Lili Crow - Wayfarer

Like every regimentation, it had its weak spots.

Ellie’s fingertips tingled, and the world went away. A thread of Potential slid ribbonlike through the maze of suppressive charms meant to keep Juno schoolgirls from pranking, and sweat prickled on Ellie’s upper lip, at the curve of her lower back, under her arms.

Don’t get caught.

The glass ink bottle in its scrolled silver stand had been recently refilled. Red-black liquid inside trembled. Grading ink, charmed so it wouldn’t come out and couldn’t be altered. That particular charm was so specific it was pretty impossible to subvert—but that specificity made it volatile when you knew your Sigmundson’s Charms and Tables of Correspondence backward, forward, and sideways.

Like Ellie did. At least she was sure the ring didn’t have much to do with that; she honestly couldn’t tell why some charmers had trouble memorizing them. They were so simple , a language of Potential and description that, unlike French, was instantly recognizable.

Cami shifted next to her, but Ellie’s concentration had narrowed to a white-hot point. She had long ago perfected the schoolroom art of sitting still and apparently paying attention while doing something else, and a fierce spiked rose of joy bloomed deep in her chest as her charm, subtle and completely opposed to the one shivering in the ink’s uneasy fluid embrace, slid home with another satisfying click . The two reacted with equally satisfying violence.

CRACK.

Broken glass whickered through the air. Two ghoulgirls—Amy McKenna and Capriana Clare, both with black-varnished nails and jet-bead rosaries, playing at being black charmers—let out a shriek. Steam rose from a spray of boiling ink, and Sister Mary Brefoil, spattered and shocked, let loose a torrent of words in French and English that she would no doubt have to say a great many Magdalas on her own polished wooden rosary for.

Ellie exhaled softly, a shocked and amazed expression sliding over her face like the mask it was. Cami’s fingers had clenched, and her pencil was in splinters. Ruby was totally awake now, dark eyes wide and her wide grin of delight a beauty to behold.

There. My work for the day, done.

Finally, for the first time since yesterday afternoon, she’d done something right. She finally felt . . . well, human again.

At least, she would until she got home.

A FEW HOURS LATER, THE BLACK SEMPRENA SKIDDED. Ellie sank her fingers into the dashboard and cursed; Ruby’s disbelieving laugh pierced Tommy Triton’s wailing. There was no sound from the tiny shelf of a backseat—Cami pretty much always had her eyes shut and her lips moving in silent prayer while Ruby drove.

It was, Ellie often thought, the only way to handle Ruby at all .

“What the hell ?” Rube yelled, and the brakes grabbed hard . Smoke rose, the smell of burning rubber thick and cloying as Tommy Triton wailed about being born bad-charmed, baby, and wasn’t that always the way?

Ellie tried to shriek, but her mouth wouldn’t work. Instead, her jaw hung loosely, her heart triphammering inside her ribs as if Tommy Triton’s drummer was thocking around in there, high on charmweed and feeling invincible.

The long straight shot of Kelleston Avenue wasn’t the most efficient way to get to Perrault Street, but traffic had been terrible and Ruby had decided to swing out and take it. Now they’d found out why traffic was so snarled.

The Semprena rocked to a stop. Stood shivering like a nervous horse, its engine uneasy as its cargo’s thump-knocking hearts. Inside the thin screen of metal and glass and moving machinery, Ellie’s skin came alive, scraped ever so lightly by a charmsilver wire-brush.

“Holy Mithrus , do you see that?” Rube stared, her dark eyes huge and her knuckles white on the steering wheel.

Ellie sucked in a deep, endless breath.

This ribbon of two-lane pavement snaked down toward the industrial district, and the small shops on either side were closed up tight. Which they shouldn’t have been, since right after school’s-out was prime shopping time.

Kelleston also ran up the slope of one of the smaller hills New Haven was built on, and the shadow hulking in the middle of the road was proof positive that it wasn’t exactly a safe street.

If there was such a thing as a safe street. Lately Ellie had been suspecting that a whole lot less of the world was “safe” in any sense. If Dad could die and there could be tunnels under the city that would swallow your friends whole, what else could happen?

Her hand flashed out; she almost broke the volume knob on the stereo with a savage twist, and the sudden silence was almost as stunning as the thing in the road.

“Oh, God,” Cami moaned in the backseat, very loud in the stillness. “I’m afraid to l-l-look. Did she h-h-hit someone?”

Oh, God. Don’t look at this. “No,” Ellie whispered. “Cami, don’t you dare open your eyes. Ruby, turn the car around.”

Kelleston ran parallel to zigzagging Southking Street for a while. And both of them passed dangerously near the core—the diseased heart of the city, where the Potential tangled and curdled, where anyone too poor or desperate to live anywhere else was trapped. Twist and jack gangs fought for territory inside the blight of the urban core—almost like a piece of the Waste except this was the Potential of too many people living all knotted together. Most cities had a kernel of disfigurement at their centers, left over from the gigantic convulsion of the Reeve after the Great War and just driven in deeper by the crowding of the poor.

Any place old enough to remember the Reeve still held the scars. That was why most cities had New somewhere in their names.

The thing lay slumped in the middle of the road, and no wonder the shops were bolted and barred. Thin Marus sunshine ran down the street like liquid, the inside of the car warming dangerously. Little prickles ran over Ellie, Potential flooding her nerve-rivers.

“Is it dead?” Ruby whispered.

“Oh M-M-M-Mithr-r-r-rus what . . .” Cami’s teeth were chattering.

“It’s not dead.” Ellie’s throat had closed to a pinhole, she had to struggle to produce a croak. The inside of her mouth was dry and slick as dusty glass. “They don’t die.” Not until every bit of wild magic has run itself off. And if they get out to the Waste they may not ever die; who knows?

There was a sharp sound from the back. Cami had looked.

Ellie made a shapeless noise, too, and her mother’s ring crackled out a single blue-white spark. The old, shared urge to protect Cami must have spurred Ruby into action. The Semprena’s engine revved.

The minotaur raised its heavy, graceless head, a blurring storm of Twisting charm-Potential swirling around it in a perpetual tornado of dust and waving fronds of wild magic. It must have been running for a while, because its flanks heaved as it poured up from its crouch, and you could barely tell it had once been human. A charmer, most likely, wandered too close to the urban core or full of hate or rage.

Strong, bad emotions could Twist a charmer up. But it took the febrile petri-dish of the core or the Waste to birth a minotaur. The head dropped and bone sprouted, ivory-glowing horns spreading wide and wicked, dripping with a dark red ectoplasmic fluid that came from nowhere, the body contorted and swelled until the arms thickened and the shoulders bunched with muscle. It grew as long as there was ambient Potential to feed it.

If you got too close, it could kill you. Or worse, Twist you too.