A person might have been forgiven, that night, for forgetting that the only sources of electricity in the City were hand-powered generators and scavenged batteries. They might especially deserve this forgiveness if they were new, as so many of the people in the club were, for it was positively alight with motion and sound. Repetitive beats shook the walls in time with blinding pulses of purple and yellow light. Drinks passed freely from hand to hand. Bathroom lines stretched out to the edge of the dance floor. It was a celebration. For what, it did not matter—another day alive was reason enough.
Some time later there would be screaming. Panicked, awful screaming. Then hundreds of people rushing to the door, oblivious or unbelieving of the harried protests of those who made it out before them. There's no way to stop a herd once it gets moving.
In the back, a young girl would clasp her fist around a man's wrist and never let go. "I'm sorry," she would say. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
*
Several miles away, in a small white living room with peeling wallpaper, a woman named Loren leaned back in her chair. She crossed her arms, and gazed out of the window. Oftentimes lately she caught herself thinking that the only advantage to living in the City was the bizarre and entertaining weather. Palm-sized snowflakes flurried past the glass, lit by a sweltering noonday sun whose heat forced her into a tank top and shorts. Minutes ago it had been clear skies.
Magic ruined everything. One day the world was normal, and the next came the infamous Nanna Olga. She was an elderly woman, out shopping in Brussels one morning when she detonated a storefront display with the sheer force of her lust for a sequined handbag, thereby announcing that the status quo had changed. Supernatural was now natural. The mind, heart, and body flattened onto one universal plane. Or so it seemed to some. Magic came unbidden, and the only consistency of it was that it never followed any rules.
Maybe history would have taken a different course if those gifted few, touched by magic, could have waved their hands and incanted some silly words to unleash their power. If they had the opportunity to be trained in rustic cottages by bearded elders in tottering hats. If only.
"It's your turn."
Loren returned her attention to the chess board. Something was different about the arrangement of pieces before her, but she couldn't place exactly what it was. She squinted, frowned, and moved her bishop.
Powerful tools gifted to man are always corrupted. Instead of incantations and pointed hats, there came the City. There came its winding streets and cramped rows of towering buildings nestled atop vague, hauntingly familiar landscapes. This is where the magically inclined and magically curious children of the world alike found themselves, dreaming in lieu of sleep—seeking excitement, chasing beauty, or simply hunting for a bit of honest spellwork.
Across the table, a series of emotions played out on Zira's wide face. Confusion, alarm, concentration. Her thin, steepled arms twitched. "I find," she observed, nudging a pawn forward, "that games of skill are best enjoyed when all participating parties are at the same level."
Loren swung her queen across the board. "Then it's good we're both garbage."
Zira's mouth broke into a broad smile, revealing yellowed teeth against pale pink gums. "Conversely, it's impossible to improve unless you practice against people who are better than you."
"Better than me?"
"You know what I mean."
A peculiar noise came from outside the window, like pebbles running down a mountainside. Like nails, scrabbling against brick. Loren turned in time to see a face pop into the frame. "Your roommate's home," Zira said, unfazed, capturing Loren's queen.
"Uh-hmm." Loren reflexively moved her rook. The second she took her fingers off, she realized it would lose her the game. Meanwhile, her roommate shimmied the window open with the subtle scrape of wood against wood.
There are precisely two manners in which a person can scale a three-story building and enter through a window: sleekly, like an urban commando, or like they have entirely more joints in their body than they know what to do with. Su always managed the former. She landed, catlike, in the apartment, wearing a jacket that was more torn strips of leather than a recognizable piece of clothing. Her face was a mask of determination, framed in a messy bob of pitch black hair. With only a nod toward the living room, she stormed into the kitchen.
The apartment was largely empty and undecorated, from plain white walls to bare cabinet tops. Their prized possession was a couch—a tan and brown, many-cushioned monstrosity that was nevertheless the most comfortable place to sit in a ten-block radius. Apart from that, there were the two old chairs and the upturned wooden barrel they called a table—primarily used as a surface for playing chess. Zira, still staring intently at the game, promptly missed her checkmate by capturing Loren's rook instead. "Did I ever tell you that my grandfather was a grandmaster?" The woman was never one to shy away from a casually fantastic story. Her grandfather might have done everything she lauded him for, if he had lived to see five hundred.
Outside, the snow picked up. Billowing white sheets obscured the sun. Loren leaned back further in her chair, and the cheap wood shuddered in protest. "I thought you said he fought in Brazil."
"No, that was my dad."
A cabinet slammed in the adjoining room. "Take a look out there," Su called to them. "Snow's stopping a few inches off the ground. Hovering in the air 'til it melts."
"He was stationed in Minas Gerais when everything went crazy," Zira continued, frowning down at her freshly acquired rook. "Part of the military operation that caused that explosion. Nobody knows what happened, of course."
Loren slid off her chair and peered out the window. Su was right. Not a single blade of dark green grass in their expansive backyard bore even a hint of the frost descendingly thickly from the sky. Her roommate jogged into the room with a strip of jerky in her mouth. "Snow's from Helsinki. Arizona's sun. University Clint says it matches up."
"Clint says there's levitating snow in Finland?"
"Didn't have time to ask." Su swallowed the dried meat and raced back out.
"What's the hurry all about?"
There came the sound of distant, harried rummaging. "We have a job!" She returned, a moment later, carrying two brown backpacks.
"Since when do we rush for that?" Loren asked. She was the sort of person to consider herself practical in all matters, and to become annoyed when others chose the word 'lazy' instead.
Su began haphazardly piling supplies into the packs. Food, flashlights, bottles, bandages. "Someone stole Miri's tome."
Loren blinked, processed, and shouldered her bag. "Lead the way."
Zira danced awkwardly in her seat. "What about me?"
As one, Loren and Su turned to regard her. They paused for a beat. "Come with."
"Really?" Zira asked.
"Yeah," Su said, swinging the front door open. "Sorry about your chess game."
Zira hesitated, for a second, as if she might ask the first question about what was going on. Then it passed, and she swiped her purse off the back of the chair. "It's fine. I was about to lose anyway."
*
The City does not have a name. Once it was called many different things, in many different languages, but in time it filtered down through a fundamental practicality: there was no reason for specificity, when referring to something so singular. The City has no utilities, businesses, or tenants. In their place it has entrepreneurs, wanderers, and a whole mess of squatters. Nobody survives long without learning how to identify a good squat, and the Northlake Apartment Complex was one of the best around.
Loren and Su found it already abandoned. Most of the second floor's interior had collapsed into the main level, sealing every conventional entrance. It was Su who discovered how to scale up the side of the building and into the largely intact third story. Properly, they considered their house to be unit number 327, but due to creative destruction-based design their bathroom was in unit 329, and Loren slept in what remained of unit 324.
These elements made the property attractive: It was remote, complex, defensible, and uninhabitable at first glance. One significant downside was that exiting the half-ruined structure was as excessively aerobic as entering it. The three women wound their way past the livable section of the third story, ducking beneath fallen beams and skirting around moldy furniture. One by one they leapt over the broken door frame of unit 302 and dropped through a narrow hole in the floor on the other side.
Besides rappelling out of the window, this was their only way out. If they angled their fall correctly, leaned to the left at the right moment, and remembered where to brace themselves against the wall, they would come out largely unscathed on the ground floor. From there they'd have only to scramble over a small expanse of broken foundation to gain their freedom.
Zira was the last out, hitting the dirt unceremoniously hard. "That's going to be the death of me one day," she said, rising shakily and dusting herself off. She peered back up at the hole. "Has anyone tried getting up that way?"
"I did once," Su said. "Wound up in a cast for a week. Pitch black, all the way up. No way to tell what you're grabbing onto."
Loren absently patted her pockets. Empty. So, everything accounted for. "Alright, let's go."
The trio set off down a gentle hill that led to the nearest road. There'd once been a parking lot and a small garage attached to the apartment, but both were long gone. Other half-collapsed structures loomed in the distance, a lingering memento that the area used to be a thriving neighborhood. As they walked, the snow stopped, returning the City to the boiling summer afternoon it had so briefly and bizarrely interrupted.
"Miri's a witch, right?" Zira asked.
"Right."
"And somebody stole her book? All of her spells?"
"That's correct."
"Why would they do that?"
"That's what we're going to figure out," Su said. A motorcycle was parked on the curb. It was a creature of beauty: long, low, sleek, and a deep royal purple in color. She dropped her pack into the cargo pod and straddled the seat.
"I still don't understand," Zira said. "Why did she come to you?"
Loren tossed her own pack into the pod and climbed aboard. "Because of where we're headed."
Comprehension dawned on Zira's face. "I've never been on a Run before."
Loren offered her hand, and Zira allowed herself to be pulled onto the bike. She grabbed on tight to Loren's waist, and the bike zipped off down the street. It hummed as it devoured pavement, hurling the three of them at breakneck speed over winding and broken streets. Su shouted into the wind. Zira's long, auburn hair streamed behind them like a banner.
*
Scholars like few things better than arguing about the phenomenon colloquially known as the Sometimes. When the City first appeared—at the same time, or very shortly after, Nanna Olga and the first incidence of magic in the larger world—it was a diminutive thing. A faint echo of a street in Chicago. A Belgian farmhouse. An abandoned Taiwanese bunker. Never all these things at once, if it was any of them at all.
At first it was found only in dreams. People drifted in and out, speaking with one another as one speaks with ghosts. One person's experience would be wildly different than the next. Then, slowly, permanent disappearances began. Many of the first residents fell asleep at night to wake in the City. Others drifted in. Still others took a wrong turn home and found, upon turning back, that they'd gone impossibly far away. The core of the City ballooned out and became stable. That not-Chicago street was always that not-Chicago street, regardless of how you found it.
But the same could never be said about the border. If someone wandered far enough away from the known, the unknown would rise up to meet them. They might find a neat little park. Or the foot of a mountain. Maybe instead, an international shipping dock on the lip of a jungle stream. Perhaps, upon turning back around, that familiar not-Chicago street would be gone. The City would be gone. That was the nature of the Sometimes. It was like so many bubbles surrounding the City, now and again popping to be replaced with another. And though the scholars loved their arguing, the Sometimes belonged primarily to the Runners - those brave or foolish few who made a habit of venturing into the unknowable.
"Did you feel that?" Loren called over the low thrum of the engine.
Zira shook her head. "Feel what?"
It was a subtle thing. Crossing into the Sometimes leaves a wrinkle down the spine, a sensation on the skin similar to an egg yolk or an electrical current. As they drove, they left the ruined buildings and pothole-strewn streets behind them. The grass grew short and violently green, hemmed in by short picket fences and clean white sidewalks. Blue, tan, and grey houses dominated the lawns, each perfectly equidistant from its neighbor.
Su took a wide turn down an adjoining road. "Area is deserted, from everything I've heard."
There were no cars on the road, no toys in the yards, and no silhouettes behind window curtains. "How long has this place been active?" Loren asked.
"A week or so. Tala was in and out a few days ago."
A mild cold brushed their faces as they coasted down empty, unmarked streets. There were no traffic lights or stop signs at the intersections, nor were there any obvious indications of other vehicles. It was like a world created for the idea of humans, that no human ever touched.
"What are we looking for?" Zira asked.
Su didn't answer. After a couple blocks, she sighed and took a sharp turn down a street identical to the rest. There sat a rusty red pickup truck, parked sideways in the front lawn of a sky-blue Colonial home.
Loren tensed. "You said you didn't know who took the tome."
Su killed the engine and let the bike drift to a stop. That was the way of her: steel-lipped and draped in leather. Hard on the outside, harder on the inside. If anything soft lived in the center, it had to be dug out. "Thought you might have second thoughts if I told you."