by Anne Zoelle
“Yup.” What else was there to say, except, “Why am I here?”
“Because I asked for you. Let's go.” He turned and headed toward the Midlands, no battle cloak in sight.
I lagged behind for a moment, then hurried to catch up. “Listen, if this is in retaliation for that spell—”
“Why would I retaliate? The search spell worked just fine.” He kept walking. “Very useful.”
His smooth voice didn't give me anything to work with, but there was something overly controlled in the way that he walked. As if, even though he had asked for it, he was uneasy in our pairing as well.
“Um, good... But I meant...” I let my voice trail off as I clutched my bag. The revealed spell paper containing his name was still inside.
“What? The other spell? Am I supposed to care that you were avoiding me? Other than a few scant meetings across campus and fighting the beast last term, I don't know you.” Without breaking his long strides, his gaze met mine. “Do I?”
Yes. “No.”
I followed him over the boundary line and into the Midlands proper, and the usual spark of joy lit inside of me as Okai immediately appeared at the side of the path. Guard Rock opened the door, pencil stick at attention. He saluted. At his side, Guard Friend waved. Their multi-colored threads rippled against my chest with welcome.
Dare's gaze followed mine. Used to strange things, though, he turned his attention back to the path spanning the distance before us. I flicked my fingers at my side as I walked past. Guard Rock tilted his rock quizzically, then nudged Guard Friend back inside Okai.
The door closed and the building flashed away in a tile slide.
I thought about lagging behind Dare just enough to lose him in a slide too, but that would hardly endear me to him and it looked like we were stuck together, at least until we got the initial information transfer out of the way. We tile slid together into an open field and I cleared my throat. “Are we meeting the others?”
“No. It's just the two of us.”
“So...you are going to teach me how to be a combat mage?” I prepared myself for a walloping. I had accidentally connected to him several times in the Battle Building's simulation matrix. I knew my fate in such circumstances.
He frowned. “No.”
My confusion must have shown.
“It takes years of diligent practice and study to become a combat mage.” His frown turned darker. “You can't just flip a switch, perform a montage, and become one.”
I lifted my hands in submission. Way to go, Ren!
Isaiah hadn't specified what we would be doing. I had just assumed combat training would be part of it.
“I have no idea what I'm doing here. Didn't they tell you that I'm...” I licked my lips. This sucked. “Sort of on parole?”
His ultramarine gaze was flat. “I don't care why you are on the Justice Squad. Just that you are on it and have to follow my command.”
That didn't sound at all foreboding.
“Great!” Total terror. “So, er, what am I supposed to do, if not fight for campus freedom?”
“Defense encompasses more than fighting. Watching. Precautions. Containment. Flexibility in strategy and problem solving. Coming up with unusual solutions. Like your search spell. And...other things you've shown an affinity for.”
Other things, like the patterned rocks that had killed the bone monster. Tension tightened my shoulders again. Everything with Dare came back to that and the questions that I hadn't answered. That I never planned to answer.
“Just because I accidentally got something right—”
“The tricorn?”
An image of the tricorn-turned-toad with its three wart-horns popped into my head.
“Justice Toad—my, er, tablet—did that.”
“Tablets read and interpret the magic and intentions of their mages.”
I didn't want to talk about that either. “You know what else is a good defense? Knowing who to call when there's a problem.”
“You don't have a frequency.” It was a statement, not a question.
“I am sure I can call you via your tablet.” By definition, the alert system necessitated that the ability was there, somewhere. Will probably knew how to do it.
Dare's gaze didn't break away from mine as he snapped his fingers and a piece of paper appeared between his forefinger and middle finger. I took it from him, automatically.
It was warm. Warm from his skin. Written on the paper was his name exactly as it had been scripted in the revelation spell.
“Have your tablet absorb it or secure it to a journal,” he said. “And you will have your contact.”
I felt a little strange as I secured the paper deeply in the front pocket along my upper thigh. I almost asked something stupid to break the tension, but held onto my words at the last moment.
“You should contact me, if there's a problem.” His gaze turned acute and businesslike. “But the tablet magic already contacts me, so what do I need you for?”
I thought this was an excellent question and patiently waited for an answer. He was not amused by my strategy.
“Prevention, observation, analytics. How do you tell me in helpful, concise terms what the team is walking into so that we can be prepared? How do you anticipate the problem before it gets out of control with the Peacekeepers’ Troop?”
“The Troop will be doing all of the campus guarding and you will return if there is a problem? I will be a glorified assistant?” Relief spread through me.
“The Troop.” Dare laughed without humor. “Is little more than a band of political mercenaries, who do as little as possible, and are quite skilled at taking credit for any successes while making sure others are blamed for any failures. Don't trust the Troop.”
“What?” My relief immediately became alarm again. “Why were they hired then?”
“They usually aren't. We normally work with retired combat mages who once attended Excelsine. But the Troop has political clout. They are seen as the best. And the politicians want to say they assigned the best. It doesn't matter whether they are actually competent as long as they come across as professional and orderly in the political arena. And they will. Nothing that has gone wrong on a job has ever, ever been judged their fault in the aftermath.”
I thought of their promotional video. They had appeared as a well-formed group of skilled cadets who trained at every hour. But marketing and sales tactics were something that Christian had naturally understood and utilized. We hadn't fought or competed for attention often, but I had learned some hard lessons when sibling rivalry did rear its head—that behavior and the appearance of behavior were two very different things.
“Why don't you complain to the administration?” Total terror seemed to be doing a decent job of making me converse with him like a semi-normal person for once.
Darkness lit in his eyes. “I have. Contrary to public opinion, I don't always get what I want, especially when politics are involved. And because of what happened last term, the Department had bargaining power.” One extended finger pointed at my nose. “You are going to make campus safe and contain any threats.”
Anxiety lit and twigs snapped around me. The ultramarine thread that connected us brightened, and all of my senses sharpened and switched into survival mode.
He pointed to the side where a number of large saplings were tearing into one another. “Tell me what you see.” His voice was pure steel and command.
My anxiety increased tenfold at the immediate test. “Fighting trees.”
“Do better.”
I started to sweat. I touched my leather bracelet, accessing information from its magical encyclopedia as quickly as I could. “Fighting gorondiers battling for territory.”
“Do better.”
Magic answered my anxiety, and I had to use precious seconds wrangling it into my control so that I could use it and not have it repressed by my cuff. I barely, painfully, managed control as I looked at the warring trees and withdrew the map
I had created last term. The map constantly redrew itself as my four paper dragons soared and gathered information from the ever-shifting Midlands.
“Fighting gorondiers battling for territory on tile 43562, which is currently on what would be the eleventh circle, fifty-eight degrees west.” I had initially numbered the map tiles as they were identified, for ease of identification and memory use, but using them for anything other than identification often tripped up my spell. Such was the Midlands' magic, and the sheer expanse of territory involved.
Tiles shifted around us, and the trees disappeared. Sweat broke across my brow. The magic involved in accessing the dragons, the map, keeping a lock on the gorondiers, and piecing everything together required extraordinary effort.
I swallowed and forced the spatial information patterns to bloom again. “Now they are on the twelfth circle, two hundred fourteen degrees east.”
He stared at me, his gaze piercing, a strange expression on his features. “Do better.”
Unwilling to set my bag on the ground and risk it getting whisked away in a slide, I juggled it, the map, and my magic connections to my paper constructs. Dragon One was rapidly losing juice under its new constraints.
Creating another cartography set would cost me paint. My lips pressed painfully together. Because the dragons had been created—unknowingly—using permanently allocated magic in the mountain, I had thought that they would maintain themselves forever. Using space permanently was how I had gotten into trouble last term.
Normal mages used temporarily allocated magical space for everyday enchantments such as clothing swaps as well as enormous, complicated creations. Permanent enchantments—rooting an enchantment for all time without shifting—was a far different can of worms.
My mind immediately sought to retain the parameters of the magic while my concentration burned through the energy keeping the paper aloft. The space parameters lit in my mind like a magical grid and I held onto the spatial thought of them as the contents of the allocated space began to sizzle. If I could keep hold of the permanently allocated magic, I could use it again without repercussion or guilt.
Dragon One plummeted to the ground in flames. Two of the remaining three dragons started to sear as well, thinning their corresponding position lines on the map as they lost their power. I had less than a minute left before I lost all of them.
I grabbed a pencil from the bottom of my bag and let the tip move across the map paper. It was one of my better pencils, and the magic seeped out of me and through it. A messy, moving image of the trees and a wobbling, compass-like direction and locator emerged from my charcoal tip. I shakily handed the paper to Dare.
His gaze held mine for a long moment, then he took the paper and moved in a slow circle, watching as the paper wobbled on its shaking axis, pointing an arrow in bright green toward an area to the left.
“Stay within three feet of my back.” He didn't look at me as he said it, clearly expecting me to follow the instruction.
He followed the indicator and I blindly followed him, so closely that I could almost feel his body heat, nearly tripping along the path as I tried to hold the arrhythmic magic streams.
Unable to concentrate on anything other than holding the different streams, I put my fate firmly in his hands. Regardless of anything else, in matters of safety and protection I trusted him completely. Because of how I first met him, I probably always would.
The remaining dragons were flapping vainly, trying to maintain their altitude, as the allocated space that signified their existence tried to refit itself as part of the enormous, temporary well that everyone on the mountain used.
The world around me broke into a kaleidoscope as I tried to hold it all together. The landscape shifted again, and new colors burst in prismatic waves.
Dare, the only clearly defined thing in my otherworldly view, followed the new path on the map in his hand without saying anything, and easily dispatched anything savage that came across our path—monsters from zombie cities, lakeside and arboreal dwellers, forest beasts, sky giants. With a flick of his wrist, he sent the magical beasts that were surging up, swooping down, galloping by, or lunging in for a kill flying to the side. Using mostly long-range artillery magic, he never moved more than three feet away from me.
Dragon Two fell in my mind, its paper burned through to ash. The drawing Dare held thinned more and I could feel myself two steps from falling over. Dragon Three fell. Dare turned toward me and two fingers touched under my chin. I zinged upright. The adrenaline overload made everything in me stand straight. Dragon Four, which had started to sizzle, gained altitude and reproduced a thin, but strong, five-millimeter line on the page.
I looked at Dare, dizzily.
“You gave me permission to do that,” he said. It was hard to focus as my magic sucked in the extra jolts, but his tone was smooth and almost casual. “You said any time.”
I really did have to remember to phrase my words carefully at all times. But the juiced-up state snapped my magic into one last blaze.
The gorondiers came into view, as if their tile had been called to us, and Dare stepped onto the tile, tugging me along with him. He stared at the drawing for long moments as it flickered.
The last dragon fell, ashes drifted over my head, and the drawing in Dare's hands stilled. The map lines turned a light, pasty gray.
I was running on hyped-up overdrive due to the magic injection, but as soon as the buzz left me, I was going to be dead on my feet.
His gaze was unreadable as he looked at the gorondiers, the empty map, then back at me. “I'm tempted to ask you to do better.”
“You want me to port you directly to them next time?” Will and I might be able to do something with his pad technology, and school permission. Will was good at getting permission for his testing. He knew exactly who to ask and how the academic system worked. Obviously, so did Dare.
But if Dare confirmed right now that he wanted me to do it, I wouldn't be able to, and that would mean disappointing him. The sudden curl of anxiety wasn't pleasant. “I can work on it?”
I couldn't see his expression, as he had turned to run his hands along the bark of the carnivorous trees, calming them. The magic he left behind was clear, but the feel of a soothing camel shade tickled the edges of my consciousness as it spread from his hands, then blanketed the trunks. The fighting trees relaxed, lethargic. Dare moved between them, motioning for me to follow.
“This is going to work out just fine,” he said, as I hurriedly caught up. It sounded like a threat and a promise.
The tiles shifted around us and Dare turned left, modifying his path. I stayed close at his heels through twelve more slides, only able to do so because of the energy he had given me. His body language was confident as he moved, easily adjusting his path as he moved toward something.
“You know where things are here,” I said abruptly. “Without a map.”
“I stroll these levels every day, and have done so for the past two-and-a-half years. Even the chaos mages don't get in here as often as we do. They like their classroom theory far too much.”
“So, what? You use some recognition of the magic?”
“The chaos mages would be out a thesis each year if a known pattern existed. But certain tiles—as you deem them—seek to attract. They are always striving to be reunited. Naturally magnetic.” His gaze pinned me. “The path of that magnetism leaves a trace. A tension. A winding path to follow. The bigger tiles that group together to form large landscapes or cities are the easiest to work with. If you can get to one of those, you have a good chance to eventually find another.”
Eventually was really the keyword. “There are gazillions of tiles.”
“Well, I haven't numbered them. Unbelievable,” he muttered. His back was tight, as he came to a stop near a red stream under the current, unnaturally lime sky of the Midlands.
“It seemed to be the best way of keeping track,” I said, feeling the need to defend myself. “I come here sometimes. I fi
nd it comforting.” I looked over to see a gnarled shrub on the bank eating the remnants of its neighbor.
Dare seemed to be looking for something in the shrubs. “Comforting?” His attention focused on the cannibalistic plant that was now licking and cleaning its thorny chops with a leafed branch. “Most mages are terrified here. And the ones who do frequent these levels like to think them full of spiritual chaos.”
I had been unafraid of dying when I began traversing the chaotic, gorgeous, and terrifying levels last term, and by the time I had stopped chasing my brother into death, I had already hooked myself into Okai. If I bypassed Okai for some reason, I had enough experience to know what to expect in the Midlands, but I was walking meat here and I knew it.
I never just strolled the Midlands—skipping through brilliantly flowering meadows and frolicking in the sun. I ducked, dove, climbed, ran, and crept with Guard Rock and his super guardian senses at my back.
Dare had taken care of at least twenty beasts that would have eaten me when I was concentrating on the map dragons' magic.
He was still looking at me for a response on why I wasn't terrified. “Well, at your side is the best place to be, right? Wouldn't being afraid question your manliness or something?”
He stared at me for a long moment, and I could feel the heat creeping up my body. Stupid mouth. Stupid crush.
Thankfully, he concentrated on the area around us again. I could feel hidden eyes tracking and watching us—there was always something watching in the Midlands. Dare crouched down near the feral bush and nudged it to the side. His fingers grazed the dirt beneath and dug inside. When he pulled them out, a singed wing of a paper dragon was cradled in his palm. Crouched on the ground, he looked up through the dark hair falling across one eye, and extended it toward me.
I numbly took it from him. Fear finally crept into my emotions.
Doing magic around Dare was dangerous. It would have taken me a vast amount of effort to find the remnants of the dragons—and they were mine—but he had tracked this one in less than twenty minutes.
“How...?”
“Traces. Everything leaves them.”