Heat. The ocean had frozen around the shattered aircraft carrier, catching its wreckage in icebergs. The air had been below freezing for hours after the confrontation between the Alchemites and the Navy.
The next cantation card shows a crudely drawn cluster of human figures. “This one pulls the life from other people. Vamping, Sahara called it,” Astrid says. “Chantments can draw light out of sunshine, static out of the air, electricity out of the power grid. There’s a cantation for drawing power ‘from the earth itself’—that’s what a page Marlowe sent us said—”
“Let me guess. That’s the one that caused the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.”
“We didn’t know that yet. All we knew was the first cantation, which would’ve made the house and yard all frosty if we’d used it. So we kept eating like pigs and sleeping late.”
I fish a third card out of the pile, one with a sun on it. “Is this the one for light?”
“Yes. Use a powerful enough chantment, the area around it will go dark.”
“That’s rather conspicuous, isn’t it?”
“Everything Marlowe told us was conspicuous. The more so because chantments can’t be turned off. Once you stick a feather in that goose purse, it makes a goose. It draws whatever power it needs until it’s done.”
I look at the cards unhappily. Cutting the mystics off from their source of power is going to be problematic.
Setting the cantation cards aside, Astrid changes the subject. “We learned that some things wouldn’t be chanted.”
“What things?”
“Glass wouldn’t work, ever. It could contain vitagua but not absorb it. Or electronics—you can’t make a chanted TV, or a calculator.”
“And everything had to be receptive, to have what your father called ‘sparkle,’ isn’t that right?”
“At first. As I continued making chantments, more objects started to call to me.”
“You improved.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t Albert improve?”
“He did…just not as fast as me. I was remembering stuff about that. He’d been nervous about how quick I picked up skills, things that took him years. Now and then I’d improvise too—try something new. That panicked him.”
“Why were you improvising?”
“When you’re initiated as a spring-tapper, you start hearing voices coming from the vitagua. Grumbles…”
“I remember. They guide you, make suggestions. Why didn’t your father hear them?”
“He’d been told not to trust the grumblers.”
“By who?”
“His grandmother,” Astrid says. “Let’s see…I learned to move the vitagua within my body, to hide it inside, deep, or push it to the surface.” She does that now, looking up at one of the ill-concealed cameras with a suddenly blue face. Then she lets a drop ooze from her bitten tongue. It floats above her hands, bouncing in midair twice before sinking into her palm.
“Sahara was exposed too. Could she—?”
“No. Albert had wired me into the spring. I was the designated chanter—no others need apply.”
“But you and Albert could both make chantments after you were initiated. What would have happened if you initiated Sahara?”
“I couldn’t. She’d been exposed—she was already cursed.”
“Did you tell Sahara what Albert said about contamination, about it making her ill?”
“Head sick,” she murmurs. Her face tightens. “I didn’t want her to worry. I thought I’d dig up a memory of Albert telling me how to get the vitagua out of her body, or that Marlowe’s book would have a solution. I went everywhere Albert and I had ever been, looking for places where he’d taught me things. There was one problem, though—”
“The headaches?”
“Yes. It hurt all the time. Most mornings when I awoke, I’d forgotten everything. Everything, Will. Seeing a chantment would bring all it back, but part of me kept wanting to bury everything I knew about magic.”
“Instead you kept touching things and having flashes.”
“Yes. That’s another thing I got better at. I started out getting images from things like the kaleidoscope. Then it was scenes, whole memories caught within items Albert and I had both touched. Then I started learning unrelated stuff. Remember when we met?”
“Of course.” She had known about our dog, my car accident, the divorce.
“Was that just a few hours ago?” She shakes her head, sifting through cards.
I consult my watch. “We had that conversation about three and a half hours ago.”
“So today is finally today?”
“It’s early afternoon, Astrid, on what you’ve called Will day—does that help?” I lean back, examining her. She is so different from the Astrid I expected to be dealing with, the one who has been under observation for ten weeks. She knows past from future, can put together a sentence.
I wonder how much she learned when she shook my hand.
It was just after the napalming of Sahara’s so-called Sacred Grove that Caroline left me. The Alchemites had gathered outside of Indigo Springs, at a spot along Teale Creek where the trees were rapidly growing to fantastic heights. The police tried to keep them out, but thousands of worshipers got through the barricades before the National Guard secured the area.
I was on a team of negotiators assigned to call the mobile phones of Alchemites who’d entered the grove, to try to talk them back out. I got lucky with two—and that, more than our past friendship, was what had brought me to Roche’s attention.
Nobody else came out of the contaminated grove, and the Air Force carried out the planned operation against the alchemized trees, hitting the site with napalm to stop the runaway growth.
A massive earthquake followed the bombing. I’d been evacuated with the rest of the nonessential personnel.
Everyone assumed Sahara and all her pilgrims had died with the trees. But when I got home, six scorched-looking Alchemites were hiding out in my basement.
Caro and I had managed not to argue about the magical outbreak and the Alchemites until then, but now a screaming fight was inevitable. We’d gotten incoherent and irrational, keeping it up until we were finally reduced to name-calling and swearing at one another.
Finally Caro had scooped up her keys: it was time to fetch Carson and Ellie from school.
“We’ll sort it out,” she croaked, and despite the hours of recriminations and fury it never occurred to me not to trust her. “We always do.”
She never came back.
“Will?”
I drag myself into the present: it is nine weeks and one day since I’ve seen my children. And apparently it’s Will day. “What were we talking about?”
Astrid touches the cards for reassurance. “It was early summer. I was still learning things from gardens where Albert and I worked together. The things I did, Will! My work roster had changed over the years, so suddenly I was going back to Albert’s original clients, people who’d fired him. I begged, worked for free, whatever it took.”
There’s a picture of her on a playing card, wearing jeans and a dirty shirt, wrestling weeds, clearly happy.
“How did the others feel?”
“We were having the time of our lives. Knowing about Albert’s secret life was a joy. I believed things could work out. My misgivings were all low-key.”
“And yet they proved valid,” I murmur.
She glowers. “We sent Marlowe the sailboat that helped you notice and remember things. Brain-sharpener, Sahara called it. Marlowe sent us the cantation for vamping energy out of groups of people.”
“Another one you didn’t dare use, I’m guessing.”
“Not a chance. Next we let her have a rubber cockroach that worked out sneaky routes for getting places—ways to avoid people. I wanted to give her things that would help her hide without making her dangerous.”
“Good tactical thinking on your part.”
She seems pleased. “Sahara started ke
eping the mermaid with her all the time. She’d drop in on the jeweler every few days, to remind him to keep quiet about the gold dust we were laundering. Every morning she checked on Ma, keeping her sane, keeping her in therapy. She was as good as she had promised: discreet and reliable.”
“How did that work for Ev?”
“Okay.” She laughs. “When I first started living with Jemmy I’d thought the town would freak out about us being gay…but it was only a few people who couldn’t shut up about it. Now suddenly Ma was talking about ‘gender dysphoria,’ about going on testosterone.”
“That must’ve been strange.”
“Strange, yeah, but it explained a lot too.”
“What about Sahara?”
Astrid touches a card, and an image of Sahara streaks across it, vibrant and happy, her long legs flying. “She seemed like a better person than the one who had bugged out of Indigo Springs so many years before.”
“You resented her leaving?”
She shrugs. “It grew out of what was happening at the time. I dropped out of school, she started spending time with Mark. Boom! They were dating, they were graduating, they were gone. That’s what you do when you’re eighteen.”
“Unless you’re you, I suppose.” Needling her now, just to see if I can find a nerve.
“Unless you’re me,” she agrees serenely. “Anyway, I thought I knew her. I wasn’t worried.”
“Except about the contamination.”
“Yeah, there was that. I gardened constantly. It was something I could do without attracting attention, and I wanted to remember the old times with Dad.”
Another card forms an image, showing the yard of Astrid’s blue house, now reordered from chaos into glorious splendor.
“As I worked, Albert memories played through my mind. He described the unreal, told me about the witch burnings, said there were prophecies about the burners coming back. He warned me, always, to stay in the shade, out of sight.”
“About the memories,” I ask. “How did they work?
Were they interactive?”
“You mean could I ask questions?”
“That’s right.”
“No. And I couldn’t pick and choose what I would remember next. It just played out, a bit of knowledge here, a fact there. Like opening a book to random pages.”
“So you couldn’t ask your father what to do about the vitagua inside Sahara.”
“No.”
“Or in yourself.”
“That was less of an issue. Every time I made a chantment, the amount of liquid magic in my body decreased and the grumbles got quieter. The premonition I’d had—of being out on my porch surrounded by reporters—dimmed. I watched Sahara for signs of madness, this supposed curse. But she seemed okay. I wasn’t as worried as I had been.”
“No,” I agree. Sahara may be insane, but she’s an organized maniac. She triggered the earthquake that shattered National Guard barricades around Indigo Springs, then led her followers out of the napalmed grove. Having identified those among her flock faithful enough to brave the fire, Sahara bestowed still more “powers” upon them, naming them Primas and sending them out with chantments to work “miracles” and recruit more followers.
It worked. The Alchemites’ survival of the bombing was national news. Primas brought rain to the drought-stricken Midwest, healed highway accident victims, opened bank vaults and dispensed cash to the poor. Simple acts in a confusing time; the cult’s numbers swelled.
I pick up a card Astrid has pushed off to the side, a portrait of Sahara’s former lover, Mark Clumber. It is a current picture; he’s profoundly alchemized. Under the influence of magical contamination, his hair has fallen out and his skin is damp and slimy, covered in black and red spots. Froggy eyes bulge over a still-human nose; his hands have salamander fingers. His mouth is so altered, he cannot form human words, and his glasses no longer fit. “Did Albert tell you the contamination could be this bad?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think he ever saw anything like this.”
“Were there any signs of it in Sahara?”
“I couldn’t decide. Sometimes I’d think she was getting more selfish, but…”
“She’d always been selfish?”
She nods.
“That’s her weakness?” I wonder what use might be made of this.
“One of them.”
“Tell me more.”
She sighs. “Sahara likes to fix people. She’s a performer, manipulative—”
“But she wasn’t any worse than before?”
“How could I tell? I thought she and Jacks might be fighting, but they saved it for when I wasn’t there.”
“Why didn’t you do something?”
“I’d wonder if I was being paranoid. Then I’d promise myself Jacks and I could handle it—handle her—be responsible enough for all three of us. My biggest worry about the contamination was actually Henna.”
“The cat?”
“Remember how she killed that rabbit?”
I nod.
“Well, she was still doing it. Bringing home pigeons, rats, rabbits. Once in a while it’d be a barn owl, a fox.”
“A fox?” I whistle incredulously.
“I know. Plus the vitagua was still flowing from the fissure in the mantel. Once a day we’d pop the hollow brick out of the hearth and siphon the droplets into a jar. We got a few drops a day, sometimes less.”
“So little?”
“Yes. The big splash that first day had built up over the year since Albert’s death.”
How much vitagua had Astrid poured into my wedding ring? A half cup? “If the flow was so modest, you ought to have been able to catch up.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” She laughs bitterly. “We’d constructed our whole lives around the vitagua spring. A couple drops a day. It should have been easy.”
• Chapter Fifteen •
Managing the magic was simplicity itself.
Sahara had a gift for secrecy and intrigue. She was the one who suggested Astrid take up driving as a volunteer for the local secondhand store, picking up unwanted junk from big-hearted Springers and searching the castoffs for chantable items before delivering the rest. It was Sahara who found hard-luck cases in news stories on the Internet, who tracked down their addresses and matched chantments to their needs. Jacks dumped packages in post offices all over the county. Nobody was the wiser.
“We’re getting behind,” Dad had told her.
The memory came back to her as Astrid was thinning foxgloves at Percy Heath’s, pulling up just enough to make the flowers look—as the old farmer put it—“like they come up wild.” In the memory flash, she had been about thirteen and achy with cramps from one of her first menstrual periods.
“Behind?” she’d said, feeling disaffected, resentful.
“Too much vitagua, not enough sparkly things. I gotta find more—or risk making a few biggies. Pressure’s increasing, see?” He rubbed dirty hands through his hair. “I can’t keep up, Bundle. Even if I make two chantments a week instead of one, I have to find ’em homes. Your ma’s starting to think I’m shooting her paycheck up my arm….”
They were alone in a big commercial greenhouse, facing each other across flats of newly sprouted garden vegetables—broccoli, cabbage, dill, glossy plants with leaves unmarred by age, dust, or insects. Albert was wearing a grubby white-and-red T-shirt, looking the part of town derelict. Astrid wore the uniform of her early teens—rugby pants, tank top, and ball cap.
“Tell her the truth,” Astrid said.
“She’d be in danger…she’d be a danger. We don’t know how the witch-burners find chanters, Astrid. Everyone my granny ever told died, but for me. My other two apprentices too.” He paced, anguished. “We’re the mice hiding in the corner, Bun. Nobody notices us.”
“If you tell Ma, she’ll stop being so mad at you.”
“And if someone notices that, and wonders why?” He shook his head. “We can’t risk it, baby
.”
“Let me talk to the vitagua. Maybe there’s a way.”
“I don’t want you carrying too much spirit water.”
“If you won’t let me be a chanter, we might as well both quit.”
He sighed; she’d said this before. “Bun…”
“Why?”
“You gotta learn to be careful.” He stroked a spinach leaf. “You’d tell Ma, let someone get contaminated—”
“I have not!”
“We got to keep people away from the raw magic. Even before it got pressed together and concentrated, a little spirit water went a long way. A little splash to make a medicine woman, shaman, prophet, whatever you call her. Even then it drove them mad sometimes….”
Astrid sighed, bored.
“Listen, Bun. With the crude stuff, even a drop’s too much. Granny told of people growing horns, killing people with just a thought, bringing down hurricanes—an’ all of them became lunatics before the witch-burners got them.”
“Say I do contaminate someone,” she broke in. “Couldn’t I just fix ’em?”
Albert led her behind the greenhouse to a couple of outdoor sinks, washing the dirt off his hands. He was thinking about it, Astrid could see, thinking hard. Would he finally let her show him something?
Hope rose in her—and then was dashed as he filled a glass with water. He drank half in three gulps. Then he upended it, spilling out the rest.
“Look,” he said. “Water’s gone, but the glass is still wet.”
“Use a rag and dry it.”
“There’d still be a bit of water on the glass,” he said. “Residue. Only way to really dry it off—to get all the liquid off it—is to let it evaporate naturally. That’s something a person can’t do. Understand?”
She shook her head.
“Vitagua, it lies in your bones. If we can’t dry water off a cup…”
“Dad, let me experiment.”
“No. Please, kid, do things the way Granny taught me.”
“I could change the rules,” she said, grabbing his arm. “Make it evaporate—make everything different, Dad.”
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