After Aconessi finished making sweet sweet love to one of his muffins —the sort of love pelicans make to pigeons, with their mouths and crops and… digestive system, speaking broadly— he stood like an earthquake from his chair and joined his hands with a clap. “I reviewed the plans for your sacromotor before going out there looking for you, Saon, and I understand I am your first magic teacher ever. Thus, tell me, do you have… experimented on your own?” He stared at me with the despicable gaze of someone who expects an answer in the short term.

  “Yesterday night, two misfires of the illusion modules. One rather tortuous, nasty,” I kept it short, as there was not much to embellish. “A foul mixture of unpleasant sensations. It would be hard to fully put into words.”

  “No need to, most illusionists have suffered one or seven hundred nasty misfires. Some even lose their minds afterwards. The problem comes when you fail to realize what is happening, for example, in the middle of a confrontation.”

  “You don’t know the attack comes from the inside amidst the heat of battle. Therefore, you keep pushing, trying to best an enemy illusionist, and feed the ungodly connection. Am I correct?”

  “Precisely!” One could see how pleased he was with my answer. Aconessi, ironically, wasn’t trying to hide anything from me. “And that’s why we are going to force your Sacromotor to misfire under my supervision as your first lesson. Or lessons.”

  I closed my eyes and crossed my forelimbs. “I see: I need to acclimate myself, to learn to recognize the symptoms of my own sacromotor misfiring. But this begs a question, Aconessi: What if the enemy knows the particular way my sacromotor misfires. If they can emulate it. What happens then?”

  Aconessi bit onto another muffin, crushing the core of caramelized milk and making it smear all over his limps. He chewed while holding a thoughtful expression. “You die, boy. You die.” He then took a sip from his mocha. He let the coffee cup on the same spot it was before, rather ceremoniously, and taped a bit with his fingers over the wooden desk. “But it’s not a concern you should have. Such event can only stem from an intimate act of treason, and I doubt you trust anybody enough for that to happen.”

  “Then, I supposed, I shouldn’t tell you the extent of my hallucinations.”

  “I’ll inevitably figure out some from your behavior. But I am no threat, Saon. Retrievers use me for ‘humane’ torture—and if there’s a truly void adjective in this conversation, is that one. I do not kill people. I do not partake in the misgivings of justice of our least honorable peers. I glace at the corruption of our organization sideways, acknowledge it and keep on walking towards my duties, letting it be unimpeded. That’s the thing about the Retrievers: as long as your refusal to interact with the corrupt system is mostly harmless to it, you are safe.” His expression degenerated into a frown as he went on and on. “There’s nothing the criminal behavior can give me that I cannot get honestly, or at least nothing I want: I paid for the muffins, and for the coffee. The clerks and merchants of the local businesses are thankful whenever I stop by uniformed and act as a client instead of demanding a bribe. My neighbors consider me strange but, I hope, mostly harmless. I cut ties with people I consider unsavory, interact with them on a need-to-do basis.”

  “Sounds like a living, teach.” I stretched my arms over my head and took my hands to the back of my neck. “Want me to do it here? try to do some illusion magic and fail spectacularly?”

  “You haven’t finished your muffins. Or your coffee, for that matter. And I’d prefer we do it outside, in case you make a mess or two.”

  I sat up and straightened my uniform. “You, stop being gay, you sorry piece of fruity fabrics.”

  Aconessi looked at me like I was half a worm found on an apple he was eating. “Are you being homophobic against your uniform?”

  “Yes. Pretty much yes. It deserves the slander.”

  “Amazing, that’s a new one.” He beckoned with a finger as he lumbered past me. “Follow me into the terrace. Far from the railings, in case you go off running and I need to save you from jumping off into the void. There, you may fail at your heart’s content.”

  Wind doesn’t blow at the heart of the Minced Meanders. A soft breeze sometimes ruffles our hairs, mischievous air currents that wander up from the sewage or result from the opening of the main city valves —for the uninitiated: that’s how we call our fleshy gates— but powerful gusts are a thing that happens only on the rare occasions when a huge oxbow breaks through the dome’s surface. Wind comes, the breakthrough alarm sounds, the children get scared to death, and those who can run, do run.

  So no, in normal times there’s no wind blowing at the terrace of Central, unless someone’s sacromotor is producing it. And that day was a rather normal day, where one could raise one’s gaze to the dome and see the bright, fragmented streams of spirit ash drifting slowly over it, around it, or into it. More than one time I had stared at the sky in awe, ruminating about how a single man blowing up could cause such a disaster. A man with more than a billion souls ensnared inside his, but a man at the end of the day.

  And if of days we speak of, one day the last meander will disperse: the ashes of a thousand million obliterated souls settling out of existence, dying like cooling embers. And then the man of a thousand faces, the biomancer that sired me and Aconessi both, will have no legitimate claim to power anymore. Not that that fussy detail will matter: The Governor, whose name knows only one living person —if you can still call him a person—shall live forever, as thus he decreed. He buries sons and daughters he never spoke to; he outlives the generations he sires once and again and again. I am quite sure he would even sleep with some of his daughters knowingly. Using other face, of course: In the unwelcomely common nights where the meanders lay dormant and avoid migrating he shapeshifts and, believing himself some antiquate deity of thunder, the man gone along the moon seduces women who strike his fancy. Students, prostitutes, married women, or even men who he knows he can transfigure into the dames his depraved thirst craves, my progenitor has mercy on none. But hey, if they get pregnant, they get a neat welfare plan, and they better never dare abort one of the governor’s children.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  That day, along my half-brother that would strive to teach me how to command my soul, we both stared at a passing meander in silence. What he thought I am not privy to, but of one thing I am almost sure: whatever it was, he wanted to eat it.

  Nobody else stood on the terrace, it was only him, I, the water tanks, a couple birds that stared at us funny from their perching position upon the TV and radio antennas, and the distant sounds of the city, several stories below.

  “Has anyone ever lobbed a fireball from here and onto the Friday open market on Lemur street?” I asked about the first thing that came to my mind after I took in the sprawling city below.

  “Saon, buddy, could you explain your thought process, the one that led up to you asking that?”

  “Well, we Retrievers are often used as an aid to conventional shock forces when repression of rebels is needed, and sieging the streets from atop roofs is a common strategy for high ranked Soulgyvers to do things… safely. I know huge fireballs are discouraged due to the property damage incurred, but a protest is a lot of people gathered in a place, just like an open market, and man, there are some motherfuckers working there that deserve to burn. I never saw shittier jeans than the one’s at that sharp nosed man’s stand, the one with round glasses, you know? I bought two pairs once. They were both ripped by the end of the month.”

  “I don’t think he deserves to die just for selling you some bad quality products, Saon.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t want them to die. But their whole wagon of shitty goods being reduced to ashes and them crying by the side? It would be priceless. And fun. Fire is fun.”

  “It’s a pretty neat warmth, that of a fire, but I hate when it sputters all of a sudden, or when a lump of coal cracks.” Aconessi was about to pat my shoulder, but refrained from doing so. “Are you okay with physical contact, Saon?”

  “You can tap my shoulder or place a hand on it if you wish to. It’s kind of you to ask beforehand, though.” I swept the terrace with my gaze. “Subject change, Aconessi. You are G rank, right?”

  “I was half a year ago. I am H now,” he said, and I felt the chasm of power between us grow. There’s practically no difference between a man with seven hundred twenty-eight souls and one with seven hundred twenty-nine. But Ranks mark lower bounds: a given letter means “from value n to value (n times three)”. It’s a log3 scale starting at B, which is the logarithm in base 3 of one snared human soul, a zero. Then Rank C would be returning a number between one and two (three to eight souls), D two and three (Nine to twenty-six). This meant Aconessi was not a man with more than two hundred and forty-three souls as I had thought, but at least seventy twenty-nine. For all I knew, the man could have more than eight hundred stashed there, inside his sacromotor.

  Central was a circular building, and so was its roof. Over the pitch-covered concrete I marched around Aconessi and boy, it was a workout. “You could show me your sacromotor, right? Spread an illusion over the floor, depicting it. I am curious, sir, about how the sacromotor of someone so far removed from us rookies looks like.”

  “Sure, it will be educational at worst.”

  Aconessi snapped his finger and under his feet the image spread, spun and grew until it encompassed the entirety of the roof. Under my feet laid one major illusion module, depicted bigger than me. Like that one, there were nine more surrounding a core that shone brighter than the sun beyond the dome. Ad I walked the pattern the core boiled under my feet, and it wasn’t the boiling of water, but hundreds of souls together, simmering, casting their white pale light under me. I stepped away from the core and started walking the lines, the connections so intricate that it would take careful study to make out what was connected to what. Most modules were illusion ones, and the rest were… obfuscated. Blurry. Everyone knew Aconessi was an illusionist. But few knew what else he was capable of. Therefore, there was no need to hide most of his build, the dozens of major illusion modules, one of them of gargantuan proportions, probably built out of thirty or more human souls, that occupied a space equivalent to the engorged core and made the whole thing look like an arcane computer board with two main processors, to put it somehow.

  “It’s breathtaking, Aconessi. I cannot even fathom what most of your sacromotor is supposed to do.”

  “It likes to lie, Saon. And you will like to too, when I am done with you.”

  “I am an honest woman, Aconessi. How dare you?” I shot, as seriously as I could. We both laughed a bit and then he finally put on the teacher mask, being silent. “Well, then, we are here for a reason, Saon.” Another snap, and the sacromotor disappeared from below us. “Stir the souls inside yours, and fail at magic so you may learn how to recognize the trappings of your own sacromotor.”

  I reached inside, and told the triplets their mother laid square eggs, which I figured would be an adequate bird-coded insult. They took no exception to it. then I simply lashed with my own soul against them, and they started giving off their precious energy. That’s the thing about sacromotors: they come with built-in spiritual torture. I channeled it to my illusion modules , and held my fingers like I had done the night prior.

  “Give me a cigar. Come on.” I said as the energy pumped through the thin, almost unused channels. Slowly, like a mist manifesting out of the air and slowly getting colored, the image of a cigar formed between my fingers, and then the feeling of paper against my skin. Finally, after remembering the smell of the smoke and picturing it in my mind’s eye, I could smell it coming off a newborn, fake cinder. “Really? I get it right when I need to get it wrong. I fail at doing it when I want to do it, and I fail at failing when I want to do it wrong!” I claimed, as if stoked. “I am the greatest unwilling joker alive.”

  “Try again. This may be a fluke, even if it works as you intended. A fun irony of life.”

  I calmed down my inner crows. Breathed in, breathed out, let the illusion disperse. Opened my hand, pictured something a bit more fancy upon it. A book. With a neat cover, all of the fancy letters and sentences and shit as I imagined myself passing the pages. I repeated the process, spurred my crows again, willed the object into my hand once more, and it began appearing, colors right, texture… deficient, but almost there.

  “Oh, a book, and it has you in the cover. That is a pretty surefire way to cause a misfire.” He then drew closer to read the title and possibly admired my sequin-demon state, a display of unparalleled fashion. “Menagerierover?”

  “I write novels in my free time. About me. Being slightly less awesome, because otherwise it’d be bad character building, you know? I need to tone down the me-ness for people to identify with the main character.”

  “I am not entertaining that.” Aconessi stated, hurting my feelings like a laser hurts a pine’s eyesight. “Once it is fully manifested, try to read it. Focus on what it says and what it should say. Notice the oddness of the words, how sentences change when you read a paragraph a second time.”

  I opened the book, and began reading the acknowledgements out loud. “I want to thank Saon Ladius for being such a great dude and, most important, myself.”

  Pursed my lips, stared at Aconessi and shook my head. “Read something you don’t know from heart.”

  “Is a single sentence okay?” I asked shuffling the pages to see if I could find the goddamn fragment I was looking for.

  “I don’t think so; you need to read something that’s—”

  “It’s five thousand words long.”

  “Ha, amazing! Go for it.”

  And whilst I read the long list of petty crimes the protagonist of my novel that wasn’t me intended to commit for the, and I quote, sake of bettering humanity, it happened.

  My sacromotor misfired. A giraffe looked at me straight in the eyes while pointing at me with a cat it held like a gun.

  “It worked like a charm.” I said, and it seemed to me like I was doing so with my belly button.