26
SARAH
‘I’ve found something you should see,’ Naomi says down a bad line. Phone reception in Salem is always dreadful – call it magical static. ‘Can you come up?’
Anything, rather than sit at home thinking about my dead friend, my absent daughter, and what exactly the government has in store for us magicals now it has our biometrics and DNA samples. When I confronted Charles Okoye, I left him in no doubt that I consider him a collaborator. But it’s not fair to condemn him, or be suspicious of Lachlan’s methods, without having my own positive vision of what needs to be done.
Thinking that over preoccupies me for the three-hour drive to Salem, and once I’ve parked up, Naomi is waiting to escort me inside the Moot.
‘It’s in the restricted section of the archives,’ she tells me softly, her heels snagging the carpet tiles of this dingy, mustard-coloured corridor. ‘So you can’t go in. I barely have sufficient clearance myself. But here, take Koeda-chan. And you won’t be disturbed in here …’
She places her wooden doll into my hands. A poppet, we’d call it in my tradition, though the little figure, featureless as an old-fashioned clothes peg, has been passed down through her Japanese family’s magical lineage. It’s warm from Naomi’sbody heat, and I don’t detect any active magics from its smooth, inert body.
‘Sit on the floor,’ Naomi says, pointing to a space beside a bulky photocopier that occupies almost all of an unobtrusive closet. ‘I’ll lock the door from the other side when I leave so you won’t be disturbed.’
‘Then why am I hiding down here?’ I ask, folding myself up small like an adult coerced into a Thanksgiving game of hide’n’seek.
‘That’s not why you’re sitting. May I?’ She gestures to where my hands are clasped around her doll and smiles when I nod. ‘It’s less jarring if you close your eyes.’
I feel her large, cool hands fold around mine. She’s speaking almost too low to hear, and I couldn’t understand anyway, because it’s Japanese. There’s a soothing, monotonous cadence to her words, and I shiver as if abruptly overcast by swift-moving cloud. In my nose, my mouth, I scent and taste the coiling aroma of incense, the earthy velvet of wet moss, the must of rotting wood that has endured in the shade for uncounted centuries, the tatter of worn, over-handled fabric. The little wooden form is suddenly hot beneath my curled fingers, as if it’s no longer a stick but a coal, or a still-solid ember.
‘That’ll do,’ Naomi says in English. ‘Open your eyes.’
So I do, and see …myself, staring up vacant and foolish, as if I’m behind Naomi’s eyes, looking out.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says with a smile. ‘I won’t let anyone see you like this.’
Naomi exits the photocopier closet and wards it from the outside, before heading through a smart, glass-paned door whose brass plate declares it the ‘Archive & Library, US Moot’.She –we– receive a cheerful wave from the on-duty librarian, a curvy woman whose alabaster complexion showsveins as blue as her vibrant hair. (There was something flirtatious in that wave. Did Naomi even notice?)
But Naomi is already moving surely through the open-access shelves, the tiers of periodicals. From the corner of her eye I see another door marked ‘Manuscript Room’. As we pass, I glimpse inside it a wide-topped plan chest where spell charts like those I use will be stored. When hatred for us ran at its height through Sanctuary and our house was burned, I was consumed with fear that our persecutors would break through the magical protections layered around my workroom and destroy the countless artifacts and documents my family has preserved down the centuries. Destroy a people’s history and ancestral knowledge, and you’re halfway to destroying them. What the Moot has here is the last line of defence against that.
An entry-pad beeps as Naomi presses her pass to it. It reveals a second, industrial-looking door with a keypad requiring a log-in code sent real-time to her Moot-issued phone. Beyond it, a security guard has Naomi empty her pockets before stepping into an airport-style scanning booth. Then another door, this one with a biometric entry mechanism using fingerprints and a retina scan – which every witch in America has now surrendered to the state. I pray to the goddess there’s a final, magical level of checks for admission to this sanctum.
There is. A grim-faced witch, who peppers Naomi with a hex to reveal hidden identities and changed forms, another to sense mal-intent, a third to detect compulsion. This is, after all, the magical-lore equivalent of Fort Knox.
And then we’re in. Naomi knows where she’s going. It’s a box of handwritten and old-fashioned typed documents, and as Naomi moves the box I see it holds correspondence directed to the Maine branch of the Association for GiftedPeople, a precursor to what became the Moot. The document she smooths out is a penned letter. The writing is copperplate and reasonably legible, but for my benefit she whispers as she reads.
The author writes to ask: ‘…whether anyone can verify or disprove the rumoured events of “Redhaven”, believed to have been destroyed by persecution in 1866. And to know whether a Susanna Fenn might have been involved.’ A separate sheet folded around the first explains the request was sent by ‘Miss Maia Fenn (aet. 19, det. 1894), daughter of Thomas Fenn, Mundane, of Sanctuary, CT’.
Maia.A name from the front of our Starcross, with only four more below: Maia’s daughter Lilian, then Lilian’s granddaughter Serafina, then Serafina’s granddaughter, me. And my daughter Harper.
Thomas Fenn, Mundane. Sympathy stirs in my breast for this ancestor whose name I’d not even known till now. Mundane. Giftless. Non-magical.Unremembered.A few generations from now, my mother will be forgotten just the same way. She despised magic, but it took me a long time to realise that the feeling sprang from jealousy, not contempt.
Naomi flips the sheet so I can see a final annotation in a third hand. ‘Request denied. Insufficient resources.’ She turns the paper once more, giving me a final chance to take it all in, then returns it to the shelf and retraces her steps.
The lurch is giddying when she reclaims her doll and I’m back behind my own eyes. I swallow down a roil of nausea. Raise my eyebrows in what I hope is apology but might equally be warning – keep-clear-in-case-I-projectile-vomit.
‘Interesting, yes?’ Naomi says.
‘Very. But it’s hardly proof a Fenn founded Redhaven. The letter is from a Fenn, Maia, who’s not even sure if Redhaven was real.’
‘She thinks Susanna holds the clue.’
‘I wonder why she didn’t simply ask her. Susanna would only have been in her sixties at the time Maia wrote that letter.’
‘Unless she died at Redhaven,’ Naomi suggests. ‘The legend is that there were no survivors.’
‘Then how did Thomas survive? He would have been a small boy when it happened.’
