by Jenn Stark
“Solar flares!” came another shout, this time in Mandarin, echoed in languages across the northern portion of the world.
Again and again, we pulsed the energy outward, and again and again, the gods twisted and writhed, desperate to find their way to Earth. But as Armaeus intoned the seventh minute of totality, the tide shifted. We—all of us—finally began to push the gods back. We stood in front of the goal and knocked away every attacker coming at us. The energy from our strongholds swept up like a net of darkness, blanketing the sky, and the scream of wind and fury roared through the cosmos, punching first one, then another, then all the gods back into the dying shadow of the moon. Even as they collapsed into the maelstrom of their own creation, however, there was no denying the burst of colorful meteorites that soared out from the gods, raining fire over the earth. Before I could fully process what that meant, the shadow of the moon finally slipped off the surface of the sun—a sun that no longer shone with infernal fury, but beamed down gently to the world below.
Silence reigned for one long, impossible moment. Then the chaos returned.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Get ’em, get ’em, get ’em!” Simon’s voice crowed over the intercom, and suddenly, all the screens were wrenched away from the eclipse and recalibrated to several bursts of glowing white-yellow balls of flame—either featured against bright blue skies or blasting across the black backdrop of night, depending on the location. As they shot toward the earth, these flares were met with equal and opposite forces that looked like tiny spaceships from a retro Asteroids video game, each ship disappearing into a puff of smoke as they connected with the falling fire.
“We’ve got more reports of grids failing, particularly in the northern sections of Europe and Central Russia,” Ma-Singh barked. He was at another set of monitors, his hands racing over the keyboard. “Also reports of fire falling from the sky there.”
“We don’t have enough people,” I said, my gaze jumping from screen to screen. “There’s not enough.”
“Not enough good ones, anyway,” Simon howled. “And yes, I’m looking at you, Z-86. Get your ass in gear!” His words were shouted with more joy than censure, however, and in my mind’s eye, I pictured the group of gamers crouching over their controls. How many had Simon marshaled together to set up this net of protection, I wondered? And how much of this was actually being seen by the government leaders?
A quick glance to those screens made me blanch. The offices of government were empty of both leaders and their hired guns. No doubt everyone was scrambling into battle…against what, the flares? More likely the perceived threat of spaceships over claimed airspace.
“Uh, guys, we kind of need to wrap it up,” I said.
“Well then, maybe a little freaking help here?” Simon yelled back, and I blinked with sudden realization. I could help, here. We all could, in our way.
“Where are you?”
Simon rattled off the coordinates, and I turned to the nearest console, but I didn’t think for a moment I could help with gaming. That was a skillset that I not only didn’t know, but I hadn’t seen. I barely had enough hand-eye coordination to manage pouring a bowl of cereal. Still—the help that I could give here was no different from the help I could provide Mercault.
I barked commands to the other Houses of Magic, then dropped my hand to the keyboard. I focused all my energy into the circuits, targeting it to the GPS coordinates Simon had given me. I had no idea where that was, but I didn’t need to know. The circuits lit up like a map, and I pushed out toward it, praying it would be enough.
Shouts of excitement greeted me, but they were distant to me now, as my attention remained on the crackling networks of connectivity joined together all over the world to fight this new and almost invisible threat. At the front of the war room, someone shouted the word “Scrambling!” and I redoubled my efforts. Scrambling was bad. Fighter pilots in air force jets scrambled. We didn’t want any part of that.
Then I was lost again in the matrix of energy, pushing all I had. And not me alone. Another pulse of power ran along those networks, then another. And finally, a wave of energy so immense, I knew it could only be from Armaeus. The entire Council was lending its aid to the gamers shooting their explosions into the sky, magic combating magic, while on the ground, it seemed only that the solar flares were suddenly blanked out of existence. If there were no screens, there were no visible indicators of what was flying up to greet the flaming meteorites. The non-Connecteds of this world could see the power cast down by the gods, but not the equal and opposite power thrown up by man to combat it.
“Got ’im!” Simon’s crow of success brought me back to partial awareness of my immediate surroundings, but I was still lost in the sea of Connected power that was coming from the Council. One by one, I could feel them merging into a general flow, and I realized that this—this power wasn’t only going to the Connected gamers desperately trying to push back the impact of the solar flares. It was going to the downed grids, too. First in the heart of Russia, then spreading out, a sea of lights reconnecting, flaring back to life, generators reengaged in a blink of an eye, networks rebuilt. Tesla, I thought. Tesla was spearheading this reboot of these international power grids, so quickly that to anyone not paying attention, there was no reason for concern. Forget a projected six-hour hiatus of electricity, this was barely a blip. If you hadn’t seen the fire dropping from the sky, you might not have noticed the interruption at all.
But then there was still the mess at the bottom of the world to fix.
“Miss Wilde,” Armaeus said. This time, he spoke in my mind—but not my mind alone. “Monsieur Mercault. Madame Gamon. Warrior Rangi. Your minds and the power of your Houses, if you would.”
The command brooked no opposition, but from what I could tell, no opposition was offered. I thrust up all that was left of my energy—and froze.
Like, literally, about froze my ass off.
Suddenly, I found myself standing not in the center of the House of Swords’ war room, but on a vast, tumbling white plain, the edge of an ice field that I could see was crumbling into a roiling sea. The ice was liquefying at its center, not at its ends, as quickly as I was drawing breath. Beside me, Mercault, Rangi, and Gamon appeared, none of us dressed for subarctic temperatures, but before Mercault’s scream emerged fully from his throat, it was cut off with the sound of a sonic boom. We all flew face-first into the ice, our hands planting into the permafrost.
“Now!” the Magician roared.
Our reaction was instinctual. Ultimately, the power of the Connecteds was just that—connecting. Connecting with the force that moved the universe, connecting with the energy that created and destroyed life. We were all linked to everything made of matter and light flowing along that thundering river of energy. Now we reconnected with the earth at its core and felt the rage of the energy that had bolted from the atmosphere to rip a ragged hole in the Antarctic ice shelf. We connected with that hole, felt its violation, and worked to restore it.
For the first time since I’d begun my journey with the Magician, I reached and recognized the limits of my abilities. Fear, agony, and a deep, abiding exhaustion hammered me by turns, but there was no going back, no breaking the connection as layer upon layer of ice reformed and refroze, the seas rushing back into their solid form, the tsunamis dying almost as quickly as they’d been born. As the ice flowed back into its former position, layer upon layer, we were the ones who paid the price of the earth’s anguish. Rangi, Mercault, Gamon, myself.
The Four Houses of Magic.
The others recognized it too. Gamon turned to me with eyes first filled with rage, then with deep, fathomless pain. Rangi roared with the agony of a man who sees his own death and welcomes it fully. And Mercault merely stared, his eyes wide and his hands outstretched, his face suffused with the wonder that comes only with realizing your true strength, your true fortitude, your true worth. I had no idea how much time was actually passing, but in our bodies and min
ds, it was not the space of seconds, but years—decades. The work of this day would never be unwritten from our bones.
Then it was over.
We fell to the ground in broken heaps as the wind raged over us, the sudden squall whiting out even those nearest to me. I squinted through the storm and thought I saw Mercault’s body whisked away on the wind, then Rangi’s, until finally it was only Gamon and me—Gamon, the strongest of the Connecteds save one person outside the Council. Gamon, who together with me had still proven unable to resist that Council in the moment they called upon us to serve.
This time, we’d given our help willingly.
But what about next time? Or the time after that? When would the rules change to favor the Connecteds of this earth and not merely the Council?
In Gamon’s dark, bloodshot eyes, I saw a truth I had only now begun to consider.
Then she was gone too.
A second later, I felt my own shattered body lifted on a wave of power I could no more block than even fully understand. Had I been moved bodily to the South Pole, or was this merely the world’s most effective astral travel? Either way, the result was the same. I came back to awareness in the center of the House of Swords war room, everyone rushing around me, a cacophony of sound and color raging at fever pitch, and immediately slumped to the ground.
“Dollface!” Nikki was at my side in a heartbeat, Nigel on the other side, both of them kicking out a chair from the conference room table and pouring me into it. “Sweet Mother Mary on an ice floe, she’s frozen solid. Her freaking fingers are blue. What happened here?”
Nikki’s attention went to my face, but I couldn’t exactly see her, and with another curse, she screamed, “Warm towels! Warm towels, warm water, warm something for the love of Christmas, her freaking face is freezing over.”
I blew out a shaking breath, startled to see the ice crystals forming in the space, and my mind leapt to the other House leaders. They could not spontaneously heal. They would not survive this. They would not—
“They will, Miss Wilde. You…will.”
The words sounded so oddly faint that I might have imagined them, but I didn’t so much care anymore. I let the worry go. Instead, I turned my attention inward, rekindling the flame deep within me that I thought had been frozen into dust. As Nikki layered hot spa towels over my face and arms, my ears gradually thawed, and I could hear the rising tide of noise around me beyond her plaintive shouts. I drifted easily on the current of that sound, until the words became something more than music.
“The flares have stopped, repeat, stopped,” Ma-Singh barked. “Get off the screens, Simon, before you start a war.”
“I’m getting, I’m getting.” The Fool’s voice was petulant, and I shifted in my chair, disrupting a mound of towels as I did so.
“She’s back,” Nikki snapped. “Dollface, you in there?”
With hands that were surprisingly gentle, she scraped away the worst of the snow and ice, and I felt the warm, moist heat on my skin. I flinched back, but only a little, rewarded by another round of Nikki’s colorful, grim curses, but she didn’t stop dabbing at my face.
“What happened?” I gasped.
“To you? You were standing there, just standing there, focused on the console, your hand on the monitor, and then you straightened, and I looked away,” she said, her fingers never stopping their movement. “When I looked back, you were turning red, then you turned blue, then you freaking iced over like a hoodie-wrapped snow ghost.”
“No…” I shook my head, trying to redirect her, but it was proving more difficult to talk than I expected. My tongue felt strangely numb against my iced-over teeth. “To—the flares.”
“Oh. They’re gone. We’re monitoring—Ma-Singh! What’s the status?”
The Mongolian’s voice came back, sharp and grave. “Government bodies are issuing statements around the world using largely the same language. The earth experienced a solar storm in an unexpected event linked to the solar eclipse. Numerous electrical grids were knocked out, satellite transmission temporarily interrupted, a rash of ground fires erupted all over the world.”
“Ground fires,” I groaned. There was nothing we could have done to stop that. In some places, those fires would quickly grow out of control.
“Reports of meteorites striking the earth worldwide are coming in too, though appreciably fewer than what actually burst into the upper atmosphere,” Ma-Singh continued. “Those are also, in some cases, resulting in fires or other natural disturbances. Some have hit metropolitan areas. Too early to tell anything more.”
I could only imagine the chaos. We’d held off the worst of it, but the damage was clearly beyond simple containment.
“The flares ended within a matter of minutes,” Ma-Singh continued. “Further, the excessive heat put off by the sun dropped by fifty percent the instant the eclipse was fully past and continues to drop incrementally, according to measures still in place. A lot of those gauges were damaged during the solar storm. Widespread damage to the satellite layer is expected, though no one is admitting to that specifically.”
Nikki hummed between her tightly compressed lips. “They won’t admit to it either,” she said. “No one will want to share that their toys got broken, especially when we’re talking about billion-dollar toys. Let alone all the legit security issues these broken toys will bring about.”
“You are correct.” The Mongolian general huffed a short, resigned laugh. “ISIS has already taken the credit for the solar storm.”
That revelation seemed to crack the remaining tension in the room, and Nikki snorted. “Yo, we’re gonna need more towels—dry ones, this time—for Frosty the Snowman here,” she announced, then returned her attention to me. “And as soon as we get the last rounds of ice off you, you need out of those clothes, stat.”
I blinked, staring down at myself, startled that I could only now see my hoodie beneath the thin sheet of ice. How cold had it been down at the South Pole?
Speaking of…
Did we do it? I asked, reaching out to Armaeus with my mind. The ice—is it all back? I couldn’t bring myself to ask the other question that needed to be asked…the jewel-toned meteorites that had fallen from the sky, the last burst of energy from the raging gods. What had they been…and where had they gone?
But Armaeus didn’t respond, and then Nikki was half lifting me out of the chair, she and Nigel maneuvering me out the door. I couldn’t tell where my feet touched the ground and where they simply dragged me, but within a few minutes, I was standing beneath a hot shower fully dressed. Nikki stood with me, her Wonder Woman suit thoroughly soaked, keeping up a nonstop chatter.
“You were there, and then you weren’t, dollface, there and then you weren’t. I didn’t know that you were going. I’m betting that you didn’t know that you were going. I’m thinking it was the Council that plucked you out of here like you were a ripe tomato, and I gotta tell you, I’m not liking the fact that they can do that. I know we needed them and they needed us, but there’s need and then there’s being able to take as you please when you decide the need is big enough. And I don’t care who you are, that isn’t cool. Everyone playing always needs to be able to say no.”
I leaned against her, and finally, the tears did flow then, mingling with the melting ice and the thudding of the hot water. Everything crashed down over me at once, the panic I didn’t even realize I’d been holding so tightly at bay, the physical limits I hadn’t thought I’d be able to push through, the wonder and the terror on the other side of those limits, to realize I could still be asked to give more. But even as I could hardly believe all that we’d done, it was achingly obvious of how much further I had to go to protect the people I loved, the people who depended on me. The people who were all the reasons I needed to say yes, even when every inch of me ached to turn away, to rest, to heal.
“It’s okay,” I whispered to Nikki. “It’s okay.”
In my mind, however, I kept reaching out to Armaeus. Are you th
ere? Is everything all right?
And in my mind, once again there was no answer.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Three hours later, I lay awake in my bed deep within the House of Swords, listening to the quiet conversation of the guards at my door. I couldn’t get warm, despite all the layers of clothing on me and the four additional blankets, but I burrowed as deeply as I could beneath the covers. And, for easily the thousandth time, I reached out to Armaeus.
And this time, his response came back to me, little more than the whisper of ash.
“Sara…” was all he could manage. Then he was gone.
I jerked upright, panic jolting through me. There was no one there to send me on an astral travel journey, but I could send myself. I knew the words. I usually didn’t like doing that, since most of the time, I ended up face-planting by the end of the journey, but then again, I was already in bed. At least I didn’t have far to fall.
To be on the safe side, I pulled the pillows down from the headboard, creating cushions on either side of me. As I did that, I noticed the deck of cards on the side table—a fresh deck, the edges pristine, the plastic shiny. Clearly, the deck that I’d carried into the war room hadn’t survived the experience.
More out of habit than anything else, I reached for the deck of cards, smiling as my fingers closed around it. Nikki had chosen well, I thought. I turned the deck over, sorting through it, and the images on the cards were in the standard Rider-Waite configuration, only updated with the Radiant deck style I so preferred. Not that I had anything against Pamela Colman Smith’s original designs—I didn’t. They were rich with the symbology and fine details that made my work possible. But the color schemes were from 1910, over a hundred years ago, and they didn’t speak to me the way the bright, beautiful imagery of the Radiant deck did. Other readers hated the Rider-Waite deck entirely, preferring to go back to when the original cards were created in the early Renaissance era, but I wasn’t that much of a purist. If these designs were good enough for Aleister Crowley, they were good enough for me.