Free Blue Magic by A.M. Dellamonica

crackled through the gathering.
    Mark punched the air. “Kick ass and take names!”
    Olive frowned. “The gentle path.”
    To Astrid’s relief, most of the volunteers echoed Olive.
    The others were waiting. She could delay no longer.
    She pulled vitagua into herself, into the empty spaces within.
    Voices assailed her. Grumbles, she called them, the voices of the frozen people of the unreal, with all their opinions, resentments, their knowledge of past and future.
    They spoke of the future, of Sahara escaping, of Alchemites committing atrocities. Or maybe she’d misheard—without Sahara, the Alchemites were relatively harmless. Astrid had seen to that.
    The grumbles mumbled about her first-grade graduation ceremony, Dad’s death, the night she lost her virginity.
    She reeled, dizzy and disoriented. When was now?
    Flames licking skin, smell of burned hair …
    “She’s spacing out,” a voice said. Someone caught her before she could step off the trolley.
    “Jacks?” Jacks was the one who always caught her. She burst into tears: his blood was on her skirt. Her fault. Was that now?
    “Go, Clancy,” Will said. It was him holding her steady, not Jacks. She felt the gut-deep pain of his children’s absence, his gnawing fear they’d be harmed, the exhausting effort of holding it together.…
    “St. Louis,” Clancy said, driving into the glow. Hot, syrupy air lolled over them as they rolled out into nighttime.
    “Where are we?” Astrid said.
    “Missouri,” Will said.
    “I think it goes well here,” she said.
    Car alarms were blaring—their arrival had displaced a shock of air. People were going to their windows.
    Janet raised a tin watering can, spilling water onto the street. As it pattered on the pavement, people shrugged, closing their curtains. The alarms quieted.
    Aquino crossed himself quickly, then raised an elaborately painted lampshade over his head. Letrico flickered up his arms and hands, and countless twinkles of light boiled from the lampshade, swarming out into the city like fireflies. “Invitations to new volunteers are away.”
    “And here goes nothing.” Igme held out a plastic turkey baster filled with vitagua. Soap bubbles blew from its tip, each the size of a tennis ball, each containing a trace of liquid magic. Some drifted upward; others rolled in the street, vessels of microcontamination that would spread enchantment when they broke.
    “Boss? Boss?”
    Astrid twisted the barbell pierced into the web of her hand, breaking the skin so blue magic could steam out. Leaning out of a trolley window, she looked for objects—tricycles, dog toys, laundry, anything that could hold a benevolent charm.
    “Will—your children?”
    The magical well would be vulnerable until she had a successor, and the grumbles said it would be Will. But he wouldn’t do it if she couldn’t produce the kids.
    He will bend, he will see…, the grumbles murmured. They told the truth, but they laid traps with it; you couldn’t entirely trust them. Would he really love her one day? Could he—could anyone—love someone who was destroying the world?
    She had chanted him a spinner from a kid’s game, a plastic compass whose needle pointed east. “Turn left, Clancy,” he said.
    Astrid kept chanting. Their route took them past a derelict shopping mall that had been turned into a temporary camp for evacuees from Oregon. FEMA trailers lined its parking lot. Astrid made food spinners for the refugees, healing chantments, items that would mend broken tools and teach new skills. It wouldn’t be long before the camp realized they had magical items on their hands.
    Igme kept sending out vitagua-contaminated bubbles, using the baster.
    Astrid was chanting hundreds of things at once now: a rain barrel that purified water, a stuffed crab that cured cholera, air scrubbers, hole diggers, roof patchers, a shoemaker enchantment, a fireworks generator—anything a person might use to help, supply, even entertain others.…
    A