*
I found her in what I will call the Hall of Mirrors. In another life, it would have held Wick’s swimming pool, with all that fecundity of created life. Instead, there was just an artificial cavern almost like an amphitheater, with a dull metal floor and stone walls and a rounded ceiling that disappeared into murky heights.
At the far end: the half-light from a silvery wall. In front of the wall a track for some kind of vehicle had been pried up and stacked to the side while in front lay a chaotic pile of upended plastic crates that had spilled open. Like everything on that level, the Hall of Mirrors had a smoothed-out feel, a generic quality as if all built out of a kit. How many other Halls existed in different Company facilities?
Off to the left side stood the Magician, contemplating that vision.
I teetered between fight and flight, managed to quell both instincts.
“Hello, Rachel,” she said, not turning around.
I would never know if she meant to make herself visible to me or had no choice because her camouflage was dying. What had clothed her from the top of her head to the bottoms of her feet now lingered and leaked as a kind of living cloak. It shared attributes with moths and chameleons and bird feathers. It whirred and sighed and clicked there on the Magician’s back, kept shifting and fluttering in a nervous way. It looked ragged and old and failing.
I stepped closer, but not too close, my boots clacking on the metal floor.
“Don’t you speak anymore?” the Magician asked, with a familiar note of imperious irritation. “Don’t you want to say something? Ask what this thing is, for example?” Gesturing at the silver wall.
I didn’t want to look at the wall. I was afraid if I did, I’d lose sight of the Magician. I stepped closer, but still not too close. I could feel the lines of power, the traps waiting for me here, waiting for her here. I was well aware of the creatures at my back.
Slowly my eyes adjusted to the peculiar quality of that light and to the Magician’s darkness. She stood straight as ever, but she looked rough, and there were smudges on the side of her face and her hair was wild. I wondered if she held herself so still because she was injured and didn’t want me to know.
“I saw you on the plain,” I said. “I saw you fighting off a Mord proxy. You probably injured your cloak then.”
“They have it in their furry heads I took away Mord’s wings,” the Magician said.
“Didn’t you?”
The Magician shrugged, weary, but with satisfaction in her voice. “Maybe Mord just didn’t want to fly anymore. Maybe he was tired of it.”
“You were a fool to attack Mord,” I said.
A twisted smile in the gloom, a predatory look. “I almost got away with it. I may still get away with it.”
“Yes, it must be going well, your war with the proxies, for you to come all this way in person,” I said.
“You sound like someone who doesn’t want Mord to die, Rachel.”
“How long have you been following us?” I asked.
I didn’t care about the answer; I only wanted to know what she planned to do. But I also wanted a little time to think about what I was going to do.
That’s when she turned and I saw again her face, but now aged by a decade in just three years—hints of trauma, wear and tear, injuries. She had lost her bearings in some critical way, and I noticed, too, the trembling, the way she clenched her right hand as if making a fist against the pain. She was on the run—I knew the look by then. The Mord proxies had flushed her out around the time they’d attacked the Balcony Cliffs, I guessed, and things hadn’t gone well for her.
“Long enough,” she said. “Since the cistern, let’s say. Since I gave the bears your scent over at the Balcony Cliffs, let’s say. But that’s not important. This,” she pointed at the silver wall, “is very important, however. Something fabled, something precious, a thing they never talk about in the city, because they barely talked about it inside the Company.”
I saw that with her other hand she clutched something like a wireless control panel. She pushed a button.
“So few memories that told me about this place,” she said. “But still the hint. The hint of it was enough to want it to be real.”
The wall of silver became a river of silver raindrops and then a frozen scene so real I couldn’t accept I was looking at a kind of screen. It was like the holograms in the fancy restaurant from so long ago. But frozen on one scene, and one scene only.
“I have to hand it to your Wick,” the Magician said. “He kept this from me, and I didn’t think he’d have the nerve. Or that he’d know about it in the first place. I wonder if he kept it from you as well. Do you know how much he has kept from you, Rachel?”
The little foxes and their kin were slinking all around us by now and winking in and out of view as if slipping into and out of space, of time. She couldn’t see that she was surrounded by a congregation, that she was surrounded by people, of a kind. I had almost missed it myself, had misunderstood for too long.
The Magician pointed to the screen again. “That’s where it all went. What it was all for. They sent supplies through to us. They took and took from the city, and we sent products back. Not through a railway system or an underground tunnel but through that.”
It was a pretty-enough scene, from a place undamaged by war, untouched by ruination by the Company. It kept flickering, stayed frozen but never came back into focus. But I could tell it was whole and functional and rich, and all of the other things our city was not and might never be. But it also wasn’t real, and it wasn’t going to save us. Any of us. And I refused to give it agency, allow it into my reality.
“Things haven’t gone into it for a few years,” the Magician said. “By the time I realized it might exist, this level was just a myth, a rumor. And might as well be now. Although they kept sending things through to us for a while, didn’t they? Like those”—gesturing at the boxes, what had dribbled out of them.
I didn’t think the Magician had peered into the other rooms. She hadn’t seen even the little I’d seen, what else the fox and her companions had ransacked, brought out into the city or remade as their own. If she had seen all the tunnels dug into this level, from the base of walls, from ceilings, she had ignored that, too. Ways in too small for a human being but not for other beings.