Blue Magic Page 4

“No—wait, yes. I had a report. Your brother’s MIA?”

  “Alchemites attacked the contaminated forest near his station, sir—his squad’s vanished. But my mother’s seen him.”

  “In a dream, you mean?”

  “Yes.” Most of the missing soldiers who’d clashed with the Alchemites had turned up, apparently unharmed, in the dreams of their loved ones. “Any luck finding a way to rescue them, sir?”

  “It’ll happen—we just need to arrest the right Alchemite.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They must be using a chantment to turn people into dreams. Presumably there’s a chantment that will bring them back. We just have to catch whoever’s got it.”

  “Sounds simple.” Lots of Roche’s plans sounded easy.

  He glowered. “Be glad he’s okay.”

  Dismissed, in other words. Juanita returned to the squirrel cage.

  “Court’s adjourned,” Gladys said. “Want me to take her?”

  “No, thanks. Time to go, Knax.” Juanita touched her radio. “Transporting Prisoner One to search and sanitation.”

  “All clear,” came the reply.

  Shadowed by armed soldiers, she led her charge down the hallway to a well-lit tunnel, past more guards and into a windowless bathroom. Sahara was forbidden personal possessions, lest they be switched for magical items. A brush and other toiletries were kept here for her use.

  She uncuffed Sahara, waiting while her prisoner used the toilet and washed her hands.

  “What’s dinner tonight?” Sahara said.

  “Thai tofu,” she said, donning latex gloves. “Mouth?”

  Sahara opened her mouth, visibly steeling herself for the indignity of the cavity search. “I’d kill for a steak.”

  You’d kill for less than that, Juanita thought. She wondered how long she’d be in jail if she broke Sahara’s traitorous neck and solved everyone’s problems.

  Slap on the wrist, at worst. Roche might give her a medal.…

  She finished the search and gestured for Sahara to step into the shower. As she washed, Juanita unlocked a cabinet, bringing out a fresh towel, underwear, and jumpsuit, all sealed in plastic to ensure that nothing had been smuggled into them.

  “Time.” She held out the towel. “I need to dress that scratch.”

  Unlike her followers, Sahara restricted her self-harm to one behavior—scratching her chest, digging so deep that the skin over her sternum was scarred. Trying to get to the chantment embedded there, the psychiatrists thought, the bottle cap that kept her from running away.

  “It’s fine, it’s scabbed over.”

  “I’m not asking permission,” Juanita said, hiding another surge of murderous rage.

  “Oh, I forgot. It’s national Humiliate the Goddess Day, isn’t it?”

  “You’re no goddess.” Juanita took out the first aid kit, preparing a pad of gauze. She slipped a postage stamp and a scribbled scrap of paper inside the dressing, taping the gauze over Sahara’s chest. Then she handed over her jumper, cuffed her, and inventoried the bathroom supplies, checking each item off a printed list.

  Shrapnel churned in her stomach.

  Sahara’s eyes had dilated and her breathing was shallow.

  Juanita fumbled her radio. “Moving Prisoner One from S and S to Isolation.”

  The Alchemites had gotten to her three days ago.

  She had been coming off shift when one of the cooks, a wispy blonde named Heaven, had pushed her way into her bedroom. “Your brother’s name is Ramón, right?”

  “So?”

  “Ramón Alfonse Corazón,” Heaven repeated. From the folds of her skirt she produced a digital camera, holding it screen side out. It lit up with a shot of Juanita’s baby brother in uniform, patrolling the scorched frontier of the contaminated forest in Oregon.

  Heaven pressed a button, and the video file began to play. A civilian in a long dress and head scarf passed Ramón, turning his head. She spoke; they laughed together. Juanita saw a scrawl of henna or a tattoo on her skin as she caressed his cheek. Something sparkled in her hand.

  The woman walked away and Ramón stood bemused, staring after her. Behind him, another U.S. soldier sagged, as if drunk, then sat down in the street.

  Then it was Ramón himself falling over, lying in a spray of glittering light. The camera zoomed in—his eyes were fluttering as he fought to keep them open.

  A snore, a twinkle, and the soldiers were gone.

  The video ended.

  “That’s…,” Juanita had managed. “It isn’t real.”

  “Relax, he’ll live.” Heaven turned the camera, fiddling, and handed it over. The screen showed Juanita’s niece, crossing the street in front of Our Lady of Sorrows School. The tattooed woman was in the frame.

  A beep. The image changed—Mamá at the grocery.

  Kill Heaven now, part of Juanita thought. Kill her, take the camera, call Security.

  “What do you want?”

  Heaven held out the postage stamp and the coded note. “Give this to the Goddess, that’s all.”

  Coldly, like a dead person, Juanita picked it off her palm. And now she had done it, betrayed the judge, betrayed everyone. Passed over a chantment.

  “Smells like antiseptic,” Sahara said suddenly, with what could only be called a loving smile. Did she think Juanita was one of her followers?

  At least it was over. She locked the prisoner in her cell and bolted, heading for the mess, where the aroma of frying beef and garlic made her stomach flip. To steady herself, she scanned the room. The jury was tucked in a glassed-in, soundproofed dining room that kept them from overhearing trial-related scuttlebutt.

  Okay, cope. Unknot the shoulders, walk to the chow line. But relaxing was easier said than done, especially when Heaven slipped into line behind her with a chirpy, “Hi!”

  I could still kill her, Juanita thought. She settled for thwarting Heaven’s attempt at a hug—a hug!—by putting her tray between them.

  “How was your day?”

  “Did everything I needed to do.” Of course. The betrayal wouldn’t be a one-time thing. Heaven would cling like a tick, demanding more, waving the threat to Juanita’s family.…

  Fight her, she thought. “Sahara asked me for a steak.”

  Heaven blinked. “The prisoners are vegans.”

  “Prisoner One may talk the eco-talk,” Juanita said. “I don’t think she ever walked the walk.”

  “She preaches respect for life.” Then, remembering she was supposedly against Alchemism, Heaven added: “I heard.”

  Juanita gave her a nasty smile. “Her followers won’t know if she gets a juicy slab of Angus beef, will they? Just like they don’t know she didn’t create the sea monsters she’s always bragging about, that her prophecies are self-serving bull—”

  “I’ll tell Chef about the steak,” Heaven said hastily.

  Juanita had hoped to drive her off, but Heaven was apparently determined to keep playacting at being friends. She followed her to a table near the jury room. Spilling packets of crackers, she bent to retrieve them.…

  “You hear about Will Forest?” she asked from under the table.

  “Kidnapped, apparently.” Juanita glanced at her tray. She’d ordered lamb stew without even registering it.

  Heaven tucked a lumpy something into Juanita’s shoe before climbing into a chair. “Forest is AWOL.”

  “Says who?”

  “Everyone. He’s run off to Astrid Lethewood.”

  “They’ll search the base for chantments, then.” Juanita said, “To see how he got out.”

  Heaven’s gaze flicked in the direction of Juanita’s foot. “Everything will be fine as long as we all keep doing our jobs.”

  “A search might slow things down.”

  “Delays have consequences.” Heaven tucked in to her meal, a pasta dish with heavily burned chorizo. It was a point of honor that, prisoners aside, there were no vegetarians at Wendover. “You’ve got an ex-girlfriend at Caltech, don’t you
?”

  Juanita stirred the stew. “Roche questioned me about Ramón.”

  A twitch. “Did he?”

  “Someone must be tracking our families, watching for patterns. Ramón gets sent to dreamland, my file gets flagged. Mamá falls down a flight of stairs tomorrow, they haul me in for a real interrogation.” She was relieved to see uncertainty in Heaven’s face. That’s right, bitch—you’re not riding some tame saddle nag.…

  “You’re right. If work slows down now and then…”

  A trickle of triumph. Whatever Heaven had stuck in her shoe, she’d delay passing it to Sahara.

  By now, the jury was filing out of its soundproofed dining room. Juanita tensed. If Heaven attacked the jurors, blackmail or not, she’d have to intervene.

  But Heaven turned to her pasta.

  After dinner, Juanita moved on to the gym. She ran the treadmill, then worked her chest and shoulder muscles until she burned the rage down to a manageable level.

  Delay, fight, push Heaven’s buttons. It didn’t help the gnawing in her belly whenever she thought about that postage stamp, that undoubtedly magical postage stamp, in Sahara’s cell. It didn’t stop the recriminations: Show some backbone, break their necks.…

  If the postage stamp were enough to allow Sahara to escape, they would never have asked me to pass on a second chantment, she rationalized. And magic took power, didn’t it? If Sahara tried anything too dramatic, she’d lose weight. A person had to use her own physical resources to work magic—burning calories, they’d been told—or she had to recite something aloud.

  If Sahara vamps someone, I get to shoot her, Juanita thought, indulging the fantasy with grim satisfaction.

  Back in her room, with her curtains shut and her door locked, she fished out the lump Heaven had stuck in her shoe. It was an amber bead, no bigger than a marble. As she turned it over in her hand, her vision shimmered. She dropped it immediately, skin crawling, and shoved it in a drawer.

  When sleep took her, hours later, she saw Ramón playing football with his squad on a flawless, palm-dotted beach.

  Juanita almost wished they could trade places.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  AS WILL FOLLOWED ASTRID around the magical campground she’d called Bigtop, he saw magic in use everywhere. A black woman in a vivid red chador was directing a dozen mutated spiders as they spun thick silk sheets over a pile of mulched blue sawdust, trapping the particles beneath it, presumably so they couldn’t be inhaled. A bandy-limbed, tattooed skatepunk, meanwhile, was using a big barrel to draw tainted pollen from the air, clumping it together in balls. Workers were planting carpets of vitagua-blue moss and mushrooms over the slosh, the crushed mixture of vitagua, dead vegetation, and wreckage at ground level. Others carved flutes from contaminated deadwood, or poured vitagua into glass vessels, putting its internal radiance to use by making lanterns.

  Most called greetings as Astrid passed.

  Clad in jeans, work boots, and a brown T-shirt, her red curls hanging every which way and a hint of mud under one fingernail, Astrid reminded Will of the Communist leaders of the mid-twentieth century, with their working-class garb and lack of pretension.

  She paused to wave at a fair-haired family—a middle-aged couple and three children—who were carving planks from a dead cedar tree. Will caught a snatch of their conversation; they were speaking German.

  Was she drawing volunteers from around the world? Will asked: “Why are you still clearing forest?”

  “Lots of reasons. There are chemical spills we’re trying to get to, to clean up. The ecologists say making space helps the animals.”

  “You have ecologists?”

  “Ecologists, an ethics board, malaria-eradication team, salmon experts…”

  “Malaria?”

  “Curing malaria outbreaks overseas frees up aid money for other kinds of disaster relief.”

  “Who says?”

  “We have a couple economists, and development experts.”

  “Only a couple?” His eye fell on a picnic, a circle of lunching townspeople seated on a blanket, passing around a set of barbecue tongs and clicking them together like castanets to create sandwiches from thin air.

  “We call that spinning,” Astrid said.

  “What?”

  “Making something from nothing. It’s called spinning. It’s another of Mark Clumber’s words.”

  “Do I see Jacks Glade’s mother over there?”

  She nodded, murmuring something he didn’t catch into the tuning fork hung at her neck.

  Olive Glade had disappeared soon after Astrid escaped from government custody. Now she was presiding over what was obviously a working lunch—the picnickers were poring over a scattering of drawings spread out on their blanket. A bread box–sized crystal at Olive’s side was throwing off tiny white sparks.

  Will opened his mouth to ask what she was doing. A fluttering, like paper shuffling near his ear, interrupted him.

  “Lifeguards,” he said. The knowledge had simply dropped into his mind. “They rescue people endangered by the magic spill … get them out of harm’s way.”

  “That’s right,” Astrid said.

  He felt a thread of excitement. “I knew that. I just magically knew it.”

  “Yes. I connected you to the … Oh, what’s the word?”

  “A wiki,” he said. “I magically know that, too.”

  “Right. It’s a pool of information everyone adds to.…”

  “I’m familiar with the concept. You made a wiki? You? Astrid, you don’t even watch TV.”

  “Someone explained it to me,” she said. “If you wonder who someone is, why they volunteered—”

  “I wonder where my kids are,” he said, bracing for disappointment as he spoke. He and Roche had run down dozens of fruitless leads after Caro’s arrest.

  But now he heard a flutter, and knew: The children were in hiding with a team of eight Alchemites led by Sahara’s chief Prima, Passion. They were healthy, well fed, and a bit homesick. The Alchemites’ focus was on avoiding arrest while turning both children into devout Sahara worshippers. It seemed to be working, on Ellie anyway.

  The group stayed on the move, but just this morning one of the Indigo Springs seers had learned they were in Missouri.

  “Will?”

  “They’re in St. Louis,” he said, a little breathless.

  Astrid nodded.

  “Why haven’t you gone after them?”

  “And then what? Keep them against their will? The Alchemites are teaching ’em to hate me. I’m the Filthwitch, remember?”

  “You thought if you grabbed them and I wasn’t around…”

  “I’m afraid of scaring ’em to death,” Astrid said. “But now you’re here, we’ll go collect them.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Today?”

  “Tonight.”

  It was almost too much. He put out a hand blindly, felt her squeeze it.

  Finally, by way of pulling himself together, he turned his attention back to Olive Glade.

  Every inch the aging flower child, Jacks’s mother wore an undyed wool cardigan and a denim skirt. The owlish glasses Will remembered from her “Missing” photo were gone. A pendant—an althame, symbol of her Wiccan beliefs—hung around her neck, along with a pennywhistle.

  “Are you surprised to see her here?”

  “No,” Will said. “Her son’s in the unreal. You could help her find him, if he’s alive.”

  “Oh, Jacks is alive,” Astrid said. “I see him again.”

  “How’s that work out? Do you two rekindle your romance?”

  “Me and Jacks?” She gave him a peculiar look, as if he’d spoken in another language.

  “Or are you still hung up on Sahara?”

  “Pah. Not a chance.”

  Yeah, right. Turning back to Olive, he allowed himself a hint of curiosity and heard another flutter. Suddenly he knew the names of everyone on the picnic blanket. Astrid and her peo
ple had saved them all, from illness and homelessness and impending tragedy, from mere bankruptcy in one case.

  “You’ve got a lot going on here—I’m impressed.”

  “Job’s too big for me alone,” Astrid said.

  “I never considered the logistics.” Will had seen the vast frozen seas of liquid magic in the unreal. Astrid had promised to get it melted and into the real world.

  “Dealing with large-scale contamination and its consequences … it’s a lot, Will.”

  “So you’ve delegated. Olive’s in charge of these Lifeguards?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Mark keeps the government from bombing you flat.”

  “Bombing us flat. He’s doing a good job.”

  “It doesn’t hurt, I’m guessing, that the army’s got so much on its plate.”

  She ducked her head. “War overseas, fighting the Alchemites, containing the forest…”

  “So all Mark’s coping with are the bombing raids?”

  “That’s plenty, believe me.”

  “Roche will come after you eventually, with more.”

  “After us. Yes, there’s going to be a big battle.”

  Voice neutral, he said: “That’s a scary prospect.”

  She poked a toe into the fill, turning over a hump of blue moss, and changed the subject. “Over there is Katarina—she’s our Dean of Science.”

  “Science?” That fluttering sound again, and Will sensed a network of researchers studying everything from the atomic weight of vitagua to how much power that sandwich-making chantment of Olive’s took.

  He said: “Why does the wiki make that fluttering sound?”

  “I chanted it out of a Rolodex.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “Let’s see, what else? We’re trying to find the Fyremen. One team’s putting information about magic on the Internet. Recruiting, of course, lots of recruiting. We watch volcanoes and fault lines.…”

  “Because when magic gets out, there are earthquakes and eruptions.”

  The scale of it was staggering. These were departments—research, intelligence, propaganda. Malaria-eradication projects and Mark Clumber as secretary of defense. What Astrid had here was a makeshift government. “And you’re salvaging garbage, making—sorry, spinning—food, digging up the old town, and deflecting missiles … all using magic?”