Epilogue

A YEAR AND A HALF LATER

" A nd here, my queen, is the heart of our operation: the generator." The director of the energy committee—as well as the lead engineer—is a portly middle-aged mortal male named Jim. He has graying brown hair in a remarkably bad comb-over and wears a suit as if he was born in one, sleeps in one, and intends to die in one. "You see the mechanical structure on the left, there, which is largely original to the facility from before the Fracturing. We simplified many of the internal mechanisms to make repair and maintenance easier, mostly by removing what was no longer necessary. The magical mechanism is on your right, powered by glamours provided on a volunteer basis, as you're aware."

I scan the setup. It truly is ingenious. The original turbines, formerly powered in this case by coal, churn deafeningly, even on this side of the thick, sound-deadening glass. They're enormous, each the size of a three or four-story apartment building. Tubes and pipes and conduits run to and from it, varying in sizes. Where the power used to come from burning coal, however, the mechanisms have been entirely re-designed and re-built, making the bulk of the facility unnecessary. There's a small room, insulated, sound-proofed, and stocked with a variety of supplies. A volunteer—any immortal capable of producing even a small glamour—will spend an eight-hour shift maintaining the glamour that provides power to the turbines. The glamour is a simple one. An electrical storm, more or less—an indoor lightning storm created by Aeon. The lightning strikes a metal ball, and the energy is transmitted by a combination of magical and mechanical means to the turbines—the exact science of it is a bit above my understanding, but I'm told it functions along normal physics guidelines, albeit given a magical assist.

The net result is clean, endless energy. Not free—it costs round-the-clock manpower to maintain the glamour Aeon created, but that's the beauty of it. The manpower is done on a volunteer, rotational basis. For every shift you work maintaining the glamour, you are given a thousand credits, which is not currency, exactly. There is still money in the enclave, gold-backed, but it sees little use. Most people prefer to trade. The credits from a shift at the plant give the bearer purchasing power at the markets, and each vendor marks their goods or services with a credit cost.

The same system is applied to the waste transfer plants, where magic is again used to facilitate the processing of liquid and solid wastes, magic taking the place of electricity, all else functioning the same. Plumbing, as well.

Trash removal is wildly different now. It turns out that the Weavers, as we have begun calling the creatures who reside in The Dreaming, have a penchant for our trash since to them it is positively dripping with residual mana. The garbage removal carts are simple two-wheeled light metal handcarts drawn by individuals paid with market credits. Instead of collecting the trash on the street and hauling it away to a dump or whatever, the cart interior is a mobile portal to The Dreaming, into which the trash is tossed. The Weavers eat it, which serves to keep them sated and less likely to bother travelers using the portals.

You see, Aeon, after some tinkering, figured out how to create stable, always-open portals through The Dreaming—or, more accurately, through the pocket realm, which is somewhat like the very surface of The Dreaming, the meniscus, as Aeon explained it, what feels like so long ago.

These portals can go anywhere, providing free, clean, instant travel. They're guarded and monitored, of course, and all travel is sold and registered; the proceeds—goods, promise of service, or credits—are property of the Manhattan Enclave. There are portals to the other major Enclaves: LA, Atlanta, Chicago, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Houston, New Orleans, San Diego, and Seattle, as well as international destinations like Paris, Berlin, Prague, Hong Kong, Beijing, Sydney…all the largest of the major cities have become Enclaves designed after what we have built here.

The Enclaves are independent city-states. Most national governments collapsed in the wake of the Fracturing—the term given to the revelation of immortals and the subsequent chaos. A few places have retained a central government, but those are mostly the smaller, poorer, and more remote areas where life never really changed all that much to begin with.

The internet failed, and despite work by the best minds in the magical and mortal communities, it hasn't returned. Most agree this is a good thing.

International shipping ceased when global oil and gas supplies dried up, and without those, manufacturing ceased…the trickle-down effect was massive. Electricity, now supplied by magical-mechanical hybrid systems, is used only for lighting, heat, and climate control. The system cannot distribute beyond a certain distance from the source—some kind of innate limitation of the magic. This means outlying communities have to rely on either natural renewable energy and storage solutions—which have become a major focus of magical and scientific research—or they simply do without. In those places, life has returned to a strange amalgam of modern and pre-industrial revolution. Horses, mules, and oxen once again provide transportation and hauling, but often they haul repurposed vehicles. Agriculture is once again the purview of the individual rather than corporations.

Part of the Enclave design is to utilize vertical space in the high-rises for urban agriculture. Skyscrapers, empty now that so many industries have gone extinct, are gutted and turned into gardens tended by a mix of full-time Enclave employees and volunteers. Abandoned buildings and unnecessary structures are demolished and used for agriculture or simply as parks.

Returning, momentarily, to the power plants: the smokestacks and the rest of the facility formerly dedicated to using coal for power have been converted as well, and here is one of the truly world-changing inventions. Instead of sending pollution into the atmosphere, the smokestacks have been converted to pull smog out of the air and clean it. This is another magical-mechanical hybrid system, invented by—or at least by a committee of scientists led by—my grandfather, Elias Sparrow. The system of smog scrubbers is hellishly complex, and we've only managed one working example, but now that we have the system in place, the other Enclaves are clamoring for the design.

It's not all hunky-dory.

Outside the cities, life is much, much harder, if simpler. Food can be scarce without a central government, and road maintenance and such things are long gone. Law enforcement is a local issue, and in the rewilded areas between Enclaves, local communities, and non-Enclave cities, lawlessness abounds. Some immortals have designated themselves vigilantes, dedicated themselves to roving the roadways and stopping robbers and outlaws from preying on mortals.

I often have to arbitrate disputes between the various magical communities, as queen, which requires traveling from Enclave to Enclave, although I return to my home in Manhattan as regularly as possible.

My other home, the estate in England, remains a far-off dream—somewhere I'd like to more or less retire to when things have settled more. There's still too much upheaval and chaos, now, though, and I'm needed too constantly to spend much time there.

To mortals, those who don't live in daily proximity to me in the Enclave, at least, I'm a bit of a curiosity. There's a good bit of hubbub and fanfare wherever I go, which has taken some getting used to. Curious mortals flock to wherever I'll be just to get a look at "A Real Queen." I don't have the heart to tell them I don't have an actual royal bone in my body and that I don't even really believe in royalty anyway, and that I view my position as a kind of public servant. It won't matter because they'll see me how they want to see me. I just do my best to make sure that my words, actions, and policies are as morally aligned as possible. To that end, I surround myself with people—mortal and immortal—who will give me good advice and keep me humble.

My mates certainly don't help in that last regard. They treat me like…well…like you'd expect.

My first child was born on the new year, exactly at midnight. Fireworks celebrated her arrival.

Eliza Andrea Sparrow is the first Tertius, the first child of a Secundus. With a vampire father and a Vaer mother, Eliza is still too young to show much by way of what her powers will be. She has my ears—fae ears. Her father's hair, coal black, glossy, thick. Her eyes flash gray when she's crying—luminous from within, looking precisely like a thin layer of cloud cover in front of the sun. Otherwise, they're pale blue, like chips of a glacier, like mine and Mom's. Her skin is pale as porcelain and in direct sunlight almost seems transparent. She doesn't cry often. Aside from her daddy and me, Aeon is her favorite. She sits on his shoulders and rides everywhere with him, tugging on his hair and calling him "Eenon."

"Go fast, Eenon! Go high, Eenon!" she screeches.

And Aeon, tilting his head back to look up at her with a dry, droll expression, says, "Must I, Littlest Sparrow?"

"EENON GO FAST! EENON GO HIGH!" This is with a resounding sequence of smacks with both hands upon Aeon's head.

"Very well, then. Hold on tight."

And so Eliza clutches his head with her arms so tightly it would choke a mortal being, but Aeon, being who he is, tolerates it without a word. He summons air swirling beneath him and they rocket upward into the blue sky, Eliza's joyful shrieks of laughter receding.

We all gather in the bright open field of Central Park, watch Aeon dart this way and that, blasting himself upward and side to side, letting them fall before catching them again.

Caspian, of course, spoils her rotten. She clings to his shoulders as well, and he takes her on long runs through the Enclave, leaping from roof to roof, balcony to balcony, streetlight to streetlight, while Eliza's laughter rings out and echoes off the glass.

It's such a common thing that Enclave residents are used to it, often pausing to look up as Eliza's laughter catches up to them, a smile on their faces as the daddy-daughter pair blurs past.

There are other marriages and other Tertius children; Eliza was simply the first. We actually have quite a creche, over a dozen children ranging from newborns to toddlers Eliza's age. We, my family, have chosen a former office building near Times Square, which is the official gathering place for announcements, celebrations, meetings, elections, and speeches. We renovated it, gutting it from top to bottom and creating a comfortable, spacious home on the top two floors, the rest dedicated to the administrative endeavors necessary to running the Enclave.

As queen, I endeavor to be little more than a figurehead, and I'm constantly seeking political ways to reduce my power. Initially, I was it—the end of the line, all decisions being my purview. But it was exhausting and stressful and at the end of the day, I'm still just a girl barely out of her teen years. I wasn't raised to be a politician. Aeldfar says I make a good queen precisely because I don't want to be one, and everyone else seems to agree. But, being queen, I get my way.

I researched, discussed, questioned, and polled, and came up with a system.

Each tribe—we have taken to referring to the various kinds of immortals as tribes, in deference to Aeon's historical authority on the subject—chooses by popular vote a pair of representatives. Policies and decisions are made on behalf of the tribal constituents by the representatives, and when the entire panel of representatives gathers to make a decision that affects the entire Enclave, a simple majority wins, with me as a tiebreaker.

The representatives are elected each year—if no challenger arises for either slot, then the process is expedited—each voter chooses to keep the rep for the next year. If no challenger arises but the rep is not kept, a new election must be called. Once the individual Enclaves have chosen their tribal representatives, an Immortal Summit is convened here in Manhattan, wherein the tribes from across the globe discuss, vote on, and decide larger factors affecting immortals as a whole.

Throughout the entire process, mortals are welcome to observe and question, although they do not receive a vote on tribal matters. Mortals do, however, have representatives for Immortal Enclave Summits.

Overall, the system works well. I'm sure over time it will evolve, but for now, it works. People have a voice. Mortals, within the Enclave, at least, accept the immortals.

The funny part of it all is that the Enclaves, designed by, run by, and made possible by magicals—the increasingly more popular term that is rapidly replacing immortals—are the only places where life is truly anything like what it was before the Fracture. Elsewhere, it's a shitshow. Places where mortals—non-magicals—are in charge? No power, no plumbing, no modern amenities. Or, very little. Gasoline is all but gone—the entire infrastructure that produced gasoline has collapsed and does not show any signs of resuscitating. And that's just one facet.

Outside the Enclaves, there's still plenty of anti-magical sentiment and bigotry. There are still "militias" dedicated to hunting down magicals…and it goes as well as you can expect.

I generally don't bother myself with the world beyond the Enclaves—my responsibility is magicals and those mortals who choose to live under my care in the Enclaves for which I am responsible.

I am the ultimate tiebreaker at the Immortal Summit.

I lounge in the grass in Central Park, my head on Caleb's chest while he rubs my belly, marveling at the little shifter-something growing in there. I think about how strange it is, how far I've come from that day in LA in the car with Mom—the last time I saw her alive, the last conversation I had with her.

Andreas leads a band of vigilantes dedicated to preserving law and order in the boroughs around our Enclave. They patrol the streets and provide a sense of safety for the mortals still living there—we're working on expanding the reach of our services, but it's a slow process since it's all new technologies and magical-mechanical manufacturing is still in its infancy. Beyond the borders of Manhattan, life is still tough for the mortals—the non-magicals. We do what we can, and we welcome new mortals in every week, but eventually, we are going to run out of space and the Enclave will have to expand to include the outer boroughs.

It's a work in progress, the kind of thing that will likely never be totally complete. Will our hybrid systems be able to replace the systems and infrastructure as they used to exist? Will other cities become Enclaves? How will the more remote and isolated communities adapt and adjust to this new no-central government reality? Will new borders, countries, and governments crop up?

There are too many unanswered questions, and I'm not the one to answer them.

Not now, at least.

Caleb bolts upright. "Holy shit! She moved! It moved? He moved? The baby moved!"

I laugh, placing my hand on his and guiding his hand over to the side where the baby is currently doing gymnastics—I've felt the movement inside me before now, but this is the first time Caleb has felt it on the outside. The joy and wonder on his face are truly something to behold. I mean, sure, he felt Eliza moving around and reacted similarly, but I guess for daddies it's a little different—more moving and wondrous when it's your child. Not that Eliza is any less loved by him—but she calls Cas "Da-da" and everyone else by their name, or at least, the one-year-old version of it: Eenon, Stirring (the exact flavor of mispronunciation varies widely), Fin is always just "Fin", and "Stair" or "Al-stir", and "Cay-eb."

I think just knowing the child will emerge and one day call you "Daddy" changes things.

Well…it changes everything, to be honest.

Being a mother has changed everything. I've started trying to see the larger picture when making decisions, especially regarding the world she's growing up in.

In fact, that was the catalyst behind nudging Aeldfar to work on a smog-scrubber—wanting to improve the world—not just politically. It turns out that magic makes some things possible that weren't before—seems obvious, perhaps, but the process of learning how to combine magic and non-magical engineering is much, much harder than one would think, requiring a lot of creativity and ingenuity to make the two extremely disparate modalities work in unison to achieve a single goal. Where non-magical engineering was still a long way off from making CO2 conversion facilities a reasonable, achievable reality, magic has made it not just possible, but wildly effective. The biggest hurdle now is the simple fact of how hard it is to manufacture mechanical materials without automation and all that comes with it. Everything must be made by hand, and even in that, we're learning, slowly, how to mix magic in to make things easier and faster.

Non-magicals are adapting to life with magic—some better than others. In our Enclave, for example, there are magic-free zones. Magicals are welcome, but magic is not. No glamours, no use of powers. Shifters are welcome in their animal forms as well as human. The idea, laid out by the non-magical representatives, is to create some pockets where non-magicals can feel like things are the way they used to be—to a degree. Unexpectedly, most magicals embraced the idea wholeheartedly—to them, the Null Zones, as they're called, are places where they can just be . You can sit and have a conversation with someone, and it doesn't matter who or what they are. Something about knowing no one is going to use magic—even for something minor and harmless, or even good—seems to take some kind of pressure off of everyone. Null Zones have become the go-to place to meet people, magical or not.

Masks are a thing of the past.

Schooling in the Enclaves is different now—a hybrid of old and new. Enclaves are divided into districts of no more than a thousand school-age children, and each district is subdivided into one-room schools of no more than fifty students taught by a single teacher. Districts are managed by a single district director, and beneath the director is a regional manager, overseeing clusters of ten to twelve individual schoolrooms, ensuring no schoolroom is overpopulated, and that each room has enough supplies and such. Students are encouraged to self-direct their education, with their academic independence growing as they do, so by the time a student is eighteen he or she will be largely responsible for their curriculum, guided and facilitated by the teacher and regional manager, leaving the teacher free to be more hands-on with the younger students. One of the core subjects each schoolroom is required to teach is a magical history class. The curriculum was designed by Aeon and supported by a panel of elders from each tribe.

Schoolrooms are not divided by magical nor non-magical, but rather, students are assigned a room by location, with no student traveling more than a few blocks. Attached to each schoolroom are a handful of volunteers who watch kids below school age so the parents can work.

What has surprised me most is the spirit of volunteerism that drives the Enclaves. Not everyone volunteers in something, of course, but most do a few times a month—working the glamour rooms, watching children, street cleaning crews…the list of volunteer jobs is nearly endless and ever-changing. By providing market credits, everyone wins, because the vendors who provide the goods or services for credits are benefits of volunteers—they have kids in a school or creche, their homes are powered by fae glamours, their trash collected, their plumbing…permanent positions are paid a wage in hard currency, but those positions are limited to the most important. When we—the governing body, meaning myself, my mates, and the panel of reps—discussed the idea of volunteerism being a basic tenet of how the Enclaves function, most of us were skeptical it would work. But when we held town halls in various sections of the Enclave and took votes and polls on the subject, it became clear that most people supported the premise. And when we rolled out the first programs—glamour-rooms at the power plants, plumbing, and waste plants—it was a resounding success, and non-magicals wanted in; where could they volunteer? Volunteer support groups proliferate—many new couples meet while volunteering.

It's not perfect, of course. Many programs are always short-staffed and overworked, and things break down before volunteers can be brought in to get it going again.

But when you're building something brand new, there's bound to be hiccups, right?

It's not Utopia. There's still crime. People still steal, and people still get in fights. Someone calls someone else a slur. People have been killed. Someone uses magic in a Null Zone and is temporarily banned. People struggle to make it while others succeed. Some have more; some have less. Couples break up. Students fail or don't show up. Teachers end up with too many students and not enough resources.

It's life.

Magical, non-magical, we're all just trying to make it one day at a time in a world that is, somehow, both new and old. We face the same struggles humans have always faced. Bigotry still exists. Hate still happens. Suffering happens. But so does love, and compassion, and generosity.

Call me an optimist if you must, but I think the Enclaves are an improvement over the old ways, in general. Not having a central government anymore is both a boon and a bane and in ways we probably can't see from here, only a year and a half out from the Fracturing. Some call it the Collapse, but Fracture has increasingly become the new favorite, as it more accurately describes what happened—sure, governments collapsed when fear and confusion spread and led to infighting and civil war, but really, it was a fracturing. Political leaders moved to lead Enclaves and city-states rather than counties, states, and countries. After all, city-states were the norm for a very, very long time—in fact, according to Aeon, countries with borders and central governments are a relatively recent invention, and he always assumed it would break down and return to a decentralized system eventually.

God, my mind is everywhere today.

Probably because I don't have any meetings or decisions—it's Sunday. People have begun taking Sundays off from just about everything—another return to old ways.

It's my favorite day of the week. I sleep in late with my mates. Eliza always ends up in bed with us at some point. We have a dog, Bob, a fat basset hound Caleb found wandering the streets and adopted. Bob likes to wake us up by sitting at the foot of our bed and howling his hoarse, funny little howl until someone gets up and feeds him.

Eliza and Bob are best friends. She likes to hand-feed Bob his kibble and usually takes a bite for him and a bite for her. No amount of scolding or saying no can prevent Eliza from sharing Bob's food, so we just go with it.

After breakfast, we take a walk. Caleb and the pack shift to wolf form and spend the morning running and circling and howling while the coven, Eliza, and I stroll to the park. Eliza spends the day playing with friends while we watch and lounge. Someone brings lunch and we have a picnic.

Eliza takes a nap and we adults…play. Or just relax with books.

I haven't felt Mother's Spirit in a very long time. Perhaps I used up all the magic. Perhaps I don't need her as much as I once did. Or maybe, somehow, her spirit simply found a new vessel…her namesake.

Eliza is a magical child. I mean, obviously—she's a magical. But I mean it in a more colloquial sense. She's joyful, cheerful, easy to please, and largely self-soothing. But more than anything, her eyes shine with a gleam that seems to just be… Mom . I can't explain it. Maybe it's me inventing things, seeing things because I want to.

But I don't think so.

Aeon sees it. Caspian sees it. Aeldfar sees it—and he, being Mom's father, knew her perhaps better than I did, and he sees it.

Either way, it's a comfort to me. Knowing that Mom lives on, one way or another. In me, in Eliza, and in the world we're building. She sacrificed herself for me, to give me the power and strength to do what was necessary—what I did.

Not that I did it alone—far, far from it.

Where would I be without Caspian, Alistair, Stirling, Fin, Caleb, and Aeon? I shudder to even consider. I thank the Fates for putting my mates into my life. I doubt I've ever met them and I doubt I ever will, but if I ever do I'll thank them for their manipulation of the threads of my life.

The baby kicks again.

Stirling watches Caleb's eyes light up with wonder, and I see…not jealousy, just…wistfulness. Desire.

And I think I know who's going to give me my next baby.

Stirling must have caught my thought because he smiles at me. Damn right I'm gonna give you a baby.

I can't wait.

He laughs mentally, his lips twitching. I mean, you have to have this one first.

Details , I say. Good thing we have plenty of time, huh?

It took 127 years, but Aeon finally told me he loves me. I knew—he's shown me in a million, million ways. But Aeon has always held things close, has always taken time to process things, to communicate. Thirteen thousand years of habit is hard to break, I suppose. I've never minded. I know he loves me, and I was always content to wait—I have time.

He told me he loved me when I told him I was pregnant again…with his baby, this time. Of all my mates, he was the most hesitant to allow that. Apparently, he has some way of controlling the potency of his swimmers—a minor detail he neglected to tell me. I knew he wasn't ready, and again, I was okay with that. My other mates have given me sixteen children over the last century and a quarter—and almost thirty grandchildren. Since I don't age, or very, very, very slowly, my womb remains fertile. And my love for my mates waxes stronger than ever, so we continue having kids.

Aeon has his ear to my belly. He says he's listening to her heartbeat. Her, he says. The child will be a girl. He has a touch of the sight, you know, he tells me.

I know.

I haven't told him yet, but I've decided to name her Agana. She Who Wanders The Sky.

Four hundred years after the Fracture, my mates and I have decided it's time to retire to the England estate. The Enclaves are strong, and new ones apply for registration and admittance to the Immortal Summit every decade or so. Infrastructure is stable. Remote communities have power, plumbing, and trash removal.

There are no cell phones and no internet. But with the proliferation of portals, it's not needed. Goods can be shipped via portal, allowing international trade.

I'm no longer needed, except for official duties at yearly summits and the occasional tiebreaker vote.

My clan is thousands strong, now.

Eliza is a director of education at an Enclave in Scotland with her mates and children. My other kids are all over the place, but they all come back to Mama frequently.

The world is in good hands, I think.

We stroll through the portal, a private one going from our home in Manhattan to the front door of the estate.

Harry stands waiting, vampirically pale, eyes void, back straight and proud.

"Welcome home, my queen," he says with a bow.

"Thank you, Harry," I say, already looking forward to a splash in that amazing bathroom with my mates. "It's good to be home."

THE END