The Fire Artist (28 page)

“I want you to make me beautiful, so he’ll notice me.” She’s so dreamy and hopeful, like this is a movie, like she can just rub a lamp and a happy, cheery genie will appear to deliver pizza and earth, wind, air, or fire.

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

I sigh. I want to tell her that it’s what’s inside that matters. I want to deliver some wise, pithy adage she’ll remember forever about beauty being skin deep, and that it’s what’s in your heart that counts. But honestly, her heart doesn’t seem that beautiful either. She couldn’t be bothered to take me out for something to eat, and I feel like I’m starving.

Besides, what do I know about love? What do I even know about beauty or true hearts? I know nothing because everything I’ve felt has been turned upside down.

“You can do that, right? You can make me beautiful, right? I want blond hair, and I want green eyes, and perfect cheekbones, and I want to be thin and tall and have one of those faces that makes everyone look at you,” she says in a voice full of a sick and fetid kind of longing.

“Yes, I can do it. But do you really want to?”

“Of course. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

“You find a granter, and you wish for beauty? You’re not going to wish for health or happiness?”

She tilts her head and gives me a sharp and loathing glance. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to look ordinary? I bet you don’t. But I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s awful. It’s like an awful trap, and I want out of it.”

We all have our traps, I suppose. This is hers. “Okay then. Let’s talk payment,” I say, because this is her wish, her life, her choice. I might as well let this girl know what’s at stake, so she doesn’t feel used as I was. “Wishes come at a cost.”

“Okay. So what would it cost?”

“Your soul. Your love. Your heart. Yourself. You name it. You could give me one of your hands, and we’d be even,” I say, and she cringes, but I keep going, and this must be granter magic too, this instant knowledge I have of how she’d need to pay. “Your firstborn child and it’d be a deal.”

Blake recoils.

“You could subtract twenty years from your life, and we’d be good then.”

“Twenty years?”

I tilt my head to the side, considering. “Twenty years. Yep. That feels about right. Twenty years off your life,” I say, and I’m still not entirely sure where the words have come from, but I know them to be true.

“That’s how people pay for wishes?”

I nod.

“But what about—” she begins, but can’t finish the sentence.

I finish it for her. “It’s called a Faustian bargain. It’s called that for a reason. It’s like a deal with the devil.” My voice is harsh and clipped, and if I could I’d shake her by the shoulders and slap some sense into her. But she’s calling the shots, not me.

She doesn’t speak right away. She breathes out hard through tight lips, as if she’s considering. I offer a faint wish to whoever is in charge that she’ll see the light and walk away. But I believe in nothing anymore, so I don’t even know who I’m wishing to.

“Fine. Twenty years from my life. I’ll give you twenty years of my life in exchange for being beautiful.”

If I were a jackass granter, I’d take the twenty years right now. I’d grant her wish literally, age her up to thirty-five, and make her a beautiful thirtysomething woman in a fifteen-year-old’s life. But I am a mastered granter, so I take out the notebook, write down her wish, and tell her, “The terms are satisfactory.”

Then I escort her to the nearest park, find a quiet corner, and ask her one more time to make her wish.

“I wish to be beautiful,” Blake says.

“Your wish is my command,” I say, and mist pours forth from my hands, swirling around her, transforming her limp hair into lushness, her plain face into model features, her short and squat body into a tall, statuesque one. She is gorgeous. She is stunning. She will turn heads. And no one she knows will recognize her.

Her parents won’t know she’s her. Her classmates will no longer know Blake.

Someday, maybe in fifty years, maybe in ten, someone will
knock on her door, maybe me, maybe someone from the Union, and they will take her life twenty years before she would have said good-bye to this world naturally.

She rushes to the nearest parked car at the edge of the park and looks at her reflection. “I am beautiful,” she says, then she runs back to me and gives me a hug. “Thank you.”

“I’m still hungry,” I say, but she’s off in another direction, and I’m forgotten. Because she got what she thought she wanted, and I’m gone now too.

I’m suddenly back in the library, like I was snapped through time and space. I’m weary, though I’ve had more sleep in the last month than I’ve had in ages. My feet are heavy, my eyes are so sleepy, but I still have form, I still have shape, so I make my way to the desk, sink down in the leather chair, and pull the registry closer to me so I can enter Blake Vater’s name. The registry is open to the last entry made. The
K
s. The spot where my name was entered. I stave off sleep, I fend off hibernation as I run my thumb over the names, searching out mine. I need to know why the Leagues never made an example of me. Why they never strutted me around for stealing—the worst crime, the crime that echoes through your family forever.

I find my entry. I slide my index finger across the ruled line. My name—Aria Kilandros—back when I still had two names. Then the date, then the wish.

I take a sharp breath, bring a hand to my mouth.

The marks are scratchy, as if someone wrote my name while fighting off an invisible hand trying to pen something else. As if the granter recording this wish was resisting all the granter magic, all the granter orders and rules and regulations
and stipulations and provisos and quid pro quos, with every ounce of strength inside him.

Because it doesn’t say
natural-born fire
.

It says
whole fire
.

Whole Fire
.

It’s not the full truth, but it’s not a lie either.

What it is, however, was enough of the truth for the registry of wishes and enough of a lie for my family to be safe from my stealing. For Jana to have a chance to perform if she wants. For her kids, for the next generation to not be subjected to the League’s rules of family banishment for all time. Because
natural-born fire
would tip off the Leagues that I had stolen.
Whole fire
merely suggests I topped myself off and wished for a little more. A small difference in wording, but a big difference in penalties since no one knows I stole now.

Taj recorded my wish, as he had to, but he recorded it in a way that satisfied the granters and gave my family a chance.

He protected them, and something inside me lightens and starts to hope again.

One of his very last acts as a granter was to try to keep me safe.

Then, the choking feeling comes, and it hurts. I’m crushed into vapor.

It goes like this for the next several weeks. I’m rousted from the dead of sleep by the greedy, I grant their basest desires for a price, then I choke until I’m obliterated.

Then it happens again.

I grant a man millions of dollars in exchange for his right hand.

Literally—that is what he offers to pay with. I give him a sharp and heavy knife, and he cuts it off himself, handing me the bloody stump one starless night in a dark corner of Central Park. I try to give it back to him, to tell him to take it to the nearest hospital emergency room and have the doctors sew it back on. But then the hand disappears. It’s gone forever. He cries in pain, and I imagine he’ll keep crying for weeks and months and years to come even as he counts his money with his left hand.

I grant an older woman a job. She’s been looking for three years, and she offers me her happiness. I don’t know where it goes when I take it. All I know is she’ll no longer have it, and it’ll be in the same place where that man’s hand is, where Blake’s shortened life is. In a bank full of horrid desires.

Then I meet a boy who wishes for his sick father to be healthy. His dad has been ill for a year, and the boy offers himself as a trade. I remember the security guard with the sick sister who gave keys to Taj. I ask the boy if he’d instead be willing to give me his most valuable teddy bear, or baseball card, or even a book.

He brings me his entire collection of invaluable first-edition comic books the next day, and I grant his father health.

Then I take the comic books back to my library. I wonder why I couldn’t take the hand or the happiness with me. But maybe you can only take payments that aren’t beyond measure. Maybe we get to keep only the things that are bartered in exchange for a better life for others, like when Taj kept the keys from the security guard. Maybe there are some noble wishes.

Then again, Taj’s parents didn’t get to keep him when they traded him for peace.

Maybe there are no good wishes.

But if I could wish for one thing now, it would be for Taj to be enjoying his freedom. For the boy who protected my family to be living his life fully. I miss him. I miss him terribly.

The alarm sounds again, and I rise, rub my eyes, and go through the same motions I went through with Blake and the one-handed man and the job-hunting woman and the boy with the sick dad. I brush my hair, wash my face, grab a new outfit, tsk-tsking the selection in the closet as I snag the least boring of all the boringest skirt-blouse-shoes ensembles.

I open the door, walk through the tunnel, desperate for sunshine and air after this latest nap. I push up on the grate, wondering who I’ll see, and there’s a hand reaching for me, taking mine, and helping me the rest of the way up.

I’m aboveground, looking at my potential wisher, looking into eyes I know so well.

Taj.

I want to kick him. I want to wail on him with my fists. I want to to yell at him, to ask him how he could have used me.

I want to ask him why he tried to protect my family. I want
to know if he missed me terribly too. But it would be stupid to ask. He doesn’t miss me. He needs something, just like I did.

Instead, I fold my arms over my chest and stand against the side of the Flatiron Building. I climbed out of a different grate tonight. I’ve started to learn the labyrinths.

“You have no idea how long I’ve been looking for you,” he says. “Two months. Every day for two months. I have been looking for you, and it’s not as if I didn’t know exactly where you’d be. But it took this long to find you, Aria.”

“You’ve been looking for me?”

“Yes. God, yes. All the time. Every day. And I guess it’s true—I had to be desperate enough, I had to be at my wit’s end before you appeared.”

“But why? What could you possibly need from me? Isn’t this the only thing you wanted? To be free?” I gesture at him, taking in his new look. He’s wearing jeans and a button-down. Not quite the same as his sharp-dressed granter look, but not that different either. Maybe he wasn’t that different as a granter and as a boy. But what do I know? Everything I thought I knew about him was a mask.

There’s a shopping bag at his feet.

“Yes, and it’s great. I’m going to college and I’ve seen my mom again, and I’m wearing normal clothes, and it’s the most wonderful thing in the world. Except—”

I cut him off. “Then what do you want? What could you possibly have to wish for if you have everything you want? You used me. You tricked me into freeing you, and you admitted it at my house. That it was all a story to set you free.”

He reaches for me, but I back up.

“Aria, I’ve been looking for you. Not for me. But for you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He dips a hand inside the shopping bag. He takes out my combat boots. The sight of them reminds me of all I don’t have, and it’s as if he just yanked a bandage off a still-sore wound.

“I brought these for you. I thought you might need them.” There’s a glint in his eye.

“Why would I need them?”

“Aria, when I came to your house, the reason I lied to you and said all those awful things was because I didn’t want the union officials to have a clue. I couldn’t let on how I felt about you. They already knew you tried to free me and that it didn’t work, so they knew how you felt. I had to act like I’d used you. Like I’d tricked you. That your feelings were all just a wisher’s folly. I told you that it happened before, that wishers fell into infatuation. I had to make it seem like that’s all that had happened with you. Because if I let on that I felt the same way, they’d have reassigned you. Given you a new jurisdiction and then I’d never have found you.”

I hold up a hand in a stop sign. “Wait. Did you say felt the same way?”

He nods and grins, a sweet sheepish grin. The smile of a boy, not the smile of a onetime granter. The boy who kissed me. The boy who looked at stars with me. The boy who believed in the green light at the end of the dock.

Maybe it wasn’t an act?

“Yes,” he says, and he sounds innocent and shy as he admits it. “
Felt
and
feel
, Aria. It was never just a tale told for freedom. The way I feel for you is a true story. It’s real.”