by Chloe Garner
“Or Franky Frank,” Ethan said. He didn’t mean it literally, but Shack nodded.
“Franky Frank wouldn’t do that,” he said. “But I get it.”
Ethan stared at the line of potions.
“Are we really talking about an upperclassman student helping demons try to kill the entire school?”
Shack stood.
“Don’t get cold feet now,” he said. “That’s exactly what we’re talking about.”
Sasha and Hanson never did come wake her.
Valerie got up the next morning - okay, afternoon, if she was being honest - and she found them asleep on the couch in the front room, every bit of the magic casting material Valerie had left on a cutting board in between them.
Valerie picked it up and moved it to the kitchen, then went to look out the front window.
It was a beautiful location.
She was just altogether too aware of the creeping greenery on each side, how close someone could get to the house before she’d know anything about it, in ways that hadn’t even occurred to her when she’d been here with her parents.
She was responsible, now.
“We just fell asleep a few minutes ago,” Sasha said quietly. “I swear.”
“No harm done,” Valerie answered just as quietly. “You should go sleep in the bed, though. Get some real rest. You’re going to need it.”
She heard Sasha get up and leave on soft feet, and Valerie went to sit across from Hanson.
He stirred and opened his eyes, not moving as he looked at her.
“You’re not Sasha,” he said, his voice hoarse.
“You’ve been talking all night,” Valerie answered, and he smiled.
“She’s sweet.”
“You need real sleep,” Valerie said. “And then we’re going to go get groceries and make a plan to get raw magic ingredients.”
“She taught me some stuff,” he said, nestling his head deeper into his elbow again. “She’s nice.”
“There are two rooms off of the hallway,” Valerie said. “The one on the right is where you’re sleeping.”
“I’m fine here,” he murmured, and Valerie shook her head.
“I don’t want you out here,” she said. “Go lay down and sleep. I’ll come wake you up in a few hours.”
“Life is weird,” he said, yawning and stretching as he forced himself to his feet. “I miss basketball practice.”
She frowned, not sure where that had come from, but he was shuffling off down the very short hallway, and that was enough.
She went to sit in the front window again, watching, then switched to look out the kitchen window for a few minutes before going to get a piece of paper.
Which she didn’t have.
Anywhere.
She could have sworn her mom had had paper around here, somewhere, that she and Valerie’s dad had been working on, but the cabinets were bare. There was no place to put it that Valerie hadn’t looked, after about five minutes, other than the bedrooms.
There was one pencil, sitting in a cupboard above her head.
And that was it.
Valerie took it, going to sit on the couch and tapping her knees with it.
She was hungry again.
Strange, this awareness that she needed to eat more meals than she skipped. When there was food around all the time, she didn’t even think about it.
They’d seen a strip mall down a side street that had looked promising, so they needed to get back there today to buy groceries, so that she could eat when she woke up in the morning.
Food was important.
Her parents.
It was after noon.
If they’d had an alarm on the house - whatever shape that might have taken - that was going to tell them that Valerie and Sasha were here, they ought to have been here by now.
She knew this.
And yet.
She was going to stay on for a couple more days, just to be really sure, even if she knew that Hanson’s mom could turn up at any point.
Or worse.
People who wouldn’t hesitate to kill Hanson and Sasha.
For a moment, Valerie considered setting off on her own, hoping that her parents would come and find Hanson and Sasha and give them shelter, and let Valerie take all of that heat and all of that risk onto herself, but even if she’d been willing to do it, it was Hanson and Sasha who needed to leave, not Valerie. Leaving would have made her safer, not them.
She needed a better map, if she was going to find a park that would have real plants, not just grass and swing sets. She just felt inadequate at the idea of going and looking for magic ingredients, because she didn’t know what anything was. She would be relying on her gift to point out the plants that were worth picking and what to do with them after, and she wasn’t sure that that was how it worked.
She wasn’t sure how any of it actually worked.
So she finally got up, putting the pencil away, and went to the side door, opening it and letting the cool breeze coming off of the ocean fill the kitchen for a moment. It wasn’t comfortably cool, out there just now, and she would need a sweatshirt, but she made up her mind that if she was going to find useful things, it was at least as likely at the ocean as anywhere else, and if she searched the beach, she could stay close to the house without just sitting around all afternoon waiting for it to be time to wake up Sasha and Hanson.
She left her shoes by the door, walking out across the sand in her sweatshirt and her jeans, wrapping her arms around her as the wind grew gusty and impatient.
Sand skittered across everything, and Valerie walked slowly along, realizing how everything in front of her was either a part of the long tangle of plant rolling ashore with the waves or it was the crushed-up and destroyed body of a deceased sea creature. Seashells dominated the bits and pieces, but there were other bits of crustaceans and the like, as she fingered through everything.
She picked up a leaf from the seaweed, rubbing it between her fingers and watching the horizon.
Something Mrs. Reynolds had said in lecture came back to her as she crushed the greenleaf plant between her fingers, the goo inside mixing and evening out.
Everything has magical properties, if you know how to coax them out, the woman had said. We used the ones that are easiest, because you are beginners, but as you get better at recognizing where those properties come from and how to harness them, your palette of tools is going to expand beyond your wildest imagination.
Natural magic.
Mrs. Reynolds was good at natural magic. Valerie could sense that intuitively, the way she looked at the world and the way she worked. It was possible she had no skill at all with either light or dark, and yet she worked in a construct that required her to pass as halfway decent at either, or none.
Very much like Sasha.
And stupid.
Natural magic came from the natural world. There was no reason that it shouldn’t come from seaweed and seashells, should it? And sand and seawater? Sasha had used the sand the night before, though Valerie had had the impression that it had been tying the protection magic to the sand, rather than consuming some power from it.
She looked at the green on her fingers, then nodded with a hard frown.
She wasn’t getting something from it. Not like the inescapable magic she’d been doing all along, like someone had a string attached to her nose and she was just following along rather than fight it. If she was going to make this work, she was going to have to work at it.
Which was what every single other person in the world had to do.
She was willing.
She would stay away from bombs.
Probably.
Because while she trusted her instincts at this point, she didn’t trust her decisions when she was working off of knowledge rather than instinct. She was going to have to be careful, because Ethan hadn’t been wrong when he’d scolded her for using magic casually: it was dangerous, and it could kill people, including her, if she wasn’t ca
utious.
But.
There was magic here, if she was willing to understand it and coax it out. Her body didn’t feel it the way that it often did, but her mind knew it with a conviction that was well beyond what Valerie ever argued with.
There was no bringing sense to things she knew like that.
She knelt, picking out the pieces of shell and exoskeleton and such that were the largest and the least worn, the most complete, then she picked up feet of tangled seaweed and slung it over her shoulder, shivering at the wet but ignoring it. She walked up the beach a few dozen feet, collecting bits of this and that that called to her, then she walked back to the house, laying all of her bounty on the floor in the kitchen and going back out for a soup bowl full of sand. She brought that in and she sat down cross-legged in front of it, closing her eyes to think quietly.
It was here.
She just had to find it.
The damping spell had done its job. Shack and Ethan had managed to take down all of the defenses between the dorms and the office, and no one knew it had happened.
Which was kind of scary, that that sort of thing was even possible, but they’d had to have been inside the cast to do it, and Ethan had seen the schematics for the defensive magic when his father had approved them for the school year. Lady Harrington - and all of the heads of schools - re-did the top layer of defense every year, so that it didn’t get old and worn from too many students casting too much stuff, and so that no one could figure out what it was and work around it.
And it was a good plan.
Right up until someone like Ethan had been left alone with the plans and copied them down for his own mischief.
At the time, it had felt like it was just for mischief, because the war had just been a titillating whisper at the time, something everyone was atingle over, because of how much power and glory you got from being involved in a war.
The last war was far enough behind them that no one in Ethan’s circles had had any clue what it might mean for it to come back.
It wasn’t like it was in stories.
Or how anyone had imagined it.
There had been bodies. His friends were dead.
And the girl he suddenly cared more about than anyone in the world was the subject of a multi-party manhunt, with easily half of them trying to kill her and all of them interested in capturing her and manipulating her.
It wasn’t like it was in stories.
They got to the office and Shack forced the door - there was a mechanical lock on it that they didn’t have a spell for, so… they did what they had to.
The records room they managed to open without breaking the door, and then they paused, looking at the long row of filing cabinets, the shelves of books, the tiny desk in the corner.
“Wow,” Shack said.
“There ought to be a roster for this year around here somewhere,” Ethan said. “And then we can start pulling files for the students.”
“I’ll go see if Mrs. Young has one at her desk somewhere,” Shack said, and Ethan nodded, going to open the drawers. They were full of manila folders, all in alphabetical order, the age showing on most of them.
“Digital era didn’t make it here,” Ethan murmured, going to find Ann’s and Milton’s folders first. He put them down on the little desk in the corner, then went back, going through who he could remember was living out in the cottages, and then looking for the folders for the staff.
The bulk of the filing cabinets were dedicated to students, but he was able to find a number of the staff who had attended Survival School as students, and he pulled those folders as well, going to sit and page through Ann’s folder.
Her test with Mr. Tannis hadn’t been spectacular, apparently. There had been three different test objectives and three impediments, and Mr. Tannis had mixed them at random for the students. Ann had gotten the healing ward for impact injury and the distraction cast.
Apparently she’d spent the second half of her entrance test sitting and talking to him about how she did her hair before a dance that her parents had hosted the month before.
Her healing ward had been going the right direction when she’d succumbed to the distraction cast, though, and… well, they didn’t really have the option to turn her away, given who she was. It wasn’t written down in the folder, but it was all over the place, anyway. Her potential.
She’d been assigned to live with a girl named Meg that Ethan knew, but she’d gotten herself switched to room with Yasmine instead. She had a few discipline infractions noted, but they were simple insubordinance, not anything particularly significant.
Milton’s folder was thicker. He’d killed his entrance exam, partially because he had noticed the drain cast on Mr. Tannis’ desk from the moment he’d walked into the room, and he’d gone and destroyed it before Mr. Tannis had even given him his prompt.
Which sounded like Milton.
He had a lot of reprimands, though. Ethan went through them, all of them written out by hand from his teachers, fights he’d gotten into during class, students whose work he had disrupted by critiquing it, times that he’d been out of his room and out of the dorm wing without permission…
Ethan whistled, low.
He hadn’t realized Milton had such a rebellious streak.
Shack came back with the list and Ethan handed him Milton’s folder, going on to the upperclassmen.
“Wow,” Shack said after a minute. “Would someone who was here as a spy act out this much?”
“If he’s got no impulse control,” Ethan answered. He was sorting folders into two piles: the ones that were interesting and the ones that weren’t. Most of them had very little information at all after the entrance exam and background work. Who their family was, their magical history and any notable skills, interviews, that kind of thing. Particularly among the upperclassmen out in the cottages, it seemed that the school took very little interest in what they were up to.
“He gets good grades, though,” Shack said, handing Milton’s file back. “You really think we’re going to find something like this?”
“If you’ve got a better idea…” Ethan said. He handed the list of students back to Shack. “Meantime, you want to pull these?”
Shack checked his watch.
“How long are you intending to be here?” he asked, looking at the door. The lights were out, and the records room wasn’t visible from the front of the office, so the teachers on their patrols wouldn’t notice them, but Ethan knew that Shack wanted to be out of here long before anyone was up and working. They had a few hours at the most.
“We’re going to cut it as close as we dare,” Ethan said. “This is to keep Valerie and Sasha and Hanson safe.”
Shack nodded, opening one of the folders and looking at it.
“Wow, they keep a lot of records,” he murmured, and Ethan nodded.
“Lady Harrington has a reputation for writing everything down.”
“And never touching a computer,” Shack said, looking around the room once more. “You think she wrote all of these?”
“Could be,” Ethan said. “I don’t know for sure how far they go back, but some of the folders are pretty worn.”
“This is crazy,” Shack said softly. “Did you know that Dominic turned down a scholarship at a civilian college to play soccer, in order to come here?”
Ethan shook his head.
“Do you think he’s got a history that looks like maybe he knows people from The Pure?”
“Not specifically,” Shack said.
“Then keep moving,” Ethan told him. “There are a lot of students here, and we’re looking for the ones that we need to stalk. Not who’s actually a lot cooler than we give him credit for.”
“But he is, right?” Shack asked, and Ethan grinned.
“Yeah, that is pretty cool.”
He tossed the folder he was holding into the uninteresting pile and he picked up the next one, rubbing his eyes and forcing himself to focus.
He cou
ld do this.
It was just going to be a long night.
Valerie went outside with the compound she’d formed, pouring it into the sand at the front corner of the house.
It wasn’t as satisfying as the giant red bubble of protection, but it would keep the house cloaked from a lot of detection magics, and it made her feel a lot calmer.
She went in and sat on the couch for maybe five minutes before she got too bored for that and went in to wake up Sasha.
“What time is it?” Sasha asked.
“Four,” Valerie said. “You’ve been asleep almost three hours.”
Sasha groaned and rolled over, pulling her pillow onto her head. Valerie poked her again.
“We need to go get food, and I don’t want us to split up. So you have to come.”
The redhead groaned again.
“Couldn’t we just go later?” she asked.
“My mom said everything around here closes early, and we have a long walk ahead of us.”
Sasha sighed and pulled her feet over the edge of the bed, pressing her eyes with the heels of her hands.
“Is Hanson up?” she asked, and Valerie shook her head.
“No. I don’t expect he’ll wake up until we’re about halfway there,” Valerie said. Sasha frowned, confused and sleepy.
“I thought you said you didn’t want us to split up,” she said, and Valerie nodded, standing.
“Exactly.”
She left as Sasha staggered out of her bed to get dressed and she went across the hallway, poking Hanson in the back with her foot.
“Get up, man,” she said. “We’re going to get food.”
“I’m hungry,” Hanson muttered, not moving.
“I know,” Valerie coached. “That’s why we’re getting up and going shopping for groceries. Because I’d like to eat, too. None of us have had anything to eat since dinner last night?”
“What time is it?” he asked, still not moving. She told him, and he rolled onto his stomach.
“Five more minutes.”
“Up,” Valerie said. “Or I’ll pour water on your head.”
It had been a long time, but she’d done it before.