Magisterium by Jeff Hirsch

thing I felt be those claws?
    Glenn marshaled her fear and knelt down beside him. Being so close brought the sheer impossibility of him into bold relief. She searched along the fur that covered his head and the surprisingly delicate lines of his mouth, examining, cataloging like a good scientist.
    But she couldn’t find the root of the familiarity she felt. He was completely alien to her. She tried to draw together a plausible theory.
    Radiation was tempting, but the mutations it produced made creatures deformed and sickly. There was no way a random genetic defect could produce something so extreme. Genetic engineering? As far along as Colloquium science was, even they hadn’t achieved anything close to this level of bioengineering. And if the Magisterium was capable of such a thing, why did their people still live in walled towns and use bows and arrows for weapons? None of it made sense.
    Aamon shifted again. Glenn jerked away, but he didn’t wake. He simply turned over, exposing the thick fur at his throat.
    That’s when Glenn saw it.
    It was as if the entire room tilted on some invisible axis and a wild, sick feeling welled up inside her. Was this what her father felt like that night in his workshop when he explained the Rift and her mother’s disappearance to her? Was this what it was like to go suddenly and irretrievably mad?
    Glenn forced herself to look again and sure enough, at the base of Aamon’s throat, his gray fur stopped and formed the border around a circular patch of perfect, snowy white.
    Feeling as if she was in a dream, Glenn reached out, anticipating the patch’s downy softness. The sound of her six-year-old voice rang in her ears, the sound of a princess knighting her bravest soldier.
    Gerard Manley —
    Aamon’s eyes snapped opened. Glenn snatched her hand back
    with a gasp, but Aamon made no move toward her. She sat back, wary, and for a second their eyes were locked. Aamon’s head was tilted to the side and in the glow of the fire the warm green of his eyes bloomed.
    “You know who I am,” he said.
    “No, I don’t. I …”
    Aamon drew himself up so he sat across from her, his clawed hands poised on his knees.
    “When you were eight years old,” he said, “we sat on your bed and you whispered to me the chronicles of the great explorer Glenn Morgan and her faithful cat, Hopkins. Together they explored the red canyons of Mars. Did you ever tell anyone else that story?”
    Suddenly the fire felt hot on Glenn’s face. Aamon was right. She had never told that story to anyone else. She looked again at the patch of white and then up to the arrow-shaped nick in his right ear.
    “But that’s not …” She was about to say “possible” but the word fell flat in her mouth. Glenn muscled impossibility aside for a moment and forced herself to look at it all like the scientist she was, as if the events of the last two days were the scattered bones of a long-extinct animal. She couldn’t deny them. She could only try to assemble them into something recognizable.
    “The thermals in Kevin’s clothes stopped working as soon as we passed the border lights,” Glenn said slowly. “And the agents’ guns didn’t work either.”
    “None of your technology works on our side of the border, just as Affinity doesn’t work on your side.”
    “Affinity?”
    “What you’d call magic.”
    “I don’t believe in magic.”
    The smallest glimmer of a smile creased Aamon’s lips. “And yet, here I am.”
    Glenn churned through theory after theory, trying to construct a rational framework to hang all of this on, but no matter where she went she arrived at the same place — the unthinkable, undeniable reality of Aamon Marta and the words of her father.
    Reality is a set of rules … a game of cards …
    Glenn ran her fingers over the gray metal on her wrist. Was it possible that he wasn’t mad? That the years her father had spent lying half buried beneath The Project had actually come to something?