by James Riley
Fort didn’t respond as he stared at the bones. They were all different sizes, each one broken in two, clean through. All in all, it looked like the tables were covered in a grotesque jigsaw puzzle.
“We have to put them all back together?” he said, his stomach dropping to his feet. For the first time, he was glad he hadn’t eaten much at lunch.
“You don’t,” Jia told him, and brought him over to the other side of the room, where The Magic of Recuperation, and Restoring What Has Been sat on a podium much like the one in the room where he’d taken his test. “All you need to worry about for now is mastering Heal Minor Wounds, Cure Disease, and Cause Disease.”
“Right,” he said, secretly happy not to jump into bones right away. She opened the book to the first page, which now showed the Heal Minor Wounds spell again, though it had disappeared when he had last read it earlier that day. “I don’t care if it’s never been done before. I’m going to master all three. I have to.”
“Whatever you say,” Jia told him, looking doubtful. “To prove you’ve mastered them, Dr. Ambrose will ask you to cast each spell twice, usually by making you create a bandage of the spell on the second try. If you haven’t mastered it, you won’t be able to cast it twice, and that’ll be that.”
“How do you do that?” Fort asked. “How do you . . . add magic to something like a bandage?”
“We’ll get to that, once you know the spells,” Jia said. “No use wasting time with it unless you’ve got the spells permanently in your head. It won’t work until then anyway. But don’t worry about that part. It’s pretty simple in comparison.”
‘Simple in comparison’ was the first positive thing he’d heard all day. “Got it,” he said, then thought of something. “Do you think Dr. Ambrose would be more impressed if I mastered one more powerful spell, rather than three weaker ones?” Anything that could give him a chance here was worth considering.
Jia waved him forward. “Be my guest.”
Fort stepped past her and tried to flip forward to the more powerful magic, but the pages wouldn’t move beyond the first few. It was as if the book was made from cement past the first spell, Heal Minor Wounds.
“These books were designed for teaching students,” Jia told him, flipping the pages herself, though it stopped maybe a quarter of the way in for her. “They won’t let you go past the range of your abilities. Basically it means the book doesn’t trust you yet.”
“Fine.” Fort sighed as she turned back to the page with the Heal Minor Wounds spell. “So how do I practice it?”
“Welcome to the Boneyard,” Jia said, dropping a sewing needle down on the podium next to the book. “You’re going to be bleeding a lot.”
Fort stared at the needle for a moment, not comprehending, then suddenly he almost choked on his own saliva. “Wait, what?” he said, his eyebrows shooting up. “I have to stick this through my finger?”
“I suppose, if that makes you happy,” Jia told him, then picked up the needle and pricked his index finger until a drop of blood appeared. “Or you can go the less dramatic route. A minor wound is a minor wound, Forsythe.”
“Fort,” he said, beginning to feel slightly less terrified. “You can call me Fort.”
“Right, Fort, sorry,” Jia said, grinning at his roller coaster of emotions, though she didn’t seem to be mocking him. “The spell will disappear from the book when you have it mastered, since you won’t need it anymore. It’s still there, of course, but you won’t see it. And from there on, you won’t need the spell words anymore, and you’ll be able to cast those three spells silently.”
“Perfect,” Fort said, staring at the page with the Heal Minor Wounds spell, willing it to disappear already as he ran his eyes over the spell words. “So to master it, I just have to cast it a hundred times?”
She nodded. “Several hundred times, minimum. It’s different for everyone, so it could take you over a thousand, for all I know.”
The positive feeling of the last few seconds disappeared, and for a moment, Fort agreed with everyone else that there was no way he could do this. But then he pictured one of the creatures digging its way up through his aunt’s apartment, and he forced himself to ignore the doubt. This had to happen, no matter what.
“Whatever it takes,” Fort told her, and took the pin from her.
“After you’ve mastered that spell, I’ll get you some cultures of bacteria from storage for the next two. They’re pretty weak, but they’ll qualify as a disease that you can cure. Then you can just use the Cause Disease spell to restore them, and repeat the process. That way you can work on both the disease spells at once.” She shrugged. “That’s how I did it anyway, and it went a lot faster than the way Dr. Ambrose teaches it.”
“Thanks,” he said, meaning it. “I really appreciate your help.”
She stared at him for a moment, almost looking sad. Finally, she nodded. “No problem. And for what it’s worth, I hope you succeed.”
He smiled in return, then repeated the words from the spell book to heal his finger. “Mon d’cor,” he whispered, holding his uninjured hand over his finger, and felt the same cold energy from before flow into the tip of his finger. The blood immediately absorbed back into his fingertip, and the tiny hole closed up.
“Nicely done,” Jia said, showing him the spell again. “Since we’ve only got the one book, you’re going to have to share it with me as you go. We’ll just flip it back and forth.”
And that was how they went, with Fort practicing healing his pinpricks, while Jia jumped forward to a variety of more powerful spells to practice. At least, that was what she said she was doing, but Fort had no way of proving it, since all the later pages just looked blank to him.
Even so, he was moving more slowly than she was, as she ended up waiting on him several times. While she waited, she’d share her thoughts about magic.
“It’s not that you get more powerful as you progress,” she said, slowly wiping away the remains of a sunburn on Fort’s neck with a spell. “You just learn more complex magic. The more spells you learn, the more complicated healing you’ll be able to do. You’ll be reattaching broken bones months before getting anywhere close to curing a headache. I’m still working on migraines. Brains are the hardest part to heal, because they’re so intricate.”
“Why would a headache be harder than reattaching a bone?” Fort healed his finger, letting Jia turn forward to her spell again. “One takes aspirin, the other takes months to heal.”
“You’re thinking of it scientifically, and that’s not how magic works,” she said. “At least not Healing magic. Healing is restorative, meaning it restores something to an earlier state. If you think about it that way, reattaching a leg is just putting something back where it belongs. The magic just . . . encourages the leg to become what it used to be, one complete bone. But with something like a headache, you have to be much more careful. You might cure the headache, yes, but maybe by doing so, you restore the entire brain to a point two hours ago, and lose all the memories you made since then.”
Fort’s eyes widened, the needle inches from his finger. “Healing sounds kinda dangerous.”
“That’s what those Destruction kids don’t get about it,” she said, running a hand over her arm and slowly growing a protective armor made of toughened skin. “Healing isn’t just about fixing cuts. While they’re setting things on fire, we’re learning how to build and rebuild living things.” She brought her hand back over her arm, restoring it to normal.
“So it’s a lot more complicated than it looks,” Fort said.
“This is why Dr. Ambrose spends each morning teaching us so much about medicine and how our bodies work. Without that knowledge, we can’t really perfect our magic. It’s the basis for how we cast our spells.”
By this time, other students were beginning to show up at the Boneyard too, followed by Dr. Ambrose.
“Ignore the new kid,” their teacher said, standing between Fort and the rest of the class as the studen
ts assembled at the tables of bones. “Now, today’s training is simple. You’ve all mastered bone mending, so I want to see every single bone in here healed before dinner. And just to give you added incentive, whichever table finishes last gets sent to Destruction training tomorrow.”
Several of the kids actually gasped.
“Don’t blame me,” Dr. Ambrose said to them. “Colonel Charles says he needs healers working alongside his little soldiers, since his kids keep getting injured.” She sighed loudly and theatrically. “I swear, if child services ever showed up here, it’d be a bloodbath.”
Fort looked over at Jia, wanting to ask why Healing students would participate in Destruction training, but she was concentrating on a new spell, so he went back to practicing instead. That was the most important thing, anyway. Once he’d passed Dr. Ambrose’s challenge, then he could ask all the questions he wanted.
Including why Colonel Charles wanted him here, but no one else did.
Behind him, the students sorted through the pile of bones, reattaching each pair they found that fit together. Dr. Ambrose wandered around, watching the work, but not saying much. It took Fort a few minutes to realize why: Dr. Ambrose was too old to use magic, so she wouldn’t be able to cast even the first spell in the book.
That had to be odd for a teacher, Fort thought. Usually, someone like Dr. Ambrose would have been an expert at whatever subject she’d be teaching, but here, no one really knew much about magic, and the teachers themselves couldn’t even see the spells.
That made her less of an actual teacher, and more of . . . maybe a trainer? Or just a related expert in the field, who could teach the students relevant information, but nothing about the actual magic? Did that make her feel a little powerless?
“What is this?” Dr. Ambrose said, picking up a random bone from the table. She stared at one of the students, then snapped the bone in half. “Mason, was this your doing?”
Mason nodded, looking nervous. Dr. Ambrose nodded as well. “If you’d healed a bone in a human being like that, it’d be too weak to hold the weight of your patient. The bone would need to be rebroken before being set again. Congratulations. You just won your whole table Destruction training.”
“No,” Mason whispered, glancing around at his tablemates, who seemed ready to badly heal his bones. One look from Dr. Ambrose sent them silently to the door instead. Once the door closed, they could all hear one of the boys begin to sob.
Dr. Ambrose sighed loudly, rubbing her temples. “Get used to this,” she said, not looking at her students. “By next week, Colonel Charles wants you all cycling through Destruction training. I tried to . . . I really . . . oh, forget it. I’m not your mother. Get back to work.”
- FIFTEEN -
LATER, AFTER TRAINING WAS OVER and the other students filed out, Dr. Ambrose waved Fort and Jia over to her desk.
“You two can use the book in the Viewing Room until it’s locked down tonight before dinner, Jia,” she said, taking off her glasses and rubbing her eyes. “Just make sure he meets Dr. Oppenheimer for dinner in the officers’ mess at 1900 hours. Don’t bother killing yourself trying to help him, though. There’s no way he’s going to master one spell, let alone three.”
Fort swallowed his protest as Jia nodded and picked up the book from the podium, then led Fort out. “See you tomorrow,” Fort told his teacher, since it felt weird to just leave without a good-bye.
“Ugh, that sounds like a threat,” Dr. Ambrose said with a sigh.
Jia brought him to the elevator, where they waited in silence. Finally, the doors opened, and Fort almost leaped inside, anxiously shifting back and forth until the doors closed. Finally they did, and all the questions Fort had been holding in came flooding out like a dam breaking.
“What’s Destruction training? Why is everyone so afraid of it? Do people get hurt? Why would they let that happen? I thought we were too young to actually fight, and that’s why we were making bandages—”
Jia took a step back from his onslaught, holding up her hands. “Whoa. Okay. Wow. Slow down. One at a time.”
The elevator opened again, letting them out on the first floor. Fort kept quiet as they walked through the offices to where he’d first had his testing earlier that morning, conscious of the soldiers’ eyes on him. When they reached the testing room, what Dr. Ambrose had called the Viewing Room, it was empty, meaning Fort could get back to the questions.
“So, Destruction training?”
Jia sighed. She placed the book on the podium next to the Destruction magic book, then sat down in front of both. “We learn to heal by studying anatomy and practicing our spells. Destruction students practice through . . . well, combat. Once you know how to cast a magic missile, there’s not much you need to learn in terms of specialization, like with Healing. So they learn to fight, usually against each other. It’s pretty brutal.”
“They don’t actually attack each other, do they?” Fort asked.
“Well, do you know paintball?”
“Yeah,” Fort said. “That’s where you shoot paint pellets instead of bullets at each other?”
Jia nodded. “Imagine that, but with fireballs, or magic missiles, or lightning. The Destruction students either split into teams, or go every student for themselves, and try to hit each other with their spells. They have protective gear on, but someone’s always getting injured. That’s why Colonel Charles wants us there, for quick healing. Whenever someone gets hit in an unprotected area, a Healing student has to rush in and heal the player up. Only hits on protected areas count in their training, so we have to make sure whoever got hit can still train.”
Fort paused, several thoughts passing through his mind at once. Their training was that dangerous? But of course it would be, if they were using real magic against each other. Rachel had thrown him across the room without even trying, when she thought he was attacking Dr. Opps.
But why would the teachers be forcing the Healing students to do this? Or even allow it in the first place? What happened if a healer got hit while training was happening?
Right. Combat experience. Which made sense, if Colonel Charles was trying to teach his students how to fight for real. And if that was the case, all the more reason Destruction was where Fort needed to be.
“So, I’m guessing it’s okay to hit the healers, too,” he said.
Jia nodded. “The Destruction kids think it’s funny to aim for us. Most of them are jerks, honestly. The teachers don’t stop them either, ’cause they think it’s better training.”
“Maybe they should give us Destruction magic too,” Fort said, his mind racing with possibilities. “That’d make it a bit more even.”
“No one studies two books at once,” Jia told him. “It’d be like learning two foreign languages at the same time. If you mixed up a spell somehow, combined Destruction and Healing . . .” She shuddered.
Just because no one had yet didn’t mean it couldn’t happen. “Sounds like I should get back to mastering these spells, then,” Fort said, and walked over to where Jia was sitting. She didn’t move as he opened the Healing book and took out his sewing needle.
For a few hours, he worked at mastering the Heal Minor Wounds spell in silence while Jia read a medical handbook she’d brought. Every so often he’d think of a new question to ask her, but held back, as he really needed to concentrate on learning the spells.
As for the Destruction training, it did sound intense and pretty dangerous, but if it could prepare him for what he needed to do, then he was happy to participate. Maybe if he volunteered to take another student’s place, Dr. Ambrose would take pity on him and knock the spells he needed to master down to two?
Ha, right, like she’d care about her students at all.
“Why are you here, anyway?” Jia said out of nowhere, startling Fort from his thoughts. “I mean, I get it, the idea of learning magic is amazing. But I know what happened to you in D.C. Everyone here does. I’d think that’d make you want to get as far from this stuff as
possible.”
Fort bit his lip, not sure what to say. I want to keep what happened to me from happening to anyone else, especially my aunt. I want justice for my father. And I want to watch that monster suffer. To make it feel like I felt. To make it afraid.
“I don’t really have a choice,” he said finally. “I don’t have much of a home to go back to. Both my parents are . . . gone. And my only family is my aunt, who can’t afford to take care of me at all. I think this is it for me.”
Jia nodded. “I don’t think any of us really had a choice. My dad was from a small village in mainland China, near to where the Healing book was found, actually. He had left to study theoretical physics, and met my mother, who was becoming a chemist. But when the book was discovered, the government brought him in because they could send him to the site without bringing up too many questions with the locals. And then after a few years, we were sent here, with the Healing book, to combine research with the scientists here.”
Wow. She’d left her entire country behind? “How old were you?” Fort asked.
“Only three,” she said. “I hardly remember it anymore. We’ve never been back, because my father refuses to return until he figures out the mystery of the books.” She flashed a small smile. “He doesn’t believe there’s any such thing as magic. He keeps quoting some science fiction writer, saying, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,’ so the books must be some kind of source code to the universe. He had Dr. Opps convinced for a while, but who knows now.”
Fort shrugged. “I must have missed the lesson in school about how making fireballs was just a natural thing to do.”
She raised a hand, and Fort watched as it began to glow with blue light. “All I know is that if this is science, then whoever wrote the books was thousands of years more advanced than we are.”
Fort frowned. “Has Dr. Opps discovered anything about who did write the books?”
Jia shook her head. “Just that the books are only a few thousand years old. That’s younger than the pyramids in Egypt, but no one had seen any historic evidence of them before Discovery Day. Which brings up all kinds of questions, like where did the books go for all that time? Why were they buried? Why did magic disappear at all? Why can’t adults use it, but anyone born after that day can?” She smiled again, staring off into space. “All questions my father couldn’t answer. He and my mother are off at one of the sites now, still digging for answers. Or at least, that’s my guess. Even with their security clearances, all our letters to each other are heavily censored.”