Before Nadia was even fully awake, she reached out to touch her bedside table, checking whether the day’s birth report had landed yet. It was February now, and her morning review of births had become as ingrained as her skincare routine. Her hand caught a sheet of Spherical paper and she sat up in bed, tapping her bedside lamp to turn it on. It was a Saturday, but witches didn’t just stop having babies on the weekends, so Nadia didn’t stop tracking them. Council work had mostly slowed down in the last months, the way it always did around Winter Holiday, and ever since Nadia stepped out of line at that meeting with Violet, Dr. Diop had been relying on Nadia less and less. In the lab, she’d found herself walking past more and more meetings that she thought she should be invited to. But they’d be back to the lab on Monday, and she wanted to make sure she was familiar with the trends of the last few weeks.
Nadia added the numbers to the table she’d been compiling, then plotted the points on the two graphs affixed to the door of her closet: one tracking the percentage of MOTs who gave birth to witches each day, and the other tracking the number of new MOTs each day. Today was another good one: there were no new MOTs, and two-thirds of existing MOTs had given birth to witches.
After the jagged movements of September and October—from that magical 100 percent day to a 10 percent day soon after, then back up again—the numbers had started trending steadily upward, and now a MOT was more likely to have a restorative birth than not. There’d hardly been any new cases since September. In the WHO, there were now formal discussions about whether these stats could be considered a remission, which Nadia thought was absurd—if the number of typic births reached 100 percent tomorrow, they’d be powerless to stop it. She tried to argue this, but ever since Nadia had crossed Violet at their monthly meeting, Dr. Diop had been keeping her at arm’s length.
The dots on the graph started to swim together and Nadia concluded that sitting and staring at the chart wasn’t offering her any clarity. She sent Aura a text.
Brunch somewhere? —Nadia
Hell yeah —Aura
Where are you thinking? —Aura
Wanna try Abra in Sidesphere West? Heard they have good cauldron cakes + potions salon. It’s 91,44 —Nadia
What’s the weather there —Aura
“Springlike” —Nadia
Cool. See you in a biiiit —Aura
The upward trend of restorative births had transformed the Sphere. The scientific confusion and pressure from Violet had been a personal and professional nightmare for Nadia. But witches, in their usual manner, had taken the good news of the restorative births and run with it. Usually a peaceful and pleasant place, the Sphere had now turned into a nonstop party. The streets were perpetually full. The sky was hardly ever dark because of light shows. People had mostly stopped working and pregnancies skyrocketed. The general population, too, had increased: witches who lived in the typic world were returning, whether permanently or just to experience the energy, no one was sure. People wore their most glamorous dresses for everyday trips to the grocery store. Even some of the activists who had worn white to mourn the Crisis had started wearing color again, the purples, golds, greens, blacks, and aquamarines that were common in the Sphere. Happiness rates wouldn’t be measured for another several months but, by all appearances, they seemed to be up.
It would only intensify as the Gathering neared—even her own mother was MIA, rushing to finish a new potion in time for the Annual Accreditation Event. Nadia worried about what would happen if births returned to the way they had been, but she knew those kinds of thoughts contradicted the spirit of the moment, the spirit of witches in general. On days like this, when she saw her people lit up with happiness, she felt like giving up on the WHO. What did it matter? Everyone was happy, and she’d lost so much influence after her episode with Violet. But as a scientist, she couldn’t let herself be distracted: the Crisis was still an open issue.
When Nadia and Aura had finished eating, they nestled into a corner of the restaurant’s potion salon to gossip about Jack, who had recently gotten engaged.
“I did not expect him to do that well for himself,” Aura said, leaning into the soft leather of her chaise lounge. Abra’s potion salon was modern and dark, full of waxy plants and low redwood tables.
Nadia laughed. “No, me neither. Zinnia’s a catch.” She reached over to pinch the wick of the candle on their table, setting it aflame, then took a sip of her Dilation Draught and closed her eyes.
“Maybe it’ll make him less irritating,” Nadia offered. “Are you doing a display for the . . .” Nadia started, but couldn’t finish. She meant to ask Aura whether she’d be doing a healing display at one of the surrounding events of the Gathering, something that could get her closer to healing full-time, but the Dilation Draught had taken effect and she was suddenly totally distracted by the ceiling of the potion salon, which was fashioned entirely of Spherical glass. It seemed to be expanding and shrinking in front of her eyes. Then something else appeared before her.
Disturbances in the Baseline. Please send sanction –Iris
She sat up. Then leaned back and closed her eyes. Nadia laughed in disbelief—the group of witches that had been spiking the Baseline for months was now one display of magic away from a summons. She was kind of excited to see them come before the Council. What exactly had they been doing to destabilize the Baseline so often? Some kind of magic flash mob in the middle of Times Square? Maybe a witch social club that they neglected to shroud. Whatever it was, Nadia was amazed they’d been ignoring Council sanctions since September.
“What was that?” Aura asked languidly. “Another banner?”
Nadia nodded. “Yeah.”
“Fucks sake, it’s been nonstop since September.”
“I know,” Nadia replied. Aura had been present for the arrival of tens of banners now, though she of course had no idea what they said.
“Nina’s birth ended the Typic Crisis and started a Banner Crisis.”
Nadia laughed, deciding to ignore the fact that Aura was perpetrating the idea that the Crisis was over—didn’t she listen to anything Nadia had told her? She closed her eyes. Just a couple more minutes and she’d send the banners off. Who cared if the sanctions reached them this time? From what Nadia could tell, there would definitely be more opportunities to send them because, as Aura had pointed out, the disturbances had been nonstop since September. Nadia had gone from having no Council busywork to receiving nonstop banners, ordering her to send sanctions, on top of her WHO work.
Nadia sat up.
“Another one?” Aura asked.
Nadia shook her head, unable to speak. She took the shot of ResElix that sat in a sunken holder in the arm of her sofa. Aura did the same.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Nadia said, standing. “I have to go. The banner . . .” She kissed Aura on the cheek and rushed through the restaurant to the street, where she transported to the Nox estate, all the while thinking: September. September. September . . . first? Had the first disturbances been the same day Nina was born? She couldn’t remember now—too much time had passed, and the disturbances had always been at the bottom of her list of things to attend to.
Once she’d landed in her room, Nadia went to the file on her desk that held all of Iris’s old reports—all thirty-two of them. Nadia spread them out on the desk. The first big spike in the Baseline had been on September first. Then again on September second, and a massive one on the fourth. After that, they calmed for a while—smaller disturbances, though still frequent, with two flash points taking place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Nadia looked from the reports to her graph. As she marked a dot on the date of each of the big disturbances, everything came together like a puzzle. On the day of the first disturbance, September first, restorative births had skyrocketed—one hundred percent of the babies born that day had been witches—before starting a slow descent. Then they’d spiked again after September third. Smaller disturbances produced smaller spikes, and lulls caused the numbers to float back down, though after September first, they never again reached zero. Every single time these witches spiked the Baseline, witch births increased in response.
Nadia sat on the floor and leaned her back against her bed. She didn’t know who to tell. She’d blown her relationship with Violet, maybe even with Dr. Diop. And beyond that, she didn’t want to bring these witches to the Council, at least not yet, not until she figured out who they were and what was going on. She didn’t trust Violet to treat these witches as the asset they clearly were. No, she would probably treat them as a threat, the way she did absolutely everything. Nadia needed to find them before that could happen.
Remembering Iris’s banner, Nadia sat on the edge of her bed. She traced her hand shakily across a scrap piece of paper, then wrote “Immediate,” sending Iris a bald-faced lie:
Sent sanctions to approximate locations. —Nadia 🖤