One summer dawn, as Sol sizzled the stone of the walkways on campus, a cluster of Secondae students came together under the sun that filtered through the purple, blue and red petals on the floralwoods above, even though it was the break between exams and a new semester.

Each girl carried a whole pile of textual references in strong arms. A link portal shared by Amafu Lizulu and Inyanga Numbia dropped the two off at their designated meeting point. Their new friend Sabra Abrams jogged over as if she has been out for a run on campus since before sun up. Popping into existence, Storm Gloriam sped over. Yǔyún Mingxia hopped out of her Ma's car, racing to the circle.

Five girls circled around ad-Dafira Hall to the back by the dumpsters and dropped down, spreading textbooks and airpages of notes on the hard ground. As if searching for any last minute ideas, fixes, or breakthroughs, Sabra, Storm and Amafu kneeled down and dug through the books. Standing over the others, Inyanga passed her eyes down an airpage in her own handwriting and muttered instructions to Mingxia, who knelt over a thick book she wasn't looking at and held her gnomon high, glaring at it with an intense focus that just might help with her spellcasting.

Perhaps a concentration great enough might shape the illegal tracing spell into an ideal protecting form; perhaps the stars will hear her prayer.

Three times Mingxia cast the spell, whispering, "Cantio volo incantare et non possunt capi. Absconde me." Once she cast it on herself, once on Capo Storm, and once on Militis Sabra.

Leveling her eyes on them, she reminded, "Just in case. If possible, leave the spellcasting to me."

"I know the orders. I gave them," Storm hushed back, and she and Sabra followed Mingxia, creeping through a link she conjured into Local Area News 10, Live to You from the Shade. The link dissipated, leaving Capi Amafu and Inyanga behind on campus.

Crawling low through the studio set, Sabra, Storm, and Mingxia bowed behind a table to get out of glaring spotlight. A weather magician reporting on the Shade was in the middle of saying, live on air, that nothing could be done about the overcast sky that had covered the Shade neighborhood all summer, even though sun bathed the rest of Soliara City in nourishing rays from rise to set.

Smiling wide with red lips to punctuate the good news, Soileil Meena promised, "Shade residents can expect a respite from the clouds at the end of Iunius."

She didn't say how long the respite would be, how many days or mere hours the Shade would get its turn in the sun. Beaming with a suntanned face at her viewers, Soleil made a shallow promise she had weeks to get out of.

Easily within line of sight, Mingxia readied their censoring incantation to place it on this newscaster, Inyanga's airpage of instructions clasped before her.

Last week Inyanga had caught the weather magician in a lie. The Secondae For Open Secrets met under a soundproofing spell in the basement of a cafe downtown, and with blue light flickering, its snaps occassionaly applauding her words, Inyanga's amplified voice told the crowd, "Soileil is always lying about magic running out. She is always fearmongering about how if magic ran out, Constellation would be prevented from casting its weather modification spells. Yes, if the company's weather control spells stopped suddenly, the city would storm and hail, and disastrous weather patterns would lead to flooding, hurricanes, and far worse skies than the century of cloud obscuration afflicting the Shade.

"Yet we, the Secondae for Open Secrets, have come to the scientific consensus that such a climate disaster can only happen if the company allows it to happen. Constellation gives Soliara the power to control the environment, and only Constellation can take it away. The supply of stellar energy cannot run out. Nor can magic hit peak traffic, or snag, run dry, or trickle, or slow at a bottle neck. The studies conducted by this independent research group all arrive at the same conclusion: the newscasters are lying not about the effects of halting weather modification spells, but about the cause of such a cessation."

Inyanga had paced the stage. "Soleil Meena has been lying about the party responsible for any interruption of the capital's bonny, ideal clime. If a climate disaster were to occur, it would be Constellation's failure. The evidence supporting our hypothesis has shown that the company is full of shit regarding the possibility of magic running dry for even a second."

Applause broke out in the snaps of real fingers, occasionally accompanied by the snaps of the soundproofing web, and a few loud laughs had broken out too.

"Their continued fabrication of a story about magic running out has led the citizens of Soliara, the consumer, to agree that it's their own responsibility to prevent climate disaster.

"It's on them, they believe, to take responsibility for and prevent climate chaos, or drought, food shortage or overheating, buildings falling from the sky and an end to this era of prosperity, which would be the result of magic's being used up. Those who have less, those without licenses and magicians salaries, can't pay Constellation's high prices; they can't practice magic, and not only do they have access to fewer of Constellation's modern conveniences, they even sacrifice necessities. They go without in order to afford things like a magical education for their offspring. Some can't even afford a color subscription to replace the pigmentation loss from eternal life, and every year some thousand non-magicians default on immortality payments and must grow old and die.

"All because of a tightly controlled secret and a tightly controlled resource."

Her voice lowered a little for the next phase of her speech. "One of my grandparens lost eternal life in this way. Rei Numbia, my biological progenitor. The family couldn't afford the immortality fees for their baby daughter and two parens, so for that child, my Umama, to live, they defaulted on Rei's immortal life fees, and he passed from this world. We all know someone who has passed due to an inequality based on a lie. And if you don't," her eyes glazed across the crowd without resting particularly long on a certain Gloriam standing in the front row, or the Satiri on a stool at the back wall, or the two Solari siblings — two, imagine the immortality fees their parens must pay every month for two girls — "You will see those at risk if you take an omnibus to the Shade, where those grayscale souls working without a magic license let their color subscriptions go in order to survive another payment cycle."

In the news studio, Mingxia watched as Soleil gleefully seemed unable to resist hinting what would happen when magic ran out.

As if it were a joy to remind people to be afraid.

Soleil stuck to the impact on weather, being a weather reporter, but underneath slithered other fears. Ones every Soliari had heard on the hora septa news, and weaved into breaking news stories, and at the Wake Up Shade Crack of Crepesculum Show, and on the dies Solis special weekend report. The security systems that prevent a magician (or unlicensed criminal) from linking into your house at night would fail (if magic ran out). The water in the pipes would stop flowing (if magic ran out). Food security would fail (if magic ran out) and the poor would go hungry. No omnibus transportation to work. No instant teleportation for when you needed to be somewhere in an instant. Motos would cease flight.

Oh, and immortality spells, those would fail too. The Soliari people would return to the natural cycle of life and death, and when their bodies grew old, they would die — if they made it that far in a world without magical food production with a crashing economy as every magical job in every magical industry faded away.

As Mingxia watched the performance, and how Soleil's eyes glistened, jeweled shimmering shadow on her lids shining in the spotlight behind blackest black lashes, the real tragedy, Mingxia thought, was that it didn't need to be this way.

She had recently said as much in a circle of a Secondae for Open Secrets working group breakout. "Consumer revolution or no, Constellation wouldn't stop selling magic, the Soliari wouldn't cease paying for a link through which to watch the news, the economy wouldn't fall to pieces, the people would keep on buying and keep on consuming. All the lie does is reinforce a hierarchy between licensed magicians and the rest. If everyone could go to Magician's College . . . then everyone could be a magician. Everyone could cast spells, conjure sustenance, teleport to work, perform productively with incantations, access mental health spells, spend the time they save on travel and manual labor with their family, and stop lying awake at night wondering how they were going to pay for next month's fees."

No reason for the division ever revealed itself to the Secondae research team except that a certain few liked it that way. Armed with an anti-anxiety spell from a maestra, Mingxia had gone on and on gabbing. "A certain few like going to dine at a levitating cafe without having to make a reservation or wait in a line, and look down at the non-magicians below who would never achieve all that they had. A few Solaris and Meenas and Gloriams like it like that."

Any remaining doubts Mingxia had faded as she watched the fearmongering up close, not through a link but just feet away. She saw Soleil was not a towering godesslike paragon of successful newsanchorship, but a mere human. And she was wrong. She was capable of making mistakes just like anyone, and on this question, she was wrong. What she was doing was wrong. It propped up an unfair system using deceit — and it did not need to be this way.

Hiding behind a row of seated studio executives, Mingxia began to recite an incantation. She commanded the stars to stop this woman from ever even insinuating that magic could run out ever again.

Guiding her along to a perfect spell, the stars didn't seem to have any problem with that.

You might be wondering, in this allegory, what is magic? Magic is education. It's knowledge. It's skills training and research capability and critical thinking. It's a stepping stone to lift everyone up to their greatest potential, because we are all capable of learning, wherever we are in this life. It's facts and truth and scientific consensus.

Magic does not run out. It's infinite. It can only grow. And being infinite, we should share it with everyone, and give every single person the chance to learn and grow, gain skills for employment, and become informed to make wise choices.

This is a story for every kid who kept asking "Why?" For change to come it takes a lot of bravery. Change scares a lot of people. It means taking a risk that for every person you help, you might create a harm. For systems to change, a shift will occur, and those who had a lot might lose something. It will take courage to tamper with a system that creates great prosperity and wealth for some but not all. Many voices will tell you how much there is to fear. There will be constant reminders of everything that could go wrong and every way that people could be hurt by change. Yet I think we're coming to a point collectively where we understand that it's becoming necessary for the privileged to sacrifice something, because we can't go on like this. We can't continue like this forever. We need equality now. We needed equality yesterday, and ten years ago, and a century ago. We can't go on letting a single person slip through the cracks. Human life is worth fighting for, and worth making sacrifices for. We are all worth fighting for.

Social mobility is only possible if we raise up everyone to a standard where they can reach for education and opportunity. We need a safety net to hold us all up, and we need to raise the net to a point no one is suffering without basic needs of housing, food, and employment.

Don't let them tell us we can't do that without scary earthshaking consequences. It's not true. We can give a little so everyone can have more.

Oh, and you may have picked up on some environmental themes here. If we don't face our role in the planet's changing climate, there won't be a home for any of us, and as individuals and consumers we can all have an impact, consuming less and creating less waste, exchanging cars for bicycles and turning off lights and faucets, but a large impact on our climate is made by large polluters, and until we demand that green industries grow and the largest polluters make sustainable changes, it won't be enough. If climate change doesn't sound real to you, do it for the air we all breathe and the water we all drink. We all deserve healthy bodies and clean air and water. Let's all demand it.

Thank you to everyone who came this far along with me. Opinions are welcome and as always I am open to conversations and honest thought. Be well, all.