So this was Jade City! As he followed his parents down the sidewalk, Hari gawked at the hordes of taxis and scooters that sped around one another on the streets. Grey concrete skyscrapers bristled with colorful store signs. People were everywhere, talking, shouting, laughing, arguing, weaving smoothly between Mandarin and a dialect he couldn’t understand. Jadean, he guessed, but his mom didn’t speak it, so he’d never learned.

  Actually, it had been a challenge for him even to learn Mandarin, since his dad barely spoke it and his mom definitely preferred English. As a kid, he’d hated being forced to attend Chinese school every weekend, but now he was glad, because it meant that he could tag along with his mom for her sabbatical year at the National Jadean University. Not that he’d ever tell her that, of course.

  “Is this where you stayed when Uncle Tommy sent you and Auntie Diane here?” he asked, catching up to his parents.

  His mom was a magicist professor at Stanford University. Years ago, she and her fellow professor Diane Larson had come to Jade Island to investigate potential magical abuse. They hadn’t been able to prove anything conclusively with the technology at the time, but their findings had still been enough to win Uncle Tommy a promotion at the MEC. Now Uncle Tommy was Assistant Director, second only to Hari’s dad.

  His mom smiled fondly at long-ago memories. “No, we weren’t in Lakeside. Tommy booked us a place Downtown. It was the tiniest apartment you can imagine, and the shower flooded every time we used it. I thought Diane and I were going to murder each other!”

  Hari’s dad laughed. “And instead, you became best friends.”

  “Yeah, well. Psychology studies suggest that people form closer bonds from shared negative experiences than positive ones.”

  “Yes, Professor Chen,” Hari and his dad chorused.

  His mom frowned at them with mock strictness. “Remember that. There will be a pop quiz later.”

  “Come on, Mom!”

  There would be, too. After mentoring so many graduate students, his mom was nothing if not a teacher. Although…. When he’d interrogated her grad students at the holiday party last year, they’d sworn that she quizzed them constantly too – but then they’d smirked in a most suspicious manner.

  “We can go see that area later,” his mom promised. “Downtown’s changed a lot, but the apartment building is still there.”

  “Why are we going to HQ again?” Hari asked.

  “Because that’s where the inspectors are staying, and I want to touch base with them,” his dad explained. “It won’t take long. Why don’t you and your mom get some shaved ice while you’re waiting? If I remember correctly, there’s an Ice Monster around the corner.”

  He remembered correctly, as he always did. Around the corner from MEC HQ was a shaved ice parlor with an electric-blue signboard. A bright yellow cartoon cube with arms and legs and a mustached face waved down at them from the board. Under it, a line stretched out the door and folded back on itself on the sidewalk. Through the glass storefront, Hari could see that it looped around inside the store too, just like a Disneyland ride.

  While his dad continued on to HQ, Hari and his mom got in line behind a group of elementary school kids who were speaking near-perfect English. It reminded him of the two girls he’d seen when they came out of the Metro station. One of them had been talking about bread flour. Not what he’d been expecting. Maybe Jade City wouldn’t be so different from Palo Alto after all.

  “Hmm, this area looks new. They’ve done a lot of rebuilding,” his mom murmured, more to herself than to him.

  Hari craned his neck, studying the high-rises that surrounded them. They looked like normal buildings to him. “What did they look like before? Did they have houses or something?”

  “Oh, no, there’s no space for that. But last time I came here, most of the buildings were decades old and had suffered a lot of damage from the Toll. Crumbling concrete, cracks in the ceilings, rust streaks running down the outer walls – what causes a Toll like that?” she asked all of a sudden.

  “Mom! Stop quizzing me all the time!” But he did know the answer, so he gave it. “Damage to physical structures means it’s a Toll in the Matter Realm. That can come from a spell in either the Corporeal Realm or the Spirit Realm.”

  The three Realms of magic were coupled to one another, so when you performed a spell in one, you paid a price, or Toll, in the other two.

  “Correct.” His mom nodded her approval and blessedly stopped trying to educate him.

  When they finally reached the counter, a young woman with a bouncy ponytail asked in Mandarin, “What would you like today?”

  “Hari?” asked his mom, also in Mandarin. “Have you decided?”

  A little embarrassed about speaking the language in front of a real Jadean, Hari said carefully, “I would like to order the Mango Avalanche, please.”

  His accent must have passed inspection, because young woman grinned at him as if he were her little brother. She turned to his mom, who laughed. “I’ll share with him. At my age, you just can’t eat that much dessert anymore, as much as you’d like to. But let me get a sweet potato ginger soup for my husband.”

  When their Mango Avalanche arrived, Hari was glad they’d only ordered one. It was the largest dish of shaved ice he’d ever seen. The ice itself was pastel yellow, flavored with mango puree and shaved so finely that it felt as soft as cotton and vanished on his tongue. Scoops of mango-flavored ice cream sat around the base of the shaved ice mountain, chunks of fresh mango were heaped up its sides, and rivers of sweetened condensed milk oozed down to meet them. Sighing in contentment, Hari scooped up a large spoonful.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  Then he noticed that his mom wore the distant look she often did when she was listening to her magical scanner. It was a weaker version of the inspectors’ headpieces, just a single scanner mounted on an earbud so she could monitor their surroundings for the telltale melodies of spells. There’d been a time when he’d thought it was awesome that his mom did stuff like that, like she was a secret agent on the hunt for evil mages who were plotting to destroy the world.

  That was before he discovered that magic abuse was very much a thing of the past and that his classmates thought the MEC was a joke, if they even knew it still existed.

  “Mom, do you have to do that everywhere?” he asked, switching back to English.

  She blinked, coming back to the real world. “Sorry, dear. What was that?”

  “Never mind.” After a moment, curiosity got the better of him. “So? Did you hear anything?”

  “No. There’s nothing here.”

  He’d never gotten a “yes” once. “Then why bother?”

  She smiled. “Habit.” Picking up the spoon, she fished a sweet potato ball out of his dad’s soup and chewed it absently.

  They ate in silence until Hari asked, “Why’d you pick NJU for your sabbatical anyway? Is it just because Auntie Diane and Uncle Dave work there?”

  At the mention of her friends, Hari’s mom smiled again. “Mmm, not only for that. NJU has one of the last magicist experimental groups left in the world. They’re doing some very exciting work studying the different types of orders that exist in magic-space.”

  “Orders? Magic-space?”

  His mom laughed and shook her head. “Diane’s terminology. Shamelessly stolen from condensed matter physics.” (Uncle Dave, Auntie Diane’s husband, was a condensed matter physicist.) “We described magic in terms of music before that.”

  That was a carryover from how mages once thought about magic, Hari knew, so it was a good thing that the magicists had finally moved away from their language.

  “To answer your question, magic is made up of individual units. We used to call them ‘notes,’ like in music, but now we call them ‘magickons’.” Under her breath, she muttered, “I still can’t believe that stuck. Anyway, magickons have different properties – well, never mind, that’s too complicated. Regardless, they can form patterns in magic-space. Like stripes, or a checkerboard. An ‘order’ is just a fancy name for a pattern. But reality isn’t one uniform pattern everywhere. It’s more like a patchwork quilt. Not nearly as tidy as a quilt, of course, but you get the idea.”

  “What’s the point of studying that?” Hari asked the question that commentators raised on the rare occasions that the MEC landed in the news. An obsolete institution, they called it. A waste of taxpayer money.

  It made him bristle – even if they had a point. Magic was gone for all intents and purposes, and good riddance. Now the sooner the Alliance of Nations shut down the MEC, the sooner his dad could get a better job, and the sooner his dad’s family would stop hounding him about leading it someday.

  “What’s the point of studying magic?” repeated his mom. “Honestly? Curiosity. Of course, on grant proposals we write that it will help us better understand the nature of magic so we may be able to unravel spells without resorting to magic ourselves.”

  “Except there are hardly any spells left to unravel,” Hari pointed out. “Even on Jade Island. I heard Dad say that even the Jadeans stopped using their spelled woks and stuff. It’s just some old spells left in the shrines and temples that will decay on their own anyway.”

  “Mmm. Perhaps.”

  From his mom’s frown, Hari could tell that she was worrying about whether her field would survive much longer. She worried about that a lot these days. Feeling a little guilty about reminding her, he went back to his scientifically verifiably un-magical shaved ice.

  Silken Heights wasn’t so far from Lakeside as a magpie flew, but it lay on the outskirts of Jade City, so the Metro didn’t connect the two districts in any convenient fashion. Aly and I had to take the Brown Line all the way Downtown, switch to the Green Line, and then ride the Red Line back north. We just missed the bus, meaning it was a choice between roasting in the sun for ten minutes or hiking up the hill ourselves.

  We opted for the latter. It was the wrong call.

  By the time we reached our local Grandpa Earth shrine, we were both soaked in sweat and practically dead from dehydration. We dragged ourselves under the red awning that shaded the shrine and flopped into the plastic folding chairs next to it. For a long time, we stared blankly at the patches of merciless blue sky between the buildings.

  At last, Aly sat up back up. “Whew, where’re the clouds when you need them?” She slid a sly glance my way.

  “No idea.” It came out more curtly than I’d meant, but I wasn’t in the mood for her hint-hint-wink-wink games today. “Why don’t you ask Grandpa Earth?”

  “Good idea.” Aly winked again.

  Scooting sideways, she inclined her upper body towards the shrine. It was the size of a large dollhouse, so its top was below our eye level even when we were seated.

  “Grandpa Earth,” she cried dramatically, “please send a storm to cool things off before I drop dead from heatstroke right here!”

  Of course there was no response.

  Giggling, she slid off her chair, got on her hands and knees, and peeked through the opening at the bottom of the shrine. “Hey, Dia, did your mom or grandma make this image?”

  “No idea.” (It was my grandma.)

  “It’s so dark I can’t really see – ow!” She jumped up, palm pressed to her cheek where it had brushed the hot concrete.

  “Serves you right for disrespecting him,” I said, and half-meant it.

  She rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Let’s go home.”

  Past the Grandpa Earth shrine, the traffic dropped off, and the residential neighborhood appeared. Palace Road narrowed and turned into Weaver Road, which local lore held was named after my family. Lanes poked off it on either side, crowded with tiny shops and narrow four-story condos. Food stalls sold everything from stinky tofu to custard wheel cakes to roasted sweet potatoes. Hawkers we’d known our whole lives sang out, “Good day, Miss Weaver! Good day, Miss Chang!” and we waved back.

  Aly and I parted ways across the street from our high school. My house was further up the hill than hers. After crossing a bridge over Sky Stream, I finally walked onto Weaver Road, Section 7, Lane 7. This dead-end street – barely more than an alley, really – was crammed with the homes of my extended family.

  “Hey Dia! Too bad you didn’t get arrested!” My least favorite cousin putted by on his scooter. He did not offer me a ride.

  “Dia! Dia! What were you doing all the way in Lakeside?! You’re going to get heatstroke!” Auntie Bell, the second of Mom’s six older sisters, rushed out with a bottle of cold water. Condensation was already dripping off the plastic.

  I chugged two-thirds of it before coming up for breath. “Aly and I went to get baking supplies.”

  Auntie Bell planted her hands on her hips. “Today? Your mother let you go out today? When there’s a heat advisory?”

  “Well, I don’t think she remembered I was going. She’s been really busy with that Special Order….”

  At the reminder of the family business that was the Seventh Daughter’s birthright, that neither she nor I could ever be a part of, Auntie Bell pinched her lips together. “Shoo. Go home. Shower. Cool off.”

  Thanking her for the water, I continued down the lane towards the four-story house at the very end. The first floor was a store, with a faded red and yellow sign (not very large, because we didn’t want to attract that many customers) that said: “Weaver Porcelain Dolls.”