With just that, everything felt a little more normal. She made a stop at the mini fridge next, pulling out a can of RAGE ENERGY and taking a long sip. As the electric green liquid flowed down her throat, she could feel herself relaxing a bit. In the comforts of the recreation room—surrounded by her plush work chair, caffeine, and tech—she could find a bit of normalcy that eluded her anywhere else in the Society.
For a little bit, at least, she could pretend that she was still just Jo, the Shewolf hacker with a chip on her shoulder and something to prove. Jo walked over to the chair, falling heavily into it and nearly spilling some of her drink. She raised the can to her mouth again and took a long sip.
First things first: organize her mind.
She needed to set up a sub-script to run in the background of the android’s firmware that wouldn’t be recognizable to the AI itself. Yeah, this wasn’t going to be a pain or anything. Whatever language programmers were using now for AI wasn’t something that she kept herself regularly versed in, so hopefully her translation magic worked for computer code as well. If not, she’d need to do some quick cramming to refresh herself before doing anything else.
Setting the can down on the desk, Jo leaned forward. She needed to start on a list of things to do—twolists. One list would be for the wish, just enough that if someone called her out she looked like she was actually working. The other would be for her own research on the Society and magic.
A force that only vaguely resembled static electricity arced between her fingertip and the monitor’s “on” switch. Jo startled as lighting streaked up over the face of the monitor, knocking over her chair as she scrambled to get away. It spider-webbed with a flash, as if the force was dividing to conquer—hunting for every way in through the monitor’s casing.
With a blink, it was gone.
The monitor was dark and unassuming. The smell of smoke wafted through the air, singeing her nostrils as Jo inhaled sharply. She looked down at her hand and then back to the monitors.
It wasn’t the first time that monitor had acted up, she realized; it had issues turning on and staying on during their last wish. But a flicker in the screen and an all-out self-implosion were two vastly different things.
Jo swallowed so hard she nearly choked on her own saliva.
She righted the chair and sat with purpose. It’s what she’d wanted. Wasn’t it? Jo had a staring contest with the monitor. She wanted to dismantle the Society and this was proof that she could if she stopped ignoring her ever-increasing magic or writing it off.
So why did she not feel happier about the fact?
Holding out her palm, all of her fascination lingered between Jo’s fingers. If she had the power to bring down the Society, then she had to really get serious about learning it—learning tocontrolit. Seeing the Society go up in flames had to be a controlled burn; a wildfire would torch them all.
Without hesitation or fanfare, Jo clicked on the other two monitors. Like the light overhead they flicked on, oblivious to their now-dead counterpart.
“Okay, I’m working on two monitors then, it’s fine,” Jo reassured herself. They said that talking to yourself was the first sign of insanity, but Jo was fairly certain she was several signs in already and it made her feel the smallest bit more normal.
She pulled up her programs and her notepad, diving into her lists. The first shaped up with ease and Jo quickly had a password randomizer beginning to work on the logins she’d hacked in a past life to gain information on Primus Sanguis. It was enough work on that for now, so Jo turned herself to the second list, titled “BTCOTS.”
It stood for, “Break The Cycle Of The Society” and the title needed work as much as the project itself did.
This searching she did manually. Jo didn’t throw in random keywords and let software cull and pull sites. She wanted her own eyes on every page. Even if it took longer, she didn’t trust a script to know when something looked promising.
At first, her queries were random. This or that, chasing down rabbit holes of research that meant nothing and led nowhere—mostly just to introduce her mind to the subject and see how she wanted to approach it. She finally found the right mental pathway when her hands keyed in a query that pulled her from the mindless wandering she’d been engaging in:
WISH GRANTER SOCIETY CIRCLE MAGIC
The vague search term provided a list of results Jo eagerly scrolled through. Most of the initial sites were poorly maintained and dated. Jo clicked in to examine the source code, confirming that—based on the bootstrapping used—the sites dated back to the early 2000s.
She clicked on another, more modern site, but one that had even less information.
Another click. This time she found a familiar thread, the one that she had frantically scanned in that server barn what now felt like years ago (it very well could have been; time seemed so slippery now). This link had taken her to the Society.Perhaps it would’ve been better if I’d never made that wish and just died, Jo thought darkly. Wayne’s similar muttering about the Great Depression and his time echoed in her ears. How many of them felt the same way she did? How many would welcome the dissolution of the Society, if it meant freedom from their eternity?
Jo erased the distraction by closing the window, looking elsewhere.
She tried to think of what else she knew about the Society. There had to be a cluesomewhere. The lore of it had persisted through the ages.Why?Why did the rumors of circles and wishes seem to linger no matter how many times the world was rebuilt? It was as if an invisible hand had been guiding it along the whole time.
The memory of being drafted in the Society prompted another thought: Snow had said she was “selected” because she possessed an ancient magic. Seven lineages. Perhaps there was some clue in the depths of her ancestry? Jo opened up a new window and allowed her magic to enhance the limited Spanish abilities she possessed (far from good enough, according to her extended family) to type in yet another query.
Herabuelitahad always been filled with her own kind of magic. It was in the little things, like how she always knew when Jo needed a break from her mother, or how no matter the level of childhood insomnia, two minutes in her grandmother’s lap, rocking chair shifting beneath them like a soft tide, and Jo was out like a light.
Simple things like that could easily be explained away, but the woman had greater magic in her: eyes that could see any lie, no matter how well crafted; ears that could hear from one end of the house to the other no matter how old she grew; and hands that could heal.
In Mexico, they were calledcuranderas—healers using “folk remedies” when modern medicine wasn’t good enough. Jo vaguely remembered other words likebrujeriaor witchcraft, but all she knew was that her grandmother had helped her when her throat had gone too sore to swallow, her forehead hot while her body ran cold. The experience was broken up like snapshots now, more like recalling snippets of dreams rather than actual memories, but certain things lingered strong despite the distraction of fever and crackling breaths.
Strong hands, worn and wrinkled but gentle, rubbing an egg against her forehead, her neck, her chest. Soft words that her eight-year-old ears might have been able to translate if not for how quickly they came and went. The sound of something being placed beneath her bed before Jo gave in and succumbed to sleep.
