Archive of Our Own ^beta

Kady wakes up with a headache.

Did they even have something normal like Advil in the house right now? If she asks her mom her mom would want to do magic about it. Kady thinks This fucking blows a lot of times through each day because usually, everything fucking blows. She’s not sure if it’s a school day until she checks it on her cell, which Gabi and Celia call her drug dealer phone because obviously she wouldn’t waste money on a nicer one. It’s Saturday, thank god. She wonders what Gabi and Celia are doing. Gabi and Celia survived her having to drop from the soccer team, and they’re okay. They’re still part of the world that exists on the other side of a thick plane of glass, which seems pretty indifferent to her.

“Mom?” Kady shouts, into the dim of their apartment. “Mom!” Her own voice rattles in her aching head and it had been pretty useless of her to do, she can already tell no one is here. Once you know a little magic, everything has a vibration and shit. She goes to the medicine cabinet and shakes the last two pills out of a bottle of off-brand Advil from CVS, swallows them dry.

Now: what the fuck is she going to do today? She can call and ask if there’s work at the restaurant. Jer will pay her in cash and remind her of when they dated. She’s not a ton older now, but just old enough to know you can’t call whatever happens between a 20 year old wastoid and a 14 year old dating. But, hey: cash.

She’s debating how fucking annoying it will be to call him, her phone in her hand on the couch and open to his number in it, when the air in the room changes. It gets hot. It feels, all at once, like this is what it must be like before a gas explosion or something, a thick sweltering layer over everything that’s waiting for the first spark. There’s no explosion. Instead, suddenly there’s just some chick standing in the middle of Kady’s tiny, shitty living room. She wasn’t there before.

The chick, who’s dressed like an off-duty ballerina that goes to a fancy school about it, says, “Oh, my god. You’re so young. Fuck.”

Kady says, “What the hell,” without a ton of commitment because shit like this happens all the time because of her fucking mom.

This random fucking person shakes her head. “Sorry, no time. Kind of ironic, actually,” she says. “Okay, stand up, I need you to help me cast.”

“Sorry, you think you need me to what?” Kady says. “Lady, I’m not doing magic with some random bitch who just fucking materialized in my house.”

“I’m not some random bitch,” the chick says. “I’m a pretty specific bitch, actually. And I think something shitty is going to happen to you today. I need your help, okay? I have to go to the next one.”

Kady’s eyes narrow. “What’s going to happen to me today?”

That gets a sigh. “I think this might be the time a truancy officer comes looking for you?”

Oh, fuck. Kady is familiar with truancy officers. “And so doing whatever the fuck you want me to do…will help me?”

“Not with that,” the chick says. “But eventually, it will help you, yeah.”

It dawns on Kady: “This is time magic,” she says, her head shaking a little, not believing it. Because you can’t do time magic. Because it’s impossibly fucked up. “You’re doing some time magic idiotic bullshit.”

The chick smiles at her, and Kady is weirded out by how sweet it is, suddenly. “You were always this smart,” she says. “Help me cast so I can finish it.”

“Fuck no.” She does stand up, looking the chick up and down. “If you know me like you’re mysteriously implying, you weird asshole, you know I can do battle magic. I don’t even have to be pissed off. But you’re kinda pissing me off, so that’ll help.”

That doesn’t make this girl stop smiling. Hell, she might be smiling more. She says, “In the future, you trust me. I know you don’t trust a lot of people. But you trust me even after I’ve fucked up. Really badly. A lot. Honestly, you saved me from fucking up worse. That’s what I’m doing for you.”

Kady crosses her arms. “Okay. If we’re so ride or die, tell me one thing you know about me that it would be hard for someone to know.”

The girl thinks about this, and she sighs. “Nope,” she says.

“What the hell?”

“Well, you’re gonna think that I made it up, or got it with magic, or something. But if you think about it, you’re gonna think you can trust me. Because you can really, really tell when someone’s fucking with you. Right?”

Wow, this is so fucking stupid, but at the same time, when she looks at this girl, who’s maybe 20 or 30, she does think, I can trust you. “You’re helping future-me,” she says, dubiously, to question the premise.

That smile goes smaller, actually, now not like she’s amused. The girl says, “Always.”

She walks Kady through some truly heinous tut positions. “Is this that extra finger shit?” Kady asks, and the chick’s brows go up, but all she says is, “Yeah, it’s getting there.” Kady feels like she has to point out, “If this is that strong and I’m not good enough with it I could kill you,” and the girl just shakes her head and shows her the last hand set again. They do it standing facing each other, with an incantation which Kady’s obviously not the one reciting, but she thinks it’s one of those old forms of Italian that’s also not quite Latin. That was what was making her think of how bullshit magic is when the momentum of complex spellwork bloom and blooms in Kady’s chest, and fuck magic, but this is always kind of cool. On the last word of the spell, their hands clap together, fingers interlinking, and—

Nothing.

Kady and the chick are staring at each other. Kady’s the first one who speaks, to say, “Real impressive, hope someone else is helping me, too,” but in that same moment that same lightning heat settles over them, like it’s pulling them together where they’re linked and pulling them on from there, and it doesn’t feel like she’s in her living room for a split second before she’s in her living room, and she’s alone. The energy hasn’t left the room. Kady realizes she’s panting.

After a moment, there’s a knock at the door. Kady’s been alone in her apartment the whole time, her head throbbing to a background soundtrack of flat silence and her own annoyance with her life, which she doesn’t have a reason to question.

*

Julia doesn’t know where or when she’s landed. This spell isn't showing her things in the real-world order of events, which, why would it be? But that would be helpful, if it was. The tesseracting momentum through time is going to cycle her through these instances, but she needs someone to cast with to go forward in each one. This was one of the dumb shit, everyone else takes umbrage part of this plan, which plans kind of always have. Doing magic at all is stupid, and dangerous, and necessary, which if Julia’s honest, she’s recently come to accept that anything worth doing is dumb and dangerous. With her life, you’d kind of have to, no matter how able to outsmart shit you are.

Truancy officer had been an educated guess. This is one of a few stories that she’s heard from Kady that she’s now kind of seen play out: her friend having an overdose, the school fight that got her suspended. Maybe you wouldn’t think this would rank in comparison to that and all the death Julia knows is coming, but Julia’s now also watched from across a field as, apparently, Kady quit her high school soccer team. Julia was so hurt for Kady that it felt physical, worse than watching Kady swing on some other seventh grade girl in a sweaty middle school hallway and also, separately, having to accept that this is really how little everyone is in seventh grade. Because why would quitting a team be one of the worst moments of Kady’s life? Julia knows why: Kady loves her people and hates letting them down. Julia had realized, on that field, that she was crying, and that she had to tighten her shit.

Twice now she’s cast with Kady’s mom, who didn’t have as many questions as you’d think. This was another thing that made Julia hurt. She realized as she and Alice had started the spell, all the way back in today, that she’d probably see Kady’s mom and that she couldn’t reset absolutely everything with time magic—that wasn’t the nature of how the spell would work. But that was different from Hannah answering the door of a different shitty apartment than Julia’d just come out of, all, “How can I help you?” like she was just someone’s fucking mom.

The memories of when Kady had mentioned the things Julia has seen so far haven’t changed, but that was how the spell was supposed to work, kind of. That was as far as Julia understood, which was, you know, pretty far. They’d been trying to fall asleep in the same room together some night, in a shitty hostel on a fully different continent because of hedge stuff (long story, not relevant), and Kady had started talking about the truancy stuff. The thing was that Kady sounded almost like she thought it was funny, saying, “Came for me middle of the day, random-ass Saturday, I was 16, no fucking warning, my mom wasn’t home. But mostly, you know, it’s funny how this shit seemed like such a big deal. It was, I guess. I just had no fucking idea how much worse it could get.”

Julia knew what she meant. Julia really knew what she meant. She was grinning in the dark, in spite of herself. “I feel that way sometimes. Like, I remember fully losing it at a couple of A-minuses in high school.”

It sounded like Kady was smiling when she said, “Dude, I would’ve hated your ass.”

“Probably not, though,” Julia had said, smiling, too. Then, “You know, I didn’t know how bad it could get, but I think I didn’t know how good it could get, either.”

Kady had been quiet for a moment, then said, “You and Coldwater really are cut from that same cloth, huh.”

That present tense even though Quentin was dead. Are cut from the same cloth. Julia had found herself doing that talking about Quentin, too, and then it would bring her up short. But it was true in another way: they were cut from the same cloth, that couldn’t change, then they were different, the cloth of each of them changing in ways that confused her and ways that didn’t, now one of them was gone. Julia would swear she had felt it, that moment he was destroyed, even though she’d been pretty close to dying herself. One way she and Quentin were different is that if Julia had died and Quentin had lost his magic only to get it back because he was extra sad that she was fucking dead, he would maybe think it was some kind of cosmic punishment or joke. But Julia knew that this was just one more set of circumstances that needed to be lived through. It was either one fucking foot in front of the other, or something that needed to be accounted for in the most complex workings of magic, like the positions of the planets, the weather. The circumstance of Quentin not existing anymore.

In that moment she’d gone quiet enough that Kady said, “Sorry. Stupid to say, but I’m sorry. I don’t think I know how to talk about it. I mean, I know you really loved him, and gotta say, that’s where most of my shitty feeling is coming from. But I feel like I barely knew the guy after all this time.”

This from Kady had the air of a blunt disclosure even though it didn’t surprise Julia. It made her feel how much she liked Kady. “I mean, you both kinda are slippery characters,” she’d said. “Maybe I’m not surprised.” So Julia had done it, too: present tense. Kady had laughed, and said, “The fuck does that mean?” and Julia forgets how she explained it or if she did before they fell asleep.

Julia wouldn’t be losing Kady. Julia hasn’t yet. For all she knows right now, looking at this instance of Kady’s mom, Kady is in this pocket of time younger than Julia’s seen her yet.

“I do need your help, actually,” Julia tells Hannah.

There’s the heat and maybe the guts of time as a dimension or something, whatever it is so far there’s this kind of trippy element to the proceedings, maybe Julia’s brain filling in some void of experience. Then the world resolves into being, uh, Julia’s old apartment building, the first floor?

Oh, fuck. Reynard.

Julia doesn’t remember why on this day Kady would have gone downstairs before they started the ritual, the spell. Maybe they needed something? But out of Julia’s building stairwell comes Kady, already in the head-to-toe white that they were supposed to wear, which was one of the things about the steps they were given to follow to summon Our Lady that Julia understands now was just more massive fucking sociopathic cruelty. Julia sees Kady see her, and then sees a moment where this, for Kady, isn’t strange before it is, and Kady looks back at the stairway door behind her, confused.

“Julia?” Kady says. “I thought—you were just—“

Kady is already looking her up and down, so Julia fast forwards by saying, “Upstairs, and in my weird virgin sacrifice outfit.” Julia sighs. “Yeah, I was. Am.” It turns out death and time travel both make tenses pretty weird.

Kady looks down at herself, and says, “Guess we are kinda doing Rosemary’s Baby chic.” Kady’s look back up at her narrows, but with warmth that surprises Julia, because they haven’t been through this together yet. “What’s up? Is this from…what we’re about to do?”

There’s supposed to be, within the spell, something that signals that this is the moment that can change. There might not even be a moment for Julia to change, and she might spend a really long time finding that, depending on how many traumas of Kady’s the spell is going to take her through, she guesses? But nothing in this moment now seems like a signal. Julia even looks around after Kady asks her question, wanting something to appear to tell her this is what needs undoing, all the death that’s about to happen right now and a lot of death later too, on top of several years of pain for herself and everyone she either loved already or came to care about the most. No MacGuffins come into the foreground. It’s just the entrance of her apartment building, with an industrial-sized mop and bucket in the corner that someone’s abandoned with a now-irrelevant WET FLOOR sign, this had been here for like two days at this point, for some reason Julia suddenly recalls, and Kady in front of her, the light of day streaming in at Julia’s back from the doors.

It seems like there’s nothing Julia can do. She still says, “This—me—it’s not related, but everyone up there but us is about to die. We’re not summoning Our Lady Underground. Not really. Her son is, like—an ancient god version of a kid who shoots up his school because he’s mad at his mom. So. Yeah. That sucks.”

Julia’s memory doesn’t change. It’s hard to remember the moments leading up to what happened, she guesses, especially with those remnants of what Marina pasted over it, nauseatingly false and Marina’s best attempt at helping her at the time because Julia needed her to do it. Fuck, Marina, the Marina she knew, is still alive somewhere, has been probably most of these times where she’s landed. That can’t matter right now. But then Julia does remember something else: the moment when Kady had disappeared the day of the ritual then reappeared with a gas station-sized bag of Fritos and a Diet Coke. “Hey, don’t knock it, it’s magic fuel,” she’d said as Julia laughed. Julia had actually taken a half-handful of Fritos, which she didn’t even like that much and still doesn’t, the two of them grinning at each other and fully convinced their lives were about to change in ways they wanted them to change.

Kady says, “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” but horror has dawned easily in her eyes, probably because Kady doesn’t hesitate to believe something bad is happening. Then her head turns to the stairway door again, and Julia barely has time to say, “Kady, wait,” before Kady pulls the door open and runs.

Julia’s apartment is on the third floor. She pushes Kady out of the door and into the hallway of the second floor so that they burst out of it and says, “Jesus, why would you not use the elevator?” and Kady says, “I don’t know, my legs fucking work?” Julia, bent double and not up on her fucking Pilates and barre classes lately, okay, shakes her head and holds up her hand. Kady, uneasily, waits.

“We can’t—we can’t change this,” Julia says. “I’m so sorry, but—”

“The fuck we can’t,” Kady says. “If that’s true, why would you even tell me that?”

Julia is straightening, and has to swallow. “I really am, just, so fucking sorry. But I saw you, and I realized where I was, and I couldn’t not,” she says.

Kady shakes her head, looking to the side, face storming. “What are you even doing here, then?”

Okay, well, fuck it, apparently. Julia says, “Saving you.”

Kady looks back at her, her expression changing. She says, “Oh, bullshit you are. I’m not worth everyone else up there dying. No fucking way.”

“No,” Julia says, “I said, you and I, we make it out. Not that that’s going to be so amazing.” Julia is leaving out what had happened to herself and doesn’t have to think about the omission. She’s seen how Kady winds up reacting to that, which was Kady not wanting to give up on killing a god. Honestly, it’s almost funny that this isn’t relevant at all to anything that’s happening. “What I’m here for is happening later.”

This makes Kady stare at Julia, folding her arms.

Julia has to swallow. “Also, yeah, obviously, I really, really wish all of the sweet, weird, talented people upstairs didn’t fucking die, but you’re—”

“Okay, if you say I’m worth it, I’m fully kicking your Sarah Connor ass. Or whatever the fuck is going on. You are from the future, right?”

Julia, in spite of everything, smiles. “Yeah. Sarah Connor.”

“Okay. Then what are you doing here if not to stop this?”

“The spell I’m in—it skips me through, uh, your timeline. There could be something I can change. But there might not be.”

Kady’s look narrows again, with less warmth. “So if you’re not changing this, what even is this right now? Am I just going to forget this ever happened?” And go back to her snack run, Julia guesses.

“Okay,” Julia says, “I know we both know I’m pretty smart but I really haven’t gotten around to my theoretical magic physics. Probably should have, I guess. But this conversation we’re having won’t happen. It’s like we’re in a bubble, almost.”

Kady thinks about this, and decides, “That makes absolutely no fucking sense.”

Julia smiles again. “Magic, right?”

Kady shakes her head. “Okay.” And instead of asking more questions about everyone upstairs (who Kady knew better than Julia did, by the way) getting brutally murdered, about the future, about anything, Kady says then, “What do you need to do next?” And that’s why Kady’s not going to fucking die. Julia’s been invulnerable and kind of a demigoddess before, so you know what, actually, probably she can make it so Kady never dies. That can be their next big project after this.

“I need someone to cast with,” Julia says.

Kady looks at her, mouth working, and then sighs. “Well, if it isn’t your lucky dumbass day,” she says, not even knowing how untrue that is. But Julia knows luck is fully fungible by magic, and she’s pretty good at magic, actually.

They start going through the tuts. Kady’s done this with her now three times, but none of them have been times when she knew who Julia was. It’s funny, the way Kady does and doesn’t trust people. Probably not very nice of her to think it’s funny. But that’s what Julia thinks. These little bubbles of time, though, have so far all been untouched by magic rationing, and Julia thinks she can feel it gathering even before they’ve technically done anything. Whatever forces it is that they manipulate or ask to manipulate with words and hand motions are starting to pay them amused attention, maybe, waiting to be entertained and pushed or pulled. It’s unclear what’s going to happen if Julia arrives in a magic throttle-drought, maybe she won’t even be able to get there, maybe that will keep her from finding the moment of time that can be changed and this is all for minus shit. But to cross bridges you have to get to them.

Kady says, “Okay, I think I got this.”

Julia says, “Yep, you do.”

It feels like time is of the essence, but technically time isn’t even happening in order. That doesn’t mean Julia needs to waste it. Still, when they both drop their hands to their sides, Julia finds herself just looking at Kady because Kady’s looking at her. Julia also finds herself smiling a little. Kady’s expression isn’t really one feeling or another, and that’s fair.

There must have been some feeling there, though, because it’s Kady who says what she says next: “How long have I been dead for you?”

Julia’s smile slips and falls. She says, “Hours. Six hours, actually, when I left.”

Kady’s brows raise in her face, and her head moves like she’s weighing some different ideas, saying, “Okay, so, you definitely went into the space-time continuum or whatever faster than my mom made bail for me that one time. Impressive.”

“Oh. Good to know. Thanks,” Julia says.

Kady glances back at the doorway to the stairwell. “What if I go up and tell everyone? Would that mean everyone lives? Even just in this bubble?”

“I’m not sure,” Julia says, honestly. “It could be that. That would be nice.”

That makes Kady half-shrug, and sigh. “Richard’s kind of, you know, weird youth pastor, but all of them are good people. Really, really good people.”

“They are,” Julia says, having to swallow to say it. Were.

It seems like this has made Kady decide something. When she says it, it’s like this is the endgame call: “Take me with you.”

Julia first says, “Oh.” Then, bewilderment dawning, “Wait, what the shit?”

“Did I stutter? I’m coming with you if I want to live.”

Julia starts to shake her head, saying, “That’s not how this works.” And the reference had been Sarah Connor, not the Terminator. She almost hears this correction inside of herself in Quentin’s voice.

“And you’re going to let that stop you?” Kady looks her up and down. “Damn. Future-you got lame.”

Honestly, Julia kind of wants to roll her eyes. “No, I didn’t. I got better at magic. Like, as in, I know fucking anything at all about it. And this spell is a well-constructed roundtrip ticket for just one.” In theory, anyway.

“What’s the incantation?”

“It’s in Oscan.”

“Fuck, I hate that shit.”

A long time ago, it feels like a full lifetime, Julia might have agreed with this, out of a weakly-planted instinct to downplay being smart. She had cut it the fuck out by high school. It’s weird to remember, and in another way not weird at all, that that was partly because of Quentin. Yeah, there were times when he was so, so obviously bitter, but he also supported her and celebrated her achievements unironically, whole-heartedly. She’d figured out fast that this was not a thing most guys loved doing.

They had worked their way back to that after everything, and now he was dead. So, Julia’s going to solve the problem in front of her.

“Guess I’m Oscan-neutral,” Julia says. “Sorry, why are we talking about this?”

“So we can rewrite it? Duh.”

Maybe Julia’s not going to argue with this, but before she can commit to that, Kady’s phone vibrates and she gets it out of her pocket to look at the screen. She says, “This is literally Richard texting me from upstairs asking where the hell I am.”

“Wow. Did he literally say, where the hell are you?”

Kady snorts. “No, he said, ‘This is a long snack run.’ God, he’s annoying.”

Julia can only smile, probably a pretty weird smile, because Richard is dead. Weird to experience having sex with someone and they immediately die tragically, their corporeal form used to murder his friends, torment you and a lot worse than that when you’d barely met. That seems like it should only happen in stories, right? Before Julia says anything, Kady says, “Okay, come on, let’s go to my place.”

“You have a place right now?” Julia asks, brows raising. Kady squints at her, and Julia presses her mouth. “Okay. That was fucked up to say.”

Kady rolls her eyes to the ceiling, but also says, “And kind of not wrong, but let’s get out of here,” and Julia notices that she turns her phone off before they go downstairs.

None of the interactions Julia has had so far have been as extended as this one, which is continuing to be extended, actually. They wind up on the train, and honestly Kady kind of looks like she’s in pajamas and not even in the way you see people on the train in pajamas, so maybe that was partly why she wanted to go to whatever her place was. Her place, though, turns out to be a room in the dirtiest house that Julia’s ever been in, including her own apartment in the deepest depths of her own pain. The floor is grungy in a way that makes Julia’s shoes almost fucking stick as she walks, the couch covered in big dark stains, the windows are filmy, which is actually not something Julia’s ever seen happen, and there’s the hint of an incredibly dingy bathroom through an open door.

“I do feel like I wasn’t wrong?” Julia says.

Kady’s look isn’t not a glare, but it’s also a little wry. “So, this is my long-removed ex’s place,” he says. “Got five other roommates. All in a band. Punky grunge rock revival that sounds like ass. Shocker, right?”

This isn’t a story Julia’s heard, which she feels a weird emotion about that doesn’t seem very productive. “They’ve got the grunge part down for sure.”

“Yeah, they do.”

They go into Kady’s room, which is really pretty incredibly not in the same state as the rest of the place, but is cluttered as shit, a lot of things on the floor. Kady immediately starts taking her clothes off, heading over to a dresser, and Julia looks away. When she realizes she’s doing that, the instinct strikes her as confusing. Kady apparently also notices this and agrees with her, because she says, “What, you can’t handle seeing another chick in a bra?”

This makes Julia look back at her. She’s seen Kady fully naked in a magic context, so, this is funny of her. Kady is right then a chick in a bra, and underwear, too. “Just—uh, giving you privacy,” Julia tries. For some reason, that makes Kady shake her head. She’s putting on regular clothes. Kady-regular clothes, though. Pretty specific, especially at this juncture.

They sit on Kady’s bed and Kady finds something to write on (a notebook that looks like it hasn’t been touched) and something to write with (a pen, less interestingly), and both of these are things she hands to Julia. “Write it down,” Kady says, and Julia doesn’t need her to clarify what it is, and writes the incantation that will move her from moment in time to moment in time, but not in the same way that everyone alive is always doing that. Jesus, it’s long, long enough that Julia has to flex her hand after finishing it. Wow, cramming flashbacks.

When she’s done, without her having to say anything, Kady takes the notebook out of her hands, her eyes moving over the page again even though she’d been leaning in as Julia wrote. Kady sucks on her teeth, and asks, “Pen?” and receives that when Julia hands it to her, too. Kady says, “Thanks,” even though she’s already doing something with the pen, circling something. “Okay, I think this part—this phrase here is my path, right?”

“Yeah, that’s it exactly.”

“Okay. So you did a working to go in, and then you’re doing this to move through time, right? Not like how time is passing right now, you know what I mean.”

Hey, Julia had that same sort of thought. “Also right, and yep, I do,” Julia says.

Kady looks down at the paper, shaking her head a little but like she’s thinking, not disagreeing. She says, “So, okay, maybe, we just change some of these conjugations, and also—our path. Then, we got a bicycle built for two.”

Julia says, her brows going up, “Sure, a bicycle built for two. If you want to ride a bicycle made out of totally untested, incredibly powerful temporal magic.”

“Uh. Yeah? That’s literally what we’re trying to do today,” Kady says. “Or, some part of it’s supposed to be that, right.” She sighs. “I don’t know.”

The Free Traders, that’s what Kady is talking about. The two of them and the Free Traders are supposed to try to do this today. Julia bites down on her lip, looking at the page. She sighs. “Okay,” she says, “but if it seems for a second like this is fucking itself up—”

“If it seems like this is fucking itself up, I’m already dead,” Kady says. “I mean, you’re not, I guess.”

“I’m not dead, actually. I am trying to get you undead.”

Kady unexpectedly grins at her. “Like zombified?”

The sudden lightness feels like it shouldn’t penetrate but it does, and Julia is smiling again. “No, smartass, not zombified.”

“Hey, who knows, maybe this’ll really change the future and you’ll go back to a zombie apocalypse. Bummer.” Julia reacts to this like it’s a joke because it is, even rolling her eyes a little, but zombie apocalypse might be preferable to everyone you love is dead for real, for good.

There’s not a lot left to do except to try it, since Julia knows better than to try too hard to talk Kady out of anything she doesn’t already secretly think is a bad idea, so they both stand up. Julia wonders, when they turn to each other, if Kady looks younger. If she does, it’s clearly a lot less jarring than seeing her in high school and even younger than that. But this day didn’t actually happen all that long ago, not as long ago as it feels, anyway, since it feels like another lifetime, on top of Julia’s life before that feeling like another lifetime. Julia’s lived a lot of lifetimes.

“We don’t know each other that well yet,” Julia says. “Not as well as we will.” It’s pretty trite in movies and things when people from the future say stuff like this, but now that Julia’s somehow living that, it’s surprisingly hard not to. Hard to blame anyone for being trite in this exact way even if they’re not real.

“Oh, yeah?” Kady says, not at all impressed. “I feel like I know you okay. I’ve already seen the worst shit you’re capable of.”

Julia blinks at her, and then realizes exactly what Kady’s talking about, the first time she almost killed Quentin, and starts laughing. Actually, she finds it’s hard to stop laughing before Kady starts looking almost concerned, and then Julia says, “Fuck,” taking a sharp breath in, and she feels her eyes fill with tears that she blinks back. Actually, now Kady looks concerned, and it’s funny—she’s seen some of the shit Kady’s been through to this point, and she doesn’t look younger, but the look of concern strikes Julia as uncomplicated. There’s a lot of extra layers of shit between now and the day that Kady’s going to die. She is a little younger, and she’s the precipice of something terrible that happens to the both of them, that’s going to tie them together, for worse or for better.

But maybe, like Kady said, at the end of this, this will be a bubble where everyone lives. That would really be nice.

Kady’s hands are on Julia’s shoulders, because Julia’s doubled over again even though she managed to stop laughing. Kady’s saying, gently, “Hey, Julia, I think we gotta do this,” and Julia is straightening up, blinking back tears, pushing them back in with the heels of her hands. She has to sniff hard. She has to, again, tighten her shit. They do have to do this, and Kady, even though they know each other not as well as they will, is doing it with her. Kady’s hands drop when Julia straightens, but then Julia takes one of them, interlacing fingers. Kady, unexpectedly, squeezes her hand.

They’re going to do this. They’re doing this.

But then, Julia swallows. It’s not obvious from the incantation that will move them through to another instance, and she realizes Kady deserves the warning. So: “There’s something I should tell you,” Julia says. “About the spell. About the times it’s going to take us to, if this works with us both.” Big if, but hey, stranger things have happened to both of them, sometimes even at once.

And it’s like Kady somehow understands exactly what Julia is going to say without Julia saying it, because she says, “Oh, fuck my life.”

*

It’s dad’s day to come at the end of it to get Kady.

Kady likes dad days, more or less, because dad days mean walking to get a Happy Meal. Happy Meals make you happy, it’s right there in the name and everything. You can’t even get confused about it. Kady likes both the nuggets and cheeseburgers but today she thinks she’ll ask for a cheeseburger. She’s made her decision about the cheeseburger because she’s coloring cheesy-yellow on a printout of a dinosaur, which she thinks is supposed to look kind of like Barney, because it does look kind of like Barney. Barney’s way too young for her but whatever, she’s just coloring it. You don’t have to like something to color on it.

Dad is late but dad is always late. Mom is always late too so dad days are hugely different from non-dad days other than the Happy Meal. This has been annoying to her since before she understood about being on time or not on time. That was because she would watch other kids get picked up, and the kids after that that were left with her were always the worst, there was never someone she wanted to be her friend or someone who was already her friend. She’s been at this school for two whole months. Her friend who gets picked up before it becomes after school is named Kimber. Kimber’s parents are on time. Kady doesn’t think that Kady, herself, is the worst, but the other kids who are left with her are always the worst.

After the last bell they get herded into the gym, like always. Her music teacher, Mr. Carter, is one of the teachers who is always here, and he’s really cool. He knows a lot of things about drums and stuff. When Kady looks at him she thinks she wants to be a drummer and that she could be a drummer. If she says this to an adult they’ll be so annoying about it and weird and they’ll go, Awwwwwww. Kady doesn’t like that, but Kady likes loud noises.

Here’s a secret: Kady’s mom can make loud noises out of the thin air, and lights and stuff too, even. She’s not supposed to talk about that when she’s not at home, and just with mom, not even really dad because he doesn’t understand. To make it easier to remember, Kady tries not to think about it when she’s not at home and just with mom. But it’s pretty easy to remember not to talk about it already.

In chapter books with magic in it, the kid is usually discovering magic because it’s not normal, magic is not something most people can do. It would be cool to read a story about a kid who already knows about magic. She’s read a few things kind of like this but in it magic is too normal, which Kady knows it’s not really. Maybe a story like she’s imagining exists, and her regular teacher Ms. Valentine knows about it. She’ll help Kady get books from the school library if she asks. She likes Ms. Valentine too, but she’s really named Ms. Valentine just like Valentine’s Day, so that’s really gross.

Kady’s settled at one of the tables they put out in the gym and is coloring the same page she was coloring when she was waiting in class. There’s not anyone she really likes who comes to the gym too in the afternoon yet, but that’s okay. Kady’s really good at having fun all by herself and she doesn’t want to talk to annoying other kids. There are some adults at the double doors of the gym, which isn’t interesting because people’s parents have been coming in to get them like they do every day.

But none of the parents have ever had Mr. Carter saying, sounding really really confused, “Hey, uh, excuse me, where did y’all come from?”

The adults are two ladies. They both have long hair and one has long curly hair like Kady’s. Kady thinks they’re talking to Mr. Carter, until they’re walking right by him as he says, “Okay, hello, can you hear me right now? Why are you—”

“—because he’s in the fucking hospital,” the one with curly hair like Kady’s is saying. There’s tittering probably about the word fucking but that’s not really that interesting in comparison.

The lady she’s with tries to grab her, which startles Kady even though she’s seen adults grab other adults, and says something into her ear like a secret. Mr. Carter is talking at them both but they don’t seem to be paying attention to him. The other teacher in the room is on one of the walkie-talkies all the teachers have.

The curly-haired woman shakes her head, and then she looks at Kady, right in the eyes. The woman’s eyes are wet like she’s crying but she’s not. Then the woman has to keep ignoring Mr. Carter to come to Kady, going on one knee by her chair, even though Kady would have known she was talking to her from across the room from the way she was looking at her: “Hey. Hey, listen, honey. You’re not gonna believe this, but you’re fine.” Kady feels like no one else exists but the two of them, like magic is happening. The woman has blue eyes like Kady’s too, to go with their matching hair. “You’re gonna be fine. Okay?”

Even though she’d just said Kady wouldn’t, Kady believes this lady. Kady says, “Okay.”

After the women are gone, a bunch of other adults come in and eventually Mr. Carter asks if Kady knows who that was. Kady doesn’t, but then Mr. Carter never had a reason to ask her that, or anything else. No other adults from the school have come in because they don’t usually; actually, the only other adults who come in that day are parents, like they usually are. Mr. Carter’s mostly sitting by the door with a long chapter book open in his hands unless he’s running around with the kids, which sometimes includes Kady. After a little while, Kady will get up to get a new coloring sheet. In a few more hours, she’ll realize that her dad isn’t picking her up today, and when her mom tells her he’s in the hospital, she’s going to think about cheeseburgers.

*

Whenever they appear next happens to put them in an alley off an especially busy city street, which is a change of pace that lets Kady, as Julia watches, lean forward with her hands bracing her knees and literally just fucking scream. Like, she screams a few times. Kady has a pretty impressive octave range, which Julia knew. Now’s not the time for a hug, but Julia does put her hand on Kady’s back, where she starts making circles as Kady’s switched to words. Well, one word: “Fuck! Fuck!”

New York is the greatest city in the world where you can scream it out on a side street without anyone caring.

“Hey,” Julia says, and she gets Kady’s face in her hands, “breathe. In and out with me.” Kady does; it’s ragged, but she’s breathing in when Julia says in, out when Julia says out, still kind of hunched even with Julia thumbing tears off her cheeks. Julia says, “Yeah, you’re okay. You’re okay, baby.” Kady shakes her head in Julia’s grasp, that hot ferocity that Julia knows in her expression for a second before it’s gone like the fight has left her, too. But that must be the opposite of what’s happening, because she’s standing up, she’s standing up all the way. Julia feels like she should hold her. It wasn’t time for a hug, but when she asks, “Can I hug you?” Kady folds into her, without saying anything. She has to collapse in on herself again just to put her face on Julia’s shoulder. Julia feels the water from her eyes there, through her shirt.

They landed somewhere that’s nearly too cold for how they’re both dressed. It’s nighttime which is making that worse. A probable fall-to-winter day, or maybe winter-to-spring. It's kind of difficult to tell in the city when there’s no snow to mark your place in the colder months. This isn’t a logistical problem Julia’s thought of so far, the literal weather, but now that she has an established casting partner, they’re basically zooming through Kady’s worst traumas, so. Maybe not a logistical problem after all.

Kady’s breathing is slowing, her head pulling up. It’s still shaky, and she’s still in Julia’s arms when she says, “I can’t do this.”

“You can do this,” Julia says, because she believes in it. “You’re doing it. We’re doing it. We’re saving you.”

Kady’s head shakes again, as she’s saying, “No, we’re not. We’re not! I left myself as a kid to fucking rot. Twice in a row! You know how many fucking times in therapy they make you talk about your inner child? And that was cheap shitty therapy, by the way. Like, court-mandated.”

Julia had a pretty shitty therapist too, when she was a senior in high school and then for a while into undergrad, but now’s not the time to compare notes on that. She says, “Kady, we couldn’t do anything. You know we couldn’t. We’ll know when we can.”

“Then why in the fuck do we even do magic? When it can’t change shit?”

Julia realizes Kady is saying this and she hasn’t even lost Penny yet. Penny as she knew him, her Penny, which Julia knows is weird to think, but it’s a weird situation; the Penny from this reality. Like Kady had said about Quentin, Julia hadn’t known Penny that well. The other version of Penny who’s tried to know Julia had recently become a stranger to her again, too.

“It can change some things, sometimes,” Julia says. It has to change this one thing. This one fucking thing. That’s all Julia’s asking for until she has something else she needs to ask for. Pretty generous of her, considering.

It had seemed like Kady was ready to stand up before Julia pulled her in, but right then she puts her arms around Julia’s shoulders like Julia’s holding her up. Their relative heights make it just this side of weird, but it’s nice, maybe in the way that the eye of a storm can be nice. It’s nice to feel Kady calm down. It’s nice that she’s alive, even if it’s not the Kady who needs to be alive. But every version of Kady needs to be alive.

“That’s not good enough,” Kady says, even though she’s maybe calming down, more or less.

“It kind of has to be,” Julia says. It will be, is pretty much what she’s banking on.

Then, while she’s still holding Kady and Kady’s still letting herself be held up, Kady also walks by at the end of the alleyway; Julia barely catches that it’s her, wearing mostly-black and jeans in the intermittent flow of walking traffic. “Hey,” Julia says, “hey, we gotta go, okay? We need to see if this is the one.”

Kady takes a concussive breath in. “I’m not that fucking upset anymore,” she says, even though she sounds that fucking upset, but probably not a helpful thing to argue about.

It would be surreal to join the fray of the flow of pedestrian traffic—are they close to Times Square? Yeah, obviously they are, Julia sees a street sign and also a bunch of stupid video advertisements with distended pixels blaring on either side of the street. It would be surreal if not for the fact that the concept of things being surreal has become pretty irrelevant to Julia’s life. They’re just walking until she hears Kady whisper something, sees the motion of the tiny tut she does. There’s no external effect, but she says, back in the game, “Okay, come on,” and takes Julia’s hand, pulling her forward with real momentum.

They come up on the version of Kady they’ve landed with pretty quickly, with whatever spell the Kady she’s with did to thank, probably. They’re less than a half a block behind her when Kady stops short, making Julia stop too, and Kady’s saying, “Oh, fuck, mom.”

“What?” Julia says, even though she thinks she gets it in the next second, and she feels her eyes going wide, helplessly. It’s night. It’s a little cold outside. They’re standing still in a sea of people on the sidewalk and Julia understands, all at once, Hannah is somewhere bleeding so much that Julia in the past, in the moment with her, can’t comprehend what’s happening. This is taking place right now, or is about to be, or just did. Julia says, “Kady.”

There’s steel in Kady’s face but dullness in her voice when she says, “This isn’t the one that changes. I know. You keep saying. We’ll know.”

This is such a dumbly, punishingly painful thing to do to someone, what Julia’s done to Kady by taking her here. She says, “I’m so, so sorry.” Julia keeps saying that. She keeps meaning it, too.

It’s not exactly going to get better from here, even if it’s less loaded, which Julia knows before they cast again. It’s relentless, actually: more bad shit happening to versions of Kady so far back in time that they see Kady in diapers. Stuff with rehab, which Julia should have thought about more. They even appear outside the door of what turns out to be one of Kady’s shitty therapy sessions. Right then, from an empty dorm room in Brakebills South, freezing cold since no one’s heated it with magic since no one’s using it, Julia and Kady are listening to Mayakovsky pretty calmly, almost kindly giving Kady the option to leave because Brakebills knows. When Julia realizes Kady’s just staring, not really looking at her or anything else, she says, “Hey,” and takes Kady’s face in her hands again. “Look at me, okay?”

Kady’s eyes seem like they don’t have any color in them, pale and strange in the light that’s reflecting off snow and coming in through the window, too. But it seems like Kady brings herself back in focus, and she’s doing what Julia asked, looking at her. Julia has to crane up to kiss her forehead, and Kady kind of nods into her when she does. Julia knows what she means. They go from another time in Kady’s childhood that Kady doesn’t explain straight into the moment when Julia is going find herself magically pumping Kady’s stomach. Like a miracle.

Except in this moment they’ve created, a version of herself and Kady have now appeared in front of that version of Julia, with the heat of real magic even though it doesn’t exist in this moment in time, that maybe-roadblock that Julia had thought of earlier. Obviously, the version of Julia they’ve interrupted stops short, at the door to the room Kady's in. Obviously, she’s gawking. She says, “What the literal fuck?” but she knows Kady’s in trouble, and Julia can see in her own face as this version of her looks back around that she’s deciding she’ll deal with whatever this is later before she shakes her head, then she’s gone into the moment as Julia remembers it.

After this one, they don’t cast forward or backward or whatever it’s going to be the next time. Kady buys a pack of cigarettes at the first bodega they run into. Apparently, Kady had thought of bringing a lighter to the time stream, because she fishes it out of her pocket and uses it. Neither of them have said anything, not for a while. They don’t discuss that they’re stopping when Kady stops; Julia just stops with her, comes to stand with her where she leans back against a brick wall. They’re in a weird, mostly-dead part of the city. Julia finds she can’t remember how far they walked from where they were, from Kady almost being dead, too.

“Why was I that fucked up?” Kady asks, after a moment.

Okay. There are shitty, standoffish ways to answer this. That doesn’t feel right, even thinking about it. Obviously it doesn’t matter that magic was out when it happened, they’re probably going to get somewhere related soon, so Julia just says, sighing, “Penny died.”

Kady seems to think about this. Anyone would need to think about this. She says, “And what, we had some beautiful little reunion before this happened, right? Just, to twist that knife in.”

“I mean, yeah. You guys did. I mean, as much as—fuck, as much as any of us get anything like that. All of our stupid interpersonal crap that’s squeezed in between, you know, um, right now, time travel, and killing gods all the time, somehow, and a degree of magic fascism that I guess isn’t surprising, and fucking Santa Claus being just some actual guy. God, I don’t even get that last one still, actually. Alice is always saying all this bizarre shit she won’t ever fucking explain.”

It seems like Kady thinks about this, too. “She is pretty annoying,” Kady says. “Still probably the smartest bitch I’ve ever met. Though, hey, present company excepted.”

This makes Julia smile, but she’s eyeing Kady, too. “You’re doing the thing you do, when you don’t react to stuff because you’re so upset.”

“Wow,” Kady deadpans. “You weren’t lying. We really must get to know each other so, so well.”

Julia shakes her head a little, her eyes still moving over Kady’s face, lingering on her mouth because Kady’s taking a drag of her cigarette. Maybe Kady notices that, because she opens the box of cigarettes one-handed, pushing the top up with her thumb, to offer Julia one.

“No, but thanks,” she says. “Not my brand.”

“You know what? I knew that already, actually,” Kady takes her cigarette out of her mouth to say, a razory grin flashing on then off again.

Recently, in the real continuum of Julia’s life, the mostly-linear one, she and Kady had gone to a bar. It was the kind of bar that college kids are proud of going to because it’s divey but it’s not as divey as it gets. Kady had said to her, “Wait, wait, we are doing something,” and then with a lot of fanfare she’d put a lime wedge between her teeth, pulp facing out, eyebrows full waggling. Julia, already giggling for the first time in a long time, had leaned in to take the wedge between her teeth, feeling the sticky brush of lipgloss that had mostly worn off on Kady’s mouth, then the taste of lime. The wedge was shitty and dry, not great for a shot. For five, maybe ten seconds, nothing had been wrong.

Julia’s mouth feels dry. She says, “Hey, Kady?”

“What’s up?”

“Could I actually, um. Run something by you?”

Kady squints at her. “Uh…yeah, I guess? What does that even mean?” Honestly, Kady looks tired. Probably, they both do.

This is not a nice time to do this, at all. This is also a time when doing this has no consequences. So, okay. Julia says, “What would you think if I was kind of in love with you?”

Now, this, Kady is having a reaction to. At least, Julia thinks she is. She’s staring and what she’s staring at is Julia. God, her eyes are so, so blue. Julia had once thought of herself as not liking blue eyes on guys, and she’d joked a few times with James about him being an exception to the rule. Kady’s not an exception. Kady’s not a guy.

Kady says, “Shit. Okay, sure. Yeah, you can run that by me. Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“Well. I’d be like, Julia’s gay?”

Julia laughs. “I’m not gay. Obviously?”

“Okay. So, kinda gay and uncool about it,” Kady decides. “Baggage, much?”

Julia’s still grinning when she shakes her head. It suddenly feels like she’s stayed up all night for a fun, stupid reason instead of cycling through tiny horror movies starring her best friend, horror movies that were real. When she looks back at Kady, Kady’s stubbed out her cigarette on the ground, and Kady’s bent her head, a little, like she’s trying to peer better into Julia’s face.

“You should ask me when I like you better,” Kady says, like whatever she saw looking at Julia helped her come to that as a conclusion. “And when I’ll remember, or exist later, or whatever the fuck is happening.”

Julia feels weirdly light. Kind of deranged of her, honestly. “Yeah, maybe. Maybe I’ll get to do that.”

Kady shakes her head. “You’re the one who’s been saying you will.”

Julia says, “Okay. So, I will.”

There’s a moment that’s probably an awkward silence. It ends with Kady saying, “Can I ask you something, too?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“How the hell do I die?”

You can’t blame Julia if, now that she’s grinning again, that grin is pretty weird. She says, “I mean, as far as we could figure out? You tried to make a wish.”

*

The thing that no one knows is that Kady’s been living mostly on autopilot for, well, a pretty specific amount of time. It’s sad. But she’s come to terms with it being sad.

She’s gotten a lot of company recently on the score of Pathetic Widows for Guys You Weren’t Even Fucking Married To Who You’re Constantly Reminded Of. This now includes, of all people, Alice Quinn. And maybe Waugh? In some weird way? She knew he and Coldwater were tight, but he’s been moody and hasn’t gone back to their kiddie fantasy realm of murder and magic that Kady’s never been super interested in. Julia’s been speculating but shit is confusing and if she’s honest, Kady doesn’t care. It’d be nice if Kady didn’t care because she’s the new hedge president, or whatever the fuck, so much responsibility, right, but mostly she doesn’t care in the way that she doesn’t care about a lot of things. Not all the time, but enough of the time, now. She’s not ready to be dead, though, and at some point she has to fucking get to something, anything that’s about her, which hasn’t happened yet.

The feeling of losing Penny has worn down some, sanded over, but it’s there. Kady’s lost a lot of people and knows it’s never not going to be there. It’s honestly worse now that she’s realized she and Penny barely got a start to begin with. But she loved him: he was brave and good, and good to her. She loved him so, so fucking much. Everything about how good he was and why she loved him led directly to him dying. She knows he didn’t have a death wish. Mostly, right. But at the same time, there really wasn’t a sacrifice Penny wouldn’t make. That’s been going around lately, too.

The edges of all of this got pretty unsanded, though, when Alice said, “Penny said he told Quentin it’s better to be done. To let go. And he went. So.”

Alice Quinn tried to get her man from the underworld—which, hey, who hasn’t been there. She’s come back looking kind of dead, too, honestly. Kady can sympathize but only to the point of hearing again about how it turns out death was better than trying, to Penny. Maybe that’s not fair, but most people haven’t heard what boils down to, Hey actually I’m super at peace thanks multiple times from their dead fucking boyfriends. Once it had even come from another version of him, because magic and the universe both suck shit, actually, and now this second time around the mouthpiece is Alice. But hey, welcome to the super exclusive Your Boyfriend’s Happily Dead club, Alice, on top of being a not-widow and all. Maybe this will make Alice do something super fucked and evil again. They have magic back so that can happen, right?

They were all sitting at the table to listen to Alice’s post-underworld debrief. That they included Eliot, but after that last thing from Alice, he stood up suddenly and without speaking, making Julia’s head turn sharp as he left, disappearing into the depths of the penthouse. And Kady could recognize it, that calcified pain on Julia’s face, even when Coldwater had only just fucking died. She wishes Julia wasn’t all the way to that place already. Julia hurting is so, so hard for her to take even though they’ve been through a lot of that together. Maybe someone you love being in a shitton of pain isn’t something you get used to. You’d think Kady would have that all squared away already.

Eliot’s dramatic exit had left a silence in its wake. Into that silence, Julia had said, with a thready river running in her voice, “So, um. I guess that’s it.” Kady had thought, Fuck, and also, Julia Wicker doesn’t talk like that.

Alice had shaken her head and didn’t say anything. She’d looked, of all things, fucking angry, but Kady understands that. Then well, actually, Alice did say something, which was, “Hey, um, Kady. What happened with that—was it an elf?”

“Oh,” Kady had said, blinking out of every single thought, “yeah, shit was nuts.”

“Like a wood elf or—uh. Santa’s elves?”

Kady sighed. You could call it long-suffering because her suffering was pretty long. “Yeah, we get it already, you met Santa.”

“It’s a real question! Also—” Kady remembers Alice’s eyes, moving birdlike. “Be nice to me! Because everything left in the fucking world sucks ass!”

And hey, everything did really suck ass, so.

The thing that Kady’s dealing with right then isn’t related to an elf (which had been more of a wood elf, for the record), but it’s not dissimilar. Magical creature issues have kind of been a thing. Some hedges had known to mine them for magic because like everybody else in the world, some hedges are evil as hell. Not in the regular way most people are a little evil, right; evil-evil. With the magic equilibrium reset because of Quentin Coldwater’s grand sacrifice and whatever else, stuff like this is coming to light, and it keeps coming and coming and coming. Somehow Kady had signed up to be the one to deal with it, to the point where she’s getting calls about stuff and she goes to places where something fucked happened with people (or creatures) she mostly doesn’t recognize, and someone will eventually say something to her like, “What are we gonna do?” But hey, it’s better than being alone with her thoughts. She’s pretty sure it’s better, also, if Julia has something to work on. If she’s kinda hedge-president or whatever just to give Julia the distraction, there’d be worse reasons to be hedge-president.

The current magic creature problem is apparently about something called The Guardian of the Cistern. Kady’s pretty fucking tired of dramatic names for stuff, honestly, but whatever, if this is this thing’s deal, fine. Kady is trying to figure out of it’s alive or if hedges cannibalized it for parts. If it is alive, the Guardian should apparently be in the sewer system, by the way, so this is another real great day for Kady. Julia’s above ground, looking for different leads on this. Kady’s down a fucking manhole and is in the shitty-smelling dark, and she’s about to turn on the flashlight she’d thought to bring when the world around her changes, between blinks.

Now, where she seems to be is maybe the opposite of a city sewer: a beautiful rolling field, downright fairytale shit, clear of trees for what must be miles. Not that Kady can clock a mile just by looking at a distance. Just, you know, the grass seems to go on for a long, long time. It’s daytime when it had been after sunset where she’d just been, the light dazzling. Right in front of her, there’s an old-ass well-looking thing, and some guy who just looks like a guy, not particularly a creature.

Jesus Christ.

Kady sighs as she realizes she has to close the distance and have this interaction to get the fuck out of here so she can do something that matters. “Hey,” she says, “Guardian of the Cistern?”

The guy smiles. He’s shorter than her but maybe because he’s a magical creature or whatever, he doesn’t have a complex about it. “Greetings,” he says, which is nine times out of ten how these things talk unless they talk like a fucking cabbie. “You were seeking me.”

“I was,” Kady says. “You alive and all good here? Seems like the answer to that is yes.”

The creature seems to ponder this. “By your definitions of alive, not very much so. But by my definitions, yes.”

Wow, does Kady love talking to magic beings, or what. It’s always so straightforward, super clear. “Good to hear,” she says. “So how the hell do I get back out of here?”

The guy shakes his head. “You think you’re seeking me for the tasks you’ve so heroically given yourself,” he says. “But that’s not right. You’re seeking me because you lost something. This is what’s brought you here.”

Uh. “No, it’s not?”

“No, no. My little bubble can only be accessed by seekers. What are you seeking? What did you lose?”

God, not this kind of bullshit. But when he says that, Kady thinks, so clear and distinct, is Myself. Kady also thinks, obviously, Penny.

Kady’s not going to say any of this, because she knows better than to fuck with creatures who act exactly this way. But then he says, “I’ve heard your answer. Thank you. Would you like to receive back what you’ve lost?”

Kady knows she’s not going to like the answer to the question she has to ask. Kady asks it: “Receive what back?”

“What you’ve lost,” the creature says, because of course.

At this, Kady looks around. Everything stretches on to beautiful nothing. Nothing that looks like this really exists. Or maybe it does. Maybe she needs to go hiking more or something. Get a few hobbies. Move on, finally, for good. It’s better to be done. To let go.

You know what? Fuck that. No one’s telling her what to do, or what to let go of, or what to fight for. You shouldn’t fuck with magic creatures like this, but knowing this and wanting a different version of her stupid life, Kady says, “Yeah, you know what, hey, give it back to me. Give everything back to me, all of it,” and

*

On the pitch-black beach that feels like it should be empty, there’s actually three people: Kady, Alice, and Penny. Well, there’s three people and then Julia and then Kady again, because they’ve just traveled to this moment. Then there’s someone on the sand. Holy shit, Julia realizes: Penny’s body. Hearing it described by Kady later and seeing it in front of her are two pretty different, unequally fucked-up things. And it’s unclear if there’s some kind of noise or something when they appear places—would that make sense?—but Kady, Alice and Penny look in their direction at once.

The other Kady, like she has a lot of times today which is actually across a lot of different days from Julia’s perspective, says, “What the hell—”

But the Kady she’s come with, that Kady, isn’t looking at herself, or at Alice. The Kady who came with her says, “Penny?” And she’s looking at the Penny that’s somehow standing with them, over his own body.

Penny, who’s wearing a librarian’s suit, pretty reasonably says, “Holy shit!” and Julia feels that warm brush of magic. This is the sign.

Alice knows, off the top of her head, some kind of astral binding spell. It won’t revive Penny, she says, but it will get them closer to doing that if it turns out they can, so he won’t disconnect from his body like he’s supposed to, all of it held in suspension. Julia can cast just fine even though magic’s obviously busted here, and does the tuts with her, feeling unreal. Her memories aren’t changing, but she knows that Penny’s going to be alive, and that must change a shitload of stuff, so much that she can’t imagine what that stuff would even be. So maybe Kady was right. Zombie apocalypse.

After this, the Kady who they found on the beach says, “Okay. What the fuck do we all do now?”

Julia glances at the Kady who’s done all of this with her, but both of them have done all of this with her, really. “I guess you…go home, and we finish the spell?”

Penny says, “Hey, that was touch and go there for a minute, but you can’t say we didn’t get it together,” which two out of four of the people he’s talking at can’t hear. Julia guesses he doesn’t need to know how long this wasn’t true for.

The Alice and Kady of this moment, of all things, just have to fucking load Penny’s body into a car in the little parking area that looks over the beach. They help them. Carrying a fully dead body from one place to another really, really sucks, but two of them have fully-functioning magic, so, that works.

After that, after they’re gone, neither Julia nor Kady disappear, which is probably a paradox. Julia still doesn’t have new memories of anything, but she knows they changed this one. She thinks Kady knows that, too. She follows Kady back to the edge of the water. It’s cold as shit here, too, probably worse with the sea air. They stand next to each other, the tide lapping in front of them. The moon doesn’t feel like magic here, which is weird to Julia, even though she lived through all the stupid magic cutoffs and has experienced it before.

“What do you think’s going to happen to us when we cast?” Kady asks.

Julia sighs. “Maybe we won’t exist? I really, really don’t know.”

Kady shakes her head. “Never wanted to go out saving other people, you know.”

That Kady had thought of that as an option means it always was one, but Julia won’t say that. “You’re saving yourself, too.”

“Guess I am,” Kady says. “Finally, right?”

Julia’s not sure what the context of saying that is right now, in this moment, for Kady. But she thinks she knows well enough. Julia says, “You are worth it, you know. You said you weren’t.”

Kady says, “See, now I know you’re just saying that to get in my pants.”

Julia smiles at her, and Kady takes her hand when she puts it out. It’s too much to expect that they kiss or something. That would be weird as shit for Julia too, if she’s honest. But when Julia pulls her in for a hug, Kady comes, and they hug. They hug for a long time. The air is cold and smells like salt. Kady is warm and smells like fruity body spray like she always does, which Julia always thought was cute of her for how surprising it was. Funny, too. She puts her nose in Kady’s hair, a little.

They drop their arms from each other, take a step back, each facing each. They bring their hands back up to cast by the light of the unmagical moon.

*

Julia is in the penthouse.

It’s daytime. She’s in the living room, to be specific. Julia thinks she places a pretty reasonable amount of value on being specific. The light coming in from outside is gray, and she tries to remember what time she left in the actual day she’d experienced in chronological order what must have been only hours ago, the same day Kady wasn’t alive in. It had been 4am, so it didn’t drop her back off at the same spot, same time. That might be okay. The world might be totally different, but it doesn’t look like it.

This is what Julia’s trying to think about when, from the hallway, Quentin, who also wasn’t alive when she left this day, walks in with a bowl that clearly had potato chips in it. “Oh, hey, Jules,” he says, and then as he sees her look at him, he stops.

Quentin stares at Julia. Julia stares at Quentin.

Looking a little lost, Quentin says, “Actually, um. Weird question. Was I…dead?” and Julia launches herself at her best friend, her best friend since she was nine years old who learned card and coin tricks because he wanted to impress her and keep up with her but maybe more because he wanted to make her laugh, and she’s hugging him again, and Quentin’s even hugging her, too.

Julia obviously figures out pretty fast that whatever she did to linear time is fucked. Everyone remembers everything. Quentin remembers crossing over. But it’s also like he was alive this whole time, somehow? Penny, too. Quentin says remembering being in the underworld must be like if you were one of the people in the castle in Sleeping Beauty and suddenly it was okay that you were going to sleep for a really, really long time. Uh. Eliot’s holding him a lot? Alice is pretty upset. Obviously, Penny’s alive; the other Penny had already taken off in the original series of events, so. Yeah. Actually, he and Kady aren’t sleeping in the same room, which Julia hasn’t found a great way to ask about yet. There’s maybe not a great way to ask about it? A lot of different stuff is happening. Julia’s going to get caught up on what she needs to get caught up on, eventually.

But, for now, everyone’s alive, and everyone includes Kady. It feels like it can’t be real, like it’s those memories that Marina tried to paper over Julia’s pain with, but it is. It keeps happening. Julia wakes up for three days in a row, and in those days, everyone she loves is okay, and is there. Kady even just starts going out when hedges call her after a day or so, like nothing happened. Luck is fungible by magic.

The fourth day, after that, Kady’s the other first person awake, like she is most days. She announces herself to Julia as she rounds the couch, saying, “Hey.”

No one’s dead. Julia’s sitting on the couch eating yogurt from fucking Trader Joe’s, still pretty early in the morning. Life’s kinda funny, honestly. “Hey,” is what Julia says back, grinning as Kady sits next to her.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” Kady says, without taking a beat to say it, so probably not anything that’s a big deal.

“Okay. Ask me.”

Kady’s expression in response to this is unexpected: she’s smiling, almost, but she presses her mouth together. Opens it once, closes it again. Then, she says, “Was there a weird time travel thing where you said you were maybe kinda in love with me?”

Julia says, out loud, “Oh.” And then, “Uh?”

Kady’s looking at her. Julia can see Kady’s eyes going up and down. Then, wait. Julia also says, “Okay, are you seriously looking at my tits right now?”

Kady says, “Nah. Thinking about looking at your tits, though.”

And that’s the full swoony romantic transition that happens before Kady, actually, gets in Julia’s lap. As in, she’s, like, fully on top of Julia. Kady’s looking down at her, but then, Kady’s always looking down on her even when Julia breaks out the highest heels she’s got. Maybe this isn’t the thing she should be thinking, maybe it's baggage, but what she does think is that whatever’s about to happen won’t just be being with a girl, which Julia didn’t expect to be thinking about her not-uncheckered past with today. It’s going to be being with Kady.

Julia’s mouth is, yeah, dry, and Kady says, “Okay? Are we making out or what?” Julia laughs like she’s hysterical, or stupid, or like she’s going to cry. She might cry. Crying means good things, sometimes. When she reaches up for Kady’s face, the movement is slow, disconnected, even though it feels like she should and could claw into her, which is not something she’s ever thought before kissing a guy, because she needs to kiss Kady. She needs to kiss Kady because she needs to know what being with Kady will be like, even as it’s already happening to her, even though she already knows. Actually, she knows it really, really well.