Chapter 43
forty-three
Worse than the DMV, it’s Witch Registration
The medical building is much of the same everywhere until we get to the lower levels where staff move about between glowing workstations.
Each one is lit up with a different color magic, and most of them are displaying shapes I wouldn’t even consider language or information.
Despite that, the strange beings standing, sitting, and floating behind them seem to be gleaning some knowledge.
Bastian’s appearance had prepared me for some strangeness, but the creatures here are on a different level of weird. Tentacles. Too many eyes. No eyes at all. Transparent skulls. Armored spines. All manner of combinations from my dreams and nightmares exist here.
“There’ll be a quick stop to provide a statement to the investigatory department after you’re in the system,” Amyrah says.
“What kind of statement?”
“For the beings you and Creature Nine…” She cuts herself off with a sigh. “Bastian, decommissioned.”
I’d forgotten all about the waitress.
“That’s an awful nice way of saying killed,” I mumble, looking down at my own murderous hand.
Yes, it was self-defense, and I’m sure that’d hold up in court—an Earth court at least. Heck…I have no idea what their legal system is like, or what’s going to happen. I have no control over the outcome of any of this and I just have to keep trudging along and complying.
“Hey.” Amyrah grabs my shoulder. “Breathe. They were never alive to begin with.”
I take a long, deep breath and clasp my hands together to stop them from shaking.
“What were they?”
“Outlawed protobots. You did us a favor.”
“Protobot?”
“Did you ever play the game The Syms?”
My gaze snaps to Amyrah and I scowl. “Yeah, when I was a kid.”
She nods, pushing me along toward a door that’s perpetually held open by white light. Beings are passing through it frequently, but I can’t see anything beyond the light.
“Think of those bots as Syms. They had programmatically generated personalities to blend in with their environment, and they would operate of their own accord most of the time. Then sometimes, the operator would give them commands to follow, or even inhabit them.”
“Master,” I murmur, remembering her words. “She’d said, you’re not making this easy on Master.”
Amyrah bobs her head. “There’s a particular offender we’ve been tracking who’s very good at keeping a low profile. Their interference with the protobots was minimal—until last night. That gave us the opportunity we needed to hunt them down at the source and take them into custody.”
“So, no more protobots?” I ask.
“Don’t we all wish.” She chuffs. “Just one offender down. There’s thousands of those things still out there.”
I close my eyes against the blinding light as we pass through the doorway. The staticky sensation against my skin fades, and I feel a change in the air. The constant, ambient hum is gone, replaced with chatter, footsteps, clanking, zooming, rushing, and beeping.
The sight that greets me when I open my eyes makes me woozy.
Amyrah holds onto my elbow as I stare around the space.
At first glance, it looks like a utopian hospital entrance.
There are trees—albeit strange ones—in raised flower beds and butterfly-like bugs flitting about.
Something brown scurries between bushes and up a tree.
As I follow the creature to the top, that’s when my mind well and truly decides to do a manual shutdown.
My knees buckle as I take in the cavernous world above me and the beams of light shooting in between large towers that stretch up and down. The ceiling must be thousands of feet up and yet I can clearly see there’s people walking around the streets up there. Upside down!
“Caitlin, you should keep breathing,” Amyrah says.
I suck down a desperate gasp and the black closing in around the edges of my vision recedes.
“Holy shit!”
Some of the beings around me jump at the exclamation, looking at me warily. Something like a human, but gray-skinned with an extra leg, smiles at me with sharp teeth. I’m not sure if that was a friendly gesture…
“I know this is a lot for you, but we do have a schedule to keep.”
I blink and look at Amyrah. “Schedule.”
“Registration. Statement,” she reminds me.
“Right,” I say, remembering to keep breathing.
We walk away from the building and I try to get my bearings, try to identify the things I’m seeing. The ground is some kind of stone, but it ripples with magic everywhere we step. Our colors come bursting out with every foot—or tentacle—fall.
“Calculating trajectory,” the wall we’ve stopped at blares and I yelp in surprise.
Amyrah holds my arm steady as if I would try to escape.
“What is that?” I ask as the wall yammers out a series of numbers.
“Transport. Hold still,” she says.
“To where?” I shriek as light envelopes us.
“Office of Earth Resources and Operations,” the wall replies as gravity leaves us.
No, not gravity. There was never a sense of weight pushing down on me but rather a feeling that my feet belonged on the ground so that’s where they stayed.
But now, that’s gone, and the sensation of being sucked up starts in my head.
My knuckles ache from how hard I’m grabbing my skirt, as if that’ll save me…
There’s a bright flash and my insides tighten at the sharp, intense vertigo.
A blink later, my feet are on the ground again and the queasiness disappears.
I open my eyes and we’re in a completely different location.
The people moving around us are mostly human, and the nearby plants look much more like Earth plants.
Amyrah starts walking toward the utilitarian building ahead.
There’s no open doorway, but as we approach, our magic zips forward and activates a portal for us to pass through.
Inside is something like a DMV lobby, except there aren’t any agents sitting behind counters.
We walk toward a tablet on a stand about hip height.
“New witch registration, Legate Amyrah presenting,” she says to the device.
It glows red with her magic for a brief second, then flashes “Ready.”
“Place your hand there, then state your full name,” she says.
I do as she says, an electric tickle moving over my palm as I speak.
“New witch recognized,” the screen reads after a moment. “Adjuster Laurence Herst assigned.”
“Adjuster?” I ask with a bit of panic.
“It’s just another word for agent,” she replies cooly as she walks toward a bench.
There are no windows, but the walls have simple pieces of art. Nothing I would write home about, but I guess it’s better than staring at a blank slate. I take a moment to catalogue the different looking seats, some that are clearly not meant for human behinds.
“I thought this was the office of Earth Operations,” I say as I sit beside Amyrah.
She looks at me curiously and I point at the other chairs.
“There are many different species working in the IBMA. The waiting rooms adjust for each species currently occupying the building. Standard practice.”
A room reorganizing itself is standard practice.
Protobots being controlled like Syms. Walls opening up because my magic moves through it.
Light that beams us to different locations.
I’m pretty sure we actually died and went to some science fiction hell where people get registered like naughty animals.
There’s a flash of light and a man in a well-fitted, Earth style suit approaches. “Caitlin?”
I stand. “Yes.”
He extends his hand. “I’m Laurence, your adjuster.”
I accept it, but instead of a shake, we’re enveloped in light once more. The world disappears, and then we’re in an office that could easily be confused for a tax man’s cubicle. Laurence gestures to the chair on one side of the desk, then takes a seat on the other side.
He runs his hand along the flat surface of the desk and a light projection shoots up like a computer screen. “I’m going to ask you some questions. The more honest you are, the easier this will be, got it?”
I take my seat, and immediately notice the trickle of my magic flowing under the desk. That combined with his warning…it might be some kind of magical polygraph. Honesty it is, then.
And honesty it is for the next two hours, or what feels like it.
There are no clocks in this place and my phone is dead.
On and on he asks me about my powers, when I learned of them, strange happenings in my childhood, what my home life was like, and even some weirdly specific things about my mother—
I should probably call them when I get home, it has been about three weeks.
“Well, that does it,” Laurence finally says and I sigh with relief as I slouch back in the chair.
“You are, without a doubt, the most truthful witch to walk through these doors,” he says as his fingers dance through the magic light.
He slaps at the air and the display flips around for me to see.
“Order, high, Obedience, medium, Threat, none,” I say. “That’s good?”
He nods. “It means we won’t actively monitor you and you can use your powers how you please—within the bylaws of the IBMA.”
I wince. “New laws?”
“Afraid so,” he says, then hands me a thin bit of metal. “This is new, thanks to a very wild witch we’ve been dealing with for the past two years. It has everything you need to know in it, and a contact form for anything it doesn’t.”
I accept the little plate and look at each side. There’s nothing to it at all.
“Just hold it up like you would your phone and activate it with your magic,” he says, registering the perplexed look pinching my eyebrows.
I focus on pushing my magic into the plate and it comes alive with an orange sparkle. Laurence’s face projects from the top in stunningly accurate 3D.
“Hello, Caitlin Kennedy. What do you want to know?” the projection asks.
“That’s interesting,” the real Laurence behind the desk says.
I look at him curiously and he goes on.
“You put my face in it.”
“You didn’t put your face in it?”
He shakes his head. “They were designed to adapt to the witch’s magic, and yours is, well, really good at mimicry. Uncanny, even.”
He leans in with a grimace as he touches his head.
“Does my hair really do that in the back?”
“It’s probably just a malfunction,” I say as I stop the flow of magic to the device.
His eyes narrow on the side of the desk, then on me. “Liar.”
I can’t contain my grin. “Yeah, sorry. You’ve got Alfalfa energy.”
He groans as he moves around the side of the desk, holding the back of his head. “You’re free to go.”
“Um, how?” I ask.
There’s a little menace in his smile as he says goodbye and taps me on the shoulder. Light sucks me out of the room and drops me back in the atrium, where Amyrah is waiting for me…
But isn’t alone.