“I’d appreciate some VIP treatment. I liked being on TV—”
Ev said: “Having a million fans. What’s not to like?”
“And you, you’re the mother of their best shot at freedom. Definitely a red carpet visitor.”
“I’m not the red carpet type. Do you think it’ll be hard to find Jacks?”
“They’ll know where he is,” Patience said. Something must’ve shown in Ev’s face, because she added, “You don’t look happy about that.”
“Astrid killed the Chief,” Ev said. “And the Chief wanted Jacks to be a witch-burner.”
“The Chief wasn’t the best of fathers, maybe, but I wouldn’t worry—Olive raised Jacks to be a peacenik. Besides, Ev, the boy is mad in love with your daughter.”
“Look what contamination did to Sahara,” Ev said.
“Sahara was a self-centered half-crazy brat before she got anywhere near magic.”
“It warps you, Patience. I thought I was someone else, remember? Near took Astrid’s head off once, for trying to set me straight.” Ev shuddered, remembering the rages that had overtaken him after he’d been exposed to raw vitagua.
It started on his mail route; he had suddenly known that the envelope in his hands was a vicious attack on the woman receiving it. Hate had boiled through the paper … and he had been unable to cope. Such things didn’t happen, he had rationalized, and something in his mind gave.
Scared and grasping at straws, he’d decided he wasn’t psychic—he’d just deduced what was in that envelope. An ex-husband, a bitter breakup. It was a small town, and he knew all the local gossip.
But the insights kept coming, intimate details of strangers’ lives. To cope, Ev had adopted the persona of his favorite fictional detective.
Since Astrid had learned to treat vitagua sickness, Ev felt sane again. Now that his body was male, he felt more sound than he’d ever been during his early life. Daughter, mother, wife—all those Evs had been costumes. All of them fit wrong.
But even now, he wasn’t quite himself. Traces of the detective persona remained: a fondness for hats, hokey chivalry.
Patience didn’t get this. She had been exposed to vitagua, but Astrid treated her within minutes, before her sense of self could fracture.
“Say for the sake of argument we find Jacks alive,” she said now. “Say he’s insane and looking for revenge.”
“You think he died?”
Patience shrugged. “No. Astrid promised the Roused that if they saved Jacks, she’d thaw the unreal. There’s a lot of magic here: they can pull it off.”
“Can we afford to turn him loose?”
“Not our call, Ev.”
“Sahara broke Astrid’s heart. If Jacks was nuts too…”
“Astrid is going to risk it.”
He found that it was a relief just to have given voice to the fear. “You don’t think Jacks is a danger?”
“Nope. If you want something to worry about…”
“What?”
She sighed. “We are all of us, especially Astrid, inventing a very dangerous wheel here, Ev. We could destroy both worlds—”
“Her grumbles say it doesn’t happen that way.”
“And you believe— Hey!” She stopped. “Where’s the city?”
On their previous visit to the unreal, the Roused had been living beneath the ridge the two of them had just climbed. Their settlement had been a sprawling bundle of giant seedpods, each as big as a room, stitched together by translucent stems big enough to walk through.
Now the gritty white plains below the ridge were empty, a bare expanse stretching to the edge of a vast frozen sea.
“There, on the horizon!” He could just make out structures rising from the surface of the ice.
“That is a hell of a lot farther to walk,” Patience said.
Bubbling erupted from the bleached grit at their feet; a pair of human hands scrabbled up through the dust. They were suspended from the ends of the two slender antennae, and followed by an enormous cricket.
“Hi, guys!” he chirped. “Enjoying the stroll?”
“You uprooted the whole city?”
“The People move as we must. Action’s out on the glacier, so we are too. But I got a shortcut, if you want.”
Patience’s relief was obvious. “We definitely want.”
“Okay!” The cricket spat a stream of green juice onto the white grit. It clumped together, forming a line of ivory stalagmites that curved inward as they reached a height of seven feet. The cricket spat again, forming a second, parallel line about a yard away. Laid thusly, they formed a structure that resembled a giant rib cage. Its floor curved like a bridge, a low arch on the sandy soil.
“You have gates here in the unreal?” Patience said.
“Gates are ours, always were,” the cricket said. “Spirit realm’s everywhere. You step through Astrid’s blackberry arches in the real, you slide over us on your way elsewhere.”
Does Astrid know this? Ev would have to ask.
“Gonna take the bridge?” the cricket asked.
“Yes, thank you,” Ev said.
Stepping through, they emerged on the surface of the massive glacier. The cluster of seedpods that had formed the city rose above them, organized into a freestanding honeycomb, skyscraper high, with roots sunk deep into the ice. Human–animal hybrids moved along its walkways.
The scent of cooked food—roasted vegetables, refried beans, and something eggy—rose from a long dugout canoe parked at the base of the honeycomb. Remembering his first visit to the unreal, Ev inhaled slowly. Sure enough, his belly filled.
At the foot of the honeycomb was a pit, a melted chasm that yawned within the frozen vitagua.
Ev stared into the hole. Magic had mutated from its original, relatively benign form about seven hundred years earlier. That was when the witch-burners of Europe launched their effort to corner the market on enchantment. In the process, they had driven magic into Fairyland—to use Albert’s term—where pressure compressed the magical particles into vitagua.
In their last battle with the Fyremen, the people of the unreal had frozen it all. They had saved themselves, but they’d also been trapped by their own defensive move—the ice had formed instantly, capturing everyone on both sides.
Vitagua was naturally luminescent; staring into the pit was like being underwater on a sunny day, seeing the sun shining down at you through several feet of ocean. Half-transformed people were frozen in the ice, a profusion of animal and human faces, all with aboriginal features, most caught in attitudes of surprise or terror. Here and there, a body part stuck out; in one case, a girl’s head had melted free. She keened at Ev with the voice of a Siamese cat.
“She has been freeing about ten people a day.”
Ev turned. The speaker was a raccoon with long black braids, dressed in a nineteenth-century dress and glasses that made her look like something from a kid’s book, a raccoon granny.
“Hello,” Patience said. “I’m Patience Skye. This is Ev.”
“I’m Eliza,” the raccoon replied.
Ev was about to ask if Eliza was in charge, but Patience cut in smoothly. “You were saying something about Astrid?”
A man with dragonfly wings flew over the lip of the chasm. He had someone in his arms, a coughing, blue-slimed bullfrog from the pit. He passed the frog to a waiting quartet of Roused, who sponged off the new arrival, their movements as tender as if they were nurses attending a birth.
“You spoke of measuring the ocean in gallons,” Eliza said, indicating the bullfrog. “What matters to us is how many of our people remain trapped.”
“Astrid has melted more of you folk loose than any chanter since the freeze,” Ev said.
The raccoon eyed him. “Promises have been made.”
“They’re being kept,” Patience insisted. “She’s picking up the pace.”
“Each person freed is a gift. But the more of us there are, the more impatience we feel.” Eliza smoothed her apron. “
Asking us to have faith in your daughter’s commitment—”
“Astrid has her own reasons to want the job done,” Ev said.
“The Fyrechild.”
“Jacks Glade, that’s right. Is he alive?”
“After a fashion,” the raccoon said. “When all the others are freed, all, he will go.”
The glacier trembled. Ice melted, sending liquid magic down the chasm wall. The cat-girl tumbled free, twisting in midair as she fell. A wolf spider with human eyes skipped up and over the edge of the pit, into a waiting blanket.
Cries, human and animal, rose from below.
The dragonfly appeared, laboring under the weight of the cat girl. Dropping her, he chattered at Eliza before power-diving back down.
“What’s happened?” Patience asked.
“A large melt,” the raccoon replied. Roused were rushing out of the city, hurrying to the pit.
“St. Louis,” Patience said. “Astrid and the others must already be there.”
Ev asked: “Can we help?”
“Dry people off as we bring them up.” The raccoon pointed at a pile of blankets, then rushed downward with the others, vanishing into the impenetrable blue light.
CHAPTER SIX
VOLUNTEERS SET UP A banquet in Indigo Springs that night, amid the silk tents and vitagua lanterns of the Bigtop. They spun picnic hampers laden with baked squash, poached trout and salmon, curried chickpeas and eggplant, and cranberry custard. The food was served on scavenged glassware, a motley collection of bowls and plates. Cups of a light mead were passed round.
Afterwards, a steel drum band set up on the giant blue stump of one of the mulched trees, playing fast-paced Caribbean music while the feasters danced.
Astrid’s gaze kept returning to Will Forest. He was on the fringe of the crowd, observing, taking everything in. He seemed calm, but he must be eager to get going.
She made her way to his side, passing a pair of volunteers bent over a small video player. On its palm-sized screen, the former editor of the Indigo Springs Dispatch, Aran Tantou, was giving evidence. “Before the magical disaster, I’d been working on an article on the ten worst polluters in Oregon.” The player’s small speaker made Aran’s voice tinny. “Afterwards, Sahara came to me. She wanted my research; she wanted to go after the companies and their executives.”
“Did she say why?”
“She was going to reveal their inner monsters.”
“Contaminate them, in other words,” said the prosecutor.
“Yes.”
“Did you give it to her?”
“Of course he did,” one of the viewers muttered.
“Weasel,” added another: Aran had been unpopular in town. In trying to please everyone, he’d come off as mealy-mouthed.
“I had everything on a flash drive; the Alchemites took it,” Aran said. He looked nervous. The camera angle switched: Sahara was giving him her shark smile.
Astrid put her hand over the player. “Give the newscast a rest for a night, guys. Join the dance?”
“Too tired.” One, a pixie-faced kindergarten teacher from the team of seers, pocketed the player. “I spent all day in Marseilles, trying to figure out what’ll go wrong there when Boomsday comes. Now I just wanna kick back with a little TV.”
“Couldn’t you find a good show?”
The pixie’s medic boyfriend smirked. “Trial’s got the best ratings in America—it must be good.”
“If you say so.” She left them to it, moving through the crowd to Will. “Want to say a few words?”
“Me?” He frowned. “Surely that’s your job.”
“I’m terrible at speechmaking.”
“Comes with the job, Astrid. You may not like that they call you boss, but it’s you they need to hear from.”
“Stand up with me.”
“My mind’s far away, Astrid,” he said. His tone was gentle. “Maybe after St. Louis, okay?”
Feeling absurdly crushed, she turned away, climbing up beside the band.
The murmur of conversation didn’t wane. She hadn’t developed Sahara’s knack for getting everyone’s attention. Finally Mark started banging a couple wooden bowls together, breaking into the chatter.
Where to start? “I want you all to remember this isn’t an attack. We’re not going to St. Louis to hurt anyone.”
The words had a sobering effect.
“We’re going to make things better,” she continued. “Yes, we’re going to leave vitagua there, but we’re also going to leave behind water weavers, food spinners. We’ll cool the air, clean up garbage, patch up busted houses. The government will call it terrorism, but people will see the magic improved things.”
“They’ll all live happily ever after!” someone shouted.
“Yes.” She raised her cup. “Um, to the Happy After.”
“The more, the merrier,” replied the group, raising glasses. Will looked perplexed; she’d have to explain the toast to him.
Right now, what he needed was a successful mission. She walked to the Chimney, with its dripping rills of vitagua.
Astrid had been reluctant to shoulder this burden. Her father taught her to chant when she was a child, but when she realized how much responsibility it meant, she wimped out. She’d made a chantment that wiped out all her knowledge of magic.
Then Dad was murdered. Astrid inherited the magical well—and thanks to her self-inflicted amnesia, she got Jacks killed and let Sahara run mad.
“Stop,” she murmured aloud, as she always did when her thoughts started running this track. “No regrets.”
The world had been in trouble before the well ever broke open, she reminded herself. The goal now was to steer everyone to that happy ending the grumbles kept talking about.
Happy endings. Her and Will. Could she have misunderstood? The idea had a certain allure; he had Jacks’s steadiness, and he was so fair, so kind.…
The vitagua pool in the ravine was glass smooth. A slow trickle lipped its edge, leaking into the swamp surrounding the camp, saturating the forest floor.
Under Astrid’s direction, the blue magic roiled. She warmed it into mist, gallons of it, raising a blue fog above her head. As much as she dared, as much as she could hang on to … she all but emptied the lagoon surrounding the Chimney.
Fluid gushed out from the gap between worlds. It would fill up fast.
Drawing the magic around her like a cloak, Astrid took Bramblegate to the plaza.
A cluster of volunteers was waiting, debating who should break a champagne bottle over the front bumper of the trolley.
“Who’s newest here?” Astrid asked.
“Amber,” Pike said.
A young woman stepped up, reaching for the bottle. She christened the trolley Overlord: Clancy’s choice, in honor of all his dead Normandy invasion buddies. More warspeak, Astrid thought. Excitement crackled through the gathering.
Mark punched the air. “Kick ass and take names!”
Olive frowned. “The gentle path.”
To Astrid’s relief, most of the volunteers echoed Olive.
The others were waiting. She could delay no longer.
She pulled vitagua into herself, into the empty spaces within.
Voices assailed her. Grumbles, she called them, the voices of the frozen people of the unreal, with all their opinions, resentments, their knowledge of past and future.
They spoke of the future, of Sahara escaping, of Alchemites committing atrocities. Or maybe she’d misheard—without Sahara, the Alchemites were relatively harmless. Astrid had seen to that.
The grumbles mumbled about her first-grade graduation ceremony, Dad’s death, the night she lost her virginity.
She reeled, dizzy and disoriented. When was now?
Flames licking skin, smell of burned hair …
“She’s spacing out,” a voice said. Someone caught her before she could step off the trolley.
“Jacks?” Jacks was the one who always caught her. She burst into tears: his blood
was on her skirt. Her fault. Was that now?
“Go, Clancy,” Will said. It was him holding her steady, not Jacks. She felt the gut-deep pain of his children’s absence, his gnawing fear they’d be harmed, the exhausting effort of holding it together.…
“St. Louis,” Clancy said, driving into the glow. Hot, syrupy air lolled over them as they rolled out into nighttime.
“Where are we?” Astrid said.
“Missouri,” Will said.
“I think it goes well here,” she said.
Car alarms were blaring—their arrival had displaced a shock of air. People were going to their windows.
Janet raised a tin watering can, spilling water onto the street. As it pattered on the pavement, people shrugged, closing their curtains. The alarms quieted.
Aquino crossed himself quickly, then raised an elaborately painted lampshade over his head. Letrico flickered up his arms and hands, and countless twinkles of light boiled from the lampshade, swarming out into the city like fireflies. “Invitations to new volunteers are away.”
“And here goes nothing.” Igme held out a plastic turkey baster filled with vitagua. Soap bubbles blew from its tip, each the size of a tennis ball, each containing a trace of liquid magic. Some drifted upward; others rolled in the street, vessels of microcontamination that would spread enchantment when they broke.
“Boss? Boss?”
Astrid twisted the barbell pierced into the web of her hand, breaking the skin so blue magic could steam out. Leaning out of a trolley window, she looked for objects—tricycles, dog toys, laundry, anything that could hold a benevolent charm.
“Will—your children?”
The magical well would be vulnerable until she had a successor, and the grumbles said it would be Will. But he wouldn’t do it if she couldn’t produce the kids.
He will bend, he will see…, the grumbles murmured. They told the truth, but they laid traps with it; you couldn’t entirely trust them. Would he really love her one day? Could he—could anyone—love someone who was destroying the world?
She had chanted him a spinner from a kid’s game, a plastic compass whose needle pointed east. “Turn left, Clancy,” he said.
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