Someone finally spoke aloud. Not either of my closest cohorts, and not the next people over, either. I could see them, but the Nothing still rose tall enough to block the other three from my line of vision. I figured it was the southern compass point, the other one who was flinging as much magic potential around as I was. She had a light voice, still a teenager’s voice, which fit with the glimpse I’d had of a slight figure, on my way into the holler.
“It’s a time traveler,” she said. “It’s trying to slide through. Forward, backward, I don’t think it cares very much as long as it pulls bad shit through. We’ve gotta cut it out. We’ve gotta remove it from the timeline entirely. That’s the only way it’s gonna be vulnerable enough for us to smash it.”
I had the impression she was lecturing me specifically. That kind of made sense, since everybody else had been here for days, and she had no way of knowing I’d recognized the Nothing’s time-slip capability, too. She sounded pretty sure she knew how to deal with it, and for a half second I wondered if I could’ve been her, self-assured and rife with magic, if I hadn’t blown it so badly half a lifetime ago.
Not that it mattered, because I had blown it, and I’d largely come to terms with that. I let regret go, said, “Sounds like a plan,” to my unseen counterpart, and let her take the lead.
For the first time, an edge of alarm slipped through the power circle. Her alarm, not mine, which made me think maybe giving her the lead hadn’t been so bright, but it also seemed not only rude but potentially dangerous to yank it back now. Besides, I wasn’t at all sure how a person went about yanking things out of time to castrate them. I knew how to yank things around in time, albeit clumsily, but that didn’t seem like the skill set necessary here. The kid across the circle had sounded sufficiently confident that I’d assumed she did know.
Eventually I was going to learn that assumptions were dangerous, but today was clearly not that day. I breathed, “Calmly, calmly,” and sent a ripple of healing power through the circle. I didn’t usually use it as a soporific, but it seemed to help. I felt the multistranded adept’s aura and power strengthen again.
An image popped into my head. I didn’t know if it was my own or my counterpart’s, though if it was hers I really wanted that nifty telepathic aspect to my magic. Either way, the idea of a sensory deprivation tank came to mind. That, in essence, was what we needed to do to the Nothing. Except where I was supposed to find a tank so secluded that time didn’t affect it, I didn’t know. Well, except maybe on the event horizon of a black hole, but that led to all sorts of other really bad possibilities that I wasn’t eager to explore.
It did, though, give me an idea. Space was affected by time: anything that light passed through kind of had to be. But the idea of the dark side of the moon introduced itself to me, and I seized on it. It wasn’t really dark, I knew that, it was just that we never saw its other face, so maybe that was close enough. I was willing to take it.
I filled my shields with that idea: cold black timelessness, lingering in the silence, no pressure or need for change. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good, and the cold started crackling the edges of the Nothing. That was shamanism: change instigated by belief. I could turn the air within that crushing shield to a space vacuum without harming any of the nonspacesuit-clad elders in the power circle. And that little inkling of time that was still part of the equation, that was no big deal, that was—
—slipping.
Slipping, cracking, sliding out of control, bringing the Nothing back into the world because it still had something to latch on to. I clamped down, trying to ignore it, trying to hold on to the possibility of taking something entirely out of time, trying to remember just how much depended on me doing that, and felt a jillion little bug feet run up my spine and send shivers all over me. They all leapt off, my spine abandoned by an infinitesimal number of bugs, and I lost control of the magic.
Panic and dismay shot up from the other side of the circle. The dismay cut deep, much deeper than the fear. The Nothing erupted again, knocking us all over the holler. I crashed against soft dirt and immediately staggered to my feet, weaving physical shields together again, determined to catch the stuff before it got out-of-control large again. It was much smaller than before, but not gone, dammit. All around me, power stuttered back into wakefulness, everyone who’d been thrown around trying, as I was, to hold the Nothing to a smaller size. My counterpart’s magic rushed through us all, connecting us like railroad ties, until it slapped into me and we once more had a functional power circle around the Nothing. The younger woman’s magic was flushed with anger, fitting against my own anger tidily. I was able to hang on to its edges easily, improving our connection with the sense of long familiarity.
It all came home to me a little slowly. I’d worked with sympathetic magic before. Recently, even, up on a mountaintop in Ireland. Maybe it had something to do with mountains. Anyway, I knew the strength of blending familiar, familial magics, but I hadn’t expected it in the Qualla.
Which, in retrospect, was really, really stupid, because the Qualla had the two people on Earth who were closest to me by blood.
It wasn’t a teenage girl at all, the counterpart who stalked up to me with frustration and anger in brown eyes. It was a prepubescent boy, a twelve-year-old nearing his thirteenth birthday but not his voice change, and he said, “You’re twice as old as I am, Joanne. I thought you would be good at this stuff,” with all the disdain in the world.
It was not, all things considered, how I’d envisioned remeeting my son.
Chapter Five
Aidan Monroe had inherited his father’s golden-brown skin tones and hair so black its natural highlights were blue. He’d also gotten some of the same shape to his nose as Lucas had, mitigating my own beak somewhat. But I could see bits of me in him, too: the shape of his eyes and jaw, particularly with said jaw thrust into a too-familiar scowl. He was rangy like I’d been—like I still was—and there wasn’t any hint yet of whether he would grow into shoulders like Lucas’s or not. He was barefoot, red clay under his toenails, and his ragged-ankle jeans and sleeveless T-shirt could’ve belonged on any kid from the mid-20th century on.
I thought he was beautiful.
I mean, I guessed mothers were supposed to, but I hadn’t been a prime candidate for mother of the year when I’d gotten pregnant and given him up at age fifteen. If anything gave me potential mother-of-the-year status, in fact, it was having given him up. I had a lot of emotional investment in that decision, but not a lot of sentimental investment, even if that seemed like a fine hair to shave. The point was, I hadn’t been overwhelmed with his infantile beauty, so I was a little surprised to find myself wanting to smile and pat him on the head like he—or I—had done well, just by him being cute.
Given that he was already glaring at me, I manfully restrained myself and instead shrugged. “I probably should be, but I’m a lot further behind on my studies than you’d expect. Sorry.” The word, while flippant was also sincere: I’d have preferred to unveil myself to Aidan in all my shining glory, instead of fumbling the ball just before the end zone. I was pretty certain that was the right sports metaphor.
He squinted and rolled back on his heels, a sign of surprise so like my own body language I had to fight not to laugh. I supposed lots of people did that, but seeing it on him was a little like looking in a reverse-gender mirror. Offhand, I suspected he hadn’t expected an apology from me, or anything less than a like-for-like chip on my shoulder.