WAVE FORMS
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
When the Wayward Wave of Magic swept over the world and left everybody changed, I was too messed up for a while to pay much attention to what the rest of the world was doing.
Everybody got some nugget of magic, some quirk, some shift in who they were and what they could do. Some people got cool changes, like being able to see long distances, or levitate, or breathe underwater. Some people got devastating changes, like growing extra limbs or tails or an extra head, having their bones turn to jelly or ice, or being blind to everything but ultraviolet light.
Me, I woke up in a different body every morning. I hadn’t figured out whether I was inadvertently borrowing the bodies of people who existed, leaving them to be me for a day, or whether I was just becoming someone brand new every morning. The new selves were various, ranging along the spectrum from wildly weird to normal and back the other way weird.
I usually figured out how to make each body work by the time I was too tired to stay awake any longer, but then, poof! I was someone else when I woke up. I went from being Kim Robinson, psychology major at the University of Oregon, to Kim whom no one recognized anymore, including me.
So I kinda missed World War III, where power structures broke down around the world and then rebuilt themselves. Only they kind of built back up the way they used to be. Rich people could hire all the best witches and wizards to control everybody else. An occasional powerful witch or wizard figured out how to rise to the top, steal all the money and power from the less powerful, and carve out their own fiefdoms. It was a mess.
Most everyone lived in chopped-up bits of previous countries, because you never knew how many or what sort of magic users the next settlement over had on staff. Some of those people could create pandemics, some could turn people into animals, and some could just cast a spell that made everybody’s mouth lock shut so they all starved to death, except maybe people in the hospital who could figure out IVs. Some curses were permanent and some temporary, but basically there were a lot of people you didn’t like when they were angry, so best to lie low and not upset them. Unless you had great power yourself, and didn’t accept the responsibility. The first three months after the Wayward Wave, a lot of people died. Supply chains broke down. Cities burned, deserts spread, forests died. And in other places, new mountain chains rose up, forests grew stronger and scarier and able to defend themselves, and new islands appeared.
The northern half of Oregon got swallowed up by a committee of magic users who combined Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington, into a supercity that controlled shipping for the region and put a chokehold on trade for surrounding territories.
Down the valley from there, three wizards who could freeze you in place and do whatever they liked with you started bossing everyone around. Combined, they could freeze a lot of people at once, which made it hard to mount a workable defense against them. They just started telling us what to do, and most of us did it.
Most of the magic users with lesser powers hid their abilities, because the boss wizards, the Triumvirate of Talia, Frank, and Carolina, would force you to do work based on your quirks. One of the first things they did after they established a medium of exchange was take a census of everybody living in their territory. They doled out jobs for everyone, and if anyone protested, the protestors spent some time as statues people could throw rocks and tomatoes and yogurt at. If you were frozen overnight, someone might come by and pee on you, and if you had any personal enemies, they could do worse.
Still, the boss wizards wanted a functional community, so they tried to get everybody doing something they could stand that supported life as we used to know it. Construction, farming, road maintenance, textiles, entertainment, trucking, education, flea markets, places of worship, picking up the garbage—lots of things to do that sustained a lifestyle of comfort for most. Like most of the independent territories, the Triumvirate had a couple of financial wizards—a fairly rare quirk—to create currency so people could be paid for jobs and buy things and even trade across territorial lines. There was only one bank, and everybody used it.
I went on living in my studio apartment and hiding out from most of my neighbors. I couldn’t hold a job because nobody knew me when I showed up the next day. I started out in daycare for children of retail workers—I’d done a lot of babysitting, as I told the census taker who’d come to my door a month after the Wave, when things were settling into a new routine, sort of. That day I was a woman in her forties who looked boring and reliable. The census taker told me where the daycare was, and I went there and put in a full day’s work with children who were different from those I used to take care of. Every child had a quirk, and I had no way of stopping them from using their quirks aside from persuasion. Fortunately the woman in charge could stop other people’s magic and even reverse it most of the time. I only spent half an hour being a Siamese cat, and less time than that with green hair and a tail.
The next morning, I was a teenaged girl with a shaved head and many piercings in uncomfortable places. I didn’t even try going back to the daycare center.
My core self stayed the same no matter whom I woke up as, but my strength, age, appearance, and skill set shifted. Sometimes I had magical quirks and sometimes I didn’t, and I didn’t always discover what I could do before I changed again. What I did know was that there was no slot for me in my current community. Rumors flew about other communities up and down the West Coast and inland, but some had closed their borders; some had terrible living conditions for people who weren’t high-powered wizards; some sounded even worse.
No place sounded like a good home for a body shifter like me.
The Triumvirate had brought newspapers back, since the Internet went crazy during the Wave, and broadcasting was no longer reliable. A few tech wizards in other territories were trying to get the Internet back up, but using it was full of life-threatening risks.
Japetta noticed me at the coffee shop. She sat down at my table with her latte cradled in her dark hands and said, “Hey there. I’m Japetta. Mind if I ask you a question?”
I was paging through want ads in search of any job that didn’t depend on appearance. Phone salespeople looked promising, except not everyone had phones or service anymore. Scenery designer for stage plays might work if I could find the right stage manager or construction supervisor. Some days, though, I didn’t have much body strength. Some days I was seventy years old and crippled with arthritis. Some days I needed a wheelchair to get anywhere, so I mostly stayed home. Some days I was a kid. The people who wanted kids to work for them were good people to avoid.
I didn’t have much hope, but I still looked for the perfect job every day.
Today, I was a studly male in his twenties with an uncomfortable amount of body hair. I was furry on my chest and back, arms and legs. It kept me warmer than usual, but also took longer to dry when I got out of the shower, despite vigorous buffing with a towel. I had shaved, but the stubble came back pretty fast.
My closet was full of thrift store clothes in a lot of different sizes so I could find something to fit every day, at least well enough to get out and find something else that worked better with my new body. If not for the trust fund my father had set up for me as soon as there was post-Wave money—his quirk turned out to be a green thumb; he could raise any kind of crop and make it yield extra—I would be so out of luck.
Today’s outfit was a long-sleeved black T-shirt under overalls that were too big for me. I didn’t mind. They had a lot of good pockets and straps that I tightened enough to hold them up without distorting my shape too much.
I looked up at Japetta, this beautiful Black woman with a ’fro that gave her a six-inch dark halo tipped with gold, and shrugged. “You can ask,” I said.
“Do you, um, look different every day?”
“What?” I had made my situation clear to my brother and my parents and the person who lived in the next apartment to me, my best friend, Elias. And Grendel, my landlord, who lived in the basement. Nobody else knew. I thought.
“My quirk is I can see people’s, uh, auras? And I see your aura or whatever you call it in here every day, mostly sitting at the same table, but your outside looks different every time.”
I sighed. I had been stupid, always going to the same coffee shop and sitting at the same table. Habits could betray you.
“I see you checking out the want ads every day,” she said.
“How come I never noticed you here?” I wondered. Maybe I had gotten too mired in the routine I’d established. Job hunt. Call a prospect, see if I could interview—I’d gotten a job as a security guard on the graveyard shift. When I showed up on day two looking like someone else, they fired me for sending in a substitute.
I was convinced there had to be something I could do.
“Well, I have a second quirk,” she said. And then I was looking at a slender, colorless White girl with pale hair I might call dishwater—without the blond—and gray clothes that hid rather than showed her shape.
I glanced around to see if anybody else had noticed the transformation. Not that such a thing was rare anymore; people turned into all kinds of things these days. But doing it in public? Not so much.
She shifted back to her Black self, only now I had to wonder if either of the selves she’d shown me were real. “My Beth self, the shadow girl, nobody notices her. Not even the barista. She just drifts around, practically invisible. She’s great for surveillance work.”
“You with the government?” I asked. That would not be good.
“No. The opposite. You?”
“What’s the opposite of the government?” I whispered.
“Want to find out?” She drank the rest of her latte and grabbed my hand.
“Hey,” I said, then stuffed the newspaper and my Danish, wrapped in a napkin, into my navy blue backpack and chugged the rest of my coffee. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go anywhere with a spooky woman who could turn into a ghost girl and back, but her grip was strong as she tugged me out of the shop, and I didn’t have any solid plans for the rest of the day.
She led me through the downtown pedestrian walkway, past all the minor magicians performing for small change, the musicians spinning songs that might enchant you into doing something for them, the food carts selling roasted dead animals that hadn’t existed before the Wave, the smoke dens and bars and supply stores and curiosity shops. We headed toward campus.
I hadn’t been back to the university since the Wave. The first day I woke up as a big thirty-something Black guy with a broken nose and a tattoo of a rose in my left palm, instead of the twenty-two-year-old fashionable redheaded Kim who ran track and played hoops, I was so freaked out I didn’t want anybody to see me. Let alone I had to figure out how to stand and walk and sit, and all that was strange and difficult, and I didn’t have any clothes that fit.
From all the screams and fires and car crashes I heard outside that first morning, I didn’t think it was safe to go out anyway.
The Internet was a crazy mess when I tried to find out what was happening. Google didn’t work; it just kept coughing up weird and unrelated results to anything I put in the search box. Wikipedia had turned into Won’t-ipedia, not searchable either, and occasionally casting curses right out of the screen at me as I tried to find answers. It turned my tight afro neon blue; after that, I decided to stop looking at the computer. My phone had turned into a brick. Literally.
I finally just watched out the window as everything went to hell. My fridge still worked, at least for the first two days, and I had gone grocery shopping the day before the Wave hit. Hiding out worked for me. Then I woke up as a granny. . . .
Japetta was leading me toward Frat House Row. I wondered if she had another identity as a frat boy. I mean, if she could be a ghost girl and a queen, what was to stop her from being a douchey guy? I knew from assuming identities.
But she sidestepped the frats and led me down the alley behind a brewpub and an ice cream parlor to a manhole with a salmon on its cover—“drains to stream.” She glanced up and down the alley. Aside from some stinky dumpsters, it was clear. She lifted the cover and gestured me toward the hole. “Go on,” she said. “There’s a ladder. Quick.”
Oh well, I thought, and slid down inside the dark hole, finding the rungs with my feet and wishing I had a light. I was glad today I had a coordinated body instead of a clumsy one. I was almost to the bottom when she slid in herself and pulled the cover back on tight, plunging us into darkness.
Except there were glowing things down the corridor, evenly spaced along one wall, the light not bright but greenish and somehow cold.
A sewage smell tainted the air, along with a fainter smell of . . . popcorn? Toast? A weird combo that made me nauseated and hungry. The air was cool, with a constant current blowing from the left-hand tunnel.
“Move,” said Japetta, nudging my head with her foot.
I startled and stepped away from the bottom of the ladder. She came all the way down and stood beside me. “That way,” she said, pointing left with her chin, toward the weird lights.
The tunnel had a broad walkway beside a channel that ran with dark water, with things bobbing along in it, paper and shit and who knew what else. Small animals fled before us, some jumping into the stream, some skittering up the walls. The water level in the channel was almost even with the walkway. “What happens when it floods?” I whispered.
“Shut up,” Japetta said. We came even with the first of the strange light sources. A glowing green hunk of wood was attached to the wall by a basket. I wondered, but I didn’t say anything. I wished I had stuffed a jacket in my backpack. It was cool down here.
We walked for a while, accompanied by the green lights and the flow of sewage, and then Japetta led me through an archway to the left into a short tunnel. She pressed some buttons on the far wall and a door opened, spilling light and popcorn scents out into the hallway. “Go on,” she said, giving me a shove, and I moved past her into the cavern.
It looked like the inside of a lung, with graduated natural arches going off in the distance, the walls pitted and rough and glowing a gentle greenish gold. A small stream ran through the cavern in a narrow channel. No sewage there. The smell of popcorn was stronger here, as was the scent of burning wood. At the far end of the cavern was a picnic table holding a camp lantern and a big bowl of popcorn, flanked by benches, with two people sitting on them. Carved into the wall behind them were niches storing various things, and on the cavern floor was a ring of stones with a fire burning in it, the smoke wafting up to the ceiling. There must have been some way for it to escape, because the cavern wasn’t smoky. In an alcove to the left, eight or ten camp cots stood, with pre-Wave sleeping bags and pads on them. In another alcove to the right, there was a stack of firewood.
Air flowed in from a tunnel at the far end of the cavern. I realized there were other alcoves shrouded with dim nets, probably hiding other supplies.
“Hey,” Japetta said as we came to the table.
The two strangers had been watching us approach across the pebbly floor of the cavern. One was a very pale man with no hair—no eyebrows, even—and almost white eyes. He looked doughy and was mostly encased in a blue coverall. The other was a small woman with a lot of blond hair, wearing a red, long-sleeved shirt and black jeans. Her face was wizened and monkey-like.
“Howdy,” said the bald man in a deep voice.
“Hi,” said the small woman. “Who did you bring us today, Japetta?”
“This here’s—well, shoot, I don’t know your name.”
“Kim,” I said.
“Kim,” Japetta repeated.
“Hello, Kim,” said the bald man. “I’m Smarty, and this is Curlycue.”
I waved and smiled. From day to day, I didn’t know how people would react to my expressions. Sometimes they were scared of me, sometimes they mocked me, and sometimes they treated me like I was used to being treated. Smarty and Curlycue seemed pretty relaxed.
“Have you come to join the revolution?” Smarty asked.
“Revolution, you say?” I glanced at Japetta, who smiled and nodded. “Can you tell me more?”
“Curly?” Smarty said.
Curlycue steepled her fingers and whispered between her thumbs, and something spellish made me heat up till my skin felt like it would burn off.
“Stop it!” Japetta said. She slapped Curlycue’s hands apart, and coolness soothed me as the heat left my skin. I was breathing hard, sweat on my face. I pulled out a handkerchief from one of my many pockets and swabbed my face.
“You brought an imposter here,” said Smarty to Japetta.
“Kim’s not—Kim’s—that’s their whole thing. They’re not who they appear to be. They look different every day. Can you think of anyone better to spy for us? I mean, I have the one other form I can take, but Kim—”
“Kim’s ready to leave,” I said.
“No, wait,” said Smarty. “Your quirk is that you change shape?”
I shrugged. “Every day. Japetta’s the first one who figured it out, but if her quirk is reading auras, she’s probably not the only one who can tell. I mean, I’ve heard of other people who can do that. Never ran into anybody, though.”
Smarty nodded. “Still,” he said.
“What are you revolting about?” I asked.
“Have you noticed people are disappearing?” said Curlycue. Her voice was surprisingly musical.
“What?”
“Anybody who demonstrates a bigger-than-normal quirk—like Solo Larry performing miracles of healing in the park blocks on the weekend—he’s gone. I went by his house to ask if he was okay. His wife said he disappeared last week without a word. Same thing happened to Bowen the baker. He was giving away too much magical bread to the homeless. Now his shop is shuttered. Somebody doesn’t like the people who help others.”
“Did the census takers get your measure?” Smarty asked.
“Not this me,” I said. “I can’t even get on the grid when I want to.”
“Hmm,” he said. “How do you feel about the current government?”
“Could be worse,” I said. “I’ve heard terrible stories about Idaho and Northern California.”
“No way of knowing if the stories are true,” said Curlycue. “The Tri-Goons control the media, and we’ve found facts that disprove a lot of the horror stories about other territories. We need our own network of news gatherers. If Japetta’s right about you—”
“What if she’s wrong?” I asked. “She doesn’t know anything about me. Are you people going to threaten me?”
Curlycue steepled her fingers again and whispered into them. Bright-eyed, she looked at me. “Are you going to betray us?”
“How can I tell?” I said, before I could even think about my answer. “I don’t want to betray anyone, but I don’t even know who you are or what you want.”
“We want to know what’s really going on, and then we want to figure out how to make it better,” said Japetta. “Maybe we can even figure out how to straighten out some of the magics that really screw up people’s lives. Like yours.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “Look. I’m good at reading auras, and in yours, I see a lot to like. Wouldn’t you rather be out snooping around than sitting in that coffee shop all day looking at want ads?”
“What does it pay?” I asked.
Smarty sighed. “Yeah, it doesn’t pay.”
“Depends on what you find out,” said Curlycue.
“Why don’t you come out walking with me?” Japetta said. “Trial run. See whether you like it.”
She was right about one thing. It would be nice to break my routine and try something new.
“Okay. Tomorrow morning. Meet you out front of the coffee shop at eight,” I said.
Japetta smiled.
I opened my eyes the next day and raised my arms to study them in the morning light filtering in through my white curtains. Slender arms, medium brown skin, long-fingered hands. I felt my chest and found small breasts, then I threw back the covers and lifted my legs, stretched my feet back and forth. Long legs. I checked my crotch. No penis today. I let my arms and legs rest, closed my eyes, and listened to my insides. Nothing hurt. That was nice. No badly healed broken bones, no stomach ache, no arthritis in my joints. A good day.
I went into the bathroom and turned on the light for a look at my face. Broad nose, dark eyes, short curly hair. Not beautiful, not ugly. Probably a good body for wandering around watching things. I checked the weather by opening my window and sticking my arm out. Cool, cloudy, but not raining. After my shower, I dressed in dark slacks and an off-white sweater. I ate a banana and a protein bar. They both tasted more intense than usual; there were sour notes in the protein bar I’d never noticed in other bodies, and the bit of banana that had been bruised tasted super sweet and slimy.
I slid my backpack over my shoulders and walked down the block to the coffee shop. Japetta stood there in her Beth form, looking wispy and unpleasant. I stopped in front of her. The coffee shop door opened and a man came out, trailing the smell of coffee and pastries.
“Beth,” I said.
“Kim,” she said.
“I need coffee,” we both said at the same time.
I had to order for her. She couldn’t get the barista’s attention.
Carrying our coffees, we went outside. We headed downtown toward the Bastion of Power. The Triumvirate had taken over the pre-Wave courthouse. Their living quarters were in the top story. The lower levels were divided into a courtroom where one or the other of them heard disputes and passed judgment, a public room where people were punished, a couple of jail cells, and some administrative offices. Out front were the park blocks where people set up barter and market stalls twice a week.
“Come here often?” I asked Beth.
“About once a week. I’m afraid if I came more often they’d notice. They have a bunch of lesser wizards doing security, and I’ve noticed one of them noticing me.”
“What are we looking for?” I asked.
“That,” she said, and pulled me into the shadows under a tree in the park block nearest the government building. Wizard Talia in her red robe of office swept out of the building, trailing several lesser wizards who looked around in all directions. Two of them had handguns in visible holsters at their sides, and a third carried a staff tipped with a silver claw.
The Red Wizard passed near us. We stood silent, heads bowed. As soon as she had gone on, toward the Palace Coffee Shop and Bakery—who knew high wizards went to coffee shops? Couldn’t they hire lesser wizards to make them coffee, or even regular people?—Beth lifted her head. “Do you smell it?” she whispered.
I sniffed. Yes, there was a blue, cold smell in the morning air.
“She’s going to freeze someone. She has to, or her talent turns inward. She’ll find someone random, freeze them, and then invent a crime. Let’s go.”
By the time we got to the Palace Coffee Shop, it had already happened. We hovered outside, but could see in the open door. Two customers sat frozen at a table, their hands raised, still cupping mugs of coffee. An icicle hung from the woman’s nose.
“They were discussing dissension,” Wizard Talia told the barista, who was turned away, crafting a beverage for the wizard. “You heard them, didn’t you?”
The barista nodded and turned to hand the wizard a coffee. She said nothing. The wizard swept out past us trailing minions, and we lowered our heads again. When she was gone, Beth stepped forward with a small camera and took pictures of the frozen people. We drifted away again. Beth led me to a hidden bench. We sat down, and she was Japetta again. She eyed me. “It’s gotten worse,” she said. “She used to do it every four or five weeks, and now it’s once a week or more often. Sometimes Wizard Frank takes frozen prisoners out to the quarry and uses them for target practice.”
Her words struck me. I curled in on myself, shivering.
“We need to document it,” she said softly. “Will you help?”
I thought of the fragile peace established after the War of the Wave. Most of us had found a way forward. But if people could be targeted just for being in the wrong coffee shop—
—I didn’t see how we could work our way around wizard power. But I wanted to try.
“I will,” I said.