Blue Magic (6 page)

“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 people 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?”

“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 character 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.