Free Blue Magic by A.M. Dellamonica Page B

fainted.
    “We should take her with us.”
    Astrid shook her head. “Leave her for the police.”
    “Astrid, she might know more.”
    “I’m sorry, Will—I promised the volunteers we wouldn’t take captives.”
    “Some of us have been locked up,” Clancy put in.
    “But—”
    “Will, Sahara’s people move on. When they lose someone, they abandon them. She won’t be able to tell you.”
    Will glared at her, furious, then at the unconscious woman.
    “We can’t become a jail,” Astrid said again.
    Under the hot umbrella of the St. Louis night, sirens were wailing. Here and there, alchemized trees were getting bigger as the contaminated soap bubbles began to pop.
    “Will?”
    “Fine, all right. I see your damned point.” They boarded the trolley and Clancy floored it, bringing them to the nearest VA hospital.
    “What are we doing here?” Will asked. He was upset, but Astrid could see he was struggling to calm down.
    Aquino held out a plastic model of the human heart, offering it to Will. “This is one of our more powerful healing chantments,” he said.
    “It’ll fix anything physical—cancer, broken bones, chapped lips, diabetes,” Astrid chimed in. “It’s a power pig, but the idea is to cool off the city, give everyone a break—”
    “Heal everyone we can, it leaves a good impression,” Janet said. “Frees up doctors and nurses too.”
    “Fine.” Will stepped clear of the letrico lines, murmuring the heat cantation Astrid had taught him, and held it out. The plastic flexed; the heart started to beat.
    “Temperature’s ninety-two Fahrenheit,” Igme said.
    A low thump— buh dump, buh dump —issued from the heart. As the humid air around them cooled, fog pooled at Will’s feet, blowing outward, wisping out to caress a clutch of smokers crouched in wheelchairs beside the hospital’s glass door. The magic reached them too; one screamed as his amputated legs grew back. He jumped up, then tripped. Others scrambled to catch him.
    Mist enveloped the hospital. The wind blowing from the trolley got stronger.
    Spreading fog, a grumble said.
    “Eighty-six degrees,” Igme reported.
    Vitagua, spreading in a fog when the well opens …
    Astrid shook away the murmur, imagining the surprise inside the hospital as the sick and injured recovered. The heartbeat buh-bump ed, louder in the increasingly murky air. The chantment would cure common colds and undiagnosed tumors, fix bumps and bruises, restore failed organs, mend bones.
    “Seventy degrees,” Igme said. Their sweat-damp clothes were chilly on the skin now. The air around them was gusting outward, and a warm wind was blowing in and getting cooled in its turn. Aquino caught Astrid’s eye, a question on his face.
    Will was occupied; she nodded.
    Quickly, Aquino hefted out an acorn-shaped trunk filled with chantments, tucking it under a lamppost. The acorn spun like a top, burying itself in the shallow soil. Will, focused on the hospital, didn’t notice.
    “Sixty seconds to freezing here at the hospital.” Igme said, counting down, voice raised. “Greater metropolitan area’s falling to a nice habitable fifty.”
    “Three. Two. One.”
    Will lowered the heart and climbed back aboard the trolley.
    “Let’s go,” Astrid said. Bramblegate had bloomed on the hospital wall; Clancy drove toward it.
    Leaving the city colder, healthier, and unmistakably enchanted, they went home.

 
     
    CHAPTER SEVEN
     
    JUANITA HELD ON TO the next chantment for three long days.
    In court, the Alchemites, looking ever more brutalized as their bruises yellowed, got tossed back into the squirrel cages for biting their tongues and spitting blood at the bench. Wallstone had the jurors experiment with a chantment, a child’s finger-puppet, a glow-in-the-dark ghost that allowed its wearer to create pockets of darkness in broad daylight. The lapsed Alchemite who’d surrendered the puppet, a sculptor, testified that he’d used it to obscure their movements during