Poor baby, she thinks.
“You have no name.”
I have a name, she thinks. My mother whispered it before I was born. And then she forgot it. I am the only one who knows my name.
“You have no place. You are lost. You are a lost lamb in a dark, cruel wood.”
No, she thinks. It is you who is lost.
“But I am coming.”
I am waiting for you.
“I will find you, my darling,” the Minister says.
I will lead you to me. As a spider leads a fly.
“I will catch you. I will claim you. I will love you to bits.”
As I love you, the junk man’s daughter thinks. As I love you and love you and love you. And she does. She loves him so much. As she loves everyone. It is dangerous, this love, and she can’t control it. It is ever so much bigger than she, and growing by the day. It is a river. An ocean. The sky. Her love crushes planets, shatters suns, burns whole galaxies to cinders and dust.
“And then, child, I will drain you.”
Yes, she thinks. You can try.
“Do you hear me? I WILL DRAIN YOU DRY.”
Try, she thinks. Try and you will drown in it. You will drown, and drown, and drown.
And for the first time, she knows it is true.
2. Then.
The first appearance of the Boro comet and the subsequent appearance of magic children occurred shortly after the Minister first began his long and fruitful rule.
No one can say how long ago—how very, very long—this was.
Only the Minister knows. And he won’t tell.
The comet simply appeared one day in the eastern skies, fat and shining like a pendant on the neck of the horizon. Astonished astronomers clamored over one another, elbowing their colleagues out of the way in an effort to be the first one to name it. In the end, it was named in honor of the Minister’s father—a dear man who had met an unfortunate and untimely end a decade earlier in a tragic firing-squad accident (all condolences to the Minister). No one knew at the time—aside from the comet’s mysterious and surprising appearance—the impact the object would have on them all.
No one knew that the whole world was about to change.
First, it was the dreams, crowding thick and fast, night after night, into the slumbering skulls of the populace. No one mentioned it, but everyone knew—every man, woman, and child was marked by pale faces and darkened eyes and mouths slack from dreaming. And oh! What dreams!
And then, shortly after the comet disappeared, the babies arrived—one hundred and two of them in counties all around the nation. Magic babies.
They all had, to a one, a curious birthmark curling out of their navels—a strange spiral that glowed in the dark. They were volatile, some of them, liable to make doors explode or syringes vanish or to catapult their mothers from one side of the room to the other. There were broken bones. Cracked teeth. Annoyed nurses.
Other babies were more benign, liable to make their teddy bears sentient, so as to see to the important work of infant cuddling when their busy families could not. Or they made lullabies come gurgling out of bedsheets and cradles. Some endowed their panicked fathers with new, round breasts, laden with milk. And others, remarkably, grew wings.
The Minister, thinking fast, sent his massive landships (each one large enough to house and transport several battalions), gouging the earth as they went. In each town, swarms of soldiers poured out, invading nurseries and bassinets, checking for the magic mark. The children were to be rounded up and sequestered for study.
“They could be dangerous,” the Minister explained.
“They could be sick,” he went on. “Or contagious.”
He paid the families, of course. Handsomely. They were in no position to argue. He had all the guns.
“So many things,” the Minister mused, “can be accomplished with guns. How many more things might be accomplished with magic?”
And thus his experiments began.
He used earplugs to keep out the screams.
3. Now.
There are signs all over the marketplace.
UNLICENSED PRACTICES OF MAGIC ARE PROHIBITED BY LAW.
BE A MODEL CITIZEN.
WATCH.
LISTEN.
REPORT.
FAILURE TO REPORT IS A FAILURE TO YOUR COUNTRY.
FAILURE IS NOT TOLERATED.
The signs appeared the night before, sometime after midnight. No one knows who hung them. The people in the marketplace are doing their best not to notice the signs. Their eyes slide from side to side. They talk about the weather. They talk about their children’s need for new shoes. They talk about their recent teeth extractions. Why would they mention the signs? They have done nothing wrong. They are not breaking the law.
(They say this over and over, in the silences of their hearts, until it feels true.)
The junk man does not have a stall, and pays no tax to the mayor—never has. The mayor has never forced the issue. If he did, the junk man would simply sell elsewhere, and then the populace would revolt, and then—after both tarring and feathering him, because that’s what happens to mayors who fail their constituents—they would find themselves a replacement. Or maybe they’d just report him to the Minister, and have him disappeared quietly. These things happen.
It’s tricky work. Being the mayor. Times being what they are.
It snowed the day before, but now the winds have slowed and the sky has cleared and the day is fine and warm, with the easing dampness of a world still soft, but readying itself for a freeze.
The junk man’s daughter eats an apple. She sits on the edge of the cart while the junk man stands off to the side, conferring with a matron in low, hushed tones.
“As you can see,” the junk man says, pulling an apple out of the empty bowl, and holding it with a flourish on his open palm. He tosses it without looking at his daughter, who plucks it from its high, clean arc, and places it
