Page 13

I lay out the new clothes on my bed and sigh.

As fun as the shopping excursion was, the gown Shannon bought me is clearly not for a first date.

There are a lot of people who wear gowns every day, and that’s part of their style, but I’m not one of them.

It would feel strange outside of a special occasion.

Mom had great style. She would know exactly what to wear.

I blink.

It never occurred to me to wear Mom’s things, but I’m almost as tall as she was now. I bet I could find something of hers that would look great.

I race down the hallway and into the other bedroom. Inside the closet, I push past Dad’s clothes: shirts and coats and extra cravats and trousers, going all the way to the back. Glowing faintly with runes is the entrance to the rest of the closet.

I press my hand into the center rune, and then the stuffy closet filled with Dad’s clothes disappears around me, the contents of the otherspace closet slowly filling in where I am.

It’s not quite teleportation, and there hasn’t been enough research done to know where exactly the otherspace is, other than it doesn’t take up space in our world.

As long as you anchor it to a physical space, you can make a pocket as big as that one in the otherspace, given enough mana to fuel it.

It’s fairly complicated spellwork, but easy enough for a magetech to set one up for you if you need the storage.

Dad and Mom custom-built theirs together, and it looks like the rest of their bedroom with warm yellow walls and pine hardwood floors and pretty gray shelving units filled with boxes labeled in Mom’s neat script: everything from UCLA—Spell Development and Research Archive Matrices to Spellcraft 101 Grading Rubrics to Samuel—Winter Coats and Kat—Art, First Grade .

The careful organization of items on the shelves make the haphazard jumble of boxes in the center of the space look even shabbier.

The air is dry and dusty, and I cough, sending spirals of dust motes flitting everywhere.

A soft glow emanates from the ceiling; an automatic light is spelled to turn on when someone enters the space.

It takes me a minute to adjust to the light, and I squint, stepping forward.

There’s a colorful scrap of fabric dangling from one open box, gathering dust. I’d been through this box enough times before that I know those clothes won’t work for a first date, but I can’t help going through it for old times’ sake.

That first year after it happened, I used to come up here and look through her things, like I’d find her somehow. I’ve always gotten stuck in this box of dresses, pulling them up and inhaling them, like I could feel Mom holding me close.

Even though it’s comforting, it hurts, too.

A steady prickling pain settles at the corners of my chest. Dad just boxed up all her things in here.

Like she was gone and suddenly everything of hers had to go away as well.

Her endless collection of knickknacks and bangles, the gauzy blouses she’d wear, all of her clothes and shoes.

We never talked about it. He’d sat, stone-faced for weeks, and then one day he boxed up all her things and he went back to making coffee like nothing happened.

I shake out the dress sticking out of the open box and smile at it.

Parrots and monkeys are embroidered on a colorful rainforest backdrop.

I remember Mom laughing about how the dean of academics once asked her to wear less “loud” clothes when she taught and so she went out and bought this dress.

I fold it carefully and place it back in the box of dresses.

A wave of bitter anger rushes over me. It’s so unfair that we can’t have a burial.

It’s been awful, just waiting for an answer only for the council to deny it again because of some unexplainable Ritual complication.

If they do ever release Mom’s remains to us and we can finally put her to rest, I know she’d want to be in this dress.

I open box after box, my heart leaping into my chest as I rummage through her clothes and jewelry and books, and I start making a pile of options.

I linger on a set of traditional and modern cheongsams, tracing the delicate embroidery on a golden peony over blue silk.

These are family heirlooms, passed down through the generations.

I never thought I’d inherit these so soon.

I sigh, shifting to a few boxes of spelling supplies. I put them aside to look through later.

My stomach growls, and I wonder what time it is. I found a few options I’m excited about, especially a green linen blouse spellwoven into a glimmering pattern that looks like shifting scales.

I grab a crate I’d opened earlier to heave it aside so there’s a clear path; I’d disregarded it before since it wasn’t clothes, but I’m curious what else Mom had stashed away.

These items are all packed carefully, wrapped in heavy fabric so the contents won’t break and shift.

It hurts to think of Dad, even in his grief, putting everything away just so, as if Mom would come back at any moment and chide him for improper storage.

I unwrap the first one just to see.

Oh. This is old .

Mom and I haven’t played with this stuff since I was a kid.

It’s some sort of moving picture story box.

I don’t even remember how it works; Mom always set it up.

She’d giggle and laugh and close all the curtains to darken our living room, and I’d marvel as she’d connected long black cables and pressed things, and suddenly the box would come to life.

We’d spend the afternoon wrapped up in stories together.

One day a mana surge hit our house and the box didn’t work anymore after that.

I never asked her where she got the thing from, and now I’d never get the chance.

I poke the boxes now, wondering if I could get them to work. They’re heavy, one with an opaque glass front—that’s where the stories were. I don’t know what the smaller box is for, but there are a series of complicated slots like for some kind of physical spell diagram.

The rest of the crate is a jumble of smaller rectangular boxes with paper labels that are about the size of one of the slots.

I pick through them, recognizing the images from the moving stories.

These must be some sort of focus objects for the spell to catalyze it.

I smile fondly, tracing the image of the characters.

I blink. Wait a moment, this particular story— this is where I saw Brenda’s item before. The blue rectangular object is one of the images on the box, and it’s easily recognizable as the same one, with the same white sign. “Public telephone… pull to open,” I mutter, reading the sign.

So Brenda must know about these stories, too?

Mom had always said these stories were just for us, and not to talk about them—it wasn’t exactly legal to have, and they were hard to get.

I had no idea why this form of entertainment would be illegal, but maybe it was the type of spellcraft involved; there’s lots of restrictions on age and license for performing complicated or dangerous works of magic.

I close the crate; there’s probably instructions I can figure out later after my date. I gather up the clothes I’d set aside, and then a soft orange gleam flickers.

I shift through the pile, looking for the source—one of Mom’s favorite coats, a soft woolen beauty with long rows of shining brass buttons. My first thought is the buttons are reflecting the light, but then I realize there’s something solid in one of the pockets.

I pull it out and exhale. It’s a tiny glass vial containing one fiery feather in tones of red, yellow, and gold. The feather looks like fire caught in the breath of movement, like it would burn to touch. The label reads Phoenix Down Feather in Mom’s very small, fine print.

Phoenixes only surface every hundred years or so and leave very few feathers. I wonder how she came by it.

There’s another scrap of paper. It’s only got one word. Mom’s letters here are looped and rushed, like she was in a hurry.

Intention.

I puzzle over it, frowning. I wonder if this had something to do with the Ritual. It was the only thing Mom was working on when she died, but while a phoenix feather would be a very powerful focus object, it couldn’t replace a person as a cornerstone.

So what was it for?

I tremble a little, gripping Mom’s note tighter. Did Mom figure out something about the Ritual?

“Kat?” Dad’s voice is muffled and seems like it’s underwater, coming from the anchor runes on the side of the wall.

“Upstairs!” I call out.

“Muffins for lunch? Got leftovers from the shop. Or I can make fried rice with yesterday’s leftovers.”

“Lap cheong?” I ask hopefully.

“We’re out. It’d probably be just eggs and veggies and the rest of that garlic chicken,” Dad says, his voice getting slightly louder and less muffled. “Where are you?”

“In the back closet.”

Dad materializes in the otherspace with me. “What in the world are you doing in here?” He gives me a pinched smile as I stand up, Mom’s scarves falling off of me.

I don’t know why I feel guilty. I shouldn’t. I have every right to be here.

“Just looking at stuff, I had a—um, research project,” I improvise.

I wonder if he knows what Mom was working on.

I hesitate. Talking about her never really goes well, and Mom was pretty cagey about her research.

“So, um, I remembered this.” I poke the strange story boxes with my foot.

“Do you know how to initiate these spells?”

Dad’s face goes from sad-grief to panicked-terror in one second. “Where did you get those?” he says.

“They’re Mom’s.” I plant my feet firmly. He can’t get rid of these, too. “Do you know what they are?”

Dad frowns. “A strange and powerful magic—we shouldn’t have it in the house.” He looks around, as if there could be policemages looking over his shoulder. “I’ll get rid of it.”

“No! They were Mom’s ! Come on, Dad, what was this stuff anyway—”

“We shouldn’t hang on to all of this, Katherine,” Dad says, and it’s gone, the familiar nickname, the sweet glimpse of going back to something normal between me and Dad.

He’s far away again, back to himself as an authority figure, back to putting Mom away in a box.

“Your mother wouldn’t want you to dwell on the past.”

“Dad!”

Ignoring me, he sweeps both the strange boxes into his arms and disappears with an elbow to the rune anchor.

I slap the anchor and follow. “Dad! Why shouldn’t we have it in the house? What’s wrong with it? Where did it come from?”

He doesn’t answer me, and I can feel the tingle of magic in the air—he’s already shoved the boxes into otherspace. A different one, probably keyed only to him. Great.

“Lunch will be ready in ten minutes.”

“But—”

“Go. I’m going to donate the rest of those things tomorrow. It’s best we get on with our lives. It’s what she would have wanted.”

I bite back tears as I run upstairs and dash back to the otherspace closet. I grab the box of spell supplies and the pile of clothes I picked out and hurry to my room.

I bury myself in the clothes, inhaling the fabric; it’s dusty, but I can pick out Mom’s lavender shampoo, the scent of old books and dry parchment, the sharpness of star anise, one of her favorite spell ingredients.

The tears come now, hot and salty, and I wipe them off my face before they can ruin the clothes.

I don’t understand how he can say we just…

move on. I’m angry that he can’t talk about it other than to say that he won’t, and I don’t have anywhere else to put this feeling of being lost, of not knowing who I am anymore without her.

It’s like the whole world changed when suddenly the prophecy was about me instead of my mom, and I wasn’t ready for that.

I wasn’t ready to face the world without her.

But I guess I have to.