The general wisdom of things is: if you keep doing them, eventually they get done. That is the principle on which the witches function. But it has been days and days and days and no matter how many seeds have been planted, no laborious fruits have sprouted. Only sad, shriveled plants and bare ground. Their wheels are spinning and Wilder is up earlier than ever, drinking coffee in front of their air-gapped computer. Mia is here, too, as is Artemis. Same as always. Same as every day.
Artemis is meditating in the center of the floor, trying to See a path forward even though the future is not her bag. She thinks maybe if she looks closely enough at the present, breaks it into its smallest component parts, the current of power and Power and action and possibility will lead her to—something. She moves from sitting to lying down, shoulder blades pressing firmly into the carpet, to sitting again. Like driving in the fog, relying desperately on headlights. No matter how she tries, she can’t see more than a few feet in front of her. I could’ve told her that; fortune-telling is futile right now. There are too many paths; so many, even at the most certain of times. Artemis knows only that it all hinges on Wilder and Mia, this moment. The making of a thing. And Wilder is special. Chosen. (And of course they are, because Artemis is raising them, too. Thankless task.) But she doesn’t know what, and she resents them so fucking hard, and she doesn’t say that to them. Any of it. She focuses only on keeping them focused. She carries around a USB drive like a security blanket; it always has the latest version on it, a redundant copy checked and rechecked and backed up so many times.
Mia cleans code—Wilder is fluent like it is a conversation. But they lack tradition, convention, structure. And they are only dimly familiar with what is possible. Which is amazing, at times. They make leaps and attempt tricks Mia wouldn’t have thought of. They conceptualize undoing the Hex like unspooling a thread, not as a series of math problems. Mia is impressed. But it is also frustrating—sometimes they will miss something very basic, something down to a way of thinking that comes only with beginning at the beginning, taking Computer Science 101 and engaging in some light teenage rule-breaking. Something Mia has in spades. She makes notes, suggests functionality, asks why it’s not done x or y way, rearranges things so literally anyone who isn’t Wilder could read it.
Wilder appears to be working as well. But instead they daydream of Quibble. They didn’t spend last night in his bed. It was getting obvious, and they feel too vulnerable to be plain about it, even though everyone knows.
“Why shouldn’t you have a little fun?” Quibble had said, pouting when Wilder turned them down.
“I have had a little fun.” Wilder had smiled with half their mouth. “I’ve had more than a little fun.” And they kissed him hard, but they went to their own bed anyhow and stayed up half the night, tossing and turning and steeping in their own stress.
And Mary Margaret? She is not here at all. She is by the creek in the warming air. Sometimes she reads Middlemarch; most often she is thinking about what it is like to be Artemis, or about what her own Ascension means. She practices. Pulling things out of the air and putting them back. It seems so ordinary. Not at all beyond human. But she does pull the bullet from her Pocket and looks at it, turning it over in her hands. Finally, she buries it in the mud, hoping the earth can do something useful with it, change it into something else over time.
All the days are like this. Small variances. Wilder alone in bed; Quibble in Wilder’s bed; Wilder in Quibble’s bed; Quibble broods in his room; Quibble broods in Wilder’s attic room; Quibble broods in the kitchen / on the sofa / in the truck bed looking at the field past the trees; Artemis meditates in the kitchen; Artemis meditates on the floor; Artemis meditates on the couch; Mia sits cross-legged; Mia stands over Wilder; Mia sneaks to the creek to make sure Mary Margaret is alive and sees her bury the bullet and she weeps.
Until now, when Artemis looks at Wilder. Really looks at them. Looks at their eyes, which stare at their screen but are unmoving.
“Okay,” she says, and her voice bites. “Wilder, who do I have to fuck to get you to pay attention and do your job, you or Quibble?”
Wilder blinks rapidly, roused from their interiority and, yes, their fantasy. “Excuse me?” they say, and Mia says at the exact same time, “Oof. Toxic workplace flashbacks.”
“We’re all counting on you, Wilder, and you haven’t done anything for the past—I don’t know if it’s been fifteen minutes? An hour? I’m not sure because I don’t know what I’m looking at. I only know that every stupid fucking iota of Power around us flows right to you. So what are you going to do with that? Pump it straight into your dick?”
“Artemis! What—”
“Oh, don’t ‘Artemis what’ me. I have had it up to here with you and Quibble and the tenderist tenderqueer bullshit. There’s a teenager trapped in this house and she won’t graduate on time. We are literally eating Mia out of house and home.” She doesn’t say anything about Rico, but Wilder can see the imprint of him on her face, the hurt in her eyes. “But you have a feeling for once in your goddamn life, so you can’t do shit. I need you to grow up.”
“Artemis, what the hell?” Wilder replies. “I have plenty of feelings. Just because you’re too busy trying to See shit to see shit doesn’t mean there isn’t shit to see.”
“Point stands.” Artemis does not even hesitate for half a breath in her response, so sure is she in her red-hot righteousness. “You have everything you need here. So does Quibble. Everything in the entire world you have, it’s right here. But that’s not true for the rest of us. The rest of us have lives and futures.” Even Mia, who is cast as a wounded party in Artemis’s rage-narration, puts a hand to her mouth to keep from gasping. “But we’re all sitting here watching you two stick your thumbs in each other’s asses and spin.”
Wilder stands from the computer. They are top-to-toe red with shame and fury. “I don’t have to sit here and listen to you talk to me that way.”
“Actually, yes you do, because none of us can go anywhere!” Artemis stands and yells, and Wilder actually steps back. All they can see is the screaming they have buried deep inside them, and never mind Artemis isn’t either of their parents. She still—and they’re embarrassed to realize this—fills that sort of role. Wilder’s eyes grow wide with fear and Artemis immediately feels like crap. But she doesn’t back down. She can’t. It’s important. She does, however, change tactics. She gets quiet. So quiet that Wilder has to lean in after backing up, seesaw-style. “Do you know what I would give? To be able to do what you’re doing right now?” Artemis is angry, yes, but she is also crying and no one has ever seen her quite like this before. “To be the one with the Power and the agency, here? And you’re squandering it.” Artemis notices she is crying now, and she wipes the tears from the rounds of her cheeks with the heels of her hands.
“Shame on you.”
Wilder feels all the air push from them; they liquefy and puddle into the floor. Figuratively, but it sure feels literal. They push past Artemis and burst into the entryway, through the door, out of sight.