by Frank Morin
He had her there, and they both knew it. Connor considered the vague plan forming in his mind and decided he had to try. So he grinned and said, “I’ll be right back.”
It was a testament to how badly she wanted another affinity that she did not interfere as he raced back up the outside stair to the starting platform. He probably could’ve used planks from that platform, but instead he reached over the rail and ripped the starting slide off the ground and hefted it onto his shoulder.
“Haven’t you wrecked the Rhidorroch enough times?” Shona demanded when she saw what he was carrying.
“You sound like Frazier. I need building materials, don’t I?”
“Can’t you envision building materials to appear next to us?” She made a vague gesture to one side.
Connor shook his head. “The strongest affinities are made by materials you consider precious. I thought about grabbing some of the stone walls from the maze, but this feels even more right. Excuse me.”
He planted the slide on the ground next to the starting point of the bridge to granite. The end instantly fused to the ground, forming hinged anchor points. Bolstered by that success, Connor pushed the rest of the slide out over the chasm, dropping the far end toward the black stone basalt island.
The end of the slide clanged into place, instantly fused to the island, and the entire slide transformed into a solid wooden bridge. Connor laughed, loving that rush of wonder that came every time he discovered another trick to these mind games. That affinity came faster than any he’d created so far. He bet if Shona had pushed herself, she could have established an Agor affinity all by herself.
Shona gasped and clutched his arm, her lovely eyes wide with wonder. “I can feel basalt, Connor. Did you really do what I think you just did?”
“I guess they’ll have to start calling you Lady Agor Shona now.”
She squealed with delight, and in that moment of joy, leaned in, clearly planning to kiss him. He tensed and she caught herself inches from his face. Her expression of joy fell, and for a second she looked so crestfallen that he turned his head to one side and tapped his cheek.
“Once on the cheek is appropriate for friends, right?”
“Thank you Connor.” She kissed him lightly on the cheek. Her eyes glittered, as if she was on the verge of shedding a tear. That would have embarrassed them both, so he pretended not to see. His relationship with Shona was far too complex to read too much into anything without becoming confused and defensive again.
They seemed to have figured out how to coexist as good friends, and that was more than he’d ever hoped they could manage. Shona had played a huge role in his life over the past years, but he still hadn’t been able to figure out if that role was overall a good one.
They were both progressing in positive directions, so he decided to just focus on that.
Shona jumped up and down, laughing with delight, and that kind of honest joy was easy to celebrate. Acting like that, one could easily forget she was one of the most dangerous women on the continent.
Connor gestured toward the basalt island. “Better go over and confirm the affinity.”
She raced across, laughing, completely oblivious to the danger of possibly tumbling off. He wasn’t sure what that would do to her. She jumped up and down on the basalt island and even crouched down to kiss the black rock before rushing back to him. “This is a miracle, Connor. Thank you!”
She was acting far too much like any normal person and far too little like her conniving, calculating high lady self. On top of how she and Verena had been acting earlier, he wondered if maybe Verena and Aifric had hit Shona in the head a dozen times too many. He didn’t mind, though and decided to trust that he was seeing honest joy from her.
In good spirits, they got to work building a second bridge from basalt over to limestone, reinforcing her connection to her secondary affinity. Then they crossed to limestone and studied the tertiary islands hovering in the dimness beyond. Quartzite, slate, and soapstone floated in plain view, and a vague shape out in the fog might represent marble. Since that affinity had been broken, he hadn’t felt even that much connection to marble in any of the other minds he’d walked that day.
It took only a moment to go rip out another starting slide. A new one had appeared after he’d taken the last. It had worked so well, why risk trying any other material? Again it formed a bridge instantly.
Shona threw back her head and shouted in triumph before rushing across the bridge and sprawling across the quartzite island, arms outstretched, as if trying to hug the entire thing. “I can feel it already. You did it, Connor! This is incredible.”
As they faded from her mind to return to the real world, Connor wondered if he had just helped heal the final rift that had lingered between them. Could they really move forward without their complex history hanging over them?
And what would Verena think when she learned Connor had helped Shona become Agor?
27
There’s Always Another Secret
The next couple days passed in a blur for Connor, every waking moment consumed either in the effort of helping establish new affinities or dedicated to intense training. He pushed the limits of his affinities, focusing on new ways to mix them, hoping the combinations might surprise Queen Dreokt when he next faced her.
He could not hope to defeat her in a simple head-on elemental bash fight. She had proven her strength and experience there, but her overconfidence with her elemental affinities offered Connor a chance. If he could find ways to injure her and force her to consume healing and fleshcrafting, he hoped to finally leave her vulnerable.
Super-fracking was still one of the funnest experiences in life beside stealing rare kisses from Verena when he stopped at her workroom for brief visits, so he practiced speeding from Merkland up to Badurach Pass at least a couple times a day. He was tempted to visit the ruins of Alasdair, but decided not to. The sight would just depress him.
Super-thinking gave him plenty of ideas to test, and some proved exceptional. Combining stilling with pumice activated a super protective bubble around him that not only allowed him to remain invisible to Petralist senses and nullify elemental attacks against him, but also absorb some of that elemental energy and be strengthened by it.
Some of his ideas turned out less amazing. He tried combining stilling with limestone and managed to clobber himself with super sensory deprivation. He lost several minutes in blind, dark, cold limbo before figuring out how to undo it. He could have sworn he heard Porphyry chuckling somewhere in the distance, but didn’t have enough precious porphyry powder left to risk tapping it to investigate.
Of course he practiced with his elemental affinities too. He needed to prove he could still effectively wield them. The elementals refused to appear in his mind. All he heard were their distant voices, chiding him for not fulfilling his promises, and warning him he’d regret it.
That was unnerving, but if that proved the worst they did to interfere, he was willing to endure it. The loss of the close relationship he’d formed with them bothered him until he reminded himself that they’d been lying. Envisioning the elemental gateways as doorways in his mind still worked, although he consumed more power stone that way. For a while, he had barely consumed any stone while connecting with the elements. He also had to concentrate harder to establish a strong connection, although it still wasn’t as hard as the major instability he’d struggled with during his second ascension.
Serpentinite proved extremely interesting. Beyond its usefulness manipulating sound, mimicking voices, and panicking livestock when he unleashed a wolf’s howl, Connor sought to master how to use it as a weapon. Student Eighteen had suggested that with his third ascension, he could do some pretty amazing things with it.
She was right. Connor learned that he could increase the frequency and energy of sounds until they seemed about to explode out of control. And he accidentally hit himself with some of that super-frequency sound. It seemed to vibrate right down into
his muscles, locking them up, and for a moment he couldn’t move. It was really fun, and could be extremely useful in the coming battle. He couldn’t wait to test it on Hamish.
Connor made sure to train with strum and magnis too. The strange, fundamental powers of the natural world offered a potential advantage that he desperately needed. He figured out how to sweep his strum senses across the landscape, quickly gathering enough of a charge to unleash a lightning bolt. That was a lot of fun, but he found himself drawn even more to magnis, practicing creating invisible magnis fields around himself to deflect or manipulate strum, or even move steel objects.
He took the training to the extreme by requesting that Fyodor and his Varvakan teams set up another strum death trap like the one they hit him with during his big challenge course. When he raced into the invisible box with magnis activated, blue lightning crackled all along his forcefield, but did not penetrate. He was able to redirect it and unleash a huge lightning bolt that shattered an entire copse of trees.
That was so much fun, he planned to do it again until the farmer who lived nearby threatened to petition Shona for payment of damages if he continued to destroy his trees. Connor mollified the man by clearing an acre of timberland for him and chopping the trees into firewood.
In training with Kilian and Evander, they tried elemental wrestling matches to gauge his raw power. Both of the ancient Dawnus wielded their affinities with finesse that Connor still lacked, but he could draw upon more raw power than they could.
During one practice session with Kilian, they both targeted trees standing in an open field. Connor made sure to verify the field was owned by Shona, not another angry farmer. He incinerated his tree three seconds faster than Kilian and raised his hand in victory, feeling pretty confident.
Kilian only shrugged, then turned toward another tree. There were only a few left in the small copse in the center of the field southeast of Merkland. Kilian fracked and attacked the tree, racing around it, wielding fire like a hundred burning axes. Connor watched in astonishment as Kilian chopped the tree into a storm of kindling, then vaporized it. The entire process took half the time of the simple incineration method.
Kilian skidded to a stop nearby, grinning and rubbing imaginary specs of dirt from his hands. “You’ve got strength, Connor, but don’t forget that how much force you bring to bear matters less than knowing how to apply it for best effect.”
“You’ve been teaching me that lesson ever since Alasdair,” Connor said, feeling like he still needed to learn so much.
Kilian tapped the side of his head, his expression serious. “Make sure you remember it, because it’s the reason I’m still alive after meeting my mother on the battlefield so many times.”
Connor vowed to not only survive, but also finally defeat her.
So he turned toward one of the two remaining trees that stood proudly, oblivious to its impending fate. Connor tapped marble and summoned a wave of fire. Instead of casting it at the tree, he sucked out all the heat, letting the flames wither and die. Taking that pool of heat, he combined marble and limestone, concentrating the heat into a tiny beam, forcing it to the highest possible frequency, and unleashed the invisible death beam at the tree.
It obliterated the tree in a fantastic explosion that mushroomed up into the sky. The thunderclap ripped the air asunder, and would have probably shattered windows in Merkland if Connor hadn’t tapped serpentinite to deflect the sound waves up and away. Blinding light obscured the tree as it disintegrated under the blast, and again Connor deflected the worst of the light up into the air. The entire horizon lit up, transforming the blue sky into white brilliance.
He didn’t hit it with enough energy to break the component bits of the tree and release secondary explosions of fission like he had underground when sealing the breach the queen had made in the planet’s mantle. Up on the surface, a fission explosion would have eclipsed a Last Word bomb, and they were far too close to Merkland for that.
Connor whooped. “That was amazing!” Incredible that such a tiny death beam could wreak such damage.
Kilian actually looked impressed. “I sensed you steal the heat, but then you did something with it I didn’t quite follow.”
That moment of knowing something Kilian didn’t was a sweet joy, and Connor hesitated before responding so he could enjoy the unusual feeling to the fullest. He then outlined what he’d done and said, “I learned the trick of turning the heat into really high frequency energy when I was in that elfonnel trying to plug the hole in the mantle, I accidentally figured out how to trigger enormous explosions that Fire called fission.”
Kilian scowled. “You accidentally learned a higher form of power that I don’t think even my mother knows?”
Connor shrugged. “Yeah. I’m motivated by stress.”
Kilian laughed. “That’s an elfonnel-sized understatement.”
Laughing with him, Connor shrugged again. “Good thing, because I’m usually out-matched. My in-the-moment creativity is my only edge most of the time.”
“Let’s hope you continue to learn on the fly so quickly, but I’m glad we’ve had so much time to train this time. Fighting my mother is not something done lightly.”
“Do you really think we can beat her this time?” Connor asked seriously.
“I honestly do,” Kilian said. “You’ve already survived more encounters with her than most, but if we were planning on facing her with nothing but our skill alone, she would beat us again. For the first time we have a plan that might actually work.”
“We had a pretty good plan last time,” Connor reminded him.
Kilian gripped his shoulder. “It was, but our new plan is better. We really can win this time, but we can’t hold anything back. You will play a central role, and you now understand just how dangerous my mother is.”
A lump of dread in his throat made Connor swallow. The queen terrified him, but he didn’t have a choice. He thought of Tomas and Cameron and their noble sacrifice to give him the chance to stop her the last time. He could not hesitate, had to take the fight to her. If he failed, how many of his friends would die?
“Besides, we have something she’s never understood,” Kilian added with his trademark grin.
“What?” Connor hoped he was about to reveal another deep secret, or a mighty new mechanical, or even an epic new dessert.
“Teamwork.”
That wasn’t what he’d hoped for, and Kilian clearly read his disappointment. “Together, we can accomplish what no single one of us ever could hope to. Together, we will win the day.”
With his hope bolstered by his ancient mentor’s optimism, Connor said, “This time, she doesn’t escape.”
Kilian’s eyes filled with flickering, white-hot fire, and his expression turned grim. “No escape.”
Then he said, “Tell me about this fission thing.”
So Connor explained as best he could, relating how he had broken some of those tiny bits of matter at their most fundamental level, and the vast amount of power the resulting explosions had unleashed. “It was way more than we could ever do with diorite.”
“Really? You’re sure you’ve mastered the full measure of diorite?”
“Um, I thought I had,” Connor admitted, suddenly hoping Kilian could show him more.
His teacher gestured toward a line of trees along the edge of the field, about a hundred and fifty yards away. He took a step, leaned forward, and explosion-vomited. Instead of a firestorm that billowed into a deadly cloud of destruction, Kilian focused his fire-puke into a mouth-sized stream of compressed flames that shot across the distance like a really thick death beam. It exploded into one of the trees so hard it uprooted. The flames spread along it like grasping tendrils, snapping branches and incinerating leaves. Within seconds, the tree was reduced to a compact pile of ash.
“That’s amazing,” Connor grinned, eager to give it a try. He had thought he understood the beauty of explosive-vomiting, but now he saw there was a higher level of controll
ed puking he needed to master.
A rush of thrusters announced Hamish’s arrival. He swooped down for a landing beside Connor and pushed up his helmet, already laughing. “That was amazing!”
“If only you could join the challenge,” Connor told him. Hamish had tried to induce enhanced vomiting many times with activated stones, but had only managed some spectacular failures.
“Hey, no fair. Holding a puking contest with diorite limits the field,” Hamish protested.
“Oh, and you think you’d have a chance using traditional methods?” Kilian challenged, smiling.
“I’ve held the record as many times as Connor has,” Hamish said proudly.
Kilian laughed. “But you’ve only ever challenged each other. That’s not exactly a wide field either.”
Connor grinned. “We’ve talked about holding a puke-off too many times. It’s time to put your stomach where your mouth is.”
“What?” Kilian laughed.
“You know what he means,” Hamish grinned. “You’re on. Contact the others. I’ll get some supplies.”
He blasted into the air on full thruster and rocketed back toward Merkland. Kilian shrugged, looking nonchalant, but his eyes sparkled with tiny flecks of fire. “Let’s do it.”
28
Dig Deep and Give It Everything You’ve Ever Eaten
Connor cast his quartzite senses toward Merkland, and his super-enhanced hearing quickly bored through the tumult of sounds and zeroed in on Verena and Jean, who were discussing the deployment options for Render Flight during the battle. Using a combination of serpentinite and quartzite, he created the words he wanted and pushed them into the speakstones the girls were using.
He’d experimented a few times with the trick, and it sure made life easier. “Hey, we’re finally holding that distance puking competition we keep talking about.”
“Now?” Jean asked, sounding like she wanted to protest, but Verena piped in. “Where?”