire prep kit, as close as you can get to it.”
“My mom carries a really nice one,” Sasha said. “I think most magic users have one that they prefer, but they tend to keep it on them…”
Valerie glanced up.
She and Sasha didn’t talk about Ivory Mills very often, but it wasn’t because Sasha wasn’t forthcoming or interested. Valerie just failed to ask much.
“Tell me what your mom does, again,” she said. “Now that I at least have some clue what magic is and what it does.”
Sasha nodded, starting to pull knives out of a block and put them on a plate.
“Right. So, she goes into hospitals and stuff like that, clinics sometimes, and she’ll either tell people she’s a counselor or a holistic healer or a social worker… You know that she actually has a degree from a civilian university in counseling?”
“I didn’t,” Valerie said. “When did she do that?”
“After the war,” Sasha said. “After I was born. I remember a little bit of it, at the very end, but Bradley remembers all of it. She worked really hard, making sure that she put as much time into us as she could and didn’t give up on going to hospitals and stuff, still. It was all local, back then. Here in the last year, I was only going to school a couple of days a week, and I was traveling with her the rest of the time.”
“And your school let you do it?” Valerie asked.
“My mom didn’t really ask,” Sasha said. “She just told them that I was going to be traveling with her for work and that the exposure was worth skipping the days at school. I made up everything from the road.”
“Huh,” Valerie said. “Did you like it?”
Sasha shrugged, coming to sit on the armchair after she moved the popcorn tin to the floor and watching Valerie work some more.
“I think I did,” she finally said. “I missed my friends, and everyone thought I was really weird, but I got to see my mom do a lot of magic, and that’s helped me a lot with school. And I knew I was leaving after last year, anyway, so the fact that everyone thought I was super weird… Well, they mostly thought it before, too, but it didn’t bother me as much because I knew that they wouldn’t matter this year.”
“Okay,” Valerie said. “So what kind of stuff does your mom do?”
“She specializes in trauma,” Sasha said. “She helps people heal faster and helps keep the complications from developing. She has potions that will keep most infections from happening, and ones that prevent clots…”
“Those are usually called medicine
s,” Valerie said, and Sasha shook her head.
“It’s only a medicine if it works when someone else does it,” Sasha said. “My mom had to administer everything herself.”
“Did she ever have you help?” Valerie asked, and Sasha shrugged.
“Minor prep work, sometimes. Not anything important. If it went wrong, she could hurt someone, and if it just didn’t work… She would move on the next day, and if something didn’t work, she lost her chance to help someone.”
“What did she do for money?” Valerie asked.
“She got paid as part of the war,” Sasha said. “And my dad has a construction business that he runs. His buildings are stronger and lighter and cheaper than anyone else’s, because they’re using magic to get them built and to make everything work… It’s a really niche set of magic spells and potions that he uses, but he works on really big buildings, now. Anyway… I never hear my parents even talk about money.
“That’s so weird,” Valerie said. “To just not even have to think about it? I can’t imagine.”
“Did your mom talk about money a lot?” Sasha asked, and Valerie tipped her head back and laughed.
“I left my window open one night when it got cold outside, and she made me pay the heating bill out of my babysitting money.”
“Huh,” Sasha said. “And she had all that money the whole time.”
Valerie shook her head.
“Do you think she gave up something big, running away? Like, a life of luxury?”
“Valerie,” Sasha said, a tone of concern in her voice. “Have you seen your parents together?”
“Um,” Valerie said. “I’ve been trying not to.”
“Shut up. That’s not what I mean. I mean they’re happy. They get along and they like each other. They love each other. She gave up being with your dad to run away.”
Valerie frowned, looking at the mostly-built cast, then nodded.
“You’re right. I’m just so used to it just being the two of us, and my dad is so weird.”
“He’s smart,” Sasha said. “And to the point. And, yeah, he scares me sometimes, but he’s good at what he does.”
“Is there anyone you don’t see the best in?” Valerie asked.
“Elvis Trent,” Sasha said without pause. Valerie laughed.
“Fair enough.”
She held her hands out to the side.
“So. I think I’ve got this, actually, but I need you to open the door so it can see the hallway as it finishes setting.”
Sasha sprang out of her chair and went to open the door, leaning against the doorway and waiting.
Valerie would have been watching for some kind of purple swirly smoke to go by, but Sasha seemed to be too seasoned to expect something like that.
It was still a bit disappointing. Valerie finished the spell and, while she could feel it doing a thing, she couldn’t see anything. She liked the casts that came with pretty colors and explosions.
She looked over, the sense of the spell expanding and beginning to send her information about the room and the magic inside of it making her nervous for just a moment.
She didn’t want to have that information coming back to her for the rest of her life. It would have been like having a radio on her shoulder that she couldn’t turn off.
And then she realized that she controlled that signal, and she could turn it down, turn it off, even dismantle it at a thought.
And that.
That was remarkable.
The cast filled the outside hallway, and Valerie nodded.
“You can close it.”
Sasha came back and started to clean up, and Valerie went to get the pizza, starting a new slice when she sat up.
“What is it?” Sash asked her from the floor, and Valerie shook her head.
“I screwed up the cast,” she said. “It doesn’t…”
But she hadn’t.
She hadn’t.
She’d done it exactly right.
She put her hands over her face, then turned the television off and looked at Sasha.
“Go get your stuff. Anything you need to have with you. We need to go.”
“What?” Sasha demanded, and Valerie nodded, looking at the door.
“They’re coming.”
“No,” Sasha said from the floor. “No. It was supposed to just be because I was paranoid.”
Valerie shook her head.
“Go fast. I’m going to figure out how to get us out of here.”
Sasha stood, looking around the room once with a sense of despair, then walked away, headed for the bedroom. Valerie could hear her stuffing things into the plastic bag, and Valerie slid off of the couch to look at what she had to work with, again.
Weapon?
Or diversion?
Her mother had killed the last two men that Valerie had attacked. Valerie hadn’t had the stomach for killing them, and she still remembered how she’d felt when she’d thought she’d been the one who had taken their lives.
She couldn’t do that again.
She couldn’t.
She wouldn’t.
So she needed something to distract them or convince them that she and Sasha weren’t where they were.
How did she do that?
How had her father done it, when he’d come to rescue her?
She couldn’t do that.
Whatever it was he’d done, she couldn’t do that.
It was dangerous and it was hard, and…
No.
She needed a different plan.
Sasha was packing fast, and the magic outside of the doorway indicated that there were people casting… Scouting magic. It was the only word for it. It was like a giant hound was snuffling up Valerie’s magic and figuring out what it was, and for a moment Valerie worried that she’d attracted them by casting outside of the apartment, but - no - they’d gotten here too quickly. They’d already been on their way and it was only Sasha’s fear that had saved them from being surprised and ambushed.
Valerie needed to respect that more.
Her hands were working.
She wasn’t sure yet what they were up to, but they were working, and that was calming.
She was assembling magic… volatile magic. Smoke and confusion and noise and… violence. There was violence in there.
Heat.
She liked heat magic, it turned out.
Explosion.
Not enough to cook someone - the variety of casting ingredients that were here wasn’t quite broad enough to do that - but enough power to knock them back.
Sound.
Sound-deadening.
She was going to make them deaf.
Not permanently, she didn’t think, but…
For a few minutes.
At least.
They would have defenses.
It was possible it wouldn’t work at all, though Valerie had never seen one of her casts fail…
She actually paused, sitting back on her heels to reflect on that. She’d never failed a cast. Mr. Jamison was right - there were kids in her class who were still trying to get casts to work consistently, and she whined about how far behind she was.
And here she was, building a defense bomb that was going to get them out of the apartment safe and alive.
While the bomb was setting and cooking and becoming as potent as it was going to be in the time she was going to get, she set to work on a pair of poultices. She knew intuitively what they were, but she didn’t know specifically until they were almost done and Sasha was sitting on the floor in front of her again.
“Don’t touch that one,” Valerie said. “Don’t you wish my parents had a cell phone now?”
“What?” Sasha asked, and Valerie frowned.
“Oh, you were in the shower. Sorry. Never mind.”
“I do wish they had a cell phone,” Sasha said. “How did they find us?”
“My parents are scary,” Valerie said. “So they lay in wait on the apartment and waited for my parents to leav
e. They don’t want to go head-to-head with the Blakes; they just want to manipulate them through me.”
“You’re awfully certain,” Sasha said hesitantly and Valerie grinned.
“I’m thinking too hard about this cast to have room for doubt. It could be anything else. Maybe the neighbors are just cracked and decided to come abduct us for funsies. What do I know?”
Sasha rocked on her toes.
“What do you need me to do?” she asked, and Valerie nodded to the second poultice that she was just finishing.
“Do what I do,” she said, dipping her fingers into the green-ish cream and spreading it from her nose back to her ears, then sliding her finger through the top curl of her ear to form a ring around the outside of her ear.
Sasha did it without question.
“That’s going to go off when the door opens,” Valerie said, indicating the bomb. “We can open the door or they can, but when it goes off, we need to be running.”
“What happens then?” Sasha asked. Valerie shook her head.
“We keep moving. No matter what.”
“And how do your parents find us?” Sasha asked. Valerie shrugged, looking at the ingredients still sitting there on the floor. She needed… Those.
She started stuffing things into her pockets and handing other things to Sasha.
“We have to trust that they’re good enough to do it,” Valerie said. “If we stay here, a lot of people are going to die, and we might be some of them.”
She looked at Sasha, realizing quite suddenly that no one had any reason to keep Sasha alive. Her friend’s mom was not tactically relevant. All they needed was Valerie.
“If they catch you, they’ll kill you,” she said quietly. “But maybe I could hide you…?”
“I’m coming with you,” Sasha said. “We’re not talking about this.”
“Okay,” Valerie said. “Okay. We’re not talking about it.” She finished putting things into her pockets and stood, looking at the door. “So… This is going to be loud.”
“How loud?” Sasha asked.
The door opened.
Flying Solo
They were moving.
In retrospect…
Nothing.
No.
She couldn’t remember what had happened clearly enough to have an idea what she would have done differently, though she was sure she’d done things differently than she would have if she’d been able to know what she knew after…