Magic Resilient

by Kayla Bashe

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  Magic Resilient, by Kayla Bashe

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  Hot stone massages are the most relaxing thing ever. You can feel all the tension melting out of your shoulders.

  Your nails are buffed until they shine. A pine-scented hair mask makes your scalp sting a bit, but after another worker washes it out with a showerhead, your hair is so shiny and clean that it practically squeaks between your fingers.

  After a good long soak in a tub, everyone is well-scrubbed and pink and smelling of lemongrass. You feel really well-rested and prepared for anything.

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  Magic Resilient, by Kayla Bashe

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  The next day, your hosts return, and your training begins in earnest. Maroon is white-haired and sharp-eyed and self-contained. She can be strict if displeased, but she’s surprisingly kind if you can impress her, and she keeps you on your toes. Bechette has hugely curly hair in yellowing grey. She wears brightly colored cardigans and vintage brooches and flirts outrageously with people of all genders.

  Alice is dark-skinned and pale-haired and always fiddling with something—the hem of a sweater, a popsicle stick. She speaks little, but seems to notice everything.

  First, you learn navigation. How to find your way by remembering landmarks and little details, and telling which way is uptown and which way is downtown just by the clothes that passerby are wearing and where they’re headed. How to read a compass and how to learn to read a map.

  You learn not only how to use public transportation, but how to transform it. Riding, half-crouched, on top of buses and trains. Leaping from the top of one taxi to another when broken red lights make for stalled traffic. And there are things you learn that can’t be categorized—how to protect bystanders if you have to start a fight in the middle of a crowd, how to catch a subterranean train that closes its doors just as you get there, how to escape from a stuck elevator.

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  Magic Resilient, by Kayla Bashe

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  It’s your last night, and the girl in the bed next to yours keeps moving around. You wonder if she’s okay…seriously, though, what’s up with

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  Char?

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  Magic Resilient, by Kayla Bashe

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  The four of you take to eating a lot of hearty porridge and biting chunks off of maple syrup candies during your breaks. It’s bitterly cold in the mornings, but it’s a challenge you can more than meet.

  You learn about mushrooms that are good to eat and mushrooms that bring pleasant hallucinations to the wounded and dying, plants that you can put on wounds to make blood clot faster, plants that keep bug bites from itching—or keep away bugs! Your brain is working just as hard as your muscles.

  The environment also provides great opportunities to test out your wind powers. Can I move the leaves on this branch without affecting the leaves around it? What’s the skinniest tree limb I can land on? You’re learning how to do things that, coming from a coastal environment, you would never even have thought of exploring.

  At night, the cabin’s windows are small dots of light in the mysterious, lively wilderness that is the forest.

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  Magic Resilient, by Kayla Bashe

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  The next day, your hosts return, and your training begins in earnest. Maroon is white-haired and sharp-eyed and self-contained. She can be strict if displeased, but she’s surprisingly kind if you can impress her, and she keeps you on your toes. Bechette has hugely curly hair in yellowing grey. She wears brightly colored cardigans and vintage brooches and flirts outrageously with people of all genders.

  Alice is dark-skinned and pale-haired and always fiddling with something—the hem of a sweater, a popsicle stick. She speaks little, but seems to notice everything.

  First, you learn navigation. How to find your way by remembering landmarks and little details, and telling which way is uptown and which way is downtown just by the clothes that passerby are wearing and where they’re headed. How to read a compass and how to learn to read a map.

  You learn not only how to use public transportation, but how to transform it. Riding, half-crouched, on top of buses and trains. Leaping from the top of one taxi to another when broken red lights make for stalled traffic. And there are things you learn that can’t be categorized—how to protect bystanders if you have to start a fight in the middle of a crowd, how to catch a subterranean train that closes its doors just as you get there, how to escape from a stuck elevator.

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  >>

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  Magic Resilient, by Kayla Bashe

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  As the weeks pass, your training gets more strenuous, and you have less and less time to keep up with your studies. But that’s okay, because you’re training to protect the universe—it won’t matter if you can’t do calculus, right? Right!

  Running on the sand makes your legs stronger, and you cool down afterwards by eating chocolate ices—there’s a man who comes around to the beach with a little cart and rings a bell to let everyone know he’s there so he can give out cold desserts.

  You learn how to travel underwater by creating air-bubbles like helmets around your heads. Breathing surrounded by seawater is an almost mystically strange experience, but it teaches you that water can’t drown you unless you let it in, that nothing can harm you unless you let it. You wrestle illusory jellyfish, and you train far under the ocean,

  Malou waterproofs her knives against rust. Shani begins developing gills when she transforms. Char learns that there are certain types of gas-fires that can burn underwater, blue and yellow and strangely luminous, just like the eyeshadow she paints on each morning.

  And you discover that, underwater, swimming is a lot like flying, and the currents of water can move like those of wind. One’s willpower, not the elements in which one finds oneself…that’s what matters.

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  Please turn back a page

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  * * *

  Magic Resilient, by Kayla Bashe

  * * *

  The four of you take to eating a lot of hearty porridge and biting chunks off of maple syrup candies during your breaks. It’s bitterly cold in the mornings, but it’s a challenge you can more than meet.

  You learn about mushrooms that are good to eat and mushrooms that bring pleasant hallucinations to the wounded and dying, plants that you can put on wounds to make blood clot faster, plants that keep bug bites from itching—or keep away bugs! Your brain is working just as hard as your muscles.

  The environment al
so provides great opportunities to test out your wind powers. Can I move the leaves on this branch without affecting the leaves around it? What’s the skinniest tree limb I can land on? You’re learning how to do things that, coming from a coastal environment, you would never even have thought of exploring.

  At night, the cabin’s windows are small dots of light in the mysterious, lively wilderness that is the forest.

  * * *

  >>

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  * * *

  Please turn back a page

  * * *

  * * *

  Please turn forward a page

  * * *

  Magic Resilient, by Kayla Bashe

  * * *

  As the weeks pass, your training gets more strenuous, and you have less and less time to keep up with your studies. But that’s okay, because you’re training to protect the universe—it won’t matter if you can’t do calculus, right? Right!

  Running on the sand makes your legs stronger, and you cool down afterwards by eating chocolate ices—there’s a man who comes around to the beach with a little cart and rings a bell to let everyone know he’s there so he can give out cold desserts.

  You learn how to travel underwater by creating air-bubbles like helmets around your heads. Breathing surrounded by seawater is an almost mystically strange experience, but it teaches you that water can’t drown you unless you let it in, that nothing can harm you unless you let it. You wrestle illusory jellyfish, and you train far under the ocean,

  Malou waterproofs her knives against rust. Shani begins developing gills when she transforms. Char learns that there are certain types of gas-fires that can burn underwater, blue and yellow and strangely luminous, just like the eyeshadow she paints on each morning.

  And you discover that, underwater, swimming is a lot like flying, and the currents of water can move like those of wind. One’s willpower, not the elements in which one finds oneself…that’s what matters.

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  >>

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  * * *

  Please turn back a page

  * * *

  * * *

  Please turn forward a page

  * * *

  Magic Resilient, by Kayla Bashe

  * * *

  The four of you take to eating a lot of hearty porridge and biting chunks off of maple syrup candies during your breaks. It’s bitterly cold in the mornings, but it’s a challenge you can more than meet.

  You learn about mushrooms that are good to eat and mushrooms that bring pleasant hallucinations to the wounded and dying, plants that you can put on wounds to make blood clot faster, plants that keep bug bites from itching—or keep away bugs! Your brain is working just as hard as your muscles.

  The environment also provides great opportunities to test out your wind powers. Can I move the leaves on this branch without affecting the leaves around it? What’s the skinniest tree limb I can land on? You’re learning how to do things that, coming from a coastal environment, you would never even have thought of exploring.

  At night, the cabin’s windows are small dots of light in the mysterious, lively wilderness that is the forest.

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  >>

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  Please turn back a page

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  Magic Resilient, by Kayla Bashe

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  Once, when you and your squad are walking back to the apartment from an impromptu macaron run, you spot a man following a young woman who clearly doesn’t want to be followed. “Hey, what’s your name? What’s your number? You’re pretty cute, girl.”

  She bites her lip, moves away a little, pretends not to hear. He keeps pursuing her.

  “Hey, girl, you speak Common? You hear what I’m saying?”

  People keep walking by, and you know you have to do something.

  “Excuse me,” you say, sliding smoothly in between them. Your accent is intimidatingly strong, and you stare him down with the detached, almost disdainful force of pure nobility. “Please leave her alone.”

  He squints at you. “Oh, yeah? You know her?”

  “Yes, we know her,” Shani says, emphasizing the we.

  “We’re her bridesmaids,” Char adds sweetly. Malou, meanwhile, sets her stance a little wider, crosses her arms over her chest, the action emphasizing her muscles. Together, you give off an air of unstoppability—woe betide anyone who messes with someone under your protection.

  He scowls, mutters something inaudible, but peels away. The woman looks a bit stunned.

  “Hey, you okay?” you ask.

  “Yeah,” she says with a small, shy smile. And “Thank you.”

  It’s no problem, you almost tell her as she heads away. I would have done it for anyone. No one deserves to feel unsafe. Exchanging smiles and fist-bumps with your squad, you can tell they’re thinking the same thing.

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  Magic Resilient, by Kayla Bashe

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  Charmaine flops around on the bed. “Verdie, I can’t sleep, are you up?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Then will you entertain me? My thoughts keep going around in circles, and I can’t sleep!”

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  It's nice to finally have some time to hang out with Char one-on-one.

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  Magic Resilient, by Kayla Bashe

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  Slowly, your hosts allow you to encounter more and more challenges. Working together to stop a leaking kayak from sinking (you’re positive that Testimony put that hole in the bottom of your boat by folding her arms and giving it a sideways glare, but you wouldn’t dare mention it. ) Building a fire and setting up your own tents—even sleeping in the wilderness! (Okay, you’re only half a mile away from the cabins—but when the owls hoot at night, and the crickets buzz and the stars shine and the trees rustle in the wind, it seems pretty wild. ) You develop a sense of faith in your own inner invincibility.

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  Please turn back a page

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  * * *

  Magic Resilient, by Kayla Bashe

  * * *

  Once, when you and your squad are walking back to the apartment from an impromptu macaron run, you spot a man following a young woman who clearly doesn’t want to be followed. “Hey, what’s your name? What’s your number? You’re pretty cute, girl.”