‘Amy.’

  Amy looked up from her notebook to see Mrs Tomlinson holding out her essay.

  ‘This is excellent.’

  She took the essay and tried to read the mark she had been given but couldn’t make any sense of the marks that were supposed to make up her grade.

  ‘You really are very competent. You’re an outstanding young woman. Any organisation would be lucky to have you.’

  Was she at a job interview? No, she was at school of course. The comments were confusing but that didn’t diminish the warm feeling swelling up from the recognition of her excellence. Mrs Tonlinson more commonly told Amy to stop shouting at her and do her work, so this was a little confusing but felt right. And her pillow was very comfortable. Oh, she was in bed. She didn’t even know this classroom had beds. So comfortable. Oh, this is probably a dream. No! Consciousness snuck up from behind and started to reassert itself as the main source of sensory input. Amy fought it. She didn’t want to lose this good feeling.

  ‘Mrs Tomlison! Tell me more about my essay!’

  Too late. The classroom receded. She tentatively opened one of her eyes. She was in the recovery room where they had found Gregor, lying in one of the (very comfortable it turns out) beds. Gregor was still there, eating breakfast apparently, still with his drip in. Some of the previously empty beds were now occupied by Braddon, Thomas, and Janik. She felt sleep inviting her back and closed her eye.

  ‘Again.’ thought Amy, as she reflected on how both the ministry and the monks were very trigger happy with their knockout spells.

  To Amy this seemed typical of the way people used magic. They never seemed to use it to solve real problems. The climate was still warming. Women were still underpaid. Magic seemed to be primarily used to create small conveniences for the already wealthy. Better coffee, faster clothes drying, knocking out people they didn’t like.

  ‘It makes people lazy, it’s the worst, people who use it are always awful.’

  ‘Look, she even complains about magic in her sleep.’

  It was Baron. She must have said the last part our loud. She snapped back to full consciousness and reopened her eye.

  ‘I’m not asleep, dickhead.’

  She opened her other eye. This was very unusual. For Amy, waking up was usually a traumatic battle with each eye, one at a time. She would open one first, and it would feel awful. Her eye would complain, and she would force herself to keep it open while she tried to bludgeon herself with abuse until the other one opened.

  ‘Come on Amy, you lazy prick, open your eyes!’

  This would continue until she had bullied every part of her body out of bed. It put her in a foul mood which she would usually attempt to pass on to Baron and Thomas, who would ignore her until she regained her equilibrium. But now her eyes weren't putting up a fight at all. In fact she had never felt more rested.

  ‘How do you feel?’ asked Gregor.

  ‘Terrible,’ she lied. She had not felt this good in about a year.

  ‘Really?’ asked Thomas, ‘That was the best sleep I’ve had in years.’

  ‘It’s not sleeping Thomas, you were knocked out! That’s not “sleep”’ said Amy.

  Thomas was eating a croissant and sipping a glass of orange juice. Somewhere there was the smell of coffee. It smelled incredible. She looked down and saw that there was also a croissant and juice next to her bed. And the coffee. The amazing coffee smell was coming from her coffee. She stretched and had a strong urge to make a contented ‘hmm’ sound. Dear lord, she hated how good she felt. She noticed she was attached to a drip. That’s the reason why, she thought. That bloody magic drip. She pulled it out of her arm but it was too late. She felt great.

  ‘Amy, you always told us magic coffee was terrible.’ said Baron accusingly.

  ‘It is terrible. It puts baristas out of work’

  ‘Yes, but Amy,’ said Baron sipping from his coffee, ‘This is the best coffee I’ve ever had, I can’t believe we’ve been drinking that swill from the french bakery!’

  ‘That swill from the bakery keeps people in work!’ Retorted Amy. She took a sip from her own coffee nonetheless. It was irritatingly magnificent. ‘Disgusting.’

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  ‘Maybe being stuck here wouldn’t be ’ said Baron as he bit into his perfect croissant, which melted in his mouth in a way no human baked croissant ever had.

  Gregor laughed. ‘It’s not terrible here, I admit. But make no mistake, you are a prisoner here. Is that worth a good coffee?'

  No one answered. Because they were all thinking maybe it was, but weren't proud of themselves for thinking it.

  ‘I’ll admit staying here and eating perfect croissants does feel like a better option than going back to the mainland to be murdered by civil servants,’ said Baron. ‘But we aren’t magic. You know they would just make us wash the dishes or something.’

  ‘I’m magic,’ said Janik.

  ‘Not magic enough Janik,’ said Baron, ‘You would be like their butler or something.’

  ‘Those are exactly the kind of bullshit jobs they probably use magic for,‘ said Amy, ‘We would be doing something even worse, like washing the goat shit out of Gregor’s tank. Just to keep us in our place.’

  ‘Gregor, why do you even want out of here? How did you even end up here?’ asked Thomas.

  Gregor started playing with his beads, rolling them in his big hairy fingers. Amy realised this was a tick of his when he was thinking.

  ‘I’m not typical of the monks here. I wasn’t taken as a baby. No one detected any magic in me at all. I wasn’t even sensitive to it like you are Amy. But I know now that that happens sometimes with high power magic users. Our abilities don’t show themselves in the usual way. Usually the abbots can sense when a newborn has magic potential and will swoop fast. They take the baby and leave a phantom, it’s like a doll that is identical to a real baby, but was never alive. The parents think their child died in its crib.’

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said Amy, ‘That is the worst thing I have ever heard.’

  Baron put his coffee down, ‘Oh.’ Suddenly it didn’t taste very good.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Gregor.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Janik.

  ‘How do you even respond to that?‘ said Thomas.

  ‘I know,’ said Gregor. ‘But they don’t see it. Most of them came here as babies themselves. They don’t have malice towards mundane people, but they barely think of them as people at all. And they don’t see it. They don’t understand how detached from normal empathy they are.’

  ‘Is that why you want to leave?’ asked Baron.

  ‘I didn't come here as a baby. Some people's abilities aren't obvious when they are born. Mine manifested when I was 15. I didn’t even know I could create spark because I wasn't able to when I was a child, I wasn't even sensitive, so I was never trained. But then … well it just happened.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Janik?

  'A story for another time,' responded Gregor.

  ‘Bloody hell, you have really ruined this coffee for me Gregor.’ said Thomas.

  ‘The Monks learnt of it, they came for me. Once they were there they could sense me, what I could do. And you need to understand, my life then, my family, it wasn’t good. I was hopeless then, I was lost ... I was grateful to be taken.’

  ‘You got full Harry Pottered,’ said Amy. ‘They found you under the stairs and took you away.’

  ‘And now?’ asked Thomas.

  ‘I’ve been here 15 years, half my life. They aren’t bad people Thomas, but I’m not like them. I’m not indifferent to people on the outside. I've started to use my abilities to help people, like you all when I realised the ministry was going to snatch you.’

  ‘How did you know?’ asked Baron.

  ‘I read about the theft, and I knew it would catch the ministry's attention. Any hint of magic that isn’t constrained by normal limits gets their attention. And you had talked about magic being observable, in front of the cameras. That’s a red flag for them. I came out immediately, I tried to warn you, but well, you know what happened.’

  ‘What a mess,’ said Amy.

  ‘The abbots aren’t wrong, the ministry will kill you if you go back to Sydney. And if you go somewhere else then whoever is the equivalent of the ministry there will do it. The monks detaining you is an act of kindness, in their way. They are offering you asylum, by their standards at least.’

  Amy looked around the room, it’s beds filled with her only friends. And Janik, who she didn’t really hate. She looked at Gregor, too big for his bed, too big for any space.

  ‘But they aren’t offering us asylum, Gregor. It’s not an offer, it’s a demand’.

  Amy looked at Baron and Thomas. ‘We can't stay here guys.’

  Thomas sighed. ‘I know, I know. We can't just stop living and stay here. No coffee is that good. But what can we do? Can we never go home?’

  ‘We need to blow the lid of this. We need to expose the monastery the ministry to the light of day,’ said Amy.

  ‘If you expose the monastery they are as good as dead Amy,’ said Gregor.

  ‘Not if we expose the ministry too. And Gregor, if we expose the monks, we expose that they aren't even that powerful. Well you are, but not in the way that's getting them all killed. Then there is no reason for them to kidnap babies, which, by the way, is the worst thing I have ever heard. They have boxed themselves into a corner, whether they like it or not, it's time for all this murky shit to get out.’

  ‘How?’ said Gregor.

  Amy hesitated. Even Gregor was looking to her now. But she wasn’t the same person she had been when this mess kicked off. She couldn’t even run a security company, easily the lowest effort graft there was. She felt smaller, less capable, her confidence dented and diminished by how easily they had been thrown around by the ministry and the monks. By how little effect she had on the world. And this felt enormous, impossible. She needed time to rebuild. And did she really need to personally solve every single problem? It was time to let go a little.

  ‘Janik?’ said Amy, ‘How do we bring all this stuff out of the gutter into the unforgiving sun?’

  Janik didn’t hesitate at all. ‘You’re right. We need to expose this whole rotten thing, from the boot to the tip.’

  Amy loved it, more than anything, when people told her she was right. This was already going great.

  ‘But we don't need to solve that now,’ continued Janik. 'Right now we just need to get out of here, and get somewhere to hide. Everything else can happen afterwards.’ He looked over to the monk. ‘Gregor?’

  Amy gave Janik an invisible mental salute for how effortlessly he had taken the responsibility she had thrown to him and deflected it onto someone else. But against her expectations, Gregor made no attempt to deflect at all.

  ‘Actually, I’ve been thinking about this while you were all sleeping. I have a plan.’