Good As Dead

Chapter Two

"I want the..." Gran's finger wavers in the air as she gestures at the two bottles of nail polish I hold in my hand. Her speech falters a lot these days, so I watch her face as much as listen to her words to find out what she wants.

When she looks frustrated, I hold up one of the bottles. "The coral?"

"Yes." Sharp and explosive, like that single word drives all of her breath out of her. When her arm sinks back to the chair, it keeps shaking.

I nod and settle cross-legged on the floor, touching one of her nails to see if the base coat is dry. I also notice that her feet are as cool as her hands were this morning. One more worry to shove into the back of my mind.

She's used this color for as long as I can remember. Those bright fingernails in hands straight and strong, guiding my small, grubby fingers over the soil of a potted plant, showing me how to test for whether it needed water. I blink rapidly, trying to reconcile that image with the gnarled, frail version in my hand now. Her trembling is worse; it must be close to her evening dose of pills. Medication helps her muscle tremors, but can't do jack shit against the magic clogging up her body.

Gran was a volunteer in the clean-up that happened in the first days after Fivefield, before the site became known as a magical fuck-up of epic proportions.

Fivefield was a magictech experiment based around the biggest leyline running through the Necali Territory. According to old magazines I found, before the disaster, Fivefield was called something else, a technical name with a lot of numbers. People behind the idea said it would revolutionize thaumaturgical ability, that magic would stop being only for witches and other creatures able to tap into and control its raw form. Through Fivefield, magic would be extracted and turned into spells that anyone could use, even people like me, without a magical bone in their body.

No one knows exactly why the drilling rig for the leyline exploded. Some think it was a human error and the idea behind Fivefield is still safe. Others, the ones who believe magic is sentient, say there's a reason why some people can use magic and some people can't, and the leyline itself got pissed off when we tried finding a way around that balance. Especially because, after spewing raw magic through the ground and air for three days, the leyline repaired the gaping hole left by the explosion, plugging itself up by growing crystal fields overnight, five of them.

Fifteen years later, the land around it is still black and dead, but the real trouble is what all that raw magic set loose did to people. Too much of anything leads to death, even sunlight. And magic can be a lot more unpredictable than the sun.

Plenty of reports try to explain what happened and why it caused such horrible health impacts. I don't read them; Maria used to, obsessively, but I hate how they turn my parents and Gran into mere statistics. Sixty thousand dead within a five-year range. Three hundred thousand with lingering effects. Those are cold, bloodless estimates. Even the horror vids that use Fivefield as a setting don't hit on the really scary part. It's not just about the grotesque effects experienced by people caught in rogue spells created by Fivefield. It's also about the daily grind of watching someone slowly disintegrate after a massive overload of magic rushed through their body, settling in the same way toxic dust can sink into the lungs. I've grown up with death at the dinner table, and what's horrifying isn't whether it will be awful, but how much will be lost before it finally reaches you.

I paint all the nails on one hand before Gran says, "Where's Maria?"

"She's at school." I bite the side of my cheek to keep from saying more. My younger sister lives at a prestigious boarding school in one of the Amstar cities back east. Upon graduation, she's guaranteed a high-status government job over there. As long as she doesn't fuck up her grades, she's made for life. And also unlikely to return here any time soon.