The Left-Hand Path: Runaway

by Barnett,T. S.

  “Fuck,” Elton swore under his breath, and he let his head rest in his hands, not caring that the two men across the corridor were staring warily at him.

  19

  Cora woke up drowsy and uncomfortable. She shifted and felt the raw skin on her wrists under the rope binding them. Her hands were securely behind her back and felt like they had been for some time, and her tongue was numb from the oily gag in her mouth. The concrete floor scraped her cheek as she moved to sit up, and she flinched at the stiffness in her limbs. Her legs weren’t tied, so she was able to pull to her feet, though it was awkward without using her hands. She had to lean against the cold wall for support as she shimmied into standing.

  The room was completely empty, with only a heavy metal door on one wall. She approached it and checked it for any sign of weakness, but it was smooth and windowless on her side. There wasn’t even a handle. Cora bit at the cloth in her mouth, gagging on the taste of angelica oil. They weren’t going to risk letting her do any magic in here. She kicked the door, making a loud, reverberating bang in her little cell, and she tried to call out, but her voice was too muffled to make much noise. She leaned her ear against the door to listen for any response.

  She heard a heavy sound in the hall outside as a door slammed shut in the distance, and as soon as the echoing footsteps grew close to her door, she felt the touch of magic in her spine. A rough cry ripped itself from her throat as she dropped to the floor again, her world turning black as the spell touched her brain.

  She woke up back in her cell, but as soon as she sat up, her stomach lurched, and she threw herself across the tiny room just in time to vomit into the nearby toilet. She felt feverish, and her fingers trembled as she clutched the cold metal seat. She was afraid to look up and see where she was. She had a distant memory of being in a barren room—she had been a prisoner, maybe. But then she’d been back at home, with her mother screaming at her, laughing at her attempts to prove that she really could do magic. She had reached out her hands, said the spells she knew by heart, but nothing had happened. Nathan was there, shaking his head and turning her away when she tried to run to him. Then he was an old man, hunched in front of his television and telling her that there was no such thing as magic. She had been at work, standing timid and voiceless as customers snapped at her. The walls of her old room closed in on her, trapping her in her mother’s grasping, manicured hands. It wasn’t real—everything she’d worked for, everything she’d learned, Nathan and Elton and freedom—she was going to be nothing and no one until she died.

  She sunk down to the floor and let her forehead touch the concrete, a hiccupping sob escaping her throat. She would have stayed there forever, dreading lifting her head and seeing her mother’s scowling face, but a gentle voice drew her back to the present.

  “It isn’t real,” the voice said. “Whatever you’re remembering—it isn’t real.”

  Cora slowly sat up, her stomach still queasy. She wasn’t at her mother’s house. She was in her jail cell with the fluorescent lights flickering in the humid hall, and in the cell across from her, there was Thomas, sitting on his own worn cot with his arms wrapped loosely around his knees. There were heavy bags under his eyes, and he stared across the corridor without seeming to really see.

  “It’s the cuimne,” he said. “It’ll get better soon.”

  She pulled herself onto the end of the cot and leaned on the bars to look over at him. She almost vomited again just from the movement, but the cool metal of the bars felt soothing against her heated skin. “I feel like I’m going to die,” she groaned. “How are you so calm?”

  “It’s not my first time,” he answered softly, his empty gaze not moving from the wall behind her. “They did it to me once before. Because of Claire.”

  “Claire was…the mundane woman?”

  He nodded without looking at her. “By the time I was well enough to find her again, she was already—they’d already done it. She just…wasn’t there anymore. She didn’t speak, she didn’t walk. She didn’t see.”

  Cora listened silently, only partly because she felt like she risked throwing up every time she opened her mouth. He needed to get this off his chest. She wondered how long it had been since he’d been able to talk to anyone.

  “I couldn’t let her live like that. She wouldn’t want it. She couldn’t even get out of bed, and she’d barely eat. I had all kinds of doctors look at her. She wasn’t going to get better. So I mixed her a tincture that put her to sleep, and then she didn’t wake up again.”

  A slithering cold of realization pooled in her gut. “You…Thomas, you killed her?” Her lips could barely form the words.

  “The Magistrate killed her,” he clarified with venom in his voice. “Or Elton did. I just stopped her suffering.”

  “Jesus,” she breathed, not knowing what else to say. Her heart ached as she looked at him. He had suffered so much, and he’d only been trying to keep other people from suffering the same fate he had. She frowned and settled back onto her cot.

  “And now the others are at risk. Those photos Elton brought…the Magistrate must have tracked down at least some of them. I thought they were all well out of reach by now. But the ingnas—” He stopped as his voice caught in his throat, and when he shook his head, Cora thought she saw him wipe away a tear with his sleeve. “They got caught because of me. The Controllers—they’ll get into my head, and they’ll find the others,” he sighed.

  “Controllers?”

  “The ones who perform the cuimne and the ingnas. The Magistrate trains them to manipulate memories. It’s not magic that everyone can do. Or will do,” he added in a softer voice.

  “So...what will they do to you?”

  “They’ll put me back under the cuimne. They’ll look in my memories and find out where the rest of the people I’ve helped are now. Make sure they didn’t miss anything the first time. They’ll go and round them up.”

  Cora felt her stomach turn. She reached up to hold the bars. “Thomas, I’m so sorry. If Nathan hadn’t brought us here—”

  “I knew I’d get caught someday. And when they let me out, I’ll move and I’ll do it again.” He seemed to focus on her for the first time. “Just because the Chasers and the Magistrate think they have the right to decide our lives for us—that doesn’t mean they actually can.”

  She paused, looking at him with a furrowed brow. She hadn’t yet thought of something to say when the sound of swift footsteps approached them. A man in dress pants and a button-down stopped in front of her cell and put a hand on the door.

  “Cora Daniels,” he said. “On your feet. You’re leaving.”

  “What?” She didn’t feel certain that she could stand without vomiting, but she tried. She wobbled slightly and gripped the bars for balance. “Why?”

  “Nothing to hold you for,” he answered. “Your connection with Moore can be sorted out by your home district. The only thing you were charged with here is resisting an officer of the Magistrate, and you’ve served your sentence. You’ll be shipped back to Vancouver.” He opened the cell door and held out a hand to wave her out, but she hesitated.

  “What about Thomas?”

  The man snorted. “He’s in a lot more trouble,” he chuckled. “I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for him to get out of here.”

  Cora looked across the corridor at Thomas, his knees tucked to his chest as he watched the floor with a soft, resigned frown. They were going to torture him. They were going to use his own brain against the people he wanted to help, and he was going to be all alone. The man at her door reached out to urge her out of the cell, and she pulled away on instinct.

  “Come on now,” he said as a warning. “Don’t make things harder on yourself.”

  She didn’t have an option. This was wrong. When he reached for her arm, she twisted it out of his grip and spat in his face. “Fuck you, pig,” she snapped, and she shoved him hard in the chest. “Go ahead and let me out; I’ll burn this whole place to the ground.”
>
  “Take it easy, kid,” he snapped, and he took hold of the collar of her shirt to drag her out. “You really don’t want to go down this road.”

  Cora let him pull her to him and then fastened her teeth in his arm, causing him to swear and shove her to the ground. With a growl, the man pinned her to the floor with a binding spell that she was helpless to fight without her bracelet.

  “Wrong decision, crazy,” he said as he wiped the saliva from his face. He stepped out of the cell and shut the door behind him with a clang, leaving her curled face-down on the concrete floor as he inspected the mark on his arm. She had broken the skin. He spared her a parting scowl and disappeared back down the corridor with his footsteps echoing in the long hall.

  Cora twisted her face just enough to look over at Thomas, who stared at her in disbelief. He was out of his bed and crouched by the bars of his cell, gripping the metal tightly. “What are you thinking?” he whispered. “They’ll put you back under.”

  “I’m staying,” she answered in a strained voice. She hoped she didn’t throw up in this position. “I’m not leaving you alone in here. We’ll get out somehow—both of us.”

  “You’re insane,” Thomas sighed, but she saw the faintest hint of a smile on his lips. “How are you hoping to get us out? The whole place is warded. There’s no magic here that they don’t cast.”

  “If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the Magistrate,” Cora said, “it’s that they think their kind of magic is the only magic. They didn’t have my teachers.”

  She twisted and lifted herself as much as she was able, pressing her forehead into the concrete floor. She ignored Thomas’s objection that she didn’t have any groundings, and she shut her eyes, whispering the words Elton had taught her. She hoped she was remembering them right. She breathed slowly and repeated the phrase over and over again, her lips brushing the gritty floor, until she began to feel a soft prickling vibration at the back of her neck and down her spine. With one last deep breath, she relaxed her shoulders and exhaled the quiet sound she’d practiced in the hotel room. The humming sensation spread from her chest through the rest of her body, and her wrists finally went slack. She let her arms drop to the floor and didn’t move for a moment, trying to catch her breath. She already felt nauseated, and she hadn’t helped herself. She could feel the droplets of sweat rolling from her forehead to the stone floor.

  “What did you do?” Thomas called in a hushed voice, hunkered down against the cell bars. “How did you—”

  “Magic,” she sighed, slowly pulling up to her knees, “is will. That’s what Nathan says. And Elton happened to teach me a good trick.” She let out a tired laugh. “I’m sure as shit glad that worked, though. We don’t have a lot of time. We need to be out of here before they find out anything else about the people you’ve helped.”

  Thomas stared at her for a moment, not sure that there was a right thing to say. He had only met this strange girl a day ago, and now she was risking her freedom and her state of mind—literally—for his sake, and for the sake of people she’d never met at all.

  “Well don’t stare like a puppy,” she muttered, and she put a hand on the edge of her cot to lift herself to her feet. She nodded her head toward the top of his cell. “Is that a spider web I see up in the corner there?”

  Thomas paused and glanced up in confusion. Sure enough, he could see the delicate reflection of the strands in the artificial light from the ceiling. He had no idea how she had spotted it from across the corridor. “Looks like it. Why?”

  “Get it,” she commanded as she wiped the blood from her chin.

  “What do you mean, get it?” Thomas looked up to the far corner of the cell, not certain in the slightest that he had a chance of reaching that high.

  “Is the spider still there?”

  Thomas tugged the creaky cot a little closer to the wall and climbed up on top of it, steadying himself with one hand on the wall as he peered up at the web. A small brown spider sat at the center of the sticky nest, patiently awaiting its next meal. “It is.”

  “Even better. Can you catch it?”

  He frowned across the hall at her. “Catch it?”

  “And give it to me.”

  “The spider.”

  “Yes the spider. Our options are limited here, okay? Can you just get it?”

  Thomas hesitated, but then he turned back to the corner and stretched his fingers toward the threads. He almost tipped the bed over when he stood on tiptoe at the edge, and he swayed dangerously as he touched the web and the spider ran down his arm in a panic. He managed to get hold of the web before he dropped to the floor, and he clapped his hand over his bicep to trap the spider under his palm, silently willing it not to bite him.

  “Awesome,” Cora laughed weakly from across the hall. She pressed herself against the metal and reached her hand through the bars as far as she could. “Give it here.”

  “You’re overestimating this spider’s cooperativeness,” he muttered, but he urged the spider into his hand and held it as gently as possible without letting it escape. He edged toward the cell door and leaned forward to stretch across the aisle separating them. The spider helpfully decided to run in the direction of Cora’s outstretched hand, so she was able to snatch the web from him and catch the bug in her palm as she retreated into her own cell again.

  She sat down on her cot and held her closed hand to her lips, whispering into the hole her thumb made for a brief moment before she tightened her fist. Thomas watched from his own bed with a furrowed brow, his stomach rolling from the effort of catching the spider she’d just casually killed. This was really more active than either of them should have been so soon after the cuimne.

  When she opened her hand, the spider’s body was crumpled in her palm, its legs tightened around its abdomen. She wrapped it gently in the web Thomas had been able to gather and hid it just under the corner of her pillow.

  “Well, that’s one thing,” she sighed. “Spiders and webs make for good goofer dust, but I’m going to need more stuff.” She looked back at him. “You don’t mind donating some semen, right?”

  Thomas choked on his own breath and had to stop to cough. “What’s that?”

  “Well I can’t exactly provide it myself.”

  He swallowed and averted his eyes while she stared at him expectantly. “Why—I don’t know what you could—I mean, if it’s absolutely necessary—”

  Cora laughed and then wished she hadn’t as she clutched her queasy stomach. “I’m just screwing with you.” She smiled at his flustered frown. “I might need your pee later though; just fair warning.”

  “What sort of magic has Moore been teaching you?”

  “The gross, tricky, super effective kind. If they ever let us out or bring us something to eat, I’m sure I can scrounge up something else useful. But I’m going to throw up for real if I don’t lie down.” She laid down on the cot in an attempt to quiet her spinning head, and she could hear the creak across the hall as Thomas did the same.

  She had almost managed to doze off again despite her aching belly when a familiar voice hissed her name. She sat up and started at the sight of Chris leaning casually against the cell door. Hadn’t Nathan said he’d been sleeping? That meant they’d captured him, right? What had happened between last night and now?

  “What the hell do you want?” she snapped with as much vigor as she could summon. “Where’s Elton?”

  “Down the way, in his own cell,” Chris answered in a low voice. He checked the hall over his shoulder as he reached into his pocket, and he dangled a bracelet of crude charms through the bars of her cell on one finger.

  Cora reached forward with a skeptical frown, but when he shook the bracelet, causing a soft tinkle of bones, she snatched it from him and retreated to her cot. This wasn’t her bracelet. The charms were different, but the carvings—she knew them. A few were spells that Nahan had passed on but that she’d never dared use; they’d stayed hidden in her secret notebook since he’d
taught them to her. One spell’s carved word was spread out over three separate rough gems that practically vibrated in her hand. She didn’t know this spell. She looked up at Chris in confusion that only grew when he smiled at her.

  “You’ll want that when it’s time,” the Chaser said. “I’ll have the wards broken soon. Then do your worst, and remember what’s at stake, my love.”

  Cora recoiled instinctively at the endearment, but then she paused. “What did you say?”

  “Stay aware. When the wards lift, you’ll feel it if you pay attention.” He touched a finger to his lips and pushed back from the bars, but before he left, he paused in front of Thomas’s cell and slipped him a small bundle of black cloth. Then he gave a brief wave and disappeared back down the hallway.

  Cora leaned after him, the bracelet clutched tightly to her chest, and paused when she caught Thomas staring at her.

  “What the hell was that? Wasn’t that the Chaser who was with you before?”

  “Kind of,” she murmured. “I think.”

  “Why would he help you? Why did he help me?” he added, stuffing his own gift under his pillow as he seemed to realize he was holding it. “And what’s with the ‘my love?’ What sort of awful love triangle are you in?” He paused. “A love square? There are actually four of you.”

  “Will you chill?” she sighed. “I told you, it’s not like that. I think that was actually Nathan. Sort of. Somehow.” She looked down at the bracelet in her hands. “Either way, this is from him. And I’m going to use it to get us out of here before they dig around in your brain again. Or mine,” she noted.