She came in March, two weeks after his fourteenth birthday.
He heard Giovanni first. That theatrical voice in the foyer, warm and practiced, Thomas laughing at something. Then Martha's heels on the marble and Alfred opening the door wider and the sound of a jacket being shrugged off that was too big for the person wearing it.
Zee came around the corner behind her father. The boots were new. Black leather, laced up past the ankle, the kind of deliberate that meant she'd picked them herself. The jacket was denim, two sizes too big, and she wore it like she'd stolen it from someone taller, the sleeves pushed up to her wrists in crumpled folds. Her hair was longer than last time. Past her shoulders now, dark and thick, parted to the side in a way it hadn't been before. She'd changed. The hair was different and the face under it was different too, the bones coming through.
She looked at him and grinned and the gap between her front teeth was still there.
"Height check."
She walked over and stood next to him and put a flat hand from the top of his head to the top of hers, palm level, the same thing she'd done at twelve. Except at twelve she'd been taller and had been pleased about it. Her hand went back and forth twice. Exactly level.
"Even," she said.
"For now."
"For NOW? What, you think you're gonna-" She poked his shoulder. "I've been taller than you for YEARS. Years, Bruce."
"Two years."
"That's years, plural. I'm holding onto this."
He almost said something about growth charts and the fact that male puberty typically overtook female height by fifteen or sixteen. He didn't, because that sentence would have been deeply strange coming out of his mouth, and also because her hand was still on his shoulder from the poke and she hadn't moved it.
She looked at her hand. Moved it.
"Anyway. Even. For today."
"For today."
Behind her, Giovanni stood with Thomas near the coat rack. The cape, the mustache. But the silver at his temples was wider than last year and the lines around his eyes were deeper. He was watching the two of them. His eyes were warm but his jaw was set.
He muttered something in Italian. Under his breath.
Thomas said "hmm?" and Giovanni said "nothing, old friend" and Martha said something about tea and Alfred was already making it.
Across the room, Alfred set out cups. Four. China. Giovanni's ended up nearest the window seat. Alfred's back was to them but his pace hadn't changed, which with Alfred meant he was listening to everything.
Lunch was Mrs. Brennan's response to visitors. Food in quantities that implied the visit might last through the weekend. Tomato basil soup. Crustless sandwiches, Martha's preference, with the crusts in a separate bowl on the counter for Alfred, who would eat them later standing up in the pantry. The boy had discovered this habit at age six and never mentioned it.
Zee always talked. The content was different now. Less papier-mache volcanos, more magical theory, schools she might attend, a performer in Metropolis who did real magic disguised as stage magic and "everyone in the community knows but nobody says anything because honestly his card tricks are really good too."
But she was different.
The pauses were wrong. She'd be mid-sentence, looking at the soup or the window or anywhere, and then she'd look at him and the sentence would change direction. Like she'd been about to say one thing and her brain swapped it when his face was in the way.
"Dad's been teaching me phase work, which is basically- you know how matter is mostly empty space? So theoretically if you align the- anyway, it's hard. It's really hard."
The "anyway" was new. She'd never been a person who said anyway. She was a person who finished every sentence and then kept going into the next one without a breath between them.
She laughed at things that weren't quite jokes. He said something about Alfred's sandwiches being geometrically perfect and she laughed, a real laugh, but it went half a beat too long, and then she picked up her water glass and drank from it.
Giovanni watched. Alfred refilled glasses.
A pigeon landed on the windowsill during lunch, sat there looking personally aggrieved by something, and left.
The garden was cold. March cold, not January cold. The air still had winter in it but the sun was working and the light was longer, the shadows pulling toward evening but not there yet. The garden wall was old brick, chest-high, with moss on the north side and a crack near the gate that had been there since before the boy was born.
Zee stood in the center of the lawn. He sat on the bench near the wall. She shook out her hands like a pitcher warming up.
"Okay. Watch."
A stone lifted off the path.
Steady. It rose to about eye level and hung there, turning slowly. No hand gestures. She was standing with her arms at her sides and the stone floated in front of her like gravity was a suggestion it had politely declined.
"You could do that at twelve," he said.
"I know. Warm-up." She flicked her wrist and the stone shot sideways and embedded itself in the garden wall with a quiet thock. Flush with the brick. Like it had always been there. "That's new."
It was.
She opened her hand and light gathered in her palm. Gold, warm, the same light as the rabbit two years ago. But this time it shaped itself into a cat. Larger than the rabbit had been. More detailed. It sat on her palm and its tail curled around its feet and its ears moved independently, tracking sounds, and its eyes were gold and sharp and it looked at the boy and blinked slowly.
"Cat," he said.
"Upgrade from the bunny."
"I liked the bunny."
"The bunny was kid stuff." The cat stood and stretched on her palm, arching its back, and then stepped off her hand onto the air and walked across nothing toward the boy. Each paw left a faint gold print that faded a second later. It sat on his knee and there was warmth where it sat, just warmth. Like sunlight focused to a point.
"That's good, Zee."
"I know." She closed her fist and the cat dissolved into sparks that scattered and went out. "But that's not why I wanted to come outside."
She turned to the garden wall. Old brick. Moss. Crack near the gate.
"Phase displacement," she said. She put her palm flat against the brick. "Matter is mostly empty space. The atoms are there but they're far apart and if the magic goes between them- Dad calls it threading the needle."
Her hand went into the wall.
Not through. Into. Her fingers pushed past the surface of the brick the way you'd push into water, except it was still brick. The brick around her wrist was solid, unchanged. Her hand was inside the wall up to the knuckles. Then the wrist. Then halfway up her forearm. She was grinning but the grin had effort in it, the corners of her mouth pulling tight.
She yanked her hand free. Her fingers were gray with brick dust and she wiped them on her jeans.
"Three seconds," she said. "I can hold it about three seconds before the wall wins."
"The wall wins?"