Stacia Kane - Finding Magic

Except she couldn’t do any of that. Not unless she wanted to basically throw away any chance at actually being something one day.

Jillian spoke again once they’d gotten on the train. “It’s pretty cool, huh? That they built all of this so fast?”

Damn. If she’d had her bag with her, she could have had a drink. Of water. Of water, because her throat was dry. She only needed a drink of water, not anything else. “I thought the City was already here.”

“Well, yeah, the cavern was. But the train and everything, they had to ship all of that down specially. Pretty amazing, if you ask me.”

Chess opened her mouth to reply, but Jillian cut her off. “Shit! I need to mark you. Why didn’t you say something?”

“What? I—oh.”

“Oh” was right, because Jillian got up and reached for the bin full of black chalk molded into one of the train’s walls. The tattoos across her bare shoulders and down her arms shifted with the movement, so runes and sigils, hafurans and hex signs, planetary symbols and protective letters in ancient alphabets seemed to slide over her skin. Those symbols awarded her extra protection, extra power to keep her safe from the City’s ravenous dead.

But Chess didn’t have her tattoos yet; she wouldn’t until she’d graduated and was officially hired. Until then she was reliant on an employee to mark her, and Jillian was right. Entering the City was dangerous enough; entering it unmarked was not a good idea.

“Here. Look up.” Jillian leaned over; for an uncomfortable second or two her full breasts hung right before Chess’s eyes, before Chess obeyed with an inner squirm. Not comfortable. She was not comfortable and she was not happy, no no no.

The chalk slid over Chess’s forehead, a prickly tingly sort of feeling like a bug crawling across her face. Energy radiated from it, spreading from Chess’s head to her throat and down. Like a rash. Like sweat breaking out on her skin.

“Sorry I didn’t think of this sooner,” Jillian said. Her fingertips urged Chess’s head to the side, brushed Chess’s hair off her shoulder so her throat was visible. “Guess getting marked by a naked woman isn’t what you thought you’d be doing today.”

“It’s okay.” She tried to sound like it was okay. She was pretty sure she failed. The rocking of the train beneath her and the energy slithering along her body, her own discomfort, made her queasy; she swallowed hard, swallowed again in an attempt not to be sick. Jillian wasn’t threatening her, wasn’t coming on to her, wasn’t trying to ask her to do anything or make her do anything … Swallow, swallow, swallow. Swallow the saliva, swallow the fear, swallow the memories.

And get it the fuck together. Chess cleared her throat—she barely heard the sound of it over the pounding of her heart, the blood rushing in her ears—and straightened her spine.

It didn’t help much. By the time Jillian finished a few minutes later Chess felt like she’d spent several hours jogging in a sauna, and all she wanted to do was get the hell out of there. Screw the Church, screw her potential job—she wanted out. Or at the very least she wanted a drink. Maybe even a cigarette. Something to help her calm down, help her move on. Why couldn’t she just move on?

The train stopped. Jillian stood up and stepped back, admiring her handiwork. Her hand brushed Chess’s cheek. “Okay. You should be good now.”

“Thanks.”

Jillian acknowledged her with a nod and put the chalk back. “You know the rules?”

“Don’t look them in the eye. Don’t talk to them. Don’t make any moves toward them, they’ll see it as a challenge. Don’t try to touch them. Don’t raise your arms above your shoulders, they’ll think it’s an attack. Don’t run. Don’t raise your voice. Don’t show any emotion, but especially not fear.”

Jillian’s eyebrows rose. “You’ve been studying.”

Chess shrugged. Of course she’d been studying. Did she ever do anything else?

Jillian bent over slightly in front of the lock to look at it as she did whatever she was doing to it. Chess turned away, examining the ceiling and the blank walls around her like the unwilling witness she was, ostentatiously not looking at Jillian. The procedure to enter the City was privileged to full Church employees only, and Chess wasn’t one of those yet.

Maybe Jillian would forget the procedure, maybe it wouldn’t work … maybe they could just turn around and leave. Those silent dark walls, musty and cold, looming over her to the ceiling she could barely see … Chess felt the weight of the earth above, all six hundred feet or whatever it was that could fall at any second, felt that heaviness like a block of ice sitting on her heart. So far underground, they were, so far that help couldn’t possibly reach them in time if something went wrong. So far that no one would hear them scream.

She heard, though, when the lock gave. Felt it, too, like a snap inside her, a click as the energy shifted. Jillian glanced back at her, smiling, and opened the door to the City of Eternity. The city of the dead.

It wasn’t a city. Not at all. No buildings, no roads, no trees or—well, no anything. Nothing but blank space as far as Chess could see. Nothing but the pale blue glow of the magic sigils covering every inch of the craggy ceiling, every inch of the rough-hewn stone-and-dirt walls, shiny-bright lines of magic through solid rock like veins of silver in a mine.

Pale blue light, too, from the ghosts.

Iron chains hung over the doorway as added protection to keep the ghosts in the City; iron hurt them, burned them, made them lose their shape, and iron was essential to controlling them. The last of the chains slipped from Chess’s shoulder as she pushed herself through them to stand, barefoot and naked, inside the only world the dead were allowed to inhabit.

She thought she was going to be sick.

To her left were a few iron cages, leaking dim yellow light through iron-gridded windows. The Liaisers’ booths, where they sat all day allowing the dead to possess their bodies for the benefit of paying citizens. Through the tiny crisscrosses over the bulletproof glass Chess managed to see Bruce Wickman, one of the Liaisers, his face blank and expressionless as he spoke in the direction of the caged camera and monitor mounted high on the ceiling, while a female Liaiser Chess didn’t know stood ready with herbs and iron should anything go wrong.

How did they do it? How did they visit this place every day, spend all day on Thursdays in this horrible, cold cave of misery and death?

She could see them. The dead. The ghosts, their forms glowy and smeared, as if she was viewing them through a Vaseline-covered lens. They appeared like a strip of shifting light on the horizon, an aurora borealis of death. She saw them, and they saw her; their hate radiated across the empty space—she guessed they were at least a couple of hundred yards away at that point—to scrape at her bare skin.

Jillian touched her; she jumped.

“Sorry.” Jillian appeared to be smiling, but it was hard to tell in the shifting semi-darkness. “You okay? I know it’s a bit intimidating the first time. But listen, hear how quiet it is? How calm? And all that space, and the magic—it’s just so soothing, isn’t it? When you really think about it.”

Chess managed to nod. Soothing? Was Jillian fucking kidding?

No. No, of course she wasn’t, because everyone thought the City was peaceful. Chess had been raised to believe it was peaceful. Every Saturday of her life she’d been taken to Church—no matter that it was simply a ploy, that whatever foster family she was forced to serve at any given time only took her so they could get credit for going—and told how she would live forever under the earth, in the quiet happy peace there. She’d been told how the ghosts that aboveground were driven to kill were in the City full of joy.