No Dominion: A Garrison Report

The Rising Green

“The Rising Green” takes place at the same time MOUNTAIN ECHOES (Book Eight of the Walker Papers) ends, but contains no spoilers for that book.

The pull came from under her skin, a faint itching sensation that wouldn’t go away. It reminded Suzy of the chicken pox, which she hadn’t had until she was eleven, so she remembered it all miserably well. It wasn’t that bad, but it was enough to wake her up. Suzy crunched her eyes shut and flung one elbow over them, rubbing her forearm with the other hand. It itched. She ignored it, or tried to. Then she lifted her elbow and looked at her clock, illuminated by a soft green glow.

A quarter to midnight. Suzy dropped her elbow over her eyes again. The green glow lingered behind her eyelids. She was supposed to be up in six hours for an early-morning study group, preparing for a test the next afternoon. She didn’t need the study group. She was going to ace the test anyway. But study groups were the only thing Aunt Mae would let her out of the house for, ever since The Halloween Incident. It had been almost six months, and Aunt Mae still referred to it that way. The Halloween Incident.

Suzy’s parents had never managed to keep her grounded for more than a weekend. Not that she was doing that thing, the omg my parents were so much cooler than you thing, because although it was true, it was also true that just because Suzy was fifteen didn’t mean she was a complete asshole. Her aunt, her father’s sister, had stepped up like crazy when Suzy’s parents were murdered, and she was doing the best she could with suddenly being a parent.

It was also true that while her parents had been alive, Suzanne Melody Quinley had never done anything like walk out of school at the last bell, get on a bus, and head a hundred miles out of town without any kind of warning. She’d had to see Detective Joanne Walker. It had literally been life-and-death important. Aunt Mae would never really understand that, but then, Suzy hadn’t tried very hard to make her. She’d deserved to be grounded. Maybe not for six months, but still, she’d deserved it.

And she was never going to get back to sleep with the green shimmer peeping through her elbow or her thoughts going circles on the topic of The Halloween Incident. Once she started remembering the zombies it was all over anyway. Suzy sat up with a sigh and threw the covers aside.

The room lit up, soft green with glimmers of white and gold. Suzy stared at her legs, then pulled the covers over them and lay back down, her eyes squeezed shut again.

She knew—she’d known for some time now, of course—that she was the granddaughter of a god. The daughter of a demi-god, which made her think she should be called a semi-god herself, but it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that her grandfather’s legacy gave her power, more power than she knew what to do with. She’d deleted someone from the time line once, with that power. Other times she’d seen dozens of futures, and had tried to help people pick the right path to the only safe one.

And every time, she’d burned, blazed, with brilliant green magic. That was the color of her power, as it was the color of Cernunnos’s and of Herne’s. She knew what using that magic felt like. Breath-taking. Liberating. Exciting. Terrifying.

It was not a gentle glow or itchiness in the middle of the night. Something was wrong. Extra-wrong, and when magic went wrong the only person Suzy knew to go to was Detective Walker. Who was in Seattle. Where Aunt Mae had forbidden Suzy to ever go again without adult accompaniment.

She tried, briefly, to envision going into Aunt Mae’s room, waking her aunt up, and asking to be taken to Seattle, all while glowing like a firefly. She failed. Which meant she had to go to Seattle alone. Again. While glowing green.

She was going to be grounded for the rest of her life.

The whole idea made her skin itch even more. Suzy rubbed her arms ferociously, then stopped when the magic coursing under her skin brightened with the activity. It was no use panicking, she told herself as she threw the covers off again and got up to find clothes. At least she didn’t have to turn the lights on. She could navigate by the glow of her skin. and wanted to bite her arms by the time she found some jeans, like she could suck the magic and the itching away as if it was poison. There was a bus at a quarter past midnight, the last one heading to Seattle. She could probably catch that. If she had an extra minute at the bus station she could even call ahead to warn Detective Walker she was coming.

She dragged her jeans on, hopping around the room when she lost her balance tugging them up. The mirror caught her attention a couple of times, reflecting an image so weird it looked like it belonged on the cover of a fashion magazine. Green highlights came from within, making her wheat-pale hair glow emerald, especially near the roots. It faded out to almost white around shoulders mostly bared by a spaghetti-strapped nightgown that wrinkled at her waist as she pulled her jeans all the way up and buttoned them. The light dimmed considerably, so her eyes were just big and dark, no longer reflecting green. She would need a hoodie to keep from attracting attention. And maybe sunglasses, because now that she’d noticed them, her eyes were starting to itch too. Suzy made a face at the mirror and turned away from it, looking for a shirt and shades.

Her fingers were two inches from the hoodie when the air shriveled up against her skin, turned cold, and pulled her backward through a hole the size of a pinhead.

There was power. That was all she could tell. Power latching on to her own magic, hauling her up a slick emerald path full of loops and twists and turns, like a roller coaster. More like a waterslide. She’d never liked waterslides. The joinings weren’t smooth enough and the water wasn’t deep enough, so she always fell out of the inner tubes and scraped herself up on the joints. This one was smooth, though, and fast enough that the friction made her skin burn. It burned the itch away, which helped. It also buffed her like she was a diamond—an emerald, she guessed—so that she wasn’t so much glowing as shining. Like a star, if stars were green.

She ran up against another pinhead-sized hole, and got shoved through head first onto a shag carpet floor.

For a minute she couldn’t see anything. There was light, lots of it, but it was all coming from her, drowning out everything else. She wasn’t even afraid yet, but something was bubbling deep inside her chest. A warning, one that ran deeper than anything Suzy had ever known. A warning that up until now she’d used her magic for others, but that she had no sense at all of the depths she could plumb if it was herself she needed to protect. It gave her confidence, though at the same time it ran so deep it was itself a little scary. She was the child of gods, and no one in their right mind messed with gods.

Weirdly, the thought calmed the deep warning inside her. There couldn’t be much that threatened gods. Joanne Walker did, but Joanne knew where Suzy lived. She would have called if she needed her, not magicked her away. Anybody else who thought they could hold even a semi-god like Suzy was either very, very powerful, or very, very dumb. She could give them the benefit of the doubt for a little bit, and assume they were dumb.

The itching had stopped. She thought that was the other reason she wasn’t going absolutely crazy with fear and anger. She’d fought zombies, after all. She’d gotten through the horror of her parents’ murders, and then she’d watched her birth father sluff off mortality to become the Green Man. She thought she could handle anything as long as she didn’t want to scratch her skin off.

Joanne was always using her powers to discover things. Suzy’s didn’t work like that, or at least, she didn’t think they did. But at the same time, she felt confined somehow, like she’d been pulled into something with a specific size and shape. She stretched out her hands and encountered resistance. A flare of her own magic shot around that sensation, exploring it in the same way Suzy had explored parks when she was little: up, down, under, over, around, in. That had been what her mother called organic exploration, using her whole person to learn the world. This was the same thing, except Suzy’s wholeness included magic now.

She’d never explored a pentagram before, though. It surrounded her, wobbling with paltry human power. It would barely hold a mouse, much less her. Suzy laughed. Someone would have the scare of their life and end up grateful that they’d conjured a polite modern teenage granddaughter of a god into their flimsy pentagram instead of one of the much, much worse things that were out there. She would start by shattering the pentagram, just to show them how much trouble they might have been in. She reached out to flick it away with a fingertip.

Just before she did, a high-pitched, familiar voice squeaked, “Suzy?”

Suzy froze mid-motion, then moved her hand above her eyes, like shading them would help her see out of the pentagram when she was the one emitting the light. “Kiseko?”

“Holy crap holy crap holy crap holy cra—” The litany came in a whisper, followed by an even softer, “How do we shut this thing down, Rob? That’s Suzy, holy crap it’s not a nature god you dork it’s my friend Suzy how did we call Suzy OMG WE DID MAGIC—”

The last part was overrun by a boy’s intense, soft voice: “Kiseko, be quiet or we’ll wake your parents up—”

“Well I told you we should’ve done this at your house, your parents are all big into the paranormal thing—”

“First, my parents would have noticed us raising a pentagram in the basement,” the boy said very dryly, “and second, they’d ground me until I was fifteen for messing with this stuff without supervision. Kiseko, stop panicking, you’re just feeding the power circle with your emotion. That’s not Suzanne Quinley, is it?”

Kiseko blurted, “Yes!”

The unseen boy groaned and muttered something Suzy couldn’t hear, then stepped up to the pentagram, putting his hands against it. Suzy could see him then, a tallish boy of twelve or thirteen, with a serious, apologetic expression. “Aunt Jo’s going to kill me,” he announced. “I’m really sorry. We’ll get you out of there in a minute.”

“Who are you? What are you—oh, nevermind. Kiseko talked you into this, didn’t she?” Suzy sat down and put her face in her hands, not sure if she should laugh or cry. “Kiso, what did you do?”

“Oh, I just wanted to try a little magic,” Kiseko said with an impatient stomp of her foot. “Robert, why won’t this thing come down?”

“You’re putting too much energy into it,” Robert repeated. “You need to calm down.”

“Kiseko,” Suzy said into her hands, “doesn’t do calm. She’s Kiseko Anderson, Superhero.” Which was nicer than super-emo, which was what Suzy’s mother used to call Kiseko. She used to say that Kiseko was hysteria waiting to happen. She’d said it with a smile, but she hadn’t been wrong. The first time Suzy had met her, Kiseko had been sprawled full-length on her belly, sobbing piteously into her arms. There had been no one else around. Suzy, concerned, had crouched to ask what was wrong.

Kiseko, seven years old and dripping snot, had lifted her head, discovered her parents had gone inside rather than remain on the street to observe her tantrum, and shut off the waterworks as if they’d never happened. Her face wasn’t even red from crying. Kiseko had sat up, wiped her nose, and shrugged. “I don’t want to live in Seattle. My parents made me move here.”

“Oh! You’re the new family? I watched you move in. I’m Suzy.” Suzy had offered her hand like a little adult. Kiseko had burst out laughing and hugged Suzy instead. Overwhelmed, Suzanne had thought Kiseko was the strongest, wonderful est, and most dramatic person she’d ever met. They’d made friends, been friends, through everything, right up until Suzy’s parents and four high school students had been murdered.

Kiseko hadn’t come to school for a week, not even for the memorial services. She’d barely been able to say goodbye when Aunt Mae had come to take Suzy to Olympia. It wasn’t that Suzy blamed her. It was only that she’d never seen Kiseko take the world at anything less than full tilt, and her friend’s pallor and quietness still haunted her.

It wasn’t in evidence now, thought. Kiseko tossed her hair proudly. “Superhero nothing. Superwitch! I built a power circle! I still don’t get why you’re in it.” She squinted through the brightness at Suzy. “Or why you’re glowing.”

Robert mumbled, “She doesn’t know about y—” and then more clearly said, “If you don’t know about Suzanne, why did you want to try magic in the first place? How did you know it was real?”

Kiseko stopped with arms akimbo and looked at Robert like he was about half his actual age. “The zombies, hello? OMG, don’t tell me you didn’t even notice the zombies—!”

“Sure, it’s just most people—”

Kiseko blew an exasperated breath. “Most people are morons, hello! As if the entire city of Seattle could get turned into a film set without, like, everybody noticing? As if some director would think digging up my back yard and resurrecting my dog was worth the time and money? As if Suzy would just show up at my house to console me after we had to bury Fluffy again? Actually, Suzy, seriously, what were you doing there? I was all, like, emotional. I forgot to ask.”

Suzy peered through her fingers at her best friend, who still stood arms akimbo, but now with her attention directed away from Robert and at Suzanne. As far as Suzy had known, Kiseko wholeheartedly believed Suzy had shown up at Kiseko’s house a little after midnight after Halloween simply so Kiseko would have somebody’s shoulder to sob on as they re-buried their beloved family pet. Not once, not once, had Kiseko ever suggested that she thought there was any other reason for Suzy to show up in Seattle beyond Kiseko needing her at that very moment in time. But now light was starting to gleam in her eyes. “OMG, what were you doing there, and does it have to do with me, like, summoning you?”

“Were you summoning me on Halloween?” Suzy asked faintly.

“No, just now! OMG! Are you dangerous?”

Suzy’s response was so even, so steady, that she barely even knew it for her own voice: “You have no idea.”

For the first time since Suzy had arrived, Kiseko actually went silent, her eyes round and her throat moving as she swallowed heavily. When she spoke again, it was hardly more than a squeak: “So should I, like, not let you out of there?”

“You couldn’t keep me in if you tried. Kiso, what are you doing? Who is this boy?” Suzy’s somber tone changed as she squinted again at Robert. “You’re too young to be her boyfriend, right? I mean, no offense, but you look like you’re twelve.”

“I am. I’m Robert Holliday. My dad—”

“Detective Holliday? Detective Walker’s partner?”

“Yeah.” Robert looked apologetic. “If I’d had any idea she was going to summon you…”

“I wasn’t summoning her! I wanted a nature god, because it’s like April and it’s snowing and I don’t want my sixteenth birthday party to be in a snowstorm—!” Kiseko broke off with a small noise of dismay. “Um, Suzy, are you a nature god?”

“No.” Suzanne flicked a finger against the power circle, shattering the shields. “But my father is.”

Kiseko fell over with a thud. Suzy winced and stepped out of the circle—Kiso had drawn on the carpet with chalk, her mother was going to kill her—to help Kiso sit up. “My head’s ringing,” Kiseko mumbled. “It feels like somebody broke a crystal glass inside it.”

“I think I kind of did. Hang on, I’ll get you some aspirin.” Suzy stepped over Kiseko and scurried to the bathroom, which hadn’t changed at all since she’d last been there. Well, the towels had probably been changed, but otherwise it, and the rest of the house Suzy glimpsed, looked the same as it had six months earlier. That was a relief. Houses should stay the same, even if the people in them changed. She came back with water and aspirin, which Kiseko took as obediently as she ever did anything. Then she gave Suzy a gimlet stare, though Suzy didn’t know what a gimlet actually was, and said, “Well?”

“No, wait, first I want to know how you know Detective Holliday’s son.” Suzy sat down between Kiso and Robert, close enough that their cross-legged knees were all touching.

“I summoned you,” Kiseko muttered. “I should get to ask the questions. We’re in chess club together.”

Suzy eyed Robert. “You’re twelve and in high school?”

“I come over from the middle school because I can beat everybody there too easily.”

“Oh. Cool. Okay, um.” Suzy pulled her hair over her shoulder and twitched into a nervous braid, then undid it again. “Um.”

“Suzanne’s biological father is Herne, a nature god,” Robert volunteered into Suzy’s nervous silence. “She didn’t find out until last January, when her parents were killed. He was going to sacrifice her so he could take over his father’s position as a wild god, but Aunt Jo stopped him. Also Suzy really, really helped with the zombies last Halloween. Like, she got her grandfather, the wild god, to ride early and save Seattle from them.” He cleared his throat uncomfortably as Suzy and Kiseko both goggled at him. “Is that right?”

“Not…exactly,” Suzy said faintly. “But that’s…pretty close. How do you know…how did you…?”

Robert looked slightly apologetic. “Dad and Aunt Jo talked about it where I could hear, is all. And you looked like you were having a hard time getting started so I thought I’d help.” His face was turning increasingly red. “Sorry.”

“No, that’s okay. That, um. Yeah. Pretty much.” Suzy cast a tentative glance at Kiseko, whose eyes and mouth formed nearly perfect O’s.

“And you didn’t tell me?” Kiso demanded in a whisper. At least she had the presence of mind to whisper. Her parents weren’t going to know what to do when they woke up and found Suzy, who was supposed to be in Olympia, in their basement instead. “You didn’t tell me?” Kiseko asked more loudly.

“It’s not that easy to tell!” Suzy protested. “I wanted to, I just, well, I mean, how? How do you say, “Hey, best friend, turns out I’m like only partly human and by the way my biological father is the one who killed everybody at the high school that day?””

Kiso went white. “What?”

“Oh, God.” Suzy ducked her head and shook her hair so it fell to hide her face as she whispered, “Yeah. I guess Robert didn’t mention that part. He killed my parents, too. He was crazy,” she whispered apologetically through her hair. “I don’t even know all of it, but he was…he was like mostly human for hundreds of years, and it kind of made him crazy. I think. And he was trying to align things so he could become a whole god, when really he was supposed to be a half-god. It was awful. He was awful. It was a mess. I didn’t want to talk about it. And I can’t really anyway, because who would believe it?”

“I would have!”

Suzy looked up through the curtain of her hair. Kiseko’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright, either with offense or anger. “Would you have?” Suzy asked. “I mean, up until half an hour ago when you went crazy stupid and did magic and summoned me, would you have?”

“Well—well you could’ve told me anyway!”

“Aunt Jo says people work really hard at explaining magic away when it happens,” Robert said quietly. “Kiseko’s different to start with, because she didn’t believe the Hollywood story about the zombies—”

“What about you?” Suzy asked. “How come you’re even here?”

“My dad is a medium. He sees ghosts,” Robert clarified. “Mom’s a wise woman. My family’s all kind of cool with this stuff.”

“And Kiseko found this out how?”

“I was reading a book about magic before chess club started, a couple weeks ago. Rob said it wasn’t very good if I really wanted to learn about magic. At first I thought he was kidding but he looked so serious. So then I got curious. So you’re magic? Do something magic!”

“I don’t—it’s not like that. Most of my magic is seeing the future.”

Kiseko lunged forward, grabbing Suzy’s arms. “OMG! Can you tell me what college I’m going to? Can you tell me if I get married? How many kids do I have? No, wait, am I totally cool like Isadora Duncan and I go around having lots of kids but never getting married—”

“—and getting your neck snapped by a scarf catching on a motor car wheel,” Robert mumbled.

“—oh, not like that part, jeez,” Kiso said without catching her breath. “Can you tell me—”

“No!” Suzy held her hands up. “It doesn’t work like that. The future doesn’t work like that. There are millions of different ones, all based on whatever choices you make day by day. Sometimes something goes wrong and a whole lot of the futures turn bad. That’s why I came up here at Halloween, I had to warn Detective Walker that her futures had all gone bad. And she managed to squeeze into the one that hadn’t. So I can’t, like, read your palm, Kiso. And I wouldn’t want to if I could. I don’t want to know what’s going to happen, and I bet you don’t really either.”

Kiskeo stuck her chin out, then slumped back to sitting. “I guess not. Well, what good is magic you don’t want to use? And why did we get you when we were trying to call up a nature god? I mean, because of your biodad, I guess, but—”

“Or maybe,” Robert said worriedly, “maybe her magic responded so she could come along and protect us from that.”

Suzy turned to see a slender earthy figure unfurling from the floor.

It didn’t look evil. Not in the first few seconds, anyway. It looked quite beautiful, dark and barky, with soil spilling through the breaks in the bark. Leaves shimmered down its back like hair, and it stretched, sending the scent of new-turned earth and crushed greenery through the basement.

A deeper, older smell wafted along, too. A smell of decay, of old earth rotting and dead things falling to pieces in it. Suzy thought of zombies, and of Detective Walker’s panic, and feeling very stupid, she got up and put herself between the rising green and her friends. She didn’t know how to fight or protect or any of the things Detective Walker did. But she was magic, and that had to make her a better match for the than Robert or Kiseko were.

Robert leaned forward past her calf and slapped his hand onto the pentagram chalked onto the carpet. Suzy felt a hint of strength from him, a promise of power, but—”Kiseko!” Robert hissed. “You drew it, you have to activate it!”

“Actiwhat? Oh. Oh!” Kiseko flung herself forward too, making Suzy feel like an Egyptian god statue, flanked by two low-lying animals. Kiseko’s energy sparked out, not at all organized or well-presented, but it did the job. The pentagram came to life again, still a flickering feeble thing like it had been when Suzy arrived. Suzy took a jerky step forward, lifting her hands to add her own strength to the pentagram.

The thing inside the circle lashed out, smashing a branchy arm into Suzy’s chest. She staggered, but only a step. Only enough to be out of the pentagram’s reach, instead of knocked aside like she should have been. Kiseko squeaked with delight, but Suzy’s chest felt caved in, like she couldn’t quite breathe anymore. It wasn’t just the hit, either. It was the knowledge that flooded her with the ancient nature spirit’s touch. Once it had been neutral, neither intentionally caring nor harming. Not anymore. Sometime, so long ago it barely remembered the neutrality, it had tasted blood. Been fed blood, until the earth itself was poisoned. Until the very world was riddled with spots of hate, alive with it, waiting for magic to draw it out so it could attack.

It was hungry. It wanted youth, vitality, magic, blood. Its spindly branch arms shot out, growing at an impossible rate, but they bypassed Suzy and went straight for Kiseko and Robert.

“No!” Suzy flung her hands out like she could stop the green with a word, with an action. Like she could undo the last minutes of time, because she could. She had, before, or almost. She had unraveled a man from time once before, taken the zombie corpse he had become and undone him all the way back to conception. It had been easy, like pulling a dangling thread from a shirt, and it had popped at the end, satisfying sound of the thread snapping. She couldn’t do it again: something stopped her. Time resisted her, like it had been changed once recently and refused to be again, even for a semi-god.

Still, her magic was alive now, its own threads snapping and weaving through the air. Futures shone along them, mostly dark and deadly. Kiseko, infected by the ancient earth spirit, eyes blazing and hands becoming stretched branches like the green’s. Robert falling under that attack. Suzy running, Suzy fighting, Suzy dying: she cast away a thousand futures, searching for one where they won. Time might refuse to listen, but the future was hers to choose. She held onto the thought, leaning hard against the earth magic’s hunger. It would have everything, it said, because it was the endless turn and tide of seasons, of life. It was the rising green, and would never die.

But Suzy’s power was green and rising too.

She pushed, pushed as hard as she knew how, using just her mind. Pushed them toward the rare and faltering futures where they survived. Only a handful among hundreds, but she wouldn’t let her friends die. If the green wanted a conduit, it could try her, daughter of gods.

It hesitated like a living thing, tempted by her strength. Tempted by the ancient blood inside her, by that tie to something not of the world. Then its hesitation ended and it came for her. Suzy opened her arms and drew it in, tasting the most ancient scraps of earth that tied her to her demi-god father and the wild thing that was her grandfather. Herne was of this earth, as Suzy was, but Cernunnos came from far beyond, and there was something in the rising green that was as old and foreign as Cernunnos. It howled triumph as Suzy called it to herself, and it crashed into her, taking up lodging in her mind. Safe, certain, a part of her: it belonged, in a dark and frightening way.

Darkness. Utter and complete, overwhelming, and beyond the darkness, silence. Wind and breaking branches had howled and snapped a minute earlier, though Suzy hadn’t heard them until they were gone. Light returned in a painful rush. The pentagram was losing cohesion, its color fading and power failing, but there was nothing left inside.

Kiseko, squealing, caught Suzy before she fell. “OMG, you banished it! OMG, how did you do that?!”

“There was a…a future where we won. I just…shoved us that way.” Suzy sat down, her head in her hands. “It worked, but it…it got dark.”

“No it didn’t!” Kiseko bounced around Suzy, barely able to contain her delight. “You were awesome! You kicked ass! Did you see that thing, it went fwssht! and zooft! and—”

“No, it…” The green—except it wasn’t green anymore, it was just the dark—it felt like it was behind her eyes now, or even deeper into her head than that. It didn’t hurt, but it weighed a lot, and it throbbed in time with her heart. A trickle of it fell down from her brain to her stomach, making her want to throw up.

Kiseko, oblivious to Suzy’s half-muttered protests, only ceased her praise when the ceiling creaked. All three of them froze, Suzy peeking upward and seeing Rob and Kiso doing the same thing. “Shit,” Kiso whispered. “My parents. If they find a boy here—!”

Rob pressed a finger to his lips, then darted across the basement in a few long steps. He cranked a daylight window open, then glanced back, checking the room like he was making sure everything was okay. Kiseko flapped a frantic hand at him and he gave her and Suzy a quick, concerned smile before scrambling up to and through the window. A heartbeat later, he was gone, eaten by a suburban Seattle yard.

Suzy trembled. The wood creature would’ve eaten him for real, all of them. Inside her head, the darkness flared like it thought that sounded good. She clenched her hands against her temples, trying to squeeze its presence away. Green power, she told herself. Rising green, like the wood spirit had been rising green, but this was her own strength, her own magic. She didn’t want a dark seed at its heart. She imagined her grandfather’s vast power in her own hands, crushing the darkness away.

In an agonizing instant, it winked out. Suzy whimpered.

Kiseko was there all of a sudden, wrapping her arms around Suzy’s shoulders. She was warm and sturdy, not cold and shaking like Suzy was. “You’re okay, Suze. I’m here. You okay? That was crazy,” she said more softly. “That was really brave, Suzy. I didn’t know you had it in you. I’m sorry for messing with magic, all right? I won’t do it again. I don’t want to mess my best friend up. Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” Suzy croaked the word. “I think so.”

“Good.” Kiseko sat back on her heels just enough to grin lopsidedly at Suzy. “Because we’re going to have to come up with some kind of totally awesome story to explain why you’re here in the middle of this mess. And then we’re gonna have to convince your aunt that since you’re here you might as well stay for the whole weekend, right? And—” She bounced up, bright and cheerful as always, but Suzy caught a glimpse of deeper worry as Kiseko offered a hand. The performance was all for Suzy’s sake, Kiseko’s way of making sure everything seemed normal.

Suzy let Kiso pull her up, then hugged her and did her best to sound light-hearted and frivolous, too. “Localized windstorm. You left the window open and look what happened!”

“That’s a terrible cover story, Suze.”

“Your parents believed the zombie movie thing, didn’t they?”

“Mmrgh.” Kiseko rolled her eyes. “I guess so. And so what, did the windstorm blow you in too?”

“That’d be an awfully big storm. Uh—”

“Suzy! Your aunt called!” Kiseko’s parents, wearing robes and slippers, came down the stairs together and stopped, expressions comically confused at the mess spread around the basement. “She said you were coming up as a surprise for Kiseko’s birthday, but we didn’t expect you so soon…what happened down here?”

Suzy gave Kiseko a wide-eyed look, then smiled at her parents. “I, um, got in way earlier tonight but I was, um, trying to surprise Kiseko so I snuck in and then we, uh, fell asleep? And then the window let in the storm and we were all like ‘Oh god we have to clean this up before Mr and Mrs Anderson see,’ and—but you woke up. Early. Uh. Hi!”

“It must have been the wind that woke us,” Kiso’s mom said to her dad, who frowned at Kiseko. “How many times have I told you to be sure the windows are closed at night?”

“I’m totally sorry, Dad. We’ll get it cleaned up, okay?”

Mr Anderson nodded, appeased, and his wife smiled. “I’m glad nothing was destroyed. It’s good to see you again, Suzy. I’ll make you girls some strawberry waffles in the morning, but we’re going back to bed now.”

Kiso’s parents waved and went back upstairs, leaving the two girls to blink uncertainly at each other. Kiseko finally whispered, “Your aunt called?”

Suzy shook her head. “No way. It’s the magic, or the effect of magic. Making sense of things that don’t make sense. I hope it worked on Aunt Mae, too, or I’ll be grounded until I leave for college.”

“Are you still gonna go to UDub?” Kiseko became light and chipper again as she looked over the wreck of the basement. “Think Mom and Dad will mind if we don’t clean up until morning?”

Suzy gave her a look and Kiso giggled. “Yeah, I thought so. Okay. I’ll get some towels for the water and I’ll scrub up the chalk marks if you can get the branches and things.” She ran off to the bathroom without waiting for an answer, and Suzy picked up the nearest branches. The window was still open, so she pushed the branches through and peered into the darkness, trying to see if Robert had escaped safely.

There was no sign of him, anyway. Instead there were stormclouds on the horizon, colored yellow by Seattle’s lights. They had a dark heart, as dark as the seed she’d burst in her mine. Suzy shuddered. She knew there were other colors out there too, like Detective Walker’s gunmetal silver and blue, but she couldn’t see them, not even when she looked through the other gaze, the one that showed her the possible futures. She should be able to see them. She’d always been able to before. But there was nothing there now, just the seed of darkness.

The darkness and the shadow she cast herself, of the rising green.