Once I was no longer moving, I looked around, my head throbbing, while my vision swayed in and out of focus like a pendulum. We were nearly upside-down, with two of our tires the wrong side up. A parking lot, or a street, and stumpy, city trees leaning over concrete basins, hoisted way up into the air by the grey slabs emerging from the ground. Fountains of water spewed from the wrecked fire hydrants, and shards of metal and busted tires from the unlucky cars lay everywhere. Lights kept flickering and spitting sparks, while the buildings halfway caved in on themselves, and some pockets of people emerged from their ruined vehicles and structures, wondering what the hell kind of earthquake this was. Roads encased in ice reflected their angry faces and the slippery spots of red … Something was dancing in orange and wreathed in blue.
Something was on fire.
Beside me, someone moved—Judy was cutting through her seat belt. Her mouth was moving too, vibrating, her lips shaping words I couldn’t understand. I stared at her blankly, trying to shape my mouth into words of my own, something along the lines of “I don’t understand! I can’t hear you! I can’t understand!”
Then the glass shattered inwards, and a shadow with a cigar held out his hand. Judy took it, climbing out, turning back to say something, only louder this time.
I don’t understand, I thought, but my tongue was throbbing, I could taste rust, the metallic flavor of my own blood. I tried to spit it out, but nothing could move.
I closed my eyes and inhaled until my lungs nearly burst. Breathe, I thought as I exhaled, trying to force myself to focus, to will the agony and throbbing away. The ringing grew louder, louder, louder—
A hand landed on my shoulder, giving me a gentle shake, and a voice. “Sam?”
I opened my eyes, fumbling for my seat belt. Casey was hanging from the open door, one hand on me, the other wrapped around the car’s half-exposed metal frame.
“Come on,” Casey said, sounding eerily calm. “We need to hurry.”
“Right,” I said. “Right, um …” My seat belt clicked open and I hopped to my feet, crouching, standing up slowly on the tilted seats. Casey hauled himself out and turned back to me, anchoring me with his hand as I pulled myself onto the concrete slab lying on top of the car.
Casey hopped off the concrete slab to join the others on the only marginally less fractured ground below. “Let’s go.”
I hopped down on my own, landing, rolling, standing, and trying to ignore the incessant ringing in my ears. “Where are we going?” I asked, suppressing a wave of dizziness.
“There,” said Casey, pointing to a skyscraper of translucent grey glass across the road—remarkably unaffected by … Was it an earthquake? No, whatever it was was too strong, and too loud, to be an earthquake. A bomb? No, Kent still had his bomb.
“What happened?” I asked, but as I looked up, I saw it myself—a cloud of smoke and lightning, spider’s-eye blue and dark and imposing, was flattening itself beneath the sheet of clouds above. “Oh, shit.”
It didn’t take long to figure out what it was. The multicolored mushroom cloud hung like a chandelier against the sky—the smoldering remains of the Los Angeles ANC twitching and sizzling somewhere far beneath it. We could hear sirens and screaming when we got out of the car, stepping onto the streets now frozen solid with shivering rains that never happened. It made the strangest sounds under our feet, the tink-tink-tink like someone tapping a crystal glass with a tuning fork.
That was a really bad sign. It meant that it wasn’t ice, but ether glass, slick as oil and nearly impossible to scrape away. It also meant that sometime before the ultimate destruction of this ANC, someone must have spilled something that combined with something else and congealed, creating the cocktail necessary for ether-glass manufacture. The only conclusion I could draw from that was before the ANC went up, there must have been a fight.
And it ended poorly.
We rushed into the glass building, ducking through a revolving door, two of us at a time. I looked over my shoulder at the blistering inferno, the cloud far above, bubbling with all the bad magic an ANC might have kept locked away. News helicopters circled around it almost blithely, pointing cameras at it, leaving long trails of steam behind them when they got too close to the glacier-cold, smoking spout. I once created something similar in college, mostly by accident, while trying to brew something that would … (ahem) heighten the beauty of a friend of mine in the eyes of her beloved.
What I ended up creating, however, was a storm-heart: a glacier-cold epicenter that preceded one of the worst blizzards Brooklyn had ever seen. It was big and loud and damn near impossible to stop—taking twenty of the college’s premier warlocks and witches to end my little project, and even then, the cold lingered on for what must have been months, lasting close to a year. It made for a very unpleasant winter.
The earth trembled, and the lights in the cloud sparked like frayed plugs. Every now and then, the ground shook, causing something else to crumble, and the ether glass would crack. In a matter of seconds, a wave of silvery-white shine would pass over it, and the glass would be twice as thick as before, mending itself to conceal any fractures. If it kept up like that, all of LA—or however far the glass could spread—would be completely encased in transparent blue.
“Sam?” said Casey, and I realized I’d stopped moving.
“Sorry. Let’s go,” I said, and in we went.
###
Inside the glassy, untouched building stood a woman behind a glossy, black desk, wearing spectacles and casually picking up the clutter from the explosion. She was humming absently and seemed totally oblivious to the carnage worming its way through her city just outside. She was in the middle of a vast, otherwise completely empty, lobby of white faux-wood floors and sheer, black walls. The room lacked any chairs, tables, or a waiting area of any kind—and as far as I could tell, even an elevator. There were no stairs, no doors, no offices, no other desks, not so much as a potted plant. Just a vast, endless expanse of white and black, perfectly quiet, unapologetically chic.
Rowena walked up beside me and crossed her arms. “You feel that?”
I did—a vague pulsing between dimensions. The dull hum of magical activity that I couldn’t quite pin down.
“Yeah,” I said. “Know what it is?”
Rowena’s eyes flashed green, the skeleton’s fire burning in the back of her skull. “Some artifact,” she said, “maybe whatever’s sustaining the illusion.” She gestured to the conspicuous absence of a ceiling—the walls rising upwards into a deep, dark nothing, disappearing into its own shadows. Going up and up forever. Kind of gaudy for an office illusion—a wildly complicated visual hex maintained for the express purpose of fooling anybody that came through the door.
Our tax dollars at work, I thought, staring up at it.
The woman behind the desk—a stocky, dark-haired human with round spectacles, no more than twenty—smiled when she saw us before putting the large stack of papers she held into the first drawer she touched.
“Good morning,” she said cheerily, folding her hands together on the desk. Bubbly, bright, and looking us over with her iron-grey eyes, she had the same default suspicion Dulcie always wore on the job. “How can I help you?”
We all looked at each other, confused. Kent spun in circles, staring at the impossibly high ceiling, presumably deliberately trying to make himself dizzy.
Casey sighed and said tiredly, “Casey James to see Margaret James, please. It’s an emergency.”
“Of course.” The woman reached for her phone, a bulky-bodied, black thing with a coil cord and the thickly set number buttons of the first model to replace the rotary phone.
“Nina?” said the woman, hopefully talking to someone on Casey’s mother’s floor. “Yes, he’s here. Okay. All right, thank you, darling.” She hung up and beamed at us. “Ms. James has been expecting you.
“Of course she has,” Casey muttered.
The woman pressed a spot on her desk—a flat space identical to the res
t of it, but when she touched it, it lit up with a small square of blue, and a soft ding-dong echoed through the open lobby. The floor to the left of the desk folded open, revealing a black abyss beneath, and a large rectangular box rose out of it. Its front slid sideways and down, compressing its doors into nothing before it exposed the plush white interior of an elevator.
“Off you go,” said the woman, waving at us. It seemed so unprofessional, but I couldn’t think of anything more to say, so I just waved back as we all stepped in.
Judy had the sense to add, “By the way, the world’s on fire,” before the doors closed behind us.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Sam
We were in an elevator and hoisting ourselves to some ungodly floor far above the cloud bank. At first, there was nothing but a thin carpet of white and equally white walls, completely opaque—until we passed the threshold of the ceiling’s illusion and the walls fell away like a house of cards, exposing clear glass windows and the elevator shaft. The higher we climbed, the more I could see. Glass stretched to the horizon in every direction, ice-blue flames warring with their angry orange counterparts on the foundations of the ANC, twining around each other at the base of the cloud. Firefighters surrounded the scene, spraying the fire with half a dozen hoses, carrying the limp, smoking bodies away from the blaze. Most of them weren’t moving.
“Shit,” Casey muttered. He was staring through the glass, but only half-seeing the smoke, fire, and crystalline brimstone. Kent whistled behind him.
“That …” he said softly, “was one hell oove an explosion!”
“Yeah.” I barely heard myself reply before I lay a hand against the glass, unable to look away, or even blink. Staring intently, it seemed that if I squinted hard enough, and held my breath, I could reach out and strangle the cloud, tamping out the flames with a harsh glare, snapping my fingers and raising all the charcoal-boned bodies from wherever they lay to rest. Like I could turn back time, if only I wanted to badly enough.
“The crystal isn’t active magic,” Rowena said, her eyes still vaguely green. I wondered if anyone else could see it, and if it were an effect she had to consciously mask. “It’s just spillover from a potion leak at the ANC.”
Leak, I thought. Nothing was leaking anywhere. Whatever once contained the offending potion had been blown to smithereens by some idiot with a grenade launcher and a pocket full of fuck-yous in the evidence locker. But there had to be more—the potion had to have mixed with something else that made it a hundred times more volatile and unpredictable than it would have been on its own.
In the corner of the elevator, Judy said, “Oh, shit.”
“No kiddin’,” said Kent, and the rest of us understood her tone and stiffened.
“What?” I asked when no one else moved.
Judy scratched her neck and sighed. For a minute, she couldn’t say anything although she was clearly trying to, but none of the right muscles were working. “ANCs are going up in flames all over the place,” she said at last. “This is one of …” She squinted at her phone before finishing with, “Shit. Fifty!”
My heart froze and nearly stopped beating completely. I was holding my breath. “Fifty,” I echoed, realizing that it was more than two-thirds of the collective.
“How many does that leave?” Casey said.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Not too many.” My ballpark figure would have been around six or seven, and that was being generous. But I dared not say that out loud.
Judy’s face turned grim, an expression she didn’t wear well. Her muscles seemed unsure of what to do with a frown, and her body didn’t know how to process the emotions that accompanied it. Or maybe it was just the first time in two days I’d seen her look anything but happy, and it caught me off guard.
“I’m sorry,” she said to me, her face sagging, like she knew how worthless the sentiment was. I appreciated it anyway.
“I …” Thanks seemed totally inappropriate to say. “Um,” I sighed, when nothing else sprang to mind.
No one else said anything either. We had no means of springing into action, no more than we already were. The haunting repertoire of your-place-of-work-and-thousands-of-your-coworkers-have-just-been-blown-to-cinders only received a quick “sorry.” That was it, the end of the rope of empathy.
We sat in cold silence for a long time, listening to the bell-and-whistle jingle playing through tiny speakers in the ceiling.
I cleared my throat. “I didn’t know elevator music was still a thing.”
Casey nodded. “Yep.”
“You, uh … talk to your mom much?”
“No.”
Silence. Silence. And more silence. It hung in the air like lead curtains, drawing everything, including us, steadily toward the floor and the broken, stony ground. Ten, fifteen, twenty stories below, they were dancing with all kinds of bad light …
“She’s going to get us killed,” Casey said at last.
“Your mom?” I asked. Casey’s grimace deepened, but he didn’t reply.
Silence, silence, silence.
“Did you have a better idea?” Judy asked absently.
Casey huffed and looked away.
“Relax,” Judy replied, punching him lightly in the shoulder. “This is gonna be great.” Her grin was back in full force, gleaming white teeth, brimming with the kind of deliberate mischief usually reserved for younger siblings. Only her eyes betrayed the weight of the quiet emptiness, cold as snow. Casey didn’t spare her a glance.
Silence, silence, silence. Kent and I looked at each other. Marcus peered at everyone from over his cigar, which remained unlit, rolling it back and forth between his fingers. Judy stared at her phone, pretending to scroll—but the screen was black. I didn’t know what Rowena was looking at.
Casey sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said, turning to me. He tried to smile, and even made a valiant effort. “Um … I don’t talk to my mom often.”
Fill the silence, I thought as I strained to smile back.
“She’s our best shot, Casey,” said Judy, trying to look sorry. “She’s just … eccentric.”
Kent chuckled, tossing his bomb from hand to hand, flinching occasionally to make the rest of us think it was about to go off. He chuckled as he held up the bomb to his eyes, staring at it with wonder. He could have been holding a star in his palm instead of a petty grenade, and one that probably didn’t even work properly.
“I’m eccentric, darling,” he said, his accent curling around his words. “Mrs. Margaret James, howevah, is a fuckin’ sociopath.”
Judy flinched, but Casey stared straight ahead, looking stiff as a board, the tension literally radiating out of him. I touched his arm, and he looked down, almost startled.
“Um …” I didn’t know what to say. Perhaps I wanted to tell him that his mother couldn’t be that bad? And every good family needs a sociopath if only to balance it out? Maybe I was going to talk about my own mom and the hundred thousand cats and spirit hounds that roamed through her apartment complex. “We won’t be here long,” I said at last.
Casey nodded and took my hand, squeezing it. My heart pounded—which was stupid. Only teenagers get all aflutter when someone holds their hand—but when he didn’t let go, I almost exploded into an effusive spray of confetti hearts. How utterly unprofessional of me!
Not that my profession mattered anymore.
“Nobody say anything unless you absolutely have to,” said Casey. “And try not to make any eye contact.”
“Why? Is she gonna try to glamour me or something?” I asked. Probably not, if Casey were human by default—even if he had a singularly magical parent, it would have manifested itself somehow. I could have been able to read it in his phantom stitches. Margaret had to be human, even if she were crazy.
“No,” Casey replied. “She’ll just try and talk to you if you initiate any small talk with her, and then we’ll be trapped here forever.”
“Ah. Got it.” I pursed my lips. “How is she going to get
us killed?”
Casey groaned. “She’ll start talking,” he said, “and she won’t stop until it’s way too late to save the world.”
It seemed like an exaggeration—it had to be.
When we got to the top, however, we found out it wasn’t any exaggeration.
###
The elevator dinged and Casey jumped. The doors slid open. Casey sucked in a breath—I didn’t hear him let it out though. The room before us was just as large and unwelcoming as the lobby—white floor, black walls, a conspicuous lack of windows. I saw a flat metal disk of beaten silver set into the floor, twice as wide across as any of us were tall. Around this were curving desks, featuring an array of buttons and dials. The irritable-looking attendants were dressed in black suits and lab coats, tip-tapping away at their computer modules, ostensibly regulating the flow of energy to and from the disk. None of them looked up as we entered.
The elevator doors slid shut quietly behind us and vanished into the shaft, like an unobtrusive family member at a reunion trying to duck out of the dining room before his divorced parents noticed each other.
I stared at the techs and their equipment: state of the art arcana—phantasma, crystalline computers built for the maintenance of extremely powerful magic. All were man-made, along with stagnant, magical artifacts like portals and enchanted mirrors. In the ghost of a whisper, I uttered, “Whoa!”
All the tip-tapping stopped at once, and the attendants looked up. One pushed her square glasses higher up on her nose. Another sniffed the air. The rest stared at us blankly, blinking like dumb animals, unsure whether to classify us as proper organisms or intrusive nuisances.
“It’s stronger in here,” Rowena muttered, appearing at my side from nowhere. She was right, the hum was like a swarm of bumblebees buzzing now. Loud and irritating to anyone who could sense it, the vibration started in the center of my stomach and was almost enough to make me nauseous.