Smoke & Mirrors

The problem with being on top of the world is what happens when you don’t realize that you are. How far you can fall when you don’t think you’re high. The downside of my profession is that I now take my phone everywhere I go. Emails come and go, meetings are juggled and changed on a basis that makes the planner app strain under the weight of logistics. In the two months since The Mayor’s Office vs. Callie Perron I’ve been promoted four times to become the youngest senior partner at the law firm and the work has been as wild as it has been exhilarating. My partner insisted I needed a vacation before I burned out even though I feel like I’m glowing far more than burning.

Or I did until ten minutes ago. Helen is out shopping along expensive streets, I was getting my bathing suit and discovered my best suit – the one I wore at the case against the magician and for my bar exam – was in my bag. I hadn’t brought it with me, but it was in the bag and it looked – it looked like Helen said I’ve been looking for the last month. The reason I’ve taken to avoiding mirrors without ever noticing it. I buried it under tourist trinkets and the free soap we’d taken from the last hotel.

I turned my phone off. I imagined it resisting me, but it turned off. The beach was deserted, which didn’t strike me as odd until I stopped. White sand, clear blue water and not a single person around.

This is the thing about sandals: there is a reason they are called thongs in some places. No one wears them well. The man who walked down the beach toward me did. He looked ordinary. A few years younger than me, but he moved as though – not like a partner as the firm, not like he owned the beach but like he was a part of it. His steps were calm and unhurried. I could have got off the beach. Returned to the hotel. I know I could have, but I didn’t.

Because I wasn’t sure. There was something in his eyes. If we were in a court room, I’d have said he would win the case. No matter what it was. Not because he was better or more skilled, but simply because he’d never stop once it mattered and I didn’t have anything in me that mattered in that way. There was Helen, but maybe not even that. There are salesman’s eyes, the kind that can sell you anything. His eyes held only truth.

He said my name mildly, even though I would have sworn we never met.

“For the record, Callie Perron did not call me. It was Jay who noticed that there was a city core he was bound from entering and asked me about it. Not that he couldn’t get in – I imagine he did anyway – but he at least asked me about it. I entered the city, listened enough to know what had happened.” And this stranger smiled, then. “I was about to quote Jurassic World, since I have seen it so many times. About how just because something could be done, people don’t think if it should. Did you not wonder why no other magician has been barred from the core of a city by a court?”

“You’re a magician.”

“I am the wandering magician. And other things as well. I’m speaking to you as one of those right now, and not as a magician at all.”

And it was only then that I realized the world had gone quiet. I couldn’t hear the resort, and there was fog about us. I turned, and the ocean was frozen. A mirror reflecting my face, and I couldn’t look away from my own harrowed and exhausted face.

“You are so used to using smoke and mirrors, you didn’t wonder how deeply it was being used on you. What the mayor’s office stood to gain. What others stood to gain if a magician was not protecting a place.”

I stepped back, only the sand had become thick liquid holding my feet in place. I looked down, unable not to. Shadows moved that weren’t shadows, and that’s all I want to ever say about that.

“That is what you helped let into the heart of the city because no one was standing guard. And Callie did not challenge it to teach a lesson to the people you work for.” His smile became something else, colder and far more alien. “An error on her part, to not understand the nature of the enemy. And a burden placed upon you that should have not been yours to shoulder.”

“This isn’t my fault!” My voice broke against the still world. Nothing cracked save for me.

“It is your responsibility. Your partner notices what you will not. Others will as well. You haven’t gone into the core of the city since then, gone around it to get to work without understanding why. But it can be undone. There are agreements that can be made. Geas that can be entered into.” He sighed. “I want to do this no more than you do, but sometimes the universe leaves us no easy choices.”

“But – I –.”

He said nothing, but the future unfolded before me in the smoke of my breathe. I don’t smoke at all. But I will, from the stress, and from that smoke I see Helen leaving. I see what happens to the city. I see too much. Too much and it’s gone moments later.

He held me, this magician who is too much more, until I stopped crying.

“I blocked most it from you,” he said, not hiding the strain in his voice.

“How do I undo this?”

He tells me, almost gently.

I walk back to the hotel. The suit I’d called unarmed, unharmed, confusing myself. It burns, and my phone becomes smaller. A different model. A different firm. A different me. So small an act, and I get to feel the universe arrange itself. I was told that magicians cannot change time, but this one twists reality like a toy. The power is not his alone. I think I know that, for a moment, but I am not certain.

Helen comes back a few minutes later. Tells me about a boy and a woman she met, and they kept her busy for a bit. She notices nothing unusual at all. I tell her I have to get a bit of work done and she laughs, makes a joke about how she’d glad I didn’t take that other job.

And I write this town. I don’t know how long I’ll remember it. I don’t know how long these words will remain. I think of smoke and mirrors and how every truth is never what we think it is. And how, sometimes, we can be lucky beyond belief because someone else carries the darkness not of our own making.