Friday, April 22, 2022 Santiago, Chile

Ella regarded the dagger. It looked very familiar, in fact it was almost identical in shape and balance as the one Tabir had given her. A long tapered blade to a guard made of brass knuckles. Instead of matte black, the blade was that same crystalline material as the scepter and her eyes. The grip and guard were something gold-colored, but not soft. The balance felt the same though. Ella held it and performed some spins around her hands - just as she had done with the knife the Aqrabuamelu had given her.

The scepter and the dagger, the Aqrabuamelu had planned for her to get them. She had no idea what it did though.

She took another few swishes in the air, performed a couple of stupidly dangerous flipping tricks, when Tauthe walked in looking for something. Ella sheathed the knife and startled Tauthe a bit.

“Hey Arcsa and Bahu want to talk about the boy.”

Ella wasn’t going to let them kill some kid. There was only one choice.

She argued it out — magic would eventually be revealed to the wider world, and probably had already been revealed to who knows how many people. In the end, Seb was coming back with them as the first normal human member of the Aqrabuamelu.

“How do you feel about it?” Ella asked Seb. “We basically decided your future in there.”

“I know… but what do I have here? And you say there is magic out there? I suppose I don’t ever want to be…” he thought for a moment and then in a very quiet voice, “I don’t ever want to be scared like that again.”

“I’m always scared,” Ella said to him quietly. “So I don’t want to lie to you that it won’t be scary.” She could admit it to him,this boy who had lost the only parent he had and helped take revenge on his killer.

“So why do you need the dagger?”

Ella looked at him. He looked lost, alone. And she decided he had earned a bit more trust than the Aqrabuamelu had shared with him. He didn’t even know he was going to be living with immortal soldier-scorpions and learning combat from them.

“Look at my eyes,” she said gently and he looked. She let them glow a bit, just enough.

“Magic came back, and I ended up with some inside of me. And I have no idea what I am doing…” Ella hugged her knees on the bed they were sitting on. In the dark room, she let herself be afraid.

The next day - SCL to JFK

Bahu, Namtar and the other soldiers that Bahu had brought down were taking Seb back to Buenos Aires. He would apply for a legal passport there and then Arcsa and the Aqrabuamelu would flex some political muscle to fast track his visa to the US.

“We are not even lying,” Bahu said cheerfully. “He is the survivor of an operative who was killed aiding US interests.” She winked. “Just because his father didn’t know he was an operative, and the US didn’t know they had interests in the dagger not falling into Ekerri’s hands, well those are just details.”

Ella had been a rule-follower her whole life. But she admitted, she had no idea how to deal with this.

She spent the flight back in glorious relief from all things magic and military. She plugged in her headphones, cranked up music1, and read physics straight for 15 hours, only stopping for their transfers and to eat. It felt amazing.

Because after using magic for a while now and experimenting all the time, she thought she knew what she was doing and that changed everything.

She thought of it as pulling from different potential eigenstates. Or, to put it colloquially, from possibilities of what might have been. When she pulled light out, that was from somewhere there happened to be light. When she healed herself, maybe she replaced her body part with one that hadn’t been injured as much or at all? Was she screwing over alternate versions of herself?

Anyway, the theory felt roughly right. There was clearly more to it, but this was a step forward. She wondered if Xu’s magic operated differently. Was she pulling from different locations or times and that is what made certain magic easier or more difficult? The further she travelled along these dimensions, the harder? It also meant that there would be variability in effect depending on what was available to draw from. That was concerning, because it made magic unreliable. But… could she do crazily dangerous things like find a place where baryon assymetry had fallen the other way?

The dagger remained a mystery. Arcsa somehow procured a packing crate that purported to be a museum-to-museum shipment. Ella had barely had a chance to look at it, and she already felt naked without it.

They disembarked and Ella was excited to get to turn on her phone for the first time in a week. Messages started pouring in from Charlie and Jade. Two from Isaac asking for another date. And oddly enough, one from her ballet mistress asking her why she hadn’t been to class in so long.

And Ella suddenly felt a wave of nostalgia for her old life. She felt like she was barely holding on to physics, training, and navigating this crazed world. Could she do anything else? But she felt a bit lost. And ballet just sounded like the most amazing thing to her right then…

“Shit.” Ella regarded the run in her tights as she pulled up the leg warmers. Well there wasn’t time to worry about it, she needed to go. She checked herself in the mirror quickly on her way out of the bedroom, hair in bun, black leotard, her pointe shoes in hand even if they probably needed to be replaced. She grabbed some sneakers and a puffy jacket before hitting the street and racing over to the subway.

The 1 was just pulling in as she raced through the turnstile and she just made it on. The car was full and she managed to grab the hangrail and pulled out her phone to mess around. People got on and off as they headed to the Upper West Side.

Soon she was at the barre doing her positions like she had never stopped. Her strength was really beneficial to her dance and her training had left her immune to the normal discomfort. Soon she felt the cobwebs fall away and even the ballet mistress said she had done well. With an admonishment not to skip more.

When she went to the locker room to change into sweats, she saw that Jade had messaged her to see if she wanted to grab a coffee and study a bit. Ella texted back, and Jade said to stay uptown and they could grab something up there.

Jade was looking forward to just sitting with Ella and studying as a normal thing. Ella had been gone for over a week and when she came back, she seemed a bit distant.

She didn’t mind going uptown, it had pleased her that Ella was doing ballet again.

She went down the subway stairs and got on the 1 and found a seat and waited.

A few stops in, a father and two children got on and sat next to her and she spent the trip making funny faces at the young child next to her.

Suddenly, the train lights went out, and it started grinding to a stop. People lost their balance and went piling forward squishing everyone together.

The lights in the tunnel gave dim illumination and soon everyone was standing back up and looking around. The father was comforting them, and the younger one, maybe two year old, was crying.

Jade had a penlight in her backpack which she pulled out and asked if everyone was okay. Besides one twisted ankle, everone seemed to be fine. But the train wasn’t moving and she couldn’t see much in the next car up.

She smiled at the children and gave the father the flashlight to keep them busy and entertained.

After about twenty minutes, someone started to say they were going to get off the train. Jade thought to herself that if they meant to, they would have just done it, this was an appeal for the group to go with her.

Then the door open slightly, “This is the NYPD, everyone please keep calm. We will be evacuating the train now. The police officer’s flashlight spilled through the split doors blinding more people than it helped.

“What happened?” she asked one of the officers.

“No idea. The other side has got that. Just head this way.”

The tunnel was dark and flickering, the emergency lights only somewhat functional, but a perverse curiosity took ahold of Jade, and she managed to slip back and hide.

She waited until the train was fully evacuated which took quite a while. When the officers had cleared out, she made her way out from under the train and started heading up the tunnel.

It took a while and eventually she reached a police barrier that she slid around. She headed forward until she could see what was going on. The car she was next to just ended, and there was a groove in the floor and tunnel, ragged in shape, where it had been… “cut” away? Did the other part roll away?

There were officers there, including FBI agents. But she couldn’t hear what they were saying. They had spotlights aimed at the front of the train and she couldn’t get much closer.

Jade took out her phone out and snapped a couple of pics and then made her way back up the tunnel.

Ella’s music taste is mostly pop, so think "Working by the Knife" by Mitski and "Home Maker" by Sudan Archives