Carry On

We follow her up the stairs. Baz knocks against me with his shoulder and elbow. “All right, Snow?” he asks softly.

“Yeah. You?”

“Fine,” he says.

“Your magic?” I whisper.

“Fine.”

He touches my back so lightly, I’m not sure it’s not an accident.

We take the last step up into the attic, where Penny’s dad works. I’ve never been up here before—the whole room is maps. Maps on the walls, covered with string and pins. Maps spread out on high tables, held in place by empty tea mugs. One entire wall is a blackboard, filled with numbers and sentence fragments.

“Lovely,” Baz says. “You come by it honestly, Bunce.”

He walks around the room until he finds what he’s looking for. “There,” he says. “Already labelled.” I step up behind him. It’s a map of the South East with a red string around Hampshire. The flag on the pin says, CHRISTMAS EVE 2015.

“Last night, the Humdrum attacked Simon—and the biggest hole in Britain opened up.” He glances back at us. “When did the dragon attack Watford? What day?”

I shrug.

“It was after our Magic Words exam,” Penny says. “The middle of November.”

“Right…” Baz walks around the room, reading the flags. He stops in front of a map of Scotland. “There,” he says. “November fifteenth. The Isle of Skye.”

“Are you saying that the Humdrum is linked to the holes?” Penny asks. “Because we already knew that.”

“I’m getting there, Bunce.… Now, when did the holes first appear?”

“Do we really have to do this by Socratic method?”

Baz frowns at her.

Penny sighs. “Nobody really knows. We didn’t start documenting the holes until 1998, but there were small ones all over the country by then—”

He nods quickly, cutting her off. “And when were you born, Simon? You’d think I’d know, but I can’t remember you ever celebrating your birthday.”

I shrug again. Then clear my throat. “I don’t know. I mean … Nobody knows. They just guessed when they found me.”

“But you’re probably eighteen now. Maybe nineteen?”

“They put 1997 on my papers.”

Baz nods. “Good—1997, shortly before the holes were discovered. And when did you realize you were a magician?”

Penny’s paying attention now. She and I have never talked about this. I don’t like to talk about this.

“I didn’t realize it,” I say. “The Mage told me.”

Baz is pinning me to the wall with his eyes. “But how did the Mage know? How did he find you?”

I clear my throat. “I went off.” They both know what that means. But I didn’t, not at 11. I woke up in the middle of the night, during a vicious nightmare—I’d gone to bed hungry, and in my dream, my stomach was on fire. I woke up, breathless, and magic was pouring out of me. Blasting out. The children’s home was burnt to the ground, and everyone in it woke up streets away. Unharmed, but still, streets away. (Once I watched a show about tornadoes in America, and they showed furniture that had been picked up and set in a yard miles away without breaking. It was like that.)

“You lit up the magickal atmosphere like a Christmas tree,” Baz says.

“Like a carpet bomb,” Penny chimes in. “My mum actually threw up when it happened.”

“When?” Baz says. “When did it happen?”

“August,” I say. I know he already knows this. “The year we started school.”

“August,” Baz says, “2008.” He walks around the room. “Here,” he says, pointing at a dead spot on the map. “And here.” He points at another.

Penny and I stare at the map.

Then she steps forward. She points at a string circle. “And in Newcastle…,” she says softly. “And a bunch of tiny ones on the coast. The holes changed that year. My dad says they metastasized.”

“But—but I wasn’t any of those places!” I sputter. “I’ve never been at the site of a new dead spot before last night.”

Baz turns to me. “I don’t think you have to be there. To make it happen.”

“Simon,” Penny asks, “when did you go off on the chimera?”

“Our fifth year,” Baz says. “Spring 2013.”

“Here,” Penny says, pointing. “And a big one over there.”

“Are you saying I’m the Humdrum?” I step away from them. “Because I’m not the Humdrum.”

Baz meets my eyes. “I know. I know you’re not. But Simon, listen. The Humdrum told us—he said he doesn’t take the magic, that he’s ‘what’s left when you’re done.’”

“I don’t even know what that means, Baz!” I feel like I might go off right now. My fingertips are buzzing.

“It means, the Humdrum doesn’t take the magic, Simon—you do.”

Penny gasps. “Simon. The first time you went off, you were eleven years old—”

“Exactly,” Baz says. “Probably wearing a shitty T-shirt and cast-off jeans—and bouncing that bloody ball.”

They’re looking at each other now. “Simon went off,” Penny says, “and he sucked up so much magic—”

Baz nods eagerly.