The Best of Galaxy’s Edge 2013-2014 (17 page)

I
’m on my way to meet Johnny when I trip over the well-manicured hand.

“Sheila …” I sigh. “You’ve dropped your hand again!”

“Have I?” Sheila calls from her cubicle, her voice from beyond the grave. “Could you please bring it here?”

I navigate through the deserted gray maze. Sheila often works late; zombies don’t need food or rest. Now she’s charging her batteries. Her eyelids twitch, and her skin glows in disturbing shades of poison-green.

“Thanks for bringing the hand, Luisa.” Sheila smiles at me, but her gaze remains empty.

I flee past the conference room where Johnny and I once kissed. We both pretend that it didn’t happen, though we sometimes go out for
business dinners
. Neither of us has the courage to hope for more.

A rhythmic, pulsing sound echoes down the glass-walled aisle, muffled by the carpeted floor. A shiver runs down my spine as I realize that someone is crying. Who else is still here besides Sheila?

I find Helen, Johnny’s secretary, in his office. Her narrow shoulders shake, twig-legs tremble. “Helen?”

“There’s been an accident,” she manages to say.

I drift closer to her, bound by morbid curiosity. “Where’s Johnny?”

“There was a truck … His car …” Helen wipes tears into her chiffon blouse’s sleeve. “Johnny is dead.”

Johnny? But we’re having dinner tonight. Right?

My legs give in. I collapse on his leather-padded office chair. As Helen sobs, I can only think of all the things that could have been, the romance on which Johnny and I never followed through. We could have been so happy together!

“What are you girls crying about?” The Big Boss avalanches into the room, reeking of cigarettes and whisky, interrupted night.

“Johnny …” I whisper, my voice wavering with regret and disbelief.

“Yes, he’s dead,” the Big Boss cuts in. “But the company insurance covers resurrection expenses and he’s been pieced back together already. Never let it be said that we don’t take care of our own.”

* * *

Johnny returns to work the next Wednesday. He wears his best pinstripe suit, but there’s a strange dent on his left side, where his car got smashed in. He looks mildly puzzled, but not like he’s in pain.

We greet Johnny with green and blue balloons. Many accept champagne, but no one wants to be the first to cut the sugar-frosted cake.

“It looks delicious!” Sheila announces, trying her best to fit in.

“Go on, everyone,” the Big Boss orders, stomping to fill his plate.

I don’t want cake. I drift past the queuing people, to Johnny. He looks as perplexed as I feel.

“How are you?” I ask.

“A little worse for wear.” Johnny attempts a grin. His eyes, dull and pale, no longer glint with humor. Or with life, for that matter.

“Johnny …” I thought I wasn’t that bad with zombies, but here I am, at a loss at what to say.

“It’s all right,” Johnny says. “I’m not hungry for brains or anything.”

I try to laugh, but I sound like I’m cackling. Several people turn to stare at me. I hate them all for witnessing the awkward reunion.

“Luisa, listen.” Johnny lowers his voice. “We’ve wasted enough time already.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, all too aware of the Big Boss’ banter, Sheila laughing at bad zombie jokes.

Johnny brushes my shoulder, his fingers cold against my skin. “Would you go on a date with me tonight?”

Would I go on a date with a zombie? I blink, my mouth open, thinking how at that moment I must look like one.

“Yes.”

* * *

Johnny takes me out to dinner, though he no longer needs to eat. He orders chicken curry to keep me company. The waitress asks if there is something wrong with his untouched dish. When she realizes he’s a zombie, she mumbles apologies and refuses to let us pay. Which isn’t that romantic.

Johnny drives me home. I say goodbye as I climb out of the car, but Johnny accompanies me all the way to the stairs leading to my apartment. I think of the months we wasted for no good reason whatsoever, how I always longed to invite him in.

“Listen.” Johnny cups my chin in his palm, his touch akin to melting snow. “If you want me to leave, just say so.”

“It’s not that,” I say. It starts to drizzle. I waver on the verge of tears. “I just never imagined our first date to be like this.”

Johnny laughs, but he looks miserable. “Me neither. We were so silly.”

Silly indeed … And what am I afraid of? He’s still Johnny. Isn’t he?

* * *

I trace his broken ribs with my fingertips. Where the white edges protrude through his ashen skin, the texture changes from porcelain to sand. “Does it hurt?”

“No.” Johnny takes a deep breath, but his chest remains still. “I feel nothing.”

I pull my hand away. For so long I have yearned to undress him. But now that I see him as he is, in his broken state, I regret my wish. “Nothing?”

Johnny places my palm on his chest, where his heart used to beat, where the resurrectors installed the batteries. “There really isn’t anything after death but regret.”

I know what he means all too well, and I’m still alive.

Johnny moves an escaped lock behind my ear. “This is my second chance, and I want to live it to the fullest.”

His choice of words takes me by surprise. “You want to spend your undead life living?”

He stares back at me, grins. I can’t help but giggle as his smile widens. Somewhere there behind the pale eyes is still my Johnny.

I say, “We won’t know if this will work out unless we try, right?”

We kiss, and he comes back to life for a moment more.

Published in Galaxy’s Edge Issue 11
Copyright
©
2014 by Leena Likitalo. All rights reserved.

V
ickie Nagy hefted the backpack up onto her shoulders, and winced. It was freaking heavy. Why couldn’t magic books be light? You’d think that
someone
would think of adding a little lifting spell to the spines, or something, when they were bound. But no.

Teachers prolly just want us reminded of how “weighty” our studies are
, she thought with resignation, as she faced what looked like the blank cinderblock wall of the basement. Mom and Dad had already gone to work; she had locked up the house completely behind them, Locks and Wards as well as physical locks. She’d locked herself in, of course; she wouldn’t be leaving the house by a door.

Not a conventional door, anyway.

She closed her eyes and envisioned the mathemagical formulas for the apporting spell (“
remember, a spell is a process and not a thing
”) then ran through them as her hands sketched the glyph-components in the air in front of herself. Then, with her eyes still closed, she walked confidently to and through the wall.

There was the expected moment of disorientation, and the burst of nausea caused by every apporting spell. When it passed, she opened her eyes.

She was no longer in the basement of a little bungalow in Quantico, Virginia. She was somewhere—and only a handful of people knew
where
—in upstate New York. She stood in the Center Courtyard of St. Rhiannon’s School for Exceptional Students, in the exact center of a Magical Circle carefully inlaid in the granite of the paving, under a blinding blue, warm September sky.

The Magical Circle was a construction built of several circles, actually; this was one of the most complex permanent Circles she’d ever seen. Literally a Master Piece; it had been put together by the Founders as one of the first constructions of this School, so there would never be a road leading to it. She had to presume that all of the material used to construct the School had been apported here directly. It must have been a massive undertaking.

The school buildings were some of the oldest in North America, had been built on the pattern of Merlin College in Oxford, and the Founders had left no safety factor unconsidered when creating the “landing pad” for their institution. Well,
she
called it a “landing pad.” The people who spelled Magic with a “k” on the end referred to it as a lot of other things, most of them sounding like the terms came straight out of a D and D book. The location of St. Rhia’s was so secret not even Vickie’s parents could get there by anything but apport. Probably the Dean and a couple of other senior Professors who literally never left the place knew where it really was, but no one else. Somehow, some way, they were even keeping the school screened from satellite and other aerial cameras. You couldn’t see it from an airplane, and nothing led to it.

It sometimes seemed ridiculous to Vickie that in an age where metahumans saved the day with their super-human powers so often their stories only ended up on Page Three of the newspaper, her fellow magicians should be so paranoid about keeping their existence ultra-secret from most. But …
well, maybe not. It’s true that the majority of metahumans have secret identities. And I’ve never heard of any schools for super-teens either. Maybe all of us are better off hiding in plain sight.

There were four smaller primary circles within the larger one, one at each of the cardinal points, and a slightly bigger one in the middle. Vickie was in the North, the Earth point. She quickly moved off it and onto clear pavement. As long as she stood there, whoever was next and was Earth couldn’t come in. Simple physics; two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Of course, the Founders never thought of it as physics, but they had understood the principle.

The Central Courtyard was paved with what looked like granite, and the four buildings around her were likewise built of stone, and looked positively ancient, although they were equipped with modern things like central heating and electricity and all that inside. Thank the gods. Otherwise going to school here would be like torture, especially in the winter. Or like living in a Dickens novel, an experience she would really rather pass on.

The buildings looked a lot like many of the buildings at Oxford University in the UK, actually; Gothic, but in the pretty way, not the morbid way. Stone made graceful. More of the “dreaming spires” that poets talked about. It was hard not to feel a little awe.

North and South were the classrooms, East were the dorms for the live-in students, and West was home to the teachers’ apartments, theater, gym, library … all the other things that weren’t classrooms or dorms. The place was set in the middle of an extensive garden. Outside the garden were thick woods that looked really, really old, and impenetrable, although Vickie knew for a fact that the students were actually encouraged to explore them.

Most students lived here; there were only a few who were “day pupils,” like Vickie. There were a lot of reasons for that, but the chiefest were that most students didn’t have the benefit of having parents as magically ept as Vickie’s—or, even had parents that actually believed in magic. And those parents who
were
magicians were busy making sure everyone around them thought they were mundies. That made it hard to cover up for your budding Magikal Childe. Very few kids understood as young as Vickie had that making fireworks and drawing attention to the fact that you were very different was dangerous.

She’d had a full day of Orientation already, though thanks to working unofficially with her parents for a couple of years now, she thought of it as a “briefing.” So she set out confidently for North Quad, knowing exactly where her first class was.

Maybe other kids came here with mingled dread and anxiety; all she could feel was relief. Finally, she was going to go to a school where she didn’t have to hide what she was. Finally, she
wasn’t
going to be spending every waking hour in
some
kind of lesson or other—because for as long as she could remember, she had been going to normal schools like every other kid, then coming home and plunging straight into magic lessons. She generally hadn’t been finished with homework and magic-work until an hour before bedtime, and freshman year at Chafee High School had darn near finished her.

After seeing her shorting herself on sleep and running herself ragged, to the point where she had permanent dark circles under her eyes and the teachers at Chafee High School were calling her folks for conferences and asking pointed questions about drugs, Alexander and Moira Nagy had decided enough was enough. They’d wanted her to have a “normal” life—but this was anything
but
normal.

All that the State of Virginia cared about was that you were in
a
school until you were old enough to quit. The authorities didn’t really care which school. St. Rhia’s was no different from any other private school so far as they were concerned.

So far as the parents of about half of the students here were concerned, this was some sort of correctional school supported by eccentric benefactors, and as long as they saw their offspring as little as possible and there were no obvious signs of abuse, the lack of parental access bothered them not at all. Budding mages born into normal families tended to get into a lot of trouble they couldn’t adequately explain as they came into their powers, and adult magicians out in the world were always on the alert for the signs of a youngster in need of rescue. A little glamorie, a little persuasive geas, and the relieved parents were happily sending their “problem” off to be dealt with by someone else. And as for the kids, well, Vickie was pretty sure they were as relieved to finally find themselves in a place where they actually
belonged
as she had been. Vickie had even written a paper once postulating that the legends of “changelings” could be traced to magicians being born into mundie families. The fact that in legends, changelings were almost universally rejected by their parents was certainly mirrored in the rejection modern mundie parents evidenced in dealing with magical offspring.

Maybe there’s something about magic that mundie instincts completely revolt against.

Mom had really liked the paper, and had made it part of her application to St. Rhia’s. It was a good theory, anyway.

So far as the parents of the
other
half were concerned—the parents who were themselves magicians—St. Rhia’s was the place where their children were free to study and practice magic openly, and where they would get the best magical education to be had in North America. More part of the campaign to keep their nature hidden; at St. Rhia’s, their kids learned both magic and camouflage. Eventually, some few, with the right skills, would actually go off and pass as meta-humans, joining
ECHO
, with no one ever the wiser about
where
their abilities came from.

Even Vickie’s parents managed that, at least as far as most of the FBI was concerned. Outside of Section 39, except at the very top levels of the Bureau, no one was aware that they were anything other than metahumans—or that the things they stalked were considerably different than “mere” super-criminals.

Vickie hurried in through the ornate double doors of North, joining a stream of others who were making their way from East Quad and the dorms. The contrast between this place and her old high school could not have been greater. Inside and out, it looked like a movie setting. She felt as if she should at the least be wearing one of the academic gowns from a BBC period drama, and not the jeans, white shirt and blue sweater that were the school uniform for everyone. As she hurried up the handsomely carved steps to her first class, though, she felt herself grinning. Like everyone else, her school day was going to be spent half in academic classes, but half in magic. She wasn’t going to have to pretend magic didn’t exist, or hide it anymore.
This is going to be great!

* * *

Morning classes were … mixed. Exciting, because she was finally getting to practice and talk about magic and
be
a magician in the open for the first time. Frustrating because no one, literally no one, seemed to talk about how
she
saw magic.

It’s the math!
she thought, bewildered, as they went on about vibrations and components and stuff that really didn’t matter as long as you knew the math. It was as if they simply didn’t realize that magic and physics were not only related, they were so incestuously related they might as well have been Borgias. It was as if no one understood that as long as you knew the math, you didn’t need the components and … all of the other rigmarole. Well, the glyphs and diagrams, maybe, because you still had to impose your will on the energy, and that was the easiest way to do it. But the rest? Not so much …

She wondered if this wasn’t just a way to get kids to work and understand spell-casting without forcing them into the math. Obviously it
worked
, since they were doing magic successfully, and all the old grimoires were built around
eye of newt and tongue of dog
and all that sort of icky procedure, so obviously this was how people had been practicing magic since the year dot. But these were modern times, and man had walked on the moon. It was time to modernize.
And wouldn’t it be better to start them on the math first?

But when she tried to talk to the teachers about it, they smiled patronizingly and suggested she was oversimplifying.

The lessons themselves, once she got over the excitement of actually being able to do all of this in public, were … boring. She’d been doing these sorts of things since she was ten or twelve. This was all
old
. It was the math, of course. When you knew the math, you could always get exactly the same result, at least in this really simple stuff. The Uncertainty Principle really didn’t apply when you were lighting candles and apporting small objects. When you knew the math, you could make shortcuts, and you didn’t have to memorize pages and pages of chants and what-have-you. When you knew the math, you not only could do
one
spell, you could figure out how to generalize and do all kinds of spells that were like that one spell.

And there was another fly in the ointment, though it was hardly an unexpected one. She’d figured out within the first half hour that this school was no different from any other. There were cliques. There was an elite coterie of the Very Popular and Very Pretty. There were jocks of some sort (you could tell by the muscles and the attitude), who were part of the Very Popular. The Elite made it their business to try and make life miserable for the Outcastes.