A Universe of Wishes

by A Universe of Wishes (epub)

  “You’re thinking about drawing right now?” an murmured.

  “I can’t stop thinking about the lines of your body, the tucks and shadows, the curves and planes,” Elir whispered, slowly standing. “I’ll draw it however you like, you know, however you want it.”

  Irsu put a hand out to stop her approach. “I like it as it is, Eliri. I told you that.”

  “Then that’s how I’ll draw it. Though I think you’d look magnificent with wide drooping wings to match….” She caressed one of Irsu’s head feathers.

  An kissed her again, hands on her hips, and she tasted the threads of ans design on her tongue!

  * * *

  “Why are you a cultist? What is your cult?” she asked Irsu, draped against an later, half-dressed but lazy with kissing and touching and sharing knots of force between them. She knew an would say the hope cult that Insarra supported, but she longed for an to say something else. Give her a reason to argue.

  “Roc Aliel is the leader. Have you read any of his philosophy?”

  “No,” she said, though she knew the name: he was the founder of the hope cult.

  “He writes about possibilities. About being better than our design, pushing past what we know and believe, into a realm of infinity.”

  “What does that mean?” Elir asked, trying not to sound intrigued.

  “Well.” Irsu kissed her shoulder. “For example, he thinks we should have names for more than four genders.”

  Elir snorted softly. “More between? Or beyond?”

  “Either. Both. I know you are stuck at four in the same way most are, especially because you are an architect. Four-way thinking is the foundation of our entire society. Four genders, four directions, four forces! But there are more ways to walk to the horizon than east or west or north or south, and there are more possibilities between bodies and what different designs—physical and inner—signify.”

  Elir hummed, staring at the tiny whorls of hair on Irsu’s forearms.

  “Isn’t it more wonderful to imagine more than to limit your thinking?” an said.

  That made her sit up. She stared down at an, stunned.

  She’d had the same thought about architecture. About life itself.

  “See?” Irsu grinned. “You’re imagining possibilities.”

  But this was the thinking that had led to catacombs of dead babies and rampant sky-whales. Imagination and power running wild together. It sounded exhilarating—and dangerous.

  Irsu said, “Soon, Roc and I will crash over the city, and everyone will change in our wake.”

  “You and Roc? The leader of the hope cult.”

  “I’ll take you to meet him.” An lifted her hand to kiss the pads of her fingers, trailing them against ans lips. “I’ve been going to meetings and funneling cash. Mother has no idea. Rivermouth will be the stronghold of hope.”

  Elir’s pulse pounded in her fingers. Irsu was the one supporting the cult, not ans mother. An was the one her college should have her kill.

  She could never do that. She loved an. She agreed with an. Elir wanted to imagine more.

  Irsu sat up, holding her close. “Eliri, stay with me. You were made for infinite design! Born for this—for me. It is a fight worth fighting. Limitless potential! Hope!”

  She pushed away, climbed to her feet. She had to think. “The fallen god will not let you amass against him.”

  “He likes ambition!”

  “I should design you those wings,” Elir said, picking her robe up off the floor. “You would fly all the way to the stars.”

  Irsu laughed, and an was so beautiful it took her breath away. “I’ll let you, if you design a matching pair for yourself. I’m a little in love with you.”

  “A little?” she laughed, giddy and horrified—she’d not realized before they were so much the same feeling.

  “With all the possibilities ahead of us for more!” Irsu said, finally rising to ans feet, too. “A little love is only the beginning. This is the beginning.”

  Elir stared at an a long moment, at the curve of ans thin lips, the brightness of ans eyes, and the perfect haughty lines of ans bearing.

  She fled.

  * * *

  Her personal room in the college complex was tucked among those of other final-year students, in a honeycomb tower grown from the red rock of the crater. Elir hid herself within, curled on her pallet with her knees drawn up. She stared at the wall, papered with chimerical diagrams she’d drawn as a child: a griffon, its bones, muscles, connective tissues, feathers, and wings all on separate tracing papers; a thorn tree with bisected branches to show rings and veins; a rainbow bee, stingers drawn in large scale to show their mechanism; pear blossoms randomly sketched in corners; lips; her own name repeated over itself, again and again, to form a complex heart-design that might suit a massive monster like a sky-whale. From the ceiling hung the real wing of a tree dragon, furry chimeras made of lizards and rain-forest megabats. The wing’s long bones splayed like an open hand, with white-gold membrane stretched between, and the longest bone arced down, glinting pearlescent in the small bobbing force-lights.

  She thought of Irsu with such wings, though an probably would prefer graceful feathers, the black-and-white patterns of an oasis vulture.

  Elir thought of many things that long week she confined herself, sketching wings for both of them, various models and skins. Avian, draconic, mammalian, insectile. She thought of the first lessons of architecture, that there were only four forces; of the special blaze she felt when ecstatic pops fizzled into something more like flow; of what made the fallen god a god—his ability to change his design at will, without architecture, without external design; of her parents, especially her ama, who had so strongly proselytized moderation yet had worked design on az own womb to give Elir this crystal gift. Az had certainly imagined possibilities. Maybe the difference between college and cult was merely education and skill. Or only regulation. Maybe the cult needed someone to describe the distinction between true possibility and doom.

  Maybe Elir was arrogant to think she could make any kind of choice like that.

  She was only sixteen.

  But maybe only somebody at the beginning of their life could change the course of the future.

  A little love is only the beginning, Irsu had said. Maybe a little arrogance was only the beginning, too.

  * * *

  The song of the riot did not vibrate through the intricate security of the college, but Elir heard the noise. She was already on her feet when Sahdia came to drag Elir out of her reclusion, rolling her sharp eyes. “While you pouted, never finished your work, the hope cult has risen, Eliri! The commander will see you now, and you need a good explanation for your failure.” She pulled Elir into the corridor.

  Elir grabbed Sahdia’s wrist, jerking free. “What do you mean it has risen?”

  “That leader, Roc, has taken over Rivermouth, and you are the only one who can stop him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Insarra wants her new body, and she trusts you. Her household knows you.”

  “No, Sahdia, why must the cult be stopped?”

  “Ah! Eliri! If they have their way, someday there will be no humans left.”

  Elir flexed her hands, unsheathing all ten of her claws. “What is human?”

  “Has Insarra been preaching? She is corrupt. Remember your ama, and listen now to your commander.”

  “I never spoke to Insarra about hope.” Elir smiled before she could stop herself, recalling the passion in Irsu’s voice. She’d made her choice days ago. “Sahdia, I forgot something in my room. Go, and I will come after to the commander-philosopher’s office.”

  Sahdia frowned. She’d assisted the commander for years and knew well how to look for subterfuge in students. “You promise?”

  “I promise,” Eli
r lied.

  But the woman left her, and Elir hurriedly packed a small bag with only her favorite slippers, a set of styli, and the tracing-paper griffon diagram. She did not need any of the winged designs. After putting on her best robe she went out of the honeycomb student rooms and across the eight-star courtyard. The sky blazed red with bright lily-bombs, and intricate spirals of purple smoke rose. There came a roar in the seven-note chord of a raging sky-whale.

  Instead of turning into the command tower, Elir walked for the massive gates of the college.

  They spread like wings, cut of mountain crystals, with veins of red crater rock. Fuchsia blossoms trailed over them, from vines rooted in place, for the gates of the college rarely opened. Instead, a tiny arch cut into the granite wall beside them served as an entrance—and an exit.

  Elir drew a deep breath and unsheathed her crystal claws. She dug them into the gate, and baring her glittering crystal teeth, she tore through a knot of falling force. It snapped free, and she hooked a pop of ecstatic force, redirected it with two claws to disrupt the flow force binding the gates together.

  They groaned; the fuchsia blossoms shivered and began to fall around her like vivid rain.

  Then the gates of the college opened, scraping the street in a raw cry that would call the sky-whale here to distract the commander-philosopher.

  Elir walked through it, and there was Irsu with a streak of dark blood on ans cheek.

  Her lips parted in surprise and eddies of chaotic forces tickled her tongue as she stared. The crater city lifted around them in gleaming towers and arched bridges, floating apartments and rising ribbons of force, all a-shudder with the peal of alarm bells and the chanting cultists, with booming explosions and something like distant laughter.

  “I came to see you,” Irsu said. An wore a dark-blue robe, sleeveless and tight to ans chest and waist. It flared around ans hips like a skirt, and for the first time Elir had seen, an wore shoes, to protect ans feet against the dusty flagstones. She lifted her eyes from the soft brown boots, dragging her gaze up and up to ans face again, and the straight lines of ans hair as it gleamed in the hot morning violence. An added, “I came to implore you.”

  “I hoped you would,” she announced, letting her bag slide off her shoulder.

  Irsu stepped closer and took it, smiling ans wry smile. An offered ans free hand.

  Elir scraped her claws gently against Irsu’s sensitive palm. She said, “This is only the beginning.”

  Belvedere Castle in Central Park was an extraordinary building, but not everyone knew that. When construction began in 1867, the building was designed to be a folly. Danaë always thought that a folly was a mistake. Something people did by accident or an eternal flaw, like heroes in fantastical stories who tried so hard to beat a cruel destiny that would always be against them because of their foolish actions. But for architects, it meant a replica.

  The thing that made Belvedere Castle magnificent, to those who could see it, was the additional tower, a thousand and one feet tall, shrouded in a magical barrier. For everyone else, the folly was magnificent in a mundane way, meant to be whimsical but nothing else.

  Danaë felt that way sometimes, but then she remembered that, imprisoned in the top of her tower, she was not a folly. She was just forgotten.

  * * *

  Fabían Macías had the Sight, and it sucked. Coming from a family of brujas meant that he always smelled like incense and buried his moms’ good-luck trinkets at the bottom of his book bag, where they lived next to a city of pencil shavings, broken erasers, the MetroCards he kept forgetting about so they each only had seventy-five cents, and sticks of gum so old they were smooshed into the cheap polyester fabric.

  Fabían wished he could shove his family’s magic down in the bag with the rest of the forgettables, but he wasn’t about to piss off his gran. Besides, there was this girl down in Brooklyn everyone whispered about, Alex Morticia or whatever, who had some big type of magic that she tried to curse away, and it had backfired, turning all her family members into frogs. At least that’s what people said. What. A. Dum. Dum.

  See, Fabían’s beef with magic wasn’t that he didn’t like it. It was that he liked it so much. But he wasn’t chosen. Why couldn’t he have been an Encantrix or a weather brujo or even have the ability to guess Lotto numbers so he could buy his moms something nice. His cantos were weaksauce. One time, he tried to cast a canto to make his beard grow out so he wouldn’t look like an alley cat with patchy hair. Instead, he ended up with tiny green shoots, like he’d sprouted grass.

  Meanwhile, his brother, Gabriel, had that nice beard all slick and curly. They were otherwise the same, he and Gabriel. Both had their parents’ brown skin, thick eyebrows, and round eyes framed by lashes so long it made girls angry because the Macías brothers didn’t have to try. He wished that his family had been blessed by the gods of old, the Deos, the ones that their ancestors had brought with them as they migrated from Ecuador to Colombia, picking up magic tricks until they settled in a dank little building in El Barrio.

  Most days Fabían wished he’d been born ordinary. Knowing about the magical underbelly of a city like New York just made him want more of it. Other days, he felt lucky to just be part of the most exclusive club in the world. A brujo. Even a not-so-powerful one like him. He might not be raising the dead any time soon, but he could do what regular humans—magical ones, even—could not.

  He could See. That’s See with a capital S.

  The Sight was said to have been passed down in his family ever since his ancestor Túpac Pachaquil made a bargain with a goddess. He’d sacrificed something or other—Fabían couldn’t always remember if it was fifty guinea pigs or fifty rabbits, but that was the gist. The goddess blew in Túpac Pachaquil’s face the way Fabían had seen curandera witches blow holy water on the body of a possessed person to banish an evil spirit. The goddess banished Túpac’s human ignorance to the supernatural. Dispelled the layer that exists between the mundane and that which is magic.

  Of course, not everyone in his family had the Sight, which was sometimes a good thing. It was like how his uncle Marcelo had a crooked finger bone just like his great-granddad, and how his moms had the same beauty marks on her shoulder in the exact same spot as her father, and how his cousin Willie had the Macías ears but not the Macías nose. It was just another thing he’d been lucky enough to inherit.

  Fabían was unique in his own way. Even though he’d never been to Ecuador, he had something from the Earth’s belt. Something no one could take away from him.

  And he could see when he was getting a rat deal from the fairies in Central Park, when the mermaids were wearing their legs but didn’t hide their scales or strange ears and stranger eyes.

  He could see when vampires tried to glamour themselves a tan. Creepy AF.

  His Sight helped him survive the streets of New York City in a different way.

  That’s why it was so tragic that the Sight, the very thing that should have helped him See, was the very thing that would lead to Fabían’s undoing. There is only one thing that can trick a gods-given gift like his.

  Love.

  * * *

  Up in her tower Danaë could see the entire city and beyond. When she first came to be trapped inside its stone walls, she thought that someone might eventually come for her. But the only person who might have once remembered Danaë was her mother.

  Decades ago, they’d gotten off a ship to Miami, taken a train to New York City, and finally hopped on the subway as far as 116th and Lexington and walked down to their apartment on 114th. They had one suitcase between the two of them, plus a handful of seeds her mother had smuggled in the hidden pockets of her skirts. They’d been wearing the same dresses for days. It was lucky that her mother was a seamstress, able to repair their rips and seams, their buttons that kept falling off as if even they didn’t want to be attached to the Santiago A
guilar girls.

  Danaë could still picture her mother back then, with her thick curls carefully waved beneath a smart wool hat. Her dress perfectly fitted to curves that Danaë always believed she’d grow into herself. But over half a century later and Danaë was still stuck in the body of a sixteen-year-old.

  She pushed aside the curtain, like that might erase the memories of her life as it had been. She could divide her life in two segments: before and after the tower.

  Before the tower went as so: they rented a studio apartment in Spanish Harlem that had once smelled of urine and the carcass of an abandoned dog. Her mother always reminded her, “We might be poor, but at least we’re clean,” and soon enough they transformed their living space, polishing the wooden floors and adding a fresh coat of paint in a color that reminded them of the blush of spring. No rats or cockroaches dared sneak under their clean sheets. Even the ants that crept up the rusted fire escape avoided their space. Their little home smelled of bread after her mother learned to bake from a Polish woman on the second floor, who didn’t speak English either and didn’t seem to mind the mother and daughter who kept to themselves. For a time.

  There was a moment in between the apartment and the tower: a bad bargain, a betrayal, a terrifying limbo where Danaë slept until she woke in a stone room so high above the city, she could eat the clouds for breakfast.

  After the tower was an adjustment: there were months of screaming and tears. At least she had a soft mattress with silk sheets. At least the stones warmed in the winter and cooled in the summer. Danaë longed for a stove to bake bread. She longed for sugar to dissolve in fresh coffee. She longed for mangoes to bite into like a ripe, juicy heart. She longed for more than the three books the sorcerer had left on a single shelf, and the copper spyglass to let her peer at a world that was passing her by. Danaë was filled with so much longing, but none of the promise of possibility.