Page 34 of Redhaven
‘Well done, bru. That’s the right call.’
‘Luka, you’re doing this of your own free will?’ Okoye asks, as Barr steers him back to the table and lightly presses him down opposite the Moot President. ‘This is a grave decision. No one’s suggested it to you or is forcing you?’
Okoye glances at Obermann, the attorney, who looks affronted. He doesn’t see Barr’s gaze again seeking out Sandra’s. The silence of seven people in one room, all not speaking, is stifling. Do I say anything? Challenge Barr – challenge Sandra – as to what that glance between them meant? Luka looks almost desperate.
Then the moment passes.
‘Very well,’ Okoye says. ‘Luka, I need you to confirm that you consent to this, and understand that it is irreversible, then we’ll begin.’
Luka’s voice, which I’ve heard so clear and confident in seminars and debates, in his mom’s campaign room, orbriefing the press with casual arrogance, is barely a whisper as he gives consent.
Okoye takes one of his hands. Barr the other. Luka is shaking in their grip as Okoye begins a low, rhythmic, ominous chant that sounds like storm clouds feel.
I will not feel pity. This boy tried to kill me. He did it because he wanted more magic. If this poisonous power gives him such urges, he’s better off without it. These men are going to draw it from his veins. Nothing like a lethal injection – exactly the reverse. A purging. A cleansing.
Yet it’s hard to watch as Luka’s body vibrates and the cords stand out in his neck, his skin and face flushed with blood. Theodorou has remained standing, and he stares over everyone’s heads as if he has nothing to do with what’s taking place. After a few moments, Obermann pulls a notepad from her purse and begins to jot what I suspect is nonsense. A distraction. Sandra has a hand over her mouth and stares at her son as though she doesn’t see him.
He must be in pain. Great, invisible pressures appear to be at war in Luka’s body. Accused witches who wouldn’t confess used to be pressed to death. Crushed beneath boards heaped with bricks. Luka’s eyes bulge as theirs surely did. Yet he is taut and straining, too. A body launched from an airlock without a spacesuit, about to be torn apart by impersonal cosmic forces. It’s hard to look at.
Luka’s form blurs, and I can’t tell if it’s some bizarre effect of the magic, or my eyes welling. The chair beneath him vibrates. Surely it’s been five minutes? The condemned die faster than this. An execution is judged cruel and unusual if it takes so long.
Sandra looks away to stare fixedly at a point upon the wall.
A gasp that’s half inhale, half sobbing exhale, breaks from Luka and his body sags like that of a hanged man finally cutdown and caught. His breathing is shallow as his head hangs low.
Barr lifts a hand that’s curled in a grip around nothing. Okoye begins to move his around it. As if he’swinding. Like they’re spooling wool on a distaff. Easing out a tapeworm by wrapping it round a stick. Winching out the guts from a disembowelled felon at a Tudor execution.
Bile surges into my throat and I turn sideways in my chair and vomit. Nobody even notices.I wanted this, I tell myself. And,He deserved it.But it’s like watching someone be lobotomised in real time. Seeing a star athlete hit by a car. It’s disgusting.
Even Abigail Whitman was going to hang Harper and Sarah with their magic intact.
I wipe my mouth. Shift my chair a foot from where it was. Look at Luka, who is staring dully into space.
Okoye and Barr finish their winding. Barr makes a snapping motion as Okoye passes his hands below, as if to sweep away invisible dust or ashes.
A single tear slides down Luka’s cheek.
37
MAGGIE
I lose them on the I-95, but far enough along to know they’re not going to Hartford and HQ. Where they would have turned south, they instead went west. I pull over and make my apologies to Sarah. Tell her where I am and that she should try and get a fix on her daughter using magic. There’s a ragged edge to the witch’s voice as she tells me that won’t be easy until Harper’s stationary.
Until she’s been locked in a cell, is the clarification neither of us add.
While I wait, I scroll through the news to check what Michael Whitman said about criminalising refusal of registration. He wasn’t lying. It’s there on the major network and newspaper home pages. A way down, beneath stories about tariffs and trade wars, and rising tensions in Southeast Asia. It’s below the sports headlines but above reporting on wildfires in Central America, heatwaves in Europe, and a devastating early typhoon in the Philippines. Fills less space than the day’s market report. I shake my head over the priorities not only of our policymakers, but our media.Hello!I mime a wave.Arbitrary detention happening right over here!
‘What’s this about the Moot rubber-stamping arrest for unregistered witches?’ I bark at Naomi when I get her on the phone.
‘Hello to you too, Maggie. Retrieved Luka Ortiz yet?’
Once I’ve outlined the situation, and that Sarah is on the case tracking Harper, Naomi explains what went down at the Moot. Apparently, they were notified late last night of the law change in a ‘just letting you know’ call from someone in the implementation department of the office.
‘Okoye sent a circular round our senior team that there wouldn’t be a snap response,’ she says. ‘And a statement would be put out once we’d had an opportunity to discuss it. Guess what, no time in the diary for that, yet. In fact, no one can get hold of either him or my boss Simeon. So some of us have a meeting of our own, planned for this afternoon.’
‘Going rogue, eh?’ But Naomi doesn’t laugh.
Which is when my phone buzzes with a call from Sarah Fenn. I tell Naomi to update me and promise to do the same, then switch to Fenn. Before I can speak, I hear her hyperventilating. Breath rasping in my ear like faulty car air-con.
