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1.
The Earth was screaming and Magi Ruiz had made it yell.
It hadn’t even been that hard, really, though she’d never let on to the others about that. Keep pretending the notes were hard to decipher. They weren’t, but their author would surely forgive a small dishonesty. Even written by someone clearly lacking a theoretical backing, the tome foisted upon Magi with ‘finally someone wants this old-’ read to her a straightforward dissection of alchemical composition, sound mixing with mastery, sound from void.
When the black winds began, Magi felt close to the long-dead author. Phantom noise became their voice.
2.
The Earth was shaking and her assistant faltered.
Who’d want to be left out of Magi’s second triumph? Not the wolf. She could probably smell the promise in the air, first a friendly Wyatt, now- who could say?
Layna couldn’t. Magi could have, if she’d cared to. But there were more important matters.
“Keep going! Almost done!”
Notes blown by the air, fingers flustered on string. Rectangle of metal in Magi’s hand communicating to her on readouts and dials.
Land speaking too. Language none could mistake.
“I don’t-”
“We’re so close!”
And then-
a click-
a minute gap-
is crossed.
3.
Magi Ruiz sits in the aftermath, hands clutching her sensors. The only purchase she can find.
Layna talking to the person rejected by death. She’d gone first. She was closer. Magi was having trouble remembering how to walk.
She’s overtop of her now, Layna imposing because she wants to be.
“I should slap you.”
Magi doesn’t respond.
“I don’t know if that would be enough.”
The precipitate lays on the field, staring at the sky. Layna phones help, but people arrive before that. Sound travels fast.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Magi remains confused. Had there been something to say?
4.
“They’re loud.”
A few of the team want to know what happened, cross to Magi before seeing Layna’s head shake or checking on the new arrival.
All the explanation she can muster:
“They’re loud.”
She tries to say it in a way that explains the para-sympathetic spin imparted to parts and particles by para-frequencies para-audible, etc. Magi finds it well beyond her grasp to articulate why a soul screams. All she knows is they all do.
“They were loud.”
As if the tense, despite being more accurate, would explain anything.
She would talk more but she’s having trouble remembering names.
5.
MaX wants to know if she’s okay. Xe’s a good kid. She nods for xer benefit.
Magi remembers xem formed from static air. New equipment, new opportunities, same heedless rush to make happen what she’s decided must happen.
Strangely like a xerox machine, line by line dot by dot, pointilist laser jet sound solid. Laser coherent, crystal lattice.
There was no point where it became life. Life was an arbitrary classification, Magi knew, so she wasn’t surprised. It hadn’t started dead became alive because- were viruses alive? Were galaxies alive?
Yet she hugged MaX, then and now. Xe’s her friend.
6.
That’s when it clicks what she’s done, the first time she sees the crumpled mass, loud but not out loud, being helped off the recomposed ground, is a person. Weight of responsibility.
She must have known what would happen.
Not her thoughts, words spoken.
“She must have known.”
“She didn’t.”
“How could she not?”
“Why would she?”
“Probably our fault.”
“No way. She’s-”
Arguments reach her.
She hopes one of them will figure it out. She can’t seem to.
Nervous laughter forces its way out of her mouth. It drags down the already oppressive atmosphere. There are eyes on her.
7.
Layna is still holding the bass, which strikes Magi as more funny than it reasonably is.
She can’t hear what Layna’s saying but she’s doing it with authority. Knowledge you only got from being around since the start.
She’d just thought-
She’d just thought-
Well, Magi hadn’t thought. She’d wanted. She’d wanted to be close. She’d wanted to draw that line, to be where she belonged and vice versa.
But she hadn’t thought. That was what they were mad about, all she could decipher the team being mad about then.
Ironic for someone who spent her time thinking.
Nervous laughter.
8.
Nervous laughter and eyes on her, disapproving, some glinting red.
How could she not have known?
Maybe it’s bigger than her. Something in the land, something foul, something not yet departed.
Something in the team, the city, the people, something outside of her something bigger something-
More laughs, nervous and resigned, when she realizes how quickly she’s willing to recuse herself from what she’s done.
She did this.
No one can deny her that.
Still laughing, she makes her way to her feet and towards the assembled crowd. Smile cracked, oblong. Another proud chapter in the team’s favorite pastime: resurrection.
9.
How did it go? Look on my works, ye mighty?
Yeah, something like that. She hoped everyone took a long hard look.
The air displaced by the first swing reaches her before the blow.
Sound travels fast. She steps back before the impact.
Who knows who threw the punch. Someone’s being held back in the crowd. MaX grabs onto her and the first time she bites something back is at the condescension they look at xem with, muted thoughts of ‘poor kid’ and such and such.
The crowd reclaims xem. Magi would say something here if she could stop laughing.
10.
Death followed now. Magi Ruiz could read it in the assembled eyes. There were eyes on her. Only death followed now.
What had she summoned?
How could she not have-
But she didn’t.
She didn’t know it would be like this.
How black the skies would fall.
How deep the waters run.
Oh that’s right. Small mistake. Correction: she hasn’t been laughing. Those turned to sobs a fair while ago.
And here is the moment the picture is painted. Magi Ruiz stands alone, and she is distant and she feels hated.
A small comfort, to have been right all along.
11.
She runs. No one comes after her. She’s not most important right now.
Magi knows she will be, once the ash has settled. Her brain, blessing and curse, divorced Cartesianally from her body, is already working through things she must do, when she is ready, things she will be faced with, collates them into a proper list to be read later.
She sets it to moving. Faster than her feet. Grass and then concrete under them, and sound fading away behind her. Echoes too fade from her head until it is only hallways and sorrow. And then she was home.
12.
Escaped, Magi shuts her door behind and scrambles for the book. She finds it and holds it to her like a totem, a comfort. It was unchanging in her arms. It meant something different now than when she’d left.
Name still inscribed in fast-failing pen in tight penmanship inside the front cover. She traces her finger over it. She could never reproduce such writing.
Magi knew its author had passed before she ever touched the book. If she’d drawn a line between them, it seemed clear where its trajectory would lead.
Magi breathed.
She hid, for a while, then emerged.