An Adept meets with an old friend, but things have changed.

I knew you would be here. Not in any concrete way, but the same way I know when a storm is coming. The coincidences built up. The girl in the sandwich shop who was originally from the next city up, yet chose to go to Munich at the same time I did. The girls on the plane that had worked where I had for six months. My new phone number. The time. The dates.

They say that magic is nine parts luck, lies and self-confidence. I can believe that. The guy in the coffee shop, reading tarot to impress the goth schoolgirls, maybe score himself an underage bit of skirt… he has mastered the first ninety percent. That last part, however, is power. The guy reading tarot to try getting laid hasn’t got any of that. The bloke sat opposite with a pack of cigarettes and a fucking huge espresso, making phone numbers up from the first number in the third column of every prime-numbered page of the Independant, he has the last part.

It was obvious where we would see each other. We both still have a tie to it, no matter how tenuous. Paul doesn’t, not any more. He has no anchors here, not with his mum moving and him being consigned to the other end of the river when he’s down from Scotland. Both our links are weakening. You’ve been away, tried running from your parents, tried being unreachable. Me, I’ve been here for three weeks out of fourteen months. There’s been more than a thousand miles between me and here. My grip is weaker, but I can still see the way the stars just seem to alter as the houses fall away. As the potential becomes thicker in the air. You’re there beside me, without having walked a single step, and we lean back against the low brick wall of the bridge.

“I know why you’re here,” I say. His silence is deep.

“You’ve been looking for me. I know. All those coincidences, you never could keep them to yourself, not if you were looking for someone. And you have been looking for me.

“What did it cost you? Having to go back to your family, having to make yourself a part of their lives again. I know such things have a price. Your voice? No, there’s no link. Your health? No. But I know there is a price. There is always a price in returning here, especially with but a weak tie to the town.”

He shrugged, and I took out a pack of Winfield. I sparked up as he spoke the first words I had heard from him in two years.

“You can’t know why I am here. Beyond meeting you, at least. You can’t know, and believe me, you don’t want to.”

I saw it then. A dull reflection of my lighter’s flame from inside his jacket. Black metal. Gunmetal. This is something serious. We start walking back towards town. I keep tryign to find out why he wanted to meet with me. All he can say is that I don’t want to know, that I don’t want to get involved.

I think back to the three of us, just me, Luke and Paul and how we shared just about everything between ourselves. There were others. Caryn, the psycho-girl. Sara, trying to make her way in a world she couldn’t begin to understand. Tom and his crowd, trying to work with us and only halfway succeding.

We’re at the corner by now. The meeting point. A minute’s walk from where he and Paul always used to live, and but five from my own place. The memories are still there. The sense of desertion, that I’m the only one who can retur to where he always was. And a strange sense of foreboding. As we walk past the cemetary, it clicks.

He’d gone away, tried shutting down all his ties to his old life. He’d truly gone for it, the whole hog. Change of bank accounts, change of university, change of everything. Now, he was back, and looking for me. One of the few people who knew how far he had gone to distance himself from everything. I knew then it wasn’t a social call. He was working for them. That’s why the gun. He’d been sent here to recruit me or shoot me, either one.

He saw me realise. An eyebrow was raised. “Work with me. You know it’s the right choice… you know it’s the only real way. No more lies. No more ticking yourself into thinking what you are doing is right.”

I shook my head slowly. “No. I still want to change the world. I know I can. You could too, if you hadn’t fallen for the factions. Don’t try the same thing on Paul, either. I’m sorry to say it, but right now we are definitely on different sides.”

Magic is nine parts luck, lies and self-confidence. I had all of those in spades. But, as I let my thumb roll over the dead battery in my pocket, catching on the design added to it, I knew I had the last tenth. Somewhere, a junction box popped and the stretlights died for five streets in every direction before he could pull his gun. I looked at him, shook my head.

“I’m sorry.”

We both turned and walked off, into the darkness.