Chapter 78
HARPER
Okoye ducks back into the wings and takes the box I hold out for him.
It’s the one Mom showed him back at Moot HQ.
She sits on the chair that’s been waiting onstage all along.
Those clever hands that have stirred potions, sketched sigils, and swung the pendulum that saved Bea Garcia, rest in her lap.
To stop them fluttering she squeezes them between her thighs, but her thighs are quivering, too.
‘This is what Professor Delacourt was developing at the Montreal laboratory,’ Okoye tells the journalists, holding up a strip of five sealed test syringes.
‘You’ll find the full description in the papers released in the Redhaven Files, but essentially it corrodes the magic within a person’s body.
We understand it’s very painful. You’ll want to be certain I’m not using a placebo, so please decide among you which one of these five you’d like me to use, and we’ll give the other four to the science editors at accredited outfits – Washington Post, Fox, the BBC and Associated Press – for verification.
Please raise your hands in favour of a number when I call them. ’
The hacks look troubled, as if they’re being invited to participate in a crime. No hands go up as he says One. None at Two.
‘I can tell you’re troubled by this,’ Okoye says.
‘I feel you. This is like a drug developed purely to destroy someone’s eyesight, or to paralyse their limbs.
It’s evil, and we are calling for an immediate global ban on the development and use of such poisons.
But remember your government, arguing it only wants to protect you, has already used this and plans to use it many more times. Come on, please give me a number.’
A few hands are raised when he calls Three, and at Four the entire ballroom finds its nerve and a forest of arms goes up, heads swivelling to check that yes, there is safety in numbers.
I’m reminded of how firing squads contain multiple riflemen to shoot one condemned prisoner so no individual need feel guilty.
Well, they all pulled the trigger on my mom’s beautiful, generous Gift, and they should feel fucking guilty forever.
Once they’ve watched this, I hope it haunts them.
‘Number four it is. I’ll place the other needles here where you can all see them and we’ll distribute them direct to those outlets in a moment.’
He separates the fourth syringe from the strip.
Hands Mom a sealed injection-site wipe and she swabs her arm.
Everything is done plainly. Deliberately.
In front of a room full of people paid to observe and report the truth.
No one can call this faked. Okoye primes the needle and I’m suddenly gripped by flashbacks of my own capture and sedation, those terrifying hazed hours in Delacourt’s clinic, the deadness of my magic and the numbness it created in my soul.
The fear and the emptiness. My neck is sweating and with clammy hands I clasp Starcross even tighter, my heart thudding against the thick binding so frantically it’s as if there’s an answering heartbeat or two within its pages.
I want to rush forward and knock that syringe from Okoye’s hand. But I can’t. We made this plan and we’ve all got to play our part, however hard and painful. I want to close my eyes, but I can’t do that either. Mom has the hardest part of us all and I owe it to her to witness this.
As Okoye plunges the needle into Mom’s arm, the scent of those climbing roses still heavy in the air, the press recoils.
Mom gasps, a tiny, wounded sound, and her eyes fill with tears.
I see producers instructing their cameramen to zoom in on her agonised face, and prickle with hot anger – until I remember Anna Dao, the reporter who thought she was getting a victim sob-story out of me back in Sanctuary but instead gave me a platform to tell the truth about Dan Whitman.
They’re merely the medium; we’re the message.
Mom’s writhing in her seat, trying desperately to hold herself together, but failing.
She’s whimpering, hands clawing the arms of the low-slung seat.
Okoye’s brow is pinched with concern, but he plays his part, too, keeping back and letting the focus lie all on Mom.
It’s a couple of painful, hideous minutes until Mom sags in the chair, winded and blotchy, like someone asphyxiated to the point of unconsciousness and only then, toyingly, released.
‘No wonder I had to be sedated and unconscoius when this was done to me in Montreal.’
Okoye sits in the other chair. He takes her hand and asks how she is. Mom murmurs weakly that it hurts, and it takes everything in me not to run over and drag her offstage, yelling at the media that they’re ghouls and haven’t they seen enough?
‘Shall we try something, Sarah?’ Okoye asks gently. Mom nods, and he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a candle.
‘Baby’s first magic,’ he explains to the audience, holding up the candle.
As he passes a hand over the wick, it magically ignites.
Okoye blows it out. ‘Often the first clue parents get that they’ve a budding witch on their hands is when our birthday candles just won’t …
go … out.’ He punctuates each word with a magical reignition, extinguishing, and reignition of the candle.
‘Now you do it, Sarah,’ he says, once the audience is easing up a little, glad the worst is over.
How wrong they are, because as Okoye holds the candle up in front of her, Mom just … stares. Her eyes fill with tears.
‘Come on Sarah,’ Okoye coaxes. ‘You’re from a famous witching family. You’ve helped hundreds of people over the years, healing broken bodies and soothing broken hearts. We’ve just seen what you can do. Can’t you light even one little candle?’
Wrists shaking, jaw quivering, Mom lifts her left hand and passes it over the candle.
Nothing. Sinews strain in her neck like she’s trying to lift a 200-pound weight.
The hand passes back. Her shoulders curve inward with effort.
The cameras are still tracking and I watch their blank glass eyes travel up from the extinguished candle to Mom’s stricken face.
No sound comes through the loudspeakers except her laboured breathing, a suck of snot as she tries to breathe through her tears.
I’m filled with a sudden fiery hatred for every person watching this and twine my fingers together to stop myself cursing the entire room.
‘No?’ Okoye’s voice is all softness. All comfort. ‘Sarah, goddess, I can’t …’
And he chokes up, too, wiping his eyes. He tells the audience that for the avoidance of doubt, so they’ll know she’s not faking this, a city official will now administer the same blood test employed in Registration, to confirm her magic is gone.
Mom sits with her head down, moaning, as a person in crisp scrubs emblazoned with the insignia of the New York City Health Department takes her sample and processes it right there, onstage.
Mom is rocking in her seat, her weeping quieter now, and I wonder how on earth we ever thought this was a good idea.
How I ever let her persuade me. Dad would have stopped it, I’m sure. He’d have said there was another way.
But Mom would have told him what she told me. This is the only way. The only thing big enough to reach people. The only thing human enough.
The result of her test is announced by the official. Negative. Mom doesn’t have a drop of magic in her body. Get her off that stage already! I think in Okoye’s direction.
But Mom’s not done. She lifts her stricken face and the cameras are transfixed like phones pointed at a traffic accident.
‘I did this,’ Mom says, voice faint yet possessing a golden strength that’s nothing to do with her magic and everything to do with her goodness, ‘so you could all see the truth of what’s intended for witches.
It begins with Registration, and it ends with our erasure.
I’m begging you not to let this be done to people with a Gift that can bring such joy, who’ve spent their whole lives trying to help others. ’
‘Okay, that’s enough!’ Naomi snaps beside me, storming out from the wings, her eerie poppet long since tucked away. ‘That’s enough! Cut there, you guys. Have some respect.’
Someone in the wings, a young Moot staffer, furiously yells No More Salems!
Beside me, the guy who runs the Moot President’s office is sobbing.
Will what we’ve just done be enough? I look out at the gathered press pack one last time and yeah, even these hard-bitten journos look moved.
A camera guy thumps his chest to clear a choked-up throat.
A reporter’s mascara runs down her cheeks.
The influencer is bawling red-faced into her phone as she livestreams. The saddest thing I’ve ever seen, ohmygod.
My own face is wet with tears and Starcross bangs painfully against my hip – safe in an anonymous messenger bag layered with wards – as I run to Mom and gather her in my arms. The cameras will lap it up. I no longer care.