It was dusk when the girls arrived in Riverside Park, where they’d transported from the Archive. They walked quietly out of the park and toward Alba’s, floating in the muted bubble that only disaster could create. All around them, contented Upper-West-Siders walked their dogs, strode hand-in-hand, and carried their West Side Market grocery bags like normal. They approached Alba’s block, where the streetlamp at the corner had already flickered on, shedding a pale white light over the gloomy curb. Maya marched up the stairs and hit the buzzer over and over. She did this for at least a minute, pressing harder each time Alba didn’t answer.
“I knew it,” Maya frothed. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?” Delali asked.
“I don’t know, but I knew something. I just knew something was weird about her,” Maya said hotly.
“Maybe it’s just a misunderstanding,” Gabbie said, though even she didn’t sound like she believed it.
“What kind of misunderstanding, though?” Delali asked, trying to reason through the situation aloud. “If there’s no such thing as a binding spell then where did that whole concept come from? What else has she been wrong about?”
“I don’t know,” Gabbie said. “I mean yeah maybe she was wrong, but I don’t want to assume she was deliberately wrong—”
“Then why isn’t she answering?” Maya said, gesturing at the building.
“Maybe she’s not home?” Gabbie folded her arms close to her chest, shivering in her bike shorts and the Georgia on My Mind sweatshirt Delali had lent her before they transported. The fitting with Faison already felt like it had happened in another lifetime. “We’ve only ever been here on Sundays. Maybe she’s in the Sphere.”
“Well, I don’t have anywhere to be,” Delali said, sitting on the step where she’d spent so much of her time since September. “Let’s wait for a little? Maybe she’s out and we can catch her coming home.”
The girls sat and waited, the sun disappearing completely and the crisp spring evening descending into a cold night. After forty-five minutes, a man jogged up the steps to enter the building. Maya stood immediately and followed him, stopping the door with her sandaled foot. In the elevator they were silent, waiting for what felt like years as they ploddingly ascended to the penthouse. Then there was a chime, and the number nine on the elevator panel lit up.
“What are we even going to say to her?” Gabbie whispered as they stepped into the echoing hallway.
Neither of the girls responded. They stalked down the hall until they arrived at the familiar door, Maya walking on the pads of her feet to keep her heels from making noise. The door to Alba’s apartment was slightly ajar, the unsmiling face of her door knocker staring down at the girls. Maya looked to Delali and Gabbie before pushing it open. When the door finished its swing, Maya felt a wave of sickness. The apartment was empty—totally bare, as if no one had ever lived there. The pictures, the books, the crystal ball, the coffee table, the couches and rugs they’d become so familiar with. Gone.
Maya looked to Gabbie and Delali, her face etched with horror. “This seems pretty fucking deliberate to me.”
“What the fuck?” Delali breathed heavily as she walked further into the apartment.
“Oh my god. Oh my god, this isn’t good at all,” Gabbie said. She sat on the floor before her legs could give out.
Delali started speaking in a rushed stream. “Maybe we should go back to the Sphere. We could try to get in contact with someone on the Council and—”
“I’m not going back there,” Maya said. “No fucking way. We don’t even know what that place is. Everything Alba told us could have been a lie. What if it’s dangerous there?”
Gabbie nodded vigorously. “I think Maya’s right, Delali. At least for now. I know you wanna fix it but maybe we should just wait and come back on Sunday. Or try sending Alba a banner or something.”
“Okay,” Delali said, shaking her head. She couldn’t stop looking at the empty white shelves. It was all too strange. “Yeah, okay. Let’s regroup.”
* * *
The girls sat in a circle on Delali’s living room floor, the TV blasting Top Chef in the background.
“Did anyone else want pork?” Gabbie asked, holding up an oily delivery container filled with dumplings.
“Yeah,” Maya said, through a mouth of fried rice. “Here.”
“You know there’s no kale in this, right?” Gabbie asked. She passed the container to Delali, who passed it to Maya.
“Ha.” Maya deposited three dumplings onto her plate. She’d piled her hair into a sloppy bun to keep it out of her food and she looked slightly unhinged as she ate, dressed head-to-toe in Delali’s university sweats.
They’d been trying for hours to make sense of things, which mostly meant flipping through the two lesson books and expressing their confusion in varying tones and at varying intervals. They’d gotten nowhere.
“Okay, so Alba probably isn’t who we thought she was—” Delali started, trying again.
“Understatement,” Maya answered through a stuffed mouth.
“I don’t know,” Gabbie said. “This could be part of the assignment. Like, we have to fix the thing we broke, and Alba can’t help us to do it.”
“Maybe,” Delali said. “But how do we fix an Executioner’s spell? Execution is permanent.”
“I still think it’s possible it didn’t work,” Maya said. “Because the Executioner is the only person who can do an Execution. As far as I know none of us are named Nox.”
“That’s what’s so confusing,” Delali said. “Either Alba’s an evil genius who wrapped us up in some political game, or she’s stupid and tried to wrap us in a political game that wouldn’t work. Neither one feels great right now, considering she’s the only other witch we know.”
“I know,” Gabbie agreed. “Now I just wonder if anything we read is true. Or if anything she said is true. What if other people can Execute? And Violet’s a perfectly nice Regent who deserves her powers? I don’t want to wait until the night of the Gathering to find out. The only thing that we know is true is this.” She waved her copy of the Executioner’s spell in the air.
“Well other things did check out,” Delali noted. “The Cradle and 33,26 are real. Transporting is real and so are all of the potion recipes. Maybe she told us the truth. Mostly.”
“I still think we should go to the Gathering,” Maya interjected. “If we went we co—”
A timid knock on the door interrupted Maya and the girls all froze.
“Don’t you have a doorman?” Maya asked, her quaking.
Delali nodded slowly. “Yeah.”
“Oh, God,” Maya groaned. “Why would he not call?”
Delali put her food down on her replacement coffee table and walked slowly toward the door, Gabbie and Maya both watching motionlessly. “Why would he not call?” Maya repeated to Gabbie in a harsh whisper. Gabbie shrugged. Through the peephole, Delali saw a girl dressed in a black denim minidress with lime green stitching and a pair of black combat boots. Her hair was shaved low and dyed white, and she carried a stack of paper in her hand. She knocked again.
Delali spoke through the door. “Who are you and how did you get up here?”
All Delali could hear from the other side of the door was a stream of muffled explanations, then, “Please don’t call the police.”
“The police?” Delali asked. “Ew.” She opened the door a tiny crack.
“I’m Nadia,” the girl said, once the door was open. “Nadia Nox. I’m also a witch.”
The Executioner’s daughter. A Councilmember (even if just an adjunct). Delali opened the door further. “Why are you here?”
“Who is it?” Maya called from the sofa.
“I’m here because I need your help with something. I’m not dangerous,” she clarified, as if the idea were absurd.
Delali stepped back to let Nadia in. “Thank you,” Nadia said. She entered the apartment and Delali closed the door behind her.
“Shoes.”
Nadia struggled out of her heavy boots. “Oh,” Nadia said when she saw Gabbie and Maya. “Sorry, I didn’t know there were other people here.”
“It’s fine,” Delali said. “They’re witches, too.”
Maya emerged from the blanket. “I’ve seen you,” she said. “You bumped into me at The Bar. Literally. ”
Nadia nodded. “Oh, yes. Yeah.” She did remember the girl’s face. All three of them must be part of the larger group of offending witches—she’d been way closer than she thought. She followed Delali into the swanky living room and sat on the floor next to one of the witches.
“What are you doing here?” Maya asked. “Have you been following us or something?”
Nadia was surprised by the hostile response—she was the one who should be scared. A group of witches that had been defying Council sanctions for months. Scared of a group of witches who might somehow have the capacity to affect the witch birthrate in the Sphere. Though some people did just treat Noxes strangely, whether that meant reverence or suspicion. She didn’t know where to start. She settled on, “Yes. Kind of. In a way? I just want to ask you some questions. You’ve caused some disturbances in the past few months—I’m sure you’ve received some of my sanctions—and I just wanted to understand why.”
“How do we know you’re not here to take away our powers?” Gabbie asked.
“Execute you?” Nadia gaped, genuinely offended. These girls had no manners at all. “Why would I do something like that? I’m not even allowed to do that while my mom is still operational.”
The girls exchanged a look, assessing her sincerity between them.
“I just wanted to know if you know anything about these disturbances,” Nadia said. “If you do, you might be able to help me end the Typic Crisis.”
Maya scoffed. First, they were destined to liberate the Sphere, now they were meant to heal it from a Crisis that had progressed unresolved for more than three decades. “Sorry, but we’ve just been royally fucked by our mentor,” Maya said. “So I’m not sure how we can believe anything you say.”
“Fucked by your mentor?”
“Yes, our mentor,” Maya snapped. “So we have absolutely no reason to trust a witch who’s just waltzed into Delali’s apartment to interrogate us.”
“Actually,” Gabbie said. “We do.”
Everyone turned to Gabbie.
“We can make a truth tonic. It’s in the lesson book.” She looked to Nadia. “If you’re willing.”
“That’s fine,” Nadia said, anxious to move the girls along. “If you guys take it, too.”
Delali flipped through the lesson, making sure to hide the Executioner’s spell book underneath it. Gabbie took the recipe and started on the tonic while the rest of the girls sat in the living room, Delali and Maya on one side, Nadia on the other. The silence was excruciating, even with the sound of the chefs raging in the background.
“I like your apartment,” Nadia offered after a moment. The potion started to wail from the kitchen.
“Thanks,” said Delali. “That’s a great manicure.”
“Thank you.” More wailing in the kitchen. “I just had them redone.”
“Rantin’ ’n’ Raven?” Maya asked.
Nadia shook her head. “Black Like I Never Left.”
Gabbie returned to the living room, choosing to sit halfway between the two sides in an effort to lessen the tension.
“That’s done,” she said. “Now we just have to wait for it to brew.”
“How long will that take?” Maya asked.
“As long as it wants,” Gabbie responded at the same time Nadia said, “It’s ready when it’s ready.”
After fifteen minutes of staring tensely at the TV screen, Gabbie sighed. “I think we could be here all night.”
“Well,” Maya said, lying back on the couch. “I’m not saying anything until the truth serum is finished.”
Delali got Nadia a plate for food. An hour inched by, and by midnight, Maya was struggling to keep her eyes open and Gabbie had started redoing the box braids on the perimeter of Delali’s head, subjecting Delali and Nadia to games as she did.
“Okay, fuck/marry/kill,” Gabbie said, folding Delali’s hair into the extensions. “Drake, Idris Elba, and Chris Brown.”
“Gabbie,” Delali said, exasperated. Nadia snickered.
“What?”
“You’re not supposed to put the answer in the question.”
“Ugh, okay, let me try again,” Gabbie said. “What about—” Suddenly, a loud bang and flash of light escaped from the kitchen.
Maya jolted upright, one hoop earring plastered to her cheek. “Tonic,” she mumbled.
Gabbie scampered to the kitchen, and they followed her, all four girls huddling around the pot. “It’s ready,” Gabbie said.
Delali pulled four teaspoons from a drawer and each of the girls scooped a bit of the potion into her mouth. They returned to the living room, each sitting on one side of the coffee table.
Nadia repeated her reason for being there, now under the hold of her truth tonic: “I came here to ask you questions about your magic behavior over the past eight and a half months, because I think it may help me to understand the Typic Crisis. I would never strip you of your powers.”
“Okay,” Delali said. “But you have to answer some questions for us, too.”
“What kinds of questions?” Nadia asked.
Gabbie, Maya, and Delali looked at each other, not even sure where to start.
“We need to know how to reverse a spell,” Maya said finally.
“You can’t,” Nadia replied. “Well, you can but the reversal spell is incredibly finicky. When you cast it, the conditions have to be basically exactly as they were when the original spell was cast. You’re better off just casting a spell that does the opposite of the spell you want to reverse.” She was familiar with the reversal spell, but only vaguely. It was one of the things she’d learned in a required class in training school, deemed useless, and promptly forgotten after the exam.
Delali squinted, not sure that this solution entirely applied to their situation—surely if there were a spell that did the opposite of an Execution, the Typic Crisis would be long over.
“Why?” Nadia asked.
The girls hesitated. “Well, I’ll say it,” Maya volunteered. “Our mentor had us cast the Executioner spell on Violet, but that was before we knew it was the Executioner spell. We steeped it, and scheduled the intended impact for the night of the Gathering. We think it’s part of our final assignment to undo it.”
Nadia pursed her lips as she tried to wrap her head around what the girls were saying—a final assignment? As far as she knew, Delali was twenty-two years old. A little late to be completing training, though that explained why no one in the Sphere knew she was a witch. The content of the assignment was much stranger, though. Anyone could say the Executioner’s spell and expect absolutely nothing to come of it—kids with bad manners did it all the time—and a mentor would know that. And what kind of mentor would give a final assignment that required Violet to be stripped of her powers? Another Execution would be disastrous for morale in the Sphere, maybe even worse than the Shatter. It was all bizarre. Finally what she managed was, “That’s the dumbest final assignment I’ve ever heard—any witch in the Sphere, including and especially your mentor, knows that only the Executioner can Execute. Unless my mother or I casts the spell, it’s just a bunch of words. It means nothing.”
“Then why would our mentor ask us to do it?” Gabbie pressed.
Nadia threw up her hands, trying to come up with something. “Ah—I don’t know. Who’s your mentor?” Nadia asked. There were only so many Seers over a certain age.
“Her name is Alba.”
Nadia shook her head as she thought. “I don’t know of her. Probably just some anti-Violet weirdo.”
“And are you a Violet supporter?” Delali asked. She was still trying to unwind what was true and what wasn’t. So far, Nadia seemed to be operating on the same truths that they were.
“No,” Nadia replied. “But some people are a little more dedicated to that position than others. Look, I can check the Sphere directory for an Alba when I get home, to see if I can find her. Just because Alba mentored you, though, doesn’t mean your final assignment has to come from her. Mentorship pairings change all the time. Some people have three, even four mentors before they graduate. This assignment just sounds like something Alba made up.”
“There’s more?” Maya whined.
Delali had a perturbed look on her face. “So it definitely didn’t work?”
“Definitely not,” Nadia said. She could see what Apple had meant about the stupid questions. “I mean, I can get you the reversal spell from the Archive if that’ll make you feel better. But it’ll be just as useless as the spell you cast. Okay my turn?” She was losing her patience.
Nadia spread the disturbance reports on the table. Each one held a re-creation of the map, littered with copper and gold dots, the disturbances. She pointed at The Bar on the map with the tip of her lacquered nail. “What happened here? On the night of September first?”
“That was the night we met each other,” Gabbie said, a nostalgic smile flitting across her face. “It was the first time we ever used magic. We kept Maya’s phone from dropping into a sewer.”
“Who’s we?” Nadia pressed.
“The three of us. Me, Maya, and Delali,” Gabbie pointed to each of them.
“Just you three?”
“Just us three.”
Nadia scrunched her face. How? How could such a small thing, even if done in broad daylight, cause a disturbance in the Baseline?
“What about here?” Nadia tapped another location.
“Oh, there we transported to our mentor’s house. It was kind of by accident.”
“Just the three of you again?”
They nodded.
They continued this way through several points, and each time, Nadia was floored by the simplicity of the magic that had caused the spikes in the Baseline, and for only three witches, not the mass of witches she had assumed. Sometimes even just one girl had performed the magic that caused a spike. If it was truly just the three of them, they were absurdly, preternaturally strong. There was no question they were the key to the Crisis—Nadia just didn’t know how.
“Here?”
“I changed someone’s mood,” Gabbie said.
“You did what?”
“I changed the mood of this cashier at Michaels—he was being really rude and I just . . . made him be nicer. It was misunderstanding over a coupon,” she waved her hand dismissively. “He gave me my entire purchase for free. It was awesome. Then I made him throw up.” Gabbie looked somber for a moment—she hated remembering the whole episode.
Nadia’s jaw dropped.
“I know, not the greatest.” Gabbie said.
“Not that,” Nadia said when she recovered. “The other thing, about the man’s mood.”
“Influencing? Yeah, that’s my named power.”
“Influencing? You’re sure that’s what it was? You’ve done this more than once?”
Gabbie nodded. “A few times.” Her heart sank when she remembered the last time she’d tried using it.
Nadia could feel her heartbeat speed up. It was absurd, but only something absurd could explain what had been happening these past few months. Influencing wasn’t like any other named power. It wasn’t like being a Healer or a Seer, several of whom were born each generation. It wasn’t even like being an Executioner, which was limited to the Nox family alone. The ability to Influence was mythic, otherworldly, the stuff of children’s books and movies and academic theory. According to the Myth, it was a power attributed to the Mother who had provided Love of Others to the conception of the Sphere. No one knew for certain why the powers of the Mothers had never manifested in any witches. But Nadia felt that she could guess. Reading, Imitating, Influencing—such abilities were too dangerous to be sprinkled across the witch population at random.
“Do you have a named power?” Nadia asked Maya.
Seeing the intensity on Nadia’s face made her want to lie, but then she realized she couldn’t. “Imitating.”
She looked at Delali.
“Reading.”
Nadia dropped her head into her hands, an enormous realization coursing through her. When she looked at the girls again, they snapped into focus. How could she have missed this? When she’d seen Delali on the street, she’d seemed ordinary. So did Maya at The Bar. But now, alongside the other girls, it was clear they were not to be understood as individuals. They were a triptych, a unit in three parts, an assembly to be considered as one. Nadia’s heart began to race. They were the Mothers.