Dash to Pieces – 11.9
Author: Wildbow

Dash to Pieces – 11.9 | Pale

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A bracelet of carved wooden beads rested around Verona’s wrist, each bead roughly cube-shaped, cut from a rectangular dowel, each face etched.  A bead flicked at the corner of Verona’s wrist as it rotated.  Another one turned again at the base of her wrist.  There was a slight red mark there, she could see, from the regular abrasion.  She used a pen to gouge plastic.

Verona sat with her back to the pillar that held up the overhanging metal canopy with the big grocery store sign on it, keeping half an eye on the door, half an eye on the biodegradable, thermos style water bottle that she’d spent thirteen dollars on, as she etched the outer casing which was textured for grippage.  She’d been sitting on a bench but an older woman had needed to sit and here she was.

A teenager sat down next to her, a couple years older than her.  The vibe was a bit similar to Nibble.  One of the cubes of the bracelet stopped turning, but others were wriggling.

She had to think for a bit, deciding who it was.  Faerie?  No, Faerie liked to show off.  Lis was scared.

“Ken?” Verona asked.

“K.T.”

Verona craned her head around to give K.T. a more serious look.  K.T. looked like one of the snowboarders enduring the off-season.  Basketball shorts, skater shoes worn without socks, and a ‘Greensey Hills’ t-shirt.  K.T. had hair longer than most boys and more unkempt than most girls.

Verona showed K.T. the scratched bottle.  “How am I doing?”

“Did you kidnap a little boy, Verona?” K.T. asked, wry and bored.

“I did in fact accost what seemed to be a little boy who was running into cars.”

“I remember hearing about that.  Was the horror-story-slash-gossip of the day among the Kennet moms.  You’d have to ask another one of Ken’s offspring for the full story.  Talk lasted for a few days and then Marilyn MacLymont left her kid in a hot car and it became taboo to discuss bad parenting.  If you’re a mom and you cross Mrs. MacLymont, you get iced out of the Hot Trotters walking group, the Thursday cocktails event that happens more as a daily thing than a Thursday thing, and swimming lessons.  That’s another huge social event.”

“For someone who’s saying they aren’t the offspring with the scoop, you’re pretty on top of this.”

“It’s dull when it’s not winter, I pick up on stuff.  What I just told you is the result of hours and hours of tracking side conversations.  That minute of me talking about mom drama and being mildly entertained?  That’s all I’ve got.  There is nothing more to unpack, I don’t know any stories about the mom drama I could share, I could speculate with you but I really don’t care.”

“Neither do I, honestly,” Verona said.  “I was asking about the warding rune.”

The warding rune was two arcs that crossed one another, forming an eye shape, with a ‘water’ triangle and a ‘light’ rune contained within.

“Hmm.  Needs the fancy lines to point the way and indicate what you’re doing.”

“Diacritic lines.  Getting to that.”

“Sure,” K.T. said, leaning back.

Verona hurried to sort out the lines.  The material of the bottles was a tan brown and when she scratched it became white with surrounding cracks.  The trick was that she didn’t want to puncture the bottle, because that would let the contents out, and this wasn’t a genie.  Or if it was, it was a genie that made people get hit by cars.

She made sure she had salt on hand, then etched.  Raguly barrier, permissive, around a connection rune of interlocked diamonds.  The Raguly barrier was herald diagramming, diagonal lines hatching their way through a straight line.  It was the barbed wire fence of diagramming.  She kept the barbs but left out the fence, doing without the horizontal line.

The front door of the grocery store opened up, and a mom pushed her cart out, two kids in tow, chattering and making noise.

The bottle jerked in Verona’s hands.

Verona hurried, adding the marks, then held the bottle out for K.T.

“Sure.  Kind of an ass-first delivery,” K.T. said.

Verona smirked.  “Figured.  Ass-first works if it works.”

Verona stood, stretched, got her bag and grocery bag, and then started walking.  K.T. followed.

As she passed the mom with the kids, Verona unscrewed the bottle, ripping the tape with the salt on it.  The temperature dipped a fraction, and a shift in the sun made the cars in the lot shine brighter.  Light reflected off of scant droplets of rain that had yet to dry after summer showers.

A warding rune to encourage reflection, from the Tutelary category, courtesy of Zed’s warding instructions.  But the Raguly part of the diagram would drag at and shred parts that were further from reflection and closer to connection, those parts of the echo that were most inclined to reach out and possess, or push that impulse, connect to the parts of a person’s Self that were most open and vulnerable to outside influence.

The echo of a little boy with a stupid hat slipped from the bottle and landed beside the car, invisible to everyone present except Verona, K.T., and a woman across the street.  He looked around, a glimmer caught his eye, and the glimmer wasn’t lights reflecting off of the glass and headlights of incoming car.  His hands and feet were blurrier than normal, indistinct and faded.

The boy with the stupid hat spotted the boy he’d come from.  Enough months had passed that he’d grown a little, had even had a haircut, but the resemblance was there.  Echoes weren’t always from the dead.

He bolted, dashing, and Verona remained ready with the salt.

The echo merged with the original self, filtered by the bottle, and found a home.  The filter turned this brutal, emotional memory into a bit of reflection, the flashback following.  The tattered and shadowy arms and legs that would have helped him make contact were last, many of them disintegrating on contact.  Ass-first deployment, kind of.  Or headfirst, but ass-first was funnier.

The possession and impulse didn’t follow.  The echo returned home, and the kid impulsively reached over and hugged his mom’s leg, while she was in the middle of unloading the cart.

“He’s local, huh?” K.T. asked, as they walked away.

“I think Edith got rid of him instead of burning him,” Verona noted.

“Mmm.”

“Hey, K.T.?  Do you know anything about the circumstances of your summoning, being brought into Kennet?”

“I was nebulous, abstract, and then I Was.  They talked to me for a bit, asked me to sign onto the terms, I agreed.”

“Why?”

“Just wondering if Edith was up to anything,” Verona said.  “Were you working with Edith?”

“Of course.”

“No, I mean… on the conspiracy front.”

“No.  I barely existed while most of that happened.”

“Could’ve signed on after.  But you said no, so… that’s a relief.  Do you have any sympathies toward the conspiracy?  Do you think there’s any merit or anything to what they’re doing?  Any advantages to you?”

“I don’t know enough to say.  I don’t think so.  It’s doing a number on me, you know.”

“I know.”

They waited for cars to pass and then crossed the middle of the street.

Two neighboring cube-shaped beads on Verona’s wrist made a turn.

“It’s supposed to be part of my job to regulate the local spirits, especially now that Edith’s gone,” K.T. said.  “I’m not so good with echoes.”

“We won’t really object to assistance,” Verona said.

“Well, a tip?”

“Tips are good.”

“The Immure Lucy, Guilherme, and Gashwad faced down yesterday is a consequence of the shrines.  You’re building all the shrines on the one side of the perimeter so far…”

“We started building opposite those.”

“Yeah.  But it’s unbalanced.  In terms of spiritual flows… it’s like you’re pumping the air out of one end of a room, that creates pressure, which we’re already dealing with, and the air comes in through the window at the other end of the room.”

“We made that thing?” Verona asked.  “Wait, no-”

“No.  No, it was out there.  But that sort of imbalance acts as encouragement.”

“Right.  Yeah.”

“Have you considered talking to Charles?” K.T. asked.  “Charles set up the original perimeter.”

“Might do,” Verona said.  “Haven’t talked to Charles much.”

“Charles keeps his head down.  Especially as it gets worse around Kennet.”

Verona nodded.  She put the empty echo-container in the grocery bag, then dug out a half-eaten pretzel snack.  “Want something?  I’ve got drinks.”

“No.  All good.  That’s a lot of snacks.”

“Stuff for spirits.  Going to swing by three of the shrines, loop back.  We’re doing a rotation.  One shift between midnight and noon, one between noon and midnight, when we’re up to the full arrangement of shrines we’ll do four at a time, no shrine should have to wait more than four days to get a token offering.”

“Can we help?  Take it up on our end of things?” K.T. asked.  “I’ve been meaning to visit.”

“Do you want to head southwest this morning?” Verona asked.  “Northeast tonight?  Or send someone from the Kennet Others.”

“Sure.”

“There’s only two to the southwest.  Fluttering paper likes coffee flavors,” Verona said, digging in the bag.  She handed K.T. a coffee-flavored chocolate bar.  “Gearhead likes oily foods as tribute.”

K.T. took the kettle chips.

“Be careful.  Especially since that’s the direction the…”

“Immure.  According to Toadswallow.”

“Immure… right.  I need to look that up.  Is that E-M-?”

“No idea.”

“Right.  Right.  Be careful.”

“I’ll have to pull things together, go as Ken.  Got the goblins with,” K.T. pointed out.

Verona looked.  The bracelet was still stirring a bit, and that was probably because of K.T.’s bodyguards.  She looked, making a show of not knowing the direction to look, and it was Butty McButtbutt, the smooth-skinned, very pear-shaped goblin, and Bangnut, the goblin with the junk-filled overalls.

“Right, good.”

“I guess this is where we go our separate ways?  Or are you coming to this area too?”

“Other direction for me.  I think if we can get more regular visits to the shrines, that’ll make them stronger,” Verona told K.T.  “Which helps… you, I guess.  Helps all of us.”

“Okay,” K.T. said.  “I know John tends to patrol the perimeter when he goes on patrol, he’s probably down.”

“John is good.”

“Goblins… less so.  Ghouls are a middle ground.  Some nights they have other focuses.”

“Right, yeah.  Okay!  Anything’s solid.”

She waved as K.T. headed off.

The two beads on the bracelet ticked over.  The stir from observing goblins quieted.  They hadn’t been observing her, one hundred percent, and might even have relaxed a bit, knowing she was there to protect Ken.  Now they were gone.

Two observers.  Lis and Maricica, she guessed.  Or Lis and Cig.

The bracelet was a replacement for the papers they’d been scrawling on and carrying around.  Subtler.  And her test run was complete.  She’d made a shopping trip, found the boy, and decided to empty a bottle, returning the echo to rest, transforming it into a realization, a resolution, a memory that would shape and clarify in the future.  A pretty basic freaking lesson, not to run out into traffic, but hey.

Scrawled like it was, the bottle wouldn’t be too useful unless she wanted to focus on clarity again or scrape away the connection stuff… probably wouldn’t be an attractive hallow anymore.  But she could use it for paintbrushes and pens and stuff.  She could always use more containers.

Test run successful.  They had a way of tracking Lis and Cig.

She found an empty street, crouched down to scrawl the runework necessary to create a shortcut through the city, and set about losing the Others tailing her.

The path behind her creaked to a close, closing off the way to the House on Half Street.  The door was wide open.

Nervous, Verona grabbed spell cards and let herself in, using the Sight to track-

“I’m here!” Lucy called out.

Verona checked connections, without relaxing.  She kept the spell cards in hand, marker in the other hand, and paced her way down the hallway.

“My name is Lucy Ellingson, I have an earring implement, and my best friend is a butthead sometimes!”

Verona relaxed.  She ventured through the kitchen and into the dining room, where boxes were arranged into a kind of desk.  It looked like Lucy had nailed down a thing of plywood and thrown a towel over it so it wouldn’t scrape and gouge.  Lucy sat in a chair, surrounded by papers.  A window was open right behind her, and scant sunlight shone through, dappling Lucy’s shoulders and highlighting her hair at the edges of her head.  It was a cool look.  Verona pulled her phone out of her pocket, and caught the picture.

“Door’s open,” Verona said.

“It’s hot and this place doesn’t have air conditioning,” Lucy said.  “And I don’t want to use too many runes for cooling in case that, I dunno, starts pulling in outside spirits?  Or establishes a connection to Kennet Others that can be traced back here?”

“Hmmm, I don’t think that’s a problem, so long as you keep the spirits and power draws small.”

“I want a massive cold wind spirit.  Give me snow in August,” Lucy groused.

“Probably easier to get a fan, if you want something more than what little spirits could do,” Verona said.

“Fans cost money.  Maybe Avery?  Think she could get away with buying one?” Lucy asked.

Verona shrugged.  “I don’t think it’s that expensive.  We spend more on snacks than some fans cost.”

“Mmm.”

“Morning visit to the Northwest shrines is done, tributes delivered.”

“Good.  That’s four shrines?”

“Four in the northwest, I liked the work you guys did, three northeast, two southwest, two southeast.”

Lucy nodded.  “That’s you this morning-”

“Late morning but yeah.”

“-me tonight, Avery tomorrow before noon, you tomorrow night, between noon and midnight, for tributes.”

Verona gave Lucy a thumbs up.  “Some local Others might participate too.”

“Gotta be careful,” Lucy noted.

“Yeah.  For sure.  But if an Other poisons the well or gets problematic, they might be tipping us off.  We’ll have to see.  The spirits seemed content.  I brought over some nice looking stones and stuff for building the next shrine, but one of our town spirit’s subdivided selves was saying something like we’re a little lopsided right now.”

Lucy turned ninety degrees on the chair and brought one foot up onto the seat, resting her knee on the edge of her ‘desk’.  “In more ways than one.  Avery had a moment last night.”

“Moment?”

“We were in the middle of doing one of the shrine rituals last night and she kinda… stopped.  I had to pick up the ritual where she left off.  She got really introspective, drew into herself, then I thought she might burst into tears.  She pulled it together, but after all that it felt a lot like she was forcing herself forward.”

Verona nodded, frowning a bit.  “Why?”

Lucy shrugged.  “Why are any of us feeling ground down?  It’s a lot.  And her mom just left for the week, took Sheridan…”

“Hmm.”

“Could be even thinking about the Pam-type stuff has her down.  Could be that you being with Jeremy and me arranging that date with Wallace is not as super great as she says it is?  But I’m not great at speculating.  When you- when you were at the cabin, alone, with the furs, our confirmed culprit upstairs…”

Lucy indicated the cube of furs in the living room, a short distance away.

“Yeah,” Verona said.  Her heartbeat picked up a bit, remembering that, feeling shadows of the associated emotions pressing in.  She focused on the problem at hand.

“…I tried to guess why you were acting weird, Snowdrop was saying you were super intense,” Lucy said.  “I’m a bit bummed out still that my guesses weren’t more on target.  It might be better not to guess, and address instead.  This is our time to look after Avery.  Like we looked after you.”

Verona nodded, thinking.  “Avery makes a big deal of outside support, right?  Connections?”

“Yeah.  Which is why it’s probably good she’s handling talking to Zed, Nicolette, and Liberty and those other guys.  She’s good at that.”

Verona deposited her bag on the edge of the desk, and got a soft drink and pepperoni sticks for Lucy, along with a foil-wrapped sandwich.

“Food, yay!  Thank you for backing me up.  Just gotta figure out how to help out Avery,” Lucy said.  She opened the sandwich and took a bite.

Verona got her own sandwich, one-third complete, and tore off a segment.  Shredded beef, cheddar, garlic sauce, spinach, and black olives on toasted white.

“Five more shrines to make-” Verona mused.

“Should take two more nights at the rate we’re going.”

“-appointment with our goblin kind-of-mayor made, and test run of this thing complete,” Verona said.  She unclasped the bracelet and went to put it on Lucy’s wrist.

“Nah, not my wrist.  I hate having stuff on my wrist.  Can’t even wear a watch without getting annoyed,” Lucy said.  She stuck out her leg, foot in the air.

Verona put it on Lucy’s ankle.  “Should work better this way, even.  It’s directional.  I’ll make two more.  It excludes anyone very close to you and it excludes other members of our trio.”

“Cool.”

Verona glanced over the old investigation notes that Lucy was reading.  “Planning for our Faerie woman?”

“Our possible-and-likely co-conspirator.”

Verona nodded.

“Want to prep for your talk with our goblin leader?  Want company?”

“Honestly?  I was going to wing it, I don’t want a repeat of my talk with the child services person, overhyping myself and trying to stick to stuff and getting tied up.  I’d rather improvise.”

Lucy made a face.

“And as for company, and hanging out with you… I love you, Lucy, you’re beautiful, I just took a picture of you and I want to paint it, you’re cool, you’re kind, you’re patient…”

“Get to it.”

“I’m down for some alone time.”

“You know, I’m really the one who should be a bit sick of you?  You’re hanging out in my space-”

“Yus, yus, this is true.”

“-and making a mess.  I had a Verona shirt on my pillow, when I stopped by my room.  There was one stuck between my bed and the wall-”

“Which one?”

“The one with the scallops I hate and the strappy- thing.”

“I was looking for that.”

“You wouldn’t have to look if you didn’t fling clothes in every random direction when you change.”

“I don’t fling… much.  More like I put stuff on the end of the bed and then move covers to pull on socks and it… migrates.”

“And I opened a little jar of makeup and it was hair.  On my desk, with my makeup stuff.”

“You gave me your spare jars.”

“I did, and somehow they found their way to my desk.  Near indistinguishable from the real thing until I opened them.”

Verona laughed.

“Verona, dear best friend, butthead, weirdo.  If you want alone time, go for it.  I’m down too.  I will sit here and hate the heat and think about how we’re going to question our two conspiracy aligned newcomers and the Faerie woman.  Love you.”

That last ‘love you’ felt like it was tacked on to soften the rest and bring them back to neutral after being critical.  Verona smiled.  “Sure.”

“What are you going to do?” Lucy asked.  “Avery’s at home, stuff with her dad, I think.  Sorting out furniture and talking about what they’re going to order and how rooms are going to be allocated.”

“Sounds fun.  I have stuff I want to do, but I should probably focus more on what I need to do.  The connection detection bracelets are a good middle ground.”

“Do what you’re good at, Ronnie.  If you want to do something, and you can tie it back to what we need to do, go do the thing.”

“If I took that route I think I’d end up way in left field, doing weird Verona stuff that barely had any relevance.”

Lucy took a bite just as Verona finished her sentence, and took a few seconds to chew, one finger held up, before replying, “Are you going to hit a stopping point like Ave did last night?”

“Mmmmaybe.”

“With everything else on your mind, for after Summer, and the same thing happening with Avery, I’m really worried we’re going to get close to the deadline, panic will set in, and mistakes will happen.”

Verona nodded.  She could imagine it.

“It’s okay if it sets us back a little, Ronnie,” Lucy said, leaning sideways against the back of the chair.  “It’s going to be more and more of this until Summer is over and we’re only a few days deep and we’re already hitting or seeing those stopping points?  Take care of you, first.  Do what you’re best at.  Do whatever it was that got you into this.  Whatever it takes to get through the next two weeks.”

“And making time for Avery while I’m at it.”

“Wasn’t getting to hang with us and do stuff with us part of your reason for doing this whole thing?”

“Trueee.  Yeah.  And you?  Are you taking your own advice?”

“I got into this so I could have the power to make more of a difference,” Lucy said.  “Fight injustice.”

“Dang straight.”

Lucy indicated the investigation notes.

“So long as you’re happy,” Verona told her friend.

“I’ll be happy when we deal with the culprits.”

Verona nodded.

“So what are you going to do, Ronnie?”

“Weird practice stuff?” Verona suggested, shrugging, already walking backward toward the kitchen, sandwich in one hand, shopping bag in the other.  “Want me to close the door?  I might make a bit of noise.”

Lucy shook her head.  “No need.  I’m going to pack up, go home, handle stuff.  Clean our room.  Talk to me or text me before you make any moves?  Come back before dinner.”

Verona gave Lucy a thumbs up.  “Watch your tracks!”

“Yep!”

As Lucy packed up, Verona unpacked.  She rummaged around the building, and found various things left by the house’s prior inhabitants, easily five years, ten years, or even longer ago.  Verona collected tools and things, and brought them to the kitchen.  They didn’t cook here, so the counter worked as an extended workshop space.

They’d brought over some stuff that was tricky to store at Lucy’s.  Like things that could theoretically blow up.  Verona found the bag of things from the alchemist practitioners that Jabber had scared off.  There were more copper pipes and an artificial heart from one of the Others killed.  Verona sorted it out, giving each segment its own space, and set bottles and containers at the back of the counter.

That stuff had to wait a bit.

Cutting board, worn out with wood almost gray.  She set it on the counter.  She had sandpaper in her bag, for smoothing the edges of the cubes in the connection bracelet.  She also had the dowels.  There was spare wood lying around, the feet from a piece of furniture that had been taken apart in a move and then ignored, either forgotten or unwanted.

Notes, art, and images she’d collected in her books went up on cabinets and the backsplash behind the counters.  Books, notebooks, and things she didn’t feel a pressing need for went onto the far end of the counter.  They were too tall for the shelf that was built hanging down from the upper cabinets, so she placed some against the wall and used a spare brick to help prop them up.

Then she paused.  She looked over at the makeshift desk Lucy had put together.

This wasn’t a kitchen she was borrowing.  Technically, there was nothing saying anyone would come in and reclaim it.  It wasn’t temporary, like her stay at Lucy’s was.

She found a rusty hammer, paused, and then smashed the shelf.

She paused again, backing away, thinking.

Even her room at home was temporary, it felt like.  Wasn’t hers, it felt like.  She’d wanted to do her walls purple and she’d been told no.  Then she’d had furniture in the way and she couldn’t do it anyway, and eventually, hopefully, she’d move out and take her furniture with her.

That was if she didn’t get stuck here, friends with Melissa, trying to escape by mechanisms that didn’t involve leaving.  Drugs.  Practice.  Getting left behind by Avery, by Lucy.

She missed her room badly but it wasn’t really hers.  She was willing to bet that when she got back, end of summer, her dad would still barge in.

She smashed the wood again.  Paint came away in the shape of the hammer’s head, tinted with rust.

Nobody told her not to do this.

She smashed again, then as it came away from the wall, she saw paint break free of the screwheads, found a screwdriver that fit, and unscrewed it.  It clattered down atop her books.

She put in new wood, adding height, scribbled down a note to get paint, and then put the shelf back up, now an inch closer to the counter.  With room for all the books.

This was a weird feeling.

The counter was L-shaped, and she left half the L for the others, not that she was firmly claiming the one half she was using.  She got the paper out and began sketching plans.

Fatigue was grease on the wheels that were turning right now.  Fatigue made it easier to cut loose, to think about turning the kitchen into a workshop, at least partially.  She was tired of so many things.

She was tired of the voice in the back of her head that nagged her, told her she’d started out so far ahead and she was behind, getting further behind, Lucy and Avery had a specialty and what the heck was she going to do?  It all sounded cool, she wanted to do it all, but practice was about establishment.  Commitment.  She couldn’t exactly commit to being an all-rounder, a toes-in-all waters type.

She took off the cabinet doors below the counter and set them aside.  The tools went beneath.  Nice.

Tired of not having resources when it counted.  Not having answers in time.  Of things costing money.  Requiring power.  Of being powerless.  Of the situation being out of her control because of that powerlessness.

It was a restless kind of tired, of the sort that pushed her to act.  To sort things out.  Things put in place.  Organizing in her own way.

Things to prep.  The rusty tools could be cleaned of rust and they’d probably be fine.  She’d have to figure out how to do that.  She’d need to study alchemy.  Then for enchantment…  If she inset something into the cutting board, that could be her enchantment surface.  The trick was getting the lines right at the perimeter.  Maybe a metal hoop or something.  A band of metal she could hammer in?  Then something white for the surface.  A plate?  A disc?  The higher the quality of material, the higher the quality of the enchantment.  Mrs. Graubard at the Blue Heron had had a ton of decent stuff.  The school had had stuff.

She picked up the cutting board and used the sandpaper to sand it while pacing, getting rid of splinters and grayness.

She was tired of running out of things and tired of not having power.  So she’d have to address that.  That would be a good focus for the enchantment.

Or the alchemy.

She set the cutting board down, making a mental note, oil, as she wiped it off.

Pipes, containers, a brass heart with a valve on it.  A tight cluster of tubes and pipes with vents and a bit of charred meat stuck to one.

She set the heart on the cutting board, on white paper.

Among her books, she had the diagram prepped for analyzing magic items.  Nicolette’s method of scattershot analysis.  She dipped a watercolor brush into ink, then water, then let watered down ink drop onto the diagram from above.  In some places, the water took priority, and the ink spread out to the edges of the circle, leaving it only slightly gray.  In other places, the ink remained in the center, dark, blotting the circle with near-black.

Mostly it was ambiguous.  An emphasis on breath, muscle, puissance, price.

The white paper she’d set the heart on was darkening, staining, and turning up at the edges, blackened, as she worked.

She shuffled her artwork, that she’d taken out of the book and had loose, eyes turned away, cutting the stack, redoing it… she worried it was a skewed set of items, because there were a lot of figure drawings and there was a lot of wangs and stuff.

She sorted out the pages and set out one, then turned it over.  She already had a sense of what it might be, because the page was heavy.

Half-finished, ink thick on the page, bubbling and cracked at different points because she’d put so much ink on that the ink had no paper to adhere to.  Half of a man’s face, twisted, eyes unfinished and done not as eyes but as concentric, unfinished circles, jittery and rough, anxiety and hollowness.  The face was white and the lines and strokes where she’d worked thin and shaky in their own way, and it was backed by a black circle she’d spent too much ink and time filling in, trying to get the edges perfect with unsteady hands.  The rest of the paper wasn’t blank and white, but had fingerprints and imprints from her hand and drips of ink.

Paper between the heart and the cutting board continued to bend, twisting.  It stained like something was leaking from the heart by drips, but she couldn’t see anything.

With the Sight, the heart was too much barrier, too much wrapping.  It could have been a nest of spiders, ready to erupt.

She’d had an inkling of a feeling of maybe digging into the alchemy stuff using this as a power source, but… price, darkness, staining, and the obvious effect on the paper.

“So, the obvious answer seems to be to leave you the heck alone,” Verona observed.  “I believe you’re cursed, brass heart.”

She dug a pan covered in cobwebs out of a cabinet below, and set it down upside-down on the counter before dusting it off.  Using pliers, she lifted the heart over to the pan and set it on top.

“What’s your story?” she asked it, arms folded.  “Are you another one of the casualties of the messed up alchemy stuff that’s been going on in the broader vicinity of Kennet?  Cig’s old master, Jabber, the first syringe that Edith got that let her extract the Doom, now you…”

She picked it up, turned the pot over, and placed it within.  She set the lid on the pot and put it aside, writing a note and weighing down the note so it wouldn’t move.  Then she surrounded it with salt, and then surrounded that with chalk.

Cursed heart inside.  Careful!

She surveyed the other stuff, testing pipes, and they didn’t hold the sheer cursed-ness that the heart did.  She still had to be careful.  Alchemy could blow up, as Cig’s backstory had suggested.

She opened her computer, plugged it in, and then browsed her way to the Athenum arrangement.  The page didn’t load.

“Friggggg!” Verona groaned.

She searched around some more, double checked emails between herself and Zed, and then slapped her forehead.

Atheneum with a E.  That didn’t seem like a word.  She typed in what she needed to type in, and logged in.

Alchemy Basics 1: Elemental Alchemy.  Texts converted from study notes for an apprentice alchemist.  Further studies required permissions she hadn’t been given, which needed the A-okay from Raymond, or a signed and sworn declaration that she had completed basic studies in Alchemy with an Alchemist, and received their firm and stated approval.

Verona groaned again.  She wanted to see the cool stuff she was working toward, not this basic, piddly crap.

The stuff confiscated from the alchemists Jabber had scared away had a lot of what she needed.

Practice was about pattern, and Alchemy meant turning that into a process of chemical, or material.  Verona could visualize using the pipes to form their own kinds of diagrams, like she’d drawn a spell circle, but instead of runes for fire, she’d have actual fire, or water, or boiling water, or smoke.  Instead of lines, she’d have pipes.

There was a natural flow, stuff starting at a power source and base material, and filtering or channeling through various setups, and even though it wasn’t stated in the material, she imagined a downhill flow for fluid and and uphill flow for gas.

The beginner test was for heating, with a secondary lesson for cooling.  Fire and cold.

Verona laid out the pipes before screwing anything in, and in place of an initial heat source, made the starting point the oven ring of the old stove.  She didn’t have everything she needed, so she used runes here and there, to generate effects, and attached the diagrams to the openings of the pipes, making notations here and there on brass pipes themselves.

She didn’t want fire gouting out everywhere, though.  She took a step back, considering.

Fire was boring, and it wasn’t relevant.

Smoke.  A slight adjustment to runes, pairing two parts air to one part fire, pipes pointed into a container, with insulation to keep smoke within.  She set up the pipes and tubing so they ascended, and set things below to help support that apparatus.

That completed lessons one and two.

Lesson three meant creating the refrigeration loop.  Drawing heat out of a vessel, putting it through the system.  One thing got hot, another got cold, and the limits were determined by the materials she was putting it through and containing it in, which in this case were her very-slightly-cursed brass pipework and stuff taken from the alchemists, and the bottles she’d bought.  She removed the casing that was for grip, covered in etching, and then built the loop.  Smoke came from the main setup, hooked to the oven and open valves that pointed into the setup and fed into the loop at the end of the counter.

One bottle to hold condensed smoke.  One bottle to hold… whatever the opposite of smoke was, condensed into a container.  She drew insulating seals on the outside of the containers.

Carefully, she leaned in past and around the hot brasswork and set about screwing on the cap over the bottle of smoke.  As she interrupted the diagrams and barriers by reaching over and past them, smoke began to leak out of the setup, filling the kitchen.

“Argh, no!” Verona protested, and the no was a bit croak-y with the hint of initial smoke in her throat.  She closed her mouth tight and held her breath, squinting while she worked.

She shut valves off, turned off the oven, and hurried to seal the other bottle, of non-smoke.

As she interrupted that diagram, the smoke cleared abruptly, pushed out of the room and out through the kitchen window and the window behind Lucy’s abandoned desk.

Okay then.  Verona smiled.

That was something useful.

Lucy had left her investigation notes out.  But as much as Verona wanted to follow her trains of thoughts and pursue ideas, she had to be careful with this stuff.  She made sure to clean up all runework with a wet paper towel and made triply sure everything was off, screwing the bottle of compressed, cool air closed.

Verona walked over, and then leaned over the desk, bottle held in two hands.

Cig’s notes.  Cig traveled to smoke and smokers.  The places he could go were limited by those avenues- he couldn’t appear anywhere a cigarette would be especially suspect.

A suspicious amount of smoke could be bait, and a bit of clean, cool air, contained in a jar?  Unscrew the cap and their little cigarette might not have a lot of avenues to move.

Verona cleaned up after herself, undoing part of the apparatus and laying things out clearly.  She considered returning to the process, and making multiple jars, but for that she needed containers.

This was a start.  Once she turned the cutting board into a bottom-tier enchantment surface and started working, that would be good.

She looked at another segment of counter, empty except for some papers and the chalk she’d set down.

Her counter wasn’t full.  There was something that was supposed to go in this workspace and she felt the lack.  It was something that had come up on day one and they’d never resolved it.  The lack of it was conspicuous, and it was relevant.

The Hungry Choir had been fabricated too.  Not with enchantment, not with alchemy.  Yalda’s power had been put into a doll and there had been enough there to pull out the image of her and use it as a seed to begin the Incarnate Ritual.

Conjuring and summoning.  Creating Others.  Edith, in her way, had been created, shaped.

Verona dug in the front of her bag, found the mask in three pieces, all jammed in together, and set them down.  Later.  Once she knew what she was doing.  When she’d earned it again.

And to earn it again, there were other things that needed doing.  Things she needed to tackle.

She started on her next projects.

All things had a price.  A bit of heat, taken from one space, made that other space colder, for the lack.  A little echo with a stupid hat vacating a bottle freed that bottle up for other purposes.

There was only so much time in the day, only so much she could do.  Time was a resource too and it was slipping away.  They had two weeks and a day.

“I wanted to check with you, if-“

“If I wanted Sir?” Verona asked.

“Yeah,” Jeremy said, over the phone.  “How’d you know?”

“I follow people’s stuff online.  You posted Sir pictures on Go Foto Yourself, and you tagged Melissa, and oh, look at that, she’s buying cat stuff.”

“She’s jumping the gun, because I told her, you have priority if you want Sir, you’ve helped a lot, you gave me info-”

“It’s fine, Jer.  That’s Melissa.”

“I’ll ask you straight.  Do you want Sir?”

“I can’t, or I shouldn’t, I dunno,” Verona said, shaking her head.  Maybe Jasmine would cave and say yes but Jasmine’s was temporary and after that temporary stay…

Back to Dad’s.

“What are you doing, Jer?” Verona asked, talking while walking, phone to her ear.  “You love Sir.  He’s a top notch cat.”

“Most cats are.”

“Exactly, yes, of course!  Obviously!  So why would you do without, guy?  This is primo material for manipulating a certain female friend of yours.  It’s the ace in the hole for arguments, it’s cred, it makes her want to hang out with you even more.”

“Give me your objective opinion, will me handing Sir to an owner who needs something to take care of mean this female friend doesn’t want to hang out with me anymore?”

“It might!  This signals a serious lack of judgment in my books.  Part of it depends how bad your excuse is.”

“It was never going to be a permanent thing, I told you- her, that.”

“Mehhh.  Weak answer, verdict looking shaky.”

“I can’t tell how serious you are.”

“Deflecting, shakier…”

“My mom said I couldn’t.  Final answer, she said, I’d be grounded if I nagged her about it.”

Verona sighed audibly.

“Are you more upset about this than I am?”

“I’m upset you aren’t upset.”

“I came to terms with having to give him up weeks ago.  My mom was pretty firm.”

“Ugh.”

“You could go to Melissa’s.  You recommended I talk to her and check in, didn’t you?  Doesn’t that mean you talk to her sometimes?”

“Not so much.  I had a dream involving her once, I don’t want it to be prophetic.”

“Right.  Uh huh.  Look, if you don’t want Sir, and I can’t take him…”

“Yeah.  Fine.  Melissa’s fine.  She’s excited, looks like.”

“Yep.”

“He’ll be happy and loved and cared for and being a pet owner will probably be good for her, but he won’t be a thing we have in common anymore.”

“Guess not,” Jeremy said.  “Now you’re bumming me out.  I already adjusted all the settings in my brain, imagined this moment coming up, and you’re making it hard again.”

“Good.  Should’ve tried harder, I think.  But you’re fine, we’re fine.  Maybe we can go for a walk sometime, find more strays.”

“I think my mom would flip so hard her shoes would come off.”

Verona laughed.  “So let’s do it.”

“Sure.  Sure, that sounds good.  Talk about life and stuff.  I liked that.  During the figure drawing.”

“Cool,” Verona said.  “You do that with your other friends?”

“Figure drawing?”

“Talking.”

“Nah.  Is it weird if that’s a thing between us and it’s never been a thing with guys I’ve been friends with for five years?”

“I dunno!  But work on that.  Get Wallace to do a sexy pose for you on a beach towel and ask him about life goals and the dumb things our hormones make us do.”

“Dumb things like taking your advice and getting my guy friend to pose- on a beach towel?”

“Yeah.  Totally!  And yeah.  Is your mom in earshot?  Is that why you didn’t want to say the word?”

“My dad.  Anyway, look, I’m going to go spend time with Sir before Melissa shows up with her parents and sticks him in a cage to bring to her place.  I’ll-“

“Send me pictures!” she insisted, as he finished his sentence, “-send you pics.  Greedy.”

He hung up with that.  She put the phone in her pocket.

Because she’d continued the call on her own, she’d overshot her goal.  She walked around the block and circled around.  It had the double effect of letting her keep better tabs on the Others following her.

She was pretty sure it was Lis again.  Lis’s whole job was supposed to be keeping the perimeter clear, but it sure felt like Lis was devoting most of her energy to keeping tabs on the three of them.

It was starting to feel more dangerous, the way Lis lurked.  That it was lasting this long, that it was this intense…

Verona adjusted her bracelet, then jogged the rest of the way to Avery’s house.

Lis peeled away.  The bracelet went still.

She hit the doorbell.

There were shouts inside, a back-and forth dialogue.  She heard ‘doorbell’ uttered once.

It went on for a minute, and there was no sign of any voices getting closer to the door.

She hit the doorbell again.

A third voice joined the exchange, and in the mix of back-and-forth stuff it sounded like they were guessing who was at the door and trying to assign responsibility.  ‘Amber’, ‘Kinley’.  Theorizing on whether Avery’s Grumble had a girlfriend, if she’d be at the door.

Verona laid her forehead against the door and waited a bit, seeing how this next leg of conversation developed.

It sounded like Kerry Kelly was now taunting Declan for not getting a girlfriend.  It sounded pretty mean-spirited coming from a six year old, actually.

Verona started mashing the button over and over.

Running footsteps.  The door opened.

Kerry Kelly looked up at Verona, made a face, and sighed.  “Who are you?”

“Verona.  Avery’s friend.”

“Well I thought so,” Kerry said.  “Why though?”

“Because… I want to hang out with Avery?  Can you call her?”

“Why would you want to hang out with Avery?”

“Avery!” Verona called out, leaning past Kerry, who pushed at Verona to get her out of the way.  “Yo, Ave!”

Avery came down the stairs.

“Go, shoo, play your game,” Avery told Kerry.  She remained there, standing on the stairs, looking a bit tense.  “Did anything happen?”

“Stuff happened but nothing emergency level,” Verona said.  “Everything cool here?”

“I’m babysitting again, my dad’s bringing furniture from the store the next town over, and that has to be put together, so that’s my evening gone.  I guess it depends what you mean by ‘cool’.”

“Right, yeah.  I brought snacks.  Figured I couldn’t go wrong if I brought extra stuff.”

“Snacks!?” Kerry raised her voice, turning.

“Play your game,” Avery said, dead serious, pointing at the screen, where a bunny-headed person was trying to spray paint a wall.  A bunch of dice glowed red at the bottom of the screen.

“But!”

“Play the video game or turn it off,” Avery said.  “Let me talk with my friend.  Maybe I’ll share after.  Come in.”

Verona eased the door closed.

The chaos of before wasn’t there, but there was music playing upstairs and the game was making noise and the television was blaring game music while warning alarms went off each time one of the dice flashed red.  There was noise in the background and as Verona followed Avery into the kitchen, she could make out more of the noise.  Avery’s grandfather sat on a patio chair with a built-in sun shade, a radio beside him.

“…Liberal government is making new announcements about climate policy, in what’s bound to be pandering to niche groups at the cost of needed Albertan revenue…”

Avery’s grandfather snoozed away, head lolling back, mouth wide enough open a bird could have settled in it.  The game noises blared, television turned up about twice as loud as Verona might have ever figured she’d get away with at her dad’s.

Everything had been motion before.  Pow, pop, bang, zap, all with its big spiky speech balloons and bright colors and people yelling.  Stomp stomp stomp, kitchen noises, sounds of glee, complaining, lots of complaining…

“Avery!” Declan called from upstairs.

But there was no motion.  People stayed put.

And those spiky speech balloons still felt like they were there.  Hanging in the air filling up the rooms, many of them wordless.

Avery got out bowls.  She asked, quiet, “So no emergency?”

“Nah.”

“I thought you were seeing our mayor of monster town.”

“Rescheduled for tomorrow.  There were things I wanted to wrap up.  I asked him to bring Charles around.  I want to ask questions about some of the stuff that Charles was going to bring up.”

Avery nodded.  “Whatever makes sense, I guess.  Let me know if you need me, I’ll extricate myself.”

“Wrist,” Verona said.

“What?”

“Wrist, give me your wrist.”

Avery extended her hand, fist clenched.

Verona put the third of the bracelets on it, where it joined a friendship bracelet, charm bracelet, and ribbon.

“Another thing around my wrist,” Avery said.

“I’m afraid it’s your aesthetic,” Verona said.  She pulled another thing out of her pocket.  Another friendship bracelet, with lavender, red, and orange.  She tied it on.  After carving the bracelets out of the dowel, it had been her big project.  Not magical, just… needed.

Avery put her hand on her wrist, covering it, then smiled.

“You don’t have to stick around,” Avery said.  “I’m helping Declan with homework, and it’s pain.”

“I think I do gotta stick around,” Verona said.  “I’ll help, we’ll endure together, how’s that?”

Avery smiled.

They ascended the stairs, putting the noise of talk radio and Kerry’s game behind them, entering the spiky speech bubbles of Declan’s music of choice.  Avery gave Verona an apologetic look.

“What are we studying?” Verona asked.

“Biology,” Declan said, clearly unhappy.  “You any good?”

“Dunno!  Let’s find out,” Verona said.  She picked up a test.  “A lot of this is going right over my head.”

“Mine too,” Avery admitted.  “We’re working through it together.”

“But,” Verona said.  “One thing I think I’m pretty excellent at, is not so much learning the subject as learning to take the test.  Look.  Here, how this question is worded.  And how the question before it is worded?  One’s in the teacher’s own words, and one is probably taken from a textbook or teaching material, see?”

“Yeah, sure,” Declan said.  “She’s lazy.”

“And look at the answers.  Your teacher, Declan, has a writing style.  You can tell what the actual answer is and which ones she filled in.  I bet I could get a decent grade just with that alone.”

“Does this really help, though?” Avery asked.

“It doesn’t hurt!  Check it out, once you get a sense of what she’s doing, you can look for why.  What does she want, right?  What’s she trying to communicate?”

“I think we’re going way sideways from actually learning the material here,” Avery noted.

“Nah, no, see, it’s like a game.  A test where you’re figuring out the test as you figure out the contents of it, right?” Verona asked, “You like games, Declan?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, and Avery, you kinda like games.”

“Enh?  Sports.”

“And the Promenade puzzle?  You were trying to figure out the rules, weren’t you?”

“Promenade puzzle?” Declan asked.

“That, Declan, is something we can talk about once we’ve figured out what game the designer of this test is trying to play.  So as we go over this quiz… read it over first, right, get a sense of it, see if any questions later hint at earlier answers.  Then figure out how the questions are phrased, the subject covered.  Genus, species, that should ring a bell.”

“Yeah,” Declan said.

“Tell me if I’m off track, if I’m being annoying,” Verona told Avery.

“I’m willing to give it a shot.  What we were doing before was a slog.”

“Cool, and then after, we can talk Promenade, and pick your brother’s brain for that… if that’s cool.”

“Yeah,” Avery said.  “But I think you’ll have to handle phrasing it and explaining it.”

“So long as you remember the particulars,” Verona said.

“What’s the Promenade?”

“Focus,” Verona said.  “Read over the test.  Ignore the answers, and what’s right or wrong…”

She glanced at Avery, gauging, judging.  The tension was still there, but was it a little bit less?

“This is applicable to you too, right?  Study the system.”

“Yeah,” Avery said, an iota less tense as she said it, her eyes on the test Declan was hunched over.

Play to our strengths, cover each other’s weaknesses.  Get everything ready that we can.  I’ve got some answers to Lis and Cig.  Bracelet and smoke bottles.  Next we’ll need to deal with the goblin on top and the Faerie from below.

“Come with me tomorrow,” Verona told Avery.

Avery nodded, without saying anything.

Next Chapter