request? For a timed levitation. Her request is for five people, each with an object they would like to levitate, to meet in Palmer Square Park in two days’ time, objects in hand. Together, they will set up a timed working for the next morning, at which point all their objects will levitate at once.
“Timed workings always require at least one other person, one to do the working and one to set the timer,” Elissa says. “So they’re the most common thing you see on here. Also glowing. People are deeply interested in making things glow these days.”
For most of us, assemblies—the term for a group of magic-users convening for a single working—were integral to our magical education. But in the past, assemblies were arranged by school staff, and they had to be supervised by a teacher. Now, students are taking their learning into their own hands, meeting freely and with young people from other schools, even other cities.
“I drove all the way to Indianapolis for one once,” says Josh, sixteen, from Buffalo Grove, Illinois. “I told my mom it was for a concert. And I did go to a concert! But I also went to the group working. We built a rain cloud—some people did the illusion of a cloud, some did the water, one did lightning strikes, and one did thunder.”
Some parents, naturally, are concerned. “What if they do something dangerous?” asks Ellen Higgins, founder of Parents of Teens Under Control (PoTUC), a community action group that seeks out unsupervised group workings and interrupts them. “They can’t just run around doing magic without anybody knowing. They could really hurt themselves! So we don’t let that happen.”
When I ask Elissa about PoTUC, she just rolls her eyes. “We have to use code in our messages now,” she says. “I won’t tell you what it is. But my next assembly is going to be supervised, so PoTUC can’t spoil it.”
32
BY THE TIME Sloane’s vision cleared, they were inside the safe house, a large red-brick building perched on the river’s edge. The space looked like it had once been elegant but had fallen into disrepair. The ceiling was wood-paneled, with skylights in a squared arch that let in the glow of the moon. As with the Old Main Post Office, the lower windows were boarded up, but judging by the position of the building on the river, she was sure that the view would have been of a stretch of skyline.
Crowded inside the space were the groups of the Resurrectionist’s army that had arrived before them. Ziva wandered among them, distinguished by the braids swinging back and forth against her shoulders. When Mox walked in, he released Sloane’s arm and hunched over the piece of metal buried in his side to give it a closer look.
“Don’t go yanking that out,” Sloane said. “Not until you can clean the wound and pack it.”
Mox looked at her—or he seemed to, turning the mechanized siphon eyes in her direction for a moment. “Then it will have to wait,” he said. “Stay here.”
He loped across the dusty wood floor to Ziva’s side. Sloane leaned against one of the wood pillars at the edge of the room and watched as he worked his way through the crowd of soldiers, clapping them on the shoulder or bending his ear to them. The woman who had carried her arm in a bag took it out when he came near her and showed it to him. Sloane was surprised when he knelt beside her and took something from his pocket—a leather packet about the size of his palm that, when opened, revealed a needle and some kind of thick thread.
Sloane watched with mixed revulsion and fascination as he began to stitch the arm back on. The woman held it in place as he did so, watching the skin split around the point of the needle, the string tugging through gently and then pulling taut. When he finished, he tied off the string and gestured over the sutures. Sloane assumed it was some kind of working, but she couldn’t tell what it did. Regardless, the undead woman touched the side of Mox’s head fondly and smiled.
Sloane had assumed that the Resurrectionist’s undead army was in thrall to him, a mindless collection of zombie slaves. But it seemed clear now that they knew him. Perhaps they had even known him before they died.
It was a while before he returned to her, still with the metal embedded in his side, all his