Mia is altogether too perceptive considering she is not a witch. She notices every near-tantrum Wilder has, every resistance, every glance in Quibble’s direction. She also notices the wall in Artemis, the one she can’t even begin to scale. She notices that Mary Margaret disappears, often, how she sneaks away even though she wouldn’t have to. There is no school on the compound, no schedule, and Artemis tries to keep her out of plans as much as possible. “She’s a child,” Artemis asserts. “A baby. Doesn’t matter what she says. Doesn’t matter that she got us here. Stealing a car is one thing; fighting something this—this deadly, directly? No. I won’t allow it.” Artemis doesn’t understand the psychological consequences of powerlessness. That it is much harder, more damaging in the long run, to be chained in a time of crisis. To have something to offer, and for the aid to be refused. Or else to have nothing to offer. To be truly superfluous. To be doing one’s best and still spinning one’s wheels in the mud. All are sensations with which Mia is deeply familiar. She feels for the kid.
So Mia follows her one day, which is difficult; Mary Margaret doesn’t want to be caught and so. She is invisible. But the trail begins when a book disappears off the shelf in front of her.
Vanishes. She doesn’t see which one, just the shift in the other books. One falls like a log in a forest, into a newly empty space, and no one else hears it. They are too focused. Mia stands from her computer and stretches, wordless. She strolls, as casually as she can, out the front door.
It is only because Mia knows the compound so well by now, having barely left it for almost a year, that she can manage to follow an ethereal teenager. She watches ankle-length grass bend, a bush rustle and push aside. It is clear where she is headed—the creek. They’ve had a lot of rain and everything smells of mud and wet. The creek sings, tinkles like sleigh bells, and though the air is crisp, it is not uncomfortable to sit outside in a thick sweater, feel the slight spray of it. A fallen branch shifts and cracks. Mia corrects her course, making sure not to step on any twigs of her own, staying well back. The trees here are bent and thick; she uses them for what cover they can manage.
All at once, Mary Margaret appears and Mia can barely keep from leaping backward. She wears her standard city uniform—torn jeans with fishnet stockings underneath, a gauzy black top. But her vibe is slightly different; she’s pulled a thick Aran knit sweater Mia brought back from Ireland over it all. She watches Mary Margaret pull the neckline up over her nose and inhale. It must smell like fire or wool or both. Her hair is pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck and she pulls from nowhere a set of round, wire glasses. She sits on a long, low rock. Crosses her legs at her ankles, her back against a tree. She stares at the water as it runs.
When she flourishes her hand again, a book appears. A real doorstopper. She cracks it open and Mia cranes to see what she’s got. Middlemarch. And Mia understands, instantly, the reputation this kid must maintain in front of her elders. Prickly. Hardened. The teenage delinquent who will yell at Artemis, bare her teeth, rail against everything, even and especially those who love her. Yet here she is, her face soft as the stream, the small wrinkles nearly gone from between her eyebrows—she is seventeen! She should not have those!—reading George Eliot with so much love in her face.
Mia is sad for Mary Margaret. She backs away slowly without revealing herself. Instead, she returns to her computer and does what she can to push things forward, make this isolation move faster. She is frustrated; her ability to make this quick is limited. First, by the simple material fact that she does not possess one ounce of sensitivity to magic. And second, by Artemis, who often won’t include her, dismisses her, uses her as a proofreader to Wilder’s work. She doesn’t understand how this is the queen of their merry band, the mother. She seems distant, not the kind of woman anyone would follow into battle.
After a lunch of apples from the basement barrel and peanut butter from the shelf, Wilder stands up.
“We need to keep going,” says Artemis, her refrain.
“I can’t keep going.” Wilder says it without passion. Dead in the face with cold eyes. “I have nothing—I don’t know. I need more information. I need a break. I need a nap. I hate this.”
And for once, Artemis doesn’t argue. She stands aside and lets Wilder exit the room. Unusual, to say the least, and Mia takes note of the slight slump in Artemis’s shoulders, the pause before she says or does something. Artemis notices the quiet, the lack of music from above. “Where is that kid?” she growls absently. “I need her to be doing—homework. She can’t fall behind. She has to graduate.” And Mia can see in Artemis’s face that she knows. She knows Mary Margaret isn’t going to graduate this year. It is spring already. They didn’t get work from the school, and they’ve probably reported her truant by now. They probably assume that Mary Margaret has run away for good or is dead. There are probably guidance counselors who are worried, but not for long, because they have to share their worry around with far too many children. Mary Margaret won’t be graduating this spring and she probably won’t be graduating ever.
Alarm spikes in Mia’s chest when she sees Artemis head for the front door. She feels this guardianship, which both surprises her and doesn’t; she has never wanted children. But she’s always been a warm blanket or a big shield for whoever needed it. “Where’s she got to?” Artemis keeps murmuring.
“There are more important things than school,” Mia says, mostly to keep her in the room. She knows Artemis can see the kid even when she’s hiding.
Artemis snorts. She looks ready to say something defensive, and indeed, she is. We live in late capitalism and the world already wants her dead; I need her to get a job springs to mind as an option as well as Don’t you think I know that? It’s why we ran, why I let her steal a car. But she looks at Mia, really looks at her. Here is another grown-ass woman, a beautiful one, strong with that stork-esque neck and a keenness to her that surpasses the expected. Artemis knows she is smart; a programmer, someone who figured out the Hex long before the Hex had even figured out himself. Mia’s head is tilted to one side and her hands are clasped in front of her. She leans forward, listening, looking. Concern in her face. Understanding. Artemis feels the shiver of nakedness, the want to trust this woman, and the desire to unbuild the wall she has put up. The desire—but not the sense of safety she would need in order to do it.
“You know,” Artemis says, “we never really talked about how you tried to fucking shoot me.” And Mia fits another piece into the Artemis-puzzle. Of course. She nearly hadn’t registered that she’d been ready to kill another person—another trans woman!—given that she found out magic existed in the same thirty seconds. Mia knows the statistics, knows that Artemis is even more likely to be dead right now than her! And she fired the gun anyway. Fired the gun when Artemis shifted from white to Black.
“Oh God,” Mia says. “Artemis, I—there is literally nothing I can say that makes up for that. I am so, so sorry.” And Mia knows she will spend so many nights thinking about how she would have killed Artemis but for Mary Margaret’s intervention. A child! A child prevented her from becoming a murderer. This should be the kind of thing Mia never entirely lets go, because then it can truly change her.
And Artemis is understandably wary. She braces herself for some white people crocodile tears, gets ready to comfort her own would-be killer (or, at the very least, maimer). She holds her breath, both of them on the precipice of what will happen next, ready to plunge and flail, and Artemis ready for the same pattern, something inherited bigger than herself or Mia or any one individual in any one time.
The breath stays held. The room stays silent. The clock ticks. The Lady Anastasia licks her toes loudly; the room is so quiet that Artemis swears she can hear Mia’s cat, ironically named Pyewacket, narrow her eyes at the Lady Anastasia in pure unadulterated feline hatred.
Mia is ready for that pattern, too. And she is determined not to unthinkingly blunder forward into it. Problem is: the pattern is so tempting because there aren’t very many good examples of what else to do when someone does something unforgivable. Patterns assert themselves for a good many reasons, but one of them is that human beings need to see something and replicate it because really, in the end, they are great apes with anxiety disorders. Monkey see, monkey do.
“Mia?” Artemis asks. At this point she’d almost rather the pattern; she could lean on her righteous anger to move her through the uncomfortable moment.
“I’m—internalizing?” Mia replies. “I’m trying to figure out where we go next. I don’t want to ask you to figure out what the next step is. That seems—not fair.” Mia looks up at Artemis, who is still standing. “How do you feel about it?”
“About?”
“About me trying to shoot you. How do you feel about it?”
Pretty fucking terrible is what Artemis immediately wants to say. And that’s not untrue. But it’s glib. It’s part of the pattern. The self-dismissal, the surface-level thinking, the avoidance of feeling the actual feelings. Artemis sits on the ottoman in front of Mia. “I don’t know, actually.”
“You don’t know?”
“We haven’t really had time, you know?” Artemis scratches her beard, and she stares at the floor. “I guess—I trusted you immediately, you know? Because we’re both trans.” No one had said that aloud yet. “And I feel stupid for doing that. Like I know as well as anyone does that being trans doesn’t mean we have anything else in common. And it certainly doesn’t mean you won’t shoot me. So I feel stupid for trusting you quick and you immediately did the worst thing I can think of, which makes me feel stupider.” And it’s not like all of Artemis’s problems are solved. She still feels the strange stress of being a de facto group leader while everyone falls apart around her. She still hasn’t spoken to Rico and so is still in a limbo-mourning. Schrödinger’s Grieving for Schrödinger’s Breakup. But her shoulders settle enough that she realizes she’s been carrying them higher than usual. And that is something.
“That makes sense,” Mia replies, slow. She allows for plenty of silence. Plenty of space. She doesn’t know where to go, what to do, but she wants to hear everything Artemis says, really hear it. Feel all her own feelings in response. Mia doesn’t want to rush. What is urgency right now, anyway, when they are stuck marking time? But really, even if they weren’t—what could be more urgent than this, the moment they are having right now?
Mia figures that honesty is probably the only thing to do. “I want you to trust me.”
Artemis’s eyebrows raise. “Excuse me?”
“Sorry, that came out weird.” A pause. A flounder. “It’s understandable that you don’t.” A flail. “I want to live in a world where us both being trans means we trust each other quickly and I wish I had made choices that made that world. And I didn’t. And I would understand if you never trusted me.”
Artemis wants to snap at Mia; she almost wishes Mia had given her the opportunity because she is so full up with rage and, underneath that rage, with fear. She is, of course, understandably mad that Mia hadn’t thought about it until now. But if she’s honest—she hadn’t made the sentence until right now, either. She just carried around the anger thinking the feeling was all coming from one thing (the Hex) and turns out it wasn’t. So neither one of them had examined the violence until this very moment. Artemis sags because she discovers she doesn’t want to be carrying any of this anymore. “I’m tired,” she says.
“Yeah,” Mia replies. “That makes sense.”
“I would rather the world where we trusted each other quick and it was real, too,” Artemis says after a moment. “It would be an easier world.” The clock ticks. The Lady Anastasia stands, stretches, goes to drink some water. Pyewacket grumbles because how dare she.
“I suppose,” Mia says, slow, “that we could start now? Trying to build that world instead?” This is something Mia understands; she is an expert at building worlds out of want.
Artemis isn’t sure how to do that. And Mia isn’t clear on it either; she just knows it is possible. Without explicit agreement, the two women decide to try.
“What do you need?” Mia asks. “Like for building trust, what do you need from me?”
Artemis tries to swivel toward Mia from her perch-seat and fails, so she stands and reaches her arms toward the ceiling, then turns. “Buy-in?”
“Like—what do you mean?”
“Investment from you. Something that tells me you really intend to do what you say, that you really want the world you describe.”
Mia thinks about what that might look like. Everything feels small in comparison to her giant fucking mistake, but she knows from making worlds that the worlds are built on the small things. The turn of a head, the footprints in the dirt, the way a character puffs out their cheeks when they sigh. All the little things build the big thing.
“Not to be a narc,” she says, “but I know where Mary Margaret is.”
Artemis takes a breath to immediately ask Mia where the fuck the kid is, but Mia is already on the downswing of her next sentence. “And I can’t tell if trust building with you means spilling all the details or respecting her privacy, so—what would you like?”
Artemis closes her mouth. She thinks about Rico, about Mary Margaret, about everyone subtly and not so subtly telling her that she doesn’t need to be as tight on the reins as she’s been. The child is, after all, resourceful. She has been on the street, she is a witch, she is almost an adult. Artemis has been trying to teach her to be an adult witch, to “pull out the big girl broom” as she cleverly once said, which earned only an eye roll from Mary Margaret. But Artemis knows that Mary Margaret has had to be more adult than most adults; she knows her tightening control lasso has been, largely, a response to the unfairness of that reality. And lately, if she’s truly, deeply honest, the need to be strict with the Magpie isn’t about her at all. It is due solely to Artemis feeling out of control everywhere else.
This is so difficult. It’s so difficult to know where the boundaries should be, to know what protective impulse to follow. To raise a person—how does anyone do it? How can anyone figure it out?
Another pattern. One that Artemis hasn’t noticed until now. But this—this is a space of pattern breaking. “Is she in danger?” Artemis asks. “Is she destroying your property or anyone else’s? Is she setting anything on fire?”
Mia shakes her head. “Not even a little.”
Artemis thinks about this for another breath. It feels good to pause, to carefully consider. She’s been running straight toward a goal with her hair on fire—and why? They’re safe here. Artemis realizes that she has conflated emergency (this definitely is one) with urgency. They need to be dealing with the Hex every day, but this emergency is a slow roast, and they have been granted by luck the privilege of an off-grid fortress and a walking encyclopedia straight out of the Hex’s haunted backstory. Something shifts in Artemis, and by fucking Goddess that’s hard to do; all these witches have a stubborn streak the size of the Hudson River.
Perhaps this situation calls for some nuance. Moving with purpose toward a goal, but also seeking to meticulously carve out a space that is not frenetic where what is left of her deeply Hex-impacted personal life can still unfold at an organic pace. She scratches her beard again. “No,” she says, all that growth sprung in the natural conversational pause. Humans are absolutely so fucking bizarre. Their capacity for rapid onset wisdom still manages to surprise me after all this time. “I don’t need to know where she is if she’s not causing trouble.” She sighs. “It’s exhausting to be a parent.”
Mia crosses her legs. “It seems like.”
“You’ve never done it?”
“Not with actual children.” Mia snorts. “I have parented my fair share of grown men.”
Artemis laughs full in the throat and it booms through the house and she realizes she hasn’t done that in some time. Here is another thing she can still do—she can still make time to laugh. She adds that to the slow-growing mental list. “I imagine, working in games.”
“It’s exhausting. You have the idea and you carry it out and you socialize these folks who, it feels like, have never fucking talked to another person before and somehow, still, those guys get all the credit and the praise and then it undoes all the socializing you just did and you have to begin again.”
“Is that why you left?” Artemis asks.
“Oh no,” she replies, quick. “I’d have kept going if it weren’t for Hex.”
“The ultimate man-child,” Artemis says. “The literalization of man-child.”
It’s Mia’s turn to laugh big. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
Artemis has a lightning bolt aha moment. “Oh fuck, Mia, I’m so sorry. I’ve been doing the thing.”
“What thing?”
“I’ve been giving Wilder all the credit. I’ve been treating you like a secretary.”
Mia smiles with half her mouth. “You know, I barely noticed. That’s how used to it I still am, I guess.”
“It was your idea in the first place,” Artemis says. “I’m sorry.”
And Mia wants to leap in and say it’s fine. But that would be the guilt talking, the idea that because her transgression weighs more than Artemis’s by a metric ton, that Artemis gets to behave kind of however. Mia pauses, too. Because that is also a pattern. Nothing need be a race to the bottom. “Thank you,” she says instead.
They pause again and they let it lie and they take their time and the clock ticks and the cats stretch and fall asleep. “I wonder why I did that,” Artemis finally says. “I hate it too. The boys always just get to be heroes, in every industry, in every circumstance.” They think of Wilder. “Even the boys who aren’t exactly boys. And we have to be heroes and—some other thing. We have to be heroes and raise them to be heroes.” Artemis’s face changes in a way that Mia both understands and doesn’t. She is perceptive, after all—she knows that this face is bitterness, resentment, but it is to a degree that their abstracted conversation does not support. It is present and painful, and Mia suspects that they have wandered into territory with a backstory. What Artemis says next doesn’t answer any questions: “And then the boys are considered to be your best work.” It is almost a Pyewacket-esque hiss.
Mia lets the sentence breathe before she says, “I’m not sure I understand. I mean, I get what you said. But—” And she lets her expression do the talking, lets her eyes say Seems like there’s more to it.
Artemis looks at Mia’s open face, her luminous curiosity. Well. If they’re trusting each other for real, she may as well start now in a big way. And Artemis—she’s never talked about this before. Not with a single soul, Awakened or not. The consequences here are lower. If she told any of the coven, it would be different. They would see her differently, and they would know something, too, of their own futures without having consented to it. And whatever else, Artemis thinks, she at least consented at the time. To a Reading. To knowing.
“There is a Seer who we call the Sibyl,” she begins.
I do not have a body in this place, but if I had one, I would be leaning forward. I am the only being who knows how the rest of this story goes. I know, for instance, that Artemis once did not have a beard. She shaved it off, covered it in foundation. To have or not have the beard is neutral: it was simply a different time and Artemis was interested in different things. It was long ago, before Artemis found Quibble even. Before Artemis had developed any mastery of her own powers. She knew enough to know she did not know enough. But lucky for her, she was a Seer. So she Watched. She Watched the currents of Power, the kinds that only run along the streets when it rains. She paid close attention to Magic Smells and dazzling breezes, tried to find which way it was all flowing, convinced that somewhere there would be a gathering of people who Saw, whom she could ask all her questions. She Saw other Power, sure. But only rarely. She met the Arch Witch of Brooklyn enough to know she was a fake, a claimant of magic who had only the aesthetic of it. Surely, surely, there were real witches somewhere, warm and kind.
That was her hope for me when she sat down at my table.
So, I Said. You come to ask for what? Friendship?
But we are in Mia’s house, and Artemis is still speaking. “That kind of name?” Artemis continues. “The kind that starts with ‘the’ and then is followed by something super fucking metal? It’s a name a witch only gets when they are extremely powerful. When they are so in touch with their own Awakened Power that their abilities move beyond normal human magic. The Sibyl has no other name; they never had. They’re not really human, and so they’ve always been something else. But humans—they get there, too. Rarely. But possible. Not just Awakened, but Ascended.”
And she wanted Ascension, Artemis did. She hadn’t come to me even knowing it existed. But when her eyes and her Eyes lit on me, she blinked back tears. Not just because her corneas smarted in the bright; she cried with joy and envy intertwined. I Saw myself through her. I was a small sun, and I was glorious. Ah, I Said. You want this. And she Saw me good enough, close enough, open enough that she felt the pop and fizz, what it would be like for her and her Power to come into planetary alignment. Like having lived one’s entire life with all ten fingers dislocated and then, sudden and painless, they pop back into place. Shock, relief, awe. A whole new way of moving through the world. When I Became, I Awakened and Ascended and was Powerful all at once. She Saw and she Felt that I had never done Magic any other way. Careful, I Said. You may not want to know, in the end. I shuffled my cards. I can tell you. Probably of both things—of friendship, of Ascension. But I am the Sibyl. My Readings are real, and therefore they are terrifying.
“Yes,” she said, and there was not a moment’s hesitation and I knew it was not from surety, quick processing of feelings and consequences. Instead: a fire’s yes. Yes only to current hunger. And I did not know her future when I started; I thought maybe, maybe she could be as bright a sun as I. “I would do anything to know. About either.” Her brow furrowed. “No. About both. I want to know about both. I want to know it all.”
In Mia’s house, Artemis’s brow is furrowed in the exact same way. Her face is different, bearded and lined. But sometimes people are patterns, wildly consistent in their inconsistency. I know that her mind draws the same pictures mine does, though tinged a slightly different color. Instead of remembering the rest, the finite words, the feeling of each flipped card and each incontrovertible truth, she shuts it down. Hides herself from herself, and instead tells the story she has hardened around her like a shell. “They had to have Seen,” she says to Mia. “They could See me as clearly as I could See them. They were brighter in my Eyes than oncoming traffic. I was a flashlight with half the batteries. They knew, I’m sure, before they started and they could have refused, said I wasn’t ready. I’ve seen them refuse people since.”
“I don’t think I understand,” Mia says. And Artemis is being opaque about it. It is hard to talk about, even if talking about it is easier than truly remembering.
“The gist of my Reading, my future,” Artemis says, “is that I’ll have as much community—as much family—as many witches as I could ever want.” I remember. The Ten of Cups. “And that, as a witch, it’s not that I am bad at magic. I am—have been—will be?—quite good at it.” I remember. Queen of Wands. “But when it comes to Ascension, to the near-super-human thing that the Sibyl always has been and that some witches become? I am destined to be the mother of Ascended witches, to raise Awakened to their very fullest potential. And never to Ascend myself. I am blessed and doomed to watch my children become the most powerful witches of the age and they will all leave me behind.”
Mia reaches forward and touches Artemis’s shoulder. Artemis swallows hard. She is crying—she hadn’t noticed. I remember the card: The World, reversed. Forever not quite right. “So yeah,” she says, after catching her breath. “I do actually get it, in my own way. The boys get to be heroes. I have to be the mom.”
Mia doesn’t move her hand and Artemis—she isn’t sure if she should be welcoming this touch as much as she is, given how complicated their relationship is and has been. But she does. She leans into it like Pyewacket into a scritch.
Mia clears her throat. “Mary Margaret is even harder for you, isn’t she?”
Artemis doesn’t say anything in response. Two forking tears carve their way from the crinkle of her eye. They begin as one and split, nestling into her beard and beading like morning dew.
Mia continues. “She’s like you. But raised different. More chance, more opportunity, more potential. And you—you’re part of the reason she’s going to Ascend in the first place.” Mia pauses to take her own breath. She isn’t sure when she started crying; she doesn’t know if she is crying in response to Artemis’s revelation, to the sheer discomfort of the conversation as a whole, or to her own experience with an adjacent feeling. “Sometimes the younger girls—I always think, what if I were their age right now? How different would my life be? And that’s not even about magic. Or maybe it is. But not the Awakened Power kind.” Or maybe it is, really, when it comes down to it. To be awake and aware of something new, something different. To walk through the world with agency. In total alignment.
Artemis closes her eyes. “I hate it. I hate that it’s true. It’s so, so hard.” She opens her eyes, looks at Mia. “Sometimes I think if I hadn’t known that I would never—then I wouldn’t have stopped trying. The Sibyl isn’t a person. They’re not a person and they don’t have family and they are already one of the most powerful things on this planet. They don’t—understand. They don’t understand any of it.”
I want to protest. I really do. I pride myself on Seeing, on understanding, on knowing what the world is like before and now and hence. For instance, there is something I know that they don’t. Neither woman sees Mary Margaret in the doorway; Artemis’s back is turned, and Mia can’t see the child’s invisible mouth slacken, a figurative lightbulb gone off above her head.