Magisterium

heart.

Glenn’s father stood at the edge of a small cot in an empty, harshly lit room. He was in a pair of dingy white pajamas that hung off his emaciated frame. His eyes were hollow and darkly ringed. She could feel the people who had done this to him. His guards sat unaware on the other side of an interior wall — a fat man and a woman who went about their business like machines, bored and remorseless. She saw their interrogations, their petty torments. Glenn could kill them as easily as tearing the petals from a flower, pull them through the wall and toss them screaming out into the night. It’s what they deserved.

“Glenn?”

Her father had come to the edge of the hole in the building, his clothes whipping in the wind. Glenn’s heart twisted to see him, as skinny and frail-looking as ever. Glenn tamped down her anger at the guards and glided through the opening in the tower to hover inches from him. Her father backed away from her, skittish, as she came.

“It’s all right,” Glenn said. “I’ll explain everything later, but we have to go now.”

Glenn reached out her hand, and after a pause her dad stepped forward and took it, his own hand trembling. She drew him to her, lifting him and moving them out of his prison. She paused, closed the building back up, then slipped into the sky.

Minutes later, Glenn set down in their own front yard. Dad

stumbled out of her arms and stared at the workshop that still lay in blackened ruins. He slowly turned from it, looking across the yard, reaching the house just as the front door swung open. He froze in place.

Mom had found one of her old dresses, bright yellow and gauzy, and had done up her hair while they were away. She looked beautiful, better every minute she was away from the Magisterium. Stronger. Her hair had returned to its almost gleaming black, with only a few streaks of ivory.

He turned to Glenn, tears streaking his face.

“It’s real,” Glenn said.

And then he was running and Mom was running too, crossing the yard and diving into each other’s arms. They tangled together, both of them crying. Joy and pain welded together. Ten years apart. He thought he’d never see her again and now here she was. Glenn could feel their amazement bloom.

She turned away from them to look out beyond the wreck of the workshop. As soon as Authority realized her father was gone, they’d know exactly where to come. Glenn tensed. They had a few hours at most. Unless …

She had changed the bracelet to rescue her father, but there was more she could do, wasn’t there? She could lift off right now and find them. Sturges. Authority. They’d never expect it. Could never prepare for it. She could crush them and put this to rest once and for all. Glenn could see the path in front of her so clearly. It had a pull as strong as gravity.

“Glenn!”

Mom and Dad were at the door, waving her forward, but Glenn stepped away from the house. The engine was turning in her and it wouldn’t stop. She had to go. She had to get back on track. She had to …

Glenn stopped. Her father was beaming and so was her mother.

Contentment shimmered in the air around them both. All they were missing was her.

The engine in Glenn slowed and went still. There will be time for you, Sturges, she thought, and then ran across the yard and threw herself into her parents’ outstretched arms. The second she touched them, it was as if a circuit was completed, and their joy at being whole again moved through her in a rush.

Glenn didn’t know how long they stayed that way, floating

together on the front porch, but it was Mom who finally pulled away.

“We have to go,” she said. “It’s not safe here. We have to cross the border.”

“But — ”

Glenn took her father’s arm. “We’ll reverse the bracelet again and give it to Mom,” she said. “She’ll be fine. I promise.”

“Go, Glenn. We’ll start for the border and meet you there.”

Glenn dashed inside and down the stairs into the basement

workshop. The tools were right where she’d left them. Glenn stripped off the bracelet and bent over the workbench. As she opened its metal housings, Glenn found a strange giddiness building up in her. They would all be together for the first time since she was a little girl. Until that moment, Glenn had no idea how much she wanted it, how much she always had.

The outer shell of the bracelet fell away and she lifted a small pair of pliers, but before she could make the first modification, the entire house was rocked by the blare of Authority loudspeakers.

31

Glenn stepped out onto the porch. It was flooded with the light from four Authority skiffs that hovered in a soundless crescent around the house. The gaps between the skiffs were filled by cross-shaped drones.

Two of the agents, armed with sleek rifles, held Mom and Dad behind Michael Sturges.

“Impressive how you broke your dad out,” Sturges said, cheery as ever. “Guess you figured out how to bring a little bit of the hocus-pocus over to this side of the world, huh?”

He waited, that friendly smile playing across his lips, but Glenn said nothing. The night air was brittle and still. Wrapped in their suits of high-tech armor, the agents were nothing to her, black holes scattered about the yard. Only Sturges pulsed with a cool malevolence.

Glenn’s own pulse beat against the unaltered bracelet on her wrist.

She imagined a river pounding against the walls of a dam. Power hummed through her. The river wanted to surge, to batter their bodies and drown them all, but Glenn wouldn’t let it. She would master it. She would command its course.

“Nothing more needs to happen to any of you,” Sturges

continued in a maddeningly casual tone. “All we want is that piece of tin you have there. You’re a smart girl. I think you know that this is for the best.” Sturges reached out his hand, palm up, as if he was asking her to return a toy she had played with out of turn. “Just give it to me, and everything in your life goes back to the way it was.”

Glenn almost laughed at the lie. He’d never let them rest, not for a second. Not any of them. The ground began to shake. Trees shuddered and the glass in the windows behind her rang like a string of bells. The agents shifted, trying to keep their footing, but Sturges just stood and grinned. The river crashed inside of Glenn, tearing out its course, slipping out of her hands.

“You should go,” Glenn warned. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Sturges paused, his hand flexed and relaxed at his side. He was unsure now, afraid. The dam inside her groaned, and across the yard a tree burst into flames. Glenn slashed her hand through the air and Sturges went flying into the trees. The second he did, one of the men on the skiff opened fire. There were two sharp cracks, but Glenn closed her eyes, and the air instantly thickened, catching the rounds like pebbles cast into deep water. They slowed and fell harmlessly onto the ground. A talon of fire that would burn the man alive reared back from Glenn, but she restrained it before it could strike. Instead, Glenn called up a gust of wind strong enough to topple the skiff he was riding on. He and the agents with him tumbled twenty feet to the hard ground below.

Gunfire roared all around her now, far too many bullets for Glenn to stop, so she bounded into the air, blazing with a halo of yellow light.

She landed in the center of one of the other skiffs, surrounded by a mob of agents. They scrambled for her, but there were too many of them and their numbers made them an awkward scrum of arms and bodies. In the confusion, Glenn focused the air into a spike of force and shot it down at her feet, ripping straight through the skiff’s metal skin. The technology inside sparked and flared and the skiff began to plummet, moaning like a dying beast. Glenn jumped into the sky as the agents dove off, trying to save themselves. Glenn took the dying skiff in hand and hurled it toward the other one, knocking it out of the sky.

Glenn flitted toward the forest quick as a firefly as the agents fruitlessly tried to track her movements. Her