by Jenn Stark
“Who the hell are they?” Brody asked, saving me the trouble.
“Two of the family representatives,” Simon said. He turned to me. “They’re gonna want you up there, Sara, and you should probably lose the cape. I can give you my wings?”
“I’m, ah…good. Thanks.”
Sure enough, as I watched the others twirl through the air, I felt my own extra appendages stir in my back. I didn’t generally like to think of the fact that I’d grown wings recently, incarnations of searing-hot energy that scored my back like the flames of a thousand burning suns anytime I tried to use them, but…I did have them, after all. It would be silly to strap on Simon’s contraption.
“Off you go, then,” Simon said. “You’re going to get a leg up, looks like.”
“I…” I lifted my gaze as I felt an undeniable tug on the top of my right shoulder, almost as if the Magician was reaching down to lift me bodily from fifty feet away. While imagining the two arcs of fire unfolding from my back, I gave an experimental hop, cheeks burning with embarrassment and the heat from my own appendages as they burned through my clothing and spread wide. I wasn’t sure how the rest of my dress remained intact, but at least for the moment, it did. Was I seriously trying this?
I seriously was—and succeeding. Instead of my usual highly impressive three-inch vertical leap, I soared straight up on my first hop, shooting well beyond the top of the tent and into the night. I’d leapt easily a hundred feet at the first go, and my wings stretched wide behind me, miraculously holding me aloft.
Fortunately, I wasn’t alone. As my wings spread wide, incandescent against the midnight velvet sky, the Magician rose to my level. While my wings were a fiery red, his were silvery bright, and he circled me almost lazily, while my feet churned in the air. I never was good at treading water.
“Was this your idea?” I asked, trying to keep the gasp out of my voice. I also wasn’t so great with heights.
The Magician laughed, the sound so much lighter than I was used to. It sent a curious thrill through me. “Yet something else I must relearn about you, Miss Wilde,” he said. “With each new door that opens, I find a vast treasure awaits me.”
He sounded almost giddy with excitement, his emotion running high, and I tried not to gape. The Magician I had known so well had always kept his emotions under careful restraint. This Magician was the exact opposite. He was wild…free.
What would it be like to be free?
I frowned, forcing myself to focus on keeping aloft, not on the curious flare of wonder my own question had set loose within me. “You’ve been here a couple of hours, now, right? What have you learned?”
“Give me your hands,” Armaeus said instead. “It will be faster.”
Though I didn’t like the redirection, I was happy to oblige as it meant there was something other than my own positive thoughts keeping me aloft. The moment Armaeus’s hands touched mine, I was flooded with information. He had spoken to two of what he called the ancient families, one from the heartland of Central America and one from the Nordic realm, near the Arctic Circle. They had both lived in solitude, their tribes interacting as little as possible with the modern world, their doctrines and histories intact. Pride, that was what resonated most, overwhelming pride that they had survived this long and done so well despite the forward march of time. Intertwined with that pride, however, was a very real and present fear. What had done them so well for so long would no longer suffice. They had to act. They had to reach out. They needed the Arcana Council to reach back. Armaeus had pledged that aid.
I stared at him. “You’re going to help them?” I asked, taken aback by his almost wild grin.
“Help them and any like them that come to us, yes. Seek out those who are afraid and bring them forward as well. The Shadow Court is moving, but we will move with it. We have to at this point.”
He turned then, taking me with him. The wind shifted beneath my wings, and I forced myself not to yelp as we suddenly dropped again, plummeting back through the open skylight of the Winged Warriors pavilion. No sooner did we cross the threshold than a cheer went up and five other figures rose to greet us, each with their own pair of wings, at turns crackling with energy, glowing with a filmy hue, or gasping and clattering in a metal contraption that could’ve been plucked straight out of a steampunk novel. That flyer, a man maybe twice my age, grinned at me with fierce abandon, a crackpot scientist let loose to play with his own toys.
Armaeus took another circle, then turned his flying rig noisily, and I realized he had created a new illusion to explain his ability to fly to the masses—a machine that appeared to be the wings of an owl.
And then we flew. Diving and whirling, in and out, seven winged figures who were equals among each other, our shared flight a celebration of power and solidarity and pure, shimmering possibility. Below us, the crowd stared and whistled and chattered, a tide of sound and emotion that lifted us up even higher. There was laughter—so much laughter, none louder than from the Magician himself. It was a brief, crystalline moment that I was sure I would never forget.
At length, we finally spiraled down, going lower and lower until a few minutes later we all stood in the center of the Winged Warriors pavilion, surrounded by applause and cheers and stamping feet.
Withdrawing his hand from mine, Armaeus tucked his wings away, and I doused my own fiery wings as well, jolting only a little as they settled themselves against my back and then sank into me. No one seemed to notice that my wings simply disappeared—with the dizzying lights and suspended acrobats and undulating crowd of glow-necklace wearing revelers, there were too many grand sights to see in that moment.
We moved off the central tarmac and into a more private roped-off area of the tent, just Armaeus and myself and the five family representatives. I didn’t know where Brody, Nikki, and Simon had gotten off to, but I knew they’d be close.
I turned and took in our hosts. They stared back at me with equal interest. The steampunk flyer, in his helmet and leather vest, leaned easily against the picnic table where two women sat shoulder to shoulder. They could’ve been sisters from different hemispheres, one pale as the moon, the other dark haired and dark eyed, her skin a flawless black. The final two flyers I had already seen, albeit from a distance, so I focused on them.
“You were in Las Vegas,” I said. “You set those fires.”
“And the Arcana Council responded, even the oracle who has not left her tower to answer a supplicant’s cry in hundreds of years. A star has been lit in the heavens to draw all with the eyes to see,” said the woman on the right, who sported such bright red hair and deep green eyes that she could have been a fairy come to life. The silver-haired man beside her also rocked an ethereal vibe, but more in the way of elves of Middle Earth. Tall, slender, and beautiful, with clear gray eyes that regarded me directly.
“I am Marin,” the man said. “My people and Arden’s live on the shores of the Baltic Sea, our secrets held close for centuries. While we hide in plain sight, we have not been fools. We have watched humanity advance around us, surging forward with their wars and their technology. We shield our people from those advances, but we watch. We listen. And we build our defenses accordingly. But now the threat against us is outstripping our individual defenses. It’s moving too quickly.”
“You need our help,” Armaeus said softly.
Marin inclined his head. “It was only after much discussion that Arden and I made the attempt to reach out to you. It is not something we took on lightly. We still do not hold much hope for your help. More likely we will fail.” He gestured to the group around him. “If so, we will fade even deeper into the shadows until this threat has passed. But still, it reaches out for us, finding us in our homes when we least expect it.”
The moon-pale woman took up the tale. “They come whether we want them to or not. They come with their medicines and their drugs. They come not to save us from the world that they have helped to destroy, but to kill us one by one. I am Kata, and my
people live quietly in the hills of Croatia. We have already endured our share of war. I would turn this cup away if I could. We have no wish for more fighting, but we have no wish to be killed either.”
I thought of Rhonda and her cousin Janet. I knew where this was going. “They’ve brought conventional drugs to your communities, used them on your people.”
“Tainted conventional drugs.” The dark woman turned to me. “I am Mayah, and my people live in the foothills of Madagascar flowing down to the Indian Sea. We were threatened twice over. First, with a torrential rain, then with a second wave of unexpected humanitarian aid from a nearby medical ship.”
I jolted. “Solidarity Pharmaceuticals?”
“No,” she said, her jaw tightening. “It wasn’t a private ship. It was the International Red Cross. But as to who made the drugs they gave us? We don’t know. We didn’t ask. We considered it a miracle that help was so close and accepted the doctors’ aid gratefully. They asked for nothing in return, only the chance to save our children, our babies, our invalids. And they did. Our water was made pure and strong, our village rebuilt—and the magic of those who were vaccinated was swept away. It has not yet returned. That was six months ago. We made no connection at the time—these were children. Babies. But the sick…when they improved…it became clear that there was a cost for the aid we so desperately needed.”
“Not everyone was affected the same?” I asked. This was new.
“They were not,” Mayah agreed. “Not everyone drank the water or waded through it even after it was purified, believing it still to be tainted. They also warded themselves with the natural labradorite our village is known for mining. That stone is sacred to our people, and its protective properties may have helped. We simply don’t know. But far too many of our young are now afflicted, their magic lost.”
“We were a little luckier,” the steampunk captain said. “Dylan Pendragon at your service, ma’am. I run a little group of like-minded souls, a collective, you might call it, smack in the heart of Wales, tucked away on the prettiest piece of land you might ever imagine. We keep to ourselves and only make a bit of a fuss every year on the festival circuit. Gives us a chance to stretch our wings, you might say. We were at one of those festivals down in the south of England when the main bunker blew sky-high, some barmy terrorist attack. Nobody is safe, we know that true enough, but we were a little less safe than most. About half my group went to hospital, and I got there right before these nutters showed up with biohazard suits and vials of antibiotics or some such rot. I can’t even remember what their excuse was. But we’ve taken a pretty strong antimedicine vow and raised enough of a fuss that they only stuck two of us before we got the hell out. We’ve got our own way of taking care of our people, and it doesn’t involve big pharma.”
“And the two who were inoculated?” I asked.
“Exactly what you would think. One was a channeler, the other a card reader, both of them crackerjack magicians and that’s the truth. They lost the gift straight out. Hit them both hard. How do you recreate your life after something like that?” He grimaced. “How can you?”
“You don’t,” said Kata, her voice heavy with sorrow. “You can’t.”
I blew out a long breath. “Do you have any threads, any connections between your experiences, anything that can help us figure out who’s behind these drugs, specifically?” I thought of Solidarity Pharmaceuticals, but their front was years in the making. Finding one or two labs cooking these tainted drugs among all their international holdings would be nearly impossible.
“That we don’t,” Pendragon said. “But next week’s Global Disaster Recovery Summit is as good a place to start as any. It’s underwritten by the same big pharma types, and with the chatter about Connecteds coming out of the woodwork, looking for ways to protect themselves from tragedy—we think there will be plenty of people in the crowd who want to continue their agenda of wiping out rogue magic. We’ve got some people going to that, some of the more mainstreamers. There’s a whole lot of other people who are watching from afar too, afraid to tip their hand, but desperate for legitimate aid. It’s a no-win situation.”
“You think your people will be in danger if they go to this conference? Why run the risk?”
He grimaced. “They’re in danger no matter what they do, Justice. But this way, they’re not hiding in the shadows, right? We’re not running. Can’t run, not really. Not when they’ll find us eventually. So instead, we take a stand. We give them a target in the open, where everyone can see. And if the Arcana Council is there—that tips the balance in our favor.”
I studied him for a long moment, then nodded. “The summit’s keynote speaker is Dr. Sebastian Rindon. What do you know about him?”
Pendragon tilted his head. “Rindon? Haven’t met him. Name’s familiar—oh!” He snapped his fingers. “He’s the humanitarian, right? He’s never been to Wales, so far as I know.”
Mayah frowned. “He came to our shores, but well over a year ago. Not this last time, though, with the ship. He brought no drugs with him, barely spoke to our people. He was doing research, he said. Gathering samples.”
Kata shifted on her seat, her agitation becoming more apparent as she clasped and unclasped her pale hands. “I have only seen him on the news, but…who is to say? You have met him? He uses these drugs?”
“We think so,” I said. “Whether he’s aware of that, we don’t know. But the drugs are definitely showing up in the stock he brings to disaster sites.”
She sighed. “I wouldn’t put anything past these people. If their strategy is to get rid of the outliers, all you need is a reason to release drugs in the water, to vaccinate a population for their apparent own good, and you’ll achieve your goal. It could be a disaster, it could be a rapidly spreading epidemic… Anything could serve as the catalyst. We can’t hide forever.”
“We shouldn’t have to hide at all,” said Arden bitterly. “This is wrong. This is against everything the Connected stand for. Who kills their own? And how are we a threat to anyone?”
To my surprise, it was the Magician who spoke next. His voice rose above the others, calm and strangely resonant.
“War is coming. Those who wish to win it need to control it. Outliers like your societies are not something they can defend against. They don’t know your abilities. In a state of war, those who have augmented their magic with technoceuticals or who have made their living on the arcane black market are far simpler targets. They’re easily tracked, and very likely they will meet a bad end, and quickly, when the time comes. But not you. To stamp out your beating heart, those who would ally against you must come at you a different way.”
This pronouncement was met with a heavy silence. Then Pendragon turned to me. “So you’ll take them to Judgment, these people? That’s your job.”
I nodded. “That is my job. But I’m only one person, and the threat here is real. Attending this summit isn’t a good idea. You need to make sure you take care of your people, keep them out of harm’s way.”
He gave me a weary grin. “My people—and not mine alone—are damned well ready to run straight into harm’s way at this point. They’ll be going.”
I figured as much. I focused on each of the representatives in front of me, meeting their hard gazes, their eyes reflecting the flickering fires and writhing glow-stick-adorned revelers all around us. “Then keep a sharp eye out for an attack on your home soil, especially if there’s a disaster, a storm, anything like that. I can’t believe every aid effort out there has been infiltrated by the Shadow Court, but at this point, we have to assume it has.”
We talked for an hour more, gathering the information we needed about other pockets of connected tribes and families, some of whom we knew, many of whom had never shown their true colors. There were entire guilds, cities, societies—all of them living in the shadows. And here the Shadow Court sought to rip that protection away, ironically enough. To expose them and destroy them in the open as everyone watched and no o
ne understood. And the man they were choosing to lead the charge was…a hero? I needed to meet Dr. Rindon in person. I needed to understand who he was.
I needed to be a little more careful what I wished for, because at that moment, Simon appeared at the edge of our circle. “Ahhh…sorry to interrupt, but we’ve got a hit on Rindon. He’s in range of three different weather events that are likely to cause some damage. Looks like he’s gearing up for another humanitarian aid run.”
“Simon the Fool!” announced Pendragon. “I figured you’d be here. It’s been too long.”
Simon grinned, his eyes lighting up. “And you need to update your tech, my man,” he said, laughing. Then he refocused on me. “Anyway, we’ve got a hat trick of storms about to drop overnight in Haiti, Bali, and Baja California. I’m thinking he’s going to be in Mexico, but it’s anyone’s guess. He just boarded his plane. We’re working on getting the flight manifest.”
I nodded. “Good. This time, wherever he goes, we’ll be waiting.”
Beside me, the Magician’s eyes glittered. “And après nous, le deluge.”
17
The meeting broke up shortly after that, but there wasn’t anything we could do right away. Not until we knew where Rindon was heading. We didn’t even know if he had anything to do with this threat facing the Connected, but it was the only lead we had.
Nikki, Simon, and Brody had already left the tent by the time the other family representatives had dispersed, so Armaeus and I walked back through the Burning Man installations, each more extravagant than the last. There was an enormous ship made out of wires and sheeting that boasted huge, roaring flames exploding from its main mast. An aboveground subway car constructed from sheet metal and stained glass that overflowed with revelers high on something not even marginally legal. A carnival of stilt people dancing to a reggae band. It was half a celebration of life and half a county fair on steroids, minus the frozen lemonade stands and cotton candy. Unaccountably, I found myself thinking of my own childhood and a long-ago “fair day” at Farraday High, of the kids who’d drunk that lemonade with such careless laughter, without any clue of what might one day befall them.