WHEN DAWN CAME, it found Jo still staring out the window of her room, overlooking Paris.

She hadn’t left for the rest of the night, willing herself to forget, to feel a little stronger and less afraid. That act became easier with the first light. A normal sunrise scared away the demons and bogeymen haunting her thoughts. It seared her eyes and her mind, giving the whole affair a hazy, dream-like quality.

Feeling safer (though she didn’t know from what), or at the least much braver, Jo finally ventured from her room. She headed right for a door with a carefully painted bird and a name written in elegant script. Jo gave it a few solid knocks.

“You’re early this morning.” Nico opened the door with a smile, wiping his hands on a grungy paint-stained apron.

“Yeah, I had a bit of a weird night.”

“Come in and tell me about it? I’ll only be a minute more.” Nico stepped away from the door, leaving it open.

Jo did as asked, closing the door behind her and leaning against it. Nico paused his motions over by his easel, raising his eyebrows questioningly at her unorthodox behavior. “I ran into Pan.”

Four words, and she suddenly felt very silly. Pan was a fellow member of the Society, an odd one certainly, but hardly an unknown quantity.

“That is odd,” Nico agreed. “It’s not like her to be out of her room without a wish.”

“That’s what I thought.” Jo shrugged.

“Is that all?”

Jo paused, chewing on her tongue a moment. It wasn’t all, was it? She’d spent all night willing the interaction to go away, and now it suddenly felt distant, like a dream she’d forgotten, remembered, and was already forgetting again.

“She said something weird, too.”

“What?”

“I—” if her mind was a car, it would’ve just stalled out. Everything stopped, sputtering. Jo just shrugged, trying to play it off more casually than she felt. “Can’t remember. I was up working and mentally spent at that point.”

“Knowing Pan,” Nico made for the door, “she was doing it with the intention of being strange.” He clasped a hand over Jo’s shoulder. It was a sturdy support that pushed her feet into the earth and reminded her she was on stable ground. “I wouldn’t pay it any mind.”

“You’re right.” Jo forced a laugh. “Not like I want to give her the satisfaction of taking me off my game.”

“There’s the Josephina I know.”

They made their way directly to the common area to begin their morning ritual. From underneath the TV, Jo retrieved two tablets and, at the same time, Nico busied himself in the kitchen. She turned for the two chairs they had pulled together by the pool, and stalled.

There had been more, her mind insisted. Jo stared, transfixed by the mountains in the distance, as though she expected a monster to suddenly grasp their peaks with its giant claws and hoist itself over.

“Jo?” Nico’s voice interrupted her thoughts.

Jo shook her head. “Sorry.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked as she approached.

“I’ll be better with coffee. Nothing a hot cup can’t fix.” Jo smiled and handed him one of the two tablets. “For you.”

“Thank you.” He propped it against his knees as Jo sat on the chair next to his, placing hers on her own lap. The Italian man finished situated himself, taking a long sip of his espresso, eyes fluttering shut. “It is truly a delight to have someone to share the mornings with.”

“Honestly, I still have a hard time believing you’ve converted me into any kind of morning person.”

“What is morning? What is night?” It wasn’t the first time he’d wondered as much, and Jo only hummed in response. When one existed beyond time, the hours ticking away on a clock became more guidelines than actual governances over life.

“Oh, look at this.” Nico held up his tablet. A sketch glowed back at her in the dim sunrise. She squinted to make out the text below the picture:

Rare Da’Vinci Artwork Discovered. On exhibit, one week only.

“The man was a right loon.” Nico pulled the tablet back. “But it’s good to see his work still being appreciated so long after.”

“You knew him?” Jo didn’t know why the fact surprised her. Even though Nico was a ray of sunshine in the form of a forever-nineteen-year-old man, he was actually more than five-hundred and seventy years old. “Of course you knew him,” she added hastily.

“Not ‘of course’; he had a different patron than I and was already an old man when I was born.”

The question of who exactly that patron was, or when exactly he was born, sat heavily on her tongue, until Jo washed it away with another sip of her latte. There were two rules, sort of, when it came to the Society:

One: Use your magic to help grant wishes.

Two: Ask no one about the wish that brought them there.

She looked up from the news sprawled out across her tablet, and out at the mountains in the distance. They reflected in the stillness of the pool water before her, perfectly mirror-like and undisturbed, not even a hint of wind to mar its surface. The temperature was comfortably cool as well, as it always was, and the sun peeked from behind scattered clouds, as it always did.

It was a paradise that sat just outside of reality, a utopia in which nothing changed. It was peaceful, quiet, and all the more maddening for it. She found herself liking those mountains and their perfection less and less.

“How’re things in good old Britain?” Nico pulled Jo from her thoughts.

“All seems the same.” Jo continued her welcome distraction of swiping through the morning’s news—“research,” as Nico had explained it. They never knew where a wish would come from, but keeping up with world news could give them a good indication. Additionally, it could sometimes help them think of creative ways to lessen the Severity of Exchange for the wishes that did come in by looking at things on the macro level. “Something to do with trade treaties.”

“Still?” Nico leaned over, grabbing the side of the chaise closest to Jo. His eyes skimmed the article. “Well, at least we likely won’t get another wish about it.”

“Why not?”

“Because of the last wish.”

Their last wish had involved taking down the CEO of a British competitor to the wisher. “Why would that have anything to do with it?”

“We never seem to get a wish too similar in scope or region back-to-back. Snow’s choice? Chance? Something in the magic? Whatever the reason, it has always worked out that way.” Nico shrugged and tossed some of his scraggly brown hair from his eyes. As if sensing her next question before she did, he added, “As to the actual why it’s that way, none of us have the foggiest.”

“I see. . .” Jo flicked away her frustrations by thumbing through news articles. She hated the reasoning: because magic. It was an underlying explanation to all things in her world now. As exciting as magic was, she wished she could understand it just a little more. Or she wished she could be like everyone else and just accept it for what it was and move on.

“The variety does help keep things interesting, at least,” Nico offered.

“It does.” Jo forced a smile. He was trying to cheer her up; she wouldn't make him feel bad for the fact.

A loud ringing sound disturbed what had become an otherwise peaceful morning.

“What’s that?” Nico twisted, looking over the back of his chair and into the common area behind them.

Jo followed his gaze, squinting at the source of the sound. Their dark-haired elf now sat on the couch, glued to the television. He seemed not to notice the high-pitched alert the speakers were emitting.

“Can you kindly turn that down, Eslar?” Nico asked.

There was no reply.

“Wait, I know that noise. Well, sort of.” Jo stood, leaving the tablet on her seat. “It’s like the warning they’d play when there was a tornado in the area, or ran drills for one.”

“A tornado?” Nico followed behind, now giving the anomaly his full attention.

She walked up the few steps and into the shade of the common area. The tile was cold under her feet, still almost icy with the chill from the night. But Jo barely recognized it. Her eyes were glued to the TV.

I’ve seen this before, she wanted to say. But what escaped her mouth was different entirely. “Wh-what movie is this?” She laughed, a sort of forced, strangled sound.

Eslar made no move to respond.

Jo watched as the TV continued to scroll the announcement across the bottom of the screen in Japanese, her eyes translating instantly by magic: MT. FUJI ERUPTS. UNPRECEDENTED CATASTROPHE. DEATH TOLL UNKNOWN.

The screen filled with apocalyptic imagery alternating between news casters standing at a distance, smoke and darkness shrouding them, and social media videos posted by cell phones, most of which ending all too abruptly. Ash spewed from the earth and blacked out the sky, a stark contrast to the bright, peaceful morning where Jo currently stood.

It was worse than any horror movie she’d ever seen.

“Eslar.” Nico walked over and placed a hand on the elf’s shoulder, summoning him back to attention. “What is this?”

“The news.”