Chapter 41
HARPER
When I wake, everything feels … heavy. My head. My body. My magic.
My magic.
I lift my wrists – they’re beneath a thin blanket, I’m in a bed – and the handcuffs are gone. I can move my hands freely. But no power leaps to my fingertips. No sigil I shape springs to glowing life. Have they somehow already removed my Gift? Vivisected me while I slept, and cut it out?
I won’t believe it. Can’t let myself believe it, because otherwise I’d just curl into this bed and never rise again. Luka had clearly been in physical pain. Surely I’d know?
There’s a large window covered by a mesh metal shutter, which tells me I’m not in a prison cell, at least. I lever myself up to go raise the shutter, but the minute I’m upright, I stagger beneath a disorienting pressure, like I’m on one of those simulated-zero-gravity flights when the plane pulls out of its floating arc, or on the deck of a sailing ship as it plunges into a wave’s trough.
I grip the bedstead as I sway unsteadily.
It could be concussion, but my whole body feels it.
Running my hands all over myself confirms I’ve no obvious injuries.
Yet something done to me, or something about this place, is seriously fucking me up.
The window shutter slots tight into a frame.
It’s part blackout blind, part security grille – to stop me seeing and getting out, or to stop others looking and getting in?
No amount of prising or pushing will shift it.
Sodium light-bleed around the edge suggests night-time security flood-lamps outside.
No noise reaches me, either from beyond the window or the other side of my door.
I rest against the wall, panting lightly beneath the strange and unaccustomed strain, heart protesting.
I’m still dressed, though my shoes are gone.
Now my eyes have adjusted to the thin, grey light I check the room.
The bed I was in looks institutional – it’s fixed to the floor – but is too comfortable for this institution to be a criminal one.
There’s no desk or other large furniture, only an armchair, low and heavy, and a narrow cupboard with a railed top section and shelving below, as if the room’s occupants are expected to stay, but only for a short while.
There are plenty of plug sockets. A wall bracket for a television that hasn’t been installed yet.
A small sink with paper towel dispenser, and on the side a plastic tumbler and two large bottles of antibacterial handwash and sanitiser.
Then I see it. At eye-height with the sink. What I’d imagined was a dado rail running around the middle of the wall is a wide strip of the same material that Michael Whitman shackled me with.
Fuck. There’s no mistaking what it’s for – and what its presence in this room means. It’s deadening my magic.
What is this place? The vibes are part hospital, part budget hotel, yet everything has a rubber-and-antiseptic smell of newness. Have I been locked up in a private pysch ward, like the heroine of a Victorian thriller? Where’s my long white gown?
I’ve not wanted to try the door, lest it alert anyone outside that I’m conscious and roaming, but there’s no other way out and no more information I can glean from my surroundings.
I press the handle stealthily at first. There’s no lock or keyhole.
But it’s like the handle on the outside of a hotel door: just an unresponsive mechanism that moves uselessly in my hand.
I slam it up and down a few more times, increasingly aggressive, but I’d bet nothing’s visible on the other side.
My stomach growls – loud enough that I fancy anyone outside would hear it. And I guess that’s a good enough pretext.
‘Open up!’ I shout, hammering on the door. ‘I’m hungry and I need to pee. Constitutional right to fair treatment during detention!’
I made that bit up. But I do have a constitutional right to a bunch of other things I’ve been denied. A lawyer. A phone call to relatives.
Mom. Dad. Surely they both know what’s happened to me by now? Maggie Knight was there when I was taken away.
The door opens. A young woman in pyjamas, her eyes sleepy crescents behind chunky glasses, looks over the shoulder of the person who did the unlocking, a security guy so wide he fills the frame like a door made of meat.
‘Can we help?’ the woman asks.
‘I’d like to leave.’
‘Sorry, it’s night-time. There’s no one authorised to evaluate you for discharge.’
Discharge. Evaluate. Definitely medical. And what I’d thought were pyjamas I see now are bamboo-green hospital scrubs.
‘Where am I?’
‘It’s natural you are feeling confused and disoriented.
’ She pushes up her glasses, revealing she’s a trifle cross-eyed.
Under other circumstances the effect would be adorable, but right now all I can think is that she’s not going to let me just walk out of here, and how badly could it go wrong if I try and force my way past her.
‘Don’t worry and please try to sleep. You will be fully briefed in the morning. ’
‘I’ve already been asleep for hours,’ I say. ‘Because I was drugged and brought here unconscious. Is that how people usually arrive?’
‘Everything will be explained in the morning,’ she repeats, stepping back. ‘Koa, please?’
The guard nods and reaches for the key card around his neck. Desperately, I throw myself against him. Knocking the guy even slightly off balance might create an opening. But the meat-door of his broad chest doesn’t budge even an inch.
‘Easy’, he murmurs, one massive hand gently pushing me inside like a farmer would an unruly lamb trying its small strength against the pen.
‘Breakfast will be brought at eight,’ the woman adds. ‘Only a few more hours. And there is a pan beneath your bed.’
The door clicks shut on their kindly, disinterested gazes.
I throw myself down on the mattress. Toe out the bedpan and kick it away in disgust. I’m not that desperate. Fill the tumbler from the tap and down it in one, though that’ll be no help on the bedpan front.
The water tastes different. Not wrong-different, but not like the tap water back in Sanctuary or Redhaven.
Am I no longer in Connecticut or Maine? The accent of the woman at the door was no help – she spoke non-native but near-fluent English with an East Asian inflection I’m not sophisticated enough to pinpoint.
I could have been transported anywhere while I was out cold.
Should I take her advice and try to sleep? Drugged unconsciousness surely isn’t restorative, so true sleep would mean I’m fresher for whatever morning brings. Or is my time better spent trying to adapt and push back at this awful deadness that weighs me down, mind, body and magic?
Cross-legged on the bed, back upright, I contemplate the dull metallic strip around the wall. The handcuffs that trapped my Gift inside me.
Imagine if mundanes have found a way to neutralise magic, no longer relying on witches and the Moot to do the job for them.
Or rather, I don’t have to imagine – I appear to be living the reality of it.
What did Ortiz say? She’s not the test subject we agreed.
Then Barr: Perfect it on her, so we’ll know it works when we get hold of her father.
That must be what this is. A research facility, where they’re perfecting non-magical means of suppressing our ability.
The idea sends a shudder down my spine so violent my skull knocks the wall.
They don’t have the Gift, so don’t want us to have it either. Mean children in the playground, jealous of their friend’s toy, who snatch and stamp on it. How small they are. How spiteful. Ortiz’s vicious platitudes about helping end bigotry, by making sure no mundane need ever fear a witch.
I see it now, all laid out in a horrible, efficient line, like railway tracks leading somewhere unspeakable.
Scientists will have been working on this for years – decades.
Of course they have. Sometimes when I discussed my school History classes with Mom, she’d share magical perspectives on the same events.
Not often, because she thought I was Giftless and hurting, but I remember when we covered the 1950s and 60s, and the Cold War.
Mom explained how alongside the nuclear race and the space race, America and Russia both conducted scientific research into replicating or triggering magical ability in mundanes.
They wanted to build a race of super-soldiers, she said.
And to achieve it they tried things you wouldn’t believe.
Brainwashing. Psychoactive drugs. But most of all they wanted witches.
Gramma Serafina said that was when public opinion took a sharp turn against magicals.
We’d been legalised, but hadn’t shown our gratitude by lining up to hex the Soviet Union en masse.
And if the state failed either to harness or to manufacture magical ability? The least desirable, but still useful option, would be to know how to shut it down. To contain it.
To destroy it.
I buck off the bed in horror. They can contain it already. The handcuffs, this room both prove that. For what more am I a test subject?
I hammer on the door again. I have to get out of here, and the night-shift staff will be a lot easier to evade than whoever’s on-site during the day.
The guard, Koa, seemed gentle despite his massive size.
The young researcher I’ll take down with a punch if I must, because she’ll never see that coming.
When my pounding doesn’t bring a crack of light around my opening door, I switch tactic.
‘Please,’ I shout. ‘It hurts so bad. Please, I need help!’
But no one comes. They’re wise to me. That door won’t be opening till morning.
Just myself to rely on, then. Well, Harper Fenn, it’s not like you’ve not been in this position before.
If they want to try and take my magic, I plainly still have my magic. It’s in me somewhere. I’m a lidded container. How to pop the lid?
Settling into the armchair, closing my eyes, I send all my attention inward.
We know magic isn’t as simple as glowing particles in the blood, but that’s how the really old texts imagined it, back when people still thought of women as ovens that cooked up babies in their wombs.
There’s a lovely and bizarre illustration in Starcross, ‘Ye Anatomie of a Witche’, that shows her heart as a sun, irradiating her blood with magic.
In the darkness, desperately, I search for the spangles in my blood. My Gift. My witchery.
Time passes, I’ve no idea how much, and brightness flickers against my eyelids. Flickers – then steadies – then glows – then brightens some more. My eyelids throb redly. I’m an unhatched chick whose translucent egg lies beneath a heat-lamp. There is light and warmth.
I hear (how?) laughter.
And when I open my eyes I’m looking (how?) not at the blank, magic-proofed walls of my room, but at grass, sunlight, apple trees, and a rectangular shadow that as I blink, resolves into a farmhouse.
It’s the one I saw before, no less busy, with children hurtling around screaming gaily.
The air is hazy and shimmers with power.
It’s not Lachlan’s farmstead, but as I think of that, I recognise its contours in the space between the tall stand of pines at the back and the orchard’s generous curve.
For a moment, the two superimpose. Tavi striding across the yard.
Greggory fitting a new handle to an axe.
Yara and Bo drinking coffee under the eaves.
The folksily dressed children giggling as they race around the yard.
Eugene asleep in an Adirondack in the shade.
The ceaseless whack and whoosh of Joan’s loom upon the veranda.
Then the modern world passes back into shadow.
And I know, for sure, for the first time, what I’m looking at.
Redhaven-that-was.