As soon as Nadia landed inside 33,26, a banner dropped in front of her:
Disturbances in the Baseline. Please send sanction —Iris
She swiped it away. The banners no longer felt like a nuisance. Now, they were instead a source of total, full-body panic. Now that she’d made the connection between the disturbances and the births, she worried that it was only a matter of time before everyone else—Violet, Iris, Dr. Diop—did the same. Nadia’s main advantage, which she held over Iris, was her anxiety, her refusal to lean into the good feelings of the pseudo-remission. Her second advantage, which she held over Dr. Diop, was her intimate engagement with the SVT. And Nadia’s advantage over Violet, who was both anxious and informed, was that she was not involved in the planning and securing of the Gathering, which this year would be grander than any they had seen in years, and as such was not nearly as distracted. But who knew how long these advantages would last? Who knew how long she could get away with lying to Iris about the unsent sanctions? She needed to move quickly if she were to make contact with these witches before Violet sent the SVT to find them.
Nadia walked along the upstairs corridor of 33,26, toward the Hollow. She passed several busy witches and MAMs as she went, avoiding eye contact with anyone she encountered. Don’t be paranoid, she reminded herself. To everyone but Violet, she was precocious Nadia Nox—if anyone belonged in 33,26, it was her. After her realization about the disturbances, Nadia had immediately transported to the typic world, with only her replica maps from prior disturbance reports in hand. It was stupid, but she’d wanted to start her search for the witches as soon as possible. But as soon as she landed in a dark alley in Manhattan, stepping out into the swirling masses of people, she realized that it was simply impossible to use sight alone to identify the offending witches in a city of almost nine million people. The whole “approximate location” thing was great for the personal privacy of witches, but horrible for anyone who didn’t have SVT tools. There was a one-mile radius for each disturbance site—close enough to send a sanction and hope for the best, but near useless for finding a witch on foot. And the most recent disturbance had happened over an hour before she reached the site, when she’d been at brunch with Aura. The site was almost certainly cold by the time she reached it.
Still, Nadia walked the city. The nature of the disturbances was such that maybe she could find something big, unignorable, noticeable to the naked eye. Something big enough to impact the progress of a crisis that had mystified the Sphere for decades. She thought a big group of witches would be easily identifiable, but as she walked she realized more and more that they could be anyone—the boisterous bachelorette party spilling out of a bar; the group of teenaged girls following their teacher on a big city field trip; the squad of elderly women shuffling onto the uptown M15 bus. Or they could have been completely separate, not planning to conduct another of their spectacular displays that night. From the East Village, she went to Brooklyn Heights and then to Washington Heights, wandering aimlessly (and making eye contact with random women) as she went, before transporting back to the Sphere, both defeated and determined to think of a better plan. All she had to show for that night in New York was an underwhelming celeb sighting: Delali Tamakloe from Georgia on My Mind outside the Court Street subway station.
Back in the Sphere she considered her options. She could wait for a disturbance, then immediately transport to the approximate location of the disturbance and scan the area, or she could somehow get access to the Spherical map in the Hollow, giving her an opportunity to transport even before Iris notified her. With the real-time map, she could even see high concentrations of magic that hadn’t reached the threshold of disturbance, and follow those. Either way, she absolutely needed to get her hands on an SVT recorder. In the rare instances that the SVT needed to locate an individual witch, hundreds of taskforce members were sent to a site with handheld recorders, which could measure the amount of bodily magic in a radius as large as one square block, helping the team zero in on potential witches. Nadia was only one person, but having a recorder was better than nothing.
Amos’s desk, which sat just outside Violet’s office, was empty, to Nadia’s relief. He probably wouldn’t stop her from trying to enter the Hollow—she was a Councilmember after all—but it was better if no one saw her trying. Nadia attempted to open the Council entrance to the Hollow, but it was locked, as she expected. There was a panel of glass next to the handle, for SVT members to use to get into the office in emergencies. She held her hand up to it, hoping it would flash periwinkle, the way it did for witches with appropriate clearance, but the panel remained dark. She wondered whether she’d ever had clearance, whether it had been removed when both Violet and Dr. Diop decided to cut her out of all things important in the Sphere. Nadia felt her shoulders drop, discouraged, as she stared at the pane of glass before her. But then she had a thought. She pushed up one of the long sleeves of her shirt, concentrating as she gently touched her palm to the glass. She spoke the spell quietly to herself, feeling nauseous as she did, but when she approached the final line, the resounding “Say it loudly from your breast,” she stopped herself. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. Even though the clearance panel was only an inanimate object, the idea of Executing anything made Nadia queasy.
Fine. She’d have to work with just the recorder. Nadia pivoted to another door, the one that housed the specialized tools used by the Council and affiliated bodies. She knew she had access to this room—no Executing needed—because ever since the Violet meeting, Dr. Diop had been sending her on nonstop errands to the room to gather scales, atmo-extractors, whatever she needed. Nadia stepped into the dark room, her heart skipping when the overhead lights turned on.
In the SVT sections, there were rows and rows of shelves displaying tools in duplicate, some of them small and compact and others so large and cumbersome Nadia couldn’t imagine how they’d be useful to a mobile team. She wandered through them, lights flicking on as she walked, looking for the device as she remembered it, a slim golden rectangle that resembled a smart phone. Finally she spotted it: a glinting row of magic recorders. A stream of excitement gripped her as she snatched the tool and rushed out of the room, looking over her shoulder twice as she entered the corridor hall outside the Hollow.
Nadia transported from the hall outside the room directly to the alley in the East Village. In her hurry, she hadn’t taken the time to center herself beforehand, and her knees buckled as she landed, sending her crashing into the wall of a building. Once she recovered, Nadia pressed the small, round button that sat below the recorder’s black screen, getting frustrated when it didn’t turn on. Then she remembered the button was a defense mechanism, used to keep typics from using the tool if the SVT left one behind on a mission. Nadia sent a current of magic through the button, and the recorder came alive, three lines popping up on the screen: the one at the top a pale lavender; the second a deep, rich purple; and the bottommost a thick line of glowing gold—atmospheric magic, bodily magic, and the Baseline composite, respectively.
Nadia walked up the block, through a steady drizzle, testing the recorder. As she neared a couple on the sidewalk, leaving what appeared to be a successful date, the atmospheric magic line jumped, sending the Baseline slightly higher before it leveled out again. The jump was so small she wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for the changing numbers next to the line. When she reached a stoplight and waited next to a woman in a dark trench coat, her short, straight bob dyed an inky blue-black, the dark purple line representing bodily magic flashed quickly. The flash was what was to be expected of an average witch—but Nadia was looking for a big, sustained jump in both bodily magic and the Baseline composite. Something that mirrored the spikes they’d been seeing since September.
Nadia pulled out a map from one of the disturbance reports, looking for the nearest disturbance location. She was hoping, even praying, that the offending witches had decided to retrace their steps. She approached Tompkins Square Park, where one of the highest spikes in the Baseline had occurred back in September. It wasn’t as late as it had been the first night Nadia had come searching for the witches, so the park was not yet filled with drunken revelers, and it was too cold and wet for people to gather on the benches the way they would in the summer. Only a handful of people dotted the sparse square, and as Nadia traversed the park, she glanced at the recorder. The lines all stayed essentially flat, the atmospheric magic line warbling minutely as she walked. She spent nearly three hours just walking and waiting, recorder held aloft, only to find that the park was devoid of magic. Outside of the park, Nadia stood in front of a block that had a Michaels, Harmon Face Value, and Trader Joe’s. She checked the old disturbance maps—another incident had been logged in that area back in September, but as she stood before the storefronts, the measure of atmospheric magic actually declined.
Nadia’s resolve began to dissipate. She had almost exhausted all the disturbance sites in the East Village, and from here, her only choices were to spread out even further, to the disturbance sites on the Upper West Side, Washington Heights, and Brooklyn. But the East Village had been the hub of some of the biggest disturbances, and there was nothing to even suggest she was on the right track. If she couldn’t find anything here, she didn’t exactly feel confident about her chances further out. The recorder was useful in identifying when she crossed paths with a witch, but they’d been few and far between considering the dreary weather, and for the most part the day was identical to her first trip without the recorder: she wandered around the city retracing the locations, naively hoping that she would catch something.
The final site in the East Village was the stretch of sidewalk outside a chicly drab place called The Bar. Nadia entered, glancing at the recorder screen as she did. The atmospheric magic line turned upward slightly as Nadia stepped into the room, but fell back to average as she settled in, scanning the crowd of patrons. There was nothing out of the ordinary in The Bar, but she felt compelled to stay. After all, it was here that the first disturbance had registered on the map, the first of those spiky dots that had come to mean so much.
She settled onto a stool, pulling off her black wool coat and hanging it on a hook beneath the counter. Nadia signaled to the two men behind the bar, and wasn’t exactly disappointed when the younger one, who had an elaborate siren tattoo climbing up his forearm, headed over.
“Hi. Could I have a soda water?” she asked.
“I think I know how to make one of those,” he replied playfully. “It’s like a vodka soda, but without the vodka, right?”
Nadia laughed. “Yeah, exactly that.” Just thinking about the drink she’d had at Swallow made her sick.
He cracked a warm smile. “Coming right up.” The bartender filled a glass with seltzer and set it down in front of her. They made eye contact, their fingers overlapping as Nadia took the glass, and Nadia felt heat prickle all over her body.
“Thanks,” she said, working to keep her voice even. Nadia swiveled around on her stool and took a sip of her drink, ignoring the sharp increase in atmospheric magic that registered on the monitor’s screen. He was hot, but she didn’t need a distraction right now.
A group of laughing girls ducked into The Bar, shaking snowflakes from their hair and boots. Nadia looked down at the tool in her hand, expecting to see the dark purple line blaze to inform her that some of the witches had just walked into The Bar, but nothing happened. The lines continued to fluctuate minutely around their averages. Disappointed, Nadia gulped the rest of her seltzer and sent another jolt of magic into the recorder to turn it off before standing. It was getting late, and the other disturbance sites would have to wait another day if she wanted to give them the amount of time they deserved. She touched her pocket to conjure a fifty-dollar bill—the bartender had disappeared and she had no idea how much stuff like this cost—then dropped it on the counter and turned to leave.
She opened the door and immediately collided with a girl who was on her way in.
“Sorry,” the girl offered absently. She was tall and slender, and made a display of dragging a hand through her long, curly ponytail as she spoke. The girl was distracted, peering into the bar intently, as though looking for someone.
“No worries,” Nadia said, making her way outside. She headed back to the alley so she could transport home. If she couldn’t find the witches in the typic world, maybe she’d have to make them come to her.
Maya
Maya
Shelby
Maya
Maya
Shelby