by Shaun Barger
Nikolai looked at her, aghast. “Fucking Christ . . .”
“Just kidding! About that last part, I mean. The execution oath is real.” Then, at his expression of deepening horror: “Awww. I wouldn’t ever hurt you, Baby Nik! What I’m trying to say is if you tell me something illegal, I’m not going to report you. That makes me an accessory. So if you get busted—BOOM!—I’m busted too. But I know you, Nikolai. You’re smart. Careful. And you take an ass-kicking like a champ. So I trust you. I know you won’t get me in trouble. You can tell me anything.”
She wrinkled her freckled nose. “Except about your exes. Never tell me about your exes.”
A warmth spread through Nikolai. He felt light-headed.
“I . . . held a few things back,” he said. “About what happened with Hazeal. We talked a little, before he tried to kill me.”
Ilyana seemed unsurprised. “About your mom?”
Nikolai nodded. “He said my mom showed him what’s beyond the Veil. That we’ve been lied to about what’s really out there—that the expeditions are bullshit, the data and footage falsified. But of course he wouldn’t tell me what the supposed truth is. He just said . . .”
The gun will teach you the secrets of manipulating Veil with the apocrypha weave. To make a door in the sky. To see the human world, for yourself.
“ . . . that it’s horrible, but not in the way I’d think.” This had troubled Nik, almost as much as the newly mysterious circumstances surrounding his mother’s death. “If—hypothetically—Hazeal was telling the truth . . . what do you think might actually be out there?”
Ilyana took a swig from her bottle.
“Ohhhh, I’ve got the usual set of theories. If you really don’t buy the official story that it’s all wastelands of broken reality permanently ruined by Vaillancourt’s enchanted warheads, then . . . well . . . maybe it’s just the inky void of space. Or maggoty lands, pockmarked with Foxbourne breeding pits. Maybe boiling seas of lava, or rips and whirlpools in space-time that would drag you back to the age of dinosaurs. Oh, the folly of man! Oh, the foolishness of magi. Who knows? We’ll find out once we’re Lancers, like your mom was. So long as we do our jobs and keep our noses clean. So no more sneaking off and defying orders, kiddo. Or no government-issued time-traveling pterodactyl for you.”
“Yeah. You’re probably right.” Nikolai shifted uncomfortably, swirling around what little honeybrew remained at the bottom of the bottle. “It was weird how much he hated her. Everyone else I’ve ever met who knew my mom never shuts the fuck up about how amazing she was. How much they miss her. How much I look like her.”
His lips twisted into a sneer. “Why would I want to hear that? Um, hello, twenty-year-old boy. FYI, you look just like your piece-of-shit mother, who we were all so fucking terrified of that we still kiss her ass, even though she’s been dead for a decade. I thought my parents died in a skycraft accident, but Hazeal said he ratted her out about something, and that’s what got her killed. Which, of all the things he said, that’s what I believe the most. I wonder what she did? Knowing her, I bet it was baaaaad.”
“Treason?” Ilyana suggested. “She was really high up for a while there. Practically Jubal’s second-in-command. A traitor rising so high in command before getting caught would have made the king look weak. Covering it up makes sense.” She put a hand on Nikolai’s arm. “Especially to protect the ones she left behind.”
Nikolai tentatively put his hand over hers, grateful for the comfort. “Yeah. I totally buy her throwing a coup. Sometimes when she was manic, she’d clean the entire house with Les Misérables just blasting from a memory cube. She’d sing the whole thing—had it memorized. Then she’d be in this really great mood for the rest of the night, and would joke around with me and my dad with this genuinely terrible French accent.” He snorted. “What a fucking joke.”
“I hate Les Mis,” Ilyana said.
“I dunno,” Nikolai chuckled. “I think it’s pretty good. Humans were always so much better at theater than magi. Which doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“Bigger talent pool,” Ilyana said. “There were, what? Seven billion of them, in the end? And like, three hundred million of us—all spread out in thousands of different Veils. Population as small and divided as ours can only produce so many musical theater prodigies.” She turned her honeybrew bottle over, frowning as a single droplet trickled out. “You didn’t pack seconds, did you?”
Nikolai peered at his own empty bottle. “ ’Fraid not.”
“Probably for the best,” she sighed. “I’m tipsy already.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Did he say anything else to you? Just ‘Your mom’s a traitor, the outside’s a lie, fuck you Nik—die, die, die’?”
He looked at her for a moment, then shrugged.
“Well Nikolai,” she said. “All I can say is . . . fuck Hazeal. And fuck your mom. I know it’s easier said than done, but try not to let it get to you. And maybe . . . at least think about telling Jubal. You know he’d be cool about it.”
“Yeah. You’re probably right.”
Ilyana pulled out an intricately carved tobacco pipe. “For what it’s worth, I can sympathize with you having a shitty mom. When I was eleven, mine sent me away to live with my dad, who I barely knew, in New Damascus. Said a mage of my ‘disposition’ would be better suited to the North American Veils. Basically bought me out of the family by giving me my inheritance early. Which just happened to be slightly more than my father’s total worth, as a snub.”
Nikolai hissed a breath. “Jesus. That’s . . . fucked up. Where are you from originally?”
Ilyana rarely talked about herself, even when pressed. Nik knew that her father owned a chain of distilleries and breweries, but she’d never mentioned her mother before.
“Xanadu,” she said, thumbing tobacco into the pipe. “My little brother is studying law—being groomed for office. They’ve been prepping him since he was little, poor kid. So I obviously had to go. Bad influence and all that. My mother’s the Lady of Xanadu, actually—she’ll be running to be Duchess Elect of the Asian Veils in a couple years. Be the fourth Xue sorceress to hold the position, if she wins.”
Nikolai smiled, but then realized she was being serious. “Whoa—what? Your mom is—”
“Yep.”
“Oh,” Nik said, taken aback.
Ilyana took a glittering crystal flask from its holster at her hip and twisted the top. The liquid within, which had been a sluggish glowing red, was replaced by glittering silver dust.
The flask was Ilyana’s logic Focal, which would normally have marked her as a potion master. The long, ruby-bladed dagger sheathed at her side was her art Focal.
While many Focals, such as Nikolai’s, merely served as conduits for spellcasting, other Focals like Ilyana’s flask served as magical tools to aide in their profession. Within the flask, Ilyana could store any number of different potions and ingredients within myriad tiny pocket dimensions. The dimensional pocket of her choice was selected with intuitive twists of the cap.
A small opening appeared at the top of the flask, and Ilyana gently tapped out a dash of the mysterious silver dust onto the tobacco in her pipe. She lit up the pipe and took a deep drag, holding it in. When she exhaled, the smoke came out swirling blue and green—tiny sparks crackling like a little electric storm.
“My parents separated when I was little,” she said. “My mother remarried, then had my brother. He and I used to be close, but we barely talk now. Mother’s side of the family is an old lineage—they weren’t very happy when she ran off with my father. He’s always been wealthy; our honeybrew and dragon’s milk are popular in Veils all over the world,” she added, with a hint of pride. “But he’s Merchant class—so, you know.”
“Who cares—rich is rich, right?” Nik said.
“Royalty cares. Also, my father’s black. So there’s always that.”
“Ah. Good ol’ classism and racism,” he said, eyeing the electric cloud o
f smoke with alarm. “Disc—what the hell is that stuff?”
“What,” she purred, exhaling another cloud of emerald and blue. Nik could feel her relaxing beside him, sinking deeper against the wall as her muscles seemed to melt. “You’ve never had Strum before?”
Nik stared at her blankly.
“Poet’s Powder? Glow Dust? No?”
He shook his head.
“Aw.” She leaned over and kissed his cheek. Nikolai flushed, trying to hide his surprise. “Sometimes I forget what a hayseed you are. Want some?”
“I dunno . . .”
She giggled. “That’s okay, Baby Nik. I won’t force you. It’s pretty mild stuff. Makes colors brighter. Makes every stone and every blade of grass burn and sing. Makes it so I can see my own magic. My weaves—they’re like gossamer. I can see them, hear them. Understand them in a way that’s hard to describe. Like our bodies are just gloves and we’re our magic, you know?”
She held out her hand, spreading her fingers. Threads of light shot from her fingertips, glowing neon purple, blue, pink, and white. Then she clenched her fist, sighing, and the threads disappeared.
“When we cast spells, it’s our real bodies we’re moving, peeking out from these husks.” She looked down at her naked hand with disdain. “These gloves.”
Nikolai stared at Ilyana, concerned. She met his gaze, her lips peaking up into a sly smile.
“I used to be called the Alchemist back in Academy,” she said, her eyes lit with a feverish gleam. “Did I ever tell you that? I was a purveyor of all sorts of mind-altering substances. Dangerous stuff—stuff you can only get from the worst part of the Noir district in the capital, from half-mages of ill repute. Stuff that can make nightmares come to life.”
“Yeah?”
“I got lucky,” she said. “I’ve cleaned up since I became an Edge Guard. Strum? Strum is nothing. Strum’s a trip to the shore twenty minutes away.”
“I’m . . . I’m glad nothing bad happened,” Nik said weakly. “I’m glad you joined the Edge Guard, and that you’re okay. You . . . are okay, right?”
“Me? Oh, I’m graaaand,” she said, tapping out the ashes from her pipe and pocketing it. “I’ve always had money. Always gotten everything I’ve ever wanted. But when you get everything—it gives you a kind of clarity.”
She held up a hand and created a snake of fire. It coiled in and out through her fingers, slender and colorful.
Nik watched nervously, worried that she was going to burn herself.
“A blindness too,” she continued, “to so easily have what so many others struggle for their whole lives; it removes all value. But value’s an illusion—there’s your clarity. Magi, Nikolai? We’re purposeless little things. We work, we breed, we live our lives, but nothing really changes. Day-to-day life has been pretty much the same for a century. There’s no disease, no real poverty. And worst of all—there’s no frontier.
“The borders are set, the Veils unchanging. There aren’t any new lands to discover, to bend and shape. We’re stagnant. Nothing we do matters because nothing will ever change. So I’d Strum and I’d Glow and I’d enjoy every possible explosion of the senses. Because I don’t feel much, Nik. I never have. I smile, I talk, and I laugh—but most of the time, I’m just sort of . . . numb. Like that feeling you get when you’re so bored it hurts. Like there’re ants under my skin, and if I don’t find a way to distract myself from them, they’ll eat me alive.
“But then I became an Edge Guard. Then I found out that there are monsters at the gate. Or something like monsters. That our borders are delicate, and that we aren’t stagnant at all but desperately trying to keep the darkness at bay, to keep from being snuffed out like tiny candles. I don’t know what’s beyond the Veils, I don’t know what we’re training to fight, if anything—but for the first time, I have something to care about. I have purpose. Captain Jubal and the Edge Guard gave me that.”
Her eyes widened and she was smiling, elated; the rope of fire she’d been twisting between her fingers collected into a coil over her palm.
“Though sometimes,” she whispered, her smile disappearing, “sometimes I wonder if it might be better to let it all come crashing down.”
The coil of flame began to swirl—growing, spinning—and as it grew, she stared into it, enthralled, until the inferno began to roar and the heat of it grew so hot that Nikolai’s civilian clothing began to singe. And it was getting hotter now, so hot that Ilyana was going to hurt herself, was going to burn off her hand—
“Pyrkagias!” Nik breathed, clasping his hand down on hers, smothering the roaring flame with an inverted weave of the spell. Their fingers intertwined—and as the flame disappeared, she slowly came back to reality.
He wished he had something to say—something smart. Something funny or insightful. Something that could take away her incredible sadness. But all of a sudden, he’d never felt so young, never felt so naive—and it struck Nikolai that he didn’t know Ilyana at all.
So he kissed her. Hand sliding along her neck, down to her waist. She kissed him back and reached up. Nikolai felt a flash of heat, and then another, and looked down to see that she was burning off his buttons with tiny bursts of flame.
A wizard and a sorceress fucked in the Disc’s pale glow.
Afterward, they lounged in a tangle of limbs on the blackened picnic blanket, fingers entwined as they stared into the Disc.
“I’ve never killed anyone before,” she said, barely above a whisper. “I thought that I might eventually. But not someone I knew. Someone I liked. It’s the strangest thing.”
Nikolai brought his hand to her face, tracing his fingers across the constellations of her faint, scattered freckles. “Nobody expects you to just be okay. But Hazeal—he wasn’t the same person he used to be. He would have killed me if you hadn’t stopped him.”
She chewed her lip, avoiding Nik’s gaze.
“It’s not that. It’s . . . it’s that I don’t feel guilty at all. And no, it’s not shock. It’s not denial. I just don’t care. How awful is that?”
Nik didn’t know what to say.
After a long silence, she pulled away from him and began to dress.
“Hey,” he said, panicking. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“No, no, you didn’t do anything wrong. But this. This can’t happen. We work together. I outrank you. I shouldn’t be getting high with you, let alone fucking you. This is all already so complicated. It’s been a while since I’ve felt like such a child. I need to just . . . process all of this. You know?”
“Sure,” Nik said. He sat up, awkwardly pulling on his now buttonless shirt. “I understand.”
“Chin up, Sergeant,” she said, flashing that wicked smile that Nik was growing so fond of as she clasped her final button. “You weren’t half bad. Let’s just take some time to think about whatever the hell this was, yeah?”
* * *
Ilyana didn’t sleep at the safe house that night. She was treating herself now that the stakeout was over, and had rented a room in one of the nicer hotels.
“I’ve got to be able to get a massage somewhere, even in a Veil as small as Marblewood,” she’d said. “Don’t call me unless there’s an emergency. And even then, don’t call.”
That left only Nikolai and Albert in the cramped apartment for their final night in Marblewood. Nikolai lay there, awake, staring at the dusty ceiling as he waited for Albert to fall asleep in the other room.
Alone with his thoughts, Nikolai replayed everything that had happened with Ilyana in the Disc Chamber over and over again. Little gestures, and things she said—the way she said them. The way she looked while they held each other, naked, in the shimmering silver light.
Slowly, his mind drifted away from Ilyana, focusing instead on his far less pleasant memories of the last time he’d been in the Marblewood Disc Chamber.
The two years that had passed since that day—Assignment Day—somehow felt to Nikolai both like an eternity, and no time at all.
On Assignment Day, young magi would swear oaths of magical conduct and then reach into the pool of water beneath the Disc to draw their Focals; indestructible pieces of a mage’s soul, manifested physically as objects able to greatly focus and power one’s magic.
First they’d draw the logic Focal, which symbolically represented and practically assisted with the career a magi would be best suited for as a full wizard or sorceress.
Second, they’d draw the art Focal, which represented and aided the creative vocation for which the mage had shown the most promise.
A mage could choose either to define their career path—or neither, if they preferred. Though that was unusual.
Nikolai remembered how hot it had been. Remembered the wide-brimmed hat and the sweaty, itchy fabric of his formal robes, which seemed to grow heavier with every student called before him to swear their oaths and draw their Focals.
The mage just before Nikolai drew a Watchman’s glittering, gold-striped staff as her logic Focal, which could powerfully channel the brute elemental forces of fire and air.
Nikolai stewed with envy as applause for the mage—a full sorceress now, having sworn her oaths and drawn her Focals—roared in his ears.
His father had been a highly respected Watchman, and since his death Nikolai had dreamed—obsessed, really—of following in his footsteps. Thinking of his father always filled Nik with warmth. The pristine white of his topcoat, flapping in the wind behind him; his watchman staff, twinkling with light as it coursed sluggishly up the striped gold.
Nikolai remembered being called. He remembered the other students whispering about him. Remembered the flyball players snickering as he approached the pool.
Oaths were sworn and Nik reached into the pool, not even bothering to roll up his sleeve. The water was like ice. He reached around, snaking his hand through the pool. The edges were smooth, more like glass than stone. His hand closed around what felt like a staff, thick and sturdy. Thicker than the cane of a teacher or the scepter of a politician. Resilient and utilitarian.
