There’s a long, long pause. Finally Howie says, in a different voice, “I’ve had to fight with my fists for everything, Danfrey.”
His answer warms me, encourages me. Maybe I might actually be cut out for this line of work. Hell, maybe I’ll survive undercover. Because all the little things I can’t help but read into: all of people’s tiny gestures and comments, their looks, their sideways glances? Now I’ve got a reason to put them to use. And it’s beyond obvious to me what Howie wants right now. What he always wants, I’ve gathered, from listening to him in the cafeteria.
“It shows, Howie,” I say softly. “You’re quite the fighter.”
He laughs, full and warm, and it bubbles over his cot. “Well, you ain’t so bad yourself, Danfrey. That POS was almost twice your size.” He waits another minute before he whispers, “You know, Boss McEvoy could probably use a young street sorcerer somewhere in his outfit. Especially a guy like you—guys like me and you. Scrappy guys willing to put their time in, and work their way up the ladder,” he says. “I’m hell-bent on doing it. One day, I swear, I’m going to be sitting at McEvoy’s table.”
Howie leans over the edge of his bed once more, steals a peek at me, like he’s making sure that I’m still down here. “And I’m just saying, we didn’t make a bad team back there.”
“You’re right.” I smile up at him. “We didn’t.”
“And there could be an opportunity for you—for both of us, if you want to team up on the outside, too,” Howie says. “It’s something to consider.”
I don’t want to seem too eager. But my heart is pounding, practically beating out of my chest. I nod at his upside-down face and his greasy hair hanging straight from his head like a patch of wet weeds, and I give him my most confident Alex Danfrey smile. “Then I’ll consider it.”
Howie rolls back onto his cot. “Good.” He gives one of those long laughs again. “Christ, you’re an animal, Danfrey. I mean really, who knew? Damn near got yourself killed by that half-brained guinea.”
His laughter dissolves into a chuckle, and I chuckle along with him. Because I know I’ve just received the highest form of compliment from this lowlife.
And I also know that I’m on my way in.
BRICK BY BRICK
JOAN
The four of us are nestled deep into the woods, away from the clearing, like many days these past few weeks. Grace and I stand farther into the forest, fifteen feet apart from each other, with our other allies Ral and Billy situated closer to the clearing, fifteen feet away from us, and from each other. The four of us form a perfect square. We’re in the middle of running a series of magic immersions in what Ral calls our “sanctuary”—a boxed space in the forest enclosed by a sorcered protection wall on each side of our square. Each protection wall works like a mirror, reflects back the dense, tangled wood, so that someone approaching our sanctuary would assume there was nothing but forest ahead. We use the space to try out new magic, perfect old tricks, and hide the little bumps and setbacks we don’t want the other sorcerers or Gunn to see.
“I want to work on our performance transitions,” Ral says. “Let’s run through the seasons.”
Billy groans. “My God, I can’t do the seasons again.”
“Our timing’s off, you know it, and Grace says the end’s coming soon.”
“I said I got a sense this whole trial of Gunn’s is ending soon,” Grace corrects Ral. “Gunn’s still tougher to read than a German paper.”
“That’s why we should be working through new tricks, bigger and better manipulations,” Billy presses. “That’s what Gunn wants to see.”
“No, I think Ral’s right,” I pipe up softly, across the sanctuary. “Our transitions should be flawless. The group performance has always been what it’s about for Gunn.”
Billy grumbles, “Fine, whatever. Just know that I can make it snow in my sleep.”
Ral shoots me a quick smile, then settles into his grassy corner. He whispers his words of power, raises his hands, and a collection of thin trees erupt out of the ground in the center of our performance sanctuary. The spindly trunks sprout into a mass of branches, then a kaleidoscope of fierce orange, deep red, and yellow leaves. Just as quick, the trees begin to kiss the leaves good-bye, sending them on a slow dance to the ground.
I’m not exactly sure when Ral passes the reins of the manipulation to Billy, but the pass-off is without a stutter. Ral’s autumn trees begin to grow darker, brittle, shrink under the touch of a light, soft, falling snow. The dusky gold sky of our sanctuary hollows into a crisp, clear white, as the piles of leaves around the tree’s roots wrinkle and blacken into dark corpses, and soon become buried by the thicklying snow.