seeking, and understanding. She knew the device, and the device knew her.
Albie had been more straightforward in his use of magic. Albie with the Freikugeln—the bullets of German legend that struck their targets without fail—had just been a man with a tool, the same as a hammer or a saw. His artifact had not burrowed under his skin, becoming part of him, the way Koschei’s Needle had done to her. He had simply held the bullets, and though they never did what the legend said they would—none of the artifacts they had collected had—they had allowed him to perform rudimentary magic, lighting fires, making objects float, things like that.
Ines, Matt, and Sloane walked back down the spoke of the bicycle wheel and around its circumference until they reached Scott in his golf cart. She didn’t feel fear of the device anymore; instead, what she felt was numbness, a separation between body and mind. She knew that time would weld the two together again; she would just have to wait.
Scott took them out the same way they had come in, weaving a serpentine path through the tents. Hardly a minute into the drive, Sloane spotted the tent with MAKE THINGS RIGHT—BRING HIM BACK on it, and the ringing in her ears intensified. The distance between mind and body that she had maintained since sensing the magical device collapsed suddenly, like hands clapping together. She braced herself on the handrail that was keeping her in her seat and threw herself out of the golf cart to the tune of Ines and Matt crying “Sloane!” in unison.
She walked past a little altar made of a stump with what looked like a squirrel skeleton wrapped in beads and twine perched atop it, and a tent with a dream catcher hanging in the zipped-shut doorway, likely mass-produced in China and distributed in the Home section of a hipster clothing chain. These people wanted magic, but they had no idea what magic really was; they had never seen the great unraveling of the Drain, the way it had separated all living things into distinct pieces, bone, sinew, blood, and nerve flung apart so you could see the fine details that made up a body, all while said body was still conscious enough to comprehend it.
When she reached the little campfire of boys pretending to be men, they had finished cooking their hot dogs and were now listening to music, but Sloane could only hear the thump of the bass. The ringing in her ears was too strong at that point for her to hear much of anything, including Ines calling out her name behind her.
She noted the hunting knife on top of a pallet of bottled water nearby and planted her feet in front of the portable grill, staring down at the man who had almost but not quite called her bitch earlier. It was not the first time she had been called that word, and it wouldn’t be the last, but there was a certain violence in it—the way it made her anger small and petty, the way it reduced her entire self to some narrow, foolish thing.
“Hello there,” she said, her voice sounding oddly unctuous all of a sudden. “Do you recognize me?”
She could tell by his wide eyes that he did. And just as they were narrowing, just as the word bitch was likely taking shape in his mouth again, she bent and picked up the hunting knife.
“What—” the man started, but she had already unsheathed the hunting knife and plunged it into the side of the tent, right through the RIGHT in MAKE THINGS RIGHT.
“What the fuck?” the man shouted. They were all on their feet. Sloane only heard ringing.
“You idiot,” she said. “You think he would welcome your loyalty if he came back, that he would reward you? If he comes back to life, he will rip your guts out just like everyone else’s.”
“He only targeted the weak,” the man said. “Your boy over there got lucky the first time—”
His eyes shifted over Sloane’s shoulder to the golf cart, to Ines and Matt. But she didn’t hear what he said next. She just punched him in the face.
The ringing in her ears stopped. Pain crackled in every knuckle. She shook out her hand, gritting her teeth against the ache that spread all the way up her arm. The man’s nose was bleeding, and his friends were on their feet around him, shouting obscenities at her but not quite ready to fight