HOW I FIRST MET THE MAGICIAN AND WHAT SHE MEANT NOW
The rumors about the Magician up to that point had come to me vast and unsubstantiated, because Wick was terse on the subject and I had few other sources. Some said she was homegrown, rising from the broken communities in the west, and that she had made the Company’s business her long area of study. That she had, early on, begun to gather up memories from anyone who could give her something useful—not just to sell but for any intel that might help her see what was going on inside the Company. She planned to use whatever she could glean against the Company. Until recently, that had seemed an idle threat. But when the time came, she knew enough to extort and bribe more tools and biotech off the last Company personnel holed up in the building, abandoned, eking out their existence complying with Mord’s demands.
But others said the Magician had once worked for the Company or that she came from beyond the mountains that didn’t exist because they were so far away or that she came here because her ancestors had ruled the inland sea that was now salt and desert and next to nothing. They said she was cruel and just, that she was tall and short. They said whatever they wanted, because the elusive Magician so rarely showed her face.
I had seen the Magician only once. She did not like to be out in the open, and, as she became more powerful, made herself visible mostly through the ragtag army of people she had made into allies. She worked her power, Wick said, from the way she could reimagine parts of the city as hers, and we had no competing vision with which to fight back. Those places only had form and substance and boundaries because of her efforts, lacked structure otherwise. We gained our power, or at least survived, by rejecting those boundaries and those spaces. By ignoring her control. From wanting to live apart, in the Balcony Cliffs.
The time I saw her I’d been driven to the far south to avoid a psychopathic scavenger. It was a day when I’d planned to take up my familiar position at Mord’s flank, had tracked him far to the west, once again into territory I’d not visited much, with the cracked skull of the observatory to my right as a landmark. But I lacked the nerve that day to latch on, to pull myself up into that besotted fur, and my adversary had taken that as a sign of weakness.
To the south lay only the desolate plain and the Company building beyond it. On the edge before the plain, I veered to take refuge amongst some circular ruins on a ridge of hills. I had my binoculars in my pack and searched for evidence of my pursuer.
Soon my attention was drawn to the hill opposite, where there was a similar circular ruin. Perhaps both had been cisterns, or both had been sentinel strongholds, but against that brown-gray stone shot through with lichen and yellow vines, for a moment only, I saw the outline of a tall figure gliding across the ancient stone wall. It was gone so fast I doubted, put it down to being overly alert for signs of the other scavenger.
Not more than ten minutes later, I heard a kind of rustle or unfolding, and a voice came from beside me.
“Hello, Rachel.”
I had my knife out, cast about me, stabbing, turned in a circle but was alone. My blade passed through nothing and no one. The attack beetle I’d readied floated out and, whirring, fell harmless to the ground.
“Put your knife away,” the voice said, husky, deep, but a woman’s voice. “Put it away. I’m not here to hurt you. If I was, you’d be dead.”
I sent another attack beetle toward the direction of the voice. It divebombed the ground, landed on its back, circled there with its wings buzzing.
“That’s a waste, Rachel,” the voice said. “I never took you as the wasteful sort.”
“Who are you?” I kept my knife out, but I didn’t use another beetle.
“They call me the Magician. Maybe you’ve heard of me.” The voice echoed, came from everywhere and nowhere.
At that time, she was nothing special to me—just another pretender, another grifter, another person deluded into thinking they mattered. A name that would be forgotten soon enough.
“What do you want?”
“You’re direct—good. Just like me,” she said. There was a hint again of the rustling, of the being-in-plain-sight. But I couldn’t see her.
“Say whatever you want to say and leave.” I still had the psychotic scavenger, Charlie X, to worry about.
“Are you happy now, Rachel?” the Magician asked.
Happy? Now? What a strange question. What a self-indulgent, unanswerable question. I wanted to stab the air again because of that question, send my beetles spinning out from me toward all points of the compass.
“What business is that of yours?”
A low, deep chuckle. “You couldn’t know this, but it is my business. So I ask again, are you happy? At the Balcony Cliffs? With Wick?” The smugness there, the hint of secret knowledge, of intimacy, made me hate her.
“Show yourself,” I said. “Show yourself if you want to talk to me.”
“You’re a good scavenger. You have a good mind. I’ve watched you for a while now. Long enough to feel like I already know you.”
“I don’t know you.” The light dulled and brightened over the desolate plains below, as clouds gathered and moved swift. Nothing else moved there. Nothing gave itself away. Charlie X was somewhere out there, wanting to kill me.
“But you could. You could join me.”
“Join you in what?”
“Something more than this.” She gestured at the sky, the sun, the land, as if we had the choice to leave it all behind.
“Why would I want to?”
“Maybe because I’m not like Charlie X,” she said, surprising me. “I’m not stupid. I’m not mad. I’m not living day to day. I’m actually trying to build something here—a coalition, a way forward.”
“What do you know about Charlie X?”
“I know he’s dead, and that I killed him. Just the other side of that cistern, on the hill opposite.”
Relief and suspicion and fear pulled at me.
“You’re lying.”
“I believe he was on your trail. I believe he meant to sneak up on you and take your life. I believe that won’t happen now.”
“You’re lying.”
“After we’re done here, you can find out for yourself. And, you’re welcome.” An incorruptible assurance in her tone, and I did believe her although I didn’t want to.
“What are you planning?”
“A way to defeat Mord. A way to bring us all into the future.”
Such bitter, mocking laughter the Magician might never have heard before. “If you could do that, you wouldn’t be here now.”
“Did you know the Company made abominations much worse than Mord, Rachel? Did you know they’ve meddled in so many things they shouldn’t have? Things that affect your life, too.”