“The difference is that the Network appears to have succeeded,” Marangoz said.
“The chatter,” Nicolescu continued, “is that they have brought far more magic into the world at once than anyone has in a very, very long time.”
“What do you mean?” Frances said.
“I suppose, to use their terminology, you might say they have established a connection,” Nicolescu said. “Made a link.”
“Opened a floodgate?” Liam said.
“That,” Marangoz answered, “is not entirely clear. But it’s possible. Which is why we brought the Veil.”
Sal frowned. “I have to ask why you’re telling us all this.”
“It’s a fair question,” Nicolescu said. He hesitated.
“We have discussed this,” Marangoz said.
“I know.”
“You can tell them the truth.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. We have nothing to lose.”
“All right,” Nicolescu said. “The truth is that we have come to realize that we need you.”
“The Society, that is,” Marangoz said.
“Instability’s bad for business?” Sal asked.
“Yes, of course,” Nicolescu said. “But we are not as heartless as that. We have staked our claim on the balance of magic in the world in part because we believe in it. Understand the rules.”
“We believe in just enough magic,” Marangoz said, “but not too much.”
“Now that balance is shifting, tilting away from us. Away, I am afraid, from humanity.”
“And you think we can tilt it back?” Frances said.
“We think you are perhaps the only ones who can. There are others who want to, but they don’t have the means. And there are those who have the means, but don’t want to.”
Team Four, Sal thought.
“You are the only ones who have both,” Nicolescu said. “And that is why we are helping you.”
“Interesting choice, given that, as marketeers in black magic, you’re in the crosshairs of our stated mission,” Liam said.
Both Nicolescu and Marangoz laughed out loud. Even the Veil twitched a little.
“We live in interesting times,” Marangoz said.
“So tell me again about where you heard that these experiments were conducted.”
“Mexico, China, Ireland, Poland, and the Mediterranean,” Nicolescu said.
Liam nodded. “Good. Anything else?”
“No,” Marangoz said.
“All right, then,” Liam said. “Pleasure as always, gentlemen.”
They all shook hands. The Veil peeled the light out of the air, and the tunnel went dark again. Sal, Liam, and Frances turned back, toward the tiny light. They waited until they were well out of earshot.
“Highly convenient that two of their data points are us,” Liam said.
“Do you really think they don’t know what we’re doing?” Frances asked.
“Either that or they suspected us, and wanted to see if we would confirm it,” Liam said. “Nice work not giving it away.”
“Nice work throwing them off altogether,” Frances said.
“Thanks,” Liam said. In the lights from their phones, Sal saw Liam throw Frances a smile. One she recognized. Then she watched Frances return it.
“We still have to narrow it down from Mexico, Ireland, and China. Not exactly places we can just drive to and check out,” Sal said.
“No. But I have the feeling I already know,” Liam said.
He got out his phone and called a number. Waited a few seconds, then suddenly looked startled and hung up.
“What is it?” Sal said.
“I tried to call Christina,” he said.
“And?”
“Well,” Liam said. “Call her yourself and listen. But you’re going to want to hang up fast.”
He gave his phone to Sal. It was already ringing. It rang three times, through static. But the static grew and grew, until it sounded like a thousand voices shrieking, rushing toward her. Reaching for her, coming to get her. That’s what it felt like. She hung up before they arrived.
“What was that?” Sal said.
“I’m afraid we’re going to find out,” Liam said.
2.
The little town of Middle Coom lay along the crease of a low valley, along the banks of a winding stream that ended at the sea. When the wind was right, the townspeople on the other end of the valley could smell the salt water.
Rory lived in a small, stuccoed house in the center of town with her family—Mum, Da, her older sister, Cara, and her brother, Padraic. Da worked in a small fish processing plant in the next town over, as a foreman. Mum worked in a small grocery in their town. She walked to work after the kids headed off to school. Cara was the industrious one, an entrepreneur. It was her last year before university, and she was already talking about getting a business degree, then coming back and buying a fishing boat, maybe a small fleet of them. It didn’t matter to her that people said the fishing was getting rough, maybe impossible. She was going to do it, and make money at it, she said. Padraic, the middle child, just over a year behind her, had no sense of what he wanted to do, other than possibly leave the town. Or maybe he would stay. There was no idea that stuck for long with him.
And then there was Rory, two years younger than Padraic, who knew, with the serenity that only complete certainty can bring, that she wanted to go somewhere else as soon as she could. She didn’t hate the town. But every time she crested the ridge to head inland, whether she was on a bike or in the car with Mum or Da, she looked out over the ocean. She swore she could see the curve of the world, and wanted to see more. And her family was starting to irritate her. She couldn’t say how, wasn’t quite able to get her head around it yet, but that didn’t make her annoyance any less real.
And this morning, she had a headache. The pounding in her skull woke her before her alarm, kept her bleary-eyed in the bathroom. She fumbled for some aspirin and took it. Dressed in a haze.
“Come on, Ror,” her mum said, “move it along. You’re going to be late for school.”
“Leave me alone,” she said.
“Hmm,” her mum said. “You could at least wait until after breakfast to be that rude.”
“I’m … sorry,” Rory said. “I don’t feel right.”
“When was the last time you did?” Padraic said.
“Shut up,” Rory said.
“Yeah, shut up, Padraic,” Cara said.
“You first,” Padraic said.
“All of you!” their mum said, “give it a rest, will you?”
A keening started in the back of Rory’s skull and crept across the sides, behind her ears. It was a normal little breakfast spat her family was having, she told herself, but it didn’t feel that way.
“Mum, that’s not fair,” Cara said.
“What’s not fair?”
“Padraic’s the one being rudest.”
“I don’t care who’s being rudest,” their mum said.
The keening rose. Rory almost couldn’t understand what any of them were saying.
“You only don’t care when it’s Padraic who starts things,” Cara said. “You’re easier on him than on Rory and me.”
“That’s not true,” their mum said.
“Yeah, it’s not,” Padraic said, smiling.
“Did you hear him?” Cara said. Her voice rose. “Did you hear what he said?”
“Of course I heard him,” their mum said. “How could I not when you’re all speaking to each other at the top of your lungs?”
Below the keening was a running throb in Rory’s brain. It must be my pulse, Rory thought, though it seemed too fast for that. God help her if that really was her pulse. She felt horrible, and the fight surrounding her was not helping.
“Yeah, all of you,” she said. “Shut the fuck up.”
Padraic and Cara both turned to her, their mouths open a little.
“Rory!” her mum said. “What’s gotten
into you?”
I don’t know, Rory wanted to say. But she didn’t. Instead she said, “You all have, that’s the problem.”
The shock in the room didn’t dissipate, and Rory’s conscience told her to apologize. But it seemed too late for that now. She dove in.
“You all with your endless bickering about nothing, your endless saying you’re tired of this place but then not going anywhere,” she said. “Cara, if you want to leave, leave already! No one is stopping you. No one. Same for you, Padraic. The bus to Dublin leaves at noon, but you won’t be on it because the truth is that you have no other place to be anyway.”
“Rory,” her mum said, “best to stop talking.”
The headache flared again, and Rory rubbed her temples. She did not know how to get through dealing with her family this morning.
“Why? So I can stay here stuck in this town like you and Da?”
She didn’t even know why she said it. She’d been riding a wave of indignation, and now it had carried her out to sea. And her headache was getting worse.
“You don’t mean that,” her mum said. The hurt in her voice sounded genuine.
Rory fumbled for an apology but she couldn’t find it. What is wrong with me? she thought.
“I’m just …” Rory said. “I’m just going to school, all right?”
Her mum gave her a long look, and Rory prayed she wasn’t going to start yelling at her. Then the woman’s features softened, and Rory felt a small ripple of relief. Her mum had decided that, this morning, it wasn’t worth it.
“Don’t go without toast,” her mum said. She handed Rory a slice.
“Fine,” Rory said.
“You’re welcome,” her mum said.
Rory stumbled out the door. She hated her family right then, but knew at the same time it was the headache talking. She’d never felt anything like it. She looked up at the sky. It was pinker than usual. More pink, she realized, than she’d seen it in a long time. Last summer she’d stayed up all night with a friend, just talking, and when they realized it was almost dawn, they had walked to the top of the ridge to watch the sun come up. All around them, from where they were standing, down the long grassy slope through the town to the harbor and the sea beyond, it swam in pink light. It was too far past dawn for the sky to look like that now, but there it was.
It flickered. She saw it, but her headache was getting sharper. She looked around at the cars passing by her in the road, a handful of people walking on the opposite side. Hadn’t they noticed it too?
The fluorescent lights in the school, when she got there, seemed rose-tinted. Rory sat at her desk in her first class and looked down at her notebook. She couldn’t read what she’d written the day before. She turned the page, put her pen to the paper, and tried to write the date on the top line. Her hand moved, began to describe an intricate pattern that spiraled outward from where she’d started and soon covered the page in a web of connecting lines. It only took her a half a minute to do it, like the pattern was already on the page and all she was doing was tracing it. When she was done, the headache felt a little better. She looked up.
Almost everyone in the class was staring at her.
“What?” she said.
None of her classmates spoke.
“Rory,” her teacher said. “You don’t look good.”
“I have a terrible headache,” she said.
“I think you need to go to the nurse,” the teacher said. “Can you get there yourself?”
“I know where it is,” Rory said.
Her teacher just looked at her. That’s not what I was asking, her eyes said.
Rory got up and walked into the hallway. The color of the light was changing, flashing with orange. It was suddenly a little harder to walk. She looked down at her feet. Every time she took a step, they sank into the floor a little. The tiniest ripples passed through the linoleum tile. She followed one of them, watched it race down the hall in front of her. She took another step and watched another ripple dart up the wall and across the ceiling, where it joined the other side of the ripple that had climbed the opposite wall. They made a little peak of a standing wave directly over her head, and then subsided.
Her teacher was right. I need to go to the nurse’s office, she thought.
The nurse dropped the notepad she was carrying when she saw Rory walk in the door.
“I have a headache and I think I’m seeing things,” Rory said.
The nurse took a second to respond.
“I think you need to come in right away,” she said. She bustled over, put a hand on Rory’s back. It felt much colder than Rory expected.
“Can you see all right?” the nurse said.
“Yes,” Rory said. “Why?”
“Hmm,” the nurse said. She moved Rory to a room with a cot. There was a mirror on the wall at the foot of it. The nurse sat Rory down on the bed, let Rory figure out that she should turn her head and see what she looked like.
It was as if her face were made of candle wax, and as if she had been lit for a few minutes, and was not yet cool. Her skin was smooth and shiny; a glob of it had flowed to cover her left eye. It looked, in the mirror, like there was no eye there at all anymore, just a small bump of flesh, but Rory could still see as well as ever. Maybe the right eye was compensating; it was bigger, brighter, and if her face had engulfed the left eye, it had started to abandon the right. It bulged from her face. The eyelashes rose and twitched in the air like the tendrils of a carnivorous plant. She spent a few seconds watching it blink and then noticed that her nose had nearly smoothed itself into her face. Her mouth had shrunk to a slit, seemingly without teeth, but she could still feel teeth in front of her tongue. She raised her hand from her lap to touch her face. Her hand was different, spindlier. The nails were gone. She had only two fingers and a thumb.
The weirdest part about the whole thing was that she was all right with it. It was just that the headache was worse than ever. There was almost a sound to it, she thought, a buzzing murmur on the underside of the top of her skull. No, not almost a sound. Actually a sound, as though she were picking up a transmission. Her scalp tingled with it.
She could hear the nurse on the phone with her mum, telling her to come get Rory right away. She decided she wasn’t too keen on the idea. She turned the palms of her hands to face the ceiling, looked up, and began to rise. The ceiling wobbled. The top of her head melded with it, as though they were two pieces of wet clay, pushed together. She kept pushing. For a few seconds she was blind as her head and neck became part of the building. Then the roof around her bubbled, her enormous eye emerged, and she pulled herself from the tar and kept going. A part of the building was in her now; she was part of the building, too. It wasn’t so bad.
As she rose farther into the pink sky, it seemed to her that the entire town of Middle Coom was getting a little soft around the edges. The land in the valley all around was pushing into it, just a little bit. Her headache was getting much better now that she understood that what she was hearing really were dozens of voices, down there in the town. Most of them she didn’t recognize, but some she knew. She heard her mum talking to Padraic. I’m glad you stayed home today. As she picked the voices apart from one another, thin threads, wavering in the wind, grew from her sides and began to search downward, toward the town. A swarm of new threads rose from the town and joined with their ends. She was connected, but they didn’t constrict her. It felt good. The headache dissipated. She understood that if she felt now like she did this morning, or even most of the time, she’d have been horrified. She’d have tried to break all those connections, figure out how to snap them all off and fly far away, over the ocean, and maybe not come back. But she didn’t want to do any of that now. She just wanted to stay connected, even as a tiny thought grabbed hold of her.
What is happening here?
3.
The monsignors Angiuli and Fox frowned at Menchú. He had just told them what the Orb had done, and—because it still wasn’t work
ing right—what Team Three was going to need to do in order to find out what was going on.
“Forgive me,” Angiuli said, “but given all the research you’ve done on the Orb, I’m not sure I understand why you haven’t been able to restore some of its basic functions.”
Menchú nodded. He hoped that Angiuli was running interference with a question like that, trying to defuse any sharper criticism that might come from Fox. But he also had the feeling that Angiuli was out of patience. Or, it occurred to Menchú, worried that maybe, in supporting Team Three, he’d backed the wrong horse.
“The Orb is a complicated piece of machinery,” Menchú said.
“Still,” Angiuli said, “I hope you can see why we might be questioning your research priorities.”
“I see it,” Menchú said.
“I’m glad to hear that,” Angiuli said, an edge in his voice. “I wish it gave me more confidence.”
“I would like to echo what Monsignor Angiuli has said, more loudly,” Fox said. “And I will not ask your forgiveness. You know that I have been very opposed to Team Three’s recent activities from the beginning. All along, your argument has been that we need to prepare ourselves for an emerging threat, one greater than anything we have ever faced. Now, just such a threat seems to have emerged, and you are not prepared.”
“The research has been very difficult, Monsignor Fox.”
“No doubt it has,” Fox said. “And dangerous too.”
“I haven’t been secret about my own objections to the research for this very reason,” Menchú said. “I have been the voice of skepticism.”
“Yes, but I don’t think you’ve been skeptical enough,” Fox said. “Not political enough. Maybe just not smart enough.”
Menchú decided not to hide how much he was starting to seethe. “Please enlighten me, then,” he said.
“From your reports to us about your forays into magic, you have given the impression that the world of magic users is, in fact, rather connected—to a surprising degree, considering how secretive it all is. Maybe there are isolated cells of people working on things they say nothing about. But for the most part, people talk to one another. Everyone knows what everyone else is up to.”
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