Cursed

Sonder held up his notebook. “I think I found out Cinder’s phone number. Would that help?”

I couldn’t help smiling. “Probably not.”

We’d come out of the Underground at Euston and were talking amidst the square concrete pillars of the bus station. The station was busy with the afternoon rush, people of all looks and ages crossing the plaza. “Thanks for coming today,” I said. “Anything I can help out with?”

Sonder hesitated. “What are you going to do about Luna?”

I sighed, my brief good mood fading. The attack at the factory hadn’t been fun but it was the kind of thing I knew how to deal with. This wasn’t. “I don’t know.”

“But you’re not going to leave her with this guy, right?”

“What am I supposed to do, Sonder?” There was an edge in my voice; Sonder was hitting too close to what I was thinking myself. “She wants this. If I push her, she’ll just say no and I can’t make her.”

“But you’re supposed to,” Sonder said. “You’re her master.”

“Am I?” I leant against one of the pillars, staring out at the hurrying people. “Luna’s not part of the mage world the way you are. She didn’t grow up with the customs. I’ve been teaching her, but she never really agreed to be an apprentice. I’m not even sure she knows what it means.”

“Well, she ought to.”

“You really think that?”

“Yes. The master and apprentice system is important.” Sonder looked at me earnestly. “Yes, it goes wrong sometimes, and the kind of things Dark mages do with their apprentices are pretty awful. But it’s how mages learn—not just their magic, everything. It’s what everything’s built on.”

I looked back at Sonder. He was serious, and for the first time I stopped and faced up to the question of how I really felt about Luna.

Partly I thought of her as a friend. I lead a fairly lonely life and Luna’s one of the few people I like and trust. Partly I thought of her as a sort of protege. I’d been teaching her for months now and I wanted her to be able to make a life for herself in mage society. And partly I thought of her as something more.

But as I thought about it I realised that I’d been acting like a mixture of all three. I’d been trying to treat her as a friend and as an apprentice and as a potential girlfriend all at the same time, and it wasn’t working. I remembered Arachne telling me that she wasn’t acting like my apprentice and that I wasn’t acting like her master, and I understood that Arachne had been right. I couldn’t be both Luna’s master and her friend, and I definitely couldn’t be both her master and her lover. I was going to have to pick one of the three.

But no matter which, one thing I was sure of was that I wanted to keep Luna safe, and that meant the monkey’s paw came first. “What do you think we should do?” I said.

“What if I went and talked to Luna?” Sonder said. “And I could find out some more about this Martin guy. He sounds dodgy.”

I couldn’t help smiling; I couldn’t honestly see Luna paying Sonder any attention. But Sonder had surprised me before. “Can’t hurt to try,” I said. “But if that’s what you’re planning, do you think you could spend some time researching the monkey’s paw first? How it works, what it wants—anything you can find. The more we know about this thing, the better.”

Sonder nodded immediately. “I will. And, um, be careful.”

“You too.”

I got back to my flat and started trying to figure out how to find Cinder and Rachel. It took a long time.

A lot of people think divination magic can tell you anything you want to know, but it can’t. What it can do is tell you the consequences of a possible action. If I want to know what’s behind a door, that’s easy. I look into the future in which I open the door. Cracking a password is easy too: I look into the futures in which I try every possible password and see which one works. If there are a lot of choices it might take a while, but sorting through even millions of passwords is easier than you’d think because all the possible futures except for one are so similar. In 999,999 futures the lock doesn’t open; in the last one it does.

But once you start dealing with people instead of machines, it gets much, much harder. With people, all the possible futures are different. If I look into the futures of searching two different houses I see totally different things, and I have to look at each one individually to see if it’s right. Cracking a password is like spotting one white marble in the middle of a million black marbles. Finding a person is like spotting one white marble in the middle of a million multicoloured marbles. One is a hell of a lot harder than the other.

That doesn’t mean divination can’t find people; it can. In fact, it’s really good at finding people. If I know who I’m looking for and the rough area that they’re in, I can pinpoint them in seconds. But I need a place to start. Otherwise, divination magic is just a slightly faster way of taking a wild guess.

I had three points of contact for Cinder and Rachel: the construct attack at my shop, the burning of Meredith’s flat, and their battle with Belthas at the factory. Unfortunately, none of those were any use for finding them. They’d be operating out of a base and there was absolutely no reason that base had to be anywhere nearby. The fact that they’d used a short-range construct did suggest they were somewhere in London, but that didn’t narrow it down anywhere near enough. I didn’t have anywhere to start looking.

Although … I frowned. Maybe I did.

I’d been to one of Cinder and Rachel’s bases, five months ago. It had been a brief and not very pleasant visit but I’d managed to identify the place: a disused warehouse in Battersea. It was deserted now of course; there was no way Rachel or Cinder would go back again. And there was no reason for them to have picked a similar place this time.

Except … I knew Rachel. And one thing I knew about Rachel was that she tended to do things the same way. It had always been Shireen who had been the original one, Shireen who had come up with the ideas. Rachel had