“Right. Well—have you considered that maybe when you were trying to create a magical breath, you didn’t want to create a magical breath? That the one thing you actually wanted was a destructive indoor hurricane that broke all the windows?”
Sloane opened her mouth to object—of course she had wanted to do what she was supposed to do with the magical breath. She had spent days so frustrated with the siphon she wanted to hammer it into fragments. But really, hadn’t she found herself wondering why she cared about puffs of air and summoning elevators without touching buttons and flinging open doors when all those things were simple enough to do without magic? Hadn’t she broken that skylight in the Hall of Summons by tapping into whatever it was that gnawed inside her, telling her to take more, more, more while she could get it?
“You may be onto something,” she said.
“You can’t force someone to want something,” he said. “And knowing what you want—not just vaguely but really specifically what you want—is a big part of magic. You don’t pick the act and then force the desire. You know the desire—the exact shade of it—and then choose the act accordingly.”
“So that’s why you learned that . . . lung-collapsing move?” she said with careful nonchalance. She was referring, of course, to the working he did when he killed people. The one that had almost killed Kyros.
“Yes,” he said, sounding a little strained. “That particular method—collapsing lungs—was . . . a good match for me.” He shook his head, not as if he was saying no but as if he was trying to shake the memory out of his mind. “It’s . . . awful. I know, I—”
She reached across the center console and put her hand on his leg. He had started bouncing his knee, but he stilled it at her touch.
“I know my match too,” she said quietly.
And she told him about the Dive.
They reached the city when the moon was high. Mox sent this car into the river just as he had the police car a few days ago. They walked into the safe house when the windshield was still visible above the water.
Austin Chronicle
NEW SPINE SIPHON LAW PASSED IN TEXAS
by Kiersten Reichs
AUSTIN, FEBRUARY 2: Texas governor Colin Hauser (R) announced legislation Wednesday to legalize spine siphons on a limited basis for the purposes of medical treatment.
The federal government outlawed spine siphons three years ago with the Ethical Siphon Use Act (ESUA). The passage of the act was not difficult or contentious at the time, but with the rise of haven cities, the issue has again come into question.
“We don’t want spine siphons used casually—not by anyone. No one is disputing that here,” Hauser said in an interview Wednesday afternoon with the Washington Magical Monitor. “But there are extreme cases in which they might be useful, and we want to allow for that, especially in haven cities like Arlington.”
The “extreme cases” to which Hauser refers involve “uncontrollable, destructive magical power” that doesn’t respond to intensive training or other treatments, including relocation to a haven city where a magical dampening siphon is in effect.
Some members of the community expressed relief. “My son went to school with a boy who couldn’t control his magic despite teachers’ best efforts to rein him in,” said Mary Millay of Dallas, Texas, mother of two young children. “I was scared every day my son went to school that I’d get a call telling me he was set on fire or had floated away due to a gravity-reversal working or something. This makes schools safer for everyone.”
But not everyone felt so positive about the new law. “This legislation disproportionately targets the elderly, mentally ill, and children,” says Darcy Atwood, of the Magical Freedom Society. “It will empower bigoted people who hate magic in all its forms to suppress the magical gifts of the vulnerable—which is, of course, illegal. We don’t even completely suppress magical abilities in haven cities because our government decided it fell under the category of ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ so how in God’s name is this okay?”
37
THE SAFE HOUSE was in chaos. Rows of Resurrectionist soldiers lay head to head on the wood floor, and in the space between them were dismembered hands and feet, arms and legs. One soldier was hunched over a fractured wooden beam that protruded from his belly, oozing something dark. At the far end of the room, Ziva was perched on a table holding