“Because Insarra wants her new body, and she trusts you. Her household knows you.”
“No, Sahdia, why must the cult be stopped?”
“Ah! Eliri! If they have their way, someday there will be no humans left.”
Elir flexed her hands, unsheathing all ten of her claws. “What is human?”
“Has Insarra been preaching? She is corrupt. Remember your ama, and listen now to your commander.”
“I never spoke to Insarra about hope.” Elir smiled before she could stop herself, recalling the passion in Irsu’s voice. She’d made her choice days ago. “Sahdia, I forgot something in my room. Go, and I will come after to the commander-philosopher’s office.”
Sahdia frowned. She’d assisted the commander for years and knew well how to look for subterfuge in students. “You promise?”
“I promise,” Elir lied.
But the woman left her, and Elir hurriedly packed a small bag with only her favorite slippers, a set of styli, and the tracing-paper griffon diagram. She did not need any of the winged designs. After putting on her best robe she went out of the honeycomb student rooms and across the eight-star courtyard. The sky blazed red with bright lily-bombs, and intricate spirals of purple smoke rose. There came a roar in the seven-note chord of a raging sky-whale.
Instead of turning into the command tower, Elir walked for the massive gates of the college.
They spread like wings, cut of mountain crystals, with veins of red crater rock. Fuchsia blossoms trailed over them, from vines rooted in place, for the gates of the college rarely opened. Instead, a tiny arch cut into the granite wall beside them served as an entrance—and an exit.
Elir drew a deep breath and unsheathed her crystal claws. She dug them into the gate, and baring her glittering crystal teeth, she tore through a knot of falling force. It snapped free, and she hooked a pop of ecstatic force, redirected it with two claws to disrupt the flow force binding the gates together.
They groaned; the fuchsia blossoms shivered and began to fall around her like vivid rain.
Then the gates of the college opened, scraping the street in a raw cry that would call the sky-whale here to distract the commander-philosopher.
Elir walked through it, and there was Irsu with a streak of dark blood on ans cheek.
Her lips parted in surprise and eddies of chaotic forces tickled her tongue as she stared. The crater city lifted around them in gleaming towers and arched bridges, floating apartments and rising ribbons of force, all a-shudder with the peal of alarm bells and the chanting cultists, with booming explosions and something like distant laughter.
“I came to see you,” Irsu said. An wore a dark-blue robe, sleeveless and tight to ans chest and waist. It flared around ans hips like a skirt, and for the first time Elir had seen, an wore shoes, to protect ans feet against the dusty flagstones. She lifted her eyes from the soft brown boots, dragging her gaze up and up to ans face again, and the straight lines of ans hair as it gleamed in the hot morning violence. An added, “I came to implore you.”
“I hoped you would,” she announced, letting her bag slide off her shoulder.
Irsu stepped closer and took it, smiling ans wry smile. An offered ans free hand.
Elir scraped her claws gently against Irsu’s sensitive palm. She said, “This is only the beginning.”
Belvedere Castle in Central Park was an extraordinary building, but not everyone knew that. When construction began in 1867, the building was designed to be a folly. Danaë always thought that a folly was a mistake. Something people did by accident or an eternal flaw, like heroes in fantastical stories who tried so hard to beat a cruel destiny that would always be against them because of their foolish actions. But for architects, it meant a replica.
The thing that made Belvedere Castle magnificent, to those who could see it, was the additional tower, a thousand and one feet tall, shrouded in a magical barrier. For everyone else, the folly was magnificent in a mundane way, meant to be whimsical but nothing else.
Danaë felt that way sometimes, but then she remembered that, imprisoned in the top of her tower, she was not a folly. She was just forgotten.
* * *
Fabían Macías had the Sight, and it sucked. Coming from a family of brujas meant that he always smelled like incense and buried his moms’ good-luck trinkets at the bottom of his book bag, where they lived next to a city of pencil shavings, broken erasers, the MetroCards he kept forgetting about so they each only had seventy-five cents, and sticks of gum so old they were smooshed into the cheap polyester fabric.
Fabían wished he could shove his family’s magic down in the bag with the rest of the forgettables, but he wasn’t about to piss off his gran. Besides, there was this girl down in Brooklyn everyone whispered about, Alex Morticia or whatever, who had some big type of magic that she tried to curse away, and it had backfired, turning all her family members into frogs. At least that’s what people said. What. A. Dum. Dum.
See, Fabían’s beef with magic wasn’t that he didn’t like it. It was that he liked it so much. But he wasn’t chosen. Why couldn’t he have been an Encantrix or a weather brujo or even have the ability to guess Lotto numbers so he could buy his moms something nice. His cantos were weaksauce. One time, he tried to cast a canto to make his beard grow out so he wouldn’t look like an alley cat with patchy hair. Instead, he ended up with tiny green shoots, like he’d sprouted grass.
Meanwhile, his brother, Gabriel, had that nice beard all slick and curly. They were otherwise the same, he and Gabriel. Both had their parents’ brown skin, thick eyebrows, and round eyes framed by lashes so long it made girls angry because the Macías brothers didn’t have to try. He wished that his family had been blessed by the gods of old, the Deos, the ones that their ancestors had brought with them as they migrated from Ecuador to Colombia, picking up magic tricks until they settled in a dank little building in El Barrio.
Most days Fabían wished he’d been born ordinary. Knowing about the magical underbelly of a city like New York just made him want more of it. Other days, he felt lucky to just be part of the most exclusive club in the world. A brujo. Even a not-so-powerful one like him. He might not be raising the dead any time soon, but he could do what regular humans—magical ones, even—could not.
He could See. That’s See with a capital S.
The Sight was said to have been passed down in his family ever since his ancestor Túpac Pachaquil made a bargain with a goddess. He’d sacrificed something or other—Fabían couldn’t always remember if it was fifty guinea pigs or fifty rabbits, but that was the gist. The goddess blew in Túpac Pachaquil’s face the way Fabían had seen curandera witches blow holy water on the body of a possessed person to banish an evil spirit. The goddess banished Túpac’s human ignorance to the supernatural. Dispelled the layer that exists between the mundane and that which is magic.