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On a crisp fall day in Chicago, Jammer stood in front of a crowd of volunteers and tried to explain to them how to summon food from the new magic table they’d just finished summoning in the nonprofit's kitchen.
“It’s about intention more than anything,” Jammer said, clapping his hands together to get the energy going. “It doesn’t have to be a McRib. T-Dog, you’re hungry, right? What do you want to eat right now?”
“Uh,” a young man whose real name K didn’t know stuttered out, hunching in on himself a little bit protectively before Jammer’s warm, beckoning hand and enthusiastic smile induced him to separate from the rest of the crowd and stand in range for Jammer to clasp his shoulder. “I guess I could go for some noodles?”
“Thinking big! I like it,” Jammer said.
It was always a little mesmerizing, watching him get used to a new group of people. This was their fifth kitchen, and Jammer had gotten it down to an art form. K couldn’t see the connections between people the way Sam could, but she still knew the second T-Dog joined the team, because it was the second Jammer asked him to try something that sounded crazy to him and he did it anyway.
And so K watched a guy who probably hadn't believed in magic since he was twelve sit down at a table and try to manifest noodles, until their attention was diverted by a little scrabble of claws right outside the window.
K turned to look.
It was a sunny day, but a crowd of songbirds hung outside the window. Not perched on branches or sweetly singing, but hovering there, like giant drops of water suspended in midair, a breath away from falling.
Then, as one, they surged up and away, and K could once again see the street behind them.
“You’d think they’d learn by now,” K sighed.
They looked around the room, trying to make eye contact with Sam and Evan. But Evan had caught the warning, too, and was already slipping out the front door, so instead K narrowed their eyes and stared at Sam.
Since people naturally looked Sam’s way, she’d positioned herself behind Jammer, in a maneuver she called “boosting.” This made it a little hard for K to make eye contact with her, as Jammer was quite a bit taller than either of them. But Jammer caught the stare and immediately understood the state of play. He sat down beside T-Dog without losing a speck of that go-team enthusiasm, so that K’s gaze could sweep over his head to burn directly into Sam where she was looking down at her phone, probably looking at the analytics of her last Infinite Magic Food Mukbang. (Jammer preferred the personal touch, and this whole effort with the volunteers was probably more effective at getting the word out to people who didn’t have consistent internet access, but K privately thought Sam’s mukbangs had spread the word better than Jammer’s speeches or Evan’s dark web PDFs had.)
It took a second, but Sam looked up, stuffed her phone into her pocket, and smiled. “Be right back, everyone,” she said, crossing towards the door.
She didn’t do it subtly - subtle wasn’t Sam’s style. But everyone noticed her leaving, and everyone was so reassured that she had whatever under control that their attention snapped right back to Jammer as he clapped T-Dog on the shoulder in preparation for a pep talk, right as K swung the door open in front of Sam.
As they crossed the threshold into the outside world, K posted up in front of Sam, head on a swivel. They didn’t see anything immediately amiss - Sam had put this meeting together as a flash event, so there hadn’t been time for anyone to coordinate an angry mob chanting about god or anything - but their birds wouldn’t have given them a false alarm.
Sam touched their shoulder from behind. “I’ll take the one to the right,” she said, slipping away.
Which let K know to look left, where they saw a tall, muscular man in a dark suit who had previously seemed like a part of the wall reaching inside his jacket too fast.
It would’ve been more elegant and way more pink if K had had time to do some fancy wandwork. As it was, they whipped their wand in the man’s direction, and a stream of songbirds descended from nowhere to rip him apart before he could do anything magical or mundane.
He screamed, and screamed, and a car on the street swerved as the driver saw, but the birds were relentless, pecking in an unending, pulsing cloud that slowly tore at his flesh. He kept screaming as he ran into the road, nearly getting hit by another car, birds still trailing after him.
K cocked their head to one side, shrugged, and turned back towards Sam, who seemed to be locked in conversation with another dark-suited man.
“I'm just saying,” Sam said. From behind her, K couldn’t see her smile, but they could hear it in Sam’s voice and see it in the way the man squinted and flinched back, like a spotlight had just been turned on in his face. “You seem like you’re about to make a bad choice. You should probably reconsider!”
“I…” the man blinked rapidly, hand fumbling inside his suit and denting it outwards here and there as it searched around for something.
“We’re doing something really great here, and you could be a part of it,” Sam said, and the man’s hand faltered.
“You’re right,” he breathed. “I could be.”
His hand emerged with a dark shape in it, and K only registered it as a gun after he was already handing it off to Sam, because he’d turned it around so the barrel was pointing down the whole time. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. How can I help?”
Sam touched his shoulder and said, “Oh, I have some ideas.” With her other hand, she passed the gun back to K, in whose hands it turned into a lovely bouquet of wildflowers in every shade of pink imaginable.
While Sam wandered off with her newest convert, K scanned around for Evan. He wasn’t in the alley or on the street, and from the brief glimpse K got when Sam opened the door, he wasn’t inside with Jammer, either.
A little bird tweeted as it flew past, and K looked up just in time to see Evan drop down from the opposite roof. “Oh! Thank you, little friend,” they said, and went to join him.
“All is well?” they checked.
Evan nodded. “There was a sniper,” he explained. “Now there isn’t.”
“Oh, good,” K said. They looked down at their bouquet, then plucked out a bright pink carnation and offered it to Evan, who smiled and tucked it behind his ear. Then he paused, tilting his head one way and then the other like he was feeling the weight of the enormous flower that was already slipping out of place.
“Is this what you’re supposed to do with them?” Evan asked. “It’s kind of…”
“I think that’s probably right,” K said, and the flower rolled back into position like it was glued to Evan.
Theo scurried down K’s shoulder to grab a pale pink hollyhock, which he then put on his head like a little fairy hat, then clung to K’s elbow as K pulled a nearly magenta flower - a chrysanthemum, maybe? - out of the bouquet, frowning at it. “Do I like flowers?” they wondered aloud. “I kind of thought I didn’t, and then I thought maybe that was an internalized misogyny thing I’d work through, and now I think maybe I just don’t? They’re fine, I guess, but I like the singing animal part of my powerset a lot better than whatever this is.”
“I’ll take them off your hands,” Evan offered, and K passed them over.
“Oh,” they said. “I think your shadow likes them, too!”
Evan glanced down at where his shadow stretched out from under him all the way to the front of the building he’d jumped down from, incongruously large in the mid-afternoon light. It kept patting the silhouetted flower on its own ear, as if feeling the ruffled edges.
“Huh,” Evan said.
By the time they got back inside, Sam had dropped her new friend off somewhere and Jammer had wrapped up his explanation. He’d gotten everyone to sit at the table, and most people had a sandwich in hand, though one or two of them had opted for something more complicated and were poking tentatively at a steaming-hot noodle dish or soup. T-Dog was one of them, K noticed; he had a big steaming bowl of noodles in front of him, heaped high with fried garlic and slivers of onion, and he kept leaning over it just to smell it, like he still couldn't believe it.
One of the ones who’d tried something more elaborate, a young woman staring down into her wonton soup as if it held the secrets of the universe, asked, “So do you feed the kitchen souls to make it work?”
“Nope, no souls!” Jammer said cheerfully. He was the only one without food in front of him.
“Years of your life?”
“No, nothing like that,” Jammer said. “It’s magic. It just kind of makes it out of nothing.”
“But you can’t make something out of nothing,” the woman protested, to a vaguely agreeing murmur from the crowd, even though half of them had at least taken a bite of their something-out-of-nothing food. “If you can make food out of nothing, then you can make medicine, or - or computers, or - ”
“Yes. Yes. Exactly,” K interrupted. “You’re getting it. We can also make houses out of nothing, and then fold space so more houses fit on one street than you’d think should be able to. And you can, too! It’s all in the PDFs.”
“Or you can teleport,” Evan said. “There’s a lot of really great empty lots in Iowa. I’ve slept in a lot of them.”
“The commute, though,” a young man groused between bites of sandwich.
“No, I don’t think you’re getting it,” Evan said. “It’s - you teleport. There’s no - ”
Sam put her hand on Evan’s back and Evan immediately fell silent. Everyone did, naturally creating a silence for Sam to say, “It works just how the table works. And then what you do with that is up to you.”
“Yes, Miss Slither,” a dozen voices chorused.
As the meeting broke up, K ambled over to Sam and leaned into her space, just enough that they could whisper to Sam, “Are you okay with Miss Slither? I know you worked really hard on the alliteration for Sam Slither. If you don’t like it, I can make sure no one calls you that.”
“You know, I had this exact same talk with Evan a minute ago,” Sam said, laughing. “It’s fine. I like Miss Slither. It’s got those ‘I’ noises! Miiiiss. Sliiiither.”
“Miiiiss,” K mumbled, and then they and Sam wasted a good five minutes just hissing at each other while Jammer shook the hand of each and every person who had come for the talk.
“One of them’s a narc,” Evan said darkly as Jammer closed the door behind the last one. “How else did those private security guys know where we’d be?”
“Oh, was it private security and not government this time?” Sam asked, already scrolling on her phone again. “One of them gave me his number - hang on, I’ll ask him if he knows who the leak is.”
“It was also all over Sam’s socials,” Jammer said. “Don’t worry about it! You took care of them, right?” He slung an arm over Evan’s shoulders, which made Evan untense so rapidly he looked like a deflating balloon, features going eerie for a second before settling into something comfortable.
“We each got one,” Evan said. “I made mine envision each and every way I could kill him. He ran away, but it was off the side of a building, so.” He made a so-so gesture with his free hand, the bouquet still clutched in his other.
“You win some, you lose some,” Jammer said philosophically. “Let’s eat!”
They all slid together onto the benches of the table where Jammer had given his presentation, K bumping elbows with Jammer, Evan sliding into his seat across from them. Sam sat down next to him without looking up from her phone, but a McRib still sprung into place on a cafeteria tray in front of her at the same time as it did for everyone else.
“Where’d you get the flowers from?” Sam asked as she set her phone down.
“Oh,” Evan said, as if he had just remembered them. “They were from K, but - here.”
With a wash of cold shadow magic, flowers rushed free from the bouquet, carried forth by dark, insubstantial hands to carpet the table with petals. A sprig of small pink flowers fell on either side of Sam’s head, framing her hair like a crown; a smattering of petals wended their way onto Jammer’s shoulders, like a cape.
“Nice,” Jammer said approvingly. “Atmospheric!”
“I got the idea from the way flower petals whip around in the background when K looks up,” Evan explained, which made K crane their neck trying to look behind them for any errant petals. “Mostly when you’re outside, I mean.”
There was a moment of silence as they all dug into their respective meals. “Is it weird that I kind of miss the bones?” Sam asked eventually.
“No, the Goat House table’s McRibs were the best,” Jammer said immediately. “I bet we could get the Oggles to send us some bone-in. I’ll send a letter on Spalding sometime.”
As K sat back, picturing the trans-Atlantic journey of a slowly rolling basketball, Jammer continued, “And we should go back to my moms’ house after this, too. Finishing up Evan’s room will help us figure out those space-expanding spells, and then we can make our own PDFs. I mean, Dr. B’s aren’t bad, but they’re super British.”
“I think he’s just excited by the concept of PDFs,” K said. “No one ever took his class on purpose except for us, so the idea of someone reading his stuff deliberately even without the in-class portion is meaningful to him. He cried a little when I proofread his version.”
Sam nudged Evan where he sat beside her. “That sound good?”
“Yeah,” Evan said, his voice cracking a little. He cleared his throat, then said, “Family on six?”
“You know it,” Jammer said, and together they all stuck their free hands in the middle for the traditional chant.
“One, two, three - ”