by Alix Hadden
"It's not alive, Kir," Ali said patiently. It was a discussion they'd had before.
"Mm. But anyway -- nothing you can think of that started it?"
"No. And I dunno about you, but I had a bit of a sniff around while we were leaving, and it seemed absolutely dead. Nothing to suggest a why for it."
"Yeah. I didn't get anything, either."
Ali shrugged, and shovelled in some more ice-cream. "So. I guess we put it down as a weird one-off?"
"I suppose so." Kir felt uncomfortable. "But -- I mean, what if you hadn't just been passing? What would have happened then?"
"Sure, but what can we do about it? Patrol the streets of South London in shifts? Just you and me?" She sighed. "This whole business feels like it's held together with spit and string sometimes, you know. Because you're right, what if I hadn't been passing? But it's not like things do happen that often, right?"
"Maybe they do, and they just, I dunno, burn themselves out without anyone noticing. Or there's magic going on all over the place and people just ignore it," Kir said. It was another discussion they'd had before.
"But if we can't tell then it doesn't matter," Ali said, sing-song. "Come on. You're getting all over-responsible again. We can't be everywhere. There's not enough of us."
Kir rubbed at his forehead and put his empty bowl down on the floor beside the sofa. "I know, I know. I just -- I might go back and have another look at it? Just in case?"
"Help yourself. Let me know if you do find anything. I'd offer to come and help, but I've got a doctor's appointment tomorrow morning and then I'm on shift at the cafe."
"Doctor? You OK?"
"Yeah, just the annual blood tests and prescription stuff. No worries. I'll be at it all morning though cos I'll go straight up to the phlebotomist at Guy's after I get the test form." Ali was trans, and had been on hormones as long as Kir had known her.
She was industriously scraping out the bottom of the ice-cream tub. "Hope I didn't disturb you at anything important when I called?"
"Pretty sure it wouldn't matter if you did," Kir said mildly. "Destroying weird magical rubbish-piles that are trying to expand into the centre of Peckham counts as important."
"Yeah, but still."
Kir shrugged. "I was climbing. Nothing major."
"Ah, the ever-present climbing wall. Did you fall off many things? How are the army of twenty-something beanie--wearers with their shirts off?" She waggled her eyebrows.
"Oh, same old, same old," Kir said. He could feel himself flushing slightly. Not that Zach was that young, nor that he'd had his shirt off...The image of Zach with his shirt off was compelling, though -- he might not look like the slightly alarming wall-rats that Ali was talking about, but...
"Kir! That's not a look I've seen on you for a while. Have you been eyeing up the youth?"
"No," Kir said, trying for indignant and missing slightly.
"Not the beanie-wearers, then, but you've been eyeing someone up. Tell me more, tell me more!"
There was no point in denying it at this point. Ali would just keep on nagging at him.
"There was this guy," he said, a bit reluctantly. "Newbie."
"Cute newbie? Tell tell tell!"
"Yeah, I guess he was kind of cute." Kir found himself smiling slightly, without meaning to. "His name was Zach."
"Ooh, you got a name! Did you actually talk to him, then?" Ali was frequently scathing about Kir's preference for admiring from afar, rather than chatting people up the way she did.
"We chatted a bit," Kir said.
"And you looked at his arse," Ali said. "I mean, I'm not down with the bit where you fall on the floor a lot, but I could totally get into climbing for the opportunity to look at arses. I'm guessing it was good?"
"Ali. You know I keep telling you that..."
"Yeah, yeah, objectification. So it was good, then?"
Kir swatted her on the leg, and she poked him with her toes.
"So, did you get a number? Arrange to meet up again so you can teach him the arcane ways of the climber? Blowjob in the toilet?"
"Ali!"
"Okay, okay. At least tell me you got a number."
"I had to go, remember? I got this phone call."
"Aw, crap, sorry." Ali frowned at him. "But I'm not sure I believe you that you would have gotten his phone number if it hadn't been for me phoning."
Kir shrugged, trying not to acknowledge his own twinge of disappointment. "No, you're right. I wouldn't have. Because I thought we established pretty clearly in my last relationship that going out with non-mages was a bad idea."
"I didn't say anything about going out with him," Ali said. "I just meant you could use a damn shag. Lighten up a bit. Becky was no loss anyway."
"Don't be mean."
"You're my best friend. Being mean about your exes is part of my job description."
"I'm not surprised she got fed up," Kir said. "I kept cancelling on her about things I wasn't telling her about. She wasn't stupid, she knew there was stuff I wasn't telling her. I'd have gotten fed up if it was the other way around."
"You could have just told her, you know."
"Yeah, probably." Kir hunched into himself. "But I didn't know how she'd react, and I never quite found the right moment, and..." He trailed off. He was all too aware that he'd mishandled that whole thing, but he still couldn't see how he could have done it differently. Telling her would have changed things between them, one way or another. Either she'd have freaked out -- okay, not that likely, Becky was pretty chilled about most things -- or it would have seemed like some kind of statement about their relationship. The longer he'd thought about it, the more importance the whole thing had assumed in his mind and the more he'd ducked away from it. And the more likely it had seemed that Becky would have been upset, not because of the thing itself, but because of how long he'd taken to tell her. Which was a problem that by its nature only got worse, not better, not that being aware of that had helped in the slightest. He scowled down at Ali's feet in his lap.
"Anyway," Ali said. "My point is, regardless of this whole emo thing you have going on now about relationships, you could just get laid. That's a thing, in this modern age, right?"
"I don't like Grindr."
"You had a real live cute guy right in front of you," Ali said, patiently. "Talking to you. Flirting, even, maybe?"
Kir didn't answer.
"Flirting!" Ali crowed. "You don't need Grindr, see? God, Kir, you are a total dead loss. You should have gotten his phone number. Gah. Maybe you'll run into him again at the wall."
Kir hunched a shoulder. "Maybe. Maybe not. I don't go at the times that people with regular jobs usually go at."
"Maybe you should."
"Too many people. And anyway, I'm not staking out the damn place in the hope of seeing someone I exchanged, like, half a dozen sentences with."
"Half a dozen is pretty good, for you, if you're talking to someone new," Ali said. "But fine, fine, I see your point." She paused. "Hey, you must know the people on the desk pretty well, right? You could..."
"Data Protection Act, Ali."
"Oh, whatever. I'm sure you could convince them."
"Also, that is icky stalker behaviour, and no."
"But you're not an icky stalker, and he was flirting with you. He'd be pleased."
"He would not be pleased," Kir said firmly, "and anyway, I'm not going to do it. I don't want a date, I don't want to get laid, and I don't want you bloody going on at me about it. I think it was for the best that you called, because if I did ask him out or whatever, I'd just run into the same damn problems that I did with Becky, with all the stuff I couldn't tell her about. She knew I was keeping secrets, you know."
"Course she did. You're rubbish at lying."
"Then how do you suggest that I manage to have any kind of relationship with someone I can't tell the truth to and who'll know that? I think I convinced Becky that I wasn't cheating on her, but..."
"Wasn't talking about a re
lationship," Ali said patiently. "I was talking about a shag. But fine. I'll stop saying anything at all." She sighed. "Man, I wish there were more mages around. Maybe we need some kind of national conference. International conference. Something like that."
"Can't really see it," Kir said. "Not like there's that much co-operation."
"Well that's my point," Ali said. "Maybe there should be more. Maybe we should be thinking about patrols and stuff."
"I thought we agreed that was a once-off?" Kir asked.
Ali shrugged. "Yeah, but..." She waved an irritable hand. "Oh, I dunno. I'm probably just feeling antsy."
"It was a bit of a weird experience," Kir agreed.
"And I've not been sleeping so well. I just keep..." She stopped. "Well, Heather keeps having meetings of all her hippy mates in the flat, which is fine, but they all stay up ridiculously late. I wouldn't have let River recommend her as a flatmate if I'd known." She rolled her eyes. "Mind you, River is one of the lot banging in and out at two in the morning, so probably he didn't think about it. At least when I'm out late, I make some effort to sneak in quietly."
"Talking of flatmates, have you sorted the Arsehole Ben stuff out?" Arsehole Ben had done a moonlight flit with the contents of the rent-and-bills account two months before, and had not proved to be traceable thereafter. Kir knew that Ali didn't have much money spare at the best of times, but she'd stonewalled him every time he tried to offer to help.
Ali hunched a shoulder. "It's fine. Stop fussing, Kir. Sod flatmates. Sod magic puddles. I want to watch something trashy on Netflix and order pizza."
"Not, under any circumstances, TOWIE," Kir said.
"Spoilsport," Ali said. "Drag Race?"
"Drag Race I can handle."
"Or Miss Fisher, but that's not what you'd call trashy," Ali said, flicking through Netflix on her phone.
"Soothing," Kir said. "Predictable. Nice outfits. Inspector Jack."
"We should get Phrynie in to solve the magic puddles," Ali said. "Actually, maybe not that, then, I'll just feel inadequate. Drag Race it is. I'll get it started, you order pizza. And if you put pineapple on it, I promise you I will change straight over to TOWIE and then you'll be sorry."
Kir mimed extreme terror, and got his phone out to sort out the pizza. Online ordering, still the best thing ever, avoiding any need to interact with human beings and that moment where you said "Uh...I wanted to order some pizza" and then felt like an idiot because why the hell else would you be calling them?
Order complete, he pocketed his phone again, and slouched down a bit more on the sofa. Pizza and TV was as good a way to spend an evening as any. Hanging out with Ali was always relaxing. Kir pushed thoughts of Zach out of his head. He wouldn't show up again; Kir wouldn't see him again. And that was definitely for the best.
Kir stood in the alleyway and looked around. There was nothing there to suggest what had happened yesterday. The rubbish was still lying all over the floor, but that was entirely normal for a grotty London alleyway. It wasn't moving; it didn't even look like it was scattered in anything other that a random pattern. Everything was a bit more damp than you might expect when it hadn't rained for a week; but if he hadn't been there yesterday, he would have put it down to an external overflow pipe.
But that didn't mean there wouldn't be anything that he could sense using his mage-sight.
He reminded himself again not to use any actual magery. He and Ali had smeared their own magic all over the place yesterday; the last thing he needed was to add to that to further obscure whatever else there was. Assuming there was anything at all.
It wasn't natural, what had happened. That was obvious. But that didn't mean it was Kir's sort of unnatural. Although he maintained that magery was perfectly natural, just unusual. After all, it drew power from the living world. Ali, at this point in the conversation, would remind him that as no one knew what exactly that power was, he couldn't really say whether it was natural or not. Which was true enough in one sense -- no one did know exactly what power magery drew on, or what it was doing -- but untrue in another. Whatever power it was that magery used, it was directly linked to life, and to life energy.
But it was associated with mages. It didn't just crop up on its own, not in Kir's experience. Which was why it was so weird that neither he nor Ali had sensed anyone nearby. There should have been someone in the vicinity, and failing that -- if somehow, someone they didn't know and hadn't run into yet had managed to set something up that kept going of its own accord, which was a troubling idea in itself -- there should be some kind of resonance left behind, something for Kir to pick up on, even if he hadn't spotted it at the time.
The trouble was, he couldn't find anything. It didn't just look normal here, it was normal, entirely normal, as far as he could tell. It was an intensely frustrating half hour.
But he couldn't entirely dismiss the possibility that there was something here, something that had been triggered and then somehow left behind, that he just wasn't noticing. Once he'd given up the alley itself as a bad job, he took a sample of earth and stones scraped from the crevices between the dirty cobbled paving, and a selection of some of the rubbish that he thought he recognised from the rubbish-monster. He'd set something up at home to poke at it a bit more, some kind of experiment. After all, if it was possible to create a mage-resonance that would continue after you'd left it, that would be an incredibly useful thing to learn more about. And he liked a good experiment.
It was unsatisfying, though, leaving without any more solid information, or even any good guesses. Unsatisfying, and worrying.
CHAPTER THREE
A few days later, Kir stepped out of the doors of the air-conditioned climbing wall, and grimaced at the heat that struck him. London in hot weather was -- well, it wasn't a city that dealt well with hot weather, basically. Too much concrete radiating the sunshine back; that damp sticky feel that the air took on so quickly; the grimy feel of the air alongside main roads as London's layer of pollution settled downwards like a grubby blanket. Mind you, it wasn't always that great in cold weather either, given the way half the Tube seemed to shut down after two flakes of snow. Every so often he doubted his decision to live here, and started browsing houses in the Peak District, where he could be climbing outside as often as he went to the wall here. And for a fraction of the price, at that. He could probably even afford to buy somewhere up there, unlike here. But on the flipside: London was his city, and it had been since he was born here. In London, being mixed-race didn't make you stand out. The place thronged with people from all over the world, or whose parents or grandparents had been born half a planet away and had brought themselves here. Young lads with topi and a thick Estuary accent; women speaking Polish and Hindi and Somali and half a hundred other languages to their kids on the bus then switching without pause back into English. Diversity, that hard-done-by word. Kir's grandparents were Persian. They'd come to Britain with his mother, in her early teens, after the 1979 Iran revolution; but they'd already been familiar with the UK. His grandfather had been a student in London in the 1950s, and they had taken holidays there, had English friends. They still talked, wistfully, of going back, but with the speech patterns of people who had accepted the unlikelihood of it. His mother, on the other hand, was perfectly happy in London. She'd met his dad, who was English, at university, married him, had Kir, and now had no interest in leaving Wimbledon other than to go with Kir's father to nice holidays in places that weren't experiencing civil unrest.
Kir himself wouldn't mind visiting Iran one day. When it was safe. Now did not look like a good time; and depressingly it wasn't looking like that was going to change in the near future.
But London was home, when it came down to it. Maybe one day he'd move out, but he was happy here for now, the lure of gritstone notwithstanding.
Zach hadn't been at the climbing wall today. Not that Kir had been expecting that, of course. Not that he was actually looking for Zach. He meant what he'd said to Ali, several times
now -- he didn't want a relationship, he didn't want a quick shag, he didn't want to go chasing after cute boys, or cute girls, or cute non-binary people, he might happen to meet. He was perfectly happy being celibate and concentrating on work, and tackling interesting problems in magery, and watching humongous quantities of Netflix. He was happy. However much Ali might roll her eyes at him about it. It was his life, and he was happy living it.
He rolled his shoulders, stretching out tired muscles. He'd go home and take a shower -- he was feeling unpleasantly sweaty, after an hour spent throwing himself up artificial rocks, even with the air-conditioning in there -- and then he had a Skype meeting with the project manager for the contracting job he was working on at the moment. The deadline was coming up, and everything was under control, but it paid to reassure people, in Kir's experience. And after he'd done that, he was going to do a bit more work on it, get a bit more ahead. Bitter previous experience told Kir that there was always something that went wrong at the last minute. He'd done his fair share of all-nighters when he'd first started freelancing and was less good at time allocation; he did his best to avoid them now.
He'd pulled out his phone to check for messages and to see if he was about to miss the bus; so he wasn't looking properly when he walked around the corner and cannoned straight into someone, hard.
Already apologising, he staggered back a bit, caught himself -- and blinked to see Zach smiling at him.
"Hey! How's it going?"
"Yeah. Good. Um. Sorry about that. Should have been looking where I was going."
Zach shrugged easily. "Ah, no worries. Good job I wasn't on the bike, mind, could have been a bit messier."
"Motorbike?" Kir asked. He had sudden visions of sitting pillion, pushed up behind Zach...
"Pedal bike," Zach said. "Got a puncture this morning, running too late to get it fixed before work, so I'm on the bus today." He grimaced. "Not really the weather for it."
"I wouldn't have thought it was the weather for cycling," Kir said. He could feel sweat running down his own back, and there were tiny beads of sweat on Zach's forehead. He wondered what they'd taste like, how it would feel if he kissed that patch of freckles just above Zach's eyebrow... He cut the thought off. He didn't want to chase after Zach. Or anyone else. However many freckles he had, and however far down they might go.
