Inside 33,26, Violet gazed at the Gathering through the large windows of her study. She feared chaos, but from where she stood, the party seemed under control, moving through a jovial rhythm. The guests converged at the bars on the patio, then spread out as they bounced from tent to tent, stopping along the way for conversation, before coming together at the bars again, beginning the pattern anew. She had pulled it all off—the greatest Gathering in years, and without the benefit of the Sphere map.
Violet had spent barely half an hour outside with the guests, embracing her loyal supporters and greeting her adversaries with ingratiating but necessary friendliness, before promptly retiring to her study, where she could eye the scene from her window and watch Iris’s minute-by-minute security updates pop up on an enchanted wall in her office. On the ground, several teams of SVT agents roamed the party, dressed in gowns to avoid detection. They used miniaturized recorders worn on their wrists to monitor changes in the Baseline. By all counts, it seemed like she had done it—that she’d finally come back from the Shatter, that she had, at long last, rehabilitated her place in the Sphere’s history. She was ready to accept this as true, to unwind her shoulders for just a moment, when Amos knocked on her door.
“Regent? It’s time for the Appeal to the Mothers.”
“Yes,” Violet said. She peeled herself away from the window and entered the Hollow.
* * *
On the lawn, the girls were sitting side-by-side, watching in awe as a MAM wielding a charmed tattoo needle etched a moving image of the Mothers on Maya’s arm. Nadia had left them thirty minutes ago, joining her sister and some family friends for pictures. A sound interrupted the buzz of the needle, and Delali checked her phone. It was twenty minutes to midnight. She looked up and watched, exactly as Nadia had described, a flood of people starting to spill out of 33,26. They were mostly guests, but some staff members exited too, matching in their periwinkle uniforms. Delali nudged Maya, who looked up from her arm. Gabbie’s gaze followed.
The girls couldn’t believe how quickly the time had passed. Delali wanted to play the last two hours—the dancing, the sumptuous fruit, the unbridled screech Gabbie had let out when a witch launched her into the air and the folds of her dress flew over her head—on a loop for the rest of her life. She wanted to feed Nadia’s niece, Helia, little cubes of cake again; walk to the edge of the property with Maya and Gabbie to take Spherical pictures; flirt with the six-foot-five MAM who kept approaching her with a tray of purple candy rocks that jogged around her mouth when she ate them. But she couldn’t. It was 11:42 now. It was nearly time. They watched for another moment as 33,26 emptied, and a stream of women—Delali counted fifteen—entered the house. Nadia was last in line, her silhouette swaying as she moved up the stairs.
“That’s our cue,” Maya said. She thanked the tattoo guy and rose from the table.
The girls worked their way through the horde and toward the Cradle, where clusters of witches stood talking. They edged their way into the area they remembered from the night of the Executioner’s spell and assembled themselves.
Nadia took her place by the door and watched as the Council-members arranged themselves around the meeting table in the Hollow, standing behind their usual seats. It was strange to see the Council in the Hollow in gowns instead of their robes or everyday clothes, the room filling with the whispers of silk and satin and tulle as they moved. Violet looked delighted at the head of the table, a look of genuine satisfaction on her face, and Nadia could feel her heartbeat in her throat. Across the room, Natasha threw her an almost imperceptible smile.
“Good evening Councilmembers. I hope you’ve all enjoyed the night so far,” Violet began, warmer than Nadia had ever heard her. “As you know, it’s time for our Appeal to the Mothers, and I don’t wish to delay your return to the Gathering. So, please, bow your heads.”
One by one, each witch dropped her head.
“Your appeals may begin.”
There was silence as each witch communicated their hopes for the Sphere to the Mothers. It was all so surreal to Nadia, pretending to pray while the Mothers stood outside in the lawn. Slowly, heads rose again.
Violet smiled, a genuine, toothy smile. “Thank you all. Now, let us all return to the festivities.”
But before the witches could move to exit the room, Nadia heard a voice, her mother’s voice, begin to fill the Hollow.
“I have a proposition,” Natasha said, fixing her gaze squarely on Violet. The Councilmembers fixed their eyes on Natasha, and all the air in Nadia’s lungs quickly escaped. “A proposition that will make happiness more attainable for all witches in the Sphere. That may even answer some of the appeals made here tonight.”
* * *
Gabbie, Maya, and Delali held each other’s hands just as they had on that May night three weeks ago. In their circle, Gabbie swore that even before they uttered a word, she could feel a current of magic between them, running like electricity from one girl’s chest to another.
“Ready?” Delali asked.
“Ready,” Maya and Gabbie responded.
They closed their eyes and began to chant:
I come here now to heal my deed
Reverse the words I past decreed
All things here are as they were
My intent has grown, true and sure
The old pursuit I now negate
Please spare my soul an ugly fate
“The primary responsibilities of the Regent are simple,” Natasha continued. “To maintain the secrecy of the Sphere, to keep the Sphere safe, to foster happiness amongst all witches. Yet throughout your reign you have consistently struggled to fulfill any of these responsibilities.” Someone inhaled sharply, but Nadia wasn’t able to see who. Violet’s face was hardened, as if she couldn’t even bear to hear Natasha’s voice. Now Natasha addressed the members of the Council, speaking as if Violet were not in the room.
“In the thirty-plus years since Violet took the throne, her reign has been marked almost exclusively by catastrophe, all brought on by her own ineptitude. The births of our daughters have turned from a cause for celebration to an occasion marred by anxiety and fear. The result has been a Witch Sphere more fragmented than ever before. A happiness rate that’s dipped below 80 percent. Countless among us, myself very much included, have had to make unimaginable sacrifices to protect the reign of a weak, cowardly, short-sighted Regent. It is unfair that we all have to contort ourselves to compensate for Violet’s failures.” Natasha stopped, her accusations ringing in the air, to carefully make eye contact with the members of the Council before at last meeting Violet’s eyes. “I move to depose the current Regent and suspend all Council activities until a suitable replacement is found,” she said, her eyes still on Violet’s.
“I second that motion,” Thea said immediately.
Nadia watched Violet’s fingers strain as they gripped the edge of the table.
The girls felt the heat immediately, then came the melting of the physical world, the sublime harmony that always accompanied their acts of magic. Other witches began to move away from the Cradle, out toward other parts of the lawn, leaving the girls alone beneath the willow. It was always the girls’ instinct to speed up as they chanted, but every time they’d practiced the reversal spell successfully, it was because they’d kept the same steady, plodding rhythm, keeping their pronunciation crisp and clear. They knew now to anticipate the warmth that began at their cores and then spread through their bodies, filling them with a fever that was almost unbearable beneath the heat of the Cradle:
I come here now to heal my deed
Reverse the words I past decreed
All things here are as they were
My intent has grown, true and sure
The old pursuit I now negate
Please spare my soul an ugly fate
“I—” Violet began, her voice weak, but Natasha was swift in cutting her off.
“The motion has been seconded,” Natasha said. “We move to a vote. All in favor of the deposition?” She raised her hand and it was quickly followed by the hands of four others: Stella Hampton, a longtime friend of Natasha’s; Thistle Martinez, whose only daughter had left the Witch Sphere entirely after having two typic children; Veronica Mensah, who had long disapproved of Violet’s reign; and Betony Lupin, who had tried in vain to heal Natasha’s psyche after she’d been forced to Execute the Betrayer.
* * *
They repeated the spell again and again, light growing around the house, climbing up and around it like vines of ivy. They didn’t have to open their eyes to know what was happening—they sensed it, knew it. Around them, a commotion was beginning to erupt as guests noticed the grid of light enveloping 33,26, but the girls were oblivious: they had surrendered their senses completely to the spell.
I come here now to heal my deed
Reverse the words I past decreed
All things here are as they were
My intent has grown, true and sure
The old pursuit I now negate
Please spare my soul an ugly fate
Violet laced her fingers together on her lap. There was a stretch of quiet—it seemed for a moment that the votes would stop there. But then Gelila Bekere slowly lifted her arm. A cold sheen of sweat broke out on Violet’s forehead as she thought of other loyal supporters defecting to the other side. But, mercifully, Niellah Baker’s hands were still folded on the table before her, and when Violet looked at Mallow, she received a nod of confidence.
The vote had reached a tie. It held until Stella’s arm began to sag and Natasha’s forehead creased in uncertainty. Finally, she spoke.
“Nadia,” she said tersely, looking over at her daughter. Nadia pretended to deliberate, to buy the Mothers more time, but she had made up her mind long ago.
“Nadia,” Natasha said again. Her mother, not a stranger to coldness, had never taken such a chilling tone.
Nadia cleared her throat. “I abstain,” she said, eyes trained on her lap. She refused to enable her mother’s vendetta, to drag the episode out any longer.
“Nadi—” Natasha tried again, but Nadia cut her off.
“I abstain from the vote,” she repeated, finally meeting her mother’s gaze. For a moment, her eyes carried a range of anguished emotions: confusion, panic, anger. But then they went blank, and Nadia knew that whatever she had just done could not be reversed.
Everyone in the room turned toward the head of the table to face Violet. Her reign was as fragile as ever, but, somehow, still intact.
* * *
The earth around the girls trembled as they spoke, their voices growing louder and clearer still. All they could feel was white hot light, and their bodies were weightless as they reached the final recitation.
I come here now to heal my deed
Reverse the words I past decreed
All things here are as they were
My intent has grown, true and sure
The old pursuit I now negate
Please spare my soul an ugly fate
Finally, light released them, and they opened their eyes to a deafening silence. A single witch’s cough echoed over the lawn.
The girls looked at each other, then started toward the house, searching for Nadia. They crossed the ground floor of 33,26 pausing in the foyer, not sure whether they could go up to the Hollow. After a few moments, Nadia came running down the stairs in her bare feet, heels in one hand.
“We did it,” Maya said as Nadia reached them. Council-members were trailing behind her, starting down the stairs.
The concern on Nadia’s face dissipated. The four witches fell into an embrace as naturally as if they’d known each other forever. Gabbie let out a hiccuping cry on Nadia’s shoulder. But then they pulled away, and Nadia saw something in the corner of her eye that stole her breath. Gabbie, Maya, and Delali followed Nadia’s open-mouthed gaze to see a figure at the top of the winding staircase. The other Councilmembers turned to look, too, Thea Liatrus’s knees buckling as she caught sight of what the girls had seen. At the top of the stairs, wrapped in a floor-sweeping white dress, stood Alba.
Alba had one wrinkled hand closed around the banister, the other rested flat on her stomach. Her lips were painted a matte red that evoked dried blood, and her Afro had been pulled off her face into a striking mohawk. At first, Alba looked almost shy as she descended the stairs, the room erupting with murmurs of shock and recognition. But then she was overcome with laughter, a truly mirthful giggle that the girls had never heard from her before. Over and over, the girls heard the title whispered: the Betrayer.
It was immediately evident, as Alba walked toward the foyer, that the girls were seeing her as she truly was for the first time. She was Macy-Jo Watson, and she had none of the delicate, wounded movements that she’d performed as their mentor, which now struck the girls as utterly false. Instead, she moved with powerful determination, just as youthful as the girls themselves. Now, when she tucked her hair into her fro and fluffed, it was no longer the anxious tick they remembered, but a self-assured boast. Macy-Jo trained her eyes on Violet, who had moved to the doorway, holding the frame as though she would fall without its support. Macy-Jo approached her with a slow, deliberate swagger, and every witch in the house moved away as she walked, clearing her path to the Regent.
“It’s good to see you again, Violet,” Macy-Jo said. “Your quarters are as lovely as ever.”
It dawned on the Delali then that Macy-Jo must have been in the house all along. She watched Alba in a trance as the pieces slid into place in her mind. They’d planned every moment of the night, but the responsibility of emptying the house had fallen to the Regent’s assistant, Amos. Macy-Jo’s triumphant emergence from upstairs meant the composition of the house, an essential element of the original spellcast, had changed. The reversal would be ineffective. Delali turned to Gabbie, Maya, and Nadia, wondering if they had come to the same conclusion, and the looks of horror on their faces suggested that they had.
Nadia buried her face in her hands—how could she have been so stupid? How could she have trusted the usual protocols? Then, responding to a terrifying thought, she lifted her head and switched her focus to her hands, flexing and unflexing her fingers. They felt foreign, useless. She touched a finger to her dress and waited for it to change color as she had commanded, but it remained black. No, she thought to herself. No, no, no, no, no.
The Councilmember nearest to Nadia, catching on, mimicked her movements and had the same awful realization. Then they all did, one by one, every single Councilmember realizing that she had been stripped of her powers.
Macy-Jo was unmoved by their display—she was crossing to the doors that led to the backyard, anxious to see the Sphere she’d missed for thirty-three years, the Sphere she’d used every last bit of strength to return to. As she went, she waved her hand, and every door and window in 33,26 flung open. The Council-members followed her, awed. The powers of the Council had found the nearest empty vessel: Macy-Jo, and now she possessed the power of two Executioners, three Seers, two Healers, and a Shapeshifter. She stepped onto the patio.
Outside on the lawn, music was still playing and crowds of laughing witches were still dancing spiritedly. Between the decorative lights lilting through the sky and the colored smoke crowding their view, they hadn’t noticed the commotion inside 33,26. But when Macy-Jo appeared, the tenor of the night shifted. A wide circle cleared around her, the crowd gasping as they caught sight of her face, some attendees scrambling to grab their children and MAMs, and promptly transporting out of the event. Others fled to the edges of the property, frightened, but still curious. Exclamations of “Betrayer!” overlapped to cause a horrible din. Macy-Jo stood on the patio for a moment, speechless at the sight of the Cradle, the sight of her home. She almost hadn’t let herself believe the vision when she’d first had it, but thank the Mothers that she did. The hiss of the magic as it escaped the Hollow and found her, the flashes of silk as witches ran in their gowns—it had all gone exactly as she’d imagined it.
Inside, Nadia grabbed Gabbie, her nails pinching the flesh of her arm. “You need to go,” she barked.
The girls all looked to Nadia. It had been minutes since anyone had spoken, and they were alarmed by the tone of her voice.
“Now,” she urged. “Before you lose your powers, too.”
“Okay,” Gabbie said. “Okay.” The girls held hands there in the foyer of 33,26, and, faster than they ever had before, closed their eyes and transported back to New York.
Nadia stepped out onto the yard of 33,26, watching as people scrambled to leave. Stella Hampton shook with wailing sobs, making the motions that accompanied basic charms and howling louder when her movements spawned no action. Dr. Diop was rubbing her hands together as though the feel of them was unfamiliar to her. One by one, the remaining Council-members moved to the edge of the property, finding friends and family who could transport them home. Nadia, Natasha, Eve, and the babies collected on a patch of grass by the Cradle, and when Nadia caught sight of the baby willow, she had to try hard not to cry.
“What is going on?” Eve screeched. Nina was attached to her side in a sling and her husband was holding Helia’s hand.
“The Betrayer,” Nadia blubbered. “The Betrayer. Take us home.”
Nadia and Natasha held on to Eve, now the only one amongst them who could transport. As Eve focused, preparing to complete a transportation that would test her abilities, Macy-Jo approached them. Eve recoiled violently, but Nadia and Natasha didn’t have the energy left.
Macy-Jo’s face took on a curious expression as she looked at Natasha, as if she were inspecting a foreign insect.
“Don’t be afraid,” Macy-Jo said, keeping her hands clasped in front of her. “I’ve just come here to thank you, Natasha.”
Natasha didn’t respond, didn’t even seem to have registered the comment at all.
“For what?” Eve spat. Nina began to cry beside her.
Macy-Jo didn’t speak for a long while. “For her restraint,” she said finally, touching her fingers together to elicit a dazzling spark of magic. It was many, many magnitudes stronger than any of the inconsistent, fragile magic she’d been able to produce in the past few decades, but the message still stood. When the glow disappeared, Macy-Jo turned, then walked back to the home, the seat, the life that she had coveted for so long.
* * *
Maya had never been in a physical fight before, but she imagined this was how the outcome would feel: draining and defeating. The spell had taken everything out of them, and still, it hadn’t worked. For the brief moment that they thought they’d done it, Maya hadn’t even been able to feel her body. Now, she closed her eyes and crouched to the ground, letting her head hang before she felt a small hand on her lower back.
“Maya,” she heard Gabbie say. Maya ignored her, and Gabbie said her name again.
“Where are we?” Maya answered, disoriented. They’d transported so quickly that she had no idea where they’d intended to go. After a moment, she realized with an exhausted breath. “Tompkins.”
Gabbie said nothing, instead jutting her head to the side. “She won’t move,” Gabbie whispered. Delali was collapsed on the grass, her eyes glassy and stunned, shiny with a film of unshed tears.
Maya crouched beside Delali, careful not to teeter in her heels. “Dela,” she said quietly. She wrapped a gentle arm around Delali’s shoulders. “Come on, babe. Let’s go home.”
“Yeah,” Gabbie said. She stooped at Delali’s other side, winding her arm around Delali’s torso. “We could always go back to my place—I know how much you guys love it there,” she said, smiling weakly at her attempt at a joke.
Delali cleared her throat.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice hoarse. She moved to stand, and Maya and Gabbie stayed twined around her, propping her up. “Let’s go.”
The girls walked through the park, which was as full of people as ever. They ambled for a few aimless steps before Maya pulled out her phone to call a car—it was clear that they were way too spent to transport again. But her phone wouldn’t turn on, even though it had been fully charged before they’d left the city. She tried to reset it, but the screen stayed black. “My phone’s dead,” she said, turning to Gabbie and Delali. “Are yours working?”
“Mine’s dead, too,” Delali said. She ran a frustrated hand through her ponytail, ruining the delicate curls Gabbie had styled earlier that night.
“I’m at a hundred,” Gabbie said. “I always keep a portable charger.”
Maya refrained from reminding Gabbie that no one had asked.
“It’s eight minutes away,” Gabbie said.
The girls stood on the sidewalk, heels muddied, bodies aching, each one worlds away from the perfectly primped looks they’d worn when they left Delali’s. Gabbie started to cry, and Delali, regaining her strength, patted her back under the light of a streetlamp.
“I really loved Nadia,” Gabbie whimpered.
“I know, Gabs,” Maya said. “But we’ll see her again. She’s not dead.”
“When?” Gabbie asked. “The spell worked. The spell worked on the whole Council.”
Delali dropped her face into her hands and spoke through her fingers. “I think we’re more powerful than even Nadia knew.”
“We have to go back and fix it. There has to be something in the Archive or someone in the Sphere—” Gabbie stopped midsentence, realizing she had no real idea what a solution would look like.
“Are you insane?” Maya asked Gabbie, though her voice was gentle. “Did you see Al—” she couldn’t even get the second syllable out. “That woman? The way people reacted to her? I’m not going back there. Not yet at least.”
Gabbie started crying again and Delali shook her head. “She was a completely different person,” Delali said quietly.
“Who else is going to fix it?” Gabbie whispered through tears. “We’re the only ones who can fix it.”
“Maybe that’s true,” Maya said. “But I think we’ve fucked up enough for one night.”
“I think she’s right,” Delali said to Gabbie after a moment. “We probably are the only ones that can help. But not now. Not tonight. I can barely even keep my eyes open.”
Gabbie nodded and, after a while, responded. “Okay.”
With that, their Uber appeared, and the girls used their last reserves of energy to pile into the back of the car.