by Olivie Blake
He ignored the pins and needles in the nerves that pricked up the length of his neck, shoving aside the pinch that reverberated upwards, thudding, to his head. A headache; marvelous. Possibly he was dehydrated, too. But stopping now would mean having to start up again later, and Nico loathed a task unfinished. Call it hyper-focus, but his fixations were what they were.
Finding no further bird-nests or clumps, Nico set himself to the task of metallurgy, purifying the toxicities that were the result of erosion over time. Briefly he became aware of something nagging at his memory, an old half-attended lecture; magic cannot be produced from nothing much as the case with energy there is no difference Mr de Varona would you be so kind as to lend us your attention please, and then there was an echo of laughter as Nico must have replied irreverently and yes, fine, this unit of study belonged to the principles of time, didn’t it? The inconvenience of knowing his mind had tucked away things for future use, which were in fact too late, because the truth of the matter—that Nico was a mere human currently trying to power the regeneration of a physical structure vastly more sizable than himself—was hardly helpful now that he’d started. He felt the rumble of the ground beneath him; something else slipping out from his control. He may have miscalculated the velocity at which this house would drain him, greedily suckling at what he had intended to carefully measure out. He’d cut himself open too widely, bleeding magic without being able to keep pace or cauterize the wound.
Hm. What to do, at this point? Keep going was the only answer Nico had ever known. Failure, stopping, ceasing to be or to do was never an option. He gritted his teeth, shivering with a chill or a shudder of power that left him like an expulsive, painful sneeze. Ouch, fuck, bless you, the sort of burst that could ultimately break a rib or burst a blood vessel, which most people were not aware a sneeze could do. Funny how that worked; the innocent fragility of being human. There were so many ways to break and so few of them heroic or noble.
At least Libby could use his eulogy as a posthumous lecture, or so he assumed. “Nicolás Ferrer de Varona was an idiot,” she would say, “an idiot who never believed he had limits despite being heartily assured so by me, and did you know it was possible to die from overexertion? He knew, of course, because I told him so plenty of times, but, surprise surprise, he never listened—”
“Varona.” He heard Libby’s voice from somewhere in the pit of his stomach, the chatter of his teeth limiting him to nothing more than a grunt in reply. “Jesus Christ.”
She sounded as disapproving as she always did, so there was no telling whether she was real or imagined. The pounding in Nico’s head was deafening now, the ache from his shoulders to his neck enough to blind him with the pressure between his eyes, behind his sinuses. He could feel the fabric of his shirt being peeled from his chest and stomach, probably soaked through with sweat, but there was no stopping, not now, and why waste it? He had fixed the cystic areas of magical build-up and rot, and so turned his attention to the vacancies and gaps.
He could feel himself being dragged toward heat, waves of it unevenly covering him through flickers of what must have been flame. The so-called ‘great room’—the room for which there was a drawing room to begin with—had a hearth, so presumably Libby, if she were actually there and not merely in his imagination, was doing her damndest to keep him from a chill. She must have had plans to sweat out the fever of his effort, which was a lovely thought, all things considered, but possibly insufficient. Worst case, it would be no different from the bandages Nico was currently affixing to the house’s decay; makeshift decoration to slow an eventual demise.
But of course he was only being dramatic. He was not going to die.
“You insufferable manchild. You idiot prince.” Her fondest derivative for him, or at least her most frequent. So much so it felt like something he may have accidentally colonized and put to use. “You are not going to do something so utterly unforgivable as to waste your talent and die, I won’t have it,” Libby informed him, jerking his shoulders upright.
He would have mumbled I know that Rhodes shut up had he not been busy focusing on the task of not dying, and more specifically, on aiming what was currently oozing out of him, which was probably something he needed to survive.
“You deplorable little Philistine,” Libby said. “What on earth were you thinking? No, don’t answer that,” she grumbled, shoving him none-too-gently so that his back rested against something hard, like the leg of a Victorian chair. “Just tell me what you’re doing so I can help you—even though I ought to defenestrate you from that window instead,” she muttered in an afterthought, ostensibly to herself.
Nico grunted something in response, because what remained to be done would be exceedingly draining and, at the moment, impossible to explain in words. Nearly everything that could be sealed or reinforced had been sealed and reinforced, and all that remained were the areas of decomposition, spoiled and thin and requiring less a bandage than an amputation, reconstruction from the inside out. Reversing damage, asking chaos to be structure, was enough to sap him completely, wringing out what little remained. He could feel it in the convulsions of his intestines, the way magic was now being taken from his kidneys, his heart, his lungs.
“You can’t just give yourself away like this,” Libby scolded, ever the admonishing schoolmarm, but then she had taken his hand gruffly and laced it with hers. “Just show me.”
Most likely the moment she touched him she could already feel the direction his power had taken. They’d had a knack for it from the beginning, a way of becoming the other’s beginning and end. They typically declined to do so, of course, because it was invasive. Because him using her or her using him was like temporarily trading limbs, swapping joints. For the rest of the day he would feel like he was lifting Libby’s hand instead of his own or bending Libby’s knee to take a step, and he knew she felt the same way. He would look up to catch her eye and she would grimace like he had taken something from her, and yes, whatever she’d taken from him was equal in value as what she’d had before, and it wasn’t as if either of them had done it on purpose—but still, she was missing something that he now possessed, and vice versa.
They struggled to properly disentwine, or worse. They each became strange, molded copies of the other.
It was only when they had started using their magic to replicate the effects of space that the sense of borrowed power and stolen limbs had stopped feeling like a gruesome, halfhearted sex act and more like true synchronicity. There was a harmony to it when they were reaching together, like the gratified spreading of a broader pair of wings. Difficult to explain what the difference was, except for the sensation of having finally uncovered a proper use, an ideal purpose. They were still inhumanly powerful, yes, but they had been without aim, without direction, so that alone the use of their abilities felt retroactively clumsier, less refined. Combined it was purified and focused, untarnished and distilled.
Nico took a breath without strain for the first time in several minutes and registered with private relief that the joining of Libby’s power with his own had done more than simply alleviate his task. It left him in a cleaner, more precise stream, less the leak that Tristan might have called it (and that Nico would not have called it before if not for realizing how un-leak-like it now seemed to be) and more sleek, contoured and smooth.
Within minutes the pipes had been fixed. Seconds later the wards pulsed without disruption. Nico spent what power remained on a thorough sweep of their spherical perimeter, which left him in an unsteady rush. No faults this time, no little skips of error. No flaws to snag on the wave of his surveillance.
Libby released him and shifted, dragging slightly as she moved.
“Why?” she said after a moment.
Nico opened his eyes with difficulty, the bleary image of her manifesting at his side. The red of the walls with its gold accents seemed to blur beside her hair, the silhouette of her closed eyes. She wasn’t fully exhausted, not like he was, but there ha
d definitely been a toll. She had shouldered some of his burden for him.
“I’m sorry.” He managed to croak it out, rasped and insufficient though it was.
“You’d better be.” Libby slid a hand to the floor, pressing her palm flat against it. “Still a little tremor,” she noted.
“Is that—” Fuck, his mouth was unbearably dry. “Is that what brought you here? A tremor?”
“Yes.”
Of course it was. She’d make a big fuss of it, naturally, of the disruption he’d caused and how little control he possessed over his abilities, when really, she was the only one who could feel it. Per usual it would be his fault, and inevitably she would lord it over—
“You are unfairly talented. Upsettingly good,” Libby sighed with a tactile hum of envy, and then her eyes fluttered open. “Doing that much magic…” She twisted around to look at him, fixing him with a scrutinizing glance. “I would never have attempted it alone.”
“I shouldn’t have attempted it alone.” No point denying that now.
“Yes, but you almost managed it. You might have done fine without me.”
“‘Almost’ and ‘might have’ wouldn’t count for much if I’d been wrong.”
“True, but still.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t as if you didn’t know perfectly well I’d come.”
Nico opened his mouth to argue that of course he’d known no such thing, but on second thought, he wondered if she wasn’t a little bit right about that. There was a safety net, whether he acknowledged it to her or not, when she was around. He couldn’t get away with much without her noticing, and surely he’d known that on some level, consciously or otherwise.
“Thank you,” he said, or possibly mumbled.
She looked pleased, or smug.
“Why were you repairing the house on your own?” she said, briskly shoving their repulsive moment of benevolence aside. “Reina could have helped you,” she added as an afterthought.
Nico found it miraculously tactful that she had not suggested herself, so as a reward, he offered, “If I were going to ask someone for help, Rhodes, it would have been you.”
“Empty words, Varona,” was her reply, equally accommodating. “You never ask anyone for help.”
“Still, it’s true.”
She rolled her eyes, leaning over to press a thumb to the pulse at his wrist. “Slow,” she observed.
“I’m tired.”
“Anything else?”
“Headache.”
“Drink water.”
“Yes,” he growled, “I fucking know that, Rhodes—”
“Any aches? Swelling?”
“Yes, yes, and yes; yes to all of it—”
“You should probably sleep,” she commented blandly.
“For fuck’s sake, I just said I—”
“Why?” she interrupted, and though Nico was exhausted, though he did not want the argument that was sure to follow and though he would have very much preferred to crawl into his bed and sleep for at least the next twelve hours, he still said the one thing he knew she would not accept.
“I can’t tell you.”
His voice sounded dull, even to him.
Predictably, Libby said nothing. He could feel the swell of her tension beside him, anxiety curling defensively around her like Reina’s arms had wrapped around the book. Something of her own to protect, to keep safe, to keep hidden.
Much as he hated to admit it, Nico resented himself most when he made her feel small.
“Just… please don’t make me tell you,” he amended raggedly, hoping the last-ditch effort at sincerity might persuade her not to suffer more.
She was quiet for a moment.
“You said it was an alliance,” she said.
“It is.” And it was. “It’s an alliance, Rhodes, I promise. I meant what I said.”
“So if you need help…?”
“You,” Nico assured her quickly. “I’ll come to you.”
“And if I need anything?”
She was primly juvenile, tit-for-tat. For once, though, he didn’t begrudge her that.
“Me,” he confirmed, relieved to be able to offer something. “I’ve got you, Rhodes. From here on, I swear.”
“You’d better.” She sounded satisfied with that, or at the very least relieved. “You owe me big time after this little jaunt of idiocy.”
“I knew you’d eventually get self-righteous about it.” He added a little groan, just to maintain some semblance of decorum. No need to frighten either of them with too brisk a departure from their usual animosity.
“Still,” she sighed. “You’d tell me if you were in any real danger?”
“We’re not anymore.”
“That’s not an answer, Varona.”
“Fine, yes.” Another groan. “I’d tell you if we were, but for what’s worth, we’re not.”
“But we were?”
“Not danger, exactly. But there were some… oversights.”
“And now?”
“Check the wards yourself if you don’t believe me.”
“I already did.” She paused again anyway. “The pipes, really?”
“What, you don’t grasp the fundamentals of home ownership, Rhodes?”
“God, I hate you.”
Ah, normalcy.
“Likewise,” Nico agreed, struggling to his feet. Libby, true to form, did not attempt to help him, instead merely watching with amusement as he dragged himself upright from the foot of the chair.
Instantly, Nico suffered the swift retribution of a muscle contraction in his thigh, a stab of pain that reverberated through his leg while he struggled unsuccessfully to remain aloft, stifling a whimper.
“Charlie horse?” Libby guessed tonelessly.
“Shut up,” Nico gritted through his teeth, eyes supremely watering.
“Don’t be such a baby.”
She waved a hand and the ground slid out from beneath him, sending him sprawling forward with an unsteady lurch. The heels of his hands hit the sheets of his bed, the room tilting to deposit him fully within the walls of his bedroom until he collapsed there in a fit of throbbing limbs, not bothering to protest.
“Thanks,” Nico managed to slur into his mass of pillows, tumbling headfirst into bed without any effort to fully undress. His shirt, he realized with faint but fading awareness, remained resolutely elsewhere, probably still soaked with sweat, and worse, he still hadn’t drunk any—
Nico blinked as a glass of water surfaced pointedly atop his nightstand.
“Fucking Rhodes,” he muttered to himself.
“I heard that,” came Libby’s reply outside his door.
But by then Nico was already well on his way to sleep, dreamlessly out like a light.
PARISA
So it was not a game, then. That, or it was a highly sadistic one.
It was only in retrospect that Parisa realized Atlas and Dalton had never specified that one of the six would be sent home; only that one of the six would be eliminated in a decision made by the others. Five would choose one to go, but the conditions of their departure had never been made clear. She had thought, initially, that it was a rather arbitrary—albeit civilized—method of ensuring that only the best and most dedicated moved on.
Now, though, everything made a twisted sort of sense. Why would the world’s most exclusive society of academics ever permit one of its potential members to leave? It would be a security risk at best; even if the eliminated medeian parted amicably from the others—already a significant if—people were reliable only for being careless with information.
Only the dead kept secrets. The moment she realized it—tripping over it in Dalton’s mind—everything else fell into place.
“One of us has to die,” Parisa had said aloud, testing it out to see how it would feel against the backdrop of reality. That Dalton was still inside her at the time was a secondary concern, until he went rigid.
“What?”
“That’s why you don’t want me to los
e. You don’t want me to be the one who dies.” She pulled away to look at him. “A bit drastic, don’t you think?”
He looked neither relieved nor undone by her knowing. At best, he was resigned to it, and though he tried to pull away, she locked him in place, still processing.
“You killed someone, then.” She registered it with a blink. “Is that what you keep locked away? Your guilt?”
“You used me,” he observed tangentially, confirming his suspicions for himself.
Which was quite obviously sufficient for a yes.
“But what possible reason could there be for killing an initiate?” Parisa pressed him, uninterested for the moment in the task of soothing his ego. As if a woman could not enjoy sex and read minds at the same time! They had not even disentangled and already, Dalton was looking for ways to make her the villain of his femme fatale narrative, which was hardly something she had time or patience for. “Ridding the world of a medeian, and for what?”
Dalton drew back, fumbling with his trousers. “You’re not supposed to know about this,” he muttered. “I should have been more careful.”
Liar. He’d clearly wanted her to know it. “Perhaps we shouldn’t dwell on things we’re not supposed to know,” Parisa remarked, and Dalton slid a glance at her, the taste of her so idly sweet on his tongue that even she could see him curl his thoughts around it. “Are you going to tell me why,” she pressed him, “or should I just run off and tell the others how this is all an elaborate fight to the death?”
“That’s not what it is,” Dalton said mechanically. That was the company line, it seemed. She wondered if he were capable of delivering any other explanation, contractually or otherwise.