“So you don’t really work at the Tankard, I take it?” she said.
“I do, actually,” he said brightly. “Weekends and the occasional mid-week shift.”
“How does that work with . . .” Sloane paused. “Your other job?”
“My other job is only demanding at certain times,” Mox said. “And it doesn’t pay very well.”
The driver poked the radio dial again, and the news returned.
“Reports of a skirmish between the Resurrectionist and the Army of Flickering in Bridgeport last night have surfaced. There was only one casualty, a police officer by the name of Paul Tegen. He is survived by his wife and his two-year-old son.” The driver changed the station again. Mox looked unconcerned, as if the mention of the Resurrectionist had no effect on him whatsoever.
They crossed the river and cruised down Canal Street, past a bright pink building that bulged on one side. It turned out to be a grocery store called Hey Presto! with a flying shopping cart as the logo.
The taxi stopped in front of Union Station, a wide, tan building with a row of Doric columns across the front. She remembered the Great Hall inside it, with its gridded skylight swelling up toward the heavens in a barrel curve. She had been there only once, as a child, taking the train from central Illinois to the city with Cameron and their mother.
She followed Mox in. It was difficult for her to keep up with him—a new experience for someone as tall as Sloane, but Mox’s strides were long and purposeful. Once inside, though, he seemed lost in the chaos, twitching when people called out to each other or got too close to him. Sloane thought of the can of green beans slamming into the wall the night before. She dragged him toward the line to purchase tickets. “You’ve got cash, right?” she said. “Hand it over and stay here. I’ll do the talking.”
When she got back from the ticket counter, he was standing helplessly in the middle of the room, staring at her. She pushed a ticket at him, and together they walked to the right platform, with Sloane directing them. Mox seemed easily confused by signs and distracted by everything around them. She had to drag him along more than once before they made it to a bench where they could wait in the chill of spring, when no one else was outside. She wore the cloak he had worn the day before, the hem singed by magical fire, and he wore a jacket not unlike one she might have worn at home.
“You don’t do a lot of traveling,” she said to him once they were seated. Her words found a shape in the air, like smoke.
“I do magic,” he said, and he chewed his thumbnail. “Never been good at the other stuff.”
“Like . . . basic existence?”
To her surprise, he nodded. “I used to break all my mom’s dishes. I’d be holding one and then—I don’t know. I’d get distracted and—crack. Light bulbs too. Even forks and spoons, sometimes.”
“What you told me about your parents and Arlington,” Sloane said, “was that true?”
He nodded. “They put me on a plane to Chicago when I was . . . nine? Ten? I’ve only seen them a couple times since then.” He ripped his thumb out of his mouth. “They think I’m dead now. It’s better that way.”
“They don’t sound great,” she said.
“Maybe they weren’t.” His thumb was bleeding at the cuticle. He had bitten down too hard. “Or maybe they just . . . weren’t prepared to have a kid bursting at the seams with magic. It’s still—” He shifted. “Too much. It’s too much. Makes me—not settled. Not stable.”
She put a hand on his arm. It was the only thing she could think to do. “I don’t handle magic all that well either,” she said, and she held up the hand that wore the siphon, letting the bright light of day reflect on its scales. “It’s not that I’ve never done anything with it, you know. It’s just unpredictable. And . . .” She shrugged. “I guess I don’t like it.”
“You don’t like it?” He frowned at her. “But—”
The train was coming, the brakes squealing as it charged into the station. It was bulky and awkward-looking, with protruding lights on the front that blinked until it came to a stop. Mox and Sloane got up and walked along the platform to the last cars so they could avoid the crowd that had gathered around the first few.
Sloane climbed the narrow steps into a riot of color. The train’s carpet was a garish pattern in yellow, blue, and pink, all triangles and circles and squiggly lines. But it wasn’t a standard passenger train; it had compartments, each with two long bench seats facing each other. She ducked into one of them and settled in next to the window. Mox closed the compartment door behind them, whistled, then tugged on the door to test it. It didn’t budge. He smiled.
“And you don’t like magic,” he said to her.
“If the only thing magic did was facilitate my curmudgeonly impulses, I would love it,” she said. “Unfortunately it also has a tendency to rip people to shreds, so . . .”
Mox tipped his head in acknowledgment. He sat down across from her and draped one long arm across the back of the seat.
A few people tried the compartment door, but none of them made it through, so when the train pulled away from Union Station, Mox and Sloane were still alone. He was looking out the window, and she found herself looking at him. His face was an assemblage of opposites: stern nose and strong brow sitting over a vulnerable mouth, ears sticking out, childlike, through the tangle of hair, which had a few threads of gray she hadn’t noticed before, despite his obvious youth.
“Feels like you’re trying to take me apart,” he said without looking away from the window.
“You’re hard to figure out,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows. “So are you.”
“No, I’m not.” Sloane shook her head. “You just haven’t been to my world.”
“Something tells me I wouldn’t do well there.”
“Are you doing well here?”
He laughed. “No, I guess not.”
The train charged out of the city, following the path of the river southwest, Lake Michigan behind them. It was the same path Sloane had once taken to go to her childhood home. Her mother had told her to get her things out of the garage because she needed the space. For what, she hadn’t said. So Sloane had packed up her stuff and Cameron’s too and piled all the boxes in a U-Haul to drive back with her. She knew the big empty stretches that awaited them, cornfields crumpled by the chill of autumn, silos standing alone on the horizon. She didn’t think Genetrix’s rural Midwest would be any different than her own.
“Your soldiers will be all right in your absence?” she said.
“It’s not the first time I’ve left them,” he said. “The working that holds them to life will last a few days without me there to sustain it, so they won’t fall apart.” He paused. “Well, some of them might literally fall apart, but that’s easily remedied.”
Sloane cringed. “You were very—tender with that woman whose arm you stitched back on.”
“Oh, Tera?” He shrugged. “Well, it’s a delicate business, sewing someone’s arm back on.”
“I just didn’t realize you had personal relationships with them.”
“Ah.” Mox had been calm, sitting back on the bench, his legs crossed at the ankle. But now he sat forward and started tapping his fingers together. “They’re my friends.”
She had to be careful. She wasn’t sure what might make Mox’s magic lash out, and they were on a moving train. “From . . . before?” she said.
“From before they were dead, yes,” he said.
“How did you bring them back?” She wasn’t sure that she wanted to hear the answer, really. Knowing it would make it hard not to try it herself with Albie or Cameron or Bert. Hard not to make them a barrier between her and the world.
“I wanted it,” he replied, “more deeply than I have ever wanted anything.”
“And that was enough?”
“That’s just the part I can explain.” His hands squeezed into fists. She reached out and covered them with her own. He flinched at her touch and stared at
her, dark eyes wide.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” she said, sitting back.
But his hands were relaxing, his body uncurling. He was, she thought, a thousand things at once. A language she did not know.
“You said you were at a funeral when you were brought here,” he said. “Whose was it?”
It had been a long time since she had thought about Albie. He crept into her mind, of course, when she wasn’t vigilant. In unguarded moments before she fell asleep or when she woke up thinking about what she might tell him, only to realize she would not be telling him anything ever again. But she had not tried to think of him.
“Albie,” she said, and the name was soft in her mouth. She added, “He was my best friend.”
Mox nodded as if he knew, and perhaps he did know something about it. “Was it your Dark One who killed him?”
“No. Well, indirectly, maybe. He . . . killed himself.” She hadn’t said it out loud before—not like that, anyway. So plain, so bare. “We took down the Dark One ten years ago, but Albie never quite got past it. I guess I haven’t either.” She forced a laugh. “How do you get over that? The shit we saw. The shit we did.” The knot of scars on the back of her hand was a constant reminder of that. “In some ways it’s been easier, being here. Doing the same thing over again. I know how to do it, how to be this. But I never quite figured out how to be a regular person.”
Mox smiled a little. “I know the feeling,” he replied.
They lapsed into silence then, but there was no tension in it. Both of them just stared out the window, watching the passing buildings grow sparser and sparser.
34
TEN MINUTES from the St. Louis station, Sloane felt something within her go quiet. It was as if loud music had been playing, and someone had cut the power. Mox gave her a knowing look.
“Haven city,” he said. “They’re not content to just outlaw magic within the city limits; they also have to dampen it. They would shut it down entirely if it were legal.”
“They can do that?” she said.
“A siphon is just a machine that amplifies magical energy. It can also do the opposite.” He offered her a grim smile. “Which is why it was so alarming to my parents when I had uncontrollable magic despite living in a haven city.”
He really hadn’t been exaggerating when he bragged about his raw power, Sloane thought. Her entire body felt heavy.
They exited the train and walked down a concrete tunnel that led to the Grand Hall. The building that housed it looked like a castle, with its stone walls and towers and pointed red roofs, but the hall itself looked like Chicago’s Union Station, barrel-vaulted and spacious. There was no skylight, however, just green tile and decorative knots in the arches, with feminine figures holding lights featured here and there, offering their glow to the heavens. Red booths and chairs were arranged all around them, places for people to sit as they waited.
A security officer standing next to the doorway gestured for them to go left, toward an area with metal lockers that was set off by velvet rope. Mox led the way to one of the lockers and unfastened his siphon from his wrist and fingers. Sloane followed his example. He placed the siphon lovingly inside the locker, and she nestled hers beside it.
They joined a line of people waiting to exit the roped-off area. At the front were two security officers holding what looked like metal paddles. They ran the paddles up and down people’s bodies and around whatever bags they carried, then waved them through. Sloane raised an eyebrow at Mox.
“Siphon detectors,” he said. “Can’t have anyone smuggling in magic, can they?”
“Guess not,” Sloane said.
The line moved quickly, and Sloane made it past the paddles without a hitch. But the second the woman with the tight bun held her detector up to Mox, he put up both hands and stepped back.
“I’m an Exception,” he said.
The woman sighed. “ID card, please.”
Mox had already taken a white card that looked like a standard driver’s license from his back pocket. The security officer held it up to the light for a few seconds, then returned it to him.
“All right,” she said. “You’re good.”
Mox strolled through the security checkpoint to Sloane’s side and led the way to the exit. She waited for him to explain, but it didn’t seem like he was going to, so once they were in the taxi line, she poked him hard in the arm. “Exception?” she said.
He sighed and bent his head toward hers, almost like he was going to kiss her. She lurched back, but he only pointed to his eye. He held the lower lid down so she could see better.
Her cheeks warm, Sloane leaned in. His eyes were dark brown with a hint of green near the iris. One of them was unremarkable, but in the other, the iris appeared to be broken, as if the pupil were spilling into it. His eye shifted minutely, and the misshapen pupil glinted, iridescent as a fish scale.
“What . . .” she said.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “But it makes those machines go haywire.”
He straightened and stepped out of the taxi line for the next available car, leaving Sloane standing there, strangely breathless.
Sibyl’s house was a duplex with a chain-link fence and a set of kitschy wind chimes hanging next to the front door. A blue Toyota sat in her driveway, its bumper rusted. Mox walked up the porch steps, opened the screen door—which had several holes in it—and knocked.
When Sloane thought of a prophet, she imagined a man in robes warning of coming doom or maybe a fortuneteller in some smoky back room shuffling tarot cards. Sibyl was neither. She was small, middle-aged, wearing a green cardigan with a little star pinned near the collar. She had flung the door open in a panic—or a rage, it was hard to tell—and stuck her finger right in Mox’s face.
“What have you brought with you?” she demanded. She looked over his shoulder at Sloane, standing at the bottom of her steps.
“I’ll explain,” Mox said, “but not out here, obviously.”
“If you think I’m inviting that into my house,” she said, jerking her head toward Sloane, “you’ve got another thing coming.” She stuck her feet into a pair of slippers next to the door and stepped outside. “We’ll go into the garage.”
“Sib,” Mox said.
“Don’t call me that!” She looked around, wild-eyed, like a neighbor was going to pop out of a bush. “Good Lord, boy, have you forgotten where you are?”
She charged down the steps, giving Sloane a wide berth, and led them across her neat lawn to the garage. It smelled like mildew and gasoline, and it was packed with old furniture, sagging boxes, and rugs rolled up tight. For all that it looked like an assembly of junk, there was a kind of order to it, Sloane noticed. Sibyl wandered through the maze of possessions, turning on lamps, clearing chairs, plucking cobwebs from her hair.
“Sit!” she said, gesturing to the chairs. “You’re both huge; it’s intimidating to a little old lady like me.”
“You’re not an old lady,” Mox said with unmistakable fondness. But he took one of the seats.
Sloane stayed where she was. “I’d rather not,” she said. “It’s pretty obvious you don’t want me here.”
“She doesn’t mean anything by it,” Mox said.
“Don’t I?” Sibyl raised an eyebrow. “The magic coming off the two of you is going to choke me to death, even dampened. So what is she? Is she like you?”
“Dunno,” Mox said. “Depends what you think I am, exactly.”
“Chosen, obviously. You both stink of it,” Sibyl replied, and Sloane felt like someone had dropped a stone directly into the center of her.
“Chosen?” Sloane looked at Mox. “You’re—”
Splotches of red appeared on his cheeks and crept down to his throat.
“Now, now,” Sibyl said. “Even the dark things of this world are Chosen. It’s not a badge of honor. If anything, it’s like a blinking arrow that says ‘Kill me!’ ” She opened the refrigerator in the corner, took out a bott
le of water, and fumbled with the cap, hands trembling. “In this case, though—Mox here is our fated savior, wrapped up in enough siphons to encase a city block in ice, and surrounded by dead bodies. Doesn’t bode well for Genetrix.”
Mox. Chosen. Sloane felt like a computer that had been fried by a power surge.
“Your faith in me always lifts my spirits,” Mox said, with a bite to his words. “Sloane was Chosen, too, Sibyl. But in an alternate universe.”
Sibyl looked Sloane over, then raised an eyebrow. “Interesting,” she said. “Sit down, girl.”
This time, Sloane did, finding a lawn chair near Mox and perching on the edge of it. She was wedged between a lawn statue of a cherub, worn by rain, and a cardboard box with Charlie’s Room scribbled on it in permanent marker.
“On your other world, you fought a battle,” Sibyl said, sinking down onto a fat tree stump. She set her water bottle down and sat slumped, her arms around her knees. She looked so small that way, the bones of her spine sticking out even through her cardigan. “It clings to you still.”
Sibyl was looking down at Sloane’s scarred right hand. Sloane resisted the urge to cover it up.
“That was not your battle,” Sibyl said. “Not really.”
Sloane’s instinct was to argue. It had been her battle; of course it had. The Dark One had taken her brother from her. That she would fight him had been an inevitability not even worth discussing. But there was too much truth in what Sibyl had said for Sloane to deny it. It had been a battle worth fighting, but that didn’t mean it was Sloane’s. For ten years she had been jiggling her knee, waiting for something to make sense, for something new to happen. But until now, it had been too terrible to consider that there might be another fight in front of her and that it might be hers in a way the other had not.
“Why, exactly, have you come to see me?” Sibyl said.
“I was brought to Genetrix against my will by Aelia and Nero and . . . whoever else,” Sloane said. “They told us the Resurrectionist was destroying our world along with Genetrix, and they wouldn’t let us go home until we killed him for them. But Mox . . .” She frowned. “I just want to know what’s real.”
Chosen Ones Page 31
