Artemis is at work, and she is not happy. She would not be happy at work any other day, it is true, given that she’s pretty antiwork, but she is especially displeased on this day, the day Wilder Awakens to their Power for the first time, because she is experiencing what she can only call “light pollution.” She notices it first on her phone, whenever she drops it to her side after using it: a sparkle, a wink, like the screen staying on just a touch longer than it usually would. She makes a mental note to take the Magpie to task for doing something to her damn technology again. But she quickly realizes: the pollution is everywhere. In every bar she goes to, she sees it blinking in the cash registers, except for the old, musty one with the vintage equipment, where the point of sale has heavy circular buttons and a shrill ding. In every cell phone, tablet, smart watch on the wrists of patrons and passersby.
At first, she takes it as a glare, digs her dollar store sunglasses from her bag, two white hearts with cheap pink lenses, and puts them on. It is a glaring day, both under the sky and through windows; the stark, cold sunlight of Brooklyn in February, gray but piercingly overbright in its cranked-up exposure. Rather than it dissipating, however, she is plagued further with these wisps of light and she understands now that it’s not light she can see with her physical eyes. It’s light that she can See with her Eyes. The internal Eyes that allow her to See Awakened Power that have absolutely nothing to do with cones and rods and retinas and electricity. Though perhaps it is still electricity; Artemis is maybe the most familiar with the stuff of Magic, yet even she can’t venture a guess as to what Magic is made of.
She twitches as she does her job, empties the boxes of cash dues paid to the billiards league by which she is employed. A daytime bartender notices and offers her something for her headache. She doesn’t even realize she has one until he asks.
Despite her deepness of thought, and thus her dissociation in this moment, Artemis does indeed have a body, like Wilder, like Quibble. So far, everyone in this group does. She is tall and dark, but she is not handsome. A Black woman, a trans woman. She is in possession of long hair and a soft, feminine beard, her graceful curls maintained meticulously. She glitters it, loving the way it becomes a disco ball refracting the afternoon sun, always a party even when she doesn’t feel like dancing. She wears thick, warm leggings and a pink faux fur coat. Her beloved thrift-store-hot-find boots, which extend nearly all the way to the knee, are laced with ribbon, pink and white. Her eyes are lined heavily in black and she has a tattoo of an arrow on her right arm—whichever way she’s pointing is true north. She holds heat in her like a lizard; all sun, all fire, no nonsense. In short, a badass body with a badass aesthetic. Entirely on the outside who she is within, and if anyone tries to give her shit about it? Well, people have tried. And Artemis is a witch, after all.
She’s been so distracted by these annoying will-o’-the-wisps that she nearly misses that homo one borough over Awakening into their Power. She would have dispatched Quibble quicker if she’d been more on the ball. She wonders if the lights are related to the new queer, to the new Awakening. She supposes, if Quibble comes back with them, she’ll soon find out. She doesn’t know that their talk is in the process of going very poorly (though, to be honest, not the poorest it could go—there’s a version of the present where Wilder punches Quibble; another where they run naked into the street and get arrested by a passing cop. ACAB.).
Artemis notes all the sparks at the edge of her vision. When she turns her head to look, they poof from existence. Slippery motherfuckers. She wonders if they’re conscious, trying to hide, or if they’re simply the barest traces of Magic, latent in the device, weak because they’re weak and not because they have the capacity to try to be anything at all. She wonders if it’s something to do with Quibble, actually, because the wisps look at least a little familiar, like the confetti lights all strung together when he rips the world apart, walks through whatever that pocket dimension is to his destination.
“Any issues?” she asks the next bartender, who shakes her head. Artemis half expects there to be some problem since every point-of-sale computer is blinking in her periphery. Oh glorious day, the bartender slides her a popcorn, on the house as usual, and she shoves a handful in her mouth as she steps back out onto the street, back into the different wall of sound that is Brooklyn, so ubiquitous as to be silent in her ears. She slips in her earbuds and walks like she is listening to metal; she listens to NPR. She stomps around in her boots because that is the only way Artemis walks. Like she owns the whole city and everything in it.
She wonders if the new one will believe Quibble—he is much more socially graceful than she is. He always gets better service. At restaurants, on the phone, doesn’t matter, people love Quibble and they want to make him happy. That or he’s so very clearly a man and Artemis’s gender is illegible to most folks outside the community; femininity is something everyone loves to hate. As a team, they’ve only intervened on an Awakened Power once before, and that was the Magpie. It was a journey, that’s for certain. Artemis handed the reins over to Quibs on this particular task so as not to repeat avoidable mistakes. She does not pretend she knows it all; hell, she does not pretend she knows anything.
Artemis’s phone buzzes and she flinches as she raises it to look, a twinkle of light just barely out of reach, appearing a hair too soon, right before the screen opens its eye to her. well that was shit, she reads.
Shit how? she texts back.
The familiar ripping sound and Quibble walks beside her, having stepped clear out of the air. Anyone but Artemis would be nearly levitating (a man where there wasn’t one before! No one likes a surprise man!), but not her.
“Shit, like,” he says, “they wouldn’t come. They kicked me out.”
“That was always a possibility. They can say no. Anyone can say no.” Artemis repeats what she’s said over and over again, when she and Quibble decided to start intervening, at least in the lives of other trans people as they Awakened. And how did they decide only trans people? To make it manageable, was the first and honest answer. After all, they were only two witches. They couldn’t help everyone, so they decided to focus their efforts within their community, and maybe when there were more of them, they could expand.
The second answer was one Artemis had come up with—to keep it as safe as possible. And lo, Wilder has, in fact, responded in a pretty emotionally unsafe way—which Quibble explains. “They tried to, like, humiliate me? Shame me? I think is what they were going for.” But case in point: it didn’t work, did it? Quibble isn’t going to process this until the sun dies. Quibble probably won’t even remember it in a year, especially if that’s the last he sees of Wilder. So everyone is okay and it wasn’t unsafe, was it?
No, the kind of safety Artemis had been thinking of, back when they outlined their parameters, was physical. She was not about to ring a cis man’s doorbell as part of a “Congrats, You’re Magic” welcome wagon only to get extremely murdered. She had better things to do with her time and with her death (she hoped it was both peaceful and full of drama, like a Wes Anderson movie; sepia, symmetrical, whimsical, purposeful). No, murdered by someone she was trying to help would have made her a statistic, and it would be embarrassing for a Sighted witch not to see that one coming. Trans people only.
“That’s that, then,” she says.
“That’s that?”
“Yup. The new witch”—and here, she almost says kid but she catches herself in time—“said no. We respect a no. On to the next.”
“Artemis, I’m not sure I one hundred percent agree—like, of course we respect a no, of course we do, that’s not what I’m saying.” He rushes his words in response to Artemis’s terrifying arched eyebrow. “No, but isn’t it a bit more complicated than that? Like, we respect an informed decline, but can this decline be truly informed? They woke up speaking every language.”
Artemis grunts. That power is cool as fuck.
“Like, can anyone make a decision after that?”
“Anyone can say no before, during, and after anything. They don’t want help. They’ll have to figure it out on their own.”