Rakhil lives in Boston. Or really, she lives in Cambridge, mostly because she wants to be able to say she lives in Cambridge. But rather than the close-quartered student-esque apartments or the dusty-book-choked professorial living space, she lives in an Instagrammable minimalist paradise. Large windows overlook quaint cobblestone streets, buzzing with squinting academics coming out of hibernation. Spring has sprung. There are days now where the sky doesn’t hang close to the city. People are beginning to wake and move. Her place’s finest feature: a balcony, on which she can sit and drink tea out of a glass cup with no handles and watch them all as she works. On other people’s games, at this point, and not her own. She hopes for a comeback. Someday.
There is not one part of Rakhil’s house that isn’t connected to the internet. Her thermostat, her fridge, her security system, her lights. The lock on her door. All poke-able from an app on her phone, which of course already has the Hex’s digital roots growing through it. Everyone’s phone does. She sits at a glass desk with a monitor on it, a laptop docked into it. She does not sit properly in the chair; her legs are scrunched up underneath her and she absently chews a lock of her hair.
Rakhil, like everyone else, has a body, and it is only slightly different than Mia’s memory of her, than her body of the past. She has deep brown skin, sparkling brown eyes in which one can see both the madness and intelligence swirling, and her dark hair is tossed up in a messy bun. She has only what can be described as “gay face.” It is the face of a gay person. I do not know how else to put it. She is a small woman, short and slim with the broad shoulders and defined calves of one who runs and swims and does activities. Her sourdough bread starter sits on the counter; she has plans to go hiking in the afternoon; she has been working since six in the morning.
She hears the ripping sound behind her and leaps from her chair, her self-defense classes never far from the surface of her skin. It is bodily knowledge that is ready because all of her knowledge is always ready. Rakhil is a person with pitch-perfect recall in every sense of the word. Tightly wound and well-organized, she can reach for anything she’s ever said or thought or done in a millisecond. Everything about her says Bring It On. I would not put my Hands so quickly into this one. She would sting like the dickens.
She throws a punch at the first person through the gate, which is Quibble, and connects handily with the side of his head. She lifts her knee into his groin and he grunts. “Jesus fuck, that still hurts, goddamn, stop, stop! I have to hold it closed!” But she doesn’t stop. She grabs his wrist and twists it behind him, kicks her foot out as she registers the human shapes continuing to spill from this inexplicable portal. She connects with someone else’s stomach, Wilder’s, and they grunt as they fall on their ass. Rakhil shoves Quibble to the ground and whirls around, ready to keep attacking, preparing to ask questions later about the hole spilling into her apartment.
And she registers, dimly, that something isn’t human. Something is oil-slick snake-like. She turns to punch that, too.
Until she hears a very familiar voice. “Rakhil! Rakhil! Stop stop stop! It’s me!” And because of course, Rakhil remembers that voice, can instantly place who it is, she stops immediately. There is no wonder or searching or thinking.
“Mia?” Her fists fall to her sides and her smile brightens and then falls back into a frown, brow furrowed. “Mia, what the hell, where have you been? I thought—you must—how are you? Also, what?” She gestures to the closing Door. She takes in the woman’s appearance. More wrinkles, around the mouth, between the eyebrows. More gray hairs, and not long enough for them to have gotten there—though what can she expect, what with the mental breakdown Mia had. But certainly still Mia, her hands raised in peace-coming. From the ground, Quibble places his hand on the tear in the world and closes it with a zipping sound. The probing tentacle, as tall as a person, is chopped in half. Rather than oozing and screaming as anything organic would, it simply ceases to exist as though pixels. Everyone takes a breath.
“We don’t have a lot of explaining time,” Mia says. “I—Wow, I am nauseous, Christ. I need you to trust me, to just go with everything I say. Despite—everything. Can you do that? Can I count on you to do that?”
“Yes,” Rakhil says, “of course.”
“Internet,” Wilder croaks from the ground. And Mia springs into action. She grabs Rakhil’s phone and crunches it under her heel.
“Mia, what—”
“Internet. Anything connected to the internet, wreck it, destroy it, disconnect it.”
And Rakhil—does it. She and Mia whirligig around the gorgeous apartment pulling plugs: the router, the extender, the fridge. Rakhil grabs her toaster and, standing in a wide-legged power-pose, two-hand-hurls it at the floor.
When they are done: “You don’t—you didn’t—” Mia sits on the couch, hard. “Don’t you have any follow-up questions?”
Rakhil shrugs. “I said I trusted you. I meant it.”
This is the work that Rakhil has done. Because Rakhil didn’t believe Mia for even one second when Mia told Rakhil what she’d been experiencing. The Orb turned sentient. The horrible photos. Threatening her. It sounded to Rakhil that Mia had become obsessed with her. That she fictionalized her stalking tendencies into some fantasy, something fueled by suppressed or sublimated toxic white masculinity—and it didn’t matter that Rakhil was herself trans, she’d had her fair share of run-ins with white trans women unused to their new perceived place in the gender pecking order. “Get away,” she’d hissed. “Crazy. Fucking nuts. Leave, leave. Leave my house, leave this field, leave it all and never speak to me again.”
Rakhil hadn’t believed Mia for even one second of that explanation and she’d regretted it every second since. She’d learned about internalized transphobia, for one thing. And she’d found some—upsetting—Reddit posts for another. Too many, too disparate to have been Mia. So yes, Rakhil has been ready to, at a moment’s notice, destroy her smart toaster as penance.
“Okay, here’s the short bit of it. Magic is real and—the Orb, I was right. And these are all witches. Artemis, Mary Margaret, Wilder, and the gentleman currently bleeding from the mouth is Quibble.”
Quibble waves from the floor, glumly. “Hiya.” He hadn’t even gotten his chance to be convincing.
Rakhil blinks once and then says, “Roger. Got it. What do we need?”
And every witch in the room is shocked. I’m shocked. Every single person ever clued into the existence of Awakened Power has needed time to accept what they’ve seen. But watching Rakhil’s face, the instant reconfiguration, like someone snapping a Rubik’s Cube into a new shape, a new series of colors, is—astounding. The line from “I have witnessed magic” to “someone I have wronged and worked hard to trust is telling me about its realness” to “now I live in a reality where that is true” is so short, drawn so quickly. This woman is a genius.
“What were the Obsidian Orbs programmed for?” Mia asks. “What did they want?”
“They weren’t. Their locations were randomly generated and they did not have any behaviors or personalities.” Rakhil scratches at her chin. “If they could be said to have wanted anything at all, it would have wanted the same thing all my bad guys wanted. They just couldn’t really express it because, you know, they were orbs.”
“What was that?”
“To win.”
“What about the one that didn’t power off?” Wilder chimed in. “Would it have been different?”
Rakhil shook her head. “Shouldn’t have been. But obviously it was. It grew to expect—”
“Deference. Worship. Human sacrifice.”
“Yes. I don’t know what you need from me, then.”
“We need to figure out how to get it to willingly pick up and integrate a virus,” Wilder says, and I—I can’t warn them. I can’t warn that they’re missing something. They’re missing something big, big, big, oh shit, oh no. I am spent. There is only Watching, no matter what lessons I have learned.
Rakhil shakes her head. “It won’t. If it picked up behaviors from the other monsters and the players, everyone wanted to win. It’s not going to do anything that means it won’t win.”
Laughter emanates from another room. The bathroom. Hear you will confirm this. Developer is true. i will be king hereafter.
Artemis gasps and holds her breath; Quibble jumps to his feet; Mary Margaret turns to face the bathroom; Mia puts her head in her hands.
Wilder pales. “Shit. Fuck. I—thought you got everything. No, do you have—”
Rakhil covers her eyes. “A smart toilet? Yes.” She is (rightfully) ashamed.
forgetfulness overcame characters! The murderer discovered! Among those who are accustomed to be indulged in their native misery. Time for some shit.