Legacy to Zero

19: Restricted Access and Complicated Emotions

Lars

With a small grunt of effort, I set the box against Dr. Harth's desk. I'd only been at this for an hour, and I was already sweating. It's a good workout, at least!

Grabbing her box cutter, I removed the layers of endless tape. Beneath it were three new artifacts that needed to be categorized and placed in storage. Carefully, I removed them from their fitted cases—a shield about the size of my arm and thick as a coin, an umbrella that looked like it had come from a gift shop, and a painting of daisies in a frame.

"Oh, good," Dr. Harth said as she appeared from around the shelves. It had struck me before how easy it was to hide in the many alcoves and empty spaces, but now that I was face-to-face with it, the thought of Harlow using it to slip away from a squadron almost made sense. Maybe not in the sense that it was impressive, but that it wouldn't have occurred to me otherwise. "The new artifacts came! I've been waiting for these for ages."

"Where are they from?"

"These are from the outer-cities. A Prismatrix squadron found them and turned them over to me once they realized what they were." She pointed to the shield. "They said this one changes shape. Not sure what the others do yet."

Like the past hour, I'd come to understand that once she started telling me about a particular artifact's history, all I could do was listen. Which wasn't a bad thing—despite watching Harlow work many times, I had to admit that I didn't know how the archival process worked. But it was interesting to me, especially when it involved bound magic.

I told her as much, and she chuckled slightly. "That is the perspective of most outer-city sorcerers. You know, we just got a copy of a newspaper article that came out when magic first breached the Dome? I've got it in the other room, if that strikes your fancy."

"Oh, totally! I don't think I've ever read it," I said brightly.

"Excellent." She dipped her head back into the adjoining room where I'd first found her, and where we'd agreed to keep the archive file Skyla had given me for the time being. It was a strange sort of mutual agreement—all that she'd said was that she'd been expecting it to show up, and besides that had kept utterly silent about it. Realistically, I doubted the file would return to wherever it belonged, now that it was marked up. But I was still intrigued to know its fate and had been waiting for the right time to bring it up again.

When Dr. Harth returned, she placed the newspaper clipping atop her desk. "It's quite the story when you read it from your perspective. For us, we always knew you existed, but we were invisible. It's a bit like discovering you have neighbours you've never seen once in your life."

"That's pretty much exactly what happened." I smiled. Just the title alone was enough to express the sentiment: Magic is Real!

The writer—Vanna Prichard—had detailed the breaking news in only a few succinct paragraphs. Many envision they would be somewhere meaningful when the world gets shaken up. For those stuck in clogged traffic on the way to work when it happened, just shy of eleven in the morning, that was not the case.

A city cracked from the ground with almost no fanfare. Nothing about it strikes as unearthly—and yet, foreign all the same. One second, the city was not there, and then it was. Citizens broke free from their vehicles moments later, much faster than those on foot, who bore witness to a new frontier never before seen.