Call Forth the Waves by L. J. Hatton

knot on the floor, I crawled for the door.
    “Wait!” Jermay called. “What about the mess?”
    “You’re a magician. Make it disappear.” I gave him my most charming grin.
    He could consider the cleanup an apology.

    A few neighbors were still doing the circuit walk across the street, but Esther, Ollie, and the rest of the brave ones had gone. I stood on the porch in my horrendous, sticky pajamas, and I breathed in until the upper-atmospheric cold burned inside my body. It cleared my head and proved I was alive.
    There were no birds at this altitude, no insects, only the eerie stillness of a ghost ship on the ocean floor. Everything was suspended in the currents, being whittled away by time because nothing else could touch or change it. The air tasted of rain that hadn’t yet formed clouds.
    I stepped off the porch onto a sad, gasping patch of grass. The people across the street stopped their farce of a jog to watch me spin handfuls of vapor in my palm, separating gas from liquid. The water drew itself into a ball that I burst to wash my hands; the air sat solid, sugar-white in cubes. I tipped my hand, and they poured back into the atmosphere.
    Not a natural occurrence, this was the pull of someone like Vesper playing cat’s cradle with her element. Whoever she was, she kept the Mile ensconced in constant fog so that it would blend away into the sky if anyone on the ground looked up, but no one did that much anymore. They were afraid of what they might see. More Medusae. The start of another Great Illusion. Something worse.
    None of them realized that “worse” had already happened. The Commission let people like Nye and Arcineaux run experiments on innocents. They locked up children and tortured them with devices like the hound collars, because a gifted child was no longer considered human. They took others like Jermay who had no abilities beyond the natural and made them suffer, too. There was an entire reality that most people overlooked or willfully ignored because doing so made it easier to sleep at night.
    They could call themselves normal, and normal people couldn’t possibly be in danger.
    I could see how living apart from all of that would appeal to those who called the Mile home.
    “Thank you.”
    An unfamiliar voice startled me out of my solitude, drawing my attention to a woman all in black, cloaked in a shawl that tucked her into the clouds, leaving her edges blurred and otherworldly. Winnie’s bogeyman didn’t merely look like Death, she moved like it, too. Her eyes had the shape and color of Anise’s, and for a second I thought Iva Roma had returned from the grave a second time. Though why she would have come back carrying a large cardboard box, I didn’t know.
    “Why are you thanking me?” I asked. “What did I do?”
    “You told her it wasn’t my fault. Thank you.”
    She set the box down and turned away.
    “Wait.” I put a hand on her arm. She felt awfully solid to be a ghoul. “Your name’s Nafiza, isn’t it? Winnie said—”
    “Exactly,” she said. “The red will belong to Winifred’s mother when she’s that age. That’s the whole reason I put it in. I thought she wanted it, but she didn’t, until you told her it wasn’t my fault.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “Did I get the order wrong?” she asked.
    “I don’t know. I don’t understand.”
    Her face turned frustrated, with a deepening wince. She was trying to tell me something, but it wasn’t coming through.
    “One, two, three, not three, one, two,” she said. “Better?”
    “That’s the order?”
    “Yes, and you don’t have to thank me for the scarf. Long hair can be cumbersome.”
    “Scarf? I . . . I don’t . . . do you mean in the box?”
    I flipped the lid open warily. Inside were neatly folded stacks of clothes, each set inside a paper bag. The one on top held a red shirt and a pair of dark pants.
    “Yes! The box comes next,” she said happily. “I give you the box.