by Jeff Hirsch
“You don’t have to do this,” Glenn said.
“Sorry. Killing you is the price of admission into the good graces of the Colloquium.”
“How can you just switch sides?”
Abbe laughed, making a sick echo off the damp stone walls. “I thought you would have learned more by now, Glennora.” Abbe leaned in to whisper in Glenn’s ear. “There are no sides. The Magisterium.
The Colloquium. They’re the same — words on banners that people wave around to get others to do what they want. It’s a game. Pity you had to learn that too late.”
Abbe pulled back the dagger and in that second, Glenn dug inside herself and prayed for strength, but when she prayed, she didn’t see 813
or three distant stars, she saw the faces of Kevin and Aamon, her mother and her father. She saw them all and reached for one last bit of Affinity, her fingers scrambling toward it. Glenn strained and pushed, but in the end it was too far. Time slowed. The tip of Abbe’s dagger rose. She remembered Kevin’s lips on hers. His hand on her back. The look in his eyes. The swirling snow. A night she could have seized that was now lost.
There was a scream and Abbe flew away from her, her body bent nearly in two. Time rushed forward again. Across the cavern, Abbe was rising from the water, her black hair plastered against her face. The dagger was gone and her eyes were blazing as she looked past Glenn to the mouth of the cave.
Glenn turned and caught a flurry of movement. There was a dark blur and then a sound like thunder as the cave lit up with a flash of light.
When Glenn’s eyes adjusted, she saw Abbe slumped and unconscious on the shore across from her and a figure standing between them.
Her back was to Glenn, but it was clear that this was not the wasted woman she had left lying on Opal’s bed. She was impossibly tall, with hair the color of coal. The bracelet was gone from her wrist, and her entire body glowed, illuminating the cave with a murderous green light. She stalked across the shallow end of the water toward Abbe’s limp body, pulsing with violence.
Glenn forced herself up and staggered through the freezing water.
She made it only a few steps before her legs gave out and she collapsed, falling into the water and against her mother’s legs. Glenn reached up and grabbed hold of her dress.
She turned and Glenn saw those eyes, perfectly black, without thought or feeling or recognition, just as they had been that night past the border when Glenn was six. Whatever impulse had sent her mother down into the caves had already been wiped away and replaced with blind hate. Glenn marshaled her fear and grabbed her mother’s wrist, turning her away from Abbe.
“Stop,” Glenn breathed as she forced herself to stand.
30
For a moment the two of them stood inches apart, the Magistra glowering down at her. “What do you care if she dies?” she asked in an awful, distorted echo.
“I don’t,” Glenn said. “I just don’t want you to be the one to kill her.”
The Magistra’s eyes narrowed. Glenn saw her chance and threw her arms around her, pulling her close, battering at the wall between them. When it fell, the entire weight of her mother’s last ten years crashed into Glenn all at once. In that moment, Glenn knew that during all those years, there was a small kernel of the woman her mother once was, imprisoned deep inside her, forced to watch the things the Magistra was doing and helpless to stop them. Every death hung on her like the links of a chain, endlessly heavy, always present. There were ghosts in the Magisterium, and they never let her rest.
Worst of all, her mother always knew exactly how far away she was from everything she wanted — her husband, Glenn, their life in the Colloquium — and she could do nothing about it. The moments of the three of them together — gathered around the dinner table, in the garden, floating in the cool lake waters — lived in her like bits of a distant sun, dazzling but too far away to reach, taunting her day in and day out.
“Come back,” Glenn whispered, willing her last bit of strength into her mother, unraveling a plea that had been knotted up inside her for ten years. “I know you’re there. Please. Just listen to my voice and come back.”
Glenn held her breath and pulled away slowly.
Her mother was gazing down at her, her eyes a deep and piercing blue.
They rose out of the cavern together, Glenn’s mother’s arms wrapped tight around her, until they reached the surface and landed on the muddy ground.
“What do we do about …”
In answer, her mother lifted one hand, and the ground shook as the gash in the earth sealed itself up.
“She’ll free herself eventually,” she said. “But we’ll be long gone before she does.”
Her mother’s palms were pressed into the muddy ground, just barely keeping her upright. Her chest was heaving. The blue of her eyes was already clouding over as her Affinities rushed back in. Glenn took her arm and held it tight.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “You’ll be all right.”
“Glenn!”
Kevin dropped to his knees in front of her. Aamon appeared just behind him.
“I’m okay,” she whispered, overwhelmed by the feeling of being near him again. “I’m fine.”
Kevin pulled something out of the inside of his coat. The bracelet.
Glenn took it and hurried to her mother’s side.
“Glenn, no,” her mother protested. “You should — ”
“Take it. I’m too exhausted to do much more damage tonight
anyway.”
Glenn clamped the bracelet onto her mother’s wrist. As soon as it touched her, she winced, but the change was slow in coming. Glenn held her breath until she felt her mother’s body begin to wither under her touch.
Are these the only choices for her in the Magisterium? Glenn wondered. A monster or a frail woman aged beyond her years?
“Sturges’s forces are in retreat, but it won’t last long,” Aamon said. “Opal has coordinated with the last of Farrick’s forces.”
“Fine,” Glenn’s mother said, finding a surprising amount of command in her tired voice. “Aamon, have Opal take Kevin and Glenn as far west as she can.”
“No!” Kevin shouted. “We’re not running away.”
“I’m sorry,” Glenn’s mother said crisply. “There’s no other choice. It’s too dangerous here. It’s no place for either of you. Aamon, we’ll coordinate with the Miel Pan to secure the border.”
“Mom — ”
She turned to Glenn and knelt down close. “There’ll be no more fighting for you,” she said. “If you keep on like you are, you’ll lose control. I won’t allow that. Opal will keep you both safe. She can help you control your Affinity in a way I never learned.”
“But with the bracelet on — ”
“I’ll have to rely on Aamon and the others,” she said, and then, quietly, “I have a lifetime to make up for, Glenn. I have to try.”
Glenn could feel her mother’s grief, even through the bubble of the bracelet. It was a hard and cold thing, sunk deep inside her.
Aamon and Kevin stood waiting. Her mother was right. No
matter what had happened, she and Kevin weren’t soldiers. They weren’t rulers. They were never even meant to be here.
“Are you ready?” her mother asked.
Glenn turned to the border forest and thought of her home: the arcing run of the trains, the classrooms that were her second home, nights spent lying in bed and listening to the clank and hiss floating out from her father’s workshop.
Dad …
Glenn looked down at the bracelet on her mother’s wrist.
“No,” she said. “There’s one more thing we have to do.”
Glenn glided far over the treetops through the chilly night air. A train passed by below, winding on its magnetic track through a landscape dotted with the lights of shops and towering stacks, toward the city center of Colloquy that glowed a harsh white, miles away.
Glenn wanted to pause and take it all in; she ha
d never seen her home like this before, but she knew that even now, Colloquium forces would have detected her and were closing in.
Luckily, once Authority had destroyed Dad’s workshop, they had left, unaware of his basement lab. It had taken Glenn hours to break into the heavily encrypted files Dad kept there, but once she did, she found detailed schematics for the bracelet, and notes theorizing a way to reverse the bracelet’s field and use it to keep the reality of the Magisterium with her. Sitting there at his workbench, the guts of the thing laid out before her, Glenn appreciated for the first time how brilliant her father really was. That simple band of metal contained not only microcircuits and power generators but small gems and
rune-covered bits of metal. It was a perfect melding together of Affinity and technology. Magisterium and Colloquium. It should have been impossible, but there it was. Glenn had it rebuilt and back on her wrist in a matter of hours. She was, after all, her father’s daughter.
Now Glenn focused her attention outward, hunting for one person amidst the millions huddled all around her in the hivelike stacks and office buildings. Her mind moved through building after building until she came to a place of darkness, a kind of hole in a large tower at the north end of the city. The tower was teeming with people except for one floor that was almost entirely empty. Empty, save one person. Even as far away as Glenn was, she could feel the despair coming from that floor’s single inhabitant.
Trees below bent in her wake as Glenn shot out over the
landscape. She swung around the edges of the city, careful to avoid that gravity well of people below her, the combined force of which threatened to pull her down.
The tower stood on its own, knifing into the sky from the center of a concrete sea, surrounded by gates and alarms and security systems.
All of it would have been forbidding to the Glenn of weeks ago, but they were toys to the Glenn of today. She flew to the top of the tower and then let herself slowly drop down along its windowless face until she found the floor she wanted. Once she did, Glenn drifted away from the wall and hovered there, staring at the sleek gray of it.
To anyone else, the expanse of steel and concrete and insulation would have seemed like an impenetrable wall, but Glenn opened herself up to it. She moved into the pores of the concrete and steel, ingratiating herself with them until they were grudging allies, then slowly drawing them aside. The outer wall of concrete was the first to part. A band of it, ten feet high and two feet thick, simply peeled back from the rest of the building like arms opening to embrace her, exposing the rib cage of steel beams that lay inside. Those too opened up at Glenn’s urging, soundlessly floating out of the building and into the air. Next came the layers of insulation and the interior walls, all of them gently parting from their brothers, opening up the deep insides of the tower, down to its heart.
Glenn’s father stood at the edge of a small cot in an empty, harshly lit room. He was in a pair of dingy white pajamas that hung off his emaciated frame. His eyes were hollow and darkly ringed. She could feel the people who had done this to him. His guards sat unaware on the other side of an interior wall — a fat man and a woman who went about their business like machines, bored and remorseless. She saw their interrogations, their petty torments. Glenn could kill them as easily as tearing the petals from a flower, pull them through the wall and toss them screaming out into the night. It’s what they deserved.
“Glenn?”
Her father had come to the edge of the hole in the building, his clothes whipping in the wind. Glenn’s heart twisted to see him, as skinny and frail-looking as ever. Glenn tamped down her anger at the guards and glided through the opening in the tower to hover inches from him. Her father backed away from her, skittish, as she came.
“It’s all right,” Glenn said. “I’ll explain everything later, but we have to go now.”
Glenn reached out her hand, and after a pause her dad stepped forward and took it, his own hand trembling. She drew him to her, lifting him and moving them out of his prison. She paused, closed the building back up, then slipped into the sky.
Minutes later, Glenn set down in their own front yard. Dad
stumbled out of her arms and stared at the workshop that still lay in blackened ruins. He slowly turned from it, looking across the yard, reaching the house just as the front door swung open. He froze in place.
Mom had found one of her old dresses, bright yellow and gauzy, and had done up her hair while they were away. She looked beautiful, better every minute she was away from the Magisterium. Stronger. Her hair had returned to its almost gleaming black, with only a few streaks of ivory.
He turned to Glenn, tears streaking his face.
“It’s real,” Glenn said.
And then he was running and Mom was running too, crossing the yard and diving into each other’s arms. They tangled together, both of them crying. Joy and pain welded together. Ten years apart. He thought he’d never see her again and now here she was. Glenn could feel their amazement bloom.
She turned away from them to look out beyond the wreck of the workshop. As soon as Authority realized her father was gone, they’d know exactly where to come. Glenn tensed. They had a few hours at most. Unless …
She had changed the bracelet to rescue her father, but there was more she could do, wasn’t there? She could lift off right now and find them. Sturges. Authority. They’d never expect it. Could never prepare for it. She could crush them and put this to rest once and for all. Glenn could see the path in front of her so clearly. It had a pull as strong as gravity.
“Glenn!”
Mom and Dad were at the door, waving her forward, but Glenn stepped away from the house. The engine was turning in her and it wouldn’t stop. She had to go. She had to get back on track. She had to …
Glenn stopped. Her father was beaming and so was her mother.
Contentment shimmered in the air around them both. All they were missing was her.
The engine in Glenn slowed and went still. There will be time for you, Sturges, she thought, and then ran across the yard and threw herself into her parents’ outstretched arms. The second she touched them, it was as if a circuit was completed, and their joy at being whole again moved through her in a rush.
Glenn didn’t know how long they stayed that way, floating
together on the front porch, but it was Mom who finally pulled away.
“We have to go,” she said. “It’s not safe here. We have to cross the border.”
“But — ”
Glenn took her father’s arm. “We’ll reverse the bracelet again and give it to Mom,” she said. “She’ll be fine. I promise.”
“Go, Glenn. We’ll start for the border and meet you there.”
Glenn dashed inside and down the stairs into the basement
workshop. The tools were right where she’d left them. Glenn stripped off the bracelet and bent over the workbench. As she opened its metal housings, Glenn found a strange giddiness building up in her. They would all be together for the first time since she was a little girl. Until that moment, Glenn had no idea how much she wanted it, how much she always had.
The outer shell of the bracelet fell away and she lifted a small pair of pliers, but before she could make the first modification, the entire house was rocked by the blare of Authority loudspeakers.
31
Glenn stepped out onto the porch. It was flooded with the light from four Authority skiffs that hovered in a soundless crescent around the house. The gaps between the skiffs were filled by cross-shaped drones.
Two of the agents, armed with sleek rifles, held Mom and Dad behind Michael Sturges.
“Impressive how you broke your dad out,” Sturges said, cheery as ever. “Guess you figured out how to bring a little bit of the hocus-pocus over to this side of the world, huh?”
He waited, that friendly smile playing across his lips, but Glenn said nothing. The night air was brittle and still. Wrapped in their suits of high-tech armor, the agents were no
thing to her, black holes scattered about the yard. Only Sturges pulsed with a cool malevolence.
Glenn’s own pulse beat against the unaltered bracelet on her wrist.
She imagined a river pounding against the walls of a dam. Power hummed through her. The river wanted to surge, to batter their bodies and drown them all, but Glenn wouldn’t let it. She would master it. She would command its course.
“Nothing more needs to happen to any of you,” Sturges
continued in a maddeningly casual tone. “All we want is that piece of tin you have there. You’re a smart girl. I think you know that this is for the best.” Sturges reached out his hand, palm up, as if he was asking her to return a toy she had played with out of turn. “Just give it to me, and everything in your life goes back to the way it was.”
Glenn almost laughed at the lie. He’d never let them rest, not for a second. Not any of them. The ground began to shake. Trees shuddered and the glass in the windows behind her rang like a string of bells. The agents shifted, trying to keep their footing, but Sturges just stood and grinned. The river crashed inside of Glenn, tearing out its course, slipping out of her hands.
“You should go,” Glenn warned. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
Sturges paused, his hand flexed and relaxed at his side. He was unsure now, afraid. The dam inside her groaned, and across the yard a tree burst into flames. Glenn slashed her hand through the air and Sturges went flying into the trees. The second he did, one of the men on the skiff opened fire. There were two sharp cracks, but Glenn closed her eyes, and the air instantly thickened, catching the rounds like pebbles cast into deep water. They slowed and fell harmlessly onto the ground. A talon of fire that would burn the man alive reared back from Glenn, but she restrained it before it could strike. Instead, Glenn called up a gust of wind strong enough to topple the skiff he was riding on. He and the agents with him tumbled twenty feet to the hard ground below.
