“Thank you,” you say, your min­ion’s smile ever so broad. Your own smile, your own grat­i­tude, all so fake and so far away.

Never do you mean the thank-yous, never do you feel them. Noth­ing reaches into your heart, not from the world out­side; you and it…

Send­ing a mes­sage is such a te­dious task. Cer­tainly not one you’d do on im­pulse–so, re­ally, not some­thing you’d nor­mally do.

The magic-free way is much sim­pler. You can send an email–or, bet­ter yet, a text–in sec­onds.

But it does­n’t use magic,…

Some­thing does­n’t add up.

You keep notes. You keep lots of notes.

Your notes say you were go­ing to Apart­ment A45 at The Nile Apart­ments.

And now you’re at home, sip­ping cof­fee, eat­ing bis­cot­ti’s.

They’re great bis­cot­tis and all, but still: some­thing…

You have an inkling.

You. Wat­son.

He used to call you Wat­son. Wat­son never had inklings. That was Sher­lock’s job.

He’d be Sher­lock, of course.

You hated it.

It’s not that you weren’t the world’s biggest Sher­lock Holmes fan–you were. You knew every line…

You pick up the tele­phone. Dial the num­ber.

“Come on in,” you say. “I’m wait­ing.”

“Let me out,” whis­pers the voice, and you can­not deny. You don’t want to deny.

For it is your voice. Your own, quiet voice, which you never re­lease, which you must never…

“I work with The De­tec­tive.”

You freeze. Your fin­ger, al­ready halfway to the “End Call” but­ton, re­tracts.

You were in the mid­dle of some­thing some­what del­i­cate and rather im­por­tant, but this may be more im­por­tant still.

“You can call me Wat­son.”…

It’s an all-in-one af­fair, your build­ing.

It tow­ers im­pos­si­bly high, thou­sands of feet over any other in the city.

Some days, you sit higher than the clouds, re­flect­ing on life, the sun stream­ing in through the gi­ant floor-to-ceil­ing win­dows,…

“Like, yeah man, you don’t wanna go there.”

You ask why. Is it im­pos­si­ble to get to? Heav­ily guarded?

“No, noth­in’ like that, dude, just… they’re s­trange, man. They’re d­if­fer­ent. It’s like they’re not hu­man.”

“They’re Phoenixes.”

“Yeah, that’s it…

The ocean waves slam against the so­lid­i­fied wall of magma.

You’re go­ing to get wet. There’s no way around it.

You thought you could wait for low tide, but it’s the wrong time of year, and there’s only so long you can wait, any­way.

Last time you tried…

For a mo­ment, you won­der if The Thir­teen Id­iots man­aged to curse thir­teen af­ter all.

Then, you won­der if there are ac­tu­ally thir­teen of them.

The flames are still mile-high. The rub­ble is still all around.

The city never got to grace the face of…