The Moon’s Choice

Chapter 9. Refraction

By lunchtime, I had almost convinced myself that the day intended to limit itself to ordinary problems.

After the morning in the subway, even being seventeen minutes late, a message from the repair shop about my car, two meetings, and nearly an hour spent untangling a report in which someone had managed to misplace a sum comparable to the annual budget of a small department all felt strangely manageable. No one had called me the Moon, the walls remained loyal to basic architectural principles, and the pendant had rested quietly beneath my blouse since morning without offering a single reminder of its supernatural abilities.

Normal life was profoundly underrated.

I had just sent off the corrected report when a message from the director appeared on my screen.

Come by when you’re free.

My next meeting was in twenty minutes, so there was little point in postponing the conversation.

His office was at the end of the corridor behind a glass partition. When I walked in, he was finishing a phone call and gestured for me to sit.

I stayed standing.

“If this won’t take long, I have a meeting in twenty minutes.”

He set the phone down and looked at me with his usual calm smile.

He was an attractive man, polished, self-assured, and perfectly aware of the impression he made. Over the past few months, his interest in me had gradually stopped looking entirely professional, although until now he had not crossed the boundary I had made reasonably clear.

“It won’t take long. A division head position is opening up at the end of the month, and I want to offer it to you.”

That made me sit down.

“I wasn’t expecting that.”

“Why not? You have the strongest results in the department, people listen to you, and there are almost never problems with your clients. You outgrew your current role a while ago.”

It was good to hear.

More importantly, it was fair.

“Send me the terms and I’ll take a look.”

“I will. But first, have dinner with me tonight.”

For several seconds, I said nothing.

The transition had been so smooth that I disliked it immediately.

“If this is a business dinner, we can discuss it separately. If it’s personal, I’ll decline.”

His eyebrows lifted slightly. “You’re not even going to ask where?”

“The location won’t change my answer.”

His smile lost a little of its confidence.

“Do you always separate everything this neatly?”

“When work is involved, I try to.”

He leaned back in his chair.

“Alice, I’m not tying one thing to the other.”

“Good. Then there’s no problem. Email me the details of the position, and I’ll simply decline the dinner.”

He studied my face for a few moments before giving a short nod.

“All right.”

Most of my irritation faded. I had not liked the way he had framed the conversation, but I had no intention of turning an awkward invitation into a catastrophe either.

I stood and headed for the door.

“Alice, wait.”

I turned. He had already come around the desk.

“I didn’t mean to put you in an uncomfortable position.”

“Then let’s consider it avoided. Just don’t mix this with work again.”

He sighed, not quite annoyed.

“Sometimes you’re difficult to talk to.”

“At least I’m usually clear.”

This time he laughed, and the remaining tension finally eased. I had already reached for the door handle when he extended a hand toward me. Perhaps he meant to stop me, touch my shoulder, or simply keep me there for another second.

I never found out.

The pendant burned against my skin.

Not the gradual warmth I had learned to associate with approaching magic. This was sudden and sharp enough to steal my breath.

I jerked back.

The director froze with his hand still raised.

“Alice?”

A silver line appeared on the glass wall behind him.

For one instant, I thought the glass was cracking, but the line crossed the metal frame and kept moving through open air. A second line appeared beside it, then a third.

The office shuddered, as though I were looking at it through water.

“What the—”

His voice stretched and receded.

The desk drifted sideways. The walls lost their angles. The ceiling lights lengthened into silver streaks. I reached for the door handle, but my fingers closed on empty air.

The door was gone.

My living room was appearing in its place.

First the couch. Then the window, the edge of the table, the throw blanket I had left carelessly over the armrest that morning.

I was looking into my own apartment from inside the director’s office.

It was several miles away.

And at the same time, directly in front of me.

“Alice!”

I turned toward his voice.

He was still standing close, but silver haze now moved between us. His face showed through the window of my living room; the office desk intersected with the couch; the glass partition dissolved into the familiar wall of my apartment.

The two spaces were folding into one another, and for the first time I could physically feel distance itself disappearing.

The pendant flared again.

No doorway opened between the two places.

Space simply folded, like a sheet of paper bringing two distant points suddenly together.

Something pulled me forward.

The floor vanished beneath my feet. I threw out my hands and struck one knee hard, but the surface beneath my palms was no longer office flooring.

It was smooth wood.

For several seconds, I stayed exactly where I was.

Then I slowly raised my head.

My couch stood in front of me. The same throw lay over the armrest. The neighboring building was visible through the window, and beside the coffee machine sat the cup I had meant to put away that morning and, predictably, forgotten.

I was home.

I was still wearing my work clothes. My ID badge hung from my neck, my bag had somehow stayed on my shoulder, and my phone was still clenched in my hand.

The screen read 1:47 p.m.

A minute ago, I had been standing in the director’s office.

Now I was sitting on the floor of my own living room several miles away.

“All right,” I said aloud, mildly surprised to find that my voice sounded perfectly normal.

Apparently, my brain had simply refused to process one more emergency.

I took the bag off my shoulder, set it beside me, and pulled the pendant out from beneath my blouse. The silver crescent had already gone completely cold and lay in my palm with the innocent composure of an object that had spent the past few minutes doing absolutely nothing suspicious.

“Very convenient,” I informed it. “First you move me from my office to my apartment by methods unknown, then you sit there pretending you had nothing to do with it.”

The pendant wisely remained silent.

“Though at this point, even that barely qualifies as surprising.”

Something scratched softly against the floor behind me.

I turned.

A small creature sat near the door.

For several seconds, my mind made a serious attempt to fit what I was seeing into something familiar. The size was right. The location too; this was exactly where my cat usually liked to sit.

What stopped me completely were the eyes.

I knew that look.

“Cat?”

The creature blinked.

So familiarly that I rose slowly from the floor and looked more closely.

It was definitely not a cat.

A sleek body was covered in silver scales that caught the daylight softly. Around the eyes and along the fine membranes of the folded wings, a faint greenish sheen appeared and disappeared with the movement of the light. A long tail rested along the floor, ending in a narrow pointed tip, and the dark claws on its feet looked like a persuasive reason not to test any of this by touch.

And yet the expression was exactly the same.

It was the look my cat gave me whenever I spent five minutes searching for a phone I was already holding.

We studied each other in silence.

“You’re... the cat?”

Something close to offense appeared in those familiar eyes.

I nodded slowly.

“Right. Considering the wings, that was poorly phrased.”

The creature snorted, releasing a thin stream of silver smoke from its nostrils.

Yesterday, an entirely normal black cat had been walking around my apartment—if one chose to overlook the sudden growth, the silver flashes in its eyes, and an unhealthy interest in magical jewelry.

Today, a real silver dragon the size of a large cat was sitting in its place.

After a man from another world, an ancient hall appearing in the middle of the subway, and an instantaneous journey across several miles, this particular detail somehow became the final straw.

I sank onto the edge of the couch, still staring at the creature in front of me. “So all this time you were…” The sentence died on its own as another, rather obvious problem finally occurred to me. I looked at her more carefully. “Or should that be she?”

One of the dragon’s wings twitched with what looked suspiciously like irritation.

“Wonderful. I don’t even know that much.”

She gave another impatient snort, clearly unwilling to make the situation any easier, and I rubbed a hand over my face. After a man from another world, a castle appearing through a subway station, and an unscheduled journey across several miles, there was surely only one remaining way for the day to become more absurd.

“Please don’t tell me you can talk.”

“I can.”

For a moment, I simply stared at her. The voice was female, low and slightly husky, and so perfectly clear that calling it a hallucination would have required considerably more imagination than accepting the obvious.

The dragon, apparently satisfied that she had finally made her point, wrapped her tail neatly around her feet and regarded me with the same infuriating composure she had possessed as a cat.

“There was simply no reason to before.”