Indigo Springs by A.M. Dellamonica

Author:A.M. Dellamonica
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

• Chapter Seventeen •

“I drew the vitagua from Sahara and Henna on a Saturday,” Astrid tells me. She expertly shuffles a pack of gaming cards covered in trolls and flame demons. “Some of the grumbles said Sahara would leave me. Others said it was me who’d be leaving. I’d be taken away from them all—Jacks, Ma…”

“Even Mrs. Skye?”

Her eyes crinkle fondly. “They didn’t mention her.”

“I see.”

“I had maybe a pint of vitagua soaked in my body, Will. A fraction of what I carry now, but even so the grumbles had so much to say about my future: handcuffs, jail cells, cameras watching my every move. They said I would cut my leg—” She tugs up her jeans, revealing a pink scar on her ankle. “—on a rough edge of a bedframe, it turned out—and there’d be a hue and cry. They said Arthur Roche would think I’d attempted suicide.”

“Why didn’t you try to change the outcome?”

“How? Stop making chantments? Perhaps that would send Sahara away. Magic was pulling us together, Will. The secret made us so close; nothing could break us up. I had to believe the grumbles’ predictions could be avoided: that the premonitions weren’t set in stone.”

I bend close. “Astrid, this is important. Have the grumbles been wrong?” I need to know if there is a window for free will in her worldview, if she believes the things she predicts are inevitable.

Suddenly we are plunged into darkness. The artificial sunlight vanishes from the windowscreens, and the overhead lights die.

“I don’t know if they’re always right.” Astrid’s voice is a thread in the blackness. “The real problem is they have an agenda. They told me just enough to get me in trouble.”

She takes my hands. A trickling sensation, like blood flowing, spreads across my palms. I can feel the paint rolling over the cards, as if my skin is made of their paper surface.

Fear edges through me like a razor blade. I pull free and the sensation fades. “What’s happening up there?”

“It was…is Jemmy,” she says. “She’s one of Sahara’s Primas now, remember? Roach’s men grabbed her, and now she’s shut down the power in this cage. Sahara taught her a cantation that converts electricity to magic. It’ll pull power from any nearby source of electricity.”

“Enough electricity to black us out?”

“Looks that way. If she needs more, we might get lightning strikes. It’s something to see.”

“Is Jemmy trying to escape?”

“No. This is a message.”

“To whom?”

“To the Roach, and I’m not about to translate it.”

The darkness is beginning to get to me. The sense that my eyes would have adjusted by now, had there been any light at all, is strong. Where are the backups?

Astrid continues her story: “On Sunday, Sahara was sleepy and surly both. Every time we touched, I sensed how much she resented my pulling the vitagua out of her. She wanted to recontaminate herself, so I made sure there was no magic to be had—none pooled anywhere, none coming up through the fireplace. She thought I didn’t trust her.

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