Stacia Kane - Finding Magic

And she’d believed it. Because it was Truth. Everyone knew that.

Now she stood in the middle of the terrifying cavern of the City and felt the hatred emanating from the dead, felt the cold against her skin, saw that the gentle future she’d been promised was really like the worst hell the old religions could come up with, and something deep inside her broke.

The Church wasn’t wrong. Couldn’t be wrong. They told the Truth, and they’d proved that over and over again. They’d found her in the Corey Home and given her … given her this, this new life she was living, this chance to be someone for real. They’d saved her, just like they promised they would.

Which meant it wasn’t the Church lying to her. It was her … not getting it, not seeing it. Her fault.

Everyone in the world saw the joy of the City. Except her.

Another way she was broken, another way she was wrong. Shit, what was she even doing there if she couldn’t see something as basic as the beauty of the City? She didn’t deserve to be there if she couldn’t see it. She’d failed. This was a test, and she’d failed. And if they found out, they’d expel her. They’d see they’d made a mistake letting her come train there, and she’d be on her own again.

She could never, ever let anyone know.

So she swallowed the bile and tears threatening to clog her throat and forced her lips to stretch into the closest approximation of a smile she could muster. “It’s just—overwhelming, I mean, they said it was peaceful, but this is so much more.”

Her eyes had adjusted to the dim underwater-like light enough to see Jillian’s answering smile, wide and genuine. “I thought you’d like it. Aren’t you glad you came now?”

“Yeah.” Liar liar liar. “This is great.”

Jillian looked like she was about to hug her; Chess braced herself, already clenching her jaw hard enough for her teeth to squeak against each other. Hugging was bad enough normally, but in her current state Chess thought she might scream if Jillian tried to embrace her without any clothes on.

“How big is it?” she asked, taking a quick step away that she hoped looked like she was just wanting to explore.

“They haven’t told you yet?”

“Wha—oh, um, right, of course. Duh. I’m just—this part, this anteroom part, is like two hundred and fifty yards, right? And then it goes on for miles and miles beyond it.”

Jillian nodded. “It’s almost as big as—oh, there’s Anna and Bruce.”

Anna? Oh, right, the female Liaiser who’d been in the booth with Bruce. Yes. There was all of Anna and Bruce, smiling as they crossed the hard-packed dirt. But why wouldn’t they be? They did this every day. They liked it there. Chess was the one who didn’t belong.

“We think we might have something for you,” Bruce said when they got close enough. He was a decent-looking guy, kind of a hippie type but not bad just the same. Not that it mattered, because Chess wasn’t interested in anyone she’d have to see again after she finished, but still.

And he might have information, which was awesome, because that would mean she could leave.

“We got a few names,” Anna said. “It took some work, but we identified a few missing. And they were here at the beginning of the month, and we haven’t had any leaks—not that we can identify, and we’re very certain that means there weren’t any.”

“Which means they were Summoned.” Jillian glanced at Chess as she spoke.

“Right.” Anna also looked at Chess. “Someone performed a Summoning ritual and pulled these specific spirits from the City.”

Chess smiled, hoping she’d managed to keep the no-shit-really? off her face. She wasn’t a fucking child; she knew what a fucking Summoning was and what it meant.

She also knew that this could be a major break in the case. Which was awesome. But which also kind of sucked, because if the case ended, so would her chance to actually investigate Uncle Mark.

“So who were they? Did you write them down for us?”

Anna and Bruce exchanged looks, the quick conspiratorial glances of people who were doing something besides working together. Uh-huh. Oh well. Not her business. She shifted her weight and looked away, back toward the dead inching ever closer. Coming for her.

Never had she been more grateful that her fear of failure—and the resulting punishment she’d get—had kept her from actually using that razor blade on her wrists, from jumping off the Old Home Bridge, from overdosing on anything and everything she could get her hands on. The day she’d moved into her little room in the Church dorms she’d been grateful, the day she’d really realized what a chance this was for her she’d been grateful, but this … this was gratitude unlike any other, so strong and pure it stung her eyes. Because to kill herself would have been to send herself here, and instead of the peace and beauty she’d always been led to expect, she’d have been trapped in that—

Shit. She would be trapped anyway, one day. She was going to die one day. And when she did she’d end up there. For eternity.

Anna, Jillian, and Bruce were still talking, but Chess couldn’t wait. No foreign objects or substances were allowed in the City and she was pretty sure vomit counted, and she couldn’t hold it down anymore.

Those bespelled walls, those lines of pale blue light mocking her. Those glowing shapes of the dead coming for her, ready to grab her and hold her there and never let her leave. The pounding of her heart and the knowledge that she was wrong, she was broken so badly she couldn’t even see the beauty everyone else did … She didn’t belong there, she was ruined, she was dirty and abnormal, she didn’t feel the way everyone else felt because something was just fucked up inside her. She stumbled toward the door as fast as she could with sweat stinging her eyes and her chest aching as she fought her tight throat for air, and she flung herself through the iron-chain curtain and her knees hit the train platform with a bone-jarring smack as she threw up all over the concrete.

Shit. Chess took the little plastic cup Jillian offered her and downed its contents in one horrible pink-minty swallow. She didn’t want it; a real drink was what she wanted, but fat chance of that. At least Jillian had brought her a Sprite, so she had something to wash down the medicine with. Because she didn’t have a choice on the medicine.

She could either admit that she’d thrown up because she’d realized that instead of her soul living forever in peace and comfort, it would be trapped forever in a world even colder and emptier than the one she now inhabited, or she could lie and say something she ate must not have agreed with her. She chose the latter.

Couldn’t even blame it on her hangover, because really, it wasn’t like that looked much more professional, was it? “Oh, yeah, I knew we had a lot of work to do today so I decided to get hammered alone in my room last night” was probably not a great thing to say.

Not that she cared. She couldn’t bring herself to care about much of anything at that point; it was like someone had reached into her mouth and scraped out her insides through her aching throat. She’d failed. Three years of studying her ass off, spending hour after hour reading and taking notes and working to try to get somewhere, and she’d failed in the biggest and most important task of all: she’d failed to see what everyone else saw, didn’t have inside her whatever it was that she was supposed to have that would make her see the City the way it truly was.

“You sure you’re okay?” Jillian rinsed the little cup and tucked it back into the medicine cabinet. They were in her cottage on Church grounds, a basic one-bed-one-bath just like all of the other employee cottages. Or most of them; the Elders who chose to live on-grounds had bigger houses, especially the higher-ranking ones. And married Church employees got bigger houses, too.