The Unskillful Thaumaturge

XXXIX

Lillian sighed, her cheek pressing into the scratchy floor, and resigned herself to her inability to further aid the DIAO investigation. It seemed to have reached the point where she doubted the mystery could be solved without the help of Ashley or Beanie. How much they knew wasn't the issue, though; it was how much they were willing to tell.

Beanie had already told her that he would entrust "a great deal of information" to her, but she wasn't sure what exactly that meant. Obviously he knew at least something, but was his knowledge alone enough to solve the mystery? And would Lillian ever be able to convince him that she wouldn't tell the DIAO? She felt almost as if he would know she was lying, no matter how convincing she sounded. And beyond that, there was the trouble of finding him in the first place. And even after just two weeks in contact with the DIAO, she knew she wouldn't be able to conceal the truth from Galena.

She was lying on the floor near the closet door, her side pressed into the ground and her hair falling over her face. She moved as if to get up, but her ankle twisted and a twinge of pain shot up her leg. Wincing, she pressed her palms into the ground and brought herself to her knees, using her good ankle to rise off of the floor. She walked out of the closet and into the corner of the dorm room where her desk was, clearing papers off the surface with wide sweeps of her arm and finally flopping down into the chair.

Finding Beanie would prove difficult, if not impossible, but Lillian's hunger for answers was stronger than her fear of him. He could be the most powerful thaumaturge in the world, and he was clearly dangerous- he had been present at the explosion on the night of the Thaumatogenesis, he had clearly interfered with the burial of the dead vagrant, and he had broken into a government building to steal nothing more consequential than a key.

But beyond Beanie, Lillian had a more interesting question: What were the chances of Ashley's daughter being hired to the DIAO? Galena had admitted that although she had been mildly interested in getting a job at the DIAO, Ashley had pushed her to get her resume in and to apply for a job. Galena had already said that she thought the illusionist wanted to be noticed. Was any of this real?

Lillian reminded herself- of course it was real. They had seen Beanie on video before the Thaumatogenesis, and the vagrant as well. But beyond that, Ashley and Beanie may have been trying to get the DIAO to investigate them. Maybe other people were involved as well. She couldn't shake the hypothesis that there was a conspiracy behind the scenes of everything she and the DIAO had witnessed so far. She wasn't sure how much Ashley or Beanie actually knew about the Thaumatogenesis, or if there was anyone else they could question to find out more.

Conversely, none of this explained what was, at least for Lillian, the most confusing parts of the investigation. First, the fact that Beanie had managed to knock Galena unconscious with no traceable thaumaturgy. Second, the fingerprints from the vagrant on the key. And most disturbingly, the undeniably mysterious resemblance between the dead kid, arrested in 1978, and the man from the Thaumatogenesis.

❦

And yet after everything he's been through, all he can think about is the chair.

To be fair, it seems strikingly out of place, as if it should stand alone in the center of the room, not absurdly surrounded by eight smaller chairs, after all, it is not just the middle chair, but superior to them all, the opposite of everything he thinks a tiebreaker should be. And as she reclines in the chair, her eyes somehow boring into everyone in the room at once, as even in his shackles he stands ramrod straight, he imagines her followers, the purple-robed, pouring through those eyes: through the blue one, clear as a morning sky, and out of the other, the gray of an ominous storm cloud looming over the horizon; how those followers had brought clouds to his sky.