The internet cafe, I figured, was a dying breed. Every person in the city had a phone, even the homeless had five-year-old bricks with cracked screens. And with the internet getting cheaper and the advent of 5G, there wasn’t a place in London you could escape a stable connection, so long as you knew how to look. That was the issue, most people didn’t know how to look. And so, thanks to the miracle of human stupidity and a strip of masking tape I’d stuck onto the webcam, I searched for ‘Grabowski’ without the fear of being tracked. Most of the results were diluted by a German footballer from the 1970s, but on archived news articles and crackpot theory forums, I managed to learn three things. Firstly, Grabowski was the last name for a woman named Brigette, a Polish woman. Secondly, Brigette Grabowski had been in the RAF during the Iraq war, but there were no confirmations of any of her missions. A thread from 2013 cited this as proof of secret government pesticide dropping in the middle east to make US soldiers more violent by ‘activating their hormone receptors’, whatever that meant. Third was a picture of the woman. Or, a group candid of which she made up a barely intelligible number of pixels. It was a useless picture, not enough to upscale, you would never have known what she looked like unless it was a face you’d seen before, a face you’d seen enough times that the mass of pixels set off something in the pattern recognition part of your brain.
“We close, miss Chloe. In ten minutes” Mr Singh interrupted my thoughts, looking hopefully at me from across a row of monitors. The sign in the window that said they were open till 2 am didn’t get tested often, and he looked exhausted.
“Sorry, I just need to print something off.” I would have taken a photo of it with my phone, but It was probably still being pored over by Anvil, picking my life apart, thread by thread. I hadn’t left the hideout since then, it wasn’t safe. I’d taken back routes all the way here, and even this was a risk. The rest of us didn’t go out much either, we didn’t know what they knew, but nobody had gotten jumped yet. It was a big city, even Anvil wasn’t foolproof.
I printed out the picture and looked at it, the same pixels, just bigger. If I squinted and blurred my eyes, my brain filled in the blanks. That wouldn’t have been enough. The name I’d seen Matthias write out wouldn’t be enough either, he was a liar, I couldn’t rely on anything he’d told me. But together, it was too much of a coincidence.
“Miss Chloe?”
“Yes, sorry, on my way out now.”
“Good good. My daughter hates when I don’t read to her.”
The two of us emerged into the frigid autumn air and turned to our destinations, Mr Singh with the wind, me against it. I folded the picture of Sid in quarters and put it in my pocket, before pulling up my hood and jumping the fence into another abandoned alleyway, back to the hideout, and to Brigette Grabowski.
The next morning I choked down a bitter, black coffee out of a borrowed thermos to keep myself awake. It was from the pot of instant brew we kept in the hideout, and the barista inside of me hurt to make it. But it had been almost thirty hours since I last slept, and this was effective.
“Thanks for meeting me,” I said to Lennie, who was throwing some birdseed out to the pigeons.
“Happy to. Maybe stay out of my dreams next time?”
“Sorry. I can’t really use a phone, or anything they can track these days.”
Lennie grimaced. “I got that list you wanted.” He handed me a receipt for a new stereo system, on the back was a list of names. People with magical abilities that operated in London. Katrine’s estimations were that roughly one in a thousand people had the potential for magical abilities. Split that further in two for anyone assigned female at birth, and halve it again for good measure, I’d gone nearly twenty years without knowing anything about my abilities, someone else could easily go the rest of their lives the same way. That left a very rough figure; one in four thousand. Two thousand one hundred women, and about a hundred and fifty men and nonbinary people. Six of them were listed here.
LAURA CAULFIELD
OLIVIA LARSON
LIZ KNIGHT
COLE TOMLINS (man)
MARYAM KARIMI
LORRAINE STEVENS
On one hand, that was pitifully small. We wouldn’t fill out a decent sized concert. On the other hand, each one of us was a walking weapon, two thousand of us would be like having a nuke buried under the city.
“Thanks,” I told Lennie, “and…”
“Don’t tell Sid?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t worry. No offence to you, but I don’t like talking to her more than I have to.”
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Lennie got up and started to walk away. The names all had phone numbers and addresses attached to them. It was a massive security breach. I memorised the addresses and shredded it, careful to keep the scraps with me as I flushed more magic into the pin on my jacket, keeping me disguised as a woman with tanned skin and frizzy red hair.
Liz Knight was only a mile away, so I started with her. She lived in a house, not a big one, but one that relaxed into the space around it. I rang the doorbell and waited a few moments, then rang it again. Eventually, a small balding man with wireframe glasses opened it. “Hello?” he asked, his cheeks pulled into a look of nervousness
“Hi. I’m here for Liz?” I tried to sound upbeat and normal, as if I’d been invited, rather than stalked her to her home. The man nodded, gravely, then led me in
“Elizabeth! There’s a woman- oh shoes off please, the rug stains quite easily- there’s a woman here to see you!”
“Oh it must be Barbara about the tutor-” The woman stopped at the corner of the stairs and smiled. “Hi, I’m Elizabeth. Are you here from the school?”
“Uh, no, sorry. There’s a few questions I'd like to ask you. In private.” Her face twitched for just a second as a hundred questions and calculations flashed through her mind. When I looked around the landing, I saw the answers to each one of them. Her nearest weapon was the lamp that was only attached to the wall by two screws, she could get between me and the man, probably her husband, in under a second if she leapt from the stairs. I wasn’t visibly armed, but I could have a concealed weapon, probably a knife at this distance, ready in the same amount of time she could get to me. I ignored those thoughts, and spread my arms slightly as a show of faith. In the time it took to blink she had composed herself, the picture of a modern wife and mother.
“Of course. Can I get you some tea?”
Tea was served in the living room from a clay pot that Elizabeth explained, in a way that was obviously rehearsed, was from china, and she left it to steep for ten minutes while we sat on a sofa before pouring. It was gingery, with a slight tartness from some kind of berry and had the colour of chlorophyll. The room had been designed for image, but concessions had been made for comfort. A third armchair had been fitted into the set, which didn’t match the colours, and some of the pictures were in different frames. Elizabeth was in her forties, and looked normal. Blissfully, deliberately normal.
“You have a lovely home” felt like the correct opener for this situation. I didn’t know what to say, and it felt like a soundbite from someone else out of my mouth.
“Thank you. We moved in when the kids started to grow up. Can’t really have two toddlers running around a flat, can you?” the kids. In every picture I tried not to look at, leaving stray hazards around the floor. I suddenly felt as if I was killing this woman, like Jodie and I had with Francis. Or, if not, as if I was desecrating her, which was just as wrong. She was one of them now, a normal person, with a family and a future. I was a murderer wearing the face of a stranger. It hurt me to say it, to drag my world up and out of its pit and into her picture-perfect life, but I had to. The air grew colder in anticipation. I pulled a note card out of my sleeve and showed it to her
ARE THERE ANY LISTENING DEVICES IN THE ROOM?
She looked at it, confused, and then shook her head. I nodded, then asked the question. “What can you tell me about Brigette Grabowski”
The woman I had seen for a fraction of a second on the stairs returned in force. Brigette Grabowski, apparently, was not a name associated with good things. Elizabeth put her tea down on the table and got up
“Forget that name. Please.” She sounded distressed, like saying her name was bringing her into the house. She went over to the door and opened it
“I can’t-”
“Forget her name and anything else you think you know about her. Please” she rambled, beckoning me out
“I work with her.” That did something. Stunned her.
“Brig’s Alive?” Terror. I nodded.
“She goes by a different name. I’m trying to find out who she is.”
“Sit.” She closed the door and gulped down the rest of her tea, before pouring herself more.
“She found me in 2003. She’d just left the RAF after a stint in the middle east, Iraq or Afghanistan or something. She was… everything, but still nothing. She taught me how to-” she paused there, not wanting to talk about her powers. “She kept me safe for a while. But then she started to learn more about the world. MI6, all of it. She picked it up and never dropped it, and suddenly I was there with her. I did so many things for her. Terrible things. And she made me think they were the right things. There is nothing in that woman that is human. I left her in 2007. I heard she died a few years later, killed by one of her own gang.” The shock had worn off, and the terror had mellowed into fear. “No such luck. Now please. Get out of London. Change your name, get as far from that woman as you can,” That wasn’t an option. Not yet, at least. I drank my tea and left the house, and Elizabeth Knight, trying desperately to build back the veneer of normalcy I had torn from her.
I got back to the hideout by nightfall. Neither Jodie nor I had any communications with the other while we were out, so we just hoped for each other’s safety. She was careful not to move my left arm too much when she hugged me, the Component restored my physical body to the way I perceived myself, but my shoulder pains had been with me long enough that my self perception grew to include it. Katrine figured that either it would go away naturally, or it wouldn’t, and I’d just have a bad shoulder for the rest of my life. “How was it?”
‘It’. The funeral I’d told Jodie I was going to. Dotty’s funeral. I felt sick lying about it, but I couldn’t stand to see her. Not when I’d been the one to kill her. I thought about Dotty as little as I could, because everything always brought me back to that. I had killed my closest friend. The first time I’d realised that, a few hours after waking up, I had actually thrown up. But now it came to me, unbidden, so often that I accepted it. Like my shoulder, it was part of me. I was a woman who had murdered people, and one of those people was the kindest woman in London. I hated myself.
“It was good. Her family was there.” I would visit her grave someday.
“You okay?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
She didn’t say anything else, and didn’t let go of me till morning.