The Fire Artist

by Whitney, Daisy

  “Why not?” Maybe I should run away. Maybe we could run away. “We could get out of here. Get out of town. We could go. You’d never have to live underground again. You’d never have to stop living again. You could just be, right?”

  It occurs to me that it would be far too early in a normal relationship to suggest running away with a boy. But this isn’t a normal relationship by any stretch, so I don’t feel clingy or needy by asking him. I feel as if I’m taking charge of my own fate.

  “Ar, I love the thought. But I can’t.” He holds his palms out, showing me they’re empty, of course. “There’s always a ticking clock.”

  “Why? Do you turn into a pumpkin at midnight for real? Do you expire after seven days with a wisher?”

  He shakes his head. “If we ran away, then you’d, for all intents and purposes, no longer be in such desperate need of a wish. That’s how I found you, remember? That’s how you found me. I don’t come to everyone who needs something. Some people need things in life—a home, good health, escape—but they’re not wanting to wish, so we don’t appear. But when someone is so hungry for a wish, like you were, that’s when I’m called. I could sense your need, your deep, desperate need to wish. That’s what summoned me to you. When you stop needing a wish, you’ll no longer be my wisher. When someone decides they no longer need a wish, I can’t be kept at their beck and call,” he explains.

  “Is that what happened to Mariska the night I met you? She was done wishing, so you were no longer at her beck and call?”

  “Her situation was a bit different,” he says evasively.

  “So what happens if I don’t need a wish, then?”

  “I won’t be able to come out to see you. I’ll cease to exist, whether you wish or not. It’s only the condition of your needing something so badly that keeps me with you. When that goes away, I can’t stay.”

  It’s as if I’ve been dreaming, sinking farther away into pretend, into the land of make-believe. Now, I’ve been harshly awakened. This thing between us is like my fire. Always ticking, always unwinding.

  I kick the rooftop, a petulant child.

  “I wish there were another way.” I walk away for a minute. “That wasn’t a real wish,” I call out, and I pace toward the other edge of the balcony, thinking, working through scenarios, looking for a loophole. But I find none, because magic makes its own loopholes. It circles back in on itself and twists inward, like those trees whose roots sprout back up to form new branches, but they’re all part of the same mother tree, never splintering off to become their own.

  I walk back to him. The faint sound of a siren plays far below, cars and life happening many stories away. “How exactly does the payment thing work?” I need information so I can come up with a plan.

  “Wishes don’t come free.”

  “That much is loud and clear. How do I pay?”

  “Dearly. You pay dearly,” he says through clenched teeth, as if the words pain him.

  “Like how dearly? The key the guy gave you? That hardly seems very high a price.”

  “It was for him. The keys were his livelihood. He didn’t just give me keys. He gave up his job in exchange for the wish. Besides, his sister became well again, so I assume he felt it was worth it.”

  “Oh. So the keys are sort of symbolic. But that doesn’t seem fair for him to give up a job.”

  “I don’t make the rules, Aria. I have no say in them. I only administer them. It’s not as if I wanted this job. It’s not as if I asked for it. I may have the magic, but I have no say,” he says, enunciating the last two words carefully.

  “So how else do people pay for wishes? With money?”

  He shakes his head. “Rarely with money. Some people have paid for wishes with their children.”

  I stop pacing and stare hard at him. “Their children? You can’t be serious.”

  “Big wishes come at a big price.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Some people pay with their hearts. Some offer their souls. Some offer themselves.”

  “Themselves? Like they give you their bodies?” I ask, and I can’t keep the jealousy out of my question.

  He senses it and laughs. “No. Not that way, Aria. But I’m glad to know it bothers you.”

  “Stop,” I say. “Don’t go all sexy on me again. I want information.”

  “Sexy? You think I’m sexy?”

  “Yes. Anyway, how do they pay with their bodies?”

  “Not their bodies,” he says, laughing. “Some pay with themselves. They offer themselves in a trade. Then when it’s time to collect on the debt, they would trade places with a granter.”

  “But you’re still here. So no one has offered you themselves.”

  “Correct. But I’ve seen what other wishers have offered.”

  “In the registry? Is it like a big book?”

  He nods. “Yes. Granters are all in a union. We’re regulated. And every wish is recorded in our registry within twenty-four hours of it being granted. That way, wishers can’t ever wish again. You get one wish for life, and that’s it. It keeps wishers from abusing granters. It prevents granter addiction. That was a big problem many years ago. Wishers kept coming back, or they’d find other granters they hadn’t used before, so the union implemented more checks and balances.”

  “That makes sense,” I say in my businesslike tone. “Elemental arts are like that too. We’re super regulated. We have to be registered, and then the Leagues have all these crazy rules too about our powers. So that’s what you meant when you said I was free to wish, right? Because I wasn’t in the registry, right?”

  “Exactly. Plus, we all have different districts we work in. Like jurisdictions. But some granters just work for the union, so they’re not underground, and they don’t really deal with wishers. They just enforce the rules. The career granters love rules. They are crazy about rules. They love setting them up and administering them.”

  “Is that something a granter aspires to? Working in the union? Is that like a move up? Being a career granter?”

  “I guess. In the union or as a career granter working in administration you get to live all the time.”

  He says it in such a matter-of-fact tone, but the words are another punch in the gut. Live all the time.

  “You have a jurisdiction. What’s yours? All of New York City?”

  “I’m Manhattan.”

  “Manhattan,” I say, trying on the word in a new way, as if it’s his name.

  “That’s why we’re required to record all wishes in the registry. So if someone went to a granter in another country or state or wherever, they’d know and they could turn them down free and clear.”

  “Has that happened to you? Has someone summoned you, and you found out they had a past,” I say, sketching air quotes, “of wishing?”

  “Absolutely.” He nods his head in a resolute way. “We’re like a drug to some people. One wish is never enough, so they try for more. Or they try to undo the wish, or undo the payment.”

  “So when do you collect on these payments?”

  “Some I’ve collected on already. Some are coming due soon. It varies. The length of the loan, that is.”

  I breathe out hard and something clicks. “Right. Because that’s what a wish is. A loan right? You always have to pay up somehow?”

  “Yes. You do. There is always some sort of price. Even with a jackass granter, the wisher pays literally in the way the wish is made. As for all the others, only a few very savvy wishers have found their way around the payment.”

  “Like with the snow gator?”

  He shakes his head. “I can’t tell you, Aria. Granter-wisher privilege.”

  “Right, but a snow gator? C’mon. That’s the legend around him. Won in some sort of bet for knowledge. Did she get to keep him after proving she wouldn’t abuse the arts or the knowledge or something?”

  Another shake of the head. “You won’t get this one out of me,” he says.

  But where else would a s
now gator come from? He has to be from a wish, or a payment.

  “So some payments are delayed. And some wishers pay off their debt. But do all wishers have to pay up?”

  “Oh, they all have to pay. But every deal is different, different conditions, provisos, quid pro quos.”

  “A deal with the devil,” I say.

  “Some say that.”

  “So what would I pay with?”

  “I don’t know. What would you be willing to give up?”

  I have so little to trade. And the thing that makes me valuable—my fire power—is the thing I have to wish for. I can’t bargain with my gifts. Do I offer my soul? My heart? My life? Myself? My family? None of those sound vaguely appealing.

  I picture the TV screen from this morning. The Chicago boy being hauled away. I think of my mom in her chair, my sister’s frozen hands, my dangerous brother, and my father. I wish I could trade him, but he’s faulty and flawed and no one would want him.

  I press my palm against my forehead.

  “This makes my head hurt,” I say softly.

  “Mine too.”

  I take a step closer, then lean my head against his chest. I hate these stupid consequences. I hate the way everything has a dark side. I hate my own dark side, how it lashed me today. Most of all, I hate that I wanted to feel every dark thing, to do every dark thing.

  I don’t feel that way now though. I feel safe, and it’s so foreign but so welcome. “I don’t want to think about payment right now,” I say into his shirt.

  He strokes my hair. “So don’t. At least for tonight. Do you want to lie down and look at the stars instead?”

  “Yes.”

  23

  Starlight

  Taj lies down on the rooftop and I join him. He clasps his hands behind his head. He is lithe and beautiful, witty and trapped. For this moment, though, he is free, as he gazes at the endless night sky.

  He reaches for my hand and laces his fingers through mine. Butterflies race through me with the slightest touch. I like this. I run my free hand through his soft hair. “How did you become a granter? You said you’ve been one since you were almost sixteen. That’s not long.”

  He doesn’t answer right away. I wonder what’s going through his head, or if he’s just drinking in the stars and the sky, soaking in the nighttime, the outdoors, the things he rarely sees.

  Then he turns to me, shifts onto his side. “I was payment.”

  My skin prickles at his words. “Payment? In what way?”

  “I was traded. I was the debt. And it came due.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I haven’t told this to anyone before, Aria. No one has ever asked.” His voice is low, pinched with nerves.

  “It’s okay. You can tell me,” I say, doing my best to sound brave, as if I can handle whatever he’s going to say.

  “You’ve heard rumors about peace in the M.E.?”

  “Well, they’re true. It is peaceful there.”

  “Right. But I mean how it came to be peaceful. Do you know what they say? What people say about it?”

  “All I know is, they say it had something to do with granters, but no one really knows.”

  “Well, I know how it happened,” he says, punctuating each word like they’re thumbtacks. “It came about through the leaders of each country. They made a pact with granters. The leaders worked together and they found nearly a dozen granters, and they made a wish. A wish so big it had never been wished before. A wish so big, so expansive, the granters weren’t sure if they could deliver on it. So the granter union and the granters too set terms, and a time frame. Like a loan. To see if they could do it, to see if they could bring peace to a war-torn land. And the leaders made their offerings. They offered their children in exchange.”

  I am cold all over; my charred heart turns to ice. “They offered their children?”

  “That was the payment. That was the deal. That in ten years, if peace still reigned, if the granters had delivered on the wish—delivered peace—then the granters would be freed. In their place, the firstborn children of the leaders would become the next generation of granters.”

  “Your parents traded you for peace?” I ask, as if saying the question can make it not so, as if expressing my own incredulity can turn this conversation into something that makes logical sense.

  “Yes.”

  “Both of them? Both of them did?”

  “Well, it was my father’s idea,” he says. “My father is in charge of one of the countries in the M.E.”

  “Your dad is in charge of a whole country?”

  If we weren’t high up on a rooftop, all of Manhattan might have just heard me. They might have heard me anyway.

  “Yes.”

  “And your mom went along with it?”

  “That’s sort of how it goes when your dad runs the country.”

  “That’s like my house too. My dad is in charge of everything. But,” I say, shaking my head, getting away from my lame little family in a run-down Florida ranch home, “do you talk to your parents? Can you ever see them?”

  “I talked to my mom the other night.”

  “Do you just talk on the phone or something?”

  He laughs. “Yes, on the phone. I’m allowed to call her once a month when I’m free.”

  “Do you ever talk to your dad?”

  He shakes his head. “No. Can’t say I care to.”

  “I take it you’re not too fond of him.”

  “I understand why he did it. I do, I really do,” Taj says emphatically, as if reminding himself that he’s cool with his dad’s sacrifice. “But I understand it on a big-picture level. Like, yeah, peace. Peace is good. We all want it. We’d all wish for it. But the price, I don’t know. I suppose it could be worse. I’m just a granter. I’m not dead.”

  “I think that’s a terrible thing to do to a child,” I say as if I’m the authority on this matter. Then I back down. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t diss your family.”

  “It’s okay. Like I said, sometimes I understand it. And sometimes I hate it. And sometimes I wish I could just tell the story and it would be so entertaining and so compelling that it would free me.”

  “We’ll write you a new story, and somehow the story will free you,” I say, even though I know we can’t. “I’m sorry about your parents, Taj. And I’m sorry about what happened.”

  “Thanks. It’d be nice just to be normal, wouldn’t it?”

  “Totally. Sometimes I just want to be a normal kid. Try to get a normal job. Make pizzas or be a barista. Not this. I don’t want fire.”

  “If you wanted to be free, you could wish your powers gone.”

  “Ha. That’d cause me even more problems.”

  “But you could. You could wish to be normal.”

  “Would you? Wish to be normal if you could?”

  “What I would wish for is irrelevant.”

  “Why? We’re just talking.”

  “It just is.”

  “But I want to know,” I say, pressing the issue as the stars flicker in the sky. “Tell me what you’d wish for, Taj. You’d wish to be free, wouldn’t you?”

  “This isn’t some movie where you get three wishes and you use the last one to free me. Wishers don’t use their wishes on me, even though wishing a granter free is the only wish that requires no payment from the wisher. And so, the only thing that can break me out is the only thing that will never happen.”

  “Why?”

  He waits before speaking, touches my face, tracing the edge of my hair.

  “Besides a wish, it’s love,” he says, by way of an answer.

  “Love?” I ask, and I’m warm again, craving nearness to him when he talks about love.

  “Yet another proviso of granter-hood. The only other way you can be freed is if someone falls in love with you.”

  “Who would make that rule? I get the whole wish-you-free thing. But how would a rule come to be about love?”

  “Because love makes its
own rules,” he says in an offhand way.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because love can often transcend rules. And that’s why the granter union made a rule. There was a time many years ago when wishers were falling into infatuation with granters, and that freed the granter. Poof!” He holds his hands out as if he were a magician who made a dove disappear. “Because love was powerful in its own right, and the union needed to control that power the only way it could. By attaching a rule to it. The union couldn’t stop love from freeing granters, but they could ensure that only true love did, and that granters weren’t slipping out of the system through unregulated infatuations that would then fade quickly away. Now the only kind of love that can free a granter is the kind of crazy, in-love-with-your-whole-heart kind of thing. It erases any payment due from the wisher, and it frees the granter, right then, right there, on the spot. But as you can imagine, that hasn’t happened. Infatuation, yes. Lust, yes. Crushes, absolutely. But true and real love?” He shakes his head. “Wishers don’t have the time or inclination to fall into a deep and abiding love. Besides, how would I know when it happens? I’ve never been in love.”

  “I’ve never been in love either,” I whisper. Then I kiss him, and as we recline high above New York City, hanging out on a rooftop, I picture using my wish on him. I have that power. I could set him free.

  But then I’d have a whole new set of problems to deal with.

  24

  A Gust of Wind

  I am bleary-eyed as I stumble into practice the next day. I have my sunglasses on and coffee in my hand, and I’m starting to get used to the beverage and the need for it. We have another show tonight, but our practice is only a few hours today. I didn’t sleep much last night. I stared at the ceiling, making checklists of pros and cons of various wishes. I could wish for true fire and then never have to pierce my heart again. That would be the fastest and safest way to ensure I could protect my family. Or I could wish Taj free and save someone who’s been enslaved.

  If I did that though, could I find a different way to save my sister? What if I ran away from the Leagues and sneaked Jana out in the middle of the night, then trekked with her cross country, far away from anyone who could hurt her?