Hard to get to too, all those people stuck in the center of an expanding structure …
“Got it,” he murmured
“You’re sure?” Patience said.
“There’s a chamber inside the ice towers.”
“Let’s get that thing off you.” She had found a pair of snips in his kit; he extended his arm, and she cut the copper wire.
Ev dropped his hand, but the glass beads declined to fall. They clung to his wrist as if stuck there. His skin pulled, like it had been glued. Heads bowed, they examined the intersection between the flesh and glass.
Crystal teeth, dozens of them, had grown from the beads and sunk into his skin.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
WILL HAD RUN OFF.
He’d come back, Astrid knew, and forcing the issue would be a mistake. She still heard the four of them up ahead in the future—her, him, and the kids. Chattering, getting along. Happy.
It didn’t help the hurt she was feeling now. He’d dumped her. Walked away, like Sahara. And she should’ve seen it coming—he dumped Roche, didn’t he? He was a dumper.
Maybe I should seduce that marshal. It was an entertaining thought: Why restrict herself to one lover, after all? I’ll get a harem. The idea provoked a halfhearted giggle.
Her true self, Astrid Prime, was aboveground for the first time in weeks. Since recovering from the sea-glass poisoning, she’d let Mark bully her into remaining within her cave of wonders. They’d expanded her chanting operation there, and she’d kept making objects that could save lives. Olive and the Lifeguards were recruiting more and more volunteers to forestall disasters when the unreal popped. The pile of portraits in Limbo was shrinking by the day; everything seemed to be going well.
But Will had left her.
It wasn’t working out anyway, was it? His wife dead, one disaster after another … and now Teoquan knows about my stupid conspiracy with Pop and Eliza.
Time was running out. Soon Teoquan would lead the Roused into the real, worsening an already-messy situation.
She had been working round the clock, chanting everything the scavengers could find, everything the volunteers could buy or steal. Her ringers roamed the world beyond the protected cave, meeting with experts, slipping contamination into remote woodlands, checking on their many dispersal projects. The newshounds’ contamination map showed more and more blue spots, slowly spreading pinpricks of blue, scattered worldwide.
Right now, Astrid Prime was testing her scarf chantment, the one that hid her identity. Disguised as a scruffy middle-aged guy, she was heading into the Alchemite refugee camp with a basket of fruit and vegetables.
She found a prayer circle on the lawn, a bunch of petitioners begging Sahara to forgive them for accepting the protection of the Filthwitch. Everyone not praying was improving the camp: building sleeping quarters, a dining area, planting a garden. A cluster of Alchemites around the waterwheel Thunder had erected were weaving letrico for the few chantments the Springers had allowed them.
It was impossible not to feel a kinship with them. This was what Astrid had done in those early days with Mark and Ma and Patience: figure out how to live among the giant trees.
“Nobody’s recognized you so far.” Mark was speaking to a ringer back in the Octagon.
“One of the women has burn scars on her face.”
“She got them in a clash with the army. Medics offered to restore her, but she refused. Says they’re relics of the holy war.” He touched the ringer’s arm. “Astrid, we did the right thing.”
“Using them as cannon fodder?”
“What were we going to do, fight the U.S. Army? Stop beating yourself up. Sahara isn’t, I guarantee you.”
“True, she wouldn’t.”
“Go on, talk to someone,” Mark said.
Astrid mingled with a crowd of refugees, angling for the pregnant woman, Mary, who was waiting to use a chantment.
“Bored?” she asked.
Mary shrugged. “Hoping that when I get up there, I don’t just get to make a sandbag or wood-chip a dead tree. Is that fruit?”
“Help yourself. Can I ask—?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why line up at all? Why not organize work crews, and let everyone else do their own thing?”
Mary selected a peach, touching it reverently. “Alchemy is worship. It’s prayer. Working miracles is touching the Goddess.”
Astrid frowned. “Using magic is part of your religious practice? Like a Communion ceremony?”
Mary nodded. “So we take turns using the chantments.”
“But you’d rather not make sandbags. It doesn’t feel holy?”
A struggle worked itself out on the woman’s face. “All Works are holy.”
“What if you had something more inspiring to do?”
A smile. “I’d meant to go cure AIDS patients in Kenya.…”
“Would you still?”
“Pardon?”
“If someone turned you loose in Africa with a curing chantment, would you do it?”
The woman blushed. “There are others ahead of me for that honor. Besides, the Fil—Lethewood would never permit it.”
Astrid shrugged. “She’s always looking for—well, you’d call them miracle workers.”
Mistrust shaded Mary’s face. She put her hands over her belly. “I can’t leave here.”
“Astrid, you can’t recruit these guys as Lifeguards,” Mark said.
“It’s okay, Mary, nobody’s kicking you out.” To Mark, she said: “Why not? Give them beneficial magic, scatter them, get more people out of Limbo and onto the Big Picture?”
“They’d run off and do whatever Sahara told them. Or the Fyremen would pounce on ’em.”
“Still…”
“Why don’t you come on back?” Mark said. “It’s obvious none of them recognizes you. Successful experiment.”
“You don’t like my idea, so it’s back to my cave?”
“Are you invulnerable? Are you a god?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Well, mortal, accept that you deserve protection.”
“Deserve,” she echoed. She wasn’t sure she deserved any of this, the good or the bad. She’d done so much damage. Will had left her.
Everybody dumps me.
With a last look at the praying campers, she headed back through Bramblegate.
In the tunnel where Ilya’s diggers were extending the spillway, her ringer’s hands tingled painfully. Signs of imminent failure, Janet called it. The mouse within was dying. She took the ringer back to the plaza, walking into the glow.
“Death Valley,” she murmured. She stepped through, into a furnace, laboring to breathe as her iced body began melting.
“Mouse six is finished,” she said, this time via a ringer in the science wing. A biologist noted it: she was tracking Astrid’s ability to extend her consciousness through the vitagua.
“You’re living every woman’s dream.” Katrina came up behind her. “Doing a million things at once.”
“Thirteen things, anyway,” Astrid said. Out in the screaming heat of California, she took a last look around. Alchemized locust nymphs were hatching from vitagua-soaked sand. Cobalt grass grew at the edges of the blue-stained puddle she was leaving as she died. Birds, spiders … she’d never have thought a desert could be so alive.
The researcher produced another contaminated rat for her, dropping it into a tub of vitagua. A new Astrid coalesced around it. Once dressed, she’d gate back to Ilya’s crew.
“It feels harder right now,” she reported. “Maintaining the split focus.”
“Maybe because Astrid Prime isn’t chanting. The rush keeps your concentration sharp, right?”
“That makes sense.”
“We’ll set up a proper experiment.” The researcher made a note. Astrid took the ringer back to the end of Ilya’s spillway.
She stepped through … into chaos.
Red blood, blue magic: the first thing she saw was Ilya,
bleeding into the underground river of vitagua. Tilde, the volunteer who drove the tunneling chantment, lay half in and half out of the fluid, features shifting as contamination turned her into a muskrat. The others were under guard; armed men covered them with rifles.
One of the soldiers had been watching for her. He fired, embedding a bullet in her blue iced skull.
Astrid let the ringer fall into the river. There were more popping sounds now; they echoed weirdly in the vitagua, and she sensed bullets moving past her.
A flare: the liquid magic was afire.
“It’s the pipeline, there’s an attack, the whole pipeline could go up,” she said, all her duplicates at once—to Mark, to Katrina, to Pike and Olive, to the London intelligence center, to the scavengers and Chakeesa down in the sea pipe.
The digging crew was in danger. Rising again from the vitagua, Astrid pulled more fluid into herself, growing huge, seven feet high, eight feet. Flames licked her ankles, and her rat nose filled with a stench of burnt flowers and hair as she reached for the soldiers.
It worked. They turned, pumping more bullets into her but missing the rat, whose heart was stuttering under the strain of so much liquid weight.
“Pike, tell the miners to run through Bramblegate, now!”
The pipe organ hummed and the Springers stepped back, against the wall. One, two, three. Everyone but …
“I can’t get to Tilde,” she said.
“Tilde’s dead, boss,” Pike answered. “I’m sorry.”
The fire was spreading—she was the fire. Astrid felt a terrible sense of dislocation— Is this it? Is this when I burn? Then relief: if this was it, it was just another mouse death.
One of the Fyremen was gathering the smoke. They would use it to make purificado for potions.…
“Astrid, can you seal off the tunnel?”
“Yes,” she said. They had taken precautions: a row of sandbags lay on the bank of the channel, innocuous and well out of the flow. Now she washed vitagua upward, soaking their contents: not sand at all but a mixture of live things. Grass, seeds, mushroom spores, dirt, bamboo shoots, and earthworms began to grow and mutate, filling the confines of the tunnel, digging roots into the rock, devouring space, oxygen, and moisture. Here and there, the fire began to smother; in other places, the exploding vegetation began to burn.
A Fyreman’s bullet finally struck the rat at the heart of her ringer, and it collapsed.
“This is the Doghouse.” The announcement boomed out over all the musical instruments posted in town: “The pipeline is shutting down, repeat, pipeline is shutting down. Ilya and Tilde are dead. The rest of the tunneling crew is at the hospital. It’s the Fyremen.…”
Vitagua was still burning. She focused on the Spillway, reaching out, freezing everything solid—then did the ravine too. Iced vitagua didn’t ignite.
The flow of liquid magic from the unreal slowed.
For a terrible second, she thought it wouldn’t work. But the fire burning its way down the pipe slowed as the chill took hold and the sandbags filled the tunnel with organic matter. Soon the tunnel was an impassable mass of frozen roots and magical fluid.
The ground shook: the unreal, pushing against the slowing of the vitagua flow. She sent a ringer straight to the source: Teoquan, of course, down in the Pit.
“What gives, bitch?” Teo usually wouldn’t deign to speak to the ringers: he was offended by the way she used dying mice and other animals to sustain them. And they never lasted long here—even as he locked eyes with her, the ringer began to ache. “Daddy finds my missing people, so you shut off the flow?”
“We’ve got a problem here,” she told him.
The survivors of the digging crew were with the medics. “They drilled into the pipe,” said one. Others were sobbing, mourning Tilde and Ilya.
Crew leaders were converging on Astrid’s cave. “Chakeesa,” Mark asked, via tuning fork, “How’s the sea pipe?”
“No sign of trouble,” she replied. “We’re gonna keep going.”
“I’ll arrange more security,” Mark said.
“What do we know, Mark?” Astrid said.
“Those guys were definitely military.”
“The Fyremen teamed up with the U.S. Army. They’re not working at cross-purposes anymore: they’re focused on us.”
“I told you taking in the Alchemites would lead to this!”
“Mark, enough. How do we deal?”
“Take ’em out before they get to us,” he said.
“They may be an army, but we aren’t,” Astrid said. “And I have to get the vitagua flow reestablished before Teoquan claws a doorway from the unreal into the Chimney.”
“What if we kill two birds with one stone? Let the raging bloodthirsty lunatics out of the unreal and see how they make out against the pyromaniacs?”
“The Roused are nobody’s sacrificial lambs.”
“But the Alchemites were?” That was Olive.
With Will gone, they could discuss this openly. She clamped down an urge to cry. “The Alchemites were going after the army anyway. All we did was arm them.”
“Well, they’re out of the game now. Either the Roused go after the Fyremen or we do,” Mark said.
“Meaning?”
“Come on, Astrid. Every time you come up with one of these warm fuzzy vitagua-dispersal programs, the bad guys smack us down. It’s time to rip off the Band-Aid.”
She was alarmed to see people nodding. “No, it’s not that time yet.”
“Are you sure?”
“Mark, what are you suggesting?”
He pushed his nonexistent glasses up his nose. “Take that shovel you made and fry their rosarite. They’re hiding in the magic-proof circles they’ve made, their precious zones of disenchantment.…”
“And where are we supposed to start?”
“Do the world. Blow all their defenses. Expose them, and we can go after the source of the curse.”
“Mark, a global-scale chanting—we don’t know if it would work. Even if it did, it would take so much power.…”
“We’ll draw heat.”
“That much cold air would do a lot of damage. The storms—”
“So we shelter people.”
“All of them?”
“It might make a good dry run for Boomsday.”
“You’re talking about an enormous storm. And the Fyremen won’t sit idly by while we destroy their defenses.”
“It’ll be dangerous,” Mark agreed. “It’s time some of our butts were on the line.”
Ouch, she thought. “I bet you’ve got the butts all picked out?”
“Excuse me?”
“You ban me from the strike team, guilt me into hiding down in a cave, and now you’re accusing me of cowardice?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“It’s all very well to push people around a map in the war room, Mark. But how do I pick who lives or dies? You talk of newbies, nonessential personnel—”
“Tilde and Ilya are dead,” he snapped. “Is it any better because you didn’t choose them?”
He was right. She should have done something better, something more. “The cold snap you’re proposing to trigger … innocent people will get hurt.”
“Who dies if we keep doing this piecemeal?”
“We can’t just—”
“You let Will roam off without so much as a by-your-fucking-leave, Astrid. Either you’re in charge, in which case grab some guts and do this, or sign off on it.”
Again, that disturbing sense of agreement from the others. “Who? Who are you asking me to kill, Mark?”
Mark’s mismatched eyes widened. “Do you still believe in your Happy After prophecies? Aren’t they worth dying for?”
“Thunder, maybe? No, he’s too important. Olive—wait, that’s not fair, she’s paid a high enough price, what with Jacks dying and all, and Lee, and Dad—”
“Don’t drag me into this,” Olive said.
“We might all die.” Mark reached up,
touching the bridge of his nose, pushing up the glasses that weren’t there anymore. “I’m not on the Big Picture yet.”
“There’s time. I can save—”
“Goddammit, Astrid, your hang-up about saving every last soul is what got Jacks killed.”
She heard people gasp.
“You’re right,” Astrid replied, stung. “If I’d handed you over to the cops when I had the chance, maybe he’d be here now. Then I’d have someone who was actually—”
“Don’t stop now.”
“Someone who had my back, no matter what.”
Mark’s lips curled back. “Maybe. But you’d be short a punching bag, wouldn’t you?”
He pushed away from the table. Thunder put out a hand, and he slapped it away.
“I’m fine,” Mark said, and the magic glasses embedded in him told them all it wasn’t true, he was lying. He vanished through Bramblegate.
Astrid buried her face in her hands.
It was Olive who spoke first: “He’ll chill.”
“He’s not wholly wrong,” Thunder said. “We need to deal with those maniacs. The thing keeping us from releasing the magic into the open air is the curse. Bust that, and—”
“Happy After,” Olive said. “It’s got to happen sometime.”
“This is the Doghouse,” boomed a nearby timpani. “There’s a riot in progress in a New York toy store. A power blackout is spreading across the East Coast. Someone’s drawing power directly from the grid.”
“Mark?” Thunder asked.
“Mark’s in the Octagon,” Astrid said. “Giving my ringer there the silent treatment.”
“A Fyreman trap,” Olive suggested, “trying to lure in Alchemite looters, maybe?”
“Toy store,” Astrid said, her heart heavy. “It’s Will. He’s not just off sulking somewhere. He’s lost faith.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
WILL HAD ALWAYS LOVED time-travel stories, and he knew well enough that his own romantic ideas, gleaned from those books and movies, were the reason he’d seized upon rewriting the past as the solution to his current problems.
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