Tuesday, January 18, 2022 - Midtown, New York City, United States

Ella walked out of the building on 57th Street and could not stop trembling. She made her way over to a Starbucks next door and sat down in a vinyl covered chair. And shook.

What the hell had she been doing in there? The entire plan had been to go through the rounds of interviews, get to Xu in a normal way and sound him out subtly.

Instead she had almost failed the entry interview - which she still felt was more on the associate doing the interview - then when he walked in practically challenged him to a duel and then did shots of hyper-expensive liquor and talked so much bullshit so fast, she had no idea what was going on.

She knew the inflection point had been that quote from the poem and sent a quick prayer of thanks to her Feminist Poetry professor for making them read that. And then the four winds? What the hell - that was just from wikipediaing mahjong tiles. Ella would have ascribed it to serendipity but now she might believe in the hand of fate.

And she had walked out with a tentative alliance! With a fucking Chinese dragon.

And more…

“If we are to be allies,” and Ella could hear the distaste in that word, “then I would tell you now, my treasures are mine .” Ella had smiled at the gleam of greed that he now let forth. “And I do not trust the bugs. Nor Ekerri. His age is over. And we will not bow again to any but the Heavens.”

Ella shied away at the costs she had agreed to and the implicit collapse of this agreement should the Emperor be an ally as well.

But Kothin being Ekerri’s meant that something was up. Kothin had been following her around before and she wondered if he still was.

But now she had placed herself at the fulcrum, and could negotiate with the scorpions and dragon both. But Xu had told her one more thing:

“You will never take his place without the regalia. When he cut off the People, he used his most potent magics and anchored them to the world with the accoutrements of his rule. The crown was the one he kept and granted to you in part. But if you want to wrest the crown from him, even your magic will not suffice without those tools.” Xu had sat back and smiled, he was more comfortable in this role as the more knowledgeable, senior partner and it showed.

Ella knew it, but suspected they would need to renegotiate. But that would be a later thing.

“The bugs will expect you to get them too. They are potent symbols as well as intrinsically powerful magic items in themselves.”

“I have a line on them.” Ella lied. She couldn’t reveal the precariousness of her position entirely, even though this was the first she had heard about them. Ella jumped on the last part, “Magic is the other thing I would like to talk to you about. I want you to teach me to use it better.”

Xu looked at her and then laughed, “Even if I could, I don’t think I would. Something is different about what you wield and I have no idea what it is. It is too… crude.” He shuddered gently before taking a sip and went on, “whatever you did to take power. It is quite different and quite dangerous. And of course your modern perspective would also skew it further.”

Ella jumped on the last, “my perspective?”

“Our magic and how we approach it is shaped by our existing paradigmatic view of the Dao. You see the universe on a very different way than I do or those from before. So you will not be able to approach your magic in the same way that worked with them.”

And that one statement had crystallized Ella’s theories and understanding of her magic. She knew what she was doing, how her sense of magic needed to be seen under the lens of her education. A magic of physics and quantum superpositions.

That one off-hand comment had made all the risk worth it.

Ella sat in her chair in the Starbucks and closed her eyes for a moment in victory. Her heart had finally slowed. She felt clammy when she had let herself sweat.

She sent a text to Bahu to set up the next meeting and got up to order an orange mocha frappuccino.

The range was remarkably quiet in the afternoon. Ella and Donna walked in, donned their eyewear and ear protection…

Today she was trying something different. She aimed down her sight, squeezed the trigger and watched the bullet hole appear off center. She took another breath and flared her eyes slightly, pulling magic from deep inside of her and thinking about the arrow of time, that strange relentless ticking. She tried to explore that feeling on her head, to force the magic into different hypotheses. When she came to Linden’s entanglement theories1, she felt the smallest resonance, like this was close to the right approach.

She gently squeezed the trigger and she could see the bullet fly through the air and hit the target. Off center, but she could see it move through the air.

Her whoop of excitement brought over Donna, “Why are you so excited?” She regarded the holes in the target, “Those shots kind of sucked.”

“Oh nothing, nothing,” laughed Ella, giddy with excitement. “Let’s go back to shooting.”

They took more shots but Donna soon got annoyed at Ella making weird excited yells every so often when she was able to make it work. Eventually Donna told her to shut the hell up and said they should go over to the tactical course.

Where Ella had a surprise as they armed up.

“Hello there Ella, mon cherie! " Bahu accompanied it with a couple of kisses on each cheek. “And who is your friend? And why haven’t I met her before?”

“Hello…” said Ella weakly. And maybe she was out of poise and bullshit today as she floundered on what to say next.

Donna tensed up next to her and actually put her hand on the holstered gun to her side. “I’m Donna. Who are you?”

“The famous Donna! Enfin! " Bahu reached out and grabbed Donna’s free hand in a wrong handed handshake ignoring Donna’s gun hand.

“I’m Madeleine. Ella talks all about you, it is enough to make me jealous. She never said you were so tall though. Are you about to do the course? Let’s do it together? It will be fun to see how good everyone is?”

Ella said her byes to Donna as they split up at the train station. Then she doubled back to the range to find Bahu standing right outside.

“What the hell was that?” hissed Ella.

“What? I just thought it would be fun. Not every day one gets to go for some recreational shooting with one’s supposed reincarnated deity.”

“Well don’t you think it was suspicious you set the course record and managed to hit almost every target dead center along the way?”

“No… because my performance was terrible. Arcsa would have drawn smiley faces on each of them and set a faster time.”

Ella gritted her teeth some and then just decided to jump the gun,“let’s go meet Arcsa and this High Priestess of your now.”

“Now? Like right now?”

Ella looked down at herself, she smelled of gunpowder and sweat.

“No. I’ll text you tonight with a time and place and you will stop following me around. I get enough of that.

They went their separate ways and Ella made sure that Bahu didn’t follow her. She did see another familiar tall figure behind her which only helped to confirm her suspicions.

“Time’s Arrow Traced to Quantum Source” by Natalie Walchover