You know how weird it feels to kill someone you’ve talked to? Someone who’s been around a while? Kar wasn’t the sort of person I wanted to know; I mean, we weren’t on bad terms back in high school, but we weren’t on good terms either. It was the sort of relationship where Celi and I would catch him after school and he’d get out his tablet and I’d get mine out and we’d share projects - mostly just bullshit little games we came up with, arbitrary stuff that we pieced together ourselves, for ourselves - and then we’d be on our way. And no, it wasn’t the same sort of tablet I was using for those custom effects pedals. This was a different kind that could basically do whatever you wanted but in a simulated space; couldn’t do shit outside the tablet’s own artificial rendering. Well, unless you got into the Source and unlocked it.

Anyway, the King made sure those all went out of commission in ‘62 alongside all the movies and books and such. Know how terrifying it was, seeing mages prowl around the school all silent-like? Came right into the class I was in without a word, those ugly-ass fluorescent lights making stark little patterns all over the triangular mesh of their obsidian-black armor. They didn’t even have to ask who had a tablet and who didn’t, just came right up to me and Kar, the two mages who came in, and grabbed our backpacks and rummaged through them and pulled the tablets out. I sat totally still, hardly even let out a breath. My eyes were glued on the wall in front of me as I listened to them sift through all my shit. Not even angry, no, not even scared, not consciously. Just still.

Then they left. Teacher couldn’t even do her job after that; stopped right in the middle of the lesson - it was precalc, Kar’s favorite; hated that class myself - and sat down, lips taut and face white. “That’s it for instruction today; get started on Monday’s homework,” was all she said. But nobody did. We all just sat there. Sat there and waited for the bell to ring, and even when it did, nobody fucking moved. And then Kar got up, with this sort of extreme deliberation like he was a person in one of the games we’d make. The more ambitious ones that tried to actually simulate people and objects and shit, usually yielding less than successful results. Hence that sort of stilted motion, that weird fuckin’ expression on Kar’s face.

And you know what the weirdest part was? Nobody mentioned that particular line of tablets a few years after that happened. I think they were a defunct model of the type philosophers used to make facial recognition spells and the like, where you’re not really doing anything magical in the physical world, just sorting through a database. There were ways you could trick a spell into thinking the point of contact was somewhere that didn’t really exist. Not exactly sure how that’s done, since everything we’d need a spell like that for is carried out through . . . well, I don’t need to tell you about all that. Pretty sure that’s a contributing factor to why you left home to pout in the rain for five hours and then stab a guy.

But yeah, nobody said a word about those tablets after about - what? Five, six years? - and we thought about them, sure, just like I kept seeing shit from those gangster movies every time I got into trouble. But nobody talked about them. Not those movies, not those tablets, not those games we’d tinker with on the tablets. Think the movies had a bit more cultural impact than the games, since I’m pretty sure those tablets were still pretty new when they got pulled.

Here’s the thing, though: when I first met some of the people I work with these days who are like twenty, thirty years older than me, they talked about playing around with some pretty similar shit. Not the same, just similar. So what I’m thinking is that the King was just constantly releasing and banning some loose iteration of those tablets, over and over again, presumably to find the people who liked doing that sort of thing and subtly train them to be potential philosophers. ‘Cause it was the same deal, you know. Only difference was that, on one end, it’s a bunch of kids fucking around for fun, and on the other, it’s the King telling you to make scarier-looking deadly shit for mages to throw at people.

But that doesn’t line up with some of the stuff I learned later, so I don’t know. And also, if the King didn’t want us talking about all that, didn’t want us even thinking about it, why’d he let us bash mages like he did? Hell, you’ve got Magefucker playing shows in these big, popular places; got frontman Helt Kassian screaming up a storm about how we’ve gotta kill all mages to make things right. The band broke up eventually, yeah, but it’s not like mages were all, “Yes, thank you, I’ll be taking that,” like they were with some of the other media out there. Why’d the King let us keep all those records? I mean, that last bit’s something I know the answer to now. Still pretty baffling at the time, though.

But after those tablets were taken, I didn’t talk to Kar much anymore. Sometimes I’d complain about how much it sucked not to be able to make or play those games anymore, about how it just wasn’t fair for mages to march in and take little bits and pieces of our memory ‘cause we were all too scared to argue. And he’d just look at me and spout some fake shit like, “They can take our possessions; they can take our lives; but they can’t take our memories. You are your memory, Raena.” And then I’d run off with Celi and we’d make fun of the way he’d talk in these hollow fucking aphorisms all the time. I mean I’ve told you a fair bit of the stuff he’d say. Like for every two normal things that left that mouth of his he had to say some awkward shit that sounded like he’d rehearsed it ten times.

So, yeah, I knew the guy, but I had no love for him. But if you see someone nearly every day of your life for a good four years, even if another three pass without seeing him much at all, it’s weird to think that you’re not gonna hear his voice again. Not in any sentimental sort of way, but . . . Like, back before I killed him, when I’d be writing the spell for some effect pedal, once or twice I’d think, “You know, I pulled some impressive shit right here. Limited means - like fourteen runes to work with - but damn does the result sound good.” And then I’d think about how Kar would be blown away by what I’d just done. I’d imagine meeting him after school, showing him what I came up with, even though I knew it’d never happen again. Partially because high school was over, but mostly because I fuckin’ hated the guy.

And then when I was sitting in the back seat of that car, hail pelting the roof and street lamps sending the occasional orange beam across the stern, goateed face of the guy in the passenger seat - who had a gun trained on me the whole ride, by the way - I realized that, if I ever got to touch a tablet again, I’d probably have the same thoughts. I’d probably think about how impressed Kar would be, probably come up with imagined scenarios where I’d look him in his sour little face as he witnessed such exquisite work and realized with a bit of dismay that he’d never be able to top it.

But every time I thought that, I’d remember what I’d done to him. God, it was so easy in the moment, so thoughtless. That pop that rang out when I’d stomped him was just so sudden, and bringing my foot down hardly took an effort. It was instantaneous.

In a way, I was thankful for the car ride; spared me the trouble of wondering why I didn’t just go back inside the theater and face my friends. And you can’t stay scared forever. I mean, your whole body just kinda drops the act after a while, whether you know you ought to be scared or not. I’d been scared as hell since the club and I guess I just couldn’t take anymore so even though I had more reason to be scared now than ever before, I just wasn’t. It also helped that those guys had the heater going; the inside of that car was like eighty-five degrees.

I recognized the lights outside; we were out of Derdian and deep into Methulum. I could see patches of blurry lights through a torrent of rain and hail, little white cells that extended up into what seemed an infinity. Recognized the courthouse where I’d gone to get my license to work in that packing facility. Recognized the street that led from there down to the apartment building where I used to live, where my parents and my sister presumably still were.

The car pitched slightly as it started down a steep hill and the white lights changed to blurred pinks, oranges, blues, deep reds and blinding golds. Heard the pulse of EDM, smelled some good shit cooking. Street vendors were still at it, I guess, despite the storm. “We’re gonna have to make a stop,” the driver said. “Don’t move a fuckin’ muscle. Hik’s gonna put one in your chest if you do.”

“Not going anywhere,” I assured him. Was surprised at the lazy drawl that came out of my mouth. Like I said, after a certain point you just can’t muster up the energy to be scared.

The driver turned around slightly, bushy eyebrows raised. His thin sweep of black hair shifted with them. “I’m serious. Don’t move.” He turned into a parking garage. Hik’s gun was still trained on me, his expression uncompromising.

The driver parked, got out, approached a dark van a few spaces away. He had his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. When the guys in the van got out - faces hidden by unadorned silver masks - they seemed to demand that the driver take his hands out of his pockets, put them in the air. He complied, kept them there as they talked some more. Nothing handed off as far as I could tell, just about five minutes of talking before the guys got back in their van, and the driver put his hands back in his pockets and hurried back to the car.

When he got in, Hik shot him a tentative, “So?”

“Not right now,” the driver mumbled, starting the car. “Not while she’s back there.”

“Oh come on, Durn,” Hik insisted. “Just gimme a basic idea.”

The driver navigated out of the garage, took us back the way we came. “Not telling you shit, not ‘till we get back to Lanu.”

“Can’t be that important,” Hik grumbled. “I mean, not if she sent us this way with, y’know, her in tow.”

“Fine. They wanna set up a meeting but they don’t wanna use official channels, don’t wanna be seen. Paranoid the higher-ups are gonna catch ‘em.” We passed the courthouse again, headed in the opposite direction of my family’s apartment, where you’ve got these sort of gated suburbs that sat in the middle of what was otherwise a metropolis.

“For fuck’s sake, we can grant them amnesty, right?”

“You’d think. Dunno what the fuck happens over there. Above my pay grade.” Durn drove in silence for a while. The city lights were thinning out, just ever so slightly. He turned onto a short cobblestone road lined with hedges, and at the end there was this checkpoint, this little booth where some kid with half a beard sat in a uniform a size too small for him. “Shit,” Durn mumbled. “New guy, he one of us?”

“Yeah, we’re good. He’s onboard, bringing home a big wad of cash, too,” Hik reassured him. “Lotta shit we’re losing, paying these guys off. Hope it’s worth it.”

We got through the checkpoint no problem. The kid looked nervous, eyes went all wide when he saw Hik pointing the gun at me.

I’d never been in this part of the city before. Fifteen-foot-tall, two-foot-thick walls surrounded the place, not that you couldn’t get over them with a ladder and a little determination. Inside, there were these tiny spruce trees planted all along the sides of the road and behind them there were these oceans of grass, cut so short and even they made the hills look like some kind of smooth viridian dough. The lawns were cut in half by wide brick driveways leading up to heavenly white mansions, made a monolithic grey by the darkness and the storm. Just mansion after mansion, not identical but the same basic idea: the result of a bunch of rich assholes who thought a splash of color or two would ruin their aesthetic.

Durn pulled up to one of the bigger ones, all pillars and ornamented little abstract etchings around the front door. Thinking back to the sorts of places I’d grown up in, I had to wonder if these places were really lived in by just a single family, or, hell, a single person. You could comfortably put like six families in one of these places, and by comfortably I mean luxuriously.

We stopped just in front of the marble steps leading up to the house, and Durn and Hik got out of the car at once and came around to my side and yanked me out by my upper arms. My left arm stung where Durn grabbed it, right in the same spot where Kar had kicked it when I was down. I was just lucky he hadn’t hit something more vital.

As we approached the house, the doors opened for us in one smooth, slow, silent motion. The outlines of two more guys became visible, and when my eyes adjusted to the light from inside, I noticed they were holding assault rifles. And that’s when I panicked again, started sweating. Hik’s grip tightened on my arm. The whole interior of the house was like a dreamscape, so bright, so clean. All polished, and every heavy step taken by Durn and Hik bounced back at us with stark clarity.

They took me through a long hall and through another set of double-doors, sat me down in this chair and then they just left. “Good luck, kid,” Durn said before shutting the doors behind them. I wasn’t restrained or anything. No guns, no eyes as far as I could tell; just me, alone in a windowless room. In front of me sat a desk that was empty save for a single, sleek silver tablet. Hadn’t seen any of that type before. To my left was a mirror, this big baroque thing that nearly stretched to the ceiling.

Shit, I was a mess. My usual tangle of hair was even more tangled, my dark skin peppered with red gashes. And then, as if to contrast my ghastly appearance, an even ghastlier figure materialized beside me, this thin, pale gray face with red eyes and straight black hair broken by streaks of silver and white. I snapped around and my eyes met this suit-clad tower of a woman, sharp angles all over.

And at this point, I knew that Cypher wasn’t gonna kill me. No, they wouldn’t send one of the royal family, elves from the other side of the Raktar - god knows why they wanted to be here - just to shoot me and pass me back off to some low-level thugs who’d get rid of me. So I guess I felt a little safer; though, I mean, how safe could I feel after all the shit that happened? And after what I did to Kar, I guess I was a little scared of . . . Nah, that’s not it; I wasn’t scared of myself, I was scared of Cypher. But god, I wish Cypher was the only shit I had to worry about. Fuck, I really wish.