The next shelf down was even more interesting. Monsters and Madness in Russian Folklore. Mythical Objects of Ancient Greece and Rome. The Ark of the Covenant: Fact or Fiction?
“Were you studying to be an archaeologist?” Sloane called out to the kitchen, where the coffee machine was groaning.
“No,” Evan called back. “Just a hobby. Lost its charm when magic became a reality.”
“Why?” Sloane turned to face him as he came back into the living room, her hand still hovering over the Russian folklore text.
“No mystery left in anything, I suppose,” Evan said. He was carrying the coffeepot in one hand and three mugs, his fingers through the handles, with the other. He set all of them down on the coffee table on top of a book about castles, its dust jacket marked with rings from old cups.
“What do you do, Mr. Kowalczyk?” Esther asked.
“I work for the post office,” he said, sitting down. “Don’t you remember, Shauna? You sent me letters for Santa Claus when you were a child.”
Sloane smiled. “That’s right. I thought you knew his address.”
Evan smiled back. “It’s strange for a child to understand that it’s helpful to be well connected.”
Sloane moved to the pictures arranged on the mantel. Their Bert had lost his wife in a mysterious incident—he had never been specific—that had later motivated him to join ARIS, in search of explanations.
“I’ve never seen this picture of Anna,” she said, picking up one of the frames. In the photograph, a young Evan Kowalczyk sat beside a plump woman—Anna Kowalczyk—her hair tied up in a scarf and a pile of knitting on her lap. The picture of domesticity.
“Ah, you wouldn’t have. I was never very good at sending your mother copies.” Evan’s mouth pressed into a line. “Or staying in touch.”
“It’s a two-way street,” Sloane said, hoping it was true.
“How did she die?” Esther said.
“You don’t know?” Evan raised an eyebrow. “She was killed by the Resurrectionist.”
Esther’s and Sloane’s eyes met. Sloane thought of the rubble of the Drain site, a tomb of bodies and memories that would never be recovered.
“How is your mother doing?” Evan asked her. “I know the anniversary was always hard for her.”
“Oh, she’s all right.” Sloane shrugged. “Dad’s driving her crazy, as usual.”
It had seemed like a safe comment in her head, but it came out sounding wrong, like a dissonant chord. Evan froze with his cup of coffee on his lap, his eyes on her. Sloane didn’t dare to look away.
“I mean—” Sloane began.
“Pete’s been dead for ten years.” Evan set the coffee down on the table, his hand trembling. “You’re not Shauna, are you?”
He had gone rigid. Sloane felt her heartbeat all through her body—chest, fingers, throat, cheeks.
“Shit,” Esther said.
“No,” Sloane said. “I’m not.”
“Who are you?” Evan stood and stepped toward her. She stumbled back toward the front door. Esther was on her feet, too, inching out of the living room.
“Someone who knows what you could have been,” Sloane said coldly. “There are plenty of mysteries left in the world, Evan.”
“Who are you?” Evan demanded again. “How do you know me?”
Her eyes burned suddenly, like she might cry. Violence flared inside her, so similar to the burn of magic in her chest that she worried she would cause another gale like the one in the Hall of Summons that had shattered the oculus window.
She raised her voice: “The Resurrectionist killed your wife, and here you are delivering mail, living in your dead aunt’s house, like there’s nothing to avenge!”
“How do you know whose house this is?” Evan’s face had gone white. He blinked a stray tear down his cheek, forgetting to dab it away with his handkerchief. “How do you know anything about me?”
“She has some latent . . . clairvoyant . . . abilities,” Esther said, grabbing Sloane’s arm. “She’s also kind of an asshole, so sorry—”
“Get out,” Evan said.
“How can you be so—” Sloane started, but Esther was dragging her toward the front door.
Sloane gave in to Esther’s grip, letting herself be wrestled outside and down the steps to the sidewalk. She heard the door slamming, the lock sliding into place. Esther said something to Kyros and Edda, who were still waiting for them by the curb, but Sloane couldn’t make out the words.
She sat on the concrete and tried to breathe. Esther’s hand was on her back, steady and warm. The sun was setting, and with it came the brutal wind coming off the lake, like daggers on her skin.
They all stayed still for a long time, until Sloane’s ears burned from the cold and Esther was shivering.
After a while, Sloane said to Esther, “I wouldn’t read those FOIA documents if I were you. It’s not a Bert you’d want to know.”
“So why did you read them?”
Sloane shrugged and tilted her head back to look at the sky. The moon was rising behind the clouds. “More information is better, right?” She laughed. “Fuck.”
“Fuck,” Esther agreed. “Want to get a drink somewhere?”
“Yeah,” Sloane said, and she let Esther help her to her feet and hook her elbow around Sloane’s. “I know a place.”
Esther laughed, her crisp voice echoing down the empty street. Edda was standing on the corner of the street, her siphon hand raised and shining with ethereal light. Hailing a taxi.
“We’re in an alternate universe!” Esther said. “How do you know a place?”
Sloane managed a smile.
23
THEY PULLED UP to the Tankard, which didn’t have a real sign, just an old beer mug rendered in pink neon shining through the front window. Inside, it looked like a pub, wood paneling everywhere, sticky but warm. Sloane raised an eyebrow at Esther as they walked in; the man sitting on a stool by the door was uninterested in their IDs. Sloane ran both hands through her hair to push it away from her face as she scanned the place for Mox.
“Looks like a movie set,” Esther said with a snort. She was right. The dark alcoves, the stone walls, the tables with candles burning on top of them—it was a scene from a fantasy movie or a place in a theme park. Except here, the magical effects were real: a lemon wedge floating over a gin and tonic, squeezing every time a woman took a sip; a martini with a bouncing, glowing olive; a glass of flaming whiskey whose fire didn’t burn out when a man drank from it.
Esther found a table in the back where they could all huddle together on low wooden benches, and Sloane went to the bar. The bartender wasn’t dressed like the people in the Camel, that much was certain. Her clothes were tight, for one thing, and ripped every which way, artful tatters. Her nose was pierced horizontally with a metal rod that expanded when her nostrils flared.
“Hi,” Sloane said when the bartender came closer. “I’m looking for Mox.”
“Mox, huh?” the woman said. “Who’re you?”
“Sloane,” she said. “He told me I might find him here.”
“I’ll see if he’s around.”
“Can I also—” But the woman was already gone. “Order a drink? No? Okay.” Sloane walked back to the table, where Esther and Kyros were talking.
“So they follow me, which means every time I put up a video or a picture, it shows up in their feed—”
“Feed?”
“Yeah, like a big list of all the people they follow mashed together.”
“And following someone just means you want to see videos of them talking.”
“Yes.”
“Why not just talk to the people around you?”
“An excellent question,” Sloane said, sliding into a chair.
“Because that’s harder,” Esther said, laughing. “You have to do the whole social rigmarole. But on social media, you can be at home in your underwear and still feel like you have a social life.” Esther was wearing Barbie pink lipstick
and the standard siphon that Sloane had struggled with earlier that afternoon. It wasn’t decorative enough for Esther; it was at odds with the pale yellow swirl of fabric around her face, which dissolved into a diamond-patterned dress that tapered to her ankles.
“I’m not sure I’d want antisocial, naked people to watch videos of me,” Kyros said.
Sloane glanced at Edda. She was scanning the bar. Her siphon was rudimentary, like the one Esther wore on her hand, but hers was on her ear, giving her a lopsided appearance. She saw Sloane looking at it and arched an eyebrow.
“What? Do I have something on my face?”
“No,” Sloane said. “Just not sure what the ear ones do.”
“Enhanced hearing,” Edda said. “Distant sounds, sounds too quiet for the human ear. Some people use them to interpret a person’s tone better, but I’m no good at that.”
Sloane saw him then, ducking under the low door frame behind the bar, his dark, wavy hair pulled back into a low knot, his eyes finding hers right away, as if drawn by magnetism.
“Hey,” she said when he was close enough to hear her. “Told you I’d escape.”
Mox was so tall that when he sank into a crouch beside her stool, he was almost at eye level. “Welcome.”
“I’m Esther. This is Kyros and Edda,” Esther said, sticking out her hand for Mox to shake. “Heard you helped my girl out of a jam.”
“Unrealist snare,” Mox said.
“Unrealists.” Edda snorted. “Bunch of pretentious art students.”
“They can be brilliant, though,” Mox said. “Even the snare is an advanced working, likely requires an assembly of at least five people with a high level of dissonance. Hard to maintain.”
“Just because something is difficult,” Edda said, “doesn’t mean it’s worth doing.”
“If we’re going to talk about this, I’ll need a drink,” Kyros said. “Or seven.”
“Right.” Mox stood. “What does everybody want?”
“I want that thing with the glowing olive,” Esther said.
“The genie martini,” Mox said. “A fine choice.”
Kyros and Edda both ordered beers that were obviously familiar to them. Mox looked at Sloane.
“I . . . will go up there,” she said. “I want to look at what you’ve got.”
“Sure you do,” Esther said, and Sloane glared at her. She was glad to step away from the table and away from Esther’s assessing stare. Mox slipped behind the bar, and Sloane leaned against it from the other side, making a show of squinting at the bottles lined up behind him.
She raised an eyebrow when Mox grabbed a sheet of paper and dragged it over. On it were written the ingredients for the genie martini.
“Bad memory,” he said. “Forgot how to work the olive.”
“That sounds like a euphemism,” she said.
He laughed and grabbed the jar of olives. Sloane watched with interest as he scooped one out with a spoon and put it in the bottom of the shaker. He covered it with his siphon hand, and she heard his low hum, much deeper than she was expecting. A wet bounce came from the shaker, and it shivered, with just his siphon hand keeping it still. He hummed again, this time higher, and when he pulled his fingers away from the shaker top, just a little, the olive was glowing blue. It bounced up, almost escaping, so he covered the top again.
“I bet a lot of things get smashed when you guys figure out new recipes,” she said. “Do you serve anything that doesn’t bounce, float, or continuously burn?”
“I could make you an OF OF—old-fashioned old-fashioned,” Mox said.
“Sounds good,” she said.
“Still no siphon for you?” he said, nodding at her bare hands. He scooped some ice into the shaker, careful to cover it until the last second so the ice could pin the olive to the bottom. He poured some gin and vermouth on top of it, at which point the olive had wriggled free of its icy prison. He covered the top and let the olive do the shaking.
“For all you know, I could have one on my right breast right now,” she said. “How do you get that thing to settle down enough for someone to drink it?”
“If you were rich enough and powerful to have a chest siphon, you would be cutting holes in your clothing to show it off,” he said with a laugh. “And it’s a dwindler, this working. All it needs is time.”
She tried not to give him a blank look, but she wasn’t entirely sure she managed it. “Maybe I’m not showy about my siphons,” she said.
“It’s not a character assessment, it’s a survival instinct,” he said. “We display our best assets to attract mates or to warn off predators. Like the peacock. Are you claiming to be better than millions of years of evolution?”
“I’m the pinnacle,” Sloane said, solemn. “Congratulations on meeting me.”
“I feel so honored.” He picked up a strainer and poured the drink into a martini glass, then added the olive. It danced at the bottom of the glass, no longer threatening to become a dangerous projectile.
“My siphon’s still getting repaired,” she said. “It’s only been a day.”
“Which would drive most people insane,” he said. He tossed the ice and rinsed out the shaker, then started on the old-fashioned old-fashioned with a muddler and a sugar cube in a fresh tumbler.
“I think it’s nice not to rely on magic for everything,” she said.
“You’re in the wrong place, then,” he said. “Might want to go to a haven city instead.”
Sloane didn’t know what that meant. “You ever been to one?”
“I was born in one. Arlington, Texas,” he said.
“No accent, though?” she said.
“I had some trouble with magic pretty early in life,” he said. “Moved here as a child to learn how not to destroy things with it.”
He paused with the tumbler in one hand and the jigger of whiskey in the other, his dark eyes fixed on her. She felt like he was waiting for something, and the longer she went without giving it to him, the more of a misstep she was making. But she was missing all the vocabulary for this place—the unspoken words for what a haven city was and what it meant that he had destroyed things with magic as a child and even what it suggested, that she could go a day without a siphon. “Did your parents stay here?” she said, knowing it was the wrong thing to ask but not coming up with anything else.
“Nancy and Phil, live in a magic hub? Perish the thought!” He spooned a cherry into the tumbler on top of the whiskey, ice, and sugar. “No, they never came to begin with.”
“Ah.” She searched, desperately, for a new subject. “Well, I’m from the middle of nowhere. High-school graduating class of twenty-three students.”
It had been a middle-school class in another dimension, but he didn’t need to know that.
“And now you’re here in the big city,” he said. He still had that look in his eyes like he was waiting. She knew the smart thing would be to end the conversation, go back to her table, and never see him again. But she stayed sitting on the barstool. “Doing what, exactly?”
“I already told you,” she said. “Mayhem.”
He didn’t laugh. The blue glow of the olive reflected in his eyes, which in the dim bar looked almost black. She watched the blue ricochet in his irises as the olive moved in the glass. Finally, he smirked.
“I guess you did,” he said. “Here’s your drink.”
She took the old-fashioned old-fashioned off the bar and sipped it, then followed him back to the table, where he handed out Esther’s drink and the two beers like nothing had happened. But something had—Sloane just didn’t know quite what it was.
Edda and Kyros were singing. The four of them were walking from the bar to the nearest hotel, where it was easier to hail a taxi. It was dark, and Esther had noted that at least half of the streetlights they passed were the old gas-burning kind. It seemed to Sloane that with the spread of magic had come a deep affinity for the past, but she wasn’t sure what one had to do with the other. Maybe it was like the movie-se
t feel of the Tankard—all their magic stories were set in old-timey fantasy worlds or eras so ancient the magical acts were associated with old gods and angels and demons, so they reached backward to figure out how to be magical instead of forward.
Esther hooked her arm around Sloane’s elbow. “So that Mox,” she said.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Sloane said. “And you’re off base.”
“All I was going to say is, if you want to have a rebound fling with that hot praying mantis, you don’t have to hide it from me,” she said. “That’s all.”
“Good to know,” Sloane said.
“I’d hide it from Matt, though.”
“Obviously.”
Esther cocked her head to the side and looked up at Sloane like she was trying to remember the title of a song. “You seem better here,” she said.
“Better?” Sloane laughed. “Tell that to Evan Kowalczyk.”
“I didn’t say you were normal, just . . . better. Steadier.”
“Well,” Sloane replied, “I know how to do this. Fight the big bad, dodge the government goons. Same script, different movie.”
Esther nodded. She choked a little when she responded: “I don’t want to do this again.”
Edda and Kyros had finished their song, one they had both learned in army training, apparently. They stood under the bright overhang outside the hotel, talking to a man in uniform with a whistle in his mouth.
“What if I die here?” Esther’s voice was throaty. “What if my mom dies at home without ever knowing—”
Sloane couldn’t bear to hear the rest. She had met Esther’s mother when they were both teenagers, and Esther’s face had still been round as a dinner plate. Her mother had been warm but somehow aloof, like she was living in two worlds at the same time, and each took her attention away from the other. And then, years later, after her diagnosis, she had been half the size, her head wrapped in a scarf, and still always smiling.
None of their parents were the dream of what parents should be. Every one of them had given their child away. But of all of them, Esther’s mother was maybe the closest, fussing over Esther’s diminishing waist, always foisting cookies and tea on them even if she was in someone else’s house.
Chosen Ones Page 21
