Wattys shortlist 2021. One morning the sun rises a few hours early, striking levitating skyscrapers in Soliara ahead of schedule. People in the streets stop to look up at the sky and then down at their watches. Most of them, puzzled but disbelieving...
The lights flashed and fires flickered as he stalked the dance floor, making him feel silly, as if he were prowling to the beat of the music. It wasn't his style, but he had a man to find.
It was the boss's advice, and he had left the boss in his office in capable hands — those of a pair of body guards who actually had magic at their fingertips, and firearms in their holsters.
Feeling guilty and as if he had gone rogue, Leander hunted, as the boss had suggested, for someone he could talk into doing something about the 'solar phenomenon.' Unfortunately Stephen Potestas was busy entertaining one of the electors right now. Leander didn't interrupt.
Instead, he hunted for the other man with a recommendation from the boss. Only he hadn't seen Justin Marius in twenty years, in a manner of thinking, and Leander didn't know what he looked like now.
In the memories Cristo had shown him, Justin Marius was a hulking military man, as tall as Leander but more looking like a cop oughta look with his mountainous shoulders and muscular upper arms like boulders, on the small size but still rocks. Cropped light hair. Sharp shaved chin and cheeks. Intelligent hazel eyes. The memory began with the inception of immortality, eternal youth, so he wouldn't look any older, but that didn't mean Leander would find him shaved and buzzed. And indeed, he didn't.
A man standing at an otherwise unoccupied two person bar height table with two empty chairs caught Leander's attention. He was ignoring the chairs, standing. At attention, almost. He faced away from the table but didn't slump or lean on it. His hair waved to his chin now, and stubble pricked his sharp jaw and cheeks.
He was lean, now. Even if he was closer to Leander's build, everything in his appearance that Leander related to was gone in the place of a bespoke-suited, shiny haired politician.
Leander marched to him and asked, "Exequi Marius?"
Hazel eyes blinked at him. They were calm like smooth waves. "Do I know you?" Marius said.
"No, sir, but I wanted to talk to you. About the sun. The 'solar irregularity,' as they call it. Everyone has been ignoring it, and you aren't doing anything about it. You do nothing. Aren't you about to become president of the company responsible for the consequences of magic? What are you going to do about it?" He did shout to be heard over the music, just as the boss had asked him to. Loud.
Heads turned, not that they could really hear him over the beats, but his body language was confrontational. A smile flickered on one side of Justin Marius's mouth, a funny reaction to such hostilities. He put an arm around Leander as if he were a beloved constituent and said, shouting too, "I'm happy to address all of your worries. Let's take a link to somewhere we can talk. Somewhere it's a little quieter."
Leander considered. Ilan Potestas wanted Leander to make a scene, to confront this man in front of the heads that were turning, and keep him busy while making him look like a jerk. "Thank you, that's agreeable," Leander said. He didn't care what the boss wanted, he actually wanted to get to the bottom of this possible end of all times business.
Marius extended his other bespoke suited arm toward an open link at the edge of the bar lounge between two fireplaces. Leander led the way through it, noticing flowerbeds and garden paths on the other side of the portal, and as he stepped out into the moonlight, he enjoyed for a moment the warmth of the solarium despite the snow piled outside the glass. The penthouse dangled hundreds of feet overhead and he couldn't help but imagine it falling on them.
He kept walking until he found a bench to sit on, but they didn't sit. Both men were accustomed to standing.
Marius had honest eyes, and in them Leander found the respect he had had for the man in his memories. They were the eyes of a man who fought for his . . . for something. His voice was honest, too. "I have to be honest, you're not going to like my answer. I'm sorry, and all I can say is that it's the only answer I've got. I'll ask in advance, completely at your mercy, that you don't follow me back into the party and demand a better one, yelling about solar irregularities. I don't know the first thing about what's happening. The truth is, Constellation doesn't know. I can't do anything about the sun rising and setting early because I don't now what's causing it, or why it's happening, or how it's even possible. I don't know what magic spell will make it stop. Right now I'm a little bit more concerned about what the world will look like if the sun does rise in the morning, which is out of my control. I have a campaign to run. So tell me what you want me to do about it. Who even are you?"
That was a good question, and maybe where this whole thing should have started. The man himself, Justin Marius, took Leander aside to respond to his confrontation with a personal touch, one human being to another, without knowing who he even was.
Weird, as if words here had a strange power, and the most powerful man in the world would listen to a nobody who just said the right ones.
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