Nadia pushed her way through the crowd at Swallow, standing on her tiptoes to peer over and around the heads of reveling witches. But even with the extra inch her platform combat boots afforded her, she couldn’t see much. Little suspended flames darted in and out of her line of vision, and the bar’s décor—walls of glass and mirrors, purple mood lighting glinting off gold hardware—didn’t exactly help. Everywhere Nadia looked, there was a witch or MAM (magic-affiliated man) holding either a typic drink or a potion, shouting or breaking out into riotous laughter. Nadia felt a tap on her shoulder and turned.
“Nadia!” Aura leaned down to hug her, the jade beads at the ends of her braids clinking melodically as she did.
“Aura, I’m gonna kill you,” Nadia said.
“Why is that?” Aura asked, feigning innocence. She grabbed Nadia’s hand and led her through the crowd.
“You said this place was low-key!”
“It was low-key,” Aura said. “But people must have found out about it.” Typic alcohol was having a resurgence in the Sphere, and Aura had been adamant that Swallow was a hidden gem.
“Yeah, looks like it.” Centimeters away from Nadia, a witch materialized out of thin air, and Nadia ducked, resisting the urge to lecture her about transportation etiquette.
“Anyway, it’s not my fault it took a literal miracle to get you out of the house. If you didn’t practically live in that lab then maybe you’d have some recommendations of your own.”
Nadia’s heart jumped at the mention of her newborn niece, the baby they now called Nina. The baby everyone had come out to celebrate. News of her birth had made it around the Sphere in a matter of days, as gossip always did in their world, and for the past twenty-four hours, the Sphere had felt like a polaroid coming to life—moving from sludgy gray-green to sharp, joyous color. Nadia could only guess that this was what the elders meant when they described the Sphere before the Shatter.
Aura led Nadia up a secluded set of stairs.
“Where are we going?”
“Rooftop—it’s quieter there. Jack’s here already. He forgot to dress for the coordinates.”
Nadia snickered. Jack and Aura had been her closest friends since childhood, two people whose personalities were so different from hers, they probably wouldn’t have known each other if it weren’t for their parents. Aura’s mom, Thea, and Jack’s mom, Veronica, had been on the Council with Natasha for years, and their families had been celebrating everything (graduations, birthdays, Gathering pre-parties) together for as long as Nadia could remember. They’d all gone to the same training school, where Jack and Aura had coasted by, betting their familial connections would one day afford them appointments in the Regent’s orbit. Aura was biding her time and studying healing. Jack wasn’t doing much at all.
It was Nadia, whose eventual Council seat was predetermined, who had taken training seriously. Only two positions on the Council were explicitly inherited: the Regent and the Executioner. There was only one witch in each generation born with the ability to Execute, or completely strip a witch of her powers. It was understood as a dark but necessary ability, and unlike other named powers (like Seeing, Healing, and Shapeshifting), it didn’t distribute itself randomly throughout the population. From the beginning of time, the Executioner power had only ever been found in the Nox family—in one witch per generation—and there was no reason to believe it would ever be found elsewhere. When her mom died or retired, the role would be passed on to Nadia.
But Nadia had already made it to the Council in a different capacity. After starting at the WHO, she made an early discovery for the Atmospheric Magic Effort that caused Council-members to vote unanimously to add her to the Council as an adjunct. It was a motion the Council used to elect ad hoc Councilmembers in times of crisis, transition, or upheaval, so that the Council now had its customary sixteen members and Regent, plus Nadia, a junior member with reduced privileges. She was Dr. Diop’s right hand, aiding her in updating the Regent of Crisis developments every month. She’d worried that Violet would somehow block the appointment, but whatever Dr. Diop had said in her proposal worked. She knew it was weird to her friends—her dedication to the science of magic when her role in the Sphere was already so clear and determined. Nadia was surprised it didn’t occur to anyone that it was entirely because of her family’s legacy, because of her named power, that she chose to invest herself in a project that could someday give the gift of magic rather than take it. Aura’s sister Apple, who dabbled in typic social media, called it a “trauma response.” Nadia didn’t care to find out what that meant.
“Did you give your mom the note, by the way?” Aura asked, lowering her voice as they stepped out into the balmy air. “From Thea?”
Nadia nodded. “Yeah,” she lied. “I did.” A couple of weeks ago, Aura had given Nadia a letter to give to her mom. The letter was on Spherical paper, which meant it would be blank until it met the hands of its intended recipient, but Nadia had a working hypothesis of what the note said. And it was that hypothesis that had kept her from delivering the note. Aura hadn’t explained why Thea was choosing to contact Natasha through the most secretive form of communication available to witches, further obscuring her trail by having her daughter serve as a courier. But Nadia guessed that was the point—whatever the note held must be too sensitive to discuss openly or through more corruptible forms of contact. She wondered how much Aura knew about the probable contents of the letter, whether she was curious why Thea hadn’t just sent Natasha a text or a banner. If Aura cared though, she did a good job of not letting on.
The roof was quieter, and Nadia could feel her anxiety recede as she took her first breath of outside air. Jack sat at a sofa by the wall of the roof, wearing a wrinkly undershirt and jeans. His jacket and sweater sat in a pile next to him.
“She appears!” he said as Nadia approached. She leaned in for a hug.
“Love that shirt,” Nadia said as she settled into one of the seats. They were all emerald green and button-tufted, lazily conjured mocks of the Regent’s seat. “Where’s it from?”
“Funny. I ordered it for you guys,” Jack said. Nadia had already taken a sip of her drink.
She gagged. “Eugh. What is that?”
“It’s called an Aperol spritz,” Aura said, sipping hers.
“Why do they drink this stuff?” Nadia picked up a card that was on the table and inspected it. On one side there was a map of the Sphere, with only the coordinate of Swallow marked. On the other side was the map of the typic world, the same coordinate landing in the Sahara Desert. “What’s this?” Nadia asked.
“A coaster. You put the drinks on them in the typic world because the moisture leaves marks on tables and stuff.”
“It’s just decoration,” Jack added with a shrug. “You really should visit there more often.”
“Right,” Nadia said. She unfolded the menu. “I’m getting a potion.”
“Oh, can you get a Soothing Solution concentrate for Thea?” Aura asked facetiously, clearly ready to vent.
“Uh-oh,” Nadia said, scribbling her order on the tabletop with the pad of her finger. “What’s she upset about? I thought Amos got the job?” Aura’s younger brother had just been hired as Violet’s new assistant—it was known in the Sphere that she only trusted MAMs, since they didn’t have powers.
“It’s Apple. She keeps threatening to go to the typic world for university. California,” Aura explained. “She practically lives in the Archive now cause of all the typic stuff she has to study.”
“What, does Thea think she’s not gonna come back?” Jack asked, looking up from his phone.
“She says it’s a gateway drug.”
“I think that was the Netflix subscription, actually.”
“She’ll get bored,” Nadia said. While some witches rarely stepped foot out of the Sphere, there were others who, at the age of eighteen, agonized when deciding whether to attend university in the Sphere or in the typic world. Nadia hadn’t even considered it—she wasn’t interested in anything that wouldn’t get her closer to working for the WHO.
Jack nodded. “The return rate for witches who go to the typic world is like ninety percent or something, right? Not as high as before, but still pretty good.”
“Thea does not do numbers. Thea does Thea-trics,” Aura replied. “Oh that reminds me, Nadia. Amos says hi. You know how much Thea supports that union.”
Nadia winced. Amos had developed a mutually mortifying crush on her in the last couple of years. Whenever she ran into him at Aura’s family home, he’d freeze up, babble out some nonsense, and then disappear. She was not looking forward to seeing him at WHO briefings and quarterly Council meetings now that he was working for Violet, even if it was only on her way in.
“Hi?” Nadia joked. “I’d like to hear him say that to my face.”
They were still giggling when a witch brought Nadia’s Elation Elixir / Energy Ale cocktail. Nadia held the glass up. “Spheres,” she offered in toast.
Jack and Aura raised their eyebrows at her, Aura’s smile suggestive. “Spheres to . . . ?”
“Just . . . spheres to the Sphere.”
“Oh come on Nadia!” Aura exclaimed. “When’s the official announcement? That the Crisis is over?”
Nadia leveled Aura with a look—they weren’t the only people on the roof—then took a sip of her potion while she considered her words. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s promising, obviously, but, you know, scientific process and all that.”
Jack sat up straight and lifted his hand in a royal wave. “Oh, I could never, it’s just the state secre— I mean scientific process,” he said.
Nadia felt her skin prickle with annoyance. She hated the implication that she was some kind of social-climbing Council fangirl, the kind of person who cared about pomp and power and being where decisions were made. Jack and Aura, of all people, should know that she hated political maneuvering of any kind. In her time in the Council, she’d watched the highest members of their Sphere let their quests for meaningless amounts of power cloud their judgment—it was how the Sphere had found itself in a Crisis in the first place. Nadia had joined the Council only because she had known, for as long as she could remember, that she wanted to solve the Typic Crisis, to return the Sphere to its pre-Shatter glory. The Council appointment was an unwelcome byproduct.
“Leave it,” Aura scolded Jack.
“I have a WHO meeting on Monday,” Nadia offered. “I’ll probably know more then.” She allowed herself cautious excitement. Even post-Shatter, the Sphere was the most beautiful place, and witches the most generous people. She couldn’t imagine a world after the Crisis.
“Okay,” Aura said. “Then spheres to that.”
Nadia lifted her potion to toast, but before she could, a line of deep purple text unfurled in midair before her:
Disturbances in the Baseline. Report landing in five.
Send sanctions to offending witches. —Iris
“Be right back,” Nadia said, standing from the sofa. She slipped down the stairs and into the nearest bathroom, grateful to find that it was a single stall. She sat on the chair that was positioned by the mirrors and waited, already bracing herself for the ribbing she would get from Aura and Jack when she got back—even though they wouldn’t have been able to see the message, Nadia knew that she’d given the telltale jerk of a witch receiving an unexpected banner. Being an adjunct meant she was expected to be at the disposal of every senior Council-member whenever they needed her, even if it was for busywork that had nothing to do with the WHO.
Nadia checked the purple face of her Casio watch and, just on time, a slim report from Iris landed in her hands. She flipped through, landing on a page that held a re-creation of the Spherical map, the one that sat locked in the Hollow. Nadia watched as disturbances moved along the city of New York and rolled her eyes—how could some witches be so stupid? She turned the report over to a blank page and drafted the sanctions letter with her finger. Underneath the letter, she wrote the coordinates where acts of magic seemed to have occurred, then a selection of random coordinates in between. Sanctions were more an art than a science. There was no way to know a witch’s exact coordinates (and privacy activists Sphere had worked hard to keep it that way), so the SVT’s only recourse was to send a sanction to the approximate area where magic activity had occurred. If the offending witch were nearby, she’d receive the sanction. If not, the letter would never actually materialize. In the bottom right corner of the page Nadia wrote: Immediate, then watched the coordinates disappear from the page as the sanctions were sent. She folded up the report and placed it in the back pocket of her black cargo midi skirt.
Sent sanctions to approximate locations. —Nadia
Thx little nox. Ur a star 🌟 🤩 —Iris
When Nadia returned to the table, Aura was trying to hide a smile.
“Don’t,” Nadia said.
Aura held her hands up. “I didn’t say anything!”
Nadia dropped her shoulders and picked up her drink.
“Council duties on a Sunday?” Aura said, unable to resist.