Chapter 16
EVERLY
Felix's idea of "something normal" is a state fair in Arizona, which tells you everything you need to know about Felix's relationship with the word normal.
"We're fugitives," Callum says when Felix brings it up. He says it the way someone else might say we have dinner reservations—factual, mildly inconvenienced, as though being hunted by a paramilitary magical organization is mostly a scheduling conflict.
"We're fugitives who haven't done anything fun in two months.
" Felix has the flyer. He found it at a gas station, pinned to the bulletin board between a missing cat poster and an ad for psychic readings.
The irony of the psychic ad was not lost on him.
He's been waving the flyer since breakfast. "When was the last time any of us did something that didn't involve running, fighting, or sleeping in a car? "
"Tuesday," Ren says. "I made risotto."
"Risotto doesn't count."
"Risotto always counts."
"I'm with Felix," Atlas says, which surprises everyone, possibly including Atlas. He's leaning against the 4Runner with his arms crossed and his conductor jutting out of his back pocket and an expression that's somewhere between resignation and curiosity. "I've never been to a fair."
"You've never—" Felix stares at him. "That's the saddest thing you've ever said, and you once told me your childhood pet was a lightning bolt."
"It wasn't a pet. It kept coming back."
We go to the fair.
It's ridiculous. It's completely, absolutely, dangerously ridiculous.
Five bonded fugitives in a crowd of a thousand people, surrounded by deep-fried food and carnival games and livestock competitions and a Ferris wheel that looks like it was last inspected sometime before I was conceived.
The sun is going down and the lights are coming on—strings of bulbs and neon signs and the spinning colors of rides, all of it garish and warm and absurd—and I feel something in my chest that takes me a minute to identify.
Happy. I think I'm happy.
It's been so long since I felt it without the undercurrent—without the fear, the running, the four heartbeats in my chest reminding me that nothing about my life is simple anymore—that I almost don't recognize it.
But it's there. Warm in my sternum, spreading outward, the way sunlight feels on bare skin after a long time indoors.
Felix buys tickets. He pays with cash from a dwindling envelope he's been managing since Ohio and I don't ask where the cash came from because the answer involves gaming the odds and I'd rather not know the specifics.
The first thing he does is find the ring toss.
"No," Callum says.
"Yes."
"You're going to cheat."
"I'm going to use my natural talents." Felix picks up a ring, squints at the bottles, and throws. The ring lands perfectly over a bottle neck. The booth attendant blinks. Felix throws again. Perfect. Again. Perfect.
"That's not how physics works," the attendant says.
"Take it up with the universe," Felix says, and collects a stuffed bear the size of a small child. He hands it to me. "For the collection."
I'm now carrying a bear and the claw machine cat from Ohio and my dignity is somewhere in a rest stop in Oklahoma, but the bear is soft and Felix's grin is the real one—not the gambler's grin, not the bluff, the real one that shows up when he forgets to perform—and I hold the bear against my chest and the warmth in my sternum spreads.
Atlas finds the strength test. The one with the hammer and the bell—you swing, it measures, and the goal is to ring the bell at the top.
He picks up the hammer and weighs it in his hands the way he weighs his conductor, testing the balance, and I notice the air go slightly electric.
Not enough for anyone else to feel. Just enough that when he swings, the hammer comes down with a crack that sounds like thunder and the puck shoots up the rail and rings the bell so hard it vibrates for ten seconds.
The attendant hands him a prize. A tiny stuffed cactus. Atlas holds it like he's never been given something before and doesn't know where to put it.
"It's yours," I tell him. "You keep it."
He puts it in his jacket pocket. The cactus pokes out the top. He doesn't notice or doesn't care.
Ren drags me to the food stalls. This is Ren's version of an amusement park—not the rides, not the games, but the rows and rows of things being fried, grilled, dipped, and served on sticks. He buys me a corn dog and watches me eat it with the focus of someone conducting a medical examination.
"Well?"
"It's—what is it?"
"A corn dog."
"Is it supposed to taste like this?"
"Like what?"
"Like someone breaded a crime and deep-fried it?"
He laughs. Actually laughs—full and warm and real, the laugh I've heard maybe three times in two months, always startled out of him like a bird flushed from cover.
The sound does something to me. Low in my belly, warm, spreading, the same heat I felt when Atlas kissed me in the desert, the same pull I feel when Felix grins, the same ache I get when Callum looks at me like he's solving an equation he didn't realize he was part of.
Four of them. Four different feelings that all lead to the same place in my chest, four different flavors of the same impossible thing, and there's no word for any of it.
I carry it the way I carry the bear and the cat and the cactus peeking out of Atlas's pocket—awkwardly, tenderly, with both arms full.
Callum stays close. Not beside me—behind, or to the left, or just within reach.
He walks the fair the way he walks everything: assessing, scanning, cataloguing exits and sightlines and the location of every person who glances twice.
But once, when the crowd pushes us together and my shoulder bumps his arm, he doesn't step away.
And once, when I stop to watch a girl on the Ferris wheel scream at the top, he stops too, and stands close enough that I can feel his shadow—not see it, feel it—cool against my skin in the warm evening air.
"Are you having fun?" I ask him.
He considers this. The way Callum considers everything—like the question has implications, like fun is a contract with fine print.
"I'm here," he says. Which, from Callum, is the same thing.
We ride the Ferris wheel. All five of us in one car, which isn't how Ferris wheels work but Felix does something to the ticket system and suddenly there's a car big enough and the operator doesn't question it.
The wheel lifts us up above the fair, above the lights, above the noise, and the desert spreads out around us in every direction—dark and vast and studded with distant towns like scattered coins.
At the top, the car sways. Ren's hand finds mine. Felix's arm is around my shoulders. Atlas's knee presses against my thigh. Callum sits across from me and meets my eyes and the bond between us—all five threads, all steady, all warm—hums like a chord.
I hold the bear and the cat. Atlas's cactus pokes out of his jacket. Felix has cotton candy in his hair. Ren smells like funnel cake and hand sanitizer. Callum's shoes have dust on them and he hasn't tried to clean them off.
For one moment, at the top of a Ferris wheel in Arizona, we are almost normal. Almost happy. Almost the thing we'd be if the world worked differently and magic wasn't dangerous and nobody was hunting us and we were just five people who chose each other.
Almost.
We come down. The fair is closing—lights clicking off in sections, vendors packing up, the last riders screaming on the Tilt-a-Whirl.
We're heading for the exit, Felix carrying a cotton candy he'll never finish and Atlas holding the stuffed cactus he won't let go of, and I'm between them with the bear under one arm and the cat tucked against my hip, and for thirty more seconds everything is warm and bright and possible.
Then I see them.
Two men near the exit gate. Standing still in a crowd that's moving.
They're wearing civilian clothes but their posture is wrong—too straight, too alert, the kind of stillness that comes from training, not relaxation.
One of them is scanning the crowd. The other is talking into something—not a phone.
Something smaller, held close to his mouth.
I know what they are before I know how I know.
My body knows. The grimoire part of me, the part that ate an inhibitor spell and can feel magic the way Ren feels heartbeats—it registers them like a cold spot in a warm room.
They're carrying wards. Dampening wards.
The kind the Administration uses when they don't want their targets to run.
"Felix," I say. Low. Calm. The way you say things when screaming would be easier but there are a thousand people between you and the exit.
He sees them. His eyes go sharp—a chaos mage's focus, the whole world narrowing to a single hand. "Two more," he murmurs. "West entrance. And one—shit, one in the parking lot."
Five total. Not a retrieval team. A perimeter.
Callum's shadows draw close. Atlas's conductor hums in his pocket. Ren shifts closer to me, his hand moving from mine to my wrist—pulse point, healer's grip, ready.
"Back entrance," Callum says. "Between the livestock barns. I saw it on the way in."
We go. Not running—walking. Fast, deliberate, Felix nudging the odds so the crowd flows around us, so the eyes slide past, so we're five more fairgoers heading for the bathrooms, nothing to see.
Through the food stalls. Past the livestock barns where someone's prize pig is snoring in its pen.
Through a gate that says STAFF ONLY, which Callum's shadows convince to unlock.
We're in the parking lot. The 4Runner is three rows over. Felix's hand is on my back, steering me between cars. Atlas is sparking—barely, just his fingertips, the static charge building. Ren is counting heartbeats—I can see it in his face, the focus, tracking the mages by their pulses.
"Clear," Ren says.
We get in the car. Atlas drives. Pulls out of the lot. The fair lights shrink in the rearview mirror—yellow and spinning and beautiful and gone.
Nobody speaks for ten miles.
Then Felix, from the back seat, cotton candy still in his hair: "For the record, I had fun."
I hold the bear and the cat. The cactus is in Atlas's pocket.
The fair is behind us and the desert is ahead and the bond hums warm in my chest and the moment is over and I hold it anyway—the top of the Ferris wheel, the five of us swaying, the almost of it—like something I won from a carnival game I'll never play again.
I hold it because it's mine. Because no one—not Catalina, not the Administration, not whatever's coming—can conclude a memory.
Five people were happy. That happened. That's real.