Jonathan's memory of that session was a little hazy, but the image of Julie's shocked reaction to his reveal had stuck forever in his brain. He hadn't exactly been trying for drama, but that sort of genuine reaction became his goal forever after in his theater career.

The couple of games turned into hours of games with Nell. In fact, Jonathan fell asleep with the video call still open, his controller resting on top of his palm. It was the middle of winter break, so he didn't need to worry about school the next day, but even so, Jonathan still liked to stick to some kind of typical schedule. It helped him stay focused and alert—and he really needed to stay focused and alert.

"What time is it…" muttered Nell as she struggled to wake up. "...Oh crap." She glanced at the clock, somewhere off-screen. "I was supposed to be at my brother's thing. Are you good?"

"Yeah, go," said Jonathan. "I'm just practicing and staying in today until group."

"Call me after?"

"Of course." Jonathan gave her a little wave. "Bye."

Nell took off without even a goodbye, but Jonathan didn't mind. She was already late for sure. He'd meant to set an alarm after she'd mentioned it, but they'd both gotten too distracted.

Jonathan did exactly as he'd told Nell—as soon as the house was empty, he practiced his act. Jonathan put on his full outfit and used the family room in the back, as the largest space. He imagined a crowd past the couch, playing to the nonexistent back row, casting every spell he could in that tiny space.

It wasn't as easy as it used to be. Sure, Jonathan was getting better, and he was still inventing new spells, but the really flashy stuff wasn't easy to pull off without the old website. Sadly, sometime in late November, just after Hailey took off for London, the whole secret awakened forum had gone down. Jonathan had managed to get back in touch with a few people, but for the most part, the greater community connection was gone.

Losing that had seriously hurt his act. Jonathan relied on always having something new and exciting to show off. With magic being virtually infinite in possibility, he'd figured that could last him a very long time. He'd made good money, too, selling out one of the larger theaters nearby and promising things they had never seen.

The forum supplied him with that magic. It wasn't as easy as it sounded—Jonathan still had to take their ideas, master them, and integrate them into his show—but the spells gave him a place to start at the very least. The reconstructed object he'd used only the night before was one from a girl named Solveig. He sent her a thanks after seeing the post, but before she could reply, the site was gone.

Now, Jonathan relied on his own wits, Nell's ideas, and whatever magic he heard about coming out of the Olympic Forest. It took a lot longer every day to figure out exactly how the spells worked and how to use them, but he'd always been good at figure out puzzles. To Jonathan, magic was the most complicated puzzle in the world, and he was just putting it together little by little.

Since mastering the reconstruction spell, his next goal was more transformative magic. Jonathan was currently working on shrinking and growing objects. It wasn't as easy as he'd hoped—sure, he could make something larger, but he was really just stretching it. In order to properly grow it, Jonathan had to create actual material, and Creation magic was a good deal harder than most.

Shrinking was a little easier. Jonathan could do it as a pure illusion, obviously, with photon manipulation hiding the true object—but that wouldn't stand up to closer scrutiny. These days, with real magic everywhere and Cinza's light tricks practically common knowledge, Jonathan had to assume a more skeptical, knowledgeable audience.

His solution was to combine the three pieces into one. Jonathan removed material from the object as evenly as possible, hiding the removal with photon manipulation, all while making sure the object fused together correctly as it shrank. There were a ton of moving pieces to the spell, but he was confident in his theory.

Jonathan started with the simplest object he could think of—a plain white piece of paper. After days of attempts, he managed to shrink it intact, without bothering to add on the invisibility yet. Next, Jonathan made his first attempts at regrowth—taking the material he'd removed and basically stitching it back into the paper again at a molecular level. It took another few days, but he finally pulled it off.

A piece of paper, shrunk to a quarter of its size and back again. When Jonathan handed it to his mom that night for a grocery list, she hadn't given it a second glance.

He'd moved on to more complex objects next—something wooden, then a pencil. Graphite proved more difficult to recombine properly, but still, Jonathan managed it. As he went, he slowly integrated the invisibility element. It wasn't anywhere near impressive or smooth enough for the stage yet, but… he really felt like he was onto something.

Practice took him all the way up until group that evening. Jonathan took his mom's car and drove out of Tacoma down to the church in Olympia where they met every other Friday.

He pulled into the back parking lot and parked as far away from the building as he could. As far as a cursory scan went, Jonathan's car looked like it was just one of the typical people who used the church as overflow parking for the stripmall next door—which was packed as usual for a Friday evening, especially in the winter. Wrapped up in a coat and scarf, Jonathan hurried across the windy parking lot, pushing through the chilly December air.

"Jonathan!" said Drew Jacobs, waving to him from the circle as he walked in. It looked like everybody else was already here. Traffic had been worse than expected, and Jonathan lost track of time while practicing.

He waved back, smiling slightly. Drew was about the same age as him, an electrician apprentice who'd been through a very similar experience—finding a Scrap on his own and shortly thereafter getting a visit from Alden and Hailey. Likewise, Katie Nelson—also giving him a wave—had done much the same, though she was a mother of three boys rather than fresh out of high school.

"Welcome. Good to see you," said Rupert Roche.

Rupert had been the one to organize these meetings after the sudden loss of the website. Between his natural ability to network and his authority as Hailey's boyfriend—though many assumed they'd separated given that Hailey was never seen near him anymore—Rupert became the natural leader for many of the scattered awakened across the Tacoma-Olympia region.

Plus that accent really doesn't hurt. I wish I had a natural voice like that. Gotta use some magic to modify mine for the show every night.

Jonathan took a seat next to Drew, scooting his chair in close. "How's it going?"

"I think I've almost figured it out," said Drew quietly.

Though nobody else in the group knew it, Drew had been developing electricity magic on his own. There wasn't exactly a taboo against it, but given the drama surrounding electricity-magic users ever since it was used as evidence against Rika—plus the people killed by it—most seemed a little adverse to try and learn it.

"Awesome." He clapped Drew on the back. "Remind me to show you shrinking later. I'm getting seriously good at it lately."

"We good to start?" asked Trevor Halliday, glancing at Rupert.

Rupert looked around the group. "Do we know if anyone else is coming?"

Elissa Piao spoke up from next to Trevor. "Nobody we know."

Katie and Jonathan both shook their heads as well, while Drew just shrugged. Above them, the wind rattled the high windows of the church, as if prompting them to get on with it.

"Right," said Rupert, glancing at the guy next to him. "Wes, if you'd be so kind?"

Weston Davis nodded. He murmured something under his breath—something Jonathan had always found a little odd about him, that he spoke when he cast spells—and the familiar muffling sensation enveloped them. The whole church room had been muted, so that no sound would escape during their meeting. Likewise, the door locks clicked in every direction.

"Hey, there's exactly eight of us." said Drew aloud. "Funny, huh?"

Jonathan grinned slightly, and a faint smile twitched on Katie's face, but nobody else seemed to like the joke. The three of them had always felt a connection, as the ones who Hailey and Alden had found out of the group. Apparently the rest of the group were also connected to Hailey in some way or another, though Jonathan didn't see how that applied to Elissa, Trevor, or Kyle.

Not that this was a "Hailey Winscombe" group or anything—this was for staying in touch with other awakened, and keeping each other safe in a world that hated and feared them.

"Does anybody have anything they need to get off their chest?" asked Rupert. "Anything goes here, remember."

Nobody spoke for a few moments. Everybody was glancing between each other—they'd gotten a little close over the last couple months, but not exactly on the greatest terms. Finally, Kyle shrugged and broke the silence.

"It's been really fucking quiet for weeks," he said aloud. "Kinda freaks me out."

"You want something to happen?" asked Katie uncomfortably.

"Nah," said Kyle quickly. "Quiet's not bad. I just wish we knew when things were getting back to normal."

"It's magic," said Drew. "Is there such a thing as normal?"

"Hey man, I had a legit business. I'm still coasting, but eventually I gotta figure out a new line of work."

Jonathan shrugged. "You would've needed it sooner or later though. Eventually you'd run out of people to buy second-gen Scraps, or somebody else would've figured out your technique."

"Yeah…" Kyle sighed. "Good while it lasted though. Got a lot of money out of mundies looking for magic."

Out of the corner of his eye, Jonathan noticed both Drew and Katie looking far less than sympathetic toward Kyle. Everyone in the room had awakened from a proper Scrap—and most still had theirs, as far as Jonathan knew—and there was a certain resentment toward the wave of second-gen awakenings created by Kyle's invention. It hadn't been around long enough before the blackout to really know the extent of new awakened Kyle might have birthed, though.

Jonathan didn't really care how somebody might have awakened—so long as they took it seriously and didn't out anybody, he was fine with however people got there. It was the rest of the world that worried him.

"You guys see the news this morning?" asked Trevor. A few nods in reply.

"No," said Jonathan. "I think I slept through it."

"Rika Nishimura got denied bail."

Immediately, every head swiveled to watch Weston's reaction. Though it wasn't public knowledge he was awakened, everyone knew he'd lived in Rallsburg for a very long time while dating Hailey Winscombe, and certainly would have known Rika.

Weston sighed. "Yeah, I heard."

"What for?" asked Jonathan.

"The same reasoning as Hailey received," said Rupert, "with the added weight of Rika's previous illegal entries and exits from the country, as recorded in Cinza's diaries."

"Such bullshit," muttered Elissa. "I can't believe they're still citing that Kleiner paper."

"Nobody can prove it was written with prejudice," said Weston wearily. "Especially since he revealed he was awakened too. He's still under investigation for the accusations related to Cornelius Malton and Stefen Gearhardt, but right now he's a free man."

"And now people are citing it just at random," said Drew. He sat up slightly. "I've had customers bring it up to my face, people on the street even. It's like 'hey, this dude in England with a science background wrote a paper saying you're an unstable explosion waiting to happen, so can you please go away now'?"

"How's your boss feel about that?" asked Katie gently.

Drew sighed. "He's still on my side. Even kicked out a long-time customer who made threats at me. But still… I know he's taking a hit to his business for this. People who support awakened aren't willing to come in and make up for the lost cash."

"That really sucks, man," said Jonathan, patting him on the shoulder.

"Thanks." He smiled, but Jonathan was more than ready to pick up the outrage slack he'd dropped.

"Everybody thinks they're an expert from what they just read online," he said, sitting up straight. "It's ridiculous. Magic's only been around a couple months, and only really been around a couple years before that. How's anybody supposed to know what it does yet?"

"It's not like we agree with him, Jonathan," said Trevor. "But when he's the only source of information—"

"We've got Hailey, we've got Kendra Laushire, we've got the FBI guy and Cinza and the whole U.S. government on our side," said Jonathan, his blood pumping a little harder. He knew it was starting to boil over, but he didn't care—this had been on his mind ever since Hailey's bail hearing, and now with a repeat performance, Jonathan needed to let it out. "Why can't they just take a hint?"

"What are they meant to learn?" asked Rupert gently. "Magic isn't the most precise or definable concept. We barely understand it ourselves. Caution isn't the most unreasonable reaction, particularly given the events of this year."

"Acceptance takes time," added Weston. "We've thrown a huge new concept into the world, and we're forcing everybody to accept it without question. Worse, it's already shown a chaotic shift in practically no time at all. We went from 'magic is real and anybody can have it' to 'nobody can awaken and if you try, you die' in three short weeks."

Above, another gust of wind rattled the church. Jonathan was breathing a little heavier as he went on—he hadn't yet said his piece, and Jonathan really needed to speak his mind. "Stuff changes fast. They just gotta keep up. It didn't take the mundies three weeks to start murdering us."

"The danger's past though," said Rupert. "Brian Hendricks was captured, and his people have scattered to the winds. Hate and discrimination are horrible things and may never truly be stamped out, but we can overcome them."

"It's not past," said Jonathan, back upright in an instant. "You really think it's gone now?" He shook his head. "People are still gonna track us down. Why do you think we meet in secret here in a church where nobody can get in or hear us?"

"Because Katie volunteers here and has access to it?" supplied Elissa, clearly trying to defuse tension.

"We've gotta protect ourselves. Make sure we can fight when we have to. Show them we're not to be screwed with. Maybe it's time to replace defense with offense, too."

"That's what the authorities are for," said Rupert.

Jonathan snorted. "Yeah, because they did so much in Lakewood."

The room got very quiet as everybody winced. Weston's eyes softened. "You don't need to remind us, Jonathan," he said softly.

Jonathan fell back in his chair. "I'm… I'm sorry."

"I get you're upset," he went on. "I am too. I've lost some of my closest friends to the fighting, and I've no doubt they'd be with us now if we didn't have to deal with so much prejudice and hate."

Weston looked around the group. Everyone tended to give him a much greater breadth of respect—partly because of his true awakened status, though that wasn't known outside this circle, but mostly due to his history in Rallsburg and his close friendship with both Hailey and Jessica Silverdale.

"This will always be a safe space for us. The world may never be truly safe, but with time, it'll get better. It won't be easy, and it'll take work from all of us, but I believe it's worth doing. I like to think of it this way," he added with a small smile. "Even with everything I've seen and done, would I ever want to give up magic? Jessica went through far worse than I ever did, but she never once told us she regretted awakening. I'm never going to either."

Weston sat back again. "Let's change the subject for a little while, if that's okay?"

After a few moments to cool off, focusing on the breathing technique Julie taught him, Jonathan nodded.