We get back to the group as the sun crests the horizon. It had felt like morning already, with the sky growing light and the air getting warmer, but now the first tendrils of light are touching the tops of the trees, and it feels like dawn. Iris is flipping through her big journal of How Magic Works. It’s thick and worn, full of extra pages that she’s stapled in, bursting with her notes and charts and theories. She hasn’t cracked the Why or How of our magic yet, but she hasn’t given up either. I don’t think Iris knows how to give up.
I join the circle as Marcelina crouches, gently placing Josh’s liver near the middle of the odd arrangement of his limbs. Every part of Josh that we have is placed in an approximation of a boy-shape: arms, legs, hands, feet, head, heart, liver.
“Oh,” Maryam says, looking at his heart. “That’s not right, is it?”
I shake my head. Not right is an understatement.
“Where’s the spine?” Iris asks.
“I already got rid of it,” Marcelina replies. “It was buried there.” She points to the little hill of soil just behind Josh’s head.
“Shit,” Roya hisses. She laces her fingers behind her head and breathes in long and deep, her chest steadily rising.
“Yeah, shit,” Paulie says. “Should we dig it up?”
Marcelina shakes her head. “It’s powder. I ground it into powder.”
Roya releases the deep breath in one shocked gust. “You—what? Powder? What the fuck, Marcelina?”
“It’s fine,” Iris interrupts. “We’ll just have to hope it’s enough.”
We stand in a loose circle—Paulie is on my right, near Josh’s feet, and Marcelina is on my left. Roya is across from me, next to Maryam. Iris stands just above the head. She closes her notebook with a decisive slap, slips it into her bag, and tucks her hair behind her ears. She takes Marcelina’s and Maryam’s hands and holds them in a white-knuckled grip.
“Do you think it’ll work?” Paulie mutters.
I reach out and squeeze her hand. “Yeah,” I whisper back. “I really do.” It’s the second time I’ve lied today, and the sun hasn’t even finished coming up.
The spell starts out like it did the last time: all of us spinning loose magic up for Iris to work with, her fists in the air gathering spools of raw power. The air feels tight on my skin. The magic doesn’t make a sound, but it feels like it’s crackling. It builds and it builds and it builds and it builds and then—
It breaks.
Iris falls sideways into Marcelina, her arms falling limp by her sides. The spools of magic around her fists fall too, landing on the pieces of Josh in huge bright sheets. We all scramble, kicking up loam and running into each other. Paulie shouts, and then her hand is on my arm, pulling me away from the body. My feet slip out from under me, but Paulie keeps yanking on me and I don’t get a chance to fall, and by the time I’ve got my balance, we’re fifty feet away.
Roya grabs my hand tight, looking across me at Paulie’s wide eyes. Iris is pale, leaning heavily on Marcelina. Maryam is covering her face with both hands, staring at the smoke that rises from the place where she was standing just a few moments before.
“What are those?” Roya asks in a hoarse whisper. Her fingers twitch in mine. They’re thin and cool and soft, and I do not trace the shape of her first knuckle with the pad of my thumb. How could I even think of that, at a time like this one?
She points to the ground where we had been standing. Our circle has been replaced by six little hills. From where we are, they look like piles of earth. I squeeze Roya’s hand gently, then let it go and take a cautious step toward the body. There’s smoke there, but no fire. The air feels thick, humid. Close.
“Alexis, don’t—”
“Don’t what?” I look over my shoulder, but Maryam just shakes her head. I give her what I hope is a reassuring smile.
“Don’t touch them,” she says.
I’m not sure what she means. Not until I get a little closer. My breath catches in my throat at what I see.
Six hawks. Gorgeous, full-feathered ones. Harris hawks, I think, although I’ve never seen one this close before and my eyes catch on so many little details that I can’t be sure. They’re huge, with hooked yellow beaks and tawny wings and white-tipped tails, and they’re beautiful, and they’re dead.
Six hawks, right where we were standing.
“They fell out of the sky,” Paulie whispers, and I turn to find her standing next to me. She sinks her teeth into her bloodless lower lip briefly before clearing her throat. “One almost—it almost hit you, when it fell.”
“His feet,” Marcelina says. “They’re gone.” Her eyes are on the lingering smoke that curls up from the place where Josh’s feet had been.
“Fuck,” Iris croaks. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t—”
“It’s okay,” Maryam says, laying her fingers gently across Iris’s forehead. “You did your best.”
I step between two hawks, trying not to look at them. It feels like my feet are sinking into the earth a little too deep—the soil isn’t steady beneath me. I stare at the heart.
It throbs once. I watch it, unable to make myself so much as blink. The other girls notice and look over to see what I see, and they see it too: after a few seconds, it throbs again.
It’s beating.
The soil in Marcelina’s woods is still soft from the heavy rain we got all spring. I find a spot that’s far enough from the tree line to feel private. As I dig, I wonder if the trees will report back to Marcelina the next time she checks in. There was a girl
