Free Magic Time: Ghostlands by Robert Charles Wilson, Marc Scott Zicree

know how you are when you get that look. Give out, don’t be a tease.”
    Hell, it had to be said sometime, didn’t it? “I’m thinking of cutting you guys loose, too.” Before she could counter, he added quickly, “At least, you and Doc. Goldie…well, he and the Source, they have a hook in each other. As for me…” He didn’t need to finish it.
    “We’ve been round this track before, Cal. You really think you’re gonna shake us off? You get to the Source, you’re gonna need —”
    “Colleen, I don’t know how to beat it.” Cal mastered himself, continued with quiet fervor. “I’ve been hoping I’d find some inspiration, some guidance from on high. But I don’t have a clue how to take on the Source—and I’m getting a real strong feeling I’m not about to.” He ran a hand through his hair, blew out a frosty breath. “We saw what it could do in Boone’s Gap, and that was just a finger of it, stretched taut as a rubber band, and it still wiped the floor with us.”
    “We beat Primal,” Colleen reminded him, her voice flat, not looking at him, staring into the night.
    “Yes, we beat Primal, but he had only a fraction of the power whatever is at the Source will have…and I don’t have to remind you of the cost.”
    The snow was falling more heavily now, glistening in their hair and shoulders, enfolding them in its silence, its intimacy.
    “I need Goldie, he’s the only way I’m going to find it, I know that—which doesn’t mean I excuse myself. But you and Doc…” Here his voice softened. “I’ve seen the two of you…you’re right together. You deserve a life.”
    “Aw geez, Cal, what is this, the Lifetime Channel? No, I forgot, we don’t have that anymore. Which is one of the few good things that’s come out of all this.”
    “Don’t joke.”
    “Why not? It’s one of the rare things I’m good at.” She looked down as Big-T’s hoof connected with a hillock of snow and sent the powder flying in a wide arc into the darkness. She grew serious, was quiet a long moment that was filled only with the creak of leather and the sound of their canvas drags slithering over the rough ground.
    Then finally, in a voice so low he almost didn’t catch it, she said, “I’m scared, Cal.”
    “You?” It shocked him. Not that Colleen felt fear—after all, she was human—but that she would admit it to him.
    “I don’t want complications in my life,” she said. “I don’t want to be blindsided anymore, I don’t want the unknown. I’m sick to death of not knowing what I’m gonna face around each and every corner.”
    “So you agree with me.”
    “Hell no, you idiot. I’m not talking about the Source, I’m talking about Viktor!”
    Cal couldn’t help but smile. “Avoiding a relationship is not a good excuse to kill yourself.”
    She peered again into the blackness. “This is all your fault, you know. Dragging me to hell and gone, getting me to feel all over again…What a friggin’ mess.”
    For all her feigned gravity, he knew she was speaking playfully, chiding him to move him off his position, get him to yield. Another weapon in her arsenal, one she wielded as capably as all the rest. What a remarkable woman, he thought, and she had been there all along, living right on Eighty-first just down the street from him. And would he have ever noticed her if not for the Change?
    No.
    He’d have stayed entombed in his trivial, small life, pursuing the phantom of stability, security. Living in illusion, bracketed between interpreted past and assumed future, hardly in the present at all. Asleep to all the wondrous possibilities around him, to the miracles as well as the horrors.
    How hard it was, even now, to be fully awake…
    Yet she worked at him—they all worked at each other, the four of them, orphans and outcasts, to stay alert, to not fall into complacency, to be truly alive.
    Incredibly, he realized in this moment, with the snow feathering down, the night surrounding them like