"Healing is not a process. Recovery, self-improvement, it's not a process. It's a business. And business is good." - The Professor
The decay of edifice can often bear resemblance to that of flesh. To those which prey and scavenge, to every realtor and urban developer, each layer of exoskeleton being rent signalled opportunity and prosperity. To everyone else, it was a bloody testament to be avoided.
The depot sweat the deterrent toxin of a polydesmid on its death. The upcoming of its innards did not lessen the danger.
"Hey. Hey, Marie. What is this stuff?"
A faintly blue-tinged powder littered the floor in small heaps like waves. Time and far, far worse had weathered the walls and ceilings it once would have belonged to. Danika tried to rub some between two digits, but her fingers slipped clean through it.
"Asbestos."
"Eww."
"I'd say hold your breath, but-"
"Whazzat?" Hope, squatted and punctiliously regarding every pile, tilted her head aside.
"Danika was wondering about the asbestos."
"Oh, that? Keeps the 'umans out, I tell you what. We're perfectly safe, though, because odds are our body heals itself quicker than the symptom latency can whack out. Lotta illicit trading goes on here because of it, though."
"So if you wanted privacy,"
"Don't do this. I let you live at m place for free."
"You could say this is asbestos it gets."
"Christ's sake. Unbelievable. Dazza, are you seeing this?"
Danika looked between the two of them. "I don't get- oh! Oh! Asbestos!"
"She likes it."
Hope shook her head. "Unbebloodylievable."
"I... look, I get that it's safe for us to breathe and all that lovely stuff, but do we have to?"
Danika silently concurred.
"You don't gotta breathe, I s'pose. Only if you want to oxygenate your body."
"No, no, I- Jesus, can I do that?"
"For about three minutes, sure."
"Right. No. No, that's not what we're talking about at all. Can't we get the asbestos removed, or something?"
"Girl, this is the outer suburbs. You're standin' in the natural habitat of the asbestos removalist. 'Course we could get this all chucked."
"Oh, thank-"
"Trouble is the wait times, though. We're lookin' at three months down the drain, easy. Plus, as you do know, this is a safe space for us and ours. Let's add however long it'd take to convince the community to let this place get cleaned up."
"Right, right. I get what you're saying. But... mesothelioma? Really?"
"Tell you what. I'll put in a good word for it, maybe me and the other bigwigs can chat over the prospect."
"Thank you."
"What was that?"
"Sorry. I mean chur, brah."
"Better."
Better, within the logical confines of her own performative pedantry. Not at all conducive or pragmatically relevant to her own intentions, and any perceived similarity was a distraction, a mask concealing her own internal tribulations. Those she swallowed, for under her care were those with far worse, but with time it built in her oesophagus like the untrammelled development of mucus (as if she'd know - the experience of so much as a chest infection rested firmly outside her personal ken) which bids the body to choke and to heave. She had faced dolour, see it consume the loved and the lonely alike, crawled out of it herself time and again, tooth and nail, and felt it do much the same. But to compare vexation and bereavement was to compare fuel to a flame.
Hope knew, had known her whole life, that a determined magical girl became practically impervious to any inner turmoil. By her nature she might add outer turmoil doubly so. Crocidolite asbestos sifted between her fingers. Neither psychometry nor her own detective work had found the faintest trace of Lara Macquarie. This would change, in time. Lara might foolishly believe Hope to be combing the city, but this was never the case, was never going to be the case. These streets were her nerves, the neighbourhoods her ganglia, the very central business district her brachial plexus. Energies - not physical, nor spiritual, nor even magical, but raw social energies passed through every word, every locking of eyes between the most perfect of strangers. Lara Macquarie was not living in hiding. She was waiting, whether she knew it or not.
The dashboard clock decreed an untimely 1:58 A.M. when next Alice Cage stirred. She could feel the car rumbling, which was indication enough that Margaret was up and at it. A furtive examination demonstrated not only this, but a look of grievous displeasure sculpted into a snarl. Alice recognized it well enough to be an indication of insomnia, gently simmering frustration that she would soon enough find an outlet for. Woe betid any driver before her who knew what the speed limit was.
"Mornin'. Where are we?"
Outside was what looked like farmland, bereft of any clear utility or, for that matter, features which distinguished its crop from unkempt mountain-time wild grasses. The half-moonlight caught on the skin of a coterie of wild witches, towering impossibly above, ambling hopelessly from field to field - anywhere they could ignore the calling of their deeper hunger. One intoned a song of death as she waddled, legs furling and unfurling clockwise as she went. It was a simple melody, for so was the subject it addressed. It might have resembled a wail of mourning, if not for how beautifully, evenly measured its composition rang.
"Get off the road, cocksuckers!" Margaret huffed and slammed on the horn. The witches did not seem bothered by this. She swerved around them, passive-aggressively. "What? Oh, we just crossed the state border a little over an hour ago. Should be at city limits in the next twenty minutes."
"Wow. Exciting, huh? Getting to go home?"
"I'm sure the Somme was a real damn thrill, too."
Alice nodded, nerves wrought with uncertainty. "Do you... resent me for asking you to come out here?"
"Well, sure. 'Course I do."
"O...h. Um, If I'd known-"
"If you'd known? Fuck's it matter if you'd known? You'da said we had to come out here any which way, right? So here the hell we come!"
Alice didn't know what to say to that.
"Christ's sakes. Not a goddamn clue why I listened to you, you know. I tell you that's never happenin' again."
"I'm sorry."
"Haha. Not yet, you ain't."
Margaret's grip on the wheel tensed.
"Not yet, you ain't."
There was a sign which read, "Welcome to sunny DECOVERLEY, HC", and depicted, perhaps far more importantly, a mountain range hazed cobalt by distance and atmosphere, sprawling prairie vibrant with native wildflowers, and the eternal warmth of a golden sun, all obscured beyond any meaningful degree by a perfect nuclear Reaganite family – mother, father, daughter (likely named something common with a Mormon inclination to its spelling), son (almost certainly named Hunter), and bichon frisé, none of whom had experienced an outfit revisit since the 1960's.
It had seen a great many terrible things in its time, as is expected of something which faces the bumper stickers of departing cars in a red state. Even in its worst nightmares, though, it had never expected to see the sleepless glunch of Margaret McManus come back. It did not have a say in the matter, of course. It was only a sign by the road, and its influence only extended to spheres of political rhetoric, and taking the bulk of the momentum the occasional drunk driver brought its way.
Even if it had the power to object, it would still be too late.
McManus was back in town.
"So," Hope shrugged. Incidentally she kicked a can further down the street, then, in noting the flagrance of litter, scissor-kicked it effortlessly into a recycling bin left out after collection. "Let's say our good friend and a living conduit of history has been jumbucked by an extremist group with a strong, but confused, national identity."
"That is what has just happened," Audrey confirmed, uneasily. She poured a single Smartie from a half-finished box into her opposite palm and downed it like a pill.
"See? You're a natural. Bear with, though. I'm very particular with my wording of this situation. Because, look. The thing is... the thing is," she pinched thumb and forefinger together and made a straining motion with the relevant hand, "Lara's got her own intentions. 'Course she has. She'd been talking my ear off about them all year, before Marie rocked up. I've got enough of an inkling of what it entails to know that having Marie with her is a total rinsing, absolute primo game over stuff. That's why she's so faux-chummy with her. But the kicker is the rest of the deeplighters aren't with her on it at all. Certainly not enough to capture and lock down a warehouse."
"Which means... she's offering them all something else."
"Spot on."
"So what is it, then?" She downed two more. Already the palm of her hand was lightly stained by dissolving food dye.
"I'll wait for you to stop chewing."
This only made Audrey chew slower and more carefully.
"Sappho's a magical girl."
"What?!" She nearly dropped the box in a roadside topiary leaning just over the boundary past which it would be considered council land, whose most generous presumption that could be made about its upkeep was that whoever had maintained it later passed away.
"Probably."
"What? Christ, Fearno. Don't scare me like that."
"I do mean very very probably."
"Ah... how probably?" She winced.
"Teacher of a poetry circle of which we've not found record of a single 'uman member. Then I asked the Kyubster about it, and he said yes, but in that really noncommittal way where he obviously thinks if he out and out said 'absolutely, spot-on', you'd go and do something stupid with that information."
"That's..." It was with great reluctance that she entertained the swallowing of another Smartie.
"Yup."
"And this pertains to the case of Marie's disappearance?"
"Okay. So we've got sixteen poetry fragments scattered across time and space, in which Lara sees some esoteric, occult meaning, and a borderline nationalistically Eurocentric circle of radical feminists clamouring for some semblance of cultural identity. Now, let's say the student of one of the most famous lesbian European poets in history happened to descry one."
"Hold on. I object to 'one of the most'. They named lesbians after her."
"They named lesbians after her," Hope concurred. "I just happen to be more of a fan of Michael Field, and want to believe in a world where she's a superstar. Not- not to let that detract from the point being made here, of course!"
"Of course. Right. Yeah. So you're saying this is Macca's lucky break?"
"Would be! Would be, if we didn't know where she was keeping Marie."
Audrey downed the last of the Smarties and crumpled the box in a fist. "So we have a plan."
"You, Erika, Jane, Denise, each to a corner of the warehouse. I'll let you do the selling it to them, I feel like this whole operation's pushing my rep a bit thin. Make sure only three people are getting into the joint, and none are getting out."
"Those three being you, Lauren's sister, and her friend?"
"Don't you know it!"
"And what's your half of the plan?"
Hope only winked.
Wai-Fong's patience had worn thin waiting for other people before. Despite what her academic experience implied about her, she was ruthlessly punctual on her own terms. Her sense of responsibility only ever wavered in the highest-pressure of situations, such as in the face of the disappearances, and it took greater stresses still to keep her down (getting Professor Chang to think she was good at social sciences was the only thing that had ever taken her to this point). That not everyone else took their own lives with the same present-minded severity as her was something she considered almost disturbing. 'Living life to the fullest' was, by all accounts, a biological need for her species.
Almost exactly six minutes past their scheduled meeting time, a short, broad-shouldered girl with a perpetual look of upset and concern on her face ran to her.
"I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry I'm late!"
"Hey, slow down. Slow down! You must be the girl from Wan Chai, right?"
She nodded, out of breath. "My name is Wong Chi-Ying, and-"
"No! No, no, no! Why is everyone so insistent on publicly giving out their names nowadays?"
"I'm sorry!"
Wai-Fong winced. Was this the quality of representative the neighbourhood had to show for itself? This girl was likely not their first choice, but she knew the cruelty of business districts. This was the best they could afford to send out in public at a time like this.
"So, Ms. Wong. What's the latest from your corner of the world?"
"Nothing."
"And by 'nothing', you mean...?"
"Nothing has changed at all. That's a good sign, right? That it's not getting worse?"
"Ye- Yeah. Sure."
Immediately, yes. Long-term, it meant the organisation pulling the strings was not at all intimidated by the community's past few months of investigation. It was going to take some time before things got better. In the inner city, police involvement had achieved nothing, but of course these were not the kind of people for whom police involvement ever improved the situation.
"Hang on, did you come all this way just to tell me nothing's changed? This couldn't have been a phone call, or an email?"
"Um! I was also meant to give you this!" Chi-Ying dug her wrist deep into a jacket pocket, perhaps illogically deep, and presented a small, How-To-Make-Your-First-Website-bum-ugly business card for a nightclub named Divineaux and subtitled Seriously, This Is Not A Front For Organised Crime, The Guy Who Works The Front Desk Just Looks Kind Of Gaunt And He's Going Through It Right Now So It's Rude To Keep Asking At This Point. "Apparently some people there can help."
"This is a tax shelter for a triad clan, isn't it."
"It, um, it says it's not..."
"Look, kid. I know whoever told you to give this to me meant well. I'm thankful for that, I really am. But we still haven't deconfirmed government involvement in this situation. Even if your friends' friends are one hundred percent, no strings attached, willing to help out - which is a big if! - that could set off the kind of alarm bells that bring a total police crackdown on your neighbourhood. Let's just, let's just leave this plan for now, and you tell the people you're working with that it's best not to risk kicking the hornet's nest like this. Not until we have more information." She handed the card back, politely, of course, but too forcefully to object to.
"Are you sure? There was a girl there who really wanted to talk to you..."
"Really? What was her name?"
Chi-Yeng knitted her brow and squirmed.
"Oh, now you know giving that stuff out is dangerous?"
"They call her the Professor."
"Dammit, please tell me she wants to meet me alone."
She didn't say anything.
"Can I call her something else? Because if me and my associates are going to meet her, that's going to be a headache fast."
"No. Sorry..."
Wai-Fong sighed. "Alright. Okay. And she said she wanted to see us specifically?"
She nodded.
"Right. I'll go talk to the others when next I see them. Thank you for your help."
She nodded again, then started away. In one fluid motion, she heel turned and faced Wai-Fong again. "Actually... can I ask you a question?"
"Shoot."
"Do you really think you can do this? As in, find whoever's behind these disappearances?"
An uneasy pause. Then,
"Ma'am, as much as I would like to help, the younger of my partners learned English from cowboy movies and the elder thinks going to the library together and reading while not speaking to each other constitutes a 'hot date'. Meanwhile, I myself am a corpse kept alive by magic, cigarettes, and fast food chain restaurant breakfast menus."
Word by word, Chi-Yeng shuffled closer and closer to the brink of tears.
"Uh! Which means! The fact that we've accomplished as much as we have proves that we can do anything. Right?"
"Look at you, Crawford. Is this where your tough girl attitude has got you? The fact that you've accomplished as little as you have proves I was right about you."
Macquarie paced circles around her chair. She herself had long since decided not to give her the satisfaction of a retort. This was not her first taunt, nor, surely, would it be remotely near her last.
"I mean, your most successful haul on this entire treasure hunt so far has been breaking into my office and setting it on fire! What, do you think you're going to get ahead in life being some kind of parasite?"
Parasitoid, God willing, Marie told herself. A true parasite leaves its victim alive.
"Look, I'm going to enunciate this situation more clearly for you than Whitman ever planned on doing. We have a fragment etched on parchment that hasn't aged well. In fact, what we have is a palimpsest that got, like, swiped by some Romans a gazillion years ago and used as some palimpsestic... who knows? Shopping list?"
"You're going to belittle me, and then beg for my help. Got it."
"...Cute. No. Not at all. Actually, do you mind if I go grab a visual aide here?"
She didn't wait for an answer. What looked like a case for a small stringed instrument sat across the room. Macquarie strolled over to it, clipped it open, and presented within it some large hunting knife so long it took a great stretch of the imagination to not conceive of it as a sword.
"Pretty good, right? Stole it from the Australian Museum. Thing's hand-enchanted by the priestess Nedjem herself. They say one cut, and it'll steal your soul."
"Why are you showing me this?"
"Because I don't need your cooperation. Okay? I never have. I could cut the soul right out of your gem and use your power for myself. So I am asking you, Crawford. I am imploring you. Behave yourself. Do that, and nobody's going to put any pressure on me to tear you apart. Sound good?"
"No. That sounds really horrible, actually."
"Answer the question, smartarse."
"Right. Whatever. Can I have time to think about it?"
"No! Obviously not!"
Marie rolled her eyes. "You're right. Obviously not. Because judging by my current situation, I must be in a real damn rush to get somewhere! Huh? Huh?"
"What's there to decide? The only thing that changes is whether or not you die. Don't waste my time."
"I want to live, make no mistake... I just think it would be really funny to make you suffer the grand displeasure of having my soul."
Macquarie hesitated. "Alright. Fine. I'll give you an hour to think on it."
That was an hour and 20 minutes ago. Marie expected she would have done something in that time. If not executing her, at least leaving to go run an errand or boss someone around or sit down somewhere. But as it happened, Macquarie loomed. Not blinking. Hardly breathing.
It was not the most annoyed Marie had been in her time tied to this chair, but it was unquestionably unique in the mechanism of its irritation. It wasn't exactly like she could do anything in need of overseeing.
Good lord, was that her breath she was feeling? Marie almost missed the vacillant bouts of anger Macquarie had been expressing throughout this abduction brouhaha. She hated her either way, but there were some specific manners in which she preferred to hate her over others.
"Macquarie."
A single, heavier breath.
"Lara."
Nothing.
"Hey dicknose! Do you think you could stop being a total creep for two minutes? It's seriously getting on my nerves."
She blinked. It looked altogether too much to Marie as if it were only now she was coming to lucidity.
"Were you asleep just now?"
"What? Um... something like that. Sure."
"You don't sound like yourself right now."
"What's that supposed to mean?" She donned a timorous, and false, smile.
"It feels dishonest when you go this long without belittling me. I don't know what kind of good cop, bad cop bullcrap you and Whitman are pulling, but you got the roles the wrong way around."
"Whitman...? Oh, she can go get stuffed. Who cares about her?"
"So you've come at this interrogation with no team coordination or rapport?"
Lara scratched her neck. "I think you're making this sound a lot worse than it is."
"This seriously doesn't sound like you at all. Not even a cheap comeback? Not so much as a capricious change of subject?"
"Would you like that?"
"You're not feeling okay."
The lack of question stunned a silence into Lara. "You... wouldn't necessarily know for sure if I was."
"Show me your soul gem."
"Creep!"
"Lara Macquarie, show me your soul gem!"
"Take me to dinner first."
"Look at me."
She rolled her eyes, but did so anyway. As Marie had hoped, she forgot her gem was embedded in her spiked tiara.
It was the perfect black of space.
Too late did Lara realise what she had been coaxed into displaying, and quickly, but not nearly quickly enough, she turned away.
"You should be dead."
"Yeah, well I'm not exactly your biggest fan either, arsehole."
"No, I mean with a gem looking like yours, it stands to all real reason that you'd be dead already. Why aren't you?"
"Are you sure I'm not? I sure feel it."
There was… something the Incubator had told Marie, in another life (As an aside - come to think of it, intuition had rendered the identity of that particular body of his more obvious with time. By pure chance it had since become her ex-girlfriend).
"Depression leads to inaction and apathy, and what's more, a slowed output of emotional energy. All immense problems we never seemed to be able to breed out of your neurology without causing even worse damage elsewhere."
It occurred to her that Lara's characteristic insincerity was not the slightest bit absent - on the contrary, her outbursts were facetious. What she felt right now was nothing. It was what she did which Marie found exigent. She was bound to the throne of Damocles for the time being.
"Macquarie... do you know what the word 'metastable' means?"
"Like in chemistry?"
"Yes! Exactly!"
"I'm having a hard time thinking clearly. Sorry."
"No, no, no! It's fine! It's like... you can keep pure water in liquid form at 0°C without it freezing if you keep it perfectly still and don't agitate it at all. It's not a stable state to be in, but it still needs a bit of activation energy to get its molecules in the right configuration and turn it into ice."
Lara squinted and furrowed her brow. "I think I understand. Is that what you think is happening to me?"
"Macquarie, answer honestly." Marie's voice dropped to a whisper. "Do you have some kind of... mood disorder?" She seethed those last two words out through a cautious grimace.
"I don't know, probably? What does it matter?"
"I think it might be the only thing keeping you from being a witch."
"Wish I was one," she mourned. "Then I wouldn't feel so..."
"Nothing?"
"Nothing at all..."
Marie swallowed. Her mind leapt to a conversation with Thalia. The question of its current propriety burned the back of her mouth.
"What's... your... name?"
Lara turned her nose up. "Excuse me?"
"Your name. I- my friend, Thalia, she says witches like to go by different names before and after their transition."
"Oh... heheh."
"What?"
"Funny way of putting it, no?"
Marie smiled. "I guess it is. Should I call it something else? Something... less human?"
"Chrysalis, I think. And thank you, I... never expected anyone to ask. My name is Gabriela."
"Oh! Hey, Gabriela. Nice to... meet you?"
"No, no, it's still me. I guess. I think? I'm just not the same."
"Can't remember you going this long without being a weird shithead before, then." Marie's smirk transmitted sarcastic intent fluently, but not without bold, vibrant overtones of genuine care.
"I don't wanna be a weird shithead anymore, I guess. I want to be a giant effulgent light surrounded by eye-covered arms that try to blot it out but can't do it without blinding themselves."
"You've really thought this through."
"Not really, I guess I just kind of know that. That's how I'm supposed to be. But of course, if I tell anyone that..."
Marie nodded. "They'll kill you."
"Maybe that should make me feel something, that dread, but it doesn't. Not a thing."
"Should I be... sorry for you?"
Gabriela grinned. It was unmistakably Lara's own, but applied so obviously like a mask. "I've spent four years trying to make sure you never do that, you know."
"Why, does it sound like something I'd-"
"I love you."
"Ex- excuse me?"
"All this time, I've had an annoying little midteen girlcrush on you."
Marie scowled. Not at Gabriela, nor at anything, really. She scowled, perhaps, at the face of God. She knew for a fact that this wasn't true. There was no apologising or redeeming the way she herself had treated Lara in high school. What Gabriela saw in her filtered years of a mutual, deep, and ferric hatred, burning red and infertile as the heart of the Sahara. What dampered her emotional memory? Her probable mood disorder? Psychosomagic ennui? A labyrinth in her mind? Marie only wished now that she could take notes.
"It's the worst, because you actually kind of suck so much. I mean, no offence! Except, of course, for the offensive bit."
"Which is the whole thing."
"Which is, in fact, the whole thing."
"This doesn't explain why you're so awful to me, though."
"Got your attention, didn't it? Hey, don't give me that look. I wasn't exactly planning on confessing this way."
"And-"
"But now that I have, what do you say?"
"I-"
"Look, I won't beat around the bush, Cra- Marie. I need you. Fuck, I can't stop thinking about you, and I don't know, you're just this kind of... I want to imagine that I can have someone like you to lean on, that maybe the two of us-"
"Wa-"
"No, I'm getting ahead of myself. You and me. What do you say?"
This
would prove itself a considerably easier question if Marie weren't tied to a chair and Gabriela, in being Gabriela, wasn't standing on the brink of a murderous mental breakdown.
"Look."
She hit off with as strong a start as humanly possible.
"Look."
In case she missed it the first time.
"Gabriela. You're one of the most fascinating people in my life, and getting to see this side of you... I mean I'm flattered. You know, that you can be so open with me, even though I've been nothing but terrible to you."
One hand tied behind the chair high-fived the other.
"But you've gotta understand this is not something I'm in a good headspace to give an answer in clear judgement for. I mean, me and my last girlfriend broke up... what, last night? The night before? I lose track. Can I have time to think on this?"
"Um, erm, sure..."
"Really? You don't seem too sure about it."
"No, I just-"
"Look. Seriously, if I've upset you, let's talk about that."
"Is that really a good idea? You know, while I'm...?"
"It's blowing off steam. Shoot, dude."
Gabriela took a deep breath. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. This really isn't fair on you, I just, just, just- I need you in my life, Marie."
"Let's face the facts, yeah? The two of us? We're both pretty smart. I'm sure we can figure something out. I don't know, maybe you need a grief seed or two to clear your head, and we can smash this out like straight away."
"I don't want a grief seed."
"C'mon, it's like a shower. Sure, you say that before you get in, but once you're in there?"
"I don't know..."
"Please, Gabriela. Do it for me?"
Marie wasn't sure which frightened her more: how strikingly capable she was at emotional manipulation, or how much enjoyment she found in it.
Gabriela turned to leave, but took a second time at Marie. Timidly - swallowing - now dizzy with courage, she grabbed Marie's chin and pressed her own lips against hers, and Marie, for her part, Marie felt rise in her no need to protest or to recoil, she felt comfort in the warmth flaring within h/
/
/
/
/
/
I know what I said last time. I just haven't had the chance to find anywhere else. I wish I...
No. Let me try that again.
This is a medical emergency. You're coming with me. I am not giving you a choice.