Beside me, a young man with a cane hung off the back of his chair cranes his head up and, in a deeply French accent, asks: “Can you move, please? You’re blocking my light.”
“Huh?” Elgar asks, and then starts. “Oh, hey, it’s you. From the elevator.”
And sure enough, there is the foursome we met on the elevator yesterday—the Frenchman with the cane; the shorter, rounder fellow wearing another pithy t-shirt; the young black woman with the funky glasses; and the older woman who had blinked so owlishly.
“Uh, hi, Mr. Reed,” the older woman says, her attention stuck to my creator like day-old bubblegum.
“Turtle, it’s your turn,” the younger woman scolds her.
“Kora, it’s—”
“I see that,” her friend replies. “Play!”
The older woman lays down a card amid the complicated pattern of previously dealt cards between them and says, “I cast Darkness.”
Pip tugs on my hand, ready to start moving again, but then skids to a stop after just one step. I crash into her back, Elgar likewise crashing into mine, and we stagger forward a few steps, blind.
Blind, because as soon as the woman named Turtle lays down her card, the entire facility plunges into a deep blackness. A shiver of sound trembles upward as thousands of people gasp in unison, chairs scrape back, and items are dropped to the cement floor. And then the first shout goes up; a child wails, someone screams. Someone near the food court shouts: “Calm down. Stay still! The emergency lights will come on in a second!”
His prediction rings true as the baleful red glare of the emergency exit signs blink on, and a bank of buttery yellow floodlights splutter and surge, as if the electrical feed is fighting against the power of the spell cast upon it. There is no point trying to cast Words of Hiding in the dark, and I release Elgar to fetch out my tablet. Blast and damn, my live feed has gone dead. It is useless. With an oath, I jam it back into its pouch.
When my eyes finally adjust, a quick glance tells me that both Elgar and Ahbni are staring down at the card game beside us, eyes and mouths dropped wide in shock. Kintyre and Bevel have circled to the other side of the table, regarding the cards thoughtfully, and with no little amount of trepidation and awe. Turtle still holds the corner of the card she played pinched between her fingers, the rest of it flattened to the bare table, but she is staring straight upward in a sort of giddy awe.
“Did . . . did I do that?” she breathes.
“No!” Ahbni says.
“Yes,” Pip counters. A glance to my other side tells me that my wife is also staring up into the darkness. Even in the light of the emergency backups, the mingled orange and red from the exit signs, I can see the grim cast of her features. “I don’t think we need to hold hands anymore.”
I am reluctant, deeply reluctant, to let her go. We need to know if the magic will hold once I do. I reach across the table and pick up an unused paper napkin from what looks to be one of their finished meals and hold it out in front of me.
“What are you—?” Ahbni asks, but chokes on the rest of the question when I say a Word of Burning.
This time, the magic is strong enough that a flame immediately appears on the corner of the paper, flaring bright before withering to a wimpish coal and wisp of smoke. I reach out and take Pip’s hand again, and the flame leaps back up, flaring as bright as a pitch-dipped torch. A terrible, faint green glow flashes between her lashes, and she gasps like she’s been punched in the gut.
“Proximity is still important, but touch is stronger,” I whisper.
“Lanjakodka,” Ahbni curses. “This can’t be real.”
“’fraid so,” Pip mutters, staring down at the table.
I can see her eyes flashing over the cards, can see her trying to work out the way in which what just happened did so. And how to fix it—how to keep it from happening again. The players all lean backward, confused, unsure of why she’s peeking at their cards so intently.
“Todd? Todd? You okay?” the Frenchman asks the other fellow at the table, and Todd shakes his head, swallowing hard.
“Not so good with dark spaces,” Todd gulps. His free fingers scrabble at the table top, knuckles white. He looks ready to bolt.
“We must fix this, before people start to panic and someone is harmed, Pip,” I whisper to my wife.
“Here,” Pip says, leaning over Todd’s shoulder. “Play this one.”
“I can’t. It’s not my turn,” Todd protests.
Pip snarls in frustration. “Who’s next?”
“Me?” the young woman called Kora says.
Pip slides around the table, stumbling a little in the low light, and says, “That one. That reverses the last card played, right?”
“Right.”
“Play it.”
Tentative, staring up at my wife through her smudged glasses with an expression that clearly states that she thinks Pip is crazy, the young woman lays down a card with an image of a blue bottle in a field of equally electric blue lightning. Another, static-cling sort of shiver crawls across my skin. Pip’s eyelids flutter as she sucks back a pained gasp, that same faint green glow flaring in her eyes for a brief second. Elgar groans and catches at his chest.
The darkness splutters, and sparks, and then, with a mechanical whine, the lights surge back on.
“Merde,” the Frenchman gasps, and folds his hand. “I’m done.”
“Good idea,” Pip says. “Maybe stop playing altogether.”
“Perhaps it is best to get everyone to stop playing,” I suggest. It’s entirely possible that the cards around us have started to soak up the magic we seem to be shedding in our wake,
