Eight of Swords, Reversed

Waltham, Massachusetts, is nineteen minutes from Rakhil’s house. This normally wouldn’t mean shit, but that is where Boston Dynamics is headquartered. It has been about nine minutes since the Hex got a tentacle out of Here and into the material reality, only to be beaten back by Quibble’s closing Door. Which means as the Hex blasts Nazi death metal out of every speaker in Rakhil’s house while Mary Margaret screams, “Turn it off, turn it off,” I am watching an army of Spots twitch to life. The smooth-headed dog-adjacent robo-bodies in viral internet videos where scientists kick them only to watch them rebalance.

Meanwhile, Mary Margaret is stealing speakers one by one, pinching them out of our existence until the only thing left playing Nazi death metal is the toilet. We all stare at it, incredulous.

“I’m not sure I can get that one,” Mary Margaret says.

Rakhil goes to her closet and pulls out a toolbox. Quibble knows from experience what she’s about to do. She grabs a large wrench and beats the toilet until it cracks, until it stops. “Fuck the toilet,” Rakhil says. The apartment is quiet. Fifteen minutes, three seconds.

Wilder is crying. They ruined it. They were careless and they ruined it and now—well who knows what. Now the Hex—what will he do? Wilder hopes. They hope against all hope that maybe the Hex will simply elect to be good. They think of me. They think of my moral code, my expectation of living with humanity, the way I’ve changed.

“Fuck,” Artemis says. “Fuck.”

Quibble’s hands are on Wilder. He hugs them close, tight. “You couldn’t have known,” he murmurs.

“I could have moved slower,” Wilder says. And they bury their face in his shoulder. “Everything we just did, all that time—it’s useless. It’s all useless.”

Mary Margaret screams. Everyone turns. She is looking out across the balcony.

The Spots have arrived. But to call them Spot—the cutesy, corporate name assigned to war machines? It barely works at the least magical of times, and the Hex has made a few adjustments to these metal-bodied mutts.

Spots don’t generally have gaping mouths, lolling tongues.

“How?” Artemis says. “How? The tentacle disappeared; it couldn’t exist here. How can it be doing this?”

“He,” blubbers Wilder, and no one argues because everyone is used to ignoring their corrections.

“I don’t know,” Quibble says. “And I don’t care. We have to move. We have to go.”

“No,” Wilder sniffs. “If he’s doing this—we have to end it. It’s too dangerous. We have to end it now.”

Artemis and Quibble both know Wilder is right. The most disturbing thing about the scene beyond the balcony railing is how integrated into the world it is. People take photographs with their phones, post to Instagram. They cannot see the additions Artemis can. People get so close. So, so close. A child gets too close. A toddler holding a stuffed dog up into the face of a robot.

The tentacle lashes from the gaping mouth. The witches feel something—stop. A glitch, a clunky pause. Then the child is gone. No one saw what happened. A father screams. No one else seems to notice.

All the dogs move as one. They move toward Rakhil’s building, all their faces pointed at the witches.

Wilder, Quibble, and Artemis look at each other, full in the face. “Fight, then?” Artemis asks.

“And we figure it out,” Wilder affirms.

“Or we don’t,” adds Quibble. “But it’s better, I think, than doing nothing.”

“Me too,” says Mary Margaret. And she is clearly frightened. Her legs shake.

“Maggie,” Artemis says. Tears stick in her eyes. She does not let them fall. “No.”

“But I don’t want you all to go die without me.”

“No one is dying,” Artemis says. But no one is sure about who is and who is not dying. “And it’s not that I don’t want you fighting. You have to get Mia and Rakhil to safety. I don’t know where safety is, so you’re going to have to figure it out.” I can Hear Artemis’s thoughts—it is true-ish. And so Mary Margaret can spot the true-ish-ness, knows that Artemis plans to immediately fight, whatever the cost, to give the girl a chance to run. Because Mary Margaret is her daughter.

Because that is what mothers do.

“I’m not just blowing smoke up your ass. It’s a real job and you’re the best chance Mia and Rakhil have of making it out of this building.” This is also true. And not-ish. It is true-true. And Mary Margaret knows it. She squares her shoulders.

“Okay,” she says as the building’s fire alarm activates and the sprinklers begin to mist, to ruin everything that hasn’t already been ruined.

“Go!” Artemis yells over the mechanical bells. And: “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Mary Margaret shouts back, maybe for the last time. And Artemis catches Mia’s eye. Mia nods.

They run.

As soon as they are out the door, Quibble says, “We need to do it now.” He swallows. “You guys, I have kind of a plan. A last resort. We might—we might not come back.”

“I know,” Wilder says. All three allow themselves the briefest second to clasp hands. Wilder takes it upon themself to say the words. The words that open every spell the group has ever done together. “Pay attention.” And everyone’s spine straightens, shoulders square. “Something amazing is about to happen.”

Quibble opens the Rift. They all step through.

Mia, Rakhil, and Mary Margaret sprint. They run the obstacle course of the building, the stairs that are slippery with fresh cleaning products and now water; everyone normally takes the elevator. “Not the front door,” Mary Margaret pants as they crash-slide-pound from landing to landing. The pack of hounds is out front; it is obvious they can’t go that way. But she says it anyhow, because there is nothing else to do but say it. “Something else.”

Rakhil turns on a landing and wrenches open the door. They aren’t all the way to the ground floor yet, but there is an emergency exit that lets out on the side of the building. They rocket forward, hearing exclamations, confusion from behind the closed doors as everyone sticks their heads out the window, then retreats, frightened. They start to hear doors open behind them, people running from the sprinklers, and they pick up the pace. Rakhil runs it easily, Mia struggles, and Mary Margaret shoots forward, in front of them both, powered by the knowledge that if she must fight, she can’t do it in front of these folks. The Unawakened make all sorts of excuses not to see what’s right in front of them, but she suspects whatever it is she will have to do will be very obvious. Not even the dullest Unawakened will be able to deny it.

To the outside eye, Mary Margaret appears to move freely. But I See differently. I See the flight, the fight, and the freeze all tie their ropes around her mind. Her breath constricts. Fear, fear, fear. She knows how to look out for her party of one; now she has charges. The weight of responsibility is excruciating, pulls her spirit from the air, chains her to the ground. Panic ties a blindfold against her Eyes. No, Mary Margaret, do not ignore your next Awakening.

Your Ascent.

I can see her Power boxed in by “they just sent me to get rid of me” and “if I can’t do it right, these two ladies will die” and “I am only a kid—fuck that, I’m nearly eighteen” and “I am not a kid, I am an adult” and “I am nobody, nothing, and no one should expect much of me” and “maybe if I hand myself over, he won’t look too hard for the other two.” That’s the trouble with the Mary Margarets of the world. Whip smart. Able to shred themselves to pieces and call it rationality, talk themselves into smaller, less.

They all burst into the sunlit spring and charge away from the building. They can hear the clatter of so many uncanny feet on the cobblestones. Scrabbling and inorganic, balance both too precise and without an innate understanding of what it means to move, an installed knowledge of embodiment.

“Stay with me!” she shouts, even through the bindings and blindings and the accumulation of limits in what should be a moment of soaring on her own air. Running from police and violent parents and other kids with weapons takes over and she ducks and weaves through streets, finding the least occupied ones. She isn’t the praying type, but I Watch her send one up for no bystanders to report a pell-mell running Black teenager, to bring down officers upon them. A distant part of her conscious mind wonders if she might make them all invisible, not just herself. And I wish she would pursue it but she doesn’t. She is only running. Tying more binds upon herself. No, Mary Margaret, no, this is your moment! Can’t you feel it? Try something other than this!

She rounds a corner and stops hard. Short. For there they are. The hounds. Mia and Rakhil slam into her and she falls forward onto her hands and knees, scraping her palms, leaving blood and skin on the ground. She doesn’t get all the way up. She doesn’t trust her legs to do it; they’re now seizing up, from the running and the terror both. It is one thing to watch the hounds on YouTube do inane tricks and it is another to see a line of three, heads pointed at the trio with no proper eye sockets to indicate where and if they can see, exactly. No sniffing the air, no bunching muscles signaling an attack. Only round, metallic heads and weird, slow elbows; a strange softness to their footsteps as they advance.

All three turn and there are two more behind them. The alley is narrow. High building walls. A dumpster.

The mouths appear again. They drip shadow. What does she need, what does she need? If the others win, she only needs to hold them off until they can come and—her stomach drops because Mary Margaret knows how unlikely that is. So she needs to win. That’s the only way.

She needs to put them all away. Pay attention! she shouts to herself; she doesn’t get to finish the sentence.

All the hounds leap at once. Rakhil, though short, throws herself over Mia, who tries and fails to fling herself in front of Mary Margaret. And good thing, too. Because Mary Margaret is reaching her hands and her Hands out before her. She Inhales and Inhales and Inhales and Mary Margaret’s Body is giant and made of Light.

Mary Margaret remembers the bullet. What it felt like to Reach Beyond and to Reach Faster than gunpowder and fear. And then she does that. Five times. In five different directions. Mary Margaret’s Body becomes a Star. She Separates. She screams, white hot in pain and rage because fuck this. Because her mother is probably already dead.

She Feels herself grab the stupid dogs by their idiotic metal swivel heads and she throws them all into her Pocket dimension at once.

In this way, Mary Margaret becomes the Magpie. Collector of Anything She Fucking Wants.

When the blaze, bright enough to battle daylight, runs clear, Mia and Rakhil look up. Mary Margaret stands before them, alone. No hounds. The teenager looks back at them and smiles. “The amazing thing has happened,” she says to them. “Fuck yeah.”

Then she faints.