by Ameriie
I thought, like an idiot, that we would be together one day. That I was in love with him, and he, despite everything, was in love with me back.
But I was still just Madame Bovary, clinging to fairy tales that could never be. Which is what had set us apart from the very beginning, though I didn’t see it until too late. It’s what will set us apart forever: what we believe in. Or rather, the fact that I, Shirley Holmes, believe in something at all . . .
And he, Jim Moriarty, does not.
Now here we are, and nothing’s okay.
I need to apologize for what happened to your family. For what Jim did to them and so many people when he released those files.
Scandal in Bohemia, they’re calling it on the news, and then there’s a picture of your mom with the headline Senator Rita Watson’s private e-mails hacked; Evidence of bribes in the Senate.
I think I helped him, Jean—I think I helped Jim get access to those files that have left your mom facing expulsion. But I swear I didn’t mean to. I swear I didn’t know what I was doing. All I can guess is that Jim somehow used your e-mails to gain access to your mom’s server, which in turn gave him access to all her files.
I also know that this Scandal in Bohemia has everyone freaking out and blaming your mom. But while the media and the masses are so focused on the pawns getting crushed by kings, they’re forgetting that not all kings are bad.
Jim’s certainly forgotten it, if he ever knew it at all. That’s why I have to stop him before any more files get leaked. Before any more innocents get hurt.
I know, I know. We’re supposed to start our first semester together at Harvard in a month, but I can’t do that anymore. Don’t you see? Not while your family is hurting. Not while Jim Moriarty is still out there somewhere, walking free.
But I’ll find him, Jean. I’m taking a class on computer forensics now, and everything I learn I’ll use to make this better. Being a lawyer was never for me—at least Jim was right about that—but helping people and getting justice for the victims . . . that is me. Starting now and on my own terms.
Sometimes the only way to fix a broken wall is to patch it up from within. I’m not a ghost trapped in purgatory, nor a girl waiting for men to decide her fate.
White queen to E6. I’m coming for you, Jim Moriarty.
Checkmate.
—Your BFF,
Shirley Holmes
SASHA ALSBERG’S VILLAIN CHALLENGE TO SUSAN DENNARD:
A Young Moriarty
DEAR SASHA, THE 411 FOR VILLAINS
BY SASHA ALSBERG
The thing that unnerves me about James Moriarty is that he doesn’t have any unrealistic powers or live in a made-up world. Quite the contrary, actually. He lives in the United Kingdom. He is a professor, mathematician, son, and brother. Without adding the criminal-mastermind factor to him, he seems like a pretty ordinary guy.
So why does this bother me? Well, it creeps me out because this guy—this crazy, intelligent, psycho man—could very realistically live in this world. Our reality. Which means he could also be online, stalking villain forums, giving advice on how to dance on the ashes of your enemies.
And so could I . . .
DEAR SASHA, THE 411 FOR VILLAINS
ABOUT ME:
Some of you may think you know me, but maybe that’s just what I want you to think. Have you ever thought of that? It only took a few sweet nothings and words of a white lie to structure my ultimate façade. It was good fun for a while, but now I am ready to share my advice with some sorry souls who need a little help in the criminal-mastermind world.
Being a criminal mastermind isn’t a job; it’s a lifestyle.
Love,
Sasha
One Fed-Up Failure Sasha
Dear Sasha,
I have been struggling with the criminal-mastermind lifestyle. Not because I don’t want to become one, but because whenever I try to do something evil, well, I get caught. I’ve had to move ten times in the past year just to avoid the cops. Do I just suck at being a villain? All I want is to weasel my way into people’s lives and take all their money. Is that too much to ask? That being said, how can I avoid getting caught? I need your help.
Sincerely,
One Fed-Up Failure
Sasha One Fed-Up Failure
Dear Fed-Up Failure,
Wow, you got yourself in a pickle, haven’t you? It sure is a bummer when you can’t do what your heart desires. Something you need to remember is we all have to start somewhere and learn from our past actions.
You seem to be trying a bit too hard to stay inconspicuous. Try becoming close friends with some trust fund babies and earning their respect. Get close to them. It may take a while, a few months to a few years, but once you have them in your grasp, clamp shut and take everything you can grab and get the heck out of there. Don’t run and hide; get ahead of the game and work your way up to the top.
You got this!
Best, Sasha
Undermined Underlord Sasha
Dear Sasha,
I have been trying to blackmail my arch nemesis, Fredrick, for two weeks now. I need him to respect me and the power I have over him, but I’m having a serious problem . . . He thinks I’m a joke. Whenever I threaten to expose his secret life as a cosplayer, he seems to not care. I’ll insert a section of our text messages:
Me: Fredrick Monstepi, you need to deliver $100,000 to the corner of Sher Drive and Lock Street by Wednesday, July 5, or else I will expose your secret life of cosplay to the world . . .
Fredrick: Hello again, Nigel. Might as well get some promotion from this, so make sure when you “expose” me to tag my cosplay page: @FredCosALot. Thanks, buddy.
Do you see the disrespect he has for me? I am sick of this. Please, Sasha, tell me what to do. I need your supreme guidance.
Sincerely,
Undermined Underlord
Sasha Undermined Underlord
Dear Underlord,
The problem is simple. Your leverage against him is so utterly weak that it’s not even a threat. Cosplay? Really? Cosplay is so cool! Nerd culture is nothing to be ashamed of, and neither is cosplaying. So what you need to do is find something juicy to use against him, like a dirty hobby, a secret dungeon, a hidden child, or a missing ex-lover. It needs to be something police-worthy, and if he has nothing, make something up.
Also, Fredrick knew who you were, so that broke one of the major rules of thievery: never expose yourself until the time is right.
Good luck on your quest, Underlord.
Best,
Sasha
Professor James Moriarty Sasha
Dear Sasha Marie Alsberg,
I know a lot about you. I have been studying you for a while through this forum of yours, and let me say, I’m impressed. But I now have some tips for you.
When you are submerged in this criminal underworld, everyone is your enemy. You help these sorry excuses for masterminds become who they strive to be, but in the meantime, you are helping them gain an upper hand. You are breeding criminals, making them your equals, when really you should be degrading them, tricking them, and making them no more than an ant under your shoe. With your hand feeding these men and women, they will one day come back to bite you. And who is to blame? That’s correct: you.
With the internet at our fingertips today, it just seems too easy to get what you want. I learned the hard way. It all started with manipulating a few peers as a young lad. They were the puppets on my strings, and it has escalated since then into my now empire of deception.
Don’t get me wrong, girl. I do appreciate your efforts, but in my world, you are the ant and I am the shoe. This is no threat—just advice from one mastermind to another who has been playing this game far longer than you’ve been alive.
Best regards,
Professor James Moriarty
Sasha Alsberg has signed off.
THE BLESSING OF LITTLE WANTS
BY SARAH ENNI
Sigrid Balfour hated having to use
magic to balance an enormous pile of paper while unlocking her dorm room door. In her extracurricular studies, she was just getting the hang of bending time. Using powers to prevent a clumsy disaster felt mildly humiliating.
Then, adding insult to injury, a voice from within startled her so badly that she shrieked and threw the papers into the air. Sigrid raised her hands, sheets scattering around her like a paper cut blizzard. A whispered breath and the source of the voice was flung onto the bed and pinned there.
Breathing hard, Sigrid examined her intruder. “God bleeding dammit, Thomas,” she said. He blinked, and Sigrid realized she was still holding his paralysis. She lowered her hands.
“All I said was hello!” Thomas said, stretching his arms and legs to shake off the lingering sting of magical binding. “Bit jumpy?”
Glowering, Sigrid flicked her wrist. Thomas started, clutching at his chest. He gasped an inhale. “What was that?”
“Made your heart skip a beat,” Sigrid said. “Who’s jumpy now?”
“No need to get all kinetic on me,” Thomas sniffed. He sat up and ran a hand through his helter-skelter hair, dark brown and tinged with the occasional grey. It never obeyed—Thomas looked flushed and windblown even on the clearest London day. He relaxed against the wall, as comfortable as if it were his own dorm room, which, based on the amount of time he spent here, it might as well have been.
“If you can’t stand the wrath, don’t set fire to the kitchen,” Sigrid said, bending to pick up loose sheets. She placed a stack on the desk and drew back a curtain to let in the dying sunlight. Had Thomas been sitting here in the dark?
“Did you hear that the proclamation on limiting magic passed?” he asked. “They didn’t even amend the language on practical use. Pendle Hill has the right to keep us from using the most basic spells—”
“Thomas.”
“It’s bad enough magic is stretched thin as the queen’s mustache, now—”
“Thomas!” Sigrid raised rigid half fists, threatening imminent strangulation. Thomas quieted. She pressed her hands together. “Not today. Please.”
She’d listened to some version of this rant for years. That Chancellor Duhamel and his government were conspiring with Pendle Hill leaders to scout and recruit witches born with acute natural abilities, then teach the weaker ones as little as possible to thwart their magical capacity. There was only so much magic in the world, and it ebbed and flowed as witches were born and died, learned and forgot how to be powerful. Duhamel and his cronies aimed to keep as much as possible for themselves. Three years ago it sounded like a conspiracy theory, but it wasn’t just fringe observers wondering about it anymore.
Sigrid and Thomas both curbed their substantial powers to avoid Pendle Hill’s merit award system, which involved long visits to the chancellor’s office, from which students returned quieter, more cautious. Diminished, somehow.
Thomas reached down and grabbed one of the loose sheets. He began reading in a fake British accent he knew Sigrid couldn’t stand: “ ‘In my time at Pendle Hill, I’ve learned that cooperation between witches is paramount to solving the problems facing our kind, particularly the crisis of distribution of the world’s finite supply of magic.’ ” He paused, pretending to adjust a monocle. “ ‘Diminishing magic in the United Kingdom cannot be tolerated, but only through robust negotiation can the International Chamber of Spellcraft hope to balance the needs of the many—’ ”
Sigrid groaned. “Stop, please. Filling out applications is like meeting the tax accountant you never knew lived inside you. It’s horrid.”
“I don’t know why you even bother,” Thomas said. “Any position available will be beneath your abilities.” He crumpled up the paper and tossed it to her.
She caught the wadded-up ball with a sigh. “What choice do we have?” Sigrid asked, weary. “We can’t risk letting anyone know how powerful we are. We have to do the same as everyone else—get a position, live a normal life.”
Thomas shook his head, face full of pity. He chewed the ever-present cud of khat leaf he kept tucked in his cheek. “A cubicle gig doing busywork until you retire or die? I wouldn’t call that a life.”
“The minutiae of a normal existence: Dating. Seeing friends. Yelling at said friends about what’s on telly,” Sigrid said, uncrumpling the application. She had one particular friend in mind but didn’t dare say the name: Annabel Bates. Thomas and Annabel never quite got on. As in, on speaking terms. But if Sigrid had to brave a future filled with as many trifles and as little magic as possible, the thought of meeting Annabel at the pub every night was a silver lining. She tapped the mostly empty pages. “There’s something to be said for little wants.”
“I’ve seen what you can do,” Thomas said quietly. “What we’re both capable of. I don’t think we could have ‘little wants’ if we tried. We need to do something—something big. We need to make a change.”
“You sound like my father.”
“Your father was a great man.” Thomas shrugged.
Sigrid looked away. “Not to me.”
Annabel appeared in the doorway and knocked gently. “Sorry—is this a bad time?” Sigrid sat up straight. Annabel’s lips were pink and puckered as a petal, her hair a shining sheet of golden brown.
“It’s a fine time,” Sigrid said, flashing a bright smile.
“Have you had a minute to look over my CV?”
Sigrid slapped her forehead. “Ugh. I forgot, Bel. I’m sorry.”
Annabel glanced at Thomas’s satchel by the bed, spilling books onto the floor. “Too busy at the library?”
“Something like that,” Sigrid said, rolling her eyes at Thomas.
“Well, listen, the application for the position at Chancellor Duhamel’s office is due next Friday. I don’t want to be a pain, but it’s a position in his office, like his actual office, and—”
As Annabel went on about the potential of collating the chancellor’s personal memos, lights began to dance at the corner of Sigrid’s vision, amorphous shining shapes that spun across Annabel’s face. They broke apart into tiny pinpoint stars, rotating in foreign constellations. Thomas’s magic worked this way sometimes, when he wanted to show Sigrid something beautiful, or when he couldn’t rein it in. The lights formed a halo around Annabel’s face, then broke apart to ring her neck.
Altering another witch’s sight or mind was reserved for sorcerer-level graduate students, spellcraft neither condoned nor achievable for almost anyone at university level. But Thomas had been showing Sigrid private magic since first year. She’d never told Annabel or anyone else; both she and Thomas had worked so hard to hide the extent of their powers. At times, Sigrid worried Thomas had hidden it too well. He was nearly invisible to their classmates and, besides her, hadn’t made any real friends. She wished it was possible to praise the beauty of his spellcraft and show him off to the world. But ultimately she did as she always had: kept the special parts of Thomas close, and secret, and safe.
The stars dissolved as Thomas rubbed at his eyes, yawning.
“Sig? Hello?” Annabel raised an eyebrow.
Sigrid blinked, clearing her mind. “Sorry.”
Annabel shook her head, smiling. “I think you hung with me there for about ten seconds. A record!” She nodded to the stack of papers behind Sigrid. “How’re your applications coming?”
“Oh, you know . . .” Sigrid held up the partially crumpled sheet. “Swimmingly.”
“Right,” Annabel said drily. “I’ll remember this moment when you get every position you apply for, per usual.” She backed away from the door. “Well, let me know when you get to it.” Annabel sauntered down the hall. Sigrid stood in the doorway, watching her.
“If you want evidence that magic is shrinking, look no further than Annabel Bates,” Thomas said. “She couldn’t conjure a sense of direction.”
Sigrid threw a pen at his head. “Cork it, you elitist hag.”
Thomas swatted the pen, sending it flying. It snagged a hanging mobile of t
arot cards, sending the hand-painted figures spinning: empress, page of wands, fool, death. Sigrid moved to the bed, displacing pillows to sit beside Thomas, forcing their limbs together into a comfortable jumble. Magic had a particular warmth, a kind of glow that lingered after a series of spells had been cast. Thomas seemed to radiate that heat all the time. The khat leaf made him smell ever so slightly of licorice. Together those elements felt like home. Thomas was the only one who knew—really knew—what Sigrid was. At his side was the only place she could relax.
“The way you look at Annabel . . .” Thomas shook his head. “She’s the one making you think you want a boring normal life. But you’re Sigrid, the Viking queen.” He put an arm around Sigrid’s shoulders and pulled her in. “You’re destined for something more. You could be a legend.”
She knew Thomas meant to be reassuring, but Sigrid wasn’t sure whether a destiny like that was a blessing or a curse. She watched the tarot mobile slow. The last shaft of sunlight illuminated the tower card, a portent of change, on which two medieval figures plummeted to their deaths.
The tea in the Pendle Hill fourth-year clubroom was always weak and a little too cold, its scattered couches so worn they felt like sacks stuffed with hay. But its makeshift library was a sanctuary, with books packed two-deep on gently sagging shelves and stacked in leather-bound stalagmites. Thomas had read them all so Sigrid felt she had, too. He’d begun reorganizing the collection using a mix of the Dewey decimal system, alphabetical order, and unknowable whimsy.
Thomas was stretched over the room’s sole table, piles of open books before him. At his elbow was a legal pad jammed with frenetic scribbling. His feet were tucked under the chair, half fallen out of cheap loafers that had begun to fray, clinging desperately to peeling soles. Sigrid wanted badly to reach down and tuck his ankles back in.
At the click of her approaching heels, Thomas looked up. He gave her outfit a once-over. “Looking positively witchy.”
