Blue Magic

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “Shakespeare, just what we need.” Juanita turned back to the news.

  Maybe Sahara’s people could get rid of him, she thought.

  A jolt went through her at the idea. Cooperating meant knuckling under. Crawling like a dog—and to save her own skin. She turned abruptly to the soda machine, getting a drink she didn’t want, drowning a tar-rotten rush of self-loathing with a burning swallow of bubbles and artificial sweetener.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WRONG BED.

  Will Forest drifted up from sleep, trying to place himself.

  A whiff of antiseptic threw him back to his one on-the-job injury. He’d been cracked on the head by an especially agile junkie, had awakened in the hospital with his family around him.

  Good days, before magic, before Caro metastasized into a stranger.

  Groaning, he opened his eyes to confront his present self: sprawled, grimy, and unshaven, on a king-sized mattress in the Indigo Springs Grand Hotel. The room was cold; a draft blew under the door.

  They hadn’t saved the kids.

  “Can’t fall apart,” he muttered. “Keep it together, keep it together.…”

  An inner voice tut-tutted. Squeezing back the pain, refusing to deal, would eventually cost him. But what could he do? Nobody else would save Carson and Ellie.

  He stripped, got in the shower, and only then discovered the bathroom had no running water. Standing there naked, filthy, and furious, it was all he could do not to punch the wall.

  Struggling back into the previous day’s clothes, he took the stairs down to the lobby. Teenagers were serving breakfast in the hotel café: he grabbed a boiled egg, a piece of toast, and a tomato and chewed automatically, tasting nothing.

  “Thirsty?” chirped a floppy-haired skatepunk.

  “Yes,” Will said. As their eyes met, the magical wiki fed him information: The boy’s mother had died giving birth to his younger sister. He’d asked Astrid to help him save women who might otherwise die the same way.

  A chunk of letrico glimmered in the kid’s pocket, powering a chantment that spun cups of steaming coffee.

  “New arrival, right? How you feeling?”

  My children are missing and I’m probably wanted for treason. He faked a smile. “All right, I guess … Paolo.”

  “Things get easier.” He handed him a cup that got heavier as it filled itself.

  “I’m okay.” Will sipped. It was espresso—strong, scalding, and bitter. “Thank you for this. Any idea where Astrid is?”

  “Greenhouse, maybe?” Paolo indicated the tuning fork on his wrist. “Ask Pike.”

  “Okay.” Will headed across the lobby. A trio of researchers bubbled past, debating quantum entanglements, dark energy, and human willpower as they merged with a second clique, this one a handful of those who’d been gendermorphed by Ev. Both groups vanished into Bramblegate. Six engineers sat on two love seats near the hotel’s revolving door, dividing their attention between the glassed-in TV playing trial coverage and a set of blueprints on the floor at their feet.

  “Reporters are asking about you, Forest,” one called. “Roche told ’em you’re in the field.”

  “Uh … they buying it?”

  “Nah—sightings of you are coming in across the world. You’re the new Elvis.”

  “Just what I wanted.” He glanced at the screen. Judge Skagway had a plastic toy in his massive hand. Wallstone was explaining what they knew—what Will himself had told them—about how chantments worked.

  “William!” Over at the concierge’s desk, Pike beamed out from behind two women in lab coats who were absorbed in a tin globe. “What can I do for ye this fair morning? Want to update your wiki entry? Merle’s right over there with the Rolodex.”

  Will eyed the chantment and its elderly operator without enthusiasm. “Doesn’t that waste power?”

  “Helping everyone get to know each other?”

  “Everyone knows me already. I’m the new Elvis.”

  “You have an unhealthy sense of your own importance, lad. How about a sample of the day’s headlines?” The lab coats had moved on; Pike handed him the globe.

  Will pushed it in a languid half circle with a fingertip … and immediately saw hundreds of newspapers.

  “Focus on what you’d like to read.”

  “It’s all the same, Pike.” Magical contamination in St. Louis was front-page news worldwide. The president was calling it a terrorist attack, but insisted the damage was minor. The last desperate gasp of Sahara’s cult, he called it.

  “They’re saying last night was Alchemites?”

  “Age of Miracles,” Pike replied. “Sahara’s brand, not ours.”

  “Roche will go after them.”

  “So? Boss didn’t ask ’em to claim responsibility.”

  In Missouri, the effort to burn contaminated plants and wildlife had been hampered by the storm and the gridlock on the highways out of the city. People would start ripping out their gardens and taking flamethrowers to their lawns, Will knew; in the early days of the catastrophe, he too had succumbed to that species of panic.

  Dispersing the magic was a mistake.

  He let go of the magic globe. “How do you know this thing is safe, Pike?”

  “Medics put a couple of the news junkies through regular PET scans. No brain tumors.”

  “Yet.” Could Astrid’s so-called volunteers really know what they were doing?

  “They can scan you too, or hey—don’t use the globe. There’s a stack of papers in the plaza, near the TV.”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  “Good. Then why don’t ye ask for a map of town?” Pike pointed at Merle again.

  “A map?” Merle fluttered the Rolodex, and the geography of Bigtop snapped together in Will’s mind. Astrid had given him a general tour, but this provided details: who worked in each tent, how the hospital was divided between Katarina’s various science types and Janet’s medics, the topography of the forest where the scavengers were currently working.

  “What I want to know is where’s Astrid.”

  “Power station,” Pike said. The hospital’s generator room, in other words. “Are you in a hurry?”

  “Why?”

  Pike handed over another chantment, a soap on a rope. “Shave and a haircut, if you know what I mean.”

  “Shave and a haircut,” Will repeated. The letrico in his pocket fizzed, and the sense of being grimy, which he’d been stubbornly ignoring, dropped away.

  Taking the soap back, Pike pointed at a mirrored pillar. The phrase was literally true—the shadow on Will’s chin was gone, his hair was short, and his clothes were not only clean but also pressed. “You were getting a tad ripe. Next time—”

  “Showers on the fourth floor here in the hotel, new clothes in the hospital laundry,” Will said. “Got it. Thank you.”

  Crossing Bigtop, he went into the hospital. Down in the generator room, he found Olive’s engineer boyfriend, Thunder, overseeing a group of new volunteers. He was teaching them to convert electricity into thin fibers of letrico, weaving up powerful balls of lambent fluff and then compressing them—Will thought again of crushed cotton candy—into crystals.

  The training group was working with a small generator. Across the room, a second group was constructing a letrico boulder the size of a minivan.

  When Will caught his eye and mouthed Astrid’s name, Thunder held out both hands, waggling his fingers in an imitation of the gesture she used when chanting.

  Will headed for the Chimney, but Astrid had already been and gone: volunteers were loading newly chanted items into shopping carts, hauling them to Bramblegate.

  “Will!” That was Janet, the strike team medic. She and Clancy, the driver, stood at the edge of the vitagua reservoir. With them was a woman with tightly curled black hair, olive skin, and the huge eyes of a newborn infant.

  “What’s up?” Will said.

  “New project,” Janet replied, brandishing a set of dog tags inscribed with her name.
/>   “You’re not giving up on the strike team, are you?”

  “Your kids are priority one,” she said. “But the seers haven’t found ’em yet.”

  “Priority one,” he repeated.

  “We’ll go again as soon as we have a location.”

  “Yeah, right.” Yesterday’s optimism had leached away. They’d come close, true, closer than Roche had ever gotten. Will had seen with his own eyes that his son and daughter were healthy, unharmed.

  But Ellie’s terror at the sight of him …

  Fury with Caro and Sahara warred with anxiety for his daughter. What had they done? What if Ellie never recovered?

  “Igme and Aquino have restocked the trolley for another rescue attempt. In the meantime…” Janet jingled her dog tags. Rocky bits of rubble from the destroyed town began tumbling upward from the forest floor. With each jingle, the pile grew—until it was the size of a largish house.

  “My turn.” Grinning, Clancy pressed a beribboned Easter basket against the rockpile. It softened like clay, reorganizing itself into an imposing pyramid of concrete, brick, and asphalt champagne flutes.

  “I’m Katarina.” The curly-haired woman stuck her hand in Will’s direction. She had a faint Russian accent.

  “Will Forest. Astrid called you … Dean of Science?”

  She guffawed. “Lofty title, yes?”

  “Isn’t it difficult to conduct research in a campground? Limited electricity, no water—”

  “No computers,” she agreed. “We only do easy stuff on-site.”

  “Easy?”

  “How much does vitagua weigh, measure the freezing and boiling temperatures. Is it radioactive, does it carry electrical charge?”

  “That’s easy?”

  “Da,” she said. “More complicated experiments I give to scientists outside the forest, people with real labs.”

  “Complicated like—”

  “Oh … calculating the carbon uptake of the alchemized forest. Video of cell division in contaminated bacteria, how fast do embedded chantments absorb magic from the infected, why does this not work the same on everyone, what happens to blood glucose levels of people using chantments?”

  “PET scans for the news junkies.”

  “Medics handle that, but I get copies of the scans. Everyone studies, everyone gets results. Then we figure out what it means.” She beamed. “Which is the fun part.”

  “Ready,” Janet said, and Katarina held out a hospital IV bag. She pointed the business end of the tubing at the champagne pyramid, and vitagua arced out of the ravine and into the bottommost glasses, flowing upward, filling the cups and, as far as Will could see, not spilling a drop.

  “How does Astrid come up with this stuff?”

  “This is my project,” Janet said, voice a bit sharp.

  “Sorry.” Blue fluid oozed upward to the topmost champagne flute until they were all brimming. “What now?”

  “Watch,” Clancy said. The champagne flutes shivered. Their bases stretched and broke into sections—petals, really—that furled tightly over the open top of each “glass,” sealing the vitagua inside even as they tumbled out of the pyramid formation, becoming a disorderly pile of eggplant-shaped rocks.

  “Okay,” Clancy said, satisfied. “Cart ’em up, give ’em to volunteers to scatter, and we’re done.”

  “You’re going to disperse them?” Will said.

  “All round the world.”

  “Then what—they’re timed to break, spreading alchemical contamination?”

  “No timers,” Janet said. “The natural process of erosion will random it up nicely without wasting energy.”

  “Isn’t dispersing vitagua Astrid’s problem?”

  “You expect her to do everything?” Janet said.

  “The more, the merrier,” Clancy said.

  That phrase again: it was some kind of inspeak, Will realized. “Speaking of Astrid, I’m trying to find her.”

  “Phone her,” Clancy said.

  “Pardon?”

  Katarina raised her hand and spoke to a whistle hung round her wrist: “Astrid, where are you?”

  The answer came back immediately: “Limbo.”

  “Limbo?” Will asked.

  “The Grand Ballroom,” Katarina said, even as the wiki dropped the same information into his mind.

  “The ball—” He sighed. “Back to the hotel.”

  “Gotta move fast to catch the boss lady,” Clancy chortled.

  By now, Will had gotten the hang of getting around Bigtop: Pass through the nearest Bramblegate, step out in the plaza of the train station, and cross from there to the blue columns of vitagua. He stepped between them, murmuring “Ballroom.”

  He found himself in a hallway floored by antique flood-stained carpets and lined with ornate Victorian armchairs. Vases full of liquid magic lit the corridor, illuminating brass signs that named the conference rooms for flowers: ORCHID ROOM, LILAC LOUNGE.

  A sound drew him to a set of open French doors. Beyond them was a patio, its safety rails broken and twisted, hemmed in by alchemized foliage. Olive Glade was out there, smoking a joint and staring at a black-and-white sketch of a woman. One of Jacks’s pieces, Will thought, recognizing first the work and then the subject—a figure skater, from the U.S. national team.

  Ellie had a similar poster up on her wall. She and Caro loved figure skating.…

  Olive waved the card. “Tell me, Will. If the medics fix her wrecked ankle and she wins another gold medal, is it cheating?”

  He shrugged. “Sports organizations regulate themselves, don’t they?”

  “You’re saying leave the dilemma to the Olympic committee?”

  “They’re going to have an opinion anyway.”

  “True enough.” She added the card to a small pile.

  “We’re treating sports injuries now? Isn’t that…”

  “What, trivial?”

  “A colossal waste of resources.”

  “The ankle injury’s just a way in. We approach people with something they want, and then we ask for their assistance.”

  “You’re bartering miracles?”

  “Magic’s fun, Will. Helping people, changing their lives—it’s a rush. Most recruits end up volunteering full-time.”

  “What do you want with a figure skater?” he asked.

  “There’s a cluster of people from her skate club at risk.” She fanned out a series of the pencil sketches. “The seers say that on Boomsday, they all die.”

  “Die how?”

  “Dunno yet. If we can find out if it’s a bus crash or avalanche—well, they’re not skiers, that’s not likely—or an outbreak of cholera, we’ll equip the skater so she can protect the group.”

  “Sounds a little like you’re creating superheroes.”

  “Why not?”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  She shrugged. “We screen the recruits pretty carefully.”

  “Olive, what are you doing here?”

  She blew skunky smoke into the thicket. “You know those old-looking women who turn up on the news now and then.… My kid’s in jail, I worked twenty years to prove he’s innocent, DNA evidence overturned the conviction, I knew it all along.…” She started to offer him the marijuana, then seemed to remember he’d been a cop. “I think I’ve become that mom.”

  “Because Astrid thinks she can get Jacks back from the brink of death?”

  “She’ll do it.” Her belief was rock solid.

  Somehow, that made his own doubts more painful. “In the meantime, you save others?”

  “It was find a purpose or wallow in despair,” she said, tone pointed. “Not a tough choice.”

  He fingered the skater’s portrait. “Jacks did these?”

  “Yep.” Reaching into a satchel, Olive produced a magic paintbrush. It was the first chantment Will had ever seen up close. The paintbrush was wrapped in a coil of fine copper wire, and it had a small plastic nub over its few remaining bristles.

  “It’
s falling apart.” He touched it gently. “I thought Astrid had toughened it up.”

  “She did what she could, but heavy use wears them out. Theory is it’s the energy. Katarina’s got a physicist in Santiago trying to figure out if electrons are actually moving through the objects, if it’s friction or heat…”

  “We saw wear and tear with a lot of Alchemite chantments,” Will said. “Arthur complained that by the time he confiscated anything, it was too frail to use.”

  Olive’s eyes darkened. “Rotten luck for him.”

  “Not a fan of Arthur’s, I take it?”

  “I take the napalm runs personally.”

  It was awkward: until yesterday, after all, Will had been with the people bombing the town. He turned to the skate club pictures. “So … thirty people at risk? That’s not bad.”

  She gave him a strange look. “You were looking for Astrid, right? Boss,” she told her pipe whistle, “Will’s on his way.”

  He took the hint, continuing down the hall, wondering if she’d “phoned” Astrid out of courtesy or to warn her.

  The ballroom was a long rectangle with an arched, coffered ceiling and alcoves that ran the length of the dance floor. It was gloriously ablaze with blue light—glasses, jars, even test tubes filled with liquid magic hung from the chandeliers.

  The room was full of people, the biggest concentration of volunteers Will had seen yet, grouped around tables that lined the parquet dance floor, poring over more sketches. As his eyes roamed the crowd, the wiki filled in biographical data. One woman was contaminated; she’d been turning into a llama until Astrid treated her. The guy beside her, a doctor, had been cured of a drug habit that cost him his license. A trio nearby, lifelong friends, had come so that Ev could gendermorph them.

  This was Olive’s crew: the Lifeguards. Unsettled, he tried counting heads. There were hundreds of people.

  “Morning!” Astrid passed a silver bracelet to a gangly man with dusky skin and facial tattoos before drawing Will off to the bandstand, out of the way. “How you feeling?”

  If Olive had been warning Astrid—if she was hiding something—it didn’t show. Then again, she’d always had a decent poker face. “Overwhelmed. What we did in St. Louis…”