FOR THE FIRST time in possibly her whole life, Jo’s mind was silent.

The usual incessant buzzing, always reminding her of something she needed to be doing, something she must be freaking out over, was quiet. She wasn’t sure how to handle the stillness, so she didn’t do anything at all. Her mind must have overloaded and completely fizzled out, faced with the combination of sensory overload and utter panic.

She followed behind the strange, beautiful man while he led her out of the room, his demeanor casual, as if they were walking through the park, or down a street, and not into the hive of what had been her arch-nemesis since Jo was fourteen and took her first job.

“I know you have a lot of questions,” he started.

“Understatement.” She wanted the word to have more snark, but she just sounded tired, even to her own ears.

“Where would you like me to begin?”

“It doesn’t matter. Just begin.” She paused when another agent rounded the corner ahead of them. Just like the two in the office, the woman walked down the hall without so much as a glance at them as she passed.

“They can’t see us.” Snow seemingly answered the question she’d been posing to the woman’s back.

“Why?”

“Because you no longer exist.”

The words were like swallowing a shot of tequila and chasing it with a can of RAGE ENERGY—burning delivered with a tang of sweetness that would become one massive hangover the next morning.

“Nico said I couldn’t go home. . . Wayne said they were my family. . .” Jo tried to piece together the earlier conversations in a way that would make sense. But none of the pieces fit yet. She needed some rough edges shaved off before they’d snap into place. “What is the Society of Wishes?”

“You invoked the Society yourself, you know.” Snow had the audacity to chuckle at her. Jo’s chest had the audacity to tighten at the smooth, rich sound.

“Please,” she said tiredly. “I. . . I remember the ritual.” Admitting the fact was hard, because it meant that her memories of Yuusuke had been real. “I remember what my grandmother told me. But. . . she said it’s magic lore practically from the dawn of time. No one believes that stuff anymore. It’s stupid.”

“You believed.”

“Not really. I was frantic,” she mumbled, willfully ignoring the truth. Either she finally owned up to the fact that the part of her that believed in magic had never gone away (much to her father’s dismay up until the day he walked out), or she was in some kind of trauma-induced craze. There wasn’t a way to win.

“Dawn of time. . .” he repeated softly, mostly to himself. But before Jo could question, Snow continued. “Then I’ll start at the beginning.” There was a long pause and Snow’s expression left Jo wondering if he even knew where “the beginning” was. “The Society of Wishes exists outside of time, outside of any reality, and functions with the singular goal of granting wishes.”

“You’re telling me you’re a fairy godmother?”

Snow did laugh then and, despite herself, it brought a sly smile to Jo’s mouth. “I suppose you could call us that.”

“Where’s your wand and ball gown?”

“I’m afraid I lost those a few hundred years ago.” For all Wayne had cautioned against Snow, he was proving to be the easiest to speak to of them all.

“Wayne mentioned something about a thousand years. . .”

“As I said, we exist outside of time and space. The Society as it’s known now has been around for well over a thousand years. Closer to two thousand, actually.” Snow continued forward, walking as though he’d been in these halls many times. “Each Society member has joined at a different time, as their magic was made known.”

“How did they join?” The Society was still a “they,” an other, something Jo was not quite ready to admit to being a part of herself.

“A wish.”

A dusty server room floor, a friend bleeding out, a last resort in the form of a desperate cry for help, any help—

“It was real, then?”

“It was.”

“Is Yuusuke. . .” She couldn’t even bring herself to say it.

“He lives.”

Jo let out the breath she’d been holding, the one that couldn’t be expelled with the word “dead.”

“Your wish saw to that,” Snow continued. “But wishing takes power, an immense amount, depending on what is asked.”

“And the power came from my life?” She was dead, then. It was the only explanation on so many levels.

“In a fashion,” Snow conceded. “When a wish is made, something of equal value must be given. Every choice you make divides reality. If you say yes to a decision, there is a world in which you said no.”

Jo remembered reading something about parallel dimensions and alternate realities in quantum mechanics when she’d fallen into a binge-watch of one of Yuusuke’s favorite pop science shows.

“To grant a wish, I must utilize the very essence of that possibility. I harvest the energy that exists in each alternate world by destroying it. Then, I take the energy released from that destruction and turn it into the magic that will be used to help see the wish in a single reality.”

“So, a life for a life, in my case?” Jo struggled to understand exactly what the “destruction of worlds” meant. “You killed a world in which I existed to stop Yuusuke from dying?”

“Somewhat. . . You are a unique case. Like the other members in the Society, you are one of the rare few who come from a long lineage of ancient, now latent, magic.” Snow ran a fingertip at the edge of his hair as he spoke, pulling it just far enough away from his eye to see. But the movement didn’t register to Jo; she was more focused on the memory of her grandmother, of her mother, and the craft of mysticism that had died when the latter left her small town in Chihuahua.

“Magic is real?” It was like twelve-year-old Jo had finally got what she wanted. But the fact didn’t make nineteen-year-old Jo nearly as excited as it should. Her whole body was laden with some invisible force that grew heavier by the moment.

“It both is, and is not.” Snow nodded. “Long ago, the world was in an Age of Magic. Wishes spliced humanity time and again, driving the world as you know it away from that era, rewriting history, destroying worlds and possibilities, and rebuilding reality in each wish. Those whose magical lineage was strong enough to remain intact throughout the splices are very few now, and the power is so far removed that it’s nearly unrecognizable without the individual being a member of the Society.”

“So, let me get this straight.” Jo stopped, putting her hands on her hips. “You’re telling me I’m the descendant of some ancient witch, and you awoke magic passed on in me by forcibly drafting me into your Society, which floats between alternate dimensions?”

He paused as well, a look of focus overcoming his features. “Simply put, I suppose that encompasses the rough idea of it. Though we do not float, and there’s only ever one time. . . What it looks like merely changes due to wishes.”

“I didn’t ask for that.” She stood her ground, even if there was little use in pointing out the fact now. As Ranger agents and office workers floated around her, oblivious to her presence, it was obvious that what was done, was done.

“You asked for your family to be safe, for your friend to be alive. Those were the terms.”

“Don’t bring my family into this,” she chastised.

“You don’t want magic, then?” He arched his eyebrows. Jo instantly hated the way she felt under his gaze, like he could see right through her to the very curious, very excited girl squealing over the mere idea of being some kind of ancient witch.

“That’s irrelevant,” Jo insisted. Just because the idea of magic was sparking some curiosity in her—enough to give her a bit of fire to fuel her through the exhaustion that was trying to smother her—that didn’t excuse his actions. “There’s something called consent, and it’s necessary.”

“I believe your words were: ‘Take me, I’m yours.’”

She had said that. “I didn’t know what I was agreeing to!”

“Would you rather live with magic, or have died? Or would you rather your friend died?” he snapped, frustration creeping to the surface.

Her own front wore thin and Jo finally averted her gaze, her hands falling limply to her sides. She wanted to keep up her righteous anger, but she just felt exhausted. It was downright disorienting being a specter in a world she was so clearly—despite all logic—no longer a part of. “Is that supposed to excuse being forced into this agreement?”

“It doesn’t much matter if you think it does or doesn't.” There was the Snow that Wayne had warned her of—a colder, calculating, more calloused man. “There’s no revoking wishes and no leaving the Society. Furthermore, the reality in which you existed is gone forever.”

“What if someone wishes me back?” She just couldn’t leave something be. She had to try to pick it apart.

Snow seemed to legitimately think about the idea for a moment. “No one knows who you are to wish you back. Josephina Espinosa was never born. She never ‘adjusted’ the local ATM at age eleven to dispense at will for her friends. She never argued with her mother about what college to attend, knowing she’d never go because she was already embroiled in organized crime. She never kissed her best friend only to have him—”

“Stop.” Her toes were suddenly the most fascinating thing she’d ever seen. “I get it.” Something about having her life boiled down in Snow’s warm voice and icy manner made it all the harder to bear. It was hard to believe what was happening, but Jo couldn’t deny the evidence right in front of her eyes. “So, if all that never happened, if that Jo never existed. . . What do I do now?”

“You help the Society grant wishes with your magic.”

“I thought you had the whole wish granting business on lock?” Jo shoved her hands in her pockets as she finally gave in and let him lead again. Moving was an outlet to the frustrations she was barely keeping contained at the idea of being unwillingly selected for a team—not to mention a team that existed outside time.

“I can only grant wishes once the world is close enough to seeing the wish happen naturally. Otherwise, I risk tearing the very fabric of reality.” Snow paused, clearly reflecting on the convolution of the statement. “Think of it this way: If the world is at state A, and a wisher wants to see it at state C, I need the Society to help move the world to a B state before a wish can be granted.”

“So,” Jo started, trying to logic through what he was saying in a framework she understood. “If someone hates the prime minister and wants to see them assassinated, they make a wish.”

Snow nodded, allowing her to continue.

“State A would be the world where the prime minister is alive and well.”

“And will keep living,” he added. “State C would be a world where the prime minister is dead.”

“But the B state. . .”

“In your example, those in the Society would assist with maneuvering the prime minister into a perilous situation, perhaps.”

Jo thought about it a long moment. “Not just kill him?”

“I am the Wish Granter. Any changes made outside of reducing that margin by any member of the Society other than myself can risk serious implications for the overall success of the wish.”

“Gotta keep yourself useful?” She grinned smugly. “Everyone else is doing all the heavy lifting. . . Jumping from A to C is too hard for you, so you make it so that you’re the only one who can flip the final switch?”

“That jump is dangerously easy,” Snow corrected ominously.

Jo was distracted from any follow-up.

The narrow, office-lined hallways of the Ranger compound opened up into a large meeting space. Men and women sat at round tables, eating, working, talking—all oblivious to the specters in their midst. Snow and Jo walked the length of the room to the wall of glass that overlooked a much more familiar sight.

Picturesque hills rising into purple mountains could stay in their postcard-land of the Society of Wishes. This was the world she knew.

Dallas swept out before her underneath the towered headquarters of the Rangers. The gray sky loomed over a metropolis of straight-lined, industrial buildings. Every tower competed for light by trying to smother the next in its shadow. Other official government buildings bore large flags with two horizontal bands of red and white and one vertical band of blue with a single white star and five blue stars inside—an adjustment made to the original Texan flag back in the days of pre-WIII USA. Highways stacked over highways, congested by a meaningless rat race that Jo had long avoided.

She’d always placed herself outside the norms of conventional society. Why should it be any harder to place herself outside of reality itself?

“Is this real?” she couldn’t help but ask.

“It is, for now.”

“Until someone makes another wish?”

“Possibly.”

“How many?” Jo’s voice had dropped to a whisper. “How many wishes have there been that have changed the world itself?”

“Too many to count.”

So, nothing was real. Nothing had ever been real. It was all luck of the draw crafted by a handful of people who were playing at power by making wishes using an ancient ritual they didn’t even understand. At least, she hadn’t understood it. Not really. Not at all.

Jo remembered what Wayne had said: “Reality is what we make it.” This was supposed to be her new reality now. An odd existence outside time and space, where she was magic and nothing beyond the Society was permanent.

Her mother came to mind. Jo gripped her sweatshirt over her stomach, trying to quell the uneasiness there. Could her mother blink out of existence with one wish gone awry? If Snow was to be believed, her mother didn’t even know who she was. So, she shouldn’t feel sad about losing her.

She wouldn’t feel sad, Jo insisted to herself; she was stronger than that. “I’m ready to go back now.”

“Back?”

“To the mansion.” Jo swallowed hard and wiped her cheeks, making sure no more rogue tears had continued their bold escape. “Home.”