104 - A Promise [September 15-16, Age 15]

The next handful of days were quiet. Neville took me out two more times in four days. The first time, we went to see the Statue of Liberty, which I’d never seen in person before despite not living all that far away from it. It wasn’t the sort of thing my father considered important, or really considered at all—not in terms of its significance or in terms of its value to someone like me.

Neville seemed to have the time and the will, though, so we went down to the waterfront and got on the ferry out to the island and saw what there was to see.

It was crowded there that day—the weather was pleasant so a lot of people made the trip, and despite having more practice than before walking around with crowds of people breathing and sweating around me, those trips were outside, and this one was in—once we got into the statue itself.

And I don’t know what it was like for everyone else, but for me, standing on the staircase next to Neville, it was small—it was tight, and it was all I could do to focus on my own breathing to tune out everyone else’s.

Neville saw me, though, and he took my hand.

0 0 0

In the car on the way home, he broached a new topic. Neville had a chauffer drive us out there. We hadn’t taken a car to many places yet, since most of what we’d visited was within easy walking distance of his home base, but this was a bit more of a hike, and I guessed he preferred the privacy.

I’d been driven around in cars plenty of times, but never by an explicit chauffer, and the whole experience made me flush hot—I wasn’t supposed to be here. This wasn’t mine.

Neville sat in the back with me, on the left side of the car. After some basic small talk about the statue he said: “You know, if you go through with this—you won’t have to be a soldier anymore.”

At first that didn’t quite process. He continued. “It’s a rescue mission, right? That’s what the story calls for. So you’ll be rescued. You’ll get to be normal, as normal as one can be in times like what we’d be setting in motion.”

He paused. For a moment, something in my brain tripped and I thought it was supposed to be my turn to speak—but we both opened our mouths to continue at the same time. I tried to ask for clarification and he gave it simultaneously.

“I can’t imagine you want to do this anymore,” he said, quietly. “And I’m only saying that because I don’t, either. So—so I feel like it’s got to be the same. Not to be a broken record, but…I really do honestly believe this is the best chance we’ll ever get. It’s the only way to reveal magic without it being in the aftermath of a national disaster. Maybe you don’t care one way or another, but I don’t want to think that. I want to think that you—you just think you don’t care. But you do. You’re human just like the rest of us, aren’t you?”

The tiniest little pause between “us” and “aren’t you”—long enough to logically be a breath, but just a millisecond too long for my lizard-brain to believe it.

I convinced myself, instantly, that he was asking that legitimately.

“I think so,” I said, matching his tone. “I mean…I was born.”

“Like the rest of us,” Neville replied, absently.

“I would like to think so,” I said, words perfectly measured.

He let his breath pulse. “I want to respect your wishes on this. I mean it when I say I’m not going to force you one way or another.”

“You won’t do it if I say no?”

He shook his head. “I can’t. It wouldn’t work. It’s not like I have anything actually riding on this, for what it’s worth. I’d just keep on doing what I’ve been doing.”

“It just has to be a pity piece,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be me. It can be any random kid. Pluck someone off the street and have Matthew rewrite her memories to match whatever you need.”

Again, he denied. “No. It does have to be you. Matthew’s good, but he’s not that good. Rewriting a whole past—and removing someone’s previous one—is beyond his scope. I don’t believe there are any telepaths alive who can truly turn one person into another in-place. Maybe, if the rumors out of Hinterland are to be believed, Rose Jepsen can, but that’s too many levels of hearsay to cite.”

“They won’t believe me. They’ll—they’ll hate me. I’ve killed so many people.”

“They don’t have to know that—and even if they do, Prochazka made you do it. All you have to do is not look like you enjoyed it. You can keep a blank face. I think most people would be expecting that, honestly—after everything you’ve been through, just being conscious is a triumph. Anything past total catatonia is a success-story.”

I didn’t respond to that.

“We’ll have to lie,” was all I could muster, a good thirty seconds after he finished.

“It was always going to be lies,” Prochazka said. “The truth in all this magic was always going to shatter the world. The best we can do is offer this little thing as an entry and cross our fingers.”

“They’ll see through it,” I said.

“At that point, it’s no longer our problem. The deed will have been done, and then it’s out of our hands.”

The car accelerated past an intersection and Neville shifted in his seat. I had no idea where we were.

0 0 0

I’d spent plenty of nights wondering how much of what Neville said was truly intended. I’m wise enough in my years now to know that whatever I concluded at fifteen was about as accurate as a coinflip, regardless of subject or circumstance. Sure, maybe in the moment I’d decided that Neville was being as truthful with me as he could physically stomach, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. I was the only one who thought that, for one. People who knew Neville much better than I did seemed pretty sure that I was being manipulated by some kind of maniacal mastermind. And maybe that’s what it took to convince me that just this once the authority-person lording over me really did care what I thought, but whatever the truth was, I’d decided to take his words as they were and hope for the best.

All of this is to say that when I weighed my options that night, sorting every little thing into pros and cons again just like I’d done in every night prior, I did so with the assumption that Neville meant what he said and said what he meant. The words from his mouth were true and accurately reflected the intentions of his heart.

The angle there, maybe (because there had to be one, there always was) was that Neville thought that honesty was the best way to my good graces, and the best way to do that was to manufacture some kind of vulnerability—his real insecurities packaged as they were or a carefully-curated set of invented ones designed to sway my opinion, either way. Nobody had ever shown weakness to me before, not intentionally, so maybe someone equal to or higher than me on the social ladder bearing their soul like that would trip a switch in my head that’d make me more agreeable.

It was a different take than the conclusion most people drew, which was that power was the only thing I respected, and therefore displays of overwhelming force were the best way to win me over. If it were up to me, I’d say this method had a better shot, if only because the old approach was tired now, and the novelty of this new one hadn’t worn off yet.

Neville didn’t push anything. He laid out the facts as they were, or as he saw them, and encouraged me to draw my own conclusions. That implied trust, didn’t it?

He trusted me. He left me alone in front of the apartment door, knowing I wouldn’t run. He took me places without any guards, knowing I wouldn’t make a scene. I could, at any time, simply blow the lid off the whole charade, level a city block, kill a thousand people or more, enter infamy forever as a biblical force of nature (or, better yet, something more Lovecraftian—some kind of unknowable, unfathomable horror choosing her next course of action via an algorithm of the wind direction, the time of day, the last four words I heard, and my favorite meal form the past week. Pick flowers, overturn lakes, drain the ocean, husk out a school, reroute the Nile—anything, anything! As free as the dust in the air and as distant as the stars.)

But he trusted me to sit still and pretty while he made his case because he knew that no matter what happened, I would still lay down for bed at night and face up at the ceiling fan hanging over my bed, gently spinning the idle toy with droplet-shoves, weighing the pros and cons of everything in the whole wide world and getting absolutely nowhere.

He trusted me with this because he knew I’d be paralyzed with my own indecision. Because he knew I had no idea what I wanted. Because he knew that, eventually, given enough information, he could overload my feeble processing and get me to throw my hands in the air, give up, and just do whatever someone else wanted instead, just to move on with my life and wash my hands of this.

That was the end-goal, wasn’t it? He was just waiting for me to get bored.

A stretch, sure—and the idle wanderings of my late-night brain weren’t exactly trustworthy—but it sounded about right to me.

What were the pros and cons, anyway? The lists tended to grow so long I’d forget their starts. It’s not as though it mattered much, though, since it all boiled down to the same.

The pro of helping Neville was that all of this would stop.

The con of helping Neville was also that all of this would stop.

0 0 0

The second time we went out was the next day, two before decision time. Neville came to the door again with a new proposition. Matthew was—as tradition dictated—watching daytime TV, and by now was used to Neville appearing unannounced in the morning to spirit me away to some unknown location.

“I have a place in mind that I think you’ll like,” he told me, standing in the door, “but you’ll have to wear something nicer.”

I’d just thrown on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt that morning. It hadn’t mattered yet and I wasn’t expecting it to matter now. “What do you mean?”

“You should have some dresses in the wardrobe,” he said. “I picked a few in case we ever went somewhere high-society enough to justify it.”

“So you did buy all those clothes,” I mumbled. Obviously it had to have been him. Santa certainly didn’t bring them—it’d be far ahead of schedule.

“Of course,” he said. “Matthew certainly wouldn’t have.”

That was enough to earn a half-hearted head-turn from Matthew, but he was too disconnected from the situation—and at this point, from reality, if I had to guess—to give a shit about what we were talking about.

“Right. Um…” My train of thought petered out. Neville was quick on the up-take, though.

“I can’t twist your arm to do it just this once, can I?” he asked. “We’ll figure something out next time. I promise.”

He leaned against the doorway, crossing one leg over the other. Neville was always up to the nines, so his choice of clothes would be in line with what I assumed he had in mind more-or-less all the time. Like Cygnus was. Today, though, he had a full suit top in addition to his standard dress shirt, smooth pressed pants, a tie. He’d put something in his hair to solidify it, too.

All of this is to say he went above and beyond.

For what it’s worth—I couldn’t say for sure how many “next times” there’d be. We only had two days until I decided if the world would end or not, and it was still a perfect coinflip what I’d say.

My answer, therefore, banked on “next time” never mattering. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll do it just this once.”

“Thank you,” he said. “You know where everything is in the wardrobe, right?”

I nodded. “I’m aware of them.”

“Perfect. I’ll just wait here for you, okay?”

Slowly, I nodded, backing away a few steps before turning to my door, trying not to think too hard about much of anything.

0 0 0

I picked out a dress more or less at random. I couldn’t discern a color or anything, so it was a guess assuming everything would match. There were smooth-coated dress shoes in one of the wardrobe’s lower drawers that I assumed he wanted me to wear, too. I think they were child-size boy’s shoes, personally. He must have guessed that I had no experience wearing heels, which would be about right given what I’d been up to for the last three years instead of hitting the normal teenage marks.

I half expected to come out of my room looking like a complete disaster, but Neville saw me, shrugged, and said, “You don’t have to look so confused. Everything in that wardrobe is grayscale. You can’t mess it up as long as everything’s on correctly.”

I faced down at the dress, pinching the soft cotton between two fingers. “What color is this?”

“Black,” he said. “There’s two black ones, a gray one, and two white ones.”

“Neat.”

I couldn’t quite get the stiffness out of my steps getting to the door. Once I was near, he said, “I’d bend the dress code rules for this place if I could, but they’re not affiliated with me. I’ve got sway, but there’s standards, you know?”

This seemed like a perfect time to break out my catchphrase. “I get it,” I said. “It’s fine.”

Neville raised his eyebrows at that but didn’t directly address it. “If you’re ready, let’s go.”

0 0 0

We got to the elevator before Neville offered his one and only clue: “It’s an art museum,” he said, out of the blue. Before I could offer something dry in response, he covered his tracks: “There’s a sculpture show on display right now,” he said quickly. “And a fountain exhibit.”

“A fountain exhibit?”

“Yes,” he said. “Kinetic art. I think you’d find it interesting.”

Neville was the type to stand around and enjoy art. I never was, but I wasn’t going to tell him that I wasn’t interested, so I nodded and said, “Alright. That could be cool.”

“It’s not the MFA,” he added. “It’s a secret place.”

“What kind of secret place?”

He cracked a smile. “An art museum secret place.”

“Where is it?”

He waved a hand around. “Somewhere.”

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Neville—”

“It’s a surprise. We can do surprises, right?”

“I—I guess,” I said. “If—I guess we can do surprises.”

By now I was fairly certain that whatever Neville’s surprise was, it wasn’t going to be a bullet in the back of my head—and if it was, I’m not sure I could even be all that mad. That kind of long-con takes guts. If that was his real plan all along, well—I’m sure there are plenty of less convoluted ways to kill me.

Hell, he already had Matthew do most of the dirty work, didn’t he?

We were descending the floors in the elevator outside of my apartment. Neville folded his hands behind his back, waiting for the doors to open on the ground. We’d started this train of thought together right outside my door and finished it as the elevator slowed to a halt.

“Is it within walking distance?” I asked.

“If we’re playing twenty questions, you’re starting to run out,” he said, smirking.

My immediate instinct was to go back and count, but I hadn’t been keeping track—and maybe he was—so I skipped ahead to the next thought. “Come on—tell me something.”

But he just shook his head.

0 0 0

My questions would be answered in time. The art museum in question was about ten blocks away from Neville’s base—four up, six left. The door leading to it was a steel one with a normal knob and a lock that took a regular key instead of something electronic. I was immediately tempted to pick it—and I summoned a bit of water to do so—but Neville waved me off and produced a long, thin key from his pocket.

“Members of the club get keys,” Neville said. “Although—you know what?”

He paused, stuffed the key back into his pocket. “Let’s build a little intrigue. Go ahead—pick it.”

I frowned. “Where’s the catch?”

Just for reconnaissance, I sent a few droplets into the keyhole—and as soon as they passed through maybe a centimeter of it, I lost them. Something in the hole sealed shut—but the wall between me and them wasn’t thick enough for me to lose them completely, and after a moment and a touch of focus I found the borderline microscopic water-pockets inside the metal block that formed in there. Frowning again, I started to vibrate them—subliming the water in an instant and superheating the air pockets left inside—

Neville glanced at me. “Okay, don’t try that hard.”

I shrugged. “I could get it open. There’s a metal key on the other side of the door, right?”

“Yep.”

“So this is a magical art museum?”

He nodded. “It certainly is. The only one in the city—and the biggest and most prestigious in the country.”

That got my attention. “Okay.”

“The curator is a good friend of mine,” he said. “That’s how I heard about the kinetic exhibit. It’s not formally opening until tomorrow, but the artists are there now rehearsing. I asked if I could stop by with you just to take a look at things and she said it was okay.”

With that, Neville took the key back out of his pocket and slipped it into the lock—whatever wall was put up inside melted away at the touch of his key and lock came open, smooth and oiled.

Neville twisted the knob and opened the door, holding it open for me, ushering me inside—and it shut behind us a moment later.

“Welcome to Sammakon Kieli,” he said. “Frog’s Tongue. Right down these steps.”

We descended to a second door, which Neville opened without a lock. “That’s just to make sure nobody outside sees what’s in here,” he added. “Can’t have passerby spoiling the surprise.”

“Fair,” I said, slowly.

Through the second door was a small cube-shaped room with nothing particularly of note beyond a desk with a man in a perfectly-fitted suit. Neville greeted him with a wave and the man responded in kind—adding a “Hello, Neville,” to the gesture, followed by: “And hello, Erika.”

To his credit, he did not skip a beat—and he looked at me when he said my name. He stood and came over to us, offering a handshake to Neville and another simple wave to me.

I lifted a hand in similar greeting and did my best to align my eyes with his. It wasn’t clear to me if he simply didn’t want to shake my hand, or if Neville had told him before this that I was not a particularly touch-friendly person. Whatever the route to this outcome was, it resulted in the right call—probably for both of us, if I’m honest.

I have, and always have had, chronically cold hands.

“Impressive work with the lock,” the man said. “The rumors are true, then.”

“Depends on the rumors,” I replied.

“Quite a few,” he said back, “and I can only assume there’s quite a few beyond that. My name is Harold. I’ll be your host today. I understand you’re looking to see Reina Biiri’s collection and the collaborative kinetic exhibits?”

“That’s correct,” Neville replied.

“Biiri?” I asked, mostly to myself, but Neville heard me.

“Matthew’s sister. She’s a very skilled sculptor,” he said. “In both magical and non-magical contexts. Her non-magic art is in the hands of some very high-profile mortal patrons as it stands, and her magically-created pieces are mostly here and in the analogous museum in Oslo.”

It never occurred to me that Matthew would have relatives, despite him talking—or complaining, more accurately—about the family business on a reasonably regular basis. To me he always seemed to be an island, in right about every sense of the word. Perpetually wandering around in an air-lock. “Family” seemed to be little more than a categorical term, like those ads that describe a workplace as “family”, or how half the people in a “family” business are just there for a paycheck and share no actual relation to anyone who owns anything.

Obviously Matthew had to be related to someone—people don’t just appear out of thin air—but like a lot of the people I’d met, it was an active struggle to put them in the context of some greater human network that relied on them to exist just as much as the rest of us. I remember Loybol mentioning something about solipsism being garbage for narcissists one time, but in hindsight I can say that some amount of that philosophy sat square in my head a little more tightly than it should have. I existed but other people only existed as long as they were in my perception. It’s not that I didn’t have object permanence—I didn’t have soul permanence. If I wasn’t looking at a person, they were meaningless—just theorized stacks of flesh shambling around without rhyme or reason.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Harold said, “we can begin.”

Something in his tone made me feel like I was making a weird face, and instinctively I turned away from him to hide it—trying to neutralize an emotion I was having without really knowing what it was. After a second I gave up and faced him again and I can only imagine that, from his and Neville’s perspective, I’d flinched for no reason.

Neville glanced down at me for a confirmation and I nodded, immediately, without processing anything.

“Excellent,” Harold replied, turning from his stance and heading towards the door at the end of the room. “Without further ado, then—welcome to the Frog’s Tongue.”

0 0 0

And through that door was the entrance hall.

It was about twenty feet long, with water flowing up—up!—the curved sides, like one of those aquarium tunnels I used to see in tourism ads. It drained through a fault-line slit in the top of the room and some unseen pump system returned it to the base, where it could be again drawn up along the walls.

The water itself vibrated into still waves. Some water-key kept the sheets vibrating at a cadence that made it seem as though the walls were frozen in an endless outward rippling, even though the water was, in fact, moving.

It was enough to impress me—but then we stepped out into the hall and a trio of human figures stepped into the hall with us, the impressions of our bodies scrawled in vibrations on the walls like ghosts.

Neville and Harold had seen this before, but I was captivated. Turning to face the wall, wiggling my fingers, shrugging, rotating my wrists, and feeling the vaporous non-me move in time, ever so slightly delayed to account for human reaction.

After a few more passive test movements, the mirror-me stopped following. Instead, she waved, a peace sign, a grin (although she had no facial features before, a mouth carved itself out of her face’s relief just for this occasion), offered a curtsey, and set off toward the end of the tunnel, beckoning the other figures to follow—and ceasing their aimless milling, they stuffed their hands in their pockets and sauntered off behind her.

We all sat there and waited, watching them walk to the end, before their forms crushed against the corner and were sucked upward into the slit in the top of the room.

“How’s that?” Harold asked, sly little smile.

“It’s beautiful,” I said—still facing that corner, as though time would reverse and they’d emerge again, unscathed, unhurt.

0 0 0

That was the nature of the exhibits in Sammakon Kieli. Actively-participated, magically-powered, things that moved and danced and shimmered. Every key had a representative present. I don’t feel the need to go through them all, but my favorites were the water tunnel and the air-key room. The air-key exhibit was a blank white room in which a bunch of little model bees floated around, landing on us and crawling up our arms, going between us and the pots of flowers in the corners. The bees had working leg joints, and little pinpoint air gusts allowed them to move more or less realistically as they buzzed around and examined their new guests.

All of the exhibits were similar to that. Rooms in which a small group would enter and then be interacted with by some magical component controlled by an unseen powerful key somewhere behind the scenes. The most obvious example of this was the earth-key exhibit: a mostly-empty concrete room with the word “Jump!” printed on the back wall in big block letters (indented into the wall, so I could read them)—and upon Neville heeding its advice, a pillar rose to meet his feet right where he would land—and then he took a step off that pillar and a second one rose to meet him again, allowing him to walk around through the air without any fear of falling.

That sort of thing.

In a lot of ways, it felt to me like an extremely safe showcase of magic, like the sort of things you’d show a child. I could imagine the earth-key room being in a jungle-gym type place. The air-key room’s bees had just enough whimsy to be fun and light without asking too many tough questions. The water and fire-key’s rooms were gorgeous displays of control and art that wouldn’t scare people too much.

I think about this museum a lot nowadays. Neville never told me if this whole thing was designed to be an entry point for the mortal masses to try and understand who we were and why, but I couldn’t help but feel as though it was. Beautiful as it all was, it wasn’t moving. Not like the painting Matthew described in the atrium before Neville’s office. I didn’t have to physically see that piece to know how much it meant to him—it was all on display in the way he talked about it. The way he couldn’t quite grasp what it was that made him feel the way he did. It cut through to some vital nerve and that was all it needed to do.

It didn’t have to make sense—it just had to be.

And I’m no artist—I can’t say why I felt that these exhibits, technically impressive as they were and beautiful as their forms could be—didn’t make me feel much of anything.

Except, I guess, the moment when our water-forms disappeared against the wall. That made me pause.

But that was the only one.

After the earth-key room—the sixth we’d visited, including the entrance tunnel—Neville stopped, stuffed his fingers in his pockets, and said, “Well, that’s all six.”

“I guess it’d make sense not to have flesh or telepathy rooms,” I said quietly, still convinced that this was a soft-trial for magical exposure.

Neville couldn’t read my mind, though, so he didn’t share the sentiment—and either way, I was wrong, so it didn’t really matter. “No, they’re there,” he said, “it’s just that the exhibits aren’t open to the quote-unquote public yet, and I don’t even think the flesh-key is here right now.”

“He did his rehearsal yesterday,” Harold added. His voice startled me—in our travels through the museum I’d forgotten we had an official escort.

“Not a whole lot of flesh-keys around,” Neville said. “They—well, I guess they tend to get themselves involved in odd things.”

“They also tend to get hunted down,” Harold said. “Not a very popular bunch.”

Neville offered a limp shrug to that, turning his attention to me again. “You know the drill.”

I thought about my sample-size for flesh keys.

“That makes sense,” I said.

“How’d you like it?” he asked me.

“It’s cool,” I said. And before I could properly process the words I was about to say I added: “It was fun.”

Neville nodded like this was some sage wisdom and all of a sudden I thought I understood what was going on.

In hindsight, though, I did not.

“Harold, would you mind leaving us alone for a moment?” Neville asked, without turning to him.

He nodded, saying, “Of course,” and withdrew.

When the door closed behind him, Neville began. “To be clear,” he said, starting slow, “I am not in any way affiliated with this place. I’m just an occasional patron. I donate occasionally, but I’m not even in their top five funders.”

He snickered. “Okay, I’m number six. But still. I don’t own this—this exhibit being up now, of all times, is just a convenient coincidence. I was talking to the curator a while back, and she said that still pieces were cool and all, and they drew their crowds, but…well, she was thinking about the work I do, she said, and about how so much of the history of our people is rooted in violence. I mean—it’s hard not to feel like violence is all we are, isn’t it?”

I couldn’t find an answer to that in time. “The people who gets keys are overwhelmingly desperate people, on edge from any number of traumas. People who’ve been victims of violence in its various forms all their lives. And they’re people who’ve wished they could retaliate for just as long, even if they won’t openly say so. As an outsider to all of this it’s easier for her to draw the parallels, or to take a step back and see our charade for what it is. Violence to put down violence, spawned because of violence, all in the name of stopping further violence. It’s violence all the way down, she told me. That’s our history. It’s who we are.”

He grimaced. “Obviously, I don’t have a key. I’m one of the unlucky ones, or maybe one of the lucky ones, depending on your perspective. But I can’t help but include myself in the community. It’s my whole life. And all I see, every day, is the violence that we are.

“So she told me she wanted to do something fun. Something innocent. So much of the art normally showcased in this place is tortured. Reina Biiri’s sculptures are genuinely disturbing. It’s grown from the price paid for magic. The paintings, the ice-sculptures, the burnings, the vine-woven tapestries, all of that—even without entirely intending to, the artists that make them put violence on their canvases. When you’ve inherited the mantle of violence that all of the keys have, you see everything from beneath that crown. It makes people like me, those who are involved but not a part of it, feel like violence is all magic can do.”

He smiled, softly. “But it isn’t, and the curator knows that. One can’t say that paint is inherently violent because every painting someone makes is that way. Magic should be the same, shouldn’t it? So she set out to organize something that—well, if you ask me, I think it’s very brave. To me, anyway…” Neville trailed off, looking around the room, gesturing back at the big “Jump!” printed on the back wall. “It’s juvenile. It’s childish. But that’s why I like it so much. If you gave magic to some random eight-year-old, I feel like this room is something they might do. Why? Why not? It’s fun. It doesn’t need to be anything more than that—and the ability to recognize that, that something can be exactly the sum of its parts and nothing more, designed to be enjoyed exactly as it is without any more prying or picking—that, I think, is a statement on art worthy of this museum.”

He shrugged. “But you already get that.”

I blinked. “I do?”

“You said it looks like fun.”

“I mean…that was just…”

“A throwaway statement? The first thing that came to your head?”

Pursed my lips. Nodded.

“That’s exactly it, Erika. This conversation we’re having now is the point of this. Magic and all its terms and conditions bring so much baggage into our lives, with the violence we live and see and the future we live in eternal fear of—but why can’t, just once, something just be fun? Why can’t something just be nice? It’s weird to think of something so simple as utopian, but I find it hard to think of it any other way.”

He looked at the big word again. “In this room, you jump, and the floor catches you. That’s it. That’s all it does. If you jump and reach out for a bar on the wall, it’ll be there. If you fall, the floor contours to your body so you don’t get hurt. Watch,” he said, and he rolled back on his heels and fell backwards, arms extended—smiling still—and even though my instinct said to try and catch him I held myself and watched as he crashed into the concrete—and the floor gave way beneath him, billowing and sinking like he’d dove into a bed, and once it slowly returned to form, he sat up. Grinning. “Isn’t this the future we want? Where magic can just be cool?”

Again, I stood silent, watching him. Waiting for him to continue.

I think he was looking for a response from me, but I didn’t offer one, and so he eventually just progressed to the next thought. “I was thinking,” he said, “that you could do something like this, sometime in the future.”

“What?” I asked, sending the droplets swirling around the room again—letting them linger in the corners of that big block-lettered word in the back. “Art?”

Neville shrugged. “Erika Hanover, blind water-key, strongest in the world? With the life you’ve lived? I think people would go to see that.”

“I don’t know anything about art,” I said, quietly.

“I mean, you don’t need to,” he replied. “All good art is the product of a well-greased pipeline between the heart and hands.”

And then I said, facing down at the floor, “I just don’t know when I’d ever have the time.”

To that Neville smiled again, like I’d played right into his hands. “Well—in the future, when all of this is behind us, I’d like to think magical people can live normal lives. Maybe you could go back to school. It’s New York City—you can learn anything here.”

“I don’t live here.”

“You live here now, don’t you?” Neville said. “I—I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. It’s…honestly, I think it’s all I think about nowadays.”

I hadn’t heard him stumble over words like that in the entire time I’d been there. He always had something lined up, but now, they failed him.

So I waited.

“The decision on the 18th has no bearing on this,” he said, after a pause—a longer one than he maybe suspected it would be. “Whatever you decide then, I will respect. At the end of the day…maybe it’s not as important as I might think. My best guess pins us at having under a year before knowledge of magic goes out in a way we don’t get to ignite. Biding our time and being good citizens until then is a valid strategy, as…I don’t know, as…limp as that feels. I’m not one to twiddle my thumbs, but I know that at the end of the day, this isn’t my decision to make. It’s yours.

“But what I do know…” Neville closed his eyes for a moment, if only to block my droplets. I felt his eyes turn down. Away from me. I felt his shoulders tense, the breath rise in his throat. If I strained, I could almost feel the words: swirling down the drain in his head, dripping one by one into his mouth, passing over his tongue. Not quite vomiting but drinking in reverse—a smooth motion where something inside comes out, allowed and easily, instead of by force.

It came out, then. He spoke and I heard.

And in all the days of my life—

“What I do know is that we need each other, Erika. I need you just as much as you need this. I know you don’t want to be a soldier forever. I know I don’t want to perpetuate the violence we all come to embody—but without an active effort on both of our parts, these things will continue. You will do what you know and so will I, unless we hold each other accountable.”

His fingers wove between themselves, and when his eyes opened again they were soft. He regarded me plainly and therefore I had to regard myself.

“We’ve both lost so much in our lives,” he said, quiet. The only sound in the whole world. “But just this once, I think we stand to gain.”

For a moment he did not speak—but in my head I could only hear: Jump! Jump!

Of what purpose is this work to you?

And then Neville said: “Erika, I’d like to adopt you.”