Rebecca Costa-Brown walked into the main Cauldron conference room hoping for a peaceful space to work for a few minutes. Instead she found the other Triumvirate members already there, arms folded, wearing identically stony expressions.
Contessa was present too, but facing a corner of the room. Several portals were arranged in a semicircle in front of her. She alternated between snapping spines, flinging objects, and uttering cryptic phrases to people on the other side. Sometimes she did all three simultaneously. The woman was efficient; Rebecca respected that.
Legend nudged Eidolon forward.
"What is it this time," Rebecca said.
"This is an intervention." Eidolon cleared his throat, shuffling through his deck of cue cards to the next one. "You have a problem. Because we care about you, we're cutting you off from insert current addiction here."
Legend elbowed him. "Granting wishes."
"Granting wishes," Eidolon amended. "The insert team slash company slash organisation slash orphanage slash welfare group here is insert negative emotion—"
Legend prised the cue cards from him and placed them on the conference table face-down, sliding them out of reach. When Eidolon tried to levitate them back, Legend fried them in mid-air with a laser for good measure.
Eidolon tossed his hands up and went to sulk on a chair.
"The Make-A-Wish Foundation," Legend said, "is upset about having to field a sudden deluge of complaints and class-action lawsuits from disgruntled guardians. Not to mention having to put out all the fires you started."
Rebecca scoffed. "Slanderous hyperbole. Stonehenge was barely singed."
"Because of your egregious conduct, Make-A-Wish is considering severing official ties with the Triumvirate."
"Those bastards," she said. "They can't do that. I invented them."
"You did not," Contessa chimed in, delivering a roundhouse kick to a mob boss's groin through a portal.
"I might as well have. They're nothing without me. Do you know what percentage of wishes was granted by me alone in just the past week?"
"I do."
"I'm making a difference. A significant difference, which is more than I can say for them." She looked at Legend. "And you're just jealous because I'm faster than you."
"What?" He shook his head. "Rebecca, at least twelve trigger events that we know of have been traced to your actions this week. This is serious."
The issue with being the smartest person on the planet was that she always had to be acutely conscious of when she was wrong. There were no blinders to put on, no oasis of blissful ignorance to retreat to. But one benefit to being an indestructible flying juggernaut was that she always had an avenue of escape available. She took flight stage right, demolishing walls like a human-shaped wrecking ball smashing its way through reinforced concrete, tunnelling upwards until she breached the surface.
Then she remembered why she didn't come up here, so she doored to somewhere with a better view.
She'd just settled down on the edge of a cliff overlooking a canyon when a portal opened behind her. Contessa stepped out.
"Your tantrums are getting expensive," she said, dusting an invisible speck off her jacket cuff. "Doctor Mother will be cross."
"She can afford it."
"You've been doing this because they never granted your wish."
"Or maybe I've been doing this because you didn't go to the Flame Jamboree with me," Rebecca shot back. "Could you really not spare the time? I managed it, and I'm almost as busy as you are."
Contessa didn't challenge the assertion; both of them knew it wasn't true. She joined Rebecca on the cliff, their legs hanging off the lip. A deep green river scored the cleft below them.
"That festival was not going to happen the way it was marketed," Contessa said. "Its organisers were an assortment of nineteen-year-old con artists who never intended to deliver on their grandiose promises of gourmet meals and luxury villas. None of the performers were actually going to show up. We would have been packed together in soaking wet refugee tents with no refreshments or entertainment to speak of."
"I'm aware," Rebecca said. "Obviously I'm aware. I was at the first CaypCon fiasco. I won an extra hour in the bouncy castle. Believe me, I know how these things go."
"And yet you wanted to attend?"
Rebecca wondered why Contessa bothered asking questions when she could get the answers herself with a mere thought. "It's not about the event. I can abduct any celebrity chef or musician I please. Not that I would do that. It's about the experience."
"It would have been an unpleasant one."
"Before you and Doctor Mother saved me," Rebecca said, "I didn't wish for my life to be perfect. I didn't wish for comfort or safety. I just didn't want to die covered in cancer bruises. I didn't choose or earn them—they were things that happened to me. But I wanted a body battered and scarred by experience, and I wanted a mind to match. I wanted stories to tell, even if they didn't all have happy endings. Because that would mean I had lived.
"That was what I thought I was giving the children this past week. I thought I was giving them memories they'd asked for, a texture to their world they sorely needed. Now I'm not so certain. Now I think I might have messed up."
Rebecca's fingers burrowed into rock. She forced them to uncurl so that the cliff wouldn't crumble beneath her.
Contessa was quiet, unmoving as the breeze played with strands of her hair. When she finally spoke, her soft voice silenced all rival sounds.
"Rebecca, what was your wish? When you were fifteen."
"Don't pretend you don't already know."
"No," Contessa said, gazing down at the river. "I didn't ask. But I would like to know, so that I may grant it."
Rebecca hesitated. There was a chance that Contessa would—intentionally or not—interpret her wish in the worst possible light, twist her wording, give her a taste of her own medicine. There was a chance she wouldn't understand.
She told her anyway.
