by Harry Nix
“What happens to you if you don't go back to your enclave?” Alex asked.
“I have to go back just to declare that I don't want to be there anymore. They’ll let me go but it can still be dangerous. Although on the surface all enclaves will let mages go, so perhaps they can join another one or go off on their own, it’s still dangerous. When someone leaves an enclave, it's like they're cut off, they vanish from people's minds. Everyone simply decides they don’t exist anymore, so if after that point they happen to get killed in some kind of so-called accident, most times people don't even know about it.”
Alex felt a heavy weight settling in his stomach. Should he encourage Stephen to go back and join his enclave—don't leave them at all—knowing that it was a place of violence and sadness and Stephen might end up on the other end of a gun pointed at Alex? There didn't seem to be any good solution. Even if he had a wad of cash to offer the kid, would fleeing Baxter and trying to start a new life somewhere else work out for him?
Alex decided to push these questions away for now. The kid wanted to help with magic and perhaps with a little time they could figure out an answer to what to do next.
Alex opened the paper bag that Ruby had given him and pulled out one of the rings.
“Maybe we can talk about all that later. For now, do you want to help me try to enchant some rings? Every time I've done it before, they just explode,” Alex said.
“I've never enchanted a ring though so I’m not sure how much use I can be.”
“We managed to make a viable spell when both of us were so drunk we could hardly walk so I’m willing to try.”
“Let's do it!”
Alex smiled at the kid’s grin. There was something so similar between him and Jacob, that excitableness of teenagers, their willingness to give things a go.
“Just one moment, and I'll be right back,” Alex said and raced upstairs to the kitchen where Ruby and Juno were examining a bunch of jars filled with various ingredients.
“This seems like a lot of pecans,” Juno was saying as Alex went into the kitchen.
“Well, it's a lot of money,” Ruby said. Without stopping to ask them what they were discussing and figuring that asking forgiveness was easier than seeking permission, Alex quickly rummaged in one of the kitchen cupboards until he found a metal mixing bowl. There was only one though, but it would have to do in case the rings exploded. Neither of the witches even gave him a glance as he grabbed it and ran back downstairs again.
“In case there’s an explosion,” Alex explained to Stephen, who’d taken some of the rings out of the bag and was examining them.
“Tell me what you see,” Alex said. He cleared a space on the floor and had the metal mixing bowl sitting nearby. He brought up the spell he’d used to expand the amount the amount of code he could dump onto a ring, and touched Stephen on the shoulder. It took a few minutes for him to copy the spell, Alex feeling it as a gentle tickling in his mind.
“Watch what happens,” Alex said
He went through the usual steps, opening the small code window on the ring and then casting this new spell. It compiled and worked perfectly, expanding the amount of code he could dump onto the ring. The moment he did it, though, Stephen took the ring off him and shoved it under the metallic bowl before shuffling back.
“No, that's wrong. That's definitely going to explode,” Stephen said, a hint of panic in his voice.
“What did you see?”
“A lumberjack woman kicking the walls of a room to expand it. The rooms gets bigger but she just keeps kicking. Eventually the whole thing will just explode.”
With perfect comedic timing there was an explosion from underneath the mixing bowl, shooting it off the ground and almost hitting Alex in the head. A small puff of smoke rose to the ceiling and dissipated.
“See!” Stephen said. The ring was nothing more than twisted bits of metal now.
“How can we fix that? She needs to make the room bigger but it needs to be strong, too.”
“Give me a few minutes,” Stephen said. Alex sat back and watched the spell screen above Stephen’s head. It was weird to think the kid saw comic book pages while Alex saw code. Stephen was also making gestures in the air like using his fingers like a pair of scissors and motions that looked like he was tearing and stretching and then screwing up bits of paper. At one point it appeared he was using invisible sticky tape. Because they were no longer touching, the connection wasn't as strong.
Eventually, Stephen shared with him the remade spell. Alex carefully copied it over, realizing that he would soon have to delete something otherwise he’d run out of space.
The spell that Stephen given him was still mostly Alex's although there were some key changes in it that Alex had to read through a few times to get a hint of what they were doing. Comparing his original spell to the rewritten one side-by-side, he could almost see where he’d gone wrong although it still felt as though true understanding was just on the tip of his tongue, slightly out of reach.
He could see the code in the original spell that he guessed was the cause of the lumberjack kicking until the room exploded, and therefore the ring. To Alex it looked like that part of it had stuck into a loop and each time it went around it weakened what was around it, but he couldn't be entirely sure.
Although Stephen had helped him alter the healing flame spell and now had also helped him write a fireball spell, Alex still felt a slight nervousness. The kid could easily dump something in there that could kill him, and Alex wouldn’t know. He pushed those thoughts aside as he picked up a new ring and cast the spell. He either had to trust the kid or not, and he'd already made his decision.
The spell compiled, pulling on the mana and then the window for the code expanded. It felt the same as before and Alex sat there holding the ring, suddenly realizing he hadn’t thought this far ahead. He’d been working on the other spells he knew he needed, like the one that drained a small amount of mana from the wearer to recharge the ring, but his initial idea had been simply to enchant a ring with a simple spell that once exhausted, could not be recharged. Alex quickly looked through his spells and then grabbed the shortest one of all, Know Thyself. He quickly copied the code over into the open window and then hit the execute button before throwing the ring down and covering it with the mixing bowl.
Stephen shuffled back a few more feet while Alex sat there holding his hand on top of the bowl.
“I think this might work,” Stephen said.
“So long as it doesn't detonate my hand off,” Alex said.
They sat there for a few minutes waiting until Alex eventually lifted the bowl off the ring and quickly cast Analyze on it. It showed a single spell and the charge to cast it. As Alex watched, the amount of mana in it was dropping like water dripping from a faucet.
“You need the battery storage now,” Stephen said, looking at the ring.
Alex put the ring on and then triggered it. The spell consumed what remained of the mana and cast Know Thyself on him. His spell screen opened up, showing his stats and information and only held for a moment before the spell exhausted. Alex then slipped the ring off and cast Analyze on it again and found it was just a plain ring again, just like the others.
They were getting there.
“That worked. I have an idea for the battery storage too. Can mages rewrite each other’s spells as easy as we are?” Alex said. His mind was starting to spin with just how easy it was. Juno and April hadn’t mentioned anything like this and it seemed too incredible to be true.
Stephen grinned.
“Sympatico magic. I’ve heard of it but it’s rare. Some mages Lennon and McCartney it. Can imagine how much money there is to be made enchanting rings and selling them?”
Sudden visions of setting up an enchanting factory with Stephen began to swim in Alex's mind. Him and the kid worked together so well that maybe there was a whole world of spells out there they could lock to a ring. Together they could make entirely new ones…
&nb
sp; Then Alex remembered the silver cloud and the drones.
“You set up a shop or something. Magic defense rings go for a massive amount of money,” Stephen said, waving his hands around.
“I know, I bought one.” Alex didn’t add that it had been near-useless for him. The spells on it were too complicated for him to learn anything useful. He wasn’t going to be making his own for a long time.
Alex smiled back, half getting caught up in the excitement but he could also feel the leaden weight in his stomach. Long-term the kid had to go.
“Let me show you the battery code,” Alex said.
“Battery comic, you mean.”
Stephen put his hand on Alex's shoulder and they continued on.
13
“I see what you mean by that whole pulling avocados out of his butt thing,” Ruby said, examining one of the enchanted rings.
Juno choked on her food. Alex had to thump her on the back a few times before she could breathe properly.
“Handkerchiefs. It was handkerchiefs out of his butt. I knew you weren't listening,” she said.
“Hmm, yes, I see,” Ruby murmured, obviously not listening again.
Dinner tonight was steak, a small side salad, and a few roasted vegetables. Everyone was digging in except for Ruby who was examining the enchanted rings Alex had brought upstairs.
“I couldn’t have done without Stephen,” Alex said and cut off an enormous piece of steak. Sure, the city still didn’t smell great but when there was steak covered in salt, maybe he could come to live with it.
“This is really good work. Well done,” Ruby said to Stephen, slipping the ring onto her finger. It was a healing flame ring. She activated it then touched her burning finger against her palm. As she was uninjured, nothing happened.
“Have you considered making one of these where a damaging flame travels from the part you touch to the greatest injury? Like a fireball going down their nerves?” Ruby asked Alex.
“Can a flame travel inside someone's body?” Alex asked.
“Not usually, but then you are doing unusual things,” Ruby said.
Alex shared a glance with Stephen who was grinning like a mad fool. Him and the kid had broken through multiple barriers in just a single day. Unusual didn’t begin to cover it. Together they’d constructed a battery spell to hold mana and then refined Alex’s spell to slowly drain mana from the wearer, to charge the ring over time.
There had been a few explosions along the way but now it appeared the enchanted rings were stable.
There were still limitations of course. The rings could only hold spells of a certain size and complexity. But that was just an iteration problem. Work it long enough and Alex knew him and the kid could improve the coding.
“You say you can rewrite his code by changing the comics you see?” Ruby asked Stephen, tapping her fork on the ring.
The teenager blushed, focused on his plate, and mumbled something.
“Speak up now. If the two of you cracked this in a single day… this is life-changing work. I mean it.”
“It’s no big thing. He writes the original code and then I work on the pictures to get it flowing. We pass it back and forth until it works is all.”
Alex chewed his steak, enjoying the feeling that something was going right for once. Being able to enchant his own rings meant money, which was sorely needed but more than that it meant being able to equip his entire pack. The next time necromancers came calling, things would turn out very differently.
“No, you should be really proud of yourself. This is incredible work,” Ruby insisted.
“Leave the kid alone, he’s embarrassed,” Juno said.
“The only one that should be embarrassed here is the drunken witch who burned my fence and doesn't remember it,” Ruby snapped.
“How do we know it wasn’t you?” Juno protested.
“If I’d thrown a fireball at that fence there would be no fence. Come on, stop being silly,” Ruby said.
There was a moment of awkward silence before April cleared her throat. “So Nia and I are all packed and will be ready to go in the morning,” she said.
Everyone continued eating and chatting about shallow topics. Alex could tell the girls didn't want to say what they were doing with Stephen there. Even though there was a feeling that they'd relaxed around him they still couldn’t forget that he was a mage from an enemy enclave that had attacked them. It wasn't long before dinner was done and Alex grabbed Stephen again, heading back downstairs.
“They really don't like me, do they?” Stephen said as soon as they were in the basement.
“Well you did fly a drone full of silver, and that reanimated old dead lady, my neighbor, tore my hand off,” Alex said. He held out the hand in question and flexed it. There was still the occasional glint of metal in the skin.
It had been slowly fading. Alex hoped the same would happen to his eyes, but thus far there had been no change there.
“How long did that take to regrow?” Stephen asked.
“Most of a night and day. Spent the whole day with the skin splitting and cracking and then re-healing over and over. It was the most agonizing thing I’ve ever experienced.”
“Is that what happened to your eyes?”
“They didn’t get torn out, but yes, I got injured and then when they healed, they incorporated silver somehow. Look at how weird this is,” Alex said and then touched the tip of his finger to his eye. There was a hiss before he pulled his finger away and showed Stephen the burn mark.
“That's so weird. It’s like your eyes have total resistance to the silver, or maybe they’re just ignoring the silver.”
“I can't work it out either. I was wondering if I cut some of my skin off, splash it with silver and heal up, whether I'd suddenly be resistant to silver there, but then I wouldn’t be able to touch Nia again.”
At the mention of his mate, Stephen went silent, much the same way Jacob did.
“Let’s enchant some rings,” Alex said, changing the topic.
Working together, they spent the next two hours enchanting shield rings and soon had a pile of thirty-five of them. Alex used up the sex magic, the natural mana and the kid appeared to use up every drop of magic he had.
Eventually they stopped to rest.
“Hey, I wanna show you something,” Alex said, another idea crossing his mind.
When he'd accessed the Great Barrier spell, Alex had copied pages of numbers. The kid was visual, so maybe he could make some sense of them.
Alex brought up his spell screen, touched Stephen on the shoulder and then brought up some of the copied numbers, allowing Stephen to access the numbers. A soon as he did, the kid broke into a smile.
“Ah, this is easy. The first one is a mermaid, the second one is a nereid, the third one is a harpy, the fourth is a werewolf. This is a long list of supernaturals.”
“Are they doing anything?”
“Not really. There’s a protective circle around them… like if you're in the circle you can't be touched. But also I can see strings they have attached to the hands, feet and head. You know, like a puppet? So at the same time you can't be touched but maybe something is controlling a bit?”
It had been bubbling away in the back of Alex’s mind that as the Great Barrier was a spell that worked on normals and supernaturals in different ways, there must be categories in it somewhere. For an old spell it seemed incredibly complex and as anyone who has ever worked in programming knows, the more complexity, the more holes.
A list of supernaturals within the spell could mean he’d found what the spell checked to determine how the spell worked—a sort of ‘if normal = hide supernatural’ to put it in crude terms.
Could it be that easy? The Great Barrier was cast hundreds to thousands of years ago, according to Juno. It worked incredibly well but just like old programs, maybe it was dumb in a lot of ways.
Maybe Alex could fool it.
“I'm going to try something. See what you think,” Alex
said. He opened up the ring he had in his hands, strengthened it, added the draining mana spell, and then dropped the code Stephen had said was werewolf into the window.
He quickly wrote a small bit of code around it, that he thought essentially meant go in a loop, a sort of ‘start program-if this is true, go back to the start’. The execute button on the spell lit up but Alex didn't hit it, waiting for Stephen to check the spell.
“It’s pretty much what I said. This one’s a werewolf in a circle with the strings on them,” Stephen said. Alex compiled the spells and put the ring under the mixing bowl just in case.
“What's the point of doing that, though?” Stephen said.
“I think if a normal wears this ring, the Great Barrier will think they’re a werewolf and maybe they’ll be able to see supernaturals.”
“Nothing gets past the Great Barrier. I once saw a witch fireball a mage in a crowded street and every supernatural in the area came running to kill her. The second it was over, all the normals just walked on by like it was nothing.”
“Spells have holes in them. I think the Great Barrier can be screwed with.”
Alex removed the ring from under the mixing bowl and slipped it on. He couldn't feel any change, which was what he was hoping. He cast Flame Finger and extinguished it. Everything seemed to be normal. Then he gave the ring to Stephen. Alex immediately cast Analyze and saw in the code the werewolf number was remaining stable.
Hopefully that meant that magically the ring was saying that Stephen was a werewolf.
“Can you still cast things?” Alex asked.
Stephen cast Flame Finger and then extinguished it.
“Do you have some normals you want to see all the supernatural crap that goes on around them?” The kid passed the ring back to Alex.
Alex had been thinking more on the line of how to stop werewolves being murdered and the Great Barrier hiding it. But maybe a ring like this could be useful. Make two of them and he could give one to Puzo and Howey, tell them the truth.
At the thought of it, Alex felt a chill cross over him. Someone had murdered Bailey. If he pulled Howey and Puzo into things they could end up dead.