Once he had made his threats, Secretary Sirk rapidly grew tired of Adah’s presence, as well as that of the other magic users in the room.
“Although it is the duty of a Secretary of Magic to educate magic users on the nature of their powers,” he said, “I can spare no more time for it today. We Secretaries have other matters of government to discuss. Alone.”
He delivered that final word like the slam of a gavel, and Ren and Locke took that as their cue to stand. They both looked eager to escape from the conference room anyway. Adah, however, remained seated. Anything Sirk wanted to say to Elise, he could say in front of Adah. Maybe he liked to play drill sergeant with his region’s magic users, but that wouldn’t be the relationship Adah had with any Secretary that led hers.
Adah stared down Sirk, and he returned her glare.
Yet, even though she was sitting in place, the conference table and the Secretaries seated around it all began to appear farther away. Adah’s chair was rolling away from the table, and her legs couldn’t quite reach the floor to stop herself. She looked behind herself to find Locke had grabbed the back of the chair and was pulling her along as he left the room.
“What the hell are you doing?” she yelled to him, but Locke only rolled her faster.
The whole situation caught her so off guard that she didn’t even think to dismount her chair and walk away. She unintentionally let herself be rolled out of the room through the double doors. The last thing she saw as those same doors sealed off the conference room to her was Izzy poofing back into the ethereal plane mascots resided within.
Out in the hallway, still seated in that overly plush chair, Adah spun around to face Ren and Locke.
“What the hell was that about?” she demanded again.
Locke tried to wave away her frustration and said, “C’mon, it’s—”
“And what’s with you two?” Adah didn’t give him any time to explain himself. “Do you just do whatever your boss tells you to? Like a couple of robots?”
“Chill out,” Locke said, a blameless smile on his face. “You’re gonna get yourself into trouble over nothing. I’m saying this as a friend: you should be more careful around Sirk.”
Since he was about as tall as the twins, Locke would be looking down on Adah even if she was standing, but this chair only exacerbated the issue. She couldn’t handle feeling like a kid who’d been put in timeout any longer, so she flung herself out of the chair and stood toe to toe with the boy.
“I don’t care about his threats,” she said. “He’s not even my Secretary, and if he was, he wouldn’t last very long. And where is she going?”
While Adah had been yelling at Locke, the shark-faced Ren had silently made her way down the hall. She walked in a rush, without any of the grace she’d approached Adah with earlier, until she rounded a corner at the end of the hall. Locke wore a slight grimace as he watched her go, then cleared his face with another small smile.
“She’s just a little mad is all,” he said, a notch quieter than usual. “That’s the second time this week that she’s had to explain her numbers in front of everyone.”
“Is that some kind of humiliation ritual?” Adah asked.
Locke laughed and said, “It’s not supposed to be. It’s more like… You were given a certain timeslot on a certain stage so that you’d achieve a certain result. It takes a lot of work to plan something like that, so if it goes wrong, the Department wants to understand why. If you don’t hit your numbers, does that mean their calculations were wrong, or did you screw something up? Or maybe there were other circumstances. Anyway, the Department needs to know the reason the numbers don’t add up. It changes their little algorithms.”
“What is all that?” Adah asked.
“That’s magic,” Locke said.
It sounded more like hocus pocus to Adah, but that kind of obsessive planning and arranging must have been what Sirk had referred to earlier. That was him “turning the dials.” Adah had thought so earlier, but seeing Ren storm away like that made her certain of it—Sirk’s methodology left out a key element of the equation. If your magic users weren’t machines, you couldn’t treat their careers as factories. Ren had come up 3,000 FP short out of 300,000. Any system that accounted for that as a failure was, in fact, a failed system.
“Hey,” Locke called out to her while Adah stared down the empty hallway. “Your real name’s Adah, isn’t it?”
Adah paused, but ultimately gave him a slow nod.
“So, you’ve got time to kill while they finish talking in there, right?” he said. “How about you and I get some food downstairs? Get to know each other a little better. What do ya think, Adah?”
Something in his tone rubbed her the wrong way.
“Are you hitting on me?” she asked.
Locke laughed again, covering his mouth halfway through as if he had anything to be embarrassed about.
“C’mon now,” he said. “I’d make a lot of girls very angry if I tried something like that. Most of all, you. Right?”
“That’s right.”
“It’ll be my treat, okay?” he said. “I can’t let you leave here with nothing but bad memories of me.”
There was that feeling again. For some reason, Adah’s face kept curling into a snarl whenever he talked. Survival instincts, she assumed.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Though, outside of how annoying his flirtatious mannerisms were, she couldn’t sense any obvious ill intentions from Locke. He was trying to work his charms on her and win her over, sure, but he didn’t try to hide that fact. As far as Adah could tell, he actually just wanted her to like him.
Since she did need a way to pass the time, Adah decided to give him a shot. Maybe she’d be able to learn something more about Sirk and the others while they ate.
“Be warned,” she said. “You might end up creating even more bad memories.”
“I doubt it,” Locke said, and flashed a smile. “But first, you should transform back. You’re gonna look kinda crazy if you eat like that.”
He had a point, so Adah prepared to undo her transformation, only to stop herself short. She couldn’t drop her transformation in the middle of this building, she realized. Ever since that first trip to the cabin, she’d been following Ketzia’s advice.
“I can’t,” she told Locke.
The boy laughed again and asked, “Why not? You naked or something?”
Adah tried to kick a dent into his shins, but he was ready for her attack and dodged with ease.
“I don’t have shoes on, asshole,” she explained.
“Were you two running late this morning?”
“It’s a long story,” she said. “But I’m not going to walk around this place barefoot, so you’re going to have to deal with eating next to a crazy person.”
Locke simply shrugged and said, “Won’t bother me if it won’t bother you. Let’s get going.”
He started walking away without waiting for Adah’s reply, and she followed after him on reaction. Then she stopped and turned around.
“What about the chair?” she asked.
“They have plenty of chairs downstairs, Adah,” he answered without looking back.
Locke continued down the hall until he’d nearly reached the same corner Ren had turned past earlier. If he didn’t care about the chair, Adah supposed she shouldn’t either, so she jogged to catch up to him.
☆☆☆
The building’s lounge was more like an upscale cafeteria, located at the rear of the ground floor. All of the food was served buffet style, and once you bought a ticket to enter the lounge, you could eat as much as you wanted. A system like that probably kept things simple for the kitchen, if their goal was to feed a building full of this many people. Most Department employees wouldn’t have time to abuse the buffet style pricing during their short lunch breaks anyway, so it was quite the logical system.
Locke purchased a ticket for himself and Adah as promised, then gave her a short tour of the lounge. All of the serving stations were sequestered to the left of a giant dining room, which seemed to span the whole width of the building. The ceilings in this room were tall, and thus warped Adah’s perspective, but she could have sworn the room was larger than a football field. The rest of the lounge was full of different seating arrangements, including bar style seats against a far window, booths along the wall nearest the entrance, and various sizes of round tables.
Adah and Locke each grabbed a plate and made their way through the serving stations at their own paces. Adah began with a make-your-own crepe station, where she filled up her crepe with a mix of berries and whipped cream. She added to that a side of roasted potatoes and a croque monsieur that Locke had insisted she absolutely must try. The sandwich was part of a station filled with other foil-wrapped, pre-made sandwiches, most of which tempted her, but she went with Locke’s suggestion anyway. That decision annoyed her to an irrational degree, so she tried not to think about it.
They had agreed to meet up at a table in a remote corner of the lounge, so Adah headed that way after filling her plate. They could have sat just about anywhere and had all the privacy they wanted, given how empty the lounge was at this hour. It was too late for breakfast and too early for lunch, and office workers didn’t seem the type to grab brunch.
Locke joined Adah a minute later, sitting down with a plate piled high with various breakfast meats, jammed toast, and eggs. He didn’t waste time putting his fork and knife to work, but Adah left her plate untouched. Before she took a bite of anything, she had to set one thing straight.
“Are we just going to pretend everything in that conference room didn’t happen?” she asked. “You want us to act like buddies now?”
“C’mon, Adah,” Locke said after gulping down a mouthful of food. “What was I supposed to do? Sirk’s the big boss.”
“You could have not shown up in the first place,” she offered.
Locke laughed in that oddly reserved way he had earlier. Maybe he was aware that he laughed too much and didn’t want to piss anyone off. Yet, that coy way he covered his face bothered Adah more than the laughing itself.
“I skip out when I’m supposed to be somewhere, and Sirk will do to me what he threatened to do to you,” he said.
“And you’re actually scared of him?” Adah asked. “Seven hundred thousand FP or whatever it was—don’t you think your fans would back you up against him?”
“Not scared, just smart,” Locke said. “That number is his, not mine.”
“I don’t understand. That’s your FP.”
“And what exactly is FP?” Locke said as he tore apart a piece of toast and stuffed it in his mouth.
Adah didn’t know how to respond to a question like that, so she simply watched him chew. Once he had finished his bite, he rubbed his cheek with the back of his thumb and looked around the room.
“Look, Adah,” he said. “This country is like a big piece of putty. Everybody gets pulled in a hundred different directions all at once. People have movies to watch, music to listen to, games to play, a dozen scandals on the news by Wednesday evening, and almost two thousand different magic users they could care about. If everyone gets pulled in a different direction by all those distractions, that piece of putty gets spread out. It spreads out so thin that you could drop a grain of sand on it and pierce right through it. It’s got no strength, can’t support anything.”
He paused and watched her, but Adah waited in silence. Whatever he had to say, she wanted to hear it.
“If you want to lift somebody up—get them to a number like seven hundred thousand—you gotta bring the putty back together,” he continued. “You gotta focus everyone on one point. The news has to talk about you. The award shows have to give you the prime time prize. The ads in the mall have to show your face to everyone walking by.”
“An idol festival has to put you on the right stage at the right time,” Adah said.
“Now you’re getting it,” Locke said with a smile. “Everything has to come together. Everyone has to support your weight. I’m not stupid enough to think all those machines fell into sync just because the fans like me. It was Sirk—and all the people he knows and controls—who made it happen. And he had planned it all before I ever broke ten thousand FP. So, the spells are mine. My name is mine. But that number is his. If he wants to shut me out, the fans won’t even know. The machines won’t tell them, and I’ll just disappear.”
With that, Locke returned to eating. As grave as that situation sounded, he didn’t seem too concerned by it. For him, any threats Sirk might hold over him probably didn’t matter. He wasn’t planning to cross the man anyway. He knew the limits of what he could get away with—like he had back in the conference room—and was happy to play within those limits. He’d laugh and smile and be content with how everything worked out.
At least, that’s the impression he wanted to give off.
“I disagree,” Adah said.
“You disagree?” Locke repeated. “With what?”
“Everything,” she said with a shrug. “Sirk doesn’t control the machines and the machines don’t control the people. A magical girl can get to a million FP all on her own, and it’ll be a number no one can take away from her. If you don’t believe me, watch me.”
Locke stared at her. He had scooped some of his eggs onto his fork, but left the utensil hanging halfway between his plate and his face. He had the dumbest smile yet plastered onto his face.
“What? You creep.”
“Nothing,” he said, closing his lips. “But I’d love for you to prove me wrong.”