I spat into the dirt. “The rumor is you’re beginning to modify people, and maybe not asking them first.”
The Magician laughed. “Oh, I always ask first. But you should ask Wick for his opinion on that before you judge me. Wick just wants to be left alone. I want to change the city. Bring back what we had before.”
“You want leverage over Wick.”
“I already have plenty of leverage over Wick.”
I thought that might be a lie, but her confident tone rattled me.
“But just not enough to get him to ask me to do work for you on the side, is that it?”
“You know, Rachel,” the Magician said, “being blunt, being direct, is fine sometimes. Other times that quality leads right to the boneyard.”
“I’m going to ask you one more time to leave,” I said.
“Or what? You’ve got one attack beetle left, a spider, and no gun. And you didn’t even know where I was until right this moment.”
In front of me, a person appeared, just far enough away to make stabbing her risky. It was almost as startling as if a tiger had appeared before me—as rare and surreal and mesmerizing.
The cowl to her robes was down or I would have paid more attention to the fact her robes weren’t clothing but a kind of biotech. She had thick dark hair and deep bronze skin and features that were lionesque or in some way regal, but for a scar that ran down her right cheek, hooking into her upper lip. If I was honest, the Magician resembled me more than she should, even down to the glittering eyes and her build. But my skin was much darker, I had no scar, my hair was short, and I had never been animated by that look of being born to command.
Mord could have hurtled down from the sky to devour her right then and she would still have kept her composure, even while finding some way to thwart his appetite.
“Now you can see me,” she said. “What do you think?”
I stuck to my resolve. “I think, one last time, that you need to leave.”
The Magician smiled, and it was as if the rays of the sun burst forth from her features—a radiance I couldn’t deny, and still that dangerous sense of self-regard.
“You’re a valuable commodity,” the Magician said. “You should have happiness, boldness, purpose. You shouldn’t huddle somewhere like a rat in a cage. But I can tell you aren’t convinced. So goodbye for now, Rachel.”
The cowl rose over her head like the living creature it was, and in a kind of glittering dissolve—a whisper, a hint of a flurry of movement—the Magician disappeared while I just watched with my mouth open. A lucky find, perhaps, that biotech, some kind of camouflage that reflected its surroundings, gave to that disguise depth, breadth, so she wouldn’t move like a cardboard cutout across the landscape.
How could I know she was gone? The hilltop felt deserted, even with me still standing there. An absence. In the next few days, when I was paranoid she might still be tracking me, I strained to recover that sense of no-one-there, to know for sure that I was right. She had gone on to other things, other plans, other people. Yet even though I didn’t like the Magician there arose, from the way she stared at me, the uncomfortable and mysterious thought that she did know me, even if I didn’t know how.
I found Charlie X dead where she’d said he’d be, not a wound on him. Just horror splashed across his blurred features, as if he’d seen another side of the Magician. Or her true face.
*
Three years later, the Magician’s spirit had snuck right into the room with me, between me and Wick. She might make her headquarters well to the west, in the ruined observatory, but she had found a way to make her influence felt from afar—because we were weak, because our supplies were running low and Wick could see no other way out. She had found a way in because she’d always been there.
Borne had gone quiet above us as our voices had gotten louder, and Wick had gotten more defensive.
“We are not giving up the Balcony Cliffs,” I said. We were not giving up Borne, either. I was tired and drunk, drunk, drunk, but this I knew.
“We wouldn’t be giving them up,” Wick said, with little enthusiasm. “People would move in here, help us fortify it. We live here alone. How long do you think that can last?”
“It’s lasted pretty long already, Wick.”
I crammed another minnow in my mouth. Probably my fifth. We were both acting like if we finished off every alcohol minnow in the land tonight we wouldn’t care.
“We’re lucky we held out this long.”
“Why now? Tell me why she’s asking now?”
“I think she is planning something big. I think her plans are almost set.” Wick’s voice had lowered to a whisper, as if the Magician were listening, which only made me madder.
“And how did she reach out? Did she capture you on one of your drug runs? Did she give you all kinds of promises you know she can’t keep? And if she did, how did you make it back here? Why didn’t she just hold on to you?”
“The Magician’s not asking. The Magician’s telling. That’s what she does these days—tells people things, and people do them.”
The Magician on one hill and Wick on the other, communicating via hand signals or semaphore.
“Who reached out, Wick? Her or you?”
He mumbled something, stood, wrapped his hands around the sides of his chair, tapped its legs against the floor a couple of times.
“He said he reached out, Rachel,” Borne said helpfully from the ceiling.
“Borne, stay out of this!” we both shouted at him.
“But you said you didn’t hear him and I thought you’d want to know.”
“Go back to my apartment and I’ll come check to make sure you’re all right before you go to bed,” I said.
“Sure, Rachel. I can go back to your apartment.”
Borne sounded dejected, or maybe I just expected he would. Slowly, he slid down the wall, congealed into an upright Borne position, resuscitated his eyes, and left us. If there was a whiff of indignant spider fart left behind, I tried to ignore it, just as I tried to ignore putting Wick’s revelation before Borne’s injuries.
“I wanted nothing except to be left alone,” Wick said. “That’s all I wanted, all I’ve ever wanted.”
Familiar refrain. I’d never asked why he wanted to be left alone, though. That’s Wick, I always thought. Wick likes to be left alone.
“It will destroy us, Wick. How can you trust her?”
“How am I supposed to trust you?” he said. “You brought Borne in here. You won’t get rid of him. The proxies are getting worse—everything is getting worse. We have no choice.”
“You know what will happen to Borne when she takes over.”
Wick shrugged, a shrug that said it wouldn’t be his problem then, and maybe he even hoped once Borne became someone else’s responsibility I would come to my senses, and we would be the “us” and Borne would be one of “them.”
“But that’s not even the worst thing, Wick, and you know it.”
Wick looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”