“Nope. There was this chef. Like, legit trained-at-the-world’s-top-restaurant type of chef. He was convinced that food prepared by hand tasted better. No one was allowed to use magic when he was the one in charge of the meal. He would—”
“Hey, watch out!” Ridley called, looking over her shoulder in time to see Archer’s knife reach the end of the celery sticks and continue off the board and onto the table.
“Oops.” Archer grabbed the knife and rubbed at the marks on the wooden table. “We’ll, uh, just pretend that was already there. Okay, I’m sending you the celery now.”
The celery joined the onions and garlic in the pan just as the back door opened. “Well, I’m not changing my tune,” a woman said. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t agree with you.”
With a simple one-handed conjuration, Ridley left the wooden spoon stirring the pan’s contents and turned around. The person speaking was Tanika, a woman who had the room next to the one Ridley and Callie shared. She and Callie argued endlessly over their vastly different music tastes, but other than that, Tanika was fairly easy to get along with. She had taught Ridley a conjuration for scented bubbles, which Ridley now used almost every night in her bath. She also had a seemingly endless collection of vibrant scarves, which she used to tie up her thick, curly hair.
“Good meeting?” Ridley asked as Nathan and Saoirse walked in behind Tanika.
“Same meeting,” Saoirse said with a sigh. “Nothing ever changes. Ooh, what are you cooking?”
“Uh, not totally sure. Some kind of veggie stir-fry type of mix.”
“Smells amazing, whatever it is.”
“What’s amazing is having so much fresh produce to work with,” Ridley said. “This stuff costs a fortune in the city. Almost everything I’ve eaten over the past decade has come out of a can or a box.”
“And that’s the world you want us to join?” Tanika said to Nathan. “The world where they only eat out of cans and boxes?”
Nathan groaned. “You know that’s not the way it would be. We want to change the world. Make it more like the way it used to be. Once magic isn’t raging across most of the wastelands anymore, there’ll be plenty of space for farms and crops and all of that.”
“Uh, where’s my dad?” Ridley asked Saoirse.
“Oh, he and Cam and some of the others are packing chairs away after the meeting.” Saoirse sat beside Archer and added, “Can I, uh, show you a slightly different conjuration? One that won’t mutilate the furniture in addition to the vegetables?”
“Look, it’s not that I don’t want change,” Tanika continued. “Change would be great. I just don’t think we’ll ever have enough power to get through that much arxium.”
“Some people do,” Nathan argued. “There are elementals out there who have tremendous power. They could probably single-handedly burn through all the panels over a city.”
“Right, sure, these mythical elementals we’ve heard of. But we’re not lucky enough to have anyone like that here. So while other communities might be powerful enough to liberate their nearest city, I don’t think we are. The life we have now—it works. Why mess with that?”
“Because this isn’t enough!” Nathan insisted. “Sure, life ‘works’ right now, but it could be so much more. So much fuller. Don’t you want a world where children can do and be whatever they want? A world where they don’t have to hide? Don’t you remember what that was like?”
“No,” Tanika said flatly. She plopped into the chair opposite Saoirse. “We’ve always lived in hiding, Nathan. Yes, we used to use magic out in the open, but no one ever knew about the magic inside us. No one knew about elementals. We’ve been hiding forever.”
“And that was wrong,” Nathan said. “We should be free to be who we truly are.”
“I’m free right here,” Tanika reminded him.
“And if the Shadow Society finds us?” Ridley asked carefully, not wanting to anger Tanika but feeling that this was a valid point. “It happened before, when I was a baby. I know you’ve lived here safely for a long time, but they’ll probably find us eventually. Then what?”
“That’s why we have a backup home,” Tanika said. “We can get away and hide there. At the speed we can travel, there’s no way they’ll be able to follow us.”
“Backup home?” Ridley asked with a frown.
“Sorry, I forgot to mention it,” Nathan said. “We’ve been safe for so long that most of the time I forget we even have a backup. Oh! That reminds me. Has someone given you a gas mask yet?”
“A gas mask?”
“I’ll check if we have spares. Everyone’s supposed to have one, just in case. We’ve never had to use them, so—”
“Best to be prepared though,” Saoirse said. “I’ll check for one tomorrow.”
Ridley’s gaze moved between Nathan and Saoirse. “Uh, thanks.”
“Yeah, anyway. The backup home,” Nathan continued. “It’s on the other side of those far mountains. The ones you see in the distance when you’re out there practicing your magic. We spent a few years building it after we first set up home here at the reserve. We have some supplies stored there already—I made sure we wouldn’t have to start over from zero—but our magic is all we really need. It would be difficult, but we’d survive.”
“See?” Tanika said. “So we don’t need to worry about that.”
“But we do need to worry about all the lies the rest of the world is constantly being fed,” Nathan argued. “And the rest of the communities are starting to agree with me on this. They recognize what some of us have been saying all along: that governments across the world don’t actually have any plans to reintegrate magic into society. They’re intentionally—”
“Oh, here we go again.” Tanika pressed her fingers to her temples and rubbed in small circles. “The conspiracy theories.”
“You know I’m right,” Nathan said.
“I love a good conspiracy theory,” Archer said, successfully executing the conjuration Saoirse had just shown him. He sent a cutting board of red peppers and various green vegetables flying over Saoirse’s head and flipped it upside down over the pan. Ridley rescued the wooden spoon from beneath the pile of vegetables and continued stirring everything together.
“It’s still called a conspiracy theory even if it’s true, right?” she asked. She knew what the others were referring to. Nathan had spoken to her about it the night she arrived.
“Everyone in the cities believes the magic out here will kill them,” he had said. “But that’s a lie. Magic is wild, but if you don’t fight it, it isn’t deadly. And the only reason it’s wild is because people constantly cause it to retaliate. Way out here, far from any city, we’re fine.” Ridley might have thought he was crazy if she hadn’t seen the machines buried in the wastelands. The ones that rose from the ground and sprayed arxium into the air, stirring the elemental magic into fierce storms. She’d asked Nathan why anyone would do something like that, but at the back of her mind, she already knew the answer.