Madge let out a slow whistle. “Big group this time.”
Emon rolled his eyes and hitched his uniform pants up before slapping his hat on, and never mind that they were still indoors. “All five, boss?”
“New recruits are new recruits,” she said firmly, and tucked her graying braid back over her shoulder before marching through the door, hat properly in hand. “You. Come with me.”
The brunette with spiked hair stared blankly at Madge’s pointed finger, then swiveled her head around the dusty room with its empty desks and industrial tile floors. “Who? Are you? Why?”
“Hmm.” Lips pressed firmly together, she reconsidered briefly. “Nope. You’ll do. I’m Madge, I’m your mentor, and this is the last time you come along unquestioningly, because normally I want you to ask.”
“Ask what?”
“What’d I say about questions?” Madge tossed over her shoulder, already heading out of the stifling stale air and back into the real world.
Only her own boots squeaked on the linoleum.
“Brianna. Come on. You’ll see the others when we get back.”
“As long as we come back,” came a sullen mutter.
Madge increased her patter to match her pace. “Bathroom over there, you sure? We’ll be gone a while, okay, water bottle full? Hat? Good.”
She wrenched the door open past the sticky lock. Arizona air, hotter than Dante’d ever dreamed, blasted them in the face.
They were the only visible creatures on the hike up sandy scrub.
“I’m not used to this,” Brianna said quietly. “I’m not from around here.”
“So say we all,” Madge quipped, but the other woman didn’t get the joke. She let herself take a moment for a purely internal sigh. “We all start somewhere. You get used to it eventually.” She glanced down at the dust on her boots. “Sort of.”
The clank of a water bottle cap unscrewing carried. “Why do I get a mentor and the others don’t?”
Early questions were a good indicator. “The others get Emon. And Greg, when he’s back from leave.”
“And the extra pin on your uniform? Because you’re the boss?”
Observation was another indicator. Still, she dared not hope, not after all this time.
Instead she changed the subject. “Why’d you join? Border patrol’s a tough gig these days. Everybody hates us, no matter what side they’re on, politics or wall.”
She let the silence draw out.
“Stability,” Brianna finally offered. “I needed money. A job that won’t vanish overnight. And I heard it’s easier to transfer when you’re in the system already.”
“Wait until you hear about interdepartmental rivalry and unreasonable levels of bureaucracy,” Madge said as dryly as the dirt beneath her boots. “It’s kept me here for a blissful eighteen years. Two more, and it’ll be time to move on.”
“To what?” Brianna asked.
Madge stopped just before they crested the slope. “That’s what I’m about to show you. Come on. It’s a beautiful view.”
The final two steps brought a dazzling desert vista into sight, with hints of ochre streaking amongst more common browns and subtle yellows, shadowed by stone and pebble and sage.
And in the middle, a glowing violet portal. Madge felt her core tense as she studied Brianna with peripheral vision.
“What the…what is that thing?”
Tears sprang into her eyes. “That, apprentice, is what I hoped you could see that the others couldn’t.” Madge tapped her extra badge, a capital letter M. “This stands for magic, because the government is boring. You’re not hallucinating.”
“I’m not sure that answered my question.”
“It’s the portal,” she said softly. “The real reason we’re here. And in two more years, when you’re ready, I go through it and back home.”
“Aliens?” The word was hesitant. “Like that movie?”
Madge gestured toward a rock, half shaded by a scraggly dead tree. “I suppose, though it’s more like fantasy that sci-fi…let me tell you properly.”
The women found semi-comfortable seats on the overly warmed boulder and stared toward the portal with its spinning edges, where threads of red flickered.
“It all started when border patrol recruited its first witch…”
***
Thanks for the inspiration, nother Mike! When they started recruiting witches for the border patrol, things got magical…
My prompt went to Padre – “Have you ever heard the adage, ‘suffer in silence’? It applies to this situation, my friend.”
