“Four Corners, sir.” It slipped out before Joy could stop herself, but Flood hardly reacted.
“Four Corners. Right. This Kenneth Kite, however, we have nothing on as of yet. At first our friends over at the FBI didn’t want to talk about him, but when I pushed we got his paperwork. They lost track of him in 1994.”
“He’s got to be somewhere, sir.”
“Yes, he does.” Flood closed the file. “So. It took you two weeks to blow open a case that we’ve been working on for eighteen months. Understand that it’ll be some time before the dust settles on this one, but I’m curious what it is you’re expecting out of this.”
Joy was a little thrown by the way that Flood seemed to be giving her credit. Then again, she hadn’t told him everything yet. There would probably be more yelling soon.
“Sir,” she said, “before I answer that, I have a question for you.”
“A question.” Flood leaned back in his chair and yawned. It was one of the most human things Joy had ever seen him do. He covered his mouth and shook his head and blinked. “Sorry about that. It’s been a long day.”
“Yes,” said Joy. “For me too.”
“What’s your question, Wilkins?”
“It’s a three-part question.”
Flood rolled his eyes and grunted. Joy wondered if she had burned through his goodwill already. “Well, I’ll give you as many answers as I can. Just ask, already.”
“Sir, have you ever been in contact with the woman called the Emissary, or any of the men who call themselves the Sons of Order, and are you a double agent placed within the bureau in order to further the aims of order in taking over this dimension?”
Joy had trouble reading Flood’s reaction. His eyes narrowed, but his eyebrows went up. He looked at Piper and then at Gray.
“Do you have any idea what she’s talking about?” he asked.
“Just answer the question, sir,” said Piper.
“Gray?”
“Sir,” said Gray, “we need to know that we can trust you. Please answer the question.”
“So all three of you are in on this?” Flood asked. “I take it there are some things you haven’t told me yet. You know, I was just beginning to think you might be all right, Wilkins.”
“It’s not too late, sir. But we really need an answer.”
“I know about the woman who calls herself the Emissary,” Flood said after a pause. “The woman you met in Chicago. I don’t know who the Sons of Order are, and I don’t know anything about a plot to take over the dimension.”
Gray took a deep breath, let it out, and nodded.
“I’m glad,” said Joy. “Because before I tell you what I’d like out of all this, we have more to tell you…”
“Eliphas Levi said that man was a microcosm. Can anyone tell me what that means?”
Joy had managed to catch a short nap earlier in the afternoon, and she’d treated herself to a nice plate of pasta at the poorly lit Italian place on the north side of town before class. All things considered, she felt pretty good.
Margaret May raised her hand, and Joy called on her. “A microcosm is, like, a miniature of something larger? Like, if someone said that New York was a microcosm of the United States, they might mean that in some ways all the characteristics of the United States could be found in New York, but on a smaller scale.”
Joy nodded. “Good. Specifically, Levi said that man was a microcosm of the universe. He believed, as many do, that magicians have the capacity to embody the universe, and so to act upon it in the same way that the universe acts upon us. He said: ‘Man is the God of the world, and God is the Man of Heaven.’ ”
Some of them shifted in their seats at this.
“Are you uncomfortable with that?” she said.
“It sounds a little like blasphemy,” said a young man in the fourth row.
“Taken one way, yes, sure,” said Joy. “We’ve discussed the ways in which magic and what we might call hubris are linked. Some magicians seek to cheat death, to impose their will on others, and to gain power. No one here is thinking along those lines, I’m sure, but it happens.”
There was a ripple of uncomfortable laughter.
“That each of us is a microcosm of the universe is one of Levi’s three fundamental principles of magic. If we accept it, then it has implications for the other two. One of those is that the material universe is just a fraction of the entirety of existence, and that to attain power we need knowledge of the other aspects of reality. Other dimensions, other planes of consciousness. In other words, the secret to unlocking our potential may lie in self-knowledge, in coming to understand the good and evil that we are all capable of doing, and the ways in which they can resemble each other. You may have already noticed that many of the magicians we’re studying are ambiguous figures, never wholly good or bad. Sometimes they seem to be both at once. Sometimes their stories call into question the usefulness of terms like good and evil.”
Or order and chaos. Law and lawlessness. At this moment, AD Flood was debriefing Bebe Stapleford in her apartment at the McMonigal Arms. Downstairs, in Yves Deschamp’s apartment, Carla Drake was being reunited with her mother. Before he’d left for the Barrow, Lutrineas had suggested that Bebe and Carla might make good roommates.
“Bebe was responsible for Carla’s kidnapping,” Joy had pointed out.
Lutrineas had shrugged. “You can’t put her in jail for it any more than you can let the world at large know that Carla Drake is back. Secrets make strange bedfellows.”
“I think that’s politics,” said Joy. “I know—you’re going to say they’re the same thing.”
Standing at the front of the lecture hall now, Joy looked out at the class. Their auras were a mix of green and blue, orange and red, indigo, silver, and gold. She’d killed a man for them, for her brother and sister, her niece and nephew. And none of them would ever know.
“What was Levi’s third principle?” Joy asked. “Anyone?”
Piper Brooks raised her hand. This was her first day at the school, her new undercover role as part of the three-person unit in charge of keeping an eye on things at Gooseberry Bluff, responsible only to AD Flood.
Joy called on her.
“It’s really very simple,” Piper said. “It’s that human willpower isn’t a theoretical thing. It’s not just a state of mind. It’s a force, a tool, and with it, we’re capable of absolutely anything. We don’t even need magic.”
“Great point,” said Joy. She started to say more, but before she could go on, the Emissary’s face swam before her. Joy’s pulse drowned out every other sound in the room. Her hands clenched, and the Beretta kicked in her grasp.
She came back to herself, standing in front of the class, sweat soaking through the back of her blouse. She scanned the faces in the class but recognized none of them. None of them were the Emissary. They were staring at her with a mix of curiosity and concern.
“Good point,” Joy said again, forcing herself to remember Piper’s answer. “Good point. Although we are at a magic school, so let’s assume that sometimes we need at least a little bit of magic.”
The class laughed at that, and Joy turned back to her outline to remind herself what came next. Her head was full of sense memory, every moment of it overlaid with the Emissary’s face. Flood knew she had killed someone on Earth Positive Seven, and he wanted her to see an agency counselor to talk about it. She had put everything she knew into the casebook, every detail she had left out of the debriefing.
The casebook was a good-size hardcover now, and Flood had said he would read it all over the weekend. So far he was handling everything they had told him remarkably well.
Joy wondered how he would handle it when he read that the person she had killed on Earth Positive Seven was him.
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, David J. Schwartz spent his childhood making up plots for movies he was too young to see in theaters. Inspired by everything
from Borges to roller derby—including fantasy stalwarts such as Anne McCaffrey and Ursula K. Le Guin—Schwartz turned his creativity to writing, becoming a Nebula Award–nominated author. Schwartz regularly attends Midwestern fantasy and science-fiction conventions, such as WisCon and Convergence, and prefers kids and dogs to most adults. After traveling the country, he has settled back in St. Paul, where he hopes to spend the rest of his days.
This book was originally released in Episodes as a Kindle Serial. Kindle Serials launched in 2012 as a new way to experience serialized books. Kindle Serials allow readers to enjoy the story as the author creates it, purchasing once and receiving all existing Episodes immediately, followed by future Episodes as they are published. To find out more about Kindle Serials and to see the current selection of Serials titles, visit www.amazon.com/kindleserials.
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