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  “Mostly. Magic and computers don’t play together. And we’re bringing in food when we can. People give us money, things to chant.”

  “But where’s the power coming from?” Using his ring wore him out: it burned calories. “You can’t be drawing heat … we’d be freezing.”

  “We’ve made progress there.” She drew him through the arch of brambles, back into the train station and then across its plaza. This time when they stepped between the blue columns, they came out into a hotel lobby. People bustled around them, moving under the glow of a chandelier whose lightbulbs had been filled with liquid magic.

  “Boss,” someone called, “they’re putting Sahara’s grandma on the stand.”

  “Okay,” she called, voice cheery.

  “You’ve been watching the trial?” Will asked.

  “Oh, you know.” She spoke in the same light tone. “I’m not much for TV.”

  “Astrid.” He caught her, turning her to face him. “Don’t hide from me. I risked everything, coming here, and I betrayed an old friend. I need to trust you.…”

  Her expression changed, sadness leaking through the placid mask. She spoke softly. “Seeing Sahara like that…”

  “It hurts?”

  “I’m not hung up,” she said. “It’s not love.”

  “No?”

  “Isn’t it the same with your wife?”

  “Astrid—”

  “Sahara threw me away, like trash. Is it so weird I don’t want to see her mugging for the cameras?”

  It was important to her, Will could see, that the two of them share that—her sense of abandonment and betrayal ran deep.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Watching just rips the scab off. What’s say we avoid the trial together?”

  “Deal.” With that, Astrid led him to a marble-topped concierge counter covered in random junk. She hugged the fey and apparently genderless person standing beside it.

  “Will, this is Pike.”

  Pike looked to be about twenty years of age, with black skin covered in gold tattooed words: jigsaw, rats, leper, phantasm, gold, slate, worry, gelatin …

  “Seen you on the news, lad.” Pike’s accent was Irish. “Nice to finally meet you.”

  “Thanks,” Will said.

  “First things first.” He or she held out a box of small musical instruments—panpipes, whistles, tuning forks, all hung on leather wrist straps. “You’ll need a phone.”

  Will picked a tuning fork. “A phone?”

  Astrid ran her hands through her curls, revealing the scars on her right ear. “Everyone’s all, ‘We need cell phones, we need email—’”

  “We need communications, ye Luddite.” Pike gave Astrid an indulgent glance. “Boss here drew the line at text messaging.”

  “You got your wiki thing,” she pointed out.

  Will hung the tuning fork around his wrist. “If I wonder how this works…”

  An especially loud flutter interrupted him: the wiki was right here. A petite, nerdy-looking octagenarian sat in a recliner behind Pike, turning the Rolodex and seeming to read its cards.

  The answer about the tuning fork came all at once—Astrid had chanted the big pipe organ in the old Lutheran church, creating a magical switchboard. Musicians played the organ around the clock, routing calls and taking messages. The whistles and tuning forks functioned as receivers, like personal phones. Bigger instruments, like guitars, served as loudspeakers.

  “Got it?” Astrid asked.

  Will nodded. “I say who I want to speak to, then I just talk.”

  “Good!”

  “And you, Pike? You must do more than hand out phones.”

  Astrid said: “Pike tracks who’s doing what, who has which chantments, which crews need help.”

  “Human resources?”

  “No,” Pike said. “Overall project management.”

  “So you’ll be assigning me a job?”

  “For now, we’ll focus on finding your children,” Pike said.

  Will thought about everything he’d done for Roche: press conferences, interrogations, paperwork. “Thank you.”

  “That does mean you’ll be on the strike team,” Pike added.

  “The what?”

  Astrid winced. “We need a better name for them.”

  “Boss here don’t like the armyspeak.”

  “I also don’t like being called boss, remember?” Astrid said. “Before we move on, Pike, Will asked about powering the chantments.”

  Pike reached under the registration desk, coming up with a lambent crystal like the one Will had seen next to Olive. It was the size of an apple and glimmered like lightning.

  “This is letrico—stored power.” Astrid folded it into his palm, where it thrummed faintly, like something alive.

  “Feel that?”

  “That bit of a hum? Yes.”

  “Hold it firmly,” Astrid said. Then, without warning, she threw a punch at his face.

  Will was more startled than scared: his fists didn’t even come up. A lick of electricity, as thin as a spider leg, tickled over his skin, sparking between the crystal and his magic ring. As the letrico crystal shrank slightly within his grasp, the ring blew Astrid backwards onto her butt.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Totally fine,” Astrid said, picking herself off the floor.

  He offered her the crystal. “Stored power, I take it?”

  “Yes. Keep it. I’ve been worried that if you got attacked, the ring would suck you dry.”

  “I thought you made the ring so you wouldn’t have to worry about me.” The power crystal looked like compressed cobwebs, or fiberglass insulation. It smelled of ozone and fudge.

  “I made it to keep you safe.”

  “Safety’s good,” he said. “Where does this letrico come from?”

  “We weave it out of other energy. Heat, for example—”

  “Vamping?”

  “Theoretically possible, but we’d never kill people,” Astrid said. “Mostly it’s electricity. Remember Olive’s boyfriend?”

  “Thunder Kim?”

  “He’s an engineer. He scavenged up parts for a power generator, hooked it to a hot spring, and channeled steam through it. It took a lot of setup, but we have some cheap electricity now.”

  “Not enough,” Pike put in. “More juice we generate, more we use.”

  “You’ll learn how to weave letrico, Will. New arrivals take a class as part of the orientation process. Pike can set that up later. But for now, I want to take you to meet the—” Exasperation crossed Astrid’s face. “Strike team.”

  “It’s got a nice honest ring, darlin’,” Pike said.

  “Strike team,” Will echoed, thinking first of the shooter games he used to play with Carson and then the reality of the hostage sieges he’d worked in Portland when he was still a cop.

  But as Astrid led him down to the hotel’s underground parking lot, the first thing he saw was a 1920s-era trolley car with peeling paint and a bit of a sag. An ancient-looking black man leaned against it, clad in a leather flight jacket and pilot’s cap. A cane dangled from the crook of his arm as he fiddled with its engine. Beside him, a white woman with salt-and-pepper hair sat nearby in a deck chair, holding but not strumming a banjo. Two young men were working with hammers on something in the backseat.

  “Spiderwebs and sticks won’t hold out artillery.” The old man waved a bony hand from under the hood. “Armed forces’ll blast their way in—or it’ll be these witch-burners Astrid told us about.”

  “Boss wants to release the magic gently, I say more power to her,” the woman said. “You’ve seen the Big Picture.”

  “Casualties are unavoidable in war.”

  “Casualties, fine, but triggering a massive calamity…”

  “You don’t win these things by being touchy-feely.”

  “Sometimes you don’t win them at all.”

  The old man grunted. “I want to know how long we’re gonna wait for this Forest c
haracter to get sick of the army’s kangaroo court.”

  Astrid nudged Will, winking. “Ask him yourself, Clancy.”

  Will felt a ripple of unease as the group took him in. The woman moved first, setting aside her banjo, rising to her feet.

  “Good to have you here.”

  Astrid said: “Will, this is Janet. Clancy’s the gentleman with the wrench—he’s our driver.” She indicated the young men, a serious-looking duo. They had dark hair and Polynesian features, but there was no family resemblance: one was tall and ascetic looking; the other rounder, with cheerful, fidgety energy.

  A couple, maybe? A flutter of the wiki confirmed it.

  “This is Aquino and Igme,” Astrid said.

  Will said, “You four are the commando squad?”

  “I never said commando,” Astrid protested.

  “Don’t laugh, young man,” Clancy said. “I was dropping paratroopers on France when you weren’t yet a rude thought in your daddy’s knickers. Janet served as a nurse in Vietnam, which makes her tougher than all us put together.”

  “No offense meant.” He eased his body language, consciously broadcasting warmth, openness. “If you four are going to help rescue my children, it makes you my new best friends.”

  Igme grinned. “Have a look at our bus?”

  Will stepped aboard. Most of the seats were gone, and the interior walls were lined with Peg-Board and covered in chantments. “Looks like a cross between a dollar store and a carpenter’s shop.”

  Unlike Igme, whose speech was colored with just a trace of California surfer, Aquino had a strong Spanish accent: “You tell us where to go, Clancy takes us there. Janet, she keeps people from noticing us.”

  “We’re going to be invisible?”

  “Just sneaky.” Janet said, “Invisibility’s a power pig.”

  “What if Sahara’s people are expecting us?” Will fingered the chantments dangling from the Peg-Board. “Are these … for combat?”

  “I’d rather calm people down than fight them,” Astrid said.

  “Casualties happen,” Will said, echoing Clancy.

  “Janet will heal anyone who gets injured.”

  “Okay, I believe you. Janet’s doing stealth and first aid; Clancy’s driving. The rest of us gently quell the opposition. Anything else?”

  “We’ll leak a bit of vitagua—spread magic beyond the forest,” Astrid said. “But the primary goal is finding your kids.”

  “And after that, Pike will find me a job?”

  “If you’re willing,” she said. “Nobody’s obliged.”

  Will frowned. “Before you escaped custody, you asked me to be your apprentice.”

  “That’s up to you, Will.”

  “Is it? You know the future—bits and pieces, anyway.”

  “Nobody can force you to take on the magical well.”

  “You’re ducking the question, Astrid. You believe I’ll do it, don’t you?”

  She nodded.

  He could feel the eyes of the others on him. So much responsibility had fallen on Astrid’s shoulders. As far as anyone knew, she was the last well wizard, the only one with access to the unreal and its seas of enchantment. It was up to her to return magic to the world.

  Astrid was literally remaking the planet, and by her own admission struggling to hold off catastrophe. Expecting Will to be her backup … it was overwhelming, impossible.

  But if it was the only way to recover Ellie and Carson?

  He shook away the apprehension. Astrid wasn’t asking for anything. He’d forgotten this: her generosity of spirit, her willingness to let people be themselves.

  “Let’s just collect the kids,” Astrid said. “The rest of our plan—”

  “Mission,” Igme corrected.

  “Raid,” Clancy said. “Into enemy territory, no less.”

  “Oh! I’m really uncool with the word enemy,” Astrid said.

  “Operation?” Janet suggested, needling.

  “Maybe we can leave the semantics for later,” Will said. “According to the seers, the kids are in St. Louis, Missouri.”

  “Igme?” Astrid said. “You’ve been studying up on St. Louis?”

  “You bet I have,” the young man said. “They’re okay for food and water. There’s been power brownouts, looting. It’s too hot, especially in the refugee camps. We could draw some heat—”

  “Windstorms,” Janet objected.

  “Might keep people indoors.”

  “When you make things in a hot region very cold all of a sudden, Will, there’s side effects,” Astrid explained.

  He had seen this when the army clashed with the Alchemites. Cold air took up less space than hot. When chantments drew heat, the air pressure dropped, causing the wind to rise.

  “Katarina has a fancy weather model in Europe,” Aquino said. “In Bern.”

  “Bern?”

  “I’ll make chantments for the locals.” Astrid interrupted—hastily, he thought. “Will, I’d like to get you briefed on Alchemite activity in St. Louis.”

  “Temples, Primas, missing persons, that kind of thing?”

  “Yes. We’ll home in on the kids using magic, but preparation—”

  “Knowledge is power,” he agreed. “How do I get briefed?”

  “Igme will take you to meet the seers. I—”

  The tuning fork at her neck piped: “Astrid, are you still going with Ev and Patience?”

  “Yes, Pike. Tell ’em I’m coming, please. Will, are you okay if I go?”

  He nodded.

  She reached out, as if to touch him. Then, instead, she turned, vanishing through a gate of thorns on the nearby wall.

  Clancy clapped him on the arm. “We’ll have your family back soon, sonny.”

  “St. Louis,” Will said under his breath. It had been a long time since he had felt this much hope.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE UNREAL WAS A sunless expanse, lit by the glow cast by the glaciers of vitagua that lay atop most of its land mass. Its nature was poorly understood. Astrid, when explaining it to new volunteers, said that throughout human history there had been tales of other worlds—spirit realms, Hades, Asgard—and that the unreal was one or possibly all of those realms.

  Albert had called it the land of the fairies.

  The explanation satisfied many of the new volunteers, Ev knew. But it wasn’t that simple: the fairies were long gone. In fact, the unreal’s inhabitants were all aboriginal people, Native Americans who’d fled the European conquest. But Fairyland was a simpler concept to grasp, and a less thorny one.

  The three of them—Ev, his daughter, and Patience—had stepped through Bramblegate and now stood on the gritty steppes of the unreal, next to a tumbled-down pile of concrete and steel beams commingled with bits of tree. A sharp breeze blew from within the wreckage, along with a wisp of steam—humidity, from the real, condensing in the cooler air.

  “If I hear you’re driving yourself into the ground working, kid, I’m coming back to the real.”

  “I feel great, Pop. As long as I’m chanting, I’ve got energy to burn.”

  “Don’t think we won’t find out if you’re fibbing,” Patience said. She was wearing a copper-colored silk dress, and its skirt snapped in a gust of breeze, billowing like a sail. “None of us can afford for you to collapse from exhaustion.”

  “I’m not gonna die of burnout, promise.”

  “I hate you shoving me out of harm’s way like this,” Ev said.

  “It might not be as safe as you think, Pop. The Roused know you’re my—” She paused, snagging on his gender. “—parent.”

  “Just take decent care of yourself,” he said before things could get awkward.

  “I don’t remember there being a breeze here,” Patience said, deftly changing the subject. She turned into the wind, which pressed the dress snug against her figure.

  Ev looked away. “Vitagua’s flowing into the real through the Chimney,” he said. “Katarina figured something had to come into the unr
eal. Otherwise the whole place would collapse.”

  “Magic flows out, so air comes in?” Astrid said.

  “A little water too, from the look of it. See the steam?” Patience pointed.

  Astrid’s expression became dreamy. “Thunder’s going to put a wind turbine here. Cottages, a letrico mill.”

  “Let me check with the locals before you go putting up a suburb on their turf.” Patience’s father had been Native—Umpqua Nation, Ev thought, or Chinook?

  “Good idea,” Astrid said, missing her sharp tone. “Will you guys be okay if I get going?”

  “Of course,” Ev said.

  “If everything goes well in St. Louis, they’ll be in a good mood. We’re going to release a lot of magic tonight.”

  “Beyond finding Jacks, what do you need me to do?” Patience asked.

  “When I first came here, there were these ice statues,” Astrid said. “One of Dad, and his granny. They had all the chanters, I think, going back to Elizabeth Walks-in-Shadow. I’m wondering if they’re still around.”

  “Fine. The Roused will want to know how long it’s going to take to get the magic thawed.”

  Astrid frowned. “I know it all goes—the grumbles say so.”

  “In five years time, or fifty?” Patience pressed.

  “What if I ask Katarina about finding a … would it be a hydrologist?” Astrid said. “Someone who can measure how many gallons of magic there are and how fast we’re moving it.”

  “It’s a start,” Patience said.

  “Okay.” Astrid’s attention was elsewhere: Bramblegate had flowered amid the ruined pile of concrete. She stepped through and was gone, moving on to her next task.

  Patience jerked her suitcase, trying to make it roll on the soft sand. “Here I am playing ambassador, and what do I get? No limo, no entourage—”

  “Let me get that.” Scooping it up, Ev began to march, glad to have an excuse not to look at her.

  “I wasn’t fishing for help.”

  “I don’t mind.” His transformation had given him the body of a fifty-five-year-old man and the libido of a thirteen-year-old boy. Around Patience, he felt desire that was nigh unbearable.

  Knowing it was magic that made her sexy didn’t help.

  She has twenty years on you, Ev. Remember when she was just the dotty old crank on your Mascer Avenue mail route? “I doubt we rate an escort. It’s not far, and we’re no threat.”