Blue Magic

by A. M. Dellamonica

  With that, he staggered to bed.

  “Night, Ev,” Patience’s voice wafted from the next room.

  “Good night,” he echoed, falling into dreams of turtle girls and winged boys and an endless glare of blue light.

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHASING WILL’S KIDS WOULD have to wait until after the bombing raid was over, so Astrid decided to try distracting him.

  One of her volunteers was a TV actor. He’d opened up his apartment in Los Angeles to anyone who wanted a comfortable place to wait out the bombing raids.

  She and Will arrived to find a dozen volunteers in the home theater, watching Sahara’s trial. They sprawled on the couches, enjoying the air-conditioning, munching chips, and following the coverage while waiting for Mark to declare an all clear.

  “Defense lawyers promised the Alchemites would behave if they could come back in the courtroom,” a volunteer explained. The prisoners were filing in now. Sahara was last, accompanied as always by the woman who seemed to be her personal guard.

  “What do you know about that marshal?” Astrid asked Will.

  “Why, boss? Got a crush?” Pike crooned.

  “I know I do,” someone said. “Sista looks like a cross between a flamenco dancer and Buffy.”

  “I’d do her,” one of the engineers agreed.

  “I don’t have a crush,” Astrid protested, her face warming.

  “A woman like you should be using her power to get laid, lass,” Pike said.

  “I’m ignoring you all,” she said. “Will? The marshal?”

  “Juanita? Army brat, from a big family. She was handpicked by the judge, I think; they’re both from Nevada Federal Court. Are you thinking of recruiting her?”

  “Would it work?”

  “I doubt it. She’s loyal to Skagway.”

  She filed away the information. Juanita Corazón was important, a piece of the puzzle.

  Sahara was on-screen now, pursing her lips at the camera, smooch-smooch-smooch. Acting insane, Astrid thought. There had to be something, even now, didn’t there? Some core, buried deep, that could be touched by reason or compassion?

  The camera panned the defense table, homing in on Caro Forest. Will flinched slightly.

  Astrid slipped out to the patio, looking out at the Pacific Ocean and listening for the grumbles. She could hear Will’s children, somewhere up after the Small Bang, laughing.

  She should never have told Will that they’d become lovers. It sounded deranged.

  The thing was, she did like him. He’d always been so kind to her, so gentle and fair.

  That was just his job, argued one of her interior voices. It was the nasty one, the voice of doubt. Getting you to trust him was something he did for Roche. It was an interrogation, remember?

  No, it was more. He was decent.

  Yeah. Decent. That’s sexy.

  She pushed away the whirl of skepticism. Taking out a rubber stamp and some letrico, she pressed the stamp repeatedly against the wall. Each impression created a glowing white outline of a caterpillar. They moved, nibbling at the letrico, forming chrysalises, then breaking out a minute later, as real-looking butterflies—mourning cloaks.

  Astrid cupped her hand, allowing vitagua to well from the piercing in the web of her thumb. The magical butterflies lapped tiny drops of the vitagua, then fluttered off. They would lodge in trees, land in gardens, or get eaten by birds and spiders. Each would transmit a microscopic bit of enchantment.

  She worked for an hour, hoping the whole while that Will would join her, maybe say something to ease the awkwardness.

  What’s keeping you from going to find him?

  “I’d just make matters worse,” she said aloud.

  You want him to believe you care for him? You gotta show it.

  Maybe it would be easier if she just shelved the romance idea. He wasn’t wrong: The grumbles had misled her before.

  Someone tapped at the patio door—Pike. “Mark says it’s safe to go home. Want to come check out the damage?”

  “Coming,” she said, rejoining the group as they filed through Bramblegate.

  It was the first time the napalm had gotten close. Rainwater poured in through an ugly burn in the canopy, and there was a scorched-looking crater in one of the islands of rubble. Dense lilac-scented smoke hung in the air. Singed remnants of a silk tent blew to and fro.

  Astrid said: “Mark’s right. They’re fighting magic with magic now.”

  “Arthur’s got a new consultant,” Will said. “A Fyreman. Guy seemed to understand that you’re a bigger threat than Sahara.”

  She felt a thrill of fear. “And I guess Roche is angry that you defected.”

  “Yes. I’m sure my desertion hurt him.”

  Broken friendships. She sighed. “At least everyone’s okay.”

  “They aren’t,” Will said.

  She turned, following his gaze. A body was lying just under the sawdust-and-vitagua surface of the lagoon.

  Parting the vitagua, she exposed the corpse: a girl of maybe sixteen years. She had the features of a fox, and her red-furred face was slack, almost serene. She might have been sleeping, but for the torn clothes and the deep gash in her leg.

  “She must’ve been hiding in the forest.” That was Olive; she had appeared beside them, holding Jacks’s card-sized black-and-white portrait of the girl.

  Astrid took the body’s still-warm hand. Jacks bled out, she thought, fighting tears.

  “Is it too late to save her?” Olive asked.

  “Yes, she’s gone.” She was crying now.

  A grumble whispered: Red blood, blue magic—

  “You didn’t kill her,” Will said, drowning out whatever it might have said. “You’re trying to minimize the carnage.”

  “So many planes, all those explosives, only one death…”

  “Exactly.”

  It didn’t help. “Poor kid. She must have been so scared.”

  “So what do we do?” Olive’s voice was harsh.

  “Clean up, get everyone back to work?” She wiped at her face.

  “Not enough.” Olive jerked off her cardigan, covering the body.

  Will let out an odd, incredulous bark of laughter. “Are you accusing Astrid of slacking?”

  There’s that fairness again. Will might be angry with her, but he was defending her anyway.

  She had the weight of the world on her shoulders, so many people expecting her to be politician, priest, big sister, boss. Olive furious about every death, Roche and his bombers, a Fyreman involved now, and the Roused pushing her to speed up the contamination. She thought of the Ballroom, the room full of pictures of people she hadn’t yet saved … or lost. Small wonder the volunteers had taken to calling it Limbo.

  “Pike?” she said.

  “Aye, boss?”

  “Have the medics set space aside in the hospital for a morgue, and schedule a funeral.”

  “Done.”

  “Olive, find out who she was, get her cleaned and dressed, see if she has family.” Standing, she took in the crowd of Springers forming around the body. “Okay. Time we started dispersing the vitagua faster. Suggestions?”

  “Freeze it in chunks and tuck it into glaciers?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Dorrie.”

  She said, “Put a crew together, Dorrie, get on it.”

  Thunder coughed. “There’s a new guy, Ilya, on the letrico crew. He thinks we can build a pipeline underground.”

  “How would that work?”

  “He’s a coal miner, geologist … something. Says if we dig an underground river, we can tunnel out of the contaminated zone. Vitagua can flow through the shafts. Digging’s energy intensive, but there’d be no air release, comparatively few contaminated animals. Magic could just seep into the stratum.”

  “Tunneling—that’s a lot of displaced rock,” Astrid said.

  “We’ll find a use for it.”

  Four young men had eased the girl’s body onto a sheet of
silk from a shattered tent. Now they each took up a corner, lifting her. The crowd fell silent, parting as they bore the corpse to the hospital.

  Olive brandished a bloodstained wallet from her pocket. “Libby Wilson. Fifteen years old.”

  Fifteen. “Who dropped this bomb? Where’s the pilot from?”

  One of the seers replied: “Maryland.”

  “Find me a beach in Maryland, Pike.” She reached out to the ravine, scooping up as much vitagua as she could and stepping through Bramblegate.

  Will rushed after her. “What are you doing?”

  “Got it, boss.” Pike’s voice buzzed. “Assateague Island National Seashore.”

  “Stop calling me boss.” She stomped into the glow. Sea air embraced her, and a herd of wild horses spooked, fleeing north. Bramblegate grew out of the beach, spraying sand.

  “Astrid…” Will appeared beside her. “Don’t do this.”

  Vitagua was vulnerable to seawater, but there was plenty of life on the beach. She sprayed liquid magic into the salt marsh grass, into kelp thrown up by the tide. She brushed the birds: egrets and herons, gulls without number, a peregrine falcon roosting in a nearby tree. She contaminated a copse of small wind-blasted shrubs, a stand of pine, and then sent the rest of the vitagua rolling inland as a glowing blue fogbank to the limits of her sight, over the surface of the sand.

  Clouds of contaminated ticks and mosquitoes rose from the grasses. Clumped starfish in a tidal pool began to bloat and stretch. Ghost and horseshoe crabs by the hundreds, unseen when she had begun, grew into dog-sized monstrosities.

  “Astrid, stop! This is retaliation. You’re acting like a terrorist—”

  “Why not? I’m a murderer, aren’t I?”

  “Does this make you feel better about the dead girl?”

  “It’s not about…” But it was: she was angry, out of control. “I’m sorry.”

  He understood: She could see it.

  “This was stupid.” The horses had doubled in size. Blue patches of hair marked their coats and manes. “We hit St. Louis, Roche hits us, I do this. Tit for tat. Stupid, stupid.”

  “You can’t afford to lose your temper, Astrid. Too much is riding on you.”

  The understatement made her burst into tears. Will hesitated just a moment before he opened his arms. She let herself lean in and cry.

  He’s kind, she thought again.

  “I know you’re having a tough day,” he said eventually. “But I want to go after my kids before the Alchemites move on.”

  Of course. It was the interrogation all over again. He wasn’t comforting her because he cared; he was keeping her on task.

  Buck up, she told herself. Of course he’s tunnel-visioned on the kids. Forget the romance prophecies and get to work. “Canada, right?”

  “Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.”

  “Astrid.” Their tuning forks were abuzz. “Come back, lass, or we’re sending the strike team.”

  “We’re on our way,” Will said. He dried her eyes, then gestured at Bramblegate. “After you.”

  Bracing herself, she stepped into the plaza. A crowd waited, volunteers packed around the trolley. For once, nobody was glued to the big TV with Sahara’s trial on it.

  Mark spoke for them all. “You can’t take risks like that.”

  “She’s not hurt,” Will said.

  “This time,” Mark insisted.

  Astrid reined in an impulse to run back into the glow, to flee all this attention and the burden too. Instead she met Mark’s mismatched eyes. “I didn’t mean to scare anyone.”

  “You’re the key to this whole operation,” Clancy huffed.

  “I’m sorry,” Astrid said. “Let’s just get back to work, okay?”

  Mock groans and laughter rippled across the plaza.

  “Come on,” she said. “Are we saving the world or not?”

  “More the merrier!” someone shouted back.

  “Good!” She reached for Mark, giving him a friendly squeeze, showing solidarity. “We’re heading out after the kids. But I want a plan for that idea about hiding vitagua in glaciers. Was that Dorrie’s idea?”

  “You want it right this second?”

  “First thing in the morning.”

  The woman gave her the thumbs-up and waved to a trio of volunteers, leading them away.

  “And Thunder, set up a meet with this guy who says we can dig an underground river.”

  He nodded. “It’d help if someone could teach him English.”

  She picked a Frisbee off the nearest bench, chanting it while concentrating on the idea of language lessons, instant fluency. “Presto. Go learn him up.”

  “Abracadabra,” he replied, cheerfully, twirling the Frisbee as he headed for the glow. Around the plaza, she could hear the tuning forks buzzing, transmitting her orders.

  “It’ll be enough,” she murmured. “It has to be.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “IS SAHARA KNAX A god?”

  A couple days had passed since Juanita slipped Sahara the latest chantment, a ladybug, bringing the total number of chantments hidden in her cell to three. Three crimes, three betrayals. So far, Wendover hadn’t crumbled to dust or been obliterated by a plague of locusts. The trial was continuing in almost humdrum fashion, bound up in procedural arguments.

  Today, though, the atmosphere was tense.

  The Alchemite lawyers had petitioned to get their clients back in the courtroom, and so far they’d behaved. Sitting in a double row at the defense table, they looked vulnerable and beaten down. Some slumped in their chairs like bored schoolchildren. Caro Forest kept scanning the galleries, presumably looking for her husband.

  Lucius Landon, today’s witness, was a nerdier version of the firefighter, Gilead, who now shadowed General Roche’s every step. He dressed like a young academic, someone you’d expect to see teaching chemistry labs to university freshmen. When he was introduced as a magical expert, Sahara leaned forward, lips slightly parted.

  In response to Wallstone’s question, Landon said: “Sahara Knax is not divine. She’s David Koresh, Charles Manson … but on a different scale.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Knax escaped from Indigo Springs with a collection of magical objects. Using these items to create an illusion of godlike power, she developed a following of gullible believers.”

  A hiss from the defendants’ table. Skagway shot them a glance that could’ve frozen blood, and they quieted.

  “So there’s no spiritual foundation for the Alchemite religion?”

  “Knax has drawn her so-called prime lessons from legitimate sources,” Landon said. “She’s pilfered Wiccan teachings and exploited widespread public concern for the environment. But her disciples, the religious practice—it’s Sahara-worship, pure and simple. The people she’s attracted aren’t interested in profound spiritual practice. She’s offering easy answers and magical power. That’s what these snake oil vendors do.”

  “Sahara’s followers claim she has guided them to troves of holy artifacts,” Wallstone said. “Items she laid aside decades ago for use in their rebellion against the government.”

  “Decades ago?” Landon repeated. “When she was … what, ten?” The gallery chuckled, and the witness shook his head. “As long as magical objects—chantments—have existed, there have been chantment thieves. Knax is a gifted thief. It doesn’t make her a deity.”

  “And the sea monsters she claims to have created?”

  “Raw magic befouls living things, afflicting them with giantism and mutations.” Using a remote control, he brought up a time-lapse sequence of an ant blundering into a droplet of luminescent blue fluid, and subsequently growing to the size of a handbag. “Imagine what would happen if you exposed a blue whale, or a giant squid.”

  “The monsters are alchemically contaminated sea life?”

  “That’s all they are.”

  Wallstone asked: “What about the icebergs created when the Alchemites destroyed the Vigilant?”

 
“Using a chantment to work magic requires energy; it’s no different from technology in that regard. The Alchemites drew heat out of the ocean near the carrier. The icebergs were a side effect of the sinking. Anyone could do the same.”

  “So her powers aren’t special, her philosophy is hollow, and her so-called miracles are a side effect of chantment use?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “Is what Sahara Knax has done against the law?”

  “Objection,” defense counsel said laconically. “Witness isn’t a lawyer, Your Honor.”

  “Sustained.”

  Lucius locked eyes with the attorney. “It’s morally wrong. Isn’t that enough? As for unlawful, that’s a no-brainer.”

  “How so? It’s not illegal to propogate magic,” Wallstone said.

  “There are laws against contaminating the environment and poisoning people, aren’t there? Against terrorism? Knax openly boasts of having caused earthquakes and wildfires. Tens of thousands were displaced by the contaminated forest. They lost their homes, lost everything. And maybe I’m no lawyer, but sinking the Vigilant was certainly against the law.”

  Sahara snorted, too softly for the judge to hear. Juanita resisted an urge to flick the back of her head.

  “Let’s move on. The defendants are using a necessity defense. They claim their crimes are justified because they demonstrate magic’s potential to reverse climate change.”

  “And Sahara Knax knows how to carry that off? She’s a radio deejay. How much sea life died as a result of her actions?” Lucius Landon clicked the remote, bringing up a shot of the wreckage of the carrier, surrounded by ice floes, a fuel slick, and dead gulls.

  “Still. Drawing heat from the sea, right when the oceans are heating up and the Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking—”

  “Randomly creating massive icebergs could make things worse. What if they cool things down so much that it affects the North Atlantic current?”

  “Is that possible?”

  Landon directed his response to the camera, to the viewing audience. “A large enough casting, unchecked, could trigger an ice age.”