Contrary to the idea for discussion, Maddie was out like a light only a few minutes into the drive. They'd spent the whole night talking, with only an hour or two for sleep. Rachel, on the other hand, seemed as awake as ever, while even Jeremy felt a bit tired.

  "How the hell aren't you exhausted?" he asked finally.

  "Magic," she answered simply.

  "What, you're doing a spell or somethin'?"

  "Not exactly. But I only need about two hours of sleep a night."

  "Shit, maybe you should drive," he muttered, as he felt his eyes drooping slightly again.

  "I don't have a license."

  He rolled his eyes. "You're also supposed to be dead. If we get pulled over, I think we got bigger problems than you bein' unlicensed."

  "I've never driven a car before."

  She serious right now…? "It was a joke, Rachel."

  "Right." She stared out the window, watching Vancouver disappear behind them. "Sorry. I haven't had much to laugh at lately."

  "Uh huh." Jeremy shrugged. "You're never gonna survive Maddie's people if you ain't got a sense of humor. Just warnin' ya. You'll end up tearin' your hair out."

  "Good to know."

  Most of the drive passed in silence. They crossed the border without issue, since Jeremy was still able to wave his badge to get them through without many questions. He was still supposed to be on vacation, and if his bosses had questions about why he'd gone to Vancouver of all places, he had one hell of an answer in his passenger seat.

  Halfway to Seattle, Maddie finally spluttered awake. "...we there yet?" she mumbled, awkwardly turning over with a huge imprint of a seatbelt on her face.

  "Not even close," said Jeremy. "Still an hour at least."

  "Coulda put on some music or something," she muttered. "Awkward as shit in here."

  "Sorry I'm not the best conversation, Maddie."

  "Do I gotta do everything in this family?"

  "Yes."

  She chuckled. "Okay, fine. Hey, Rachel?"

  "Yes?"

  "Talk to my brother, so I can get some real sleep. Too damn quiet." She turned back around, pressing her face into the soft cushions in Lani's car. They both listened, and sure enough, she was gently snoring in only a couple minutes.

  "Can she fall asleep anywhere?" Rachel asked quietly.

  "Pretty much."

  "I'm jealous."

  "So you both got superpowers. Just gotta combine 'em."

  She laughed quietly. "Maybe someday."

  "...What's your endgame, Rachel?"

  She looked over at him, surprised.

  Jeremy shrugged. "Look, my job's always been to chase the scarier, smarter type of criminal, so maybe I'm just wired to think this way. But I feel like you've got somethin' you're workin' towards, somethin' drivin' you, and I can't figure it out. What are you tryin' to do?"

  "Save the world, I guess."

  "Oh, it needs savin'?"

  "It might." She sighed. "It was one thing Omega and I agreed on. Something my best friend once said really stuck with me, actually. She said magic was like we were playing with nuclear weapons, without any idea what the potential fallout might be."

  "Who's this best friend?"

  "Nobody from your lists."

  Goddammit. "Thought we were done lyin' to each other."

  "This isn't a lie, not exactly. But…" Rachel hesitated. Her brown eyes clouded over, dark and regretful. "Well, I treated her horribly. For once, I'm going to let her have the benefit of the doubt and let her do… whatever it is she's doing now. So her name stays out of it."

  I'll figure it out if I need to. "...All right then."

  Rachel smiled. "Thank you. To answer your question though, that's what I'm trying to achieve. I always knew magic was going to spread out. By the time Omega tried to do anything, it was already too late. Even if he had managed to kill every single person in Rallsburg, there were already some awakened beyond the borders. I know a few of them, and we'd already made it pretty clear we couldn't find everyone. Nor could he."

  "And those scraps of the book, right?"

  "Yes, exactly. The Scraps are spreading, too. I'm really not sure why or how. It's like they're moving on their own. I mean, since the paper seems to be effectively indestructible except by magic, there's no reason they couldn't just keep drifting around, but they don't seem to be following the wind, or any pattern I can discern. They're just spreading outward at random."

  Jeremy sighed. "That's gonna be a fuckin' headache."

  "There's only a certain number of them, so it'll be slow at least. But it won't stop. That's why we need to get a system in place. There's no way we can control the spread. Only one person in the world could hope to do that." She took a breath. "If history's anything to go by, society doesn't take well to rapid systemic change. Humanity will survive—it always survives—but I'm afraid of how much damage might be done in the meantime."

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  "Nuclear weapons."

  "Right. If people with magic can combine their power to create something with the widespread lingering destructive power of nuclear radiation, they could permanently affect the whole world in cataclysmic ways. Nuclear weaponry is held in check by the prohibitive cost of such a weapon in the first place. It takes sophisticated equipment, a strong understanding of physics, and expensive materials to construct such a weapon. The real danger from nuclear weapons these days is from nations trading or even losing those weapons to less stable elements in the world.

  "On the other hand, the development of nuclear science has lead to so many technologies and ideas that make our world better. Nuclear power. Medical breakthroughs, especially in diagnostics and cancer treatments. Magic could do the same, and that's what Omega never recognized. He was too afraid of the dangers — and on that, he's not wrong."

  Rachel glanced out the window at the suburbs passing by, the endless in-fill of the cityscape. "If some random person snaps, on a bad day, with a bit too much passion and anger, and they could somehow muster the sort of power that we saw on the fifteenth? They could wipe out whole towns. Whole cities, maybe."

  "Thought you said that took special awakened people and a whole lot of effort."

  "Yes, but everyone seems to be getting stronger over time. We haven't actually seen an end-limit yet. So will the awakened keep getting stronger over time?" Rachel shook her head. "We need to be preemptive."

  Jeremy paused while he merged around a particularly slow car on the highway. There was a lot more traffic than he expected for the time of day. It was already dark, and the main rush of the day should have passed already. "Gonna be a fine line between preemptive plannin' and guilty until proven innocent."

  "Yes." Rachel nodded. "I worry about that line every day."

  "Good."

  "What about you?" she asked, turning to him. "I know why Maddie's here, but why you?"

  He shrugged. "I was lookin' for my partner and ended up in this mess. Complete accident."

  "You could have left at any time. You still could."

  "And miss out on all this excitin' drivin'?"

  She laughed again. "It's not because you like magic, I'm guessing."

  "Definitely not."

  "But you're still here, backing us up."

  He shrugged again. "It's my job." And Jackie ain't here to do it.

  "I thought you were on vacation."

  "I'm bad at takin' vacations. Ask any of my bosses."

  Rachel nodded. "Well, I'm grateful you're here. To be honest, I really needed someone like you."

  "Huh?"

  "Someone to show up on my doorstep and remind me that I can still do some good in the world."

  Jeremy shrugged. "I was just doin' what I was told."

  "By the girl you saw, right?"

  "That's the one." He glanced at Rachel, who was still staring out the passenger window. "You gonna tell me who she is yet?"

  "I can't."

  "Why's that?"

  "Because she hates me already, and I don't think making her angrier is a good idea."

  "She hates you?"

  She sighed. "Yes."

  I already know what she's gonna say, but worth a shot. "Why's that?"

  "I can't tell you that either."

  Goddammit. "Okay, give me one straight answer at least. What's this one stop we gotta make in town?"

  "...Kendra Laushire."

  Jeremy chuckled. "Of course the rich girl survived. Probably paid her way out."

  For the first time since they'd met, he saw a bit of anger return to her face. It was actually unsettling, even for Jeremy. He knew how little she was actually capable of doing, and yet… she was not someone he wanted to piss off.

  "...Sorry. So she's a friend?"

  "Yes."

  They rode in silence for a few minutes.

  "...I wasn't sayin' she was a bad person," he added uncomfortably.

  "I know."

  "She could be totally fine. I was just makin' a joke about rich people."

  "It's fine."

  For the next half-hour, they rode in stony silence, with only the hum of the car and the light snores of Maddie from the back seat.

  Well… fucked that one up.

----------------------------------------

  "Pull off here," said Rachel.

  "That dump?" Jeremy asked dubiously.

  They were a block away from the most forlorn abandoned convenience store Jeremy had ever seen. He was shocked it hadn't been condemned and taken down — but this part of the city was notoriously filled with stubborn old landowners and a real lack of motivation to develop. The vicious cycle of no one wanting to invest because it had no existing value, which lead right back to no value again.

  He couldn't imagine someone like a Laushire living here. Buying the property and developing it maybe, but not eating, sleeping, and pissing here.

  Not only was the property itself dilapidated, but the entire street wasn't much better. Half-broken chain-link fences, the remains of a homeless camp, and boarded up buildings lined both sides of the street. In the distance, he could see the beginnings of proper city streets, but it was at least two blocks away. This whole section was left for dead, and their presence felt unwelcome. Even as he watched, a kid in an oversized green army jacket with a wicked scar on her face emerged from the store and fled away from their car, straight into the gnarled woods that jutted up against the building.

  Christ, even the street don't want this street. Seems like prime territory to me.

  "Hmm," Rachel murmured, staring at her phone in the back seat.

  "What?"

  "She's not answering."

  Jeremy shrugged. "So let's just go in anyway."

  "There's nowhere to 'go in' to. She doesn't live there, that's just where to get into her real home."

  "...Meaning what exactly?"

  Rachel paused. "Call it a sort of door, that opens to somewhere completely different."

  "What, like another dimension?" I'm not that ignorant. I'm twice your age, but I can keep up. "Just cut to the chase, girl."

  She nodded. "Kendra can create pocket dimensions where distances do not correlate with their real world counterpart. She uses a miniature version of this to create doors that effectively teleport you as you walk through. That building is just a convenient memorable anchor point."

  "...All right. So her house ain't here, is what I'm gettin'."

  "Yes." She frowned, still staring at her phone. "And she's not answering me."

  "You sure she's even got signal wherever she is?"

  "Or maybe she's just busy," added Maddie.

  Jeremy jumped. "Jesus, you're awake?

  "Awake and starvin'. Are we there yet?"

  "Yes 'n no…" Jeremy stared at the building. "So should we just go up and knock?"

  "No point…" Rachel said, trailing off. "I haven't spoken to her in months. Maybe she moved."

  "We don't have all day," said Maddie, stifling a yawn as she sat up. "I had to buy your meeting with Courtney tonight, and you're still gonna be sharing the space with a few other notables."

  "What's the plan, anyway? For the big meetin', I mean." Jeremy asked, glancing over at Rachel. She looked worried, which didn't sit well with him. If the big bad leader's thinking somethin's wrong, should I be lookin' out for more of those fucking golems?

  I miss normal bad guys with normal guns.

  "It's a first step," said Rachel, still tapping away at her phone.

  "I thought you and my sister was the first step."

  "Okay, so it's more like step fifty-seven," she sighed. "With Maddie's help, I want to approach the governor and try to arrange for a reasonable level of protection for my people. Get attacks recognized as a hate crime, for a start."

  "What do you need Laushire for, then?"

  "Last time I saw her, she was already in tight with the devil," added Maddie, leaning forward between the two seats and plucking a couple of peanuts out of the open bag on the center console. "Under a fake name, but she was rubbin' shoulders and tradin' favors with the whole crowd."

  "I…" Rachel hesitated, glancing away. "I don't need her. You're right." Petrichor wafted through the car as the first few drops of rain started pattering on the roof. "Let's not stay here any longer."

  "I hear that," Jeremy muttered, immediately turning the car back on. They pulled out of the forlorn city block and back into the living part of Seattle. "Anyone else from your old life we should check in with?"

  "...No."

  Jeremy looked over, but Rachel was still turned away. watching the street go by.

  Whatever. It's her call. "You got it."