“What’s real.” Sibyl sighed and stood. “If we’re going to talk about what’s real, we’ll need whiskey.”
The first thing Sibyl did was put on a record: Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, by Simon and Garfunkel. The plucking of the guitar was eerie in the dim living room, its furniture so old that the fabric on the seats was threadbare. The low pink sofa creaked when Mox sat on it; he looked like an adult perched on a child-size stool. The air had crackled around him when he walked into the room, and Sibyl had told him, sharply, to keep himself under control. It had no effect; Mox just scowled.
Sibyl went into the kitchen to pour whiskey, and as they waited for her to return, Sloane browsed her bookshelves. There were no books on them, just a vast collection of National Geographics and knitting magazines. There were porcelain figurines, too, of ballet dancers and stretching cats and hot-air balloons. It was as if Sibyl had seen an encyclopedia entry about what belonged in a grandmother’s house and had replicated it exactly, down to the doilies on the mahogany coffee table.
When the second song on the album started to play, Sloane snorted. “You really like to wrap yourself in clichés, don’t you?” she said to Sibyl when the woman returned with three tumblers of whiskey.
Sibyl smiled. “The song discusses patterns repeating themselves,” Sibyl said. “I thought you would both appreciate the sentiment.”
Sloane sipped the whiskey, which was like swallowing a mouthful of smoke. Her eyes watered as she tried to stifle a cough. Sibyl, on the other hand, downed half her glass at once, then sat in the recliner next to the record player to watch the record spin.
“This is a gift I didn’t choose and didn’t want,” Sibyl said after a while. “I was two years old when the Tenebris Incident occurred, and fourteen when I began to go into trances. They were frightening—I myself didn’t remember them, but I was told I spoke in riddles, as if possessed. And people avoided me once my ramblings began to come true. No one wants to know their future, not really.” She sipped the whiskey, and Sloane perched on the arm of the couch, where the pink fabric was torn and some of the stuffing was hanging out.
“It was an uncommon gift even among the magically adept—and even more uncommon was the large scale of my predictions. They pertained to world events. The outcomes of battles, natural disasters, the passage of laws. And eventually . . . the end of everything. I have a recording of it, actually.” She stood and set the tumbler down on the table next to the record player. She lifted the needle from the record, then opened a nearby cabinet and searched through a large basket of cassette tapes. Sloane wasn’t close enough to read the labels, but they were homemade, curling at the edges.
Sibyl found the right tape and took it to a little cassette player in a corner of the room, on a shelf next to the National Geographics. There was a high whine as the tape rewound. Sloane drank more of her whiskey and tried not to look at Mox.
Sibyl pressed Play and stood before the cassette player like she was standing at an altar. The recording crackled and popped at first, then steadied, a voice taking shape.
“It will be,” the voice said, low and strange, “the end of Genetrix. The unmaking of worlds. Something stands between Genetrix and its twin. The Dark One will excise it, and the worlds will be crushed together, and that will be the end of all.”
Sloane’s body jerked to attention. She thought of the thread of light she had seen connecting Genetrix to Earth, at the bottom of the Chicago River.
This world and its twin. The Needle.
The low croak went on. “The Dark One of Genetrix will be hidden, but not secret, with a thirst that will never be slaked.” Sibyl, standing before her cassette player, was mouthing the words along with the recording. “Their Equal is the hope of Genetrix, born marred by magic and mastered by a power previously unknown to us.”
Sloane watched Sibyl’s fingers tapping her leg, as if the prophecy were a song and she was dancing to it. Perhaps it was—perhaps the light threads she had seen made music, like the strings of a violin or a guitar, and the music came to Sibyl in prophecies.
“Twice will Equals greet each other anew, and the fate of the worlds is in their hands.”
Mox was staring at his hands, clasped between his knees so tightly his knuckles had gone white.
The Sibyl of the recording spoke the last line again but so quietly that Sloane could hardly hear it, and then the tape stopped.
“Your eye,” Sloane said. “You’re marred by magic.”
Sibyl was still standing behind her, but she found herself speaking only to Mox.
Mox nodded. He seemed unsteady, like he might shake apart at any moment. “Nero was my teacher for a decade,” Mox said, lower lip trembling slightly. “He betrayed me.” His eyes were locked on Sloane’s, the fault in his iris now imperceptible again without the light shining through it. “He murdered the army meant for the Chosen One, the first Army of Flickering. He blamed it on me. Twisted the prophecy against me.”
The words scraped out of his throat, sending a chill down Sloane’s spine. She thought of the Resurrectionist’s long fingers working stiff thread through the soldier’s detached arm and drawing it tight, of the desperate way he had screamed Ziva’s name in the street near the safe house. If his raised soldiers were the army meant for the Chosen One, then of course he had known them before they died, had trusted them to stand with him against an evil he didn’t comprehend.
Nero. The man with the unquenchable thirst.
They would meet on the battleground of Genetrix, and the fate of the world—the worlds—was in their hands.
EXCERPT FROM
The Magic of Cruelty
by Erica Perez
In his book The Manifestation of Impossible Wants: A New Theory of Magic, Arthur Solowell makes the bold claim that “desire cannot be threatened or manipulated into being.” While I agree that simple threats do not produce reliable magical results, it is naive to suggest that coercion is never effective in influencing magic. Perhaps Mr. Solowell was fortunate enough to grow up in a community of moral adults who never exerted their influence against children, but I was not. I saw the way that cruel parents shaped my peers and, therefore, their desires.
And it came in all forms too. Sometimes a strict religious upbringing turned an open mind into a closed one that could perform only basic, practical workings. Sometimes utter neglect created a complete disregard for boundaries, pushing someone to involve other people in unethical workings. Pressure to succeed at the highest level turned friends away from creativity and imagination in their magic. Emotional abuse twisted a person’s work to become more brutal, less finessed. One of my most talented friends lost the ability to do workings entirely and now lives in St. Louis, a haven city.
A desire is not a whim, as Solowell aptly states. But a desire is not immovable, unchangeable. The variable to consider is power. Who has power over the individual in question? Does anyone have too much power? Are any of those in power abusive spouses, family members, or friends? Is the individual particularly susceptible to manipulation, with a desire to please—or simply to avoid pain? Have they been isolated from their peers or the outside world? We must learn to recognize the signs. We cannot pretend this problem doesn’t exist. The future of our children depends on it.
35
THERE WASN’T MUCH to say after that, so Sibyl invited Sloane and Mox to stay for dinner, likely to fill the silence. Sloane accepted because she didn’t know what else to do. So they were all trapped together in the little house, orbiting each other in silence. Sibyl busied herself at the stove shoving lemon slices in the body cavity of a raw chicken, and Sloane knelt on the beige carpet near the cassette player, looking through the magazines. There were photographs of countries she had never heard of, their names and shapes and fates altered by the division between the universes. She saw rough-looking siphons on the hands of villagers in rural Romania and remote Siberia—an oddity still, the accompanying article said, but not unheard of in the younger
generation.
“Mox said he doesn’t think the Drains are controlled by anyone,” she said, looking up from a photograph of a tractor on a small farm in Argentina. There was an island separating the kitchen from the living room. Sibyl stood behind it, chopping something. Onions, judging by the smell.
Mox had disappeared a few minutes before, enticed by Sibyl’s offer of a shower and a change of clothes. Her husband had left plenty when he died, and they were still in her bedroom dresser. Sloane could hear the spray of water down the hall.
“It’s important not to confuse causation with correlation,” Sibyl said, scrutinizing the pepper grinder she held in both hands. Even though she was a widow, she was still wearing her wedding band. “However, we know that a Drain happens every time one of you shows up to kill him, so they do seem to be related.”
“Wait . . . they do?” Sloane set the magazine down and got to her feet. “So you think they’re maybe caused by . . . the presence of an outsider?”
“All I know is you’re not supposed to be here,” Sibyl said. “Maybe the Drains are like the world’s allergic reaction to you.” At Sloane’s raised eyebrow, she scowled. “Well, I don’t know, girl, I’m not a scientist.”
Sloane leaned against the island. “What did you do for a career? Spitting out prophecy’s probably not that lucrative, right?”
“It is not lucrative at all in a haven city,” Sibyl said. “But magic grinds up against me like sandpaper, so I didn’t have much of a choice, did I?” She shrugged. “I was a teacher. Retired now, obviously.”
“Grinds up against you like sandpaper,” Sloane repeated. “That’s . . . odd.”
“What does it feel like for you?” Sibyl asked.
“Like sticking my head in a vise,” Sloane said. “Makes my hands go numb sometimes. I’m not wild about it myself, actually.”
“Hm.” Sibyl put on her oven mitts and picked up a heavy pot with the chicken in it. Sloane moved forward to open the oven door for her, and the chicken went in.
“He loves it,” Sibyl said, nodding toward the hall bathroom where Mox was showering. “To him it looks like . . . beams of light or something. He plays magic like guitar strings. Pluck—your gravity’s gone. Pluck—your house is on fire. Delightful.”
Beams of light. It sounded like the working Aelia had done on Sloane before she had dived in the river. Maybe Aelia had learned it from Nero, who had learned it from Mox.
“Have you ever met Nero?” Sloane said.
“I have.” Sibyl’s eyes hardened. “He wears masks on top of masks, that man. Can’t ever get a look at what’s underneath.” She set the kitchen timer, which was shaped like an egg. Painted on it was the phrase Have an Egg-cellent breakfast!
“You, girl,” she said, leaning closer to Sloane, “have the grittiest of all magic. Fate’s grabbed you hard and it’s not letting go. So I want you to remember something.” She closed her fingers around Sloane’s arm tightly, her grip strong for a woman of her size. “The line between a Chosen One and his opposite is hair-fine, so don’t get too cozy on one side of it.”
The smell of onions was pungent enough to make Sloane’s eyes sting. She tugged her arm free. “All I want is to go home,” she said.
“That,” Sibyl said, her eyes glittering, “is the fattest lie I’ve ever heard. You want everything. You’re a bottomless pit. Makes me feel exhausted just thinking about you.”
“You know, you’re not such a peach yourself,” Sloane snapped.
Mox called out from the bedroom, his low voice carrying easily across the house. “Sloane. Can I get a hand?” She remembered the blade stuck above his hip just the night before and left the kitchen. The hallway was painted the same milky pink as the living-room sofa, and it was covered with pictures—of Sibyl and her husband and children, Sloane assumed, from the way people were arranged, stiff and formal. It was hard to believe that this woman, with her aggressively normal house and family, could have spoken so many prophecies, including one about the end of the world. No wonder magic was so repellent to her. It was the opposite of the life she had built for herself, in all its rigidity.
Mox was standing in the bedroom wearing a pair of worn blue jeans and a gray T-shirt, which surprised her, since she hadn’t seen either type of garment since she arrived on Genetrix. He stood braced against Sibyl’s dresser, hands tight around the edge and his head down. His hair was straight when it was wet, and longer, almost brushing his shoulders. His feet were bare.
He was, she thought, very solid. Spare through his midsection, likely due to the difficulty of his life for the past ten years, living on cans of soup, but his long arms were sturdy enough to fill out T-shirt sleeves, and his shoulders were broad, like he was built for more muscle than he had. Maybe in another universe.
And he was also losing control; the pressure of the air around him was so different from that of the air in the hallway that Sloane’s ears popped when she drew closer to him.
“Sorry,” he said in a tight, small voice without looking at her. “But you calmed me down . . . on the train.”
“Oh.” Sloane tried to think of what she had done on the train. She’d touched his hands. The prospect of touching him right now was far more daunting. On the train, it had been instinct, but here . . . she would have to mean it.
Air pressed against her face the same way it had when she was a kid and biked to the top of Oak Street just so she could ride down again. Like she could take fistfuls of it.
Coward, she said to herself, and she put a hand on Mox’s shoulder right where it joined with his neck. His wet hair tickled her knuckles. She leaned closer to him. “What is it?” she asked. He didn’t answer. He was hyperventilating, she noted, judging by the shifting of his rib cage under his shirt. She put her hand on the back of his neck and squeezed lightly. His skin was hot to the touch. It had been a long time since she had touched someone who wasn’t Matt in this way, vulnerable and presumptuous.
“Talking about him—all the memories,” Mox said, and it sounded like his teeth were gritted, though he was still hidden behind a curtain of hair. “It’s—”
“A lot?” Sloane supplied. “Well, let’s just . . . sit for a second.”
She pressed down gently, and as Mox went to his knees, she went with him. She sat with her back against the dresser, one of the drawer pulls digging into her spine. He knelt there, his arms shaking, still refusing to look at her.
“Me and my friend—the one who died,” she said, and she felt that old, familiar terror rising up inside her. “We were taken captive by Earth’s Dark One. It was only for a day.” She dug her shoes into the carpet. Sibyl had raised an eyebrow when she walked into the house without removing them, but she hadn’t said anything. “But the Dark One gave me a choice.”
She felt a sensation like knives piercing her throat when she swallowed.
“He told me that one of us—me or Albie—would suffer, and I would decide which one.” You or him? She didn’t close her eyes. If she had, she would have seen it, the Dark One’s placid face as he waited for her answer in the doorway, leaning against the frame. “I didn’t want to. But he said that if I didn’t, it would happen to us both, and why should both of us endure that?”
Mox had straightened ever so slightly to look at her through his curtain of hair. It was curling as it dried.
“So in the end,” Sloane said, forcing out the words that she had never, not even once, said out loud, “I chose him. I spared myself.”
The horror was so close to the surface now. If she had wanted to, she could have released it, shuddered with it, screamed it into being. She was afraid to look at Mox, afraid to see the revulsion she was sure he felt. He had killed, but only to save himself; he had not done this, thrown a dear friend into the fire to keep himself from burning. No one Sloane knew had done that.
But she made herself look at him anyway, because she deserved it, deserved to know just how disgusting she was, how she had betrayed Albie and ruined him and set him
on a path that would lead to his death—
But Mox was just looking at her.
The pressure in the air had diminished; Sloane no longer felt like she was chewing on every breath. “I know,” she said, choking a little, “about the rage that takes over when you think about someone. About the rage that changes you.”
Mox tucked his hair behind his ears with both hands. His face looked thinner this way, and pale. He was tired, and no wonder—he had lived for years just scraping by in abandoned buildings and warehouses with an army that fell to pieces every time it moved, and sometimes even when it didn’t, and the burden of what had happened to them falling on his shoulders. He was as tired as she was.
He said, “There’s a thought experiment—moral philosophy—called the trolley problem, have you heard of it?” She shook her head no. “Basically it says there’s a trolley on a track, and if it goes one way, it will kill five people, but if you flip the switch, it will only kill one. And you’re supposed to say whether you would flip the switch, whether you could bear to be directly responsible for a death even if you’re sparing lives.” He scowled. “I always hated it, hated it, and I used to tell my teacher that what I would do is take the person forcing me to make the choice and throw him on the tracks, because he’s the one who really deserved it.”
He smiled a little, forcing a crease into his cheek.
“Not really the point of the exercise,” he said. He covered her hand, balanced on her kneecap, with his own. It made her feel small, but in a good way—in a way she never got to feel, being as tall as she was. “But the person who asks you to make that kind of choice, between you and a friend, between pain and guilt—fuck that person.”
Chosen Ones Page 32