Magic's Child

by Justine Larbalestier

  “Nothing. I mean—”

  “Whatever it was, she wasn’t very impressed. Where are you now? Is Reason with you?”

  Jay-Tee told her as much as she could with the driver listening. Esmeralda said she would meet them at the international terminal in front of the departure gates. She was convinced that Jason Blake and her daughter would be flying back to New York.

  Jay-Tee hoped she and Reason would be able to find their meeting place. She’d never been to an airport before. She also hoped that Mere wouldn’t be so mad at them by then.

  8

  Reason paid with money she pulled from the air, and the driver wished them luck. She jumped out of the cab and dashed through the sliding glass doors, skidding along the tiled floor, around people laden with suitcases or enormous backpacks—there were so many of them, and a ridiculous number had small children clutching their hands, or worse, attempting escape and getting in the way of everyone else. Reason headed up escalators, then into a maze of overcrowded shops and restaurants. Past hundreds of confusing signs. If Jay-Tee hadn’t been chasing after her, she could’ve gotten lost pretty damn quick. So many different airlines, different exits. So many doors with big signs, all in red, screaming that only authorized people were permitted.

  It was as crowded as midtown. All of the people not out walking the streets of Sydney, Jay-Tee decided, had found their way here. She finally believed that Sydney was a city. She wondered how big JFK airport was. It had to be at least ten times the size of this one, given that New York was at least that much bigger than Sydney.

  Reason moved faster than Jay-Tee’d ever seen her move before. Jay-Tee weaved her way through the crowd, her skin prickling with magic. She could feel it pulling at her and started to move faster, easier, her legs becoming oiled and limber.

  No! She couldn’t do this.

  She slowed, biting her lip, forcing herself to resist the crowd magic. But that magic was so easy—it felt so good.

  A cute guy smiled at her, did a turn to keep looking, half held his arms out, like he was asking her to dance. So many people in between them, and yet the path to him was so clear, she tingled with it.

  Jay-Tee pinched her palm, let go of what she’d been feeling, said no to the pull of crowd magic, and followed Reason without giving in to her own speed, her own rhythm. She had so little magic left.

  By the time Jay-Tee caught up, Reason was standing with Esmeralda at a big entranceway littered with discarded luggage carts. A big sign said, PASSPORT CONTROL, PASSENGERS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT; smaller ones instructed passengers to leave their carts behind. Jay-Tee bent over to catch her breath.

  “Through there?” she asked.

  Reason nodded, looking like she was going to cry again.

  “That sucks,” Jay-Tee observed, when her heartbeat was almost back to normal.

  “Sarafina doesn’t have as much magic. I think he’s draining her.”

  Jay-Tee didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t surprised. It was what he’d done to her too. Over and over. And to Reason, that once. He was greedy and evil. He didn’t care about anyone but himself.

  “I’ll just get us tickets. Doesn’t matter to where,” Esmeralda said. “We’ll go through there and rescue her.” She took a step away, then stopped. “Passports. Mine’s at home.”

  “I don’t have one,” Reason said.

  “Me neither,” Jay-Tee said. “Never have had one. This is my first time anywhere foreign.” And Jay-Tee’s first time at an airport, though she wasn’t going to admit that. She’d never been outside New York (well, except for Hoboken and Jersey City, which hardly counted). If you’re born in the coolest city in the world, Jay-Tee figured, you didn’t need to travel. “Can’t you just magic your way past them? Can’t be that hard. I’ve been getting into clubs for years.”

  Mere looked at Jay-Tee, considering. Jay-Tee didn’t like the look.

  “Getting past all that security, passport checks, immigration,” she said, “would take serious magic, Jay-Tee. A lot of it. And if just one of them is a dead spot…Well, I’d be buggered, wouldn’t I?”

  “How many dead spots are there, really?” Jay-Tee asked. “I mean, I’ve only—”

  “I’ll do it,” Mere said firmly.

  “You will?” Jay-Tee hadn’t expected that turn.

  “Oh, no! She’s moving really fast now.” Reason turned and ran to the huge glass window, pressed her face up against it.

  In-a-plane fast, Jay-Tee thought, joining Reason at the window. “It’s okay. We’ll find her.”

  Reason nodded, a tear trickled down her face. She wiped it away. “Why did she go with him?”

  “Maybe he drugged her? Or…”

  Reason turned to her, looking bleak. Jay-Tee shut up.

  “Come on,” Mere said. “Let’s check departing flights.”

  Reason walked along beside them, but her movements had changed. She’d gone alien again. Jay-Tee suppressed a shudder.

  “They’re flying west,” Reason said as they came to a large board thick with flights to all parts of the world. A whole bunch Jay-Tee’d never heard of before. Where were Auckland, Bahrain, and Guangzhou? Or Incheon, Nadi, and Nouméa?

  “West?” Esmeralda asked. “You’re sure? If they’re heading to the U.S. they’d be flying east.”

  “Of course he’s going to New York,” Jay-Tee said. “Where else would he want to take her?”

  “None of the recent departures are to America,” Esmeralda said. “Look: the flights at the right time are to Auckland, Bangkok, Nouméa, Shanghai, and Singapore.”

  “And Kuala Lumpur,” Jay-Tee said, reading it off the board. “Why would he go to any of those places?”

  “There are other doors,” Reason said in her new, creepy way. This time Jay-Tee failed to suppress the shudder.

  8

  In the car on the way home, Jay-Tee felt dizzy again. She leaned her head against the window, closed her eyes. She remembered once driving out to Coney Island with her uncle and aunt and five little cousins. It had been August, and the car was so crowded that her littlest cousin, Tia, had to sit on her lap. Tia’d thrown up before they’d even hit Brooklyn.

  There was no air conditioning. They had all the windows rolled down, letting them breathe in hot, fumey air. Even after cleaning up, all Jay-Tee could smell was Tia’s vomit.

  The traffic was bumper-to-bumper, like everyone in the whole city had decided to go driving. Jay-Tee remembered wishing that they’d just taken the train, because then her dad could’ve come too and it would’ve been quicker and more comfortable. Though nothing would’ve gotten Danny to go—he was always too busy playing basketball.

  When they’d gotten there, she’d been stuck looking after Tia and Angela and only going on the lamest rides, but she’d ended up enjoying it. They both looked up to her so much. She was only eleven, but from their six-and four-year-old vantage points, she might as well have been a movie star, they were so in awe of her.

  The more annoyed she was by them, the cooler they thought she was. They trusted her to look after them, see them through the crowds, buy them cotton candy, get them on the lame-ass rides they wanted to go on. They wanted her to put their hair in ponytails like hers. They both wanted red shirts, because that was what she was wearing. They were so cute, they mellowed her down to only snapping at them a little. Anyway, no matter how mean she was, they just giggled.

  They were both going to live longer, better lives than Jay-Tee. Last she heard, Tia was doing great in school and had already declared that she was going to be a doctor. Angela was playing basketball with the boys and was better than most of them. She was going to play for a WNBA team when she grew up. She worshipped Danny.

  Jay-Tee had never had ambitions, never had any plans. She just did stuff, when she felt like it, and not when she didn’t. School was a chore. Looking after her cousins, likewise. She never wanted to hang with kids her own age, but until she’d run away, Danny’d always scared away the older boys.

&
nbsp; She could have been a dancer or a runner. But she hated adults telling her what to do. She hated the way they broke her favorite things down and turned them into boring work. They made her roll her eyes and goof off.

  Her head felt heavy, yet light at the same time.

  Jay-Tee recognized the feeling. It didn’t scare her this time, now that she knew what was happening. It was gentle. Like floating on water. How she imagined it would be if she could glide through the air, or drop through it like a feather.

  She felt exactly like a feather. Soft, small, dissolving…

  11

  Broken Pattern

  “Why are you so sure he’s going back to New York?” Esmeralda asked.

  Jay-Tee didn’t answer.

  I was back in their world, experiencing the full force of the competing pains of my mother disappearing with Jason Blake and of Danny rejecting me. Sarafina’s absence was worse, but it didn’t turn the other pain off, especially when I caught sight of Jay-Tee smiling just like Danny did. Stupid rear-view mirror.

  Esmeralda repeated her question. Jay-Tee said nothing. I looked in the mirror again. Jay-Tee was asleep. I blinked. Jay-Tee disappeared.

  I turned around. And there she was, leaning against the side of the car, her mouth a little way open. When I blinked again, she vanished again.

  She wasn’t sleeping; she was dying.

  Ignoring Esmeralda’s protests, I undid my seatbelt, climbed over into the back seat, stretched out my arms, made my fingers thin and wiry like medical instruments. Just as Raul had shown me. They felt good that way.

  I pushed them inside Jay-Tee, closed my eyes, felt my tension and panic disappearing. Here there was only calm. I could see the cells that made Jay-Tee, the strings of her DNA. I was searching for something, but I wasn’t sure what.

  Then I found it: a long stretch of frayed particles. Her magic. What was left of it. Like broken dust. I threaded it together with my needle fingers, noticing what the pattern had been—fours: 4, 8, 12, 16, 18, 24,…356,…1,424,…22,784, and on, and on.

  Of course. All her music—even when the beats per minute multiplied out of control, each minute so crowded that only Jay-Tee could keep pace—all of it was 4/4. The solid dancing number.

  But Jay-Tee’s fours were crumbling, losing their pounding beat, losing their shimmer. There was too little left to put back how it had been: fours were eroding into threes, twos, ones, into nothing. I had to break the sequence, make a whole out of broken pieces. I had to make it random. I had to kill that pattern. As I worked, the faint glint of the numbers faded under my sharpened fingers.

  I patched and threaded, pulled what was left together, watched the fours disappearing, becoming part of the darkness. I could still see them, but not in the same way. They were textured, like a blue heeler’s coat, a soft roughness. Dark against dark.

  Was I killing Jay-Tee’s dancing? Breaking her 4/4 rhythm forever?

  I finished the last one, pulled my hands out of her; I could no longer see the boundary of where Jay-Tee ended and space began.

  From outside, Esmeralda’s voice was calling. Reluctantly, I opened my eyes, made my fingers normal.

  The panic returned. Was Jay-Tee alive? Had I killed her?

  Her eyes were still closed. Esmeralda had stopped the car. We were somewhere out of the sunlight. She’d opened the back door and was crouched beside Jay-Tee, feeling for a pulse. Esmeralda looked up at me, her mouth open. “Reason,” she said. “Oh my God, Reason.”

  “Is she—”

  Jay-Tee coughed; her eyelids fluttered. Then she smiled. “Did I fall asleep?”

  When I blinked, she still wasn’t there.

  8

  Esmeralda insisted that we eat. “I already bought sandwiches.” She put them on plates and poured me and Jay-Tee water and herself wine. She kept looking at both of us, staring most intently at me.

  “Can I have some wine too?” Jay-Tee asked.

  “No.”

  “I almost died.”

  “You’re still fifteen. Death didn’t bring you any closer to being allowed to drink legally.”

  Jay-Tee screwed up her nose. “Whatever,” she said.

  I couldn’t stop looking at Jay-Tee. She hadn’t almost died; she’d been all the way dead. I saw her magic go, every last bit of it. Yet here she was, sitting in front of me, breathing, without the faintest trace of magic. What I’d done had kept her alive without it.

  “I’m all right, Ree,” Jay-Tee said. “Stop looking at me like that. I’m fine. Whatever you did, it worked. Death’s door is miles away.”

  I looked away and mumbled, “Sorry.” Would Jay-Tee stay like that and live a normal life? Or had I just delayed her dying for a day or two? If it was permanent, could I do the same thing again? Could I free Sarafina of magic? It was what she had always wanted—so much that she had lied to me, told me magic wasn’t real.

  If I could find Sarafina again before Jason Blake took all her magic and killed her. What would I be without my mother? I felt as if the main tether of my existence had been severed. I hadn’t even had a chance to tell her about her grandchild.

  I put the half a sandwich I was holding back on my plate. “Do we really have time for lunch?”

  “There’s time,” Esmeralda said. “If he’s gone to Auckland, it’s still another hour and a half before he gets there. If there’s a door there to New York, we can still get there before him.”

  “If he’s gone to New York City,” I said. I tried to picture them going through a door in Auckland and coming out in New York City. Or would the door go to somewhere else? Where he had yet another that took him to New York City? How had he found these doors? Not to mention their keys. Even Raul Cansino hadn’t been able to get to Sydney without the key. How many doors were there in the world?

  “He’s definitely heading home,” Jay-Tee said. “Why would he go anywhere else?”

  Esmeralda started asking Jay-Tee questions about where my grandfather lived, what he did, where they were likely to find him. It was almost impossible not to look at Jay-Tee, to examine what I’d done.

  “Reason,” Jay-Tee said, rolling her eyes at me. “Quit it. I’m fine, okay? You did great. But stop blinking at me. It’s creepy.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And stop saying sorry.”

  “Sorr—”

  “Reason!” Jay-Tee laughed. She certainly didn’t seem like she was dying. “I wonder where Tom is. You said he wasn’t at home, Mere? Shouldn’t he be told what’s going on?”

  “Well, he’s probably gone out with his father. You can’t expect him to be around all the time. Why don’t you call him?” My grandmother pulled her cell phone out and clicked at it. “Just hit the green button. It’ll call his mobile.” She handed it to Jay-Tee.

  “Hey, Tom? It’s Jay-Tee. What’s up? Everything’s gone crazy here and we’re wondering where you are. Come on back!” She handed the phone back to Esmeralda.

  “Not there?”

  It occurred to me that if I could turn Jay-Tee’s magic off and she stayed alive, then I could do the same for Tom too. He wouldn’t have to die young either. And his mother. She was mad. If I turned her magic off, wouldn’t that make her sane again? But first I had to find Sarafina. “We have to find her,” I said. “We can’t just talk about it.”

  “Reason, that’s how we are going to find her. By figuring out where Alexander’s likely to go, by making educated guesses. How many doors did you see in New York?”

  I didn’t answer, because my stomach had contracted horribly. I barely made it to the sink before I chundered again. The fourth time in as many days, which was about as many times as I’d vomited in my entire life up till then.

  Morning sickness was horrible. I could see why Esmeralda and Sarafina only had one baby. But, I realised, I didn’t have to be sick again. I didn’t have to experience any pain at all. If I shifted into perceiving the world the way Cansino did and stayed there, I wouldn’t ever be sick again. Nothing would touch me
.

  I ran the water, washing the mess down the sink.

  “Are you okay?” Esmeralda asked.

  I nodded, then rinsed my mouth out with water, splashed my face. I squirted some detergent into the sink and a little on my hands to wash them.

  “Morning sickness,” I heard Jay-Tee say. She sounded proud of knowing it.

  “How can it be morning sickness?” Esmeralda replied. “She can’t have morning sickness already. She’s only been pregnant a day or two.”

  “Less than a day, you mean.”

  Esmeralda knew Danny was the father, but Jay-Tee still thought Raul Cansino had made me pregnant with magic.

  Esmeralda was looking at her. “Yes, of course, one day. It can’t be morning sickness.”

  “How do you mean, it’s not morning sickness?” I asked before Jay-Tee started thinking about it too hard. I wasn’t ready for Jay-Tee to find out that her brother, Danny, was the father of my baby and that he didn’t want it or me.

  “It’s too soon.”

  “Too soon?”

  “It usually takes about four weeks for morning sickness to set in.”

  But Danny and I slept together only two days ago. I blushed; it turned into a flush of anger. You can think of me as a big brother, he’d said. Forget about the other thing. His words burned me in a whole other way. How could he reject me?

  “Then why’s she been barfing like crazy?”

  “She has? When?”

  “This morning, when the social worker was here. Tom told her Reason’s a nervous vomiter.” Jay-Tee laughed and I scowled. “He thought he was being helpful, Ree.”

  “Fabulouser and fabulouser,” Esmeralda said. “I am going to have fun talking to her, aren’t I? How do you feel now?”

  “Pretty good, actually,” I lied. I was burning from the memory of Danny’s words. And aching with the need to find Sarafina, rescue her. “Once the vomiting stops, I feel fine. So if it’s not morning sickness, then what’s causing it?”

  She put down her wineglass. “I can’t be sure, of course.”

  “But you have an idea?”