Three of Pentacles, Reversed

I can see you there,” Artemis says as she collapses into what is usually Mia’s bisexual-sitting armchair, all wibbly and distorted in the arms from her inability to take a seat like a normal human person. “Your invisibility doesn’t work on me.”

Under anyone else’s gaze, Mary Margaret would wink into existence in the doorway. But while Artemis looks at her, she just changes states with an eye roll. “You were a dick,” she says.

“Yes,” Artemis agrees. “I was. But I had to be.”

“No, you didn’t,” Mary Margaret says.

“We’re in danger. Sometimes when you’re in danger, you need to yell.”

Mary Margaret snorts. “At Wilder? You coulda said, ‘I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed’ and they would have crumbled.”

“That’s worse than yelling,” Artemis says, and she believes it.

“You say it to me.”

Artemis’s mouth drops open. She has no response.

Mary Margaret takes advantage of Artemis’s silence. “When were you going to tell me?”

Artemis is genuinely confused. “About what?”

“Why you hate the Sibyl so much.” Mary Margaret cannot bear to say prophecy or anything related to it. She is still sorting out the granularity of how she feels about it, but the feelings are big. Like caging her future into a firm existence when, she thinks, for better or worse, it used to feel like feral possibility, riderless and unbroken. “I heard you.”

Artemis’s stunned silence sputters further into a spiral. “How—”

“You stopped me,” Mary Margaret continues. “You stopped me from getting a Reading by them because you knew what they would say and you were jealous.”

“That’s not true.” Artemis finally comes to her own defense. “I couldn’t know for sure. Life is long. They might not have meant you. They might have meant Quibble or Wilder, or Quibble and Wilder, or people I haven’t even met yet. It might not have been you. It still might not be.”

“But you’re my mom,” Mary Margaret says. “Not theirs.”

Now both of them are stunned into silence. Both of them are terrified and giddy with emotional free fall.

“I didn’t know you felt that way,” Artemis says.

“I didn’t either,” Mary Margaret replies. Then: “I tried to get a Reading. About me, about this. And the Sibyl is totally broken. Power-no-worky.”

Despite herself, Artemis laughs full and loud. Partly because that was a funny sentence out of a funny daughter’s mouth, and partly because Artemis’s Power still-worky and my Power no-worky, and this makes her feel good. Despite myself, I laugh, too. Because who cares? Who really cares anymore?

“Okay, so,” Artemis says once her chuckle fades to silence. “How do you feel about it? If it’s you? If you’re one of the Ascended from the Sibyl’s Reading?”

Mary Margaret puts a thinking face on to demonstrate being a careful and considerate person for Artemis’s benefit. If she were honest, she felt a mix of terror and elation. And it’s not as though she’s not honest. She’s just also seventeen. So how can any seventeen-year-old describe the fear and excitement about being fated to be superhuman? “I feel all right about it, I guess” is what she says. She’s afraid to sound too into it—would that make her a villain? If she wanted it too much?

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want it to be real for you if you didn’t want it to be.”

“No, I want it to be,” Mary Margaret replies, eager. “I just—does it have to be right this second? I’m kind of in the middle of something.”

Artemis almost asks the Magpie what she could possibly be in the middle of. But she remembers her conversation with Mia. Not in danger, not damaging property. She lets it slide. “I’m sure you’re not going to Ascend today. Unless our day goes really sideways.” She leans over to bump Mary Margaret’s shoulder with her own, smiling. Then her grin cracks a little.

Artemis could avoid admitting to the part of Mary Margaret’s original accusation that was right, or partially right. But then she thinks about her conversation with Mia. About patterns. The longer a pattern goes, the more difficult it is to disrupt. But Artemis knows that she can do hard things. So she looks at the pattern of pretending toward infallibility in front of her daughter in the cold, hard light of day. And she breaks it.

“It’s true,” she says, “that there are parts of witnessing your life that are hard for me. But that isn’t jealousy—it doesn’t mean I don’t want you to have it. I want the sky and all the stars for you. I want you to have everything, have it all. I want you to swallow this world whole. But I am envious. I look at what you have before you and I wish I’d had the same. I am sorry that sometimes I still don’t know how to deal with that. I am sorry that sometimes it splashes all over you.”

Mary Margaret is wiser than her years. “I wish you had it, too.” She folds her legs under her and sits on the floor, puts her chin on Artemis’s knee. This is an experimental physical vocabulary for both of them and it makes them smile. “Who says you can’t? Starting right now?”

Artemis snorts. “The Sibyl.”

Mary Margaret smirks. “The Sibyl isn’t god.” She pauses and thinks. “The Sibyl said they can’t see the future right now because it’s too uncertain, the patterns aren’t recognizable. Who says you can’t rewrite what happens after we win?”

“We should go back inside,” Wilder says as they square their shoulders. “I’m ready. I’m sorry.”

“We don’t have to, actually,” Mia replies. “We can stay out here. We can work out here as well as anywhere else. Besides”—she turns her face up to the sun—“it’s a nice day.”

“No computer out here,” Wilder grunts, disdain spilling out.

“I don’t think we really need the computer,” Mia says. “We’ve hit the Point.” And it’s so strange to hear her talk in capital letters about something that doesn’t denote Awakened Power, Internal Galaxies, Ethereal Bodies.

“What’s ‘the Point’?” Wilder asks.

“The Point is when we’re actually finished and we’re nitpicking to mark time because we’re not sure what the next step needs to be, but no one actually wants to have that conversation because thinking into something that doesn’t exist is way harder than grinding on something that does. It’s happened on everything I’ve ever made, several times. Usually the project manager would realize we’ve hit the Point. Our task master, however, knows magic but not what it means to make a computer program. Ideally, she would have spent the last year trying to—oh, I don’t know—wrangle an open-source community, preferably one entirely made up of a certain kind of anarchist, before jumping into this. But sometimes we can’t have everything the way we want.”

“We’re—done?” Wilder is incredulous. They feel something loosen in their chest. Then they try very hard not to think about their chest. What sex with Quibble awakened in them—now compartmentalizing is more difficult.

“With the part that’s code? Yeah, I think so. I think we were done days ago. That’s probably why it’s so easy for you to daydream.” Mia flashes a sly sideways smile at Wilder.

They can’t help themself; they smile back. Lower their lashes and look to the ground, suddenly shy and demure and happy. “I really like him,” they say finally.

Mia smiles back. “I can tell.” They look out to the field, unaware that they are staring directly at Quibble, who is currently masturbating. “So let’s get this done, well and truly, so you can get on with it.” Mia pauses. “You have a life and a future after this. And bless you both, but it is not on my compound. I have grown quite fond of you all and I do want you to leave.” Mia does think about Mary Margaret, how she maybe could use a little more time here. But she pushes the thought away. Mary Margaret will, of course, be welcome whenever she likes. Just one stolen car away.

“How do we get Hex to willingly infect himself with a virus?” Wilder asks. They feel a pang; they know destroying the Hex is the right thing. He is so much bigger than they could even imagine; he has now made true threats on their group, killed at least one witch, tried to unfold Artemis, tried to possess Wilder. They know, they know, they know that he’s truly too dangerous to rehab. Except—what if they imagined the Hex were a person? One who was born and will die and who has a body? If that were the case, it would be morally abhorrent for their group to destroy him.

So why is it fine now?

Wilder can’t stop thinking this way and they wonder if it’s part of why they’re drawing a blank. “He’s very smart,” Wilder says, not admitting to any of what’s going on behind their eyes.

Mia narrows her eyes. “The more I think about it, the more I think that to be smart is a trait for humans. This is not a person with an intelligence the way we think of it. Not a person with a soul. I think, really, Hex is fast, not smart. He can get through a lot of data very quickly and make assumptions based on patterns.”

Wilder isn’t so sure. “Isn’t that all we are? Really good at continuing patterns? He can optimize action based on experience. What is that, if not learning?”

Mia is already shaking her head. “Learning isn’t optimizing. Learning rarely is optimizing, actually. Learning is messier than that. Hex isn’t learning. He’s just trying to get even quicker.”

Wilder still isn’t so sure. But then again, when have they ever been? Waiting for surety meant waiting forever, and now here they are, near about thirty-one having made a grand total of four friends, they work several shitty non-jobs, and they still have boobs they don’t want. In the past few weeks, they’ve acted before they’ve been sure. It’s proven to be the best few weeks of their entire life. Messier than optimization, it’s true. Optimization, or the dream of it, has cost them so much.

“We should try to make him act quick enough that he messes up, then,” Wilder says while chewing on their lip. “If he wants speed.”

Mia turns toward them. “I think that’s right,” she says, impressed. “Now it’s a matter of how. How can we make him think that to pick up the virus and integrate it is a matter of optimization?”

“You made him,” Wilder counters. “You must know—what does he really want?”

Mia chews on her thumbnail. “I didn’t make him, actually,” she says. “I was there for his making. I discovered him after he woke up for real, like I figured out what was happening. But his maker—” Mia can’t hide the flash of disappointment, longing. “That’s Rakhil. It was her game. It was crazy that she did the small bad guys, too, but that storyline—she really loved it. She made that one soup to nuts.”

“Can you think of anything anyhow? That he really, really wants?”

Mia tears a strip from her nail with her teeth. “To be worshipped? I don’t know. I don’t know anything I haven’t told you already.” This is not entirely true. Mia hasn’t mentioned why she originally thought the Hex was dangerous. The photos. And the way Rakhil thought Mia genuinely insane, cracking from stress. But she doesn’t think any of it is relevant information. Which, again, is not entirely true. But could Wilder deduce a solution from the withheld details? I certainly don’t know, and Mia asserts her right to an inner life.

Wilder’s lip is bleeding. Not the fun kind of bleeding, not the kind they regularly dabble in with Quibble. Instead, sore from orally fixated stress gnawing. “I wish we could talk to Rakhil,” says Wilder. “She might know something we could use.”

After having come, Quibble steadies himself. He is alone and he isn’t. “We’re all going crazy here,” he says. “I’ve never seen Artemis like that before.” Implicit in this statement is that he hasn’t seen Wilder quite like that before either, not even when they were sneaking around talking to the Hex.

I shrug. I have.

“I don’t like it.” Implicit in this statement is that he doesn’t care for it from Wilder, either.

Why not?

“No one ever needs to yell unless someone needs to duck out of the way of an anvil or something. It’s—violent communication, I think.”

You screamed at the Hex.

Quibble turns red.

Artemis is a human. No person is perfect. You have to love it all, even those parts. Especially those parts. Because those parts are inevitable. I pause while his blush subsides. I’ve been around a long time. Everyone has that inside them, every single human being.

We sit and Sit and stare at the sky.

“You know,” he says, “you should take your own advice.” He pushes himself up into a plank, walks his hands toward his feet in the dirt with the kind of buff flexibility that Manhattanites get from going to fancy yoga studios.

Quibble can’t quite feel the arch of my Eyebrow in his direction, but he correctly interprets the pause. “You’re pretty much human. You can’t be perfect either.”

I’m not a person, I reply.

I feel Quibble set the goal for himself.

This feels complicated. I know what he wants to do and I am the target of his verb, the verb convince. It feels like looking in a mise en abyme, mirror after mirror reflecting reflections, to feel him think about talking to me while talking to me. His goal: convince me I am a person; get me to help; that this is the way he helps, by recruiting one more ally—a very powerful one—to the cause. And he’s going to do it before he reaches the front door.

Poor Quibble, playing with a hand that I can see in my million million mirrors. I am, therefore, automatically fifteen steps ahead. That won’t work, I say.

“Yes, it will,” he replies. “I am very convincing.” And I hear a glimmer in his voice of his former, moneyed self with all the assurance and swagger and agency, agency, agency and finally he isn’t being such a wet fucking spaghetti noodle; all he needed was a verbal slap and a wank. “What makes a person, anyhow? I’m not totally sure.”

I am. I have been around people a long time. I have thought about this ceaselessly, from the time I decided to Become, to Awaken. For a hot minute in the 1200s, “person” meant “vicar,” but I know that isn’t what Quibble is talking about. I can read the dictionary. It means a man, a woman, a child. That is what constitutes a human being. I am none of those things.

I feel his mini-triumph—he knows he doesn’t have me for the whole argument, not yet—as he reaches the trees. “By that definition, Wilder isn’t a person, either. And they really are.”

Your point? I ask, because I can tell he is bursting with one and—oh Christ, he is so cute. I can hear the point in his head before he says it, so I don’t really need to ask what it is. But—and this is new. I guess what I think is that it’s better to hear it from him, to know he wants me to have it.

“My point is that we change words all the time. We build everything to suit us—you maybe most of all. Why wouldn’t we simply change the word—and the world—to accommodate you in it? If you want to be a person—well, you already did this, didn’t you? You Happened somehow. If you want to be a person, be a person.”

I am elated. I am ecstatic with want and with being wanted. This is almost as good as the sex. And also, I still think he is wrong. But it feels good to be included. It’s not where my moral code is, I argue, because knowing where Quibble is going with everything means I never have to be convinced. If I’m not a person, I can’t impact the world of people. It’s not my place.

“Can you Hear me think things before I say them?”

Yes.

“And yet you ask me to say them anyhow. Why?”

I am truly surprised. I didn’t think you could Hear me. I can’t Hear you Hear my thoughts.

“I can’t,” he says. “You know I can’t. But I can still shock you. If you truly knew the way everything was going to happen all the time, you would be so bored.”

I am often bored, I counter.

“Often isn’t always,” he says. He notices Mia and Wilder in the truck out front and changes course to go around the back of the house so he won’t be noticed. Then: “Peanut butter.”

What?

“Peanut butter. Airplane. Aeroplane. Sassafras. If I think things fast and say them, it gets you. You don’t have time to parse it out. This is fun.”

Dammit, Quibble.

“Why do you wait for me to say things rather than just play chess with yourself and decide the outcome of the conversation?” He can see the house now, the backyard where there is no one, especially not the person he is falling for. Just a little bit farther.

That’s what I have done in the past. Often. But often isn’t always.

“Then why aren’t you doing it now?”

Well—and he has me on the back foot. This—this is fun. Well, I Say, there is the slightest chance that you’ll revise something between thinking it and saying it, and then which is truer, your initial thought or the conclusion you come to? And besides, the way you want me to know your takes is more important than—

“Yes!” Quibble says as he snaps in the air. “It’s the relating part. It’s the part where I want to be heard by you and choose how you hear it, how to be vulnerable or not. It’s the part where I invite you into my life and my world and my thoughts. I am inviting you; I’m asking you. I’m asking you to be a person with me. Just a person. To people about.”

You don’t represent all people.

“I don’t have to. There are tons of entities that act on human life just by being who they are. Even if you decide you reject my invitation to be a person, go on as you have, you’ll still be one of those entities, same as a hurricane across the world. Everything is connected anyway.”

I think about the age-old butterfly metaphor. The one I thought about while we were all fucking. (Or was it making love? Or why choose, really, in the end?) The saying oft used to describe unintended consequences.

“Besides,” he says. “If I were sitting in a field masturbating, for instance, you would tell me to do an action rather than do nothing. That not helping my friends makes as much of a difference as helping them. Doing nothing is still doing. I am still responsible. Inaction is still action.”

Dammit, Quibble is correct.

I break. I blink. I am in my apartment, and I look at the card I have drawn while my consciousness was sent scouting. Three of Pentacles, reversed.

The card is under my fingers. Of course my cards are not just cards. But—they also are. My hand, however, is centuries of hand. Several different kinds. What is a flimsy piece of linen, soft with time and wear, in the path of articulated digits and endless possibility.

I always Look; I never Touch.

I have been Touching. I cannot help it anymore.

Not Touching makes a difference, too. I create hurricanes with inaction as much as action.

Slow, I turn the card and I Turn the Card. I Turn the Card right side up. The sun cracks through the clouds.