Chapter 10: Community Project

Mrs. Huxley was not her usual gentle self when she came over to my area. I had just finished picking up the circular and put all the books back. I don't know the Dewey Decimal System, but I know enough to know that some of these extremely adult-looking romances probably didn't belong with the young adult fantasy books I had been browsing. I left those to the side for Mrs. Huxley.

She didn't even glance at them.

"Young lady," she told me firmly, "stop. You're going too fast. You need to stop. Yesterday, you tethered your soul to your body. Today, you cast a spell on a fellow witch without permission using a combination of magical techniques which are frankly terrifying to see in the hands of a high schooler."

"So," I said, "I guess if I asked you for tips on pyromancy..."

"That," she said, "would be frankly terrifying in anyone's hands. You already have more power than—" She stopped. She pulled up a chair. "Please," she said, sitting herself down, and pulling out a chair for me. "Power is bad for you if you get it by accident. It's meant to come with responsibility and an understanding of that responsibility."

I arched an eyebrow at her, but sat. That sounded suspiciously more like philosophy or possibly religion than metaphysical reality.

"If you don't have the discipline to look for edge cases—ways you could hurt someone, even by accident—then you become dangerous the moment you get power," she said. She could tell I hadn't been buying it. "And if you become dangerous to society…" she held my gaze, "...then society becomes dangerous to you."

Okay, I could see that.

"You're going to find it easier," she said, "to do what comes naturally, and harder to do what does not. I'm sorry to hear you couldn't move the flame. I'm sure that was a disappointment. But without an end game, without a goal in mind, without at least thinking through the danger involved, you do not need to pick up pyromancy right now in any case. You're showing good intuitive use of your new tools, but I really think you need to stop and think a little longer about their use before you go picking up more. Elsie may not agree with me, but..."

Here, she dug into her pocket and brought out a twenty. She pressed it into my hand. "Go to the carnival. Watch Zaz the Zabulous and his apprentice, Pete the Pete-iful. They do sleight of hand. They are illusionists. They do what you do, but better. Get some ideas. See if that's a direction you'd like to grow towards. The stage. It's $20 for entry. You'll have to cross the railroad tracks and go to the industrial park; that's where the carnival is set up."

"I want you to think about the damage you could do by accident with what you already have before you reach for more. Will you promise me?"

And I did promise her.

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My legs were tired from the bike ride, but I didn't mind. I walked up to the ticket booth and put her twenty on the table. "One for the illusion show, please?" I asked the young man sitting there. It was Pete. His partner lounged nearby, helping hold up the canvas wall. I could recognize them from the playbill on said wall.

Pete snapped his fingers over the bill, then went back to busily shuffling cards.

"Hey?"

"Look at it," he said without looking up.

I looked down. The twenty now had holographic lettering running vertically down one side. "...Sleight of Hand. Real Tricks. Real Illusion," I read aloud.

I smirked a little. "Real illusion." I reached to pick it up, but it was gone. Scary fast.

I thought about it. The ticket was folded like a twenty. It wasn't all that different from a card or a receipt. His head was cocked back, a cocky expression on his face, one cheek slanted mostly away from me. I figured he'd reverse-palmed it. But a trick is better if the onlookers can see it. What couldn't I see? My hand snapped out, quick as a snake, and I snatched the paper I'd barely seen resting against his cheek.

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He looked genuinely hurt.

I inspected my prize. It was a grocery receipt.

Mine.

But how did he...? I looked up from the receipt. Pete was gone, but Zaz remained, leaning on a tent-pole and grinning at me—a bombastic, showman's grin that didn't seem to mean anything real.

Entertainers sometimes make me nervous.

I was almost home before I realized. His reaching into my pocket to get the receipt probably wasn't just an effort to acquire the receipt. It was a distraction. I stopped my bike and checked my pocket. I was right: my hand emerged bearing a carnival ticket, dated tomorrow, noon.

"Admits One to Zaz the Zabulous's Circus of Perception."

"Showdown," I joked to myself, standing up on the pedals to go even faster.

I was part of the wider world now. Being let in.

I liked it.

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I practiced a routine that night, long into the night, past when it became morning.

I figured I had a couple of advantages. Or at least, if they weren't advantages, they weren't expected. I'm wrong-handed as a caster, which makes everyone expect that I'll cast with my right hand anyway. But if I led by showing off that I could spin a pencil in my left hand and cast the symbols with my right hand hidden in a hoodie pocket, then they wouldn't see I was casting, and they'd be confident they were looking at my dominant hand.

So I practiced that, dozens and dozens of times. And yes, that worked. That worked fine.

I could already cast visually; there was no charge or anything. So now I could just make anyone I could see, who could see me, see what I wanted them to see.

Like maybe a step was another foot further along, so they'd just step right off the top stair and fall.

Like maybe they'd pick up a light bulb but think it's an apple. I saw that in a movie once.

Like maybe I could change one of the numbers on each of Monica's math questions.

No, bad brain. Stop. We don't want to be a bad guy.

My brain wasn't so sure. Neither was I. But I'd give Mrs. Huxley a chance. She'd admitted that there were scary things out there. Apparently, most of them either look human most of the time or can't be sensed by humans most of the time.

"Weeeak," I complained. But she assured me there was more than enough evil in the world as it was without going looking for more.

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On Sunday, I got on my bike early and headed over to the circus-carnival thing. The ticket got me in, but instead of being ushered to the show, I was pulled backstage by a carnie. "Zaz wants to talk to you," he said.

Zaz turned out to be the older of the two—shocker—but he was surprisingly human and personable without his stage makeup on.

"Before the show," he said, "I want you to give me the opportunity to see what you've got. Then I can tell you what acts to pay the most attention to. Obviously, we would love it if you'd pay attention the whole time, but this is me doing my bit for the community."

I rolled my eyes. I wasn't a community project, was I? Okay. We were in a small dressing room, which made striking a confident pose and dramatically spinning a pencil more difficult, but I went for it. "As you can see," I said, spinning the pencil through my fingers deftly, "I am left-handed."

"Very good," he said, "but that's—” I pictured the pencil bursting into flame and shoved the image back along his gaze. I could see it when the spell took effect. He raised an eyebrow. “Well.”

I dropped the spell on Zaz and pushed the same effect onto Pete. It was like maintaining concentration on the image in my mind but just focusing on Pete seeing it instead. "Show Pete?"

"I see it," said Pete. Zaz looked over to him, startled.

"I still see it too—no, it's gone," Zaz amended an instant later. "Young lady," he said, "you may be a true Conjurer."

"What's that?"

"You'll have to ask Elsie," he said. "She is the most formally trained witch in your coven, and I'm not formally trained at all. Meanwhile, watch the show. I think you will find misdirection, such as you employed with the pencil, can be very effective—but there are other ways of misdirecting you might want to consider."

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Elsie was napping when I knocked on her door, and our conversation didn't go very far. It started with her saying, "It's not Friday, is it?" and me asking, "What's a true Conjurer?" before she was pulling me inside to pour me some peppermint tea while she woke up enough to talk.

“My migraine wants a word, little girl,” she said listlessly. “So here’s the five-second pitch: The world is made of mana, Maxine. It has too many kinds of mana to count—mana is reality. And you're taking it in raw—more so than most. If your stuff is harder to make but longer-lasting, it's because it's more real. No, I don't know if you're a True Conjurer."

"True this, true that—is this common?"

"Most people are only truly compatible with one or two disciplines. I've heard of up to four, though. The ability to master a discipline is few and far between. You’re probably just polluted. I’ll see what I can dig up over the next week. Call next time?”