Marvin collapsed on top of Dani. The security man screamed. Fell silent. And stared at his left arm. It was crumbling into rich good garden soil. Dani tried to sit up. Tried to pull her magic to her. But someone must have given her a booster directly into her IV. Her eyes were drugged and dazed. There were too many medicines in her system for Dani to a help.
Sandra had to act.
But her magic was a claylike lump of hard uselessness inside her. What her first teachers had labeled as fear.Fear. Yes. She was terrified.
But Sandra moved through the chaos to the other end of Dani’s bed, away from the one-armed magic user, and pulled the heavily laden gurney—or what was left of it—back into Dani’s room. She shut the door on the chaos of the hallway. The door had a latch. She figured it was easily unlockable from the hallway, but she turned it anyway.
Dani was still trying to move, still trying to gather her magic, but it wasn’t coming. Moving on some kind of automatic reflex, Sandra pulled Marvin off of Dani and lowered him to the floor. Well, tried to. Her back, which hadn’t twinged in months, spasmed tight, so it was more like providing a cushion for his head with her hands when he landed. Then she folded the IV line into a kink to shut off the last of the drugs. Aloud, she said, “Mable. We’re in Dani’s room. Marvin’s been hit with a spell and he’s drooling on the floor. Dani’s coming back awake but her magic is doped up again. There’s a finger latch between us and a magic user whose left arm is now made of dirt. Get me help!”
Sandra spotted some tape on a shelf and removed Dani’s plastic IV needle, happy to see that Marvin’s spell had missed the plastic attached to and inside of her friend. There was no gauze so she folded a tissue and held it in place over the bleeding hole and wrapped the tape around Dani’s arm. She gave Dani a few sips of water and dumped the rest of the cup over Marvin’s face. He cursed as he struggled to wake up fully. Then cursed some more when he finally sat upright on the floor. “What the hell did you do that for?”
“It worked, didn’t it? Get up. You need to get it together. You just turned some thug’s arm to dirt. We’re out of the closet and I have a feeling it’s about to get busy in here.”
“The guy,” he groaned, placing a hand on his chest. “Nose Ring. He had magic.”
“A lot of magic,” Sandra said, putting her ear against the door. “He zapped you.” She glanced at his pants. “You don’t wear pull up protection, do you?”
“No?”
“Shouda, wouda, coulda.”
Marvin looked down. “I peed my pants. Son of a bitch.”
“You could be, I guess,” Sandra said. “I never met your mama. It’s too quiet out there.”
Marvin spluttered as if he had never heard her make a joke. Maybe he never had. Maybe she didn’t make jokes anymore.
“It’s too quiet for Mable to be on the way. We’d hear things,” Dani said, sitting up on her ruined stretcher. She fingered the dirt beneath her. “Who knew mattresses were mostly plastic?”
“Everything is mostly plastic,” Marvin said. “Crap never breaks down unless you have a magic spell and a lot of power to make it work. Everything currently made of plastic could be made out of hemp and revive the farming economy and improve the oxygen content of the atmosphere—”
“We heard it before, Marvin,” Sandra interrupted.
He rolled over to his hands and knees and grabbed one of the wall shelves to pull himself up. “Oh hell. My knees. I’m too old for this shit.”
Dani slid off the dirt gurney and held herself upright with both hands. “I’ma vomit,” she slurred.
Adjusting the position of her ear on the door, Sandra whispered. “Shhh. I hear something.”
Dani
Dani triedto gather her power, but it was like sucking water through a trick straw, one stuck with pin holes. Useless.
Marvin moved around the room to the window, took in the view, and met her eyes, shaking his head.
Mable wasn’t outside.
The big guy had been zapped. That could be really dangerous to old people. If she got zapped on top of all the drugs in her system, she’d be down for the count. Maybe dead. Their plan hadn’t included magic-using goons.
She tried again to draw up her magic, but nothing happened.
She was powerless, Marvin was still pressing his chest, and Sandra had never before used her power on purpose. And their rescue knight on a white horse was … Mable and her tiny dragons.
“Problems,” Sandra said. She backed away from the door. “They’re bringing in voids and a battering ram.”
Over Building Z’s emergency loudspeaker—the one used to call out codes when patients crashed—a voice said, “Code Red, dining room. Code Red, dining room. Code Red, dining room. This is not a drill. Code Red, dining room.”
It was Mable’s voice, breathless and hollow. As if she was running.
