“A little. And I would have been glad to live longer, you know. But… I always knew when I was going to die. It gives you an advantage. You can prepare yourself.”
“Daphne once told me that it changes you guys. That…”
“Yes, yes. The illusion of omnipotence,” he said disparagingly. “I told Daphne she should spend more time reading philosophy and less time worrying about my moral fiber.”
I almost smiled.
“The best thing about knowing when you’re going to die is that makes planning a lot easier. I know exactly when I’m going to see my parents for the last time. The last time Daphne and I are going to see each other. The last time I’ll see Ivy…” He paused. “Sorry.”
“It’s OK.”
“She was happy to see you,” he hesitated. “She… she misses you a lot, you know.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that.
“I’m not justifying what she did or what… well. Everything that happened between you two. I’m just saying. You were there for her during a really difficult period. If you decide you want to renew your relationship with her…”
I fixed my eyes on Daphne’s computer. The heart stickers glittered in the dark. “I’m not going to renew our relationship,” I said, keeping my voice quiet. “She betrayed me. She betrayed all of us. I’m sorry, I know she’s your sister, but I’m never letting her anywhere near me again.”
“You’re going to die,” Oleander replied. “Don’t you want tie up loose ends before it’s all over?”
I tightened my grip on the blanket. “I tied up that end a long time ago.”
Oleander didn’t say a word. Neither did I.
“Thanks for being there for Daphne,” I eventually said.
“I should thank you as well,” Oleander said.
We hung up.
I stared at the dark ceiling, replaying our conversation in my mind. My thoughts kept wandering back to Ivy. To getting closure before I died. But I wasn’t going to die, because Daphne and Sherry were working hard to make sure I stayed alive. But what if they failed? What if I died?
I thought about our last conversation. Ivy had told me to take care of myself, and…
I sat up. Daphne was mumbling in her sleep. I knew Ivy could see what was going on with me. She was with the Sons of Simeon. She knew what they were planning. And she had asked me to take care of myself because she was no longer around to look after me. And Oleander said she had been happy to see me. She was still my friend. Maybe she was trying to hint that somewhere, at some point, there would be an opportunity to get myself out of this mess. But the Sons of Simeon were convinced they’d succeed in killing me. They had me in their sights. Whatever path I paved they would immediately find out. Whatever plan I made, Daphne would notice, and the Sons of Simeon damuses would see what she was focusing on and make out the timeline.
I lay back in bed, staring into space. I had to beat them at their own game. I had to wait for an opportunity, and the moment it presented itself, seize it. I had… I had to pull one over on everyone. Even on Daphne.
I fell asleep, edging out any shred of hope.
34
The second time I visited Sherry’s office at police headquarters, I went without Lee. Dimitri drove. Unlike my rides with Daphne, it seemed as though he was intentionally getting stuck behind every red light and in every traffic jam.
“Can’t you arrange for a smoother ride?”
Dimitri tightened his grip around the steering wheel. “Easy to make out damuses if you look for person who hit only green lights. Keep you hidden also mean hidden in traffic.”
I sank into my seat. “And…”
Dimitri raised his hand from the wheel. “Not good time for talking. Many timelines bumping into each other.”
We proceeded to ride in silence.
A phone call from Oleander saved me from mind-numbing boredom.
“I need to surprise Daphne, and I need you to help me do it,” he said before I managed to say hello.
“I can’t block her out completely, and…” He paused. “Am I talking too fast?”
“You’re talking too out of context.”
Dimitri made a turn into a traffic jam on Ha-Nevi’im Street. “I can blur Daphne a little, but she keeps looking at me,” Oleander said. I didn’t hear any background noises on the other end of the line. “And I want to do something nice for her. You know. Something that… that’ll remind her of me. For later.”
So he had found something meaningful to do after all. “What were you thinking of?”
“I can’t tell you,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “She’s too close to you. She’ll see.”
I smiled in response. He really was looking out for Daphne. “OK, so what do you need?”
“I can vaguely see there’s a damus close to you.”
I glanced at Dimitri as he cursed all the Israeli drivers in raving Russian. “I’m not sure he’ll go along with it.”
“Not that one. A young one. He’s not close enough to Daphne for her to see what he’s doing, not unless she’s actively searching, and he’s experienced enough to hide himself.”
“Guy,” I immediately said.
“I guess. Could you give him my number? I’ll explain to him what I need.”
I didn’t have Guy’s number, but I certainly had Gaia’s.
I called her. “Can I use you for something secret?”
“Depends,” Gaia replied in a sleepy voice.
I passed on Oleander’s message. She said, “Are you sure?”
“What do you mean?”
We were already quite close to the police station.
“A damus tricking another damus is… they have codes. Like we do. Like you wouldn’t maneuver me without consent, they won’t hide things from each other without consent.”
“It’s fine. He’s Daphne’s boyfriend. He just wants to surprise her.”
“Are you sure?” she asked again, sounding hesitant.
“Sometimes in a relationship we do things to each other that… that we wouldn’t do outside a relationship.” I tried sounding as vague as possible. She was underage after all. Dimitri parked and turned off the engine.
“OK, fine. But just know it’s weird.”
“If he asks anything of you that sounds immoral, tell me. I’ll report him to Aurora, and she’ll punish him by forcing him to serve as a counselor,” I said, trying to sound lighthearted. “And in any event, don’t accept candy from him.”
“God, you’re a geezer,” she giggled.
“We go,” Dimitri said, gesturing at the front door.
“I have to get going,” I told Gaia. We said goodbye and I hung up.
Dimitri got me past security. This time I didn’t have to take any drug. His escort was enough.
The pile of papers on Sherry’s desk seemed taller than on my last visit, and Sherry looked paler. Dimitri remained fixed in his post next to the door, his hands crossed on his chest. He looked like a model bodyguard. “Alder’s abroad,” she said the moment I walked in.
“Good.” I sat down. “Can you make his plane crash?”
Sherry nodded towards Dimitri. “I’ll ask my people to get on it.” A hint of a smile flashed on her lips and quickly faded.
“Information we do know,” she said, picking up a document and handing it to me. I took it. It was a list of names. “All these people met with either you or Daphne and had some form of contact with the Sons of Simeon, directly or indirectly.”
I scanned the list. Half of the teenagers in my group were on it, with Tempest’s name topping the list. “Why are these kids here?”
“They’re on neutral.” Sherry’s voice betrayed none of the emotions whirling inside her. I could only sense a few of them, vaguely. I blocked her out.
“And…?”
“And they might be passing on information. They might be divulging things without even knowing it. They might…” Sherry held her hands up. “I don’t know. That’s
why I need your help.”
“They just don’t want to practice their powers. That’s not a felony.” I refrained from mentioning that the police administered a substance of similar impact.
“No, that’s not what they want.” Sherry drummed on the desk. “What they want is to not be sorcerers anymore.” Her expression turned grave. “They’re sick of being different. Sick of having to struggle all the time. They’re looking for a way out, and neutral is their form of escape.” She sounded as though she believed what she was saying.
“Ever tried it?”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t on the street back in the day. But I can totally understand them. I can also understand why a kid, in exchange for a pill, would tell someone things that don’t seem very significant to him. For instance, who his youth movement counselor trusts, who he hangs out with.”
I handed Sherry back the list. “What do you need me to do?”
“Use your brain.” She leaned in. “You know the community, you’re kept in the loop.”
“I don’t know every sorcerer in the country.”
“Start thinking on a different level. Someone’s trying to hurt you, and there’s a chance it’s someone you know. We’re not talking just people who get into fights at the pub after an attack. We’re talking people who truly cross the lines. It’s a small country. You probably know such people.”
“What, Ivy? We’ve already talked about her. You said she isn’t a threat.”
Sherry tapped her pen on the table. “Will you focus? Please? Instead of playing dumb?”
I looked at the list again. None of the people on it seemed like someone who’d want to hurt me. It looked like a list of all the people who wished me no harm.
“I’m not looking for someone who obviously, visibly, flipped sides. I’m looking for people who are capable of understanding the Sons of Simeon, of accepting them. Maybe who even agree to run errands for them in the name of some ideal.”
Like Aurora.
Sherry leaned in closer. “I’m looking for people who think freedom from sorcery is true freedom.”
Like most of my teenagers at Yoyo. I couldn’t sic Sherry on my group, though. And Aurora was solid. She’d never truly cross the lines.
I put down the paper on the desk. “Maybe Daphne will have a useful idea.”
“Daphne…” Sherry sighed and leaned back in her chair. “I let her go. Told her I didn’t need more help.”
“You told her what?”
“She was taking on too much. She and Lee. They were very helpful, but…” She sighed again. “Sometimes it’s easy for me to forget that even though you guys volunteer to do something, it doesn’t mean you’ve got proper training. When I send out our empaths or seers, they know how to isolate themselves.”
I bit my lip. Lee was alone in his apartment, refusing to see me. Daphne was overwhelmed with pain she wouldn’t let me dismantle.
“So, enough,” Sherry said. “Enough. I won’t put them in harm’s way anymore. We’ve got all the information we could get from them, and any further move would…”
“Put them in danger,” I completed her sentence.
“No,” she said. “Would take from the time they have left. With you. With Oleander.”
A sharp pain shot through my chest. “None of those kids would hurt me. Most of them don’t know me well enough to volunteer information, and the ones who do…” I said, thinking of Guy and Gaia, the only ones close to me, “are doing all they can to protect me.”
Sherry placed her hands flat on the desk. “And yet. Give it another try.”
She brought her hands together and gestured sorcery and protection.
I mimicked the gesture and buried my fear beneath every other emotion.
35
Sherry put me on a 24-hour protective detail again; every morning a different cop reported at our door, and the same ritual ensued: I took a photo of the cop and sent it to Sherry. She sent confirmation; the officer entered the apartment and relieved the previous officer from his post. None of them exchanged more than two consecutive sentences with me.
One day, unable to find a reason to go out into the living room, I spent hours in bed. The officer stationed at our house at the time was busy on his phone and didn’t look up from his screen even once. He was a damus, and every time I tried to initiate a conversation with him he only said I’d make him lose the round, and went back to playing his game on his phone. When I asked him about the situation with the Sons of Simeon, he exclaimed, “Motherfuckers, I hope they burn,” without elaborating. A Yoyo meeting was to take place that evening, and I had the feeling Daphne wouldn’t let me out of the house. I couldn’t find a single lead for Sherry, and was resigned to shuffling from the living room to the kitchen, to my room, restlessly opening and closing cupboards and closets.
That afternoon I suddenly remembered my and Blaze’s list. After we had received our IDF postings, we made a bucket list. It was stuck in the bottom of the same drawer where I kept our photo from my seventeenth birthday.
I rummaged through the drawer until I found it, beneath a pile of letters I had received at the end of the training course, an empty water bottle with the signature of a singer I used to admire scribbled with a felt-tip marker, an unopened deck of playing cards, and the journal I thought I’d keep but eventually gave up on after writing only one entry. Both photos of Blaze and me were faded. My face was riddled with acne and smeared with chocolate, and my smile enormous. Blaze looked so young in those photos. Long hair, the same smile, and his arm wrapped around me in a suggestive manner. We looked like my kids at Yoyo. I picked up the photos and found the list.
It was a sheet of grid paper torn out of a math notebook, the list scribbled in blue ballpoint pen. The same pen that had run out in the middle of my final civics exam.
I smoothed out the paper. First item on the bucket list was ‘Finding true love,’ and it was crossed off. I remember how Blaze had kissed me when he saw me crossing it off. I sniffled. I was so young. So stupid. No, not stupid. Naïve.
Second item: ‘Attend a ThunderCats concert.’ It made me smile, just like it had done back then. Blaze reminded me that animated TV shows didn’t go on tour, and I explained that it was a list of dreams, so I could write whatever I wanted. It was an argument that ended when he added ‘Marry Brian May’ to the list, and we began bickering about that item.
The third item was ‘Backpack through South America.” I picked up a pen from the dresser and crossed it off. Daphne and I had traveled there together right after we were discharged from the army. I had been planning a surprise visit to the Confederacy, showing up unannounced on Blaze’s doorstep, but when I looked into getting a visa I discovered their immigration laws stipulated that sorcerers who had served in a foreign military required a special security clearance to enter the country. To this day I wasn’t entirely confident Daphne hadn’t manipulated me to agree to the trip she had proposed. I never asked her what would have happened if I had succeeded in obtaining the special clearance.
Item four was crossed off: ‘Eat nothing but chocolate for a whole day.’ There was that class trip I had spent throwing up from a stomach virus, and the only thing I managed to eat was one square of chocolate for dinner. Blaze had crossed that item off for me.
Item five was a list of seven books, three of which were crossed off. I looked up from the page and stared at the wall in front of me. I could spend my last few weeks on Earth reading dead Soviet authors. I toyed with the idea of convincing Lee to let me do some erotic moodification to one of those books, and then have an underground edition printed and distributed. I imagined literature students getting off on reading it.
I got back to the list. Items six through nine included ‘See the northern and southern lights,’ ‘Cycle through Europe,’ ‘Learn to make souffle,’ and ‘Participate in a full-on sorcerers battle outside the military.’
I crossed out item nine, and arrived at ten. I’d forgotten all about that one. ‘We
ave myself fully into another empath.’
I considered crossing it off the list. I remembered the explanation I’d given Blaze. That it was like when he stepped into bonfires on Lag BaOmer, or how pebbles go spend entire days in the desert. The boy I’d once been was convinced that a full weaving of consciousness with another moody was the closest I could get to pure sorcery. But it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t similar at all. Lee and I didn’t feel as one, even though there were no walls between us anymore. We were still two separate individuals.
I held the pen hovering over the paper. I wanted to add another item. Something meaningful. Something I could do, and be remembered for. Like Oleander. ‘Change the world.’ That was something seventeen-year-old Reed would have written. Not feasible, but meaningful. Maybe ‘Not die.’ Also a good item.
I didn’t write any of them. I put the pen back on the dresser, folded the paper and stuck it back in the drawer, beneath the water bottle, card deck and journal. I wasn’t seventeen anymore. And I wouldn’t live long enough to cycle through the radioactive craters in Europe, or see the northern lights, or any of the silly things that seemed so significant when I was with Blaze and the world was our oyster.
I’m going to die. I’m going to die, leaving no mark on the world. Nothing but a few books better moodified than they had been, and one sad Lee.
My phone beeped. It was a message from Aurora: Meeting at the ditch. We have visitors.
The ditch was an open, derelict lot in the eastern part of town. We used it for big get-togethers during the summer. But Yoyo met at the dank community center, not at the ditch. Odd.
I got out of bed and left my room.
Daphne was sitting in her room going over stock exchange listings. “No,” she said before I even asked. She had dark bags under her eyes, and a few unruly curls had slipped out of her hairband. She was still in the same chafing bra she had worn to work, and I could feel how much her legs hurt after an entire day in high heels. Underneath it all were the same sadness and loss that wouldn’t abate, no matter how much she tried to immerse herself in work.
I waited.
The Heart of the Circle Page 31
