Shift

FOURTEEN.1

Kayden was glad she had grabbed the passenger seat of the taxi leaving Le Lieu.

After their adrenaline-fueled sprint out of the conference room, they had nabbed the first cab they had seen: a small thing loitering in the front parking lot. Kayden had instinctively gone to the front, leaving Blaze, Helio, and Lexi in the back. The problem was that Lexi and Helio had clearly made up from their earlier fight; they were nestled against each other in the backseat, whispering sweet nothings into each other's ears and giggling like school children. Blaze, meanwhile, kept sending Kayden uncomfortable glares through the overhead mirror. She could almost hear his voice in her head: Why did you leave me back here by myself?

Kayden hid her smirk and ran her hand over the cover of her pocket-sized copy of A Progressive Book of Magic.

She couldn't believe that she had forgotten about the book; the fear of losing her family had driven all rational thoughts out of her head. This book—this specific copy that Blaze had almost tossed into the sewer—had been their savior.

And now they were going to the author to beg him to pull it from the presses. It felt a bit hypocritical. Kayden rubbed the mark on her wrist self-consciously. But it's the only way.

Tilting the book away from the cab driver, she watched the capital letters in the title bloom into bright flowers and then withdraw into pointed green buds; it reminded her of the morning glories that crawled up a lattice on the side of her house. Once the letters had re-bloomed, Kayden opened the book and landed on the dedication page. It was just a few lines long and framed by a small circle of inked flowers:

To my loving wife, Elise.

Even now, after this shift, you are with me,

my lovely flower.

Kayden's heart twinged, but she moved onwards, flipping a few more pages until she reached the book's foreword. It was only a few pages long, but she skimmed through the first half; most of it addressed the failures of the original edition after predicting the wrong shift date and then it lightly touched on the consequent death of Walter's wife; that section was simply too painful to linger on. But she slowed when she saw the words "global warming."

Walter mentioned that earlier, she thought, remembering how once he had said it, Helio had begun to taunt the old man. Kayden glanced up at the overview mirror. She watched as Helio—unaware of her gaze—placed a kiss on Lexi's pink cheek. Kayden looked away, her stomach roiling, and bent her head to read the passage.

The slow evolution of magic is normal, but this sudden shift is anything but. Reliable statistics haven't been compiled yet, but news reports on television have told us all about the deaths and other disasters because of the shift.

Why has magic shifted so dramatically? Consider an analogy:

Global warming.

Before my wife and I began compiling the first edition of this book, we were members of an organization devoted to halting the rapid evolution of magic. Everyone knows about global warming in relevance to the environment. When it comes to magic, we believe a similar thing is going on, a sort of speed-up of unhealthy magical residue lingering in the world. We wanted to stage a global spell to cleanse the world, but we were not successful. And now the shift that we fought to prevent has occurred.

What this means is that it might not be very long until there is another shift, and then another. As a reader of this book and as a member of the potestas community, I beg you to do your part to stop the vicious cycle. If you are a man or woman of science, look into the matter and try to determine why the world is behaving like this. And if you are just a normal civilian, be respectful of magic and the environment. Think before you cast. Help make it so that a sudden shift will never happen again. If not for me, then for my late wife.