up into the light and let the goldenness slide over his palms and between his fingers. He tested out smiling, jumping. He tasted the dry, gritty air and felt grains of sand in his mouth. He bit his lip until he felt what must be pain and tasted his own metallic red blood, warm and thin in his mouth.
I am alive! he thought, and he felt his new heart speed in his chest.
He couldn’t believe his luck. He had spent countless days throughout the eons looking down from the Between, watching humans. Most daemons watched during wars or plagues or disasters—some even had a hand in them—but Asa had loved watching their quiet moments more. No human life, Asa thought, could ever really be called quiet. He’d watched courtships and marriages and births; he’d seen sorrow and anger and death. He knew the names of many people, from tartan-skirted librarians in Lansing, Michigan, to tattooed warriors in Polynesia. He knew about burdensome taxes and the luxuries of wealth; he’d seen the jutting ribs of starvation and the heaping tables of excess. It all played out before him, an endless melodrama with an endlessly rotating cast, and he never ever tired of it. Now, with his own new, young, and capable body, he would get to be part of it. And though he privately wondered why he, a most unremarkable daemon, had been chosen—and by the Mother Herself!—Asa couldn’t wait to begin.
He wiped wetness from his brow, and thin mud came away on his forearm. Is this what it is to sweat? He smiled. On a bit of wood with a rope were the six bags of wheat, which had appeared along with the makeshift sleigh they were on. He knew the plan: use them to barter for his entry to Elysium. They were a bit heavy, though. Was this what it was to work? He squinted into the distance. Over the ripples of heat, he could just make out the tall dark shapes of walls and windmill arms. Elysium. Not too much farther.
He heard a papery sound and glanced to his left. From the ditch, three grasshoppers the size of terriers watched him, wondering, perhaps, whether or not to attack. He showed them his face—his real face, which was hidden behind this human disguise—and the grasshoppers sprang away in terror.
Hmph, he thought, and started moving. It was easy at first, but as his body grew heavier and more substantial, he began to sink into the dust. Even so, he walked on, passing automobiles, rusted, doorless, stripped of anything useful. Some had radios left in them, long dead, and these began to spark and sputter, crackling as he walked by, in reaction to the strong magic that clung to him. He stepped over half-buried fencerows, walls of tumbleweeds. He passed through the high-ribbed, tubelike skeleton of something like a giant snake, bleached by the sun. Only about three hours, he suspected.
But once he got there… then what? How was he supposed to do what he had been sent to do, exactly? Go to everyone in Elysium and show them the weird amber bug? That would take too much time. And what happened when he found the right person? He was sure that it indicated to them that they must change in some way. Humans, he had noticed, were oddly change-resistant, and if there was one thing they hated, it was a messenger. He’d seen how things like that had gone for a few people in the past, and it was almost uniformly Not Good. But She hadn’t given him instruction. She’d just given him the bug and told him to go to Elysium, using the bags of wheat as his key to entry.
Then he thought perhaps that there was some sort of clue in the appearance and items that had been provided for him. He stopped and looked around, looked at his hat, at the suitcase that he carried with all its stickers and tags. He opened it and found one change of clothes, a book of card tricks, a harmonica, and…
“Magic supplies?” he said aloud. He cocked his head to one side. He saw something blue sticking out of his shirtsleeve, and when he pulled it, out came a seemingly unending string of colorful handkerchiefs.
“I’m a magician?” he said aloud, feeling his face crack into what must have been a smile. Simultaneously, he felt years of study, years of tricks, illusions, sleight of hand rush into his mind and take