Niko reached out and unfastened the wires from Suzi’s wrist-cuff. “That’s all I can do in advance, but I think it will work.” Suzi rubbed her wrist, but it was just a reflex: she hadn’t felt anything.
“You think it will?” Kayla echoed, while Niko freed her as well.
Niko shrugged. “Until we actually try, I can’t be sure. I can’t do a proper test or a practice run, because I doubt that this will work more than once. But on the whole, I think the odds are very good that it will be successful now, and that’s the only part that’s currently important. We can worry about the next bit once we know that there’s no security leak leaving us vulnerable.”
“Are you that anxious about this?” Kayla asked softly.
“Yes,” Niko said. His tone was calm—he could have been talking about what JC had made them to eat. “I’m very aware of just what a strong wizard could potentially do, and while I try to avoid business dealings with complete psychopaths, even some of the ones I sell items to are not good people to cross. Potentially that could include virtually all, under the correct conditions. I have no idea what the motivations behind our spies are, but creating those things would not have been cheap or easy, and I still don’t know as much as I would like about their construction or that very peculiar fae scent Des picked up. I’m not panicking, but I do have the experience to know what the stakes realistically might be, and I am taking that very seriously.”
That was a sobering thought. They’d been cautious, of course, but when it came right down to it, Suzi was sure they’d all felt like the worst was over and they could relax. If there might be another threat out there... were they going to regret bringing Levi and the others here? Should they have waited, despite the emotional anguish?
“Seven took down two wizards and a medium alone,” Kayla said. “Okay, mostly alone, with a bit of backup from the wisps and from Paz and Orfeo. If anyone tackles us, I bet we could get at least two or three times that to help out. Really must introduce you to the sweetest trio of foxes, and the other house fae. Any wizard who breaks in here is probably not going to stand a chance.”
Niko dipped his head in acknowledgement. “There’s truth in that. Faelings are highly resistant to wizard magic, but that isn’t always the case the other way around, and fifteen or twenty faelings would be difficult to deal with. Your cuff exists for a reason, after all.”
Kayla’s faith in them was as strong as Theo’s in her, apparently.
“Not starting wizard-fae wars is at the top of the list of rules for a reason,” Niko added. “While powerful wizards can do an immense amount of damage, they are vastly outnumbered, they can never be sure that they are adequately protected against all the chaotic variations of fae magic, and not all forms of attack will work on all kinds of fae—if any at all. Most wizards will grumble about a war interrupting their research and personal pursuits. The truth under that is that while wizards might win in a skirmish, they cannot win a war, and they know it.”
“How does the psycho research here fit into that? They thought they could find a way to change that?”
“I don’t know, because I don’t know what they were actually researching.”
Kayla’s gaze flickered to Suzi, and Suzi wished she could read minds. Was Kayla considering giving him the binder?
*Guys? I think we should start thinking about whether to let Niko have the binder. He’s trying hard to keep us safe but that’s a big job and he could probably use all the info available.*
She’d gotten so used to brief pauses while Alison listened and repeated what the others said, and the necessity of giving Alison time to do so, that she hardly even noticed anymore, and her own mind filled in the appropriate voices. Since Alison tried to keep the tone of the original, that wasn’t hard at all.
*I trust him,* JC said. *But I don’t know how much of that is because I want to trust him. I’ve been trying to figure that out.*
*I think I trust him too,* Des said, after a longer pause than usual. *Suzi has a point, about how much effort he’s putting into helping, and that includes protection. He might have a better foundation for that if he knows what was going on here.*
*And he could probably make sense of the parts that we can’t,* Erica said.
*He was already doing all he could to try to help us,* Theo said. *Not his fault the psychopath trio sniped us right out from under him. We’re sorta stuck depending on him, Riley, Nora, and Arctos to a scary degree, but out of those, Niko’s the one we have a history with. And it’s hard to blame him for not telling us all about wizards before. Kind of a difficult topic to bring up, and not one you’d want to get into without a good reason.*
*All in favour of giving Niko access to that binder?* Alison asked.
*I am,* Suzi said.
*Zach has a condition: Kayla continues to hold onto it for the time being. Otherwise, that’s unanimous, gang. Suze, if you think it’s a good time to mention it, you can. Theo says Kayla will accept that as our choice, because she’s already made it clear she doesn’t get any warning vibes from him.*
Suzi had missed an exchange or two, distracted: Niko was already on his feet.
“About those details of what they’ve been researching,” Suzi said hesitantly.
“Yes? I assume Jace knows exactly where they are and you’ve been trying collectively to decide what to do about them.”
“We... what?” Suzi felt her eyes widen. Beside her, she heard Kayla laugh.
Niko shrugged. “I’d be unsure who to trust at this point, too. I won’t ask for it. I doubt there’s anything in it with quick easy answers regarding who sent the spies or why, although there might be hints from an in-depth study of it. I wouldn’t have time for that until after Riley and all get back anyway.”
“Um... yes? Jace found it days ago, and read part of it to us, but there’s a lot in that binder, and there are parts of it we can’t understand. We’re... not sure who else we’re ready to let see it. But when you want it, tell us. It’s safe where it is for now. Jace thinks Isabel’s journals will have a lot, but as near as she can tell, she’s been writing in them literally every day for years, so getting through them could take ages. The research binder’s big, but probably more useful.”
“For most purposes, yes. Both are potentially useful as evidence for a tribunal as to the full extent of their crimes, but I’m not sure that’s going to matter—fae are going to get as far as ‘kidnapping faelings for experiments’ and demand blood anyway. I’ll take a look at that binder later, although I doubt that’s going to be pleasant. For right now, let’s get our spies taken care of, shall we?”
Kayla, still silent, got to her feet and offered Suzi a hand.
Suzi nodded, slipping her hand into Kayla’s. “We just wanted you to know.”
“Thank you for having that much faith in me.”
They went back to the others, Niko still with the brass contraption in his hand.
“Got that announcement sorted out?” Kayla called to Theo. Emma, beside her, was studying the pad in her hand, lips moving without sound.
“All good,” Theo said. “And Emma picked up balancing speed with clear enunciation in no time flat. I hope thirty seconds is accurate, though, ‘cause after half a dozen rounds of editing, I’ve timed this multiple times at just about twenty-nine.”
“The timing isn’t what’s in doubt,” Niko said. “It might even last slightly longer. The only question is whether this hack will in fact work at all, since I’m using equipment for off-label purposes to force magical items to do something they were definitely never intended to do.”
“Is this going to be dangerous?” JC asked. She was sitting on the edge of the fountain, her back to the water and perfectly straight, her knees together.
“I can’t swear there is zero risk. It’s minimal, however, and considerably lower than the risk of letting those spies finish their mission and send detailed information to an unknown wizard.”
“Well, when you put it that way...”
“Emma?” Theo said. “You’re good with this?”
Emma nodded. “Yes. And while we wait, those things are still splitting and spreading.”
“Kayla?” Niko said. “Come over here beside Emma, please?” He connected wires to one of Emma’s wrist-cuffs, then did the same on Kayla’s again, and looked at his brass device. “Hold your wrist up, please, Emma, you’ll be talking into it. This is going to make all matching cuffs resonate with the vibrations of your voice, which means everyone will hear you. I wish I could tell you exactly how far to hold it from your mouth.”
“Treat it like a microphone,” Theo said, and wrapped a hand around Emma’s dark one, steadying her wrist a few inches out. “I’ll try to monitor the sound volume and clarity. Just in case it picks up feedback, everybody else move back a few feet.”
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Theo was the expert, and that made sense. The rest of them spread out, giving them some space—Suzi hooked a hand into Alison’s harness, the simplest option. They stayed close enough to follow what was going on, though.
After flipping a couple of switches, Niko looked at Emma and said, “On zero, I’ll activate it. We almost certainly don’t have a second shot at this.”
Another nod from the shadowy house-fae, who had the notepad in her other hand still. “Go ahead.”
“Three... two... one...”
Emma took a deep breath, and Suzi saw Theo give her hand a quick squeeze, the light shimmering on the pearly-blue webbing.
“Zero.” Niko flipped one last switch.
“This is Emma, of the house fae.”
Even ready for it, the sudden sound echoing from wrists and ankles made Suzi start, and she saw similar reactions from Alison and Erica. JC, of course, didn’t twitch at all. Theo, free hand near her ear, adjusted the position of Emma’s wrist, and the house fae went along with it, all her attention on the words she was reading out.
“The island has been invaded by small creatures that look alive but they’re wizard-created.” That was better, clearer and just a little louder. Theo held her hand steady there. “They are a threat to all of us. Crystals inside are like batteries. Remove or crush them. They have no known weapons but they change colour to hide. We don’t know what else they can do or how many but we fear there are a lot. Bring the bodies to the central fountain or the house fae collective for a reward for each one you can kill. You will not be in danger doing that. You have my word as part of the collective.”
Niko’s brass gadget let out a loud alarming buzz, and the cuffs all tingled oddly.
As soon as the buzz started, Niko hastily yanked the wires off both Emma’s cuff and Kayla’s, and only then started tapping buttons on the little box. Most of them elicited alarming grinding sounds.
Suzi and the others drifted back over.
“That sounded good,” Alison said. “All we can do is hope that enough take it seriously.”
“I think they will,” Emma said.
Niko sighed in resignation, wrapped the wires around the brass box, and stuffed it into his backpack.
“Presumably no one will show up here immediately,” JC said. “Emma? Suze? Come help me find some rewards? Ali parked the wagon by the front door so we can just throw things in it and then beg her to take it out to Jo. With company, of course.”
Emma nodded briskly, and slid off the fountain wall. “I spent enough time in there, before I heard about the other house fae and took a chance on going there instead. I don’t think I would have been safe in the house much longer. I honestly had no idea why Isabel and her employees disliked being around me so much—I thought it was just more of their attitude about faelings. In retrospect, I imagine they were actually relieved when I moved. They could have just told me why they were always trying not to look at me.”
Suzi started to agree, but paused when she saw the wisp consort coming in their direction. More experienced, he had less trouble crossing the distance, although it still took some effort, his wings fluttering to help. “Hold on.”
Alison flattened a hand against Suzi’s back and gave her a forceful push in the direction of the consort. She was getting good at judging her strength and Suzi’s momentum: Suzi was able, using her half-open wings, to bring herself to a stop next to the consort. Even opening her wings that far made her wince, though, and she resolved to ask her friends more often for help until they healed. It was hard on her pride, but it was better than hurting.
“We’re helping,” he said, without preamble. “If those things get into swampland, they’ll be unreachable to almost everyone. We can catch them there. Or in water that has no water fae.”
“We can?” Suzi said. “And getting there will take forever.”
The consort shook his head. “It takes time to learn, but it’s possible to increase your mass enough to walk normally. It’s also possible to fly properly. It’s just that both are exhausting, and new wisps generally don’t have the energy reserves to maintain it for more than a few seconds. If that. I don’t think anyone has been able to do it less than two or three weeks after getting their wings. You’re exceptional, but it’s been less than two weeks and you’re hurt. Even with experience, you wouldn’t be able to fly without your wings. We’re down one more, Callie’s a good healer but that damage was extensive, but three of us should be enough.”
“I... you’re probably right, which is maddeningly frustrating, but... how?” If it generally took at least a couple of weeks, did that make it one of those further changes Niko had mentioned? Abilities that were still developing?
He grinned at her. “We’re still stronger than humans, despite the disadvantages, and those aren’t always disadvantages. With any luck, everyone else will be too busy hunting to bother us, but we are taking a chance. Worth it, though.”
She’d have been nervous going out there only with the other wisps, even knowing that she could call her friends for help with a thought, but they were choosing to go out there and risk encounters with aggressive faelings without that emergency option. It made her feel like a coward.
But maybe there was a way to help.
“Hold on.” Suzi spun in place, and called, “Jace! C’mere, please?”
JC shrugged and detoured over to join them. Emma paused to wait. “Yes?”
“Apparently wisps can do things I didn’t know we can do, I’ll explain later, but it takes a lot of energy. If the queen and consort and one other are going out hunting spy-things, they’re going to get hungry a lot. I can’t, because of my wings and because I don’t know what I’m doing.”
JC nodded calmly. “Give me five minutes and I’ll throw together an emergency high-sugar snack just in case for three.” She turned away, headed for the house with long fast strides. “Emma? One other job first.”
The consort, Suzi noticed, was eyeing her speculatively; then he sighed and smiled. “Long enough for a quick lesson that doesn’t need your wings,” he said. “Probably you’ll be able to get this, and there’s enough food available that it won’t matter much if you end up being hungry after trying. Stand still. Let yourself sink until you’re touching the ground.”
Suzi obeyed. Gravity had at least a weak hold on her, and if she stood straight and didn’t move, she dropped a bit more quickly. After a moment, she felt the grass tickle the bottoms of her bare feet.
“Okay. Now what?”
“Think heavy. Don’t overdo it by thinking of stone or metal or anything like that. Just think about how it feels to have mass. Remember walking, before you came here. All of it. How your muscles move, the feedback you get from the resistance of the ground, keeping your balance, everything. Make it as real as you can.”
Suzi closed her eyes. She spent so much time walking, taking the dogs out. Bipedal walking really was kind of strange—she’d once heard Alison describe it as a series of falls forward, prevented by a constant cycle of throwing the other leg forward to catch one’s weight briefly, and the runner had speculated about how it could nonetheless be so energy-efficient and effective across the right kind of terrain. It just didn’t work at all without gravity pulling downwards. That was what she wanted, needed, the weight to draw her down after each step, so that the first one wasn’t simply a jump that left her with no leverage.
She could feel the ground under the grass, and there was a small knot of something, soil or vegetation, digging into the bottom of one foot.
Which it could only be doing if she were pressing down hard enough on it. Which meant... it worked!
The sudden elation shattered her visualization, and she lost the sensation of the ground under her.
“It’s all right,” the consort said. “You’ve got the idea. It gets easier to hold onto it. It just takes practice. But it will make you hungry. You should make sure you’re with us or your friends while you’re learning, just in case.”
“Right. And that is going to be such a relief sometimes, even if it does end up tiring me out. You said we can fly properly too?”
“You have wings and minimal mass. Of course you can fly. You’ve seen us do it, in little bursts, but I’m guessing you interpreted it as leverage or something. It’s harder to explain, because there are no memories to use. It’s... do you remember playing on a swing? How shifting your weight back and forth will make you move, and kicking your legs out on the way forward and tucking them on the way back makes you move faster? It’s something like that. I’d say that it’s like swimming, but that doesn’t involve wings and the motions in flying are much smaller than in swimming. Your wings are important, but it isn’t a purely mechanical process, because we’re all different and we can all fly if we try. It’s partly intention too. Knowing where you’re going, or at least the direction, and deciding that you’re going there in the air and how fast. The trickiest bit is usually building up speed.”
“Did we even need my friends, when we moved?”
“Yes. That would have been a long way to fly straight, without risky pauses to rest and eat, and there’s no way you could have kept up—probably you couldn’t have gotten in the air at all. And carrying weight while flying will make you hungry much more quickly. It’s a hard thing to explain in words. By the time your wings heal, you should be able to start learning it, but it will take practice.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before? Oh—so I wouldn’t try and possibly hurt myself?”
“Essentially, yes. There are reasons we’re protective of you. Whatever life you had before here and no matter how little damage Isabel did, you’re very new to the island and even newer to being a wisp, and it isn’t a good idea to encourage a child to do something they don’t yet have the physical stamina and emotional maturity for. But you learn fast, and you’re strong, and you’re developing quickly. Your wings are unfortunately going to interfere until they heal, but by the time they do, I think you’ll be fine.”
Suzi spotted JC coming towards them, holding a tray in both hands. “I think your travel food is coming. We can go over to the tree, Jace’ll bring it there.”
“That would help.”
Suzi’s gaze flickered to Erica; the green fae nodded, and came towards them, long swift strides. “Half a sec, we can get a boost in the right direction.”
“Your friends are helpful. And accommodating.”
“They understand differences. I suppose you could get there but why waste the energy? And I can’t.”
Erica offered each a hand, smiling.
“We need to get back to the other wisps,” Suzi said, sliding her small hand trustingly into Erica’s. “They’re going out to help. Well, three are. Jace is bringing something they can eat.”
Erica nodded, and once she had the consort’s hand as well, she drew them both to the tree the wisps had claimed.
JC joined them there, only heartbeats later.
“A bit of this and that,” their house fae said. “The bottles have drink crystals, I measured them so you can just fill the bottle with water and shake it and it’ll be ready to drink. The cookies might not be quite sweet and juicy enough for you but they do have sugar, and the peanut butter ones should have other useful stuff. A bit of fresh fruit. I didn’t want to weigh you down too much, and I figured you’d prefer to make bags that will work for you instead of hauling around shopping bags.”
“Thank you,” the queen said. “You’re always thoughtful.”
“We’re all in this together.”
“Thanks, Jace,” Suzi said, and then, to the other wisps, “Please be careful. I’ll help you get this packed up to carry easily.”