The Rise of Ren Crown

by Anne Zoelle

  I had seen pictures. Eight weeks of Layer Politics classes three times a week plus homework hadn't kept me ignorant of what had happened to the Third Layer. But most of our classes had to do with the politics between the layers and the political efforts made between. And we'd been saving the “ways to go forward using everything we've learned” discussions for the last few weeks of term, which we hadn't yet fulfilled.

  Seeing the devastation firsthand—feeling it—was a lot different than reading about it and abstractedly observing pictures.

  “It—” I reached out a hand as if I could unhook the sky from the ground where it was pinched, then curled my fingers back in. My breath stuttered and my magic tried to reach forward. To connect to all the broken paths.

  It would be visually fascinating if it didn't feel so wrong.

  “Darling?”

  “It's horrible,” I breathed.

  “It's the Third Layer.” His lips curled distastefully. “It's akin to hell. Or a vacation in Tus Onus,” he said pensively. “Horrible place. All tourists and pr—”

  “The magic here. It's broken.”

  He looked around, cocking his head as if to try and see it from a new view. He held out his hand to me without looking back, and I put mine within his grip. I sent the vision of it—the grid of broken connections and strings with torn ends.

  “Ah. I could swim in your brain, darling.”

  “Yeah, I've heard that before.” I sighed and dropped his hand, concentrating on what I could do.

  “You can't fix it,” he said sharply. “And you can't do magic out here without drawing on a container hooked to your recycler. We went over what happens if you use magic here outside of a safe zone, Ren.”

  It was always serious when he was addressing me by name.

  “Yes, I know, layer shift, blah, blah. What if we just fixed the layer shifts?”

  “And world hunger. Peace. We could go for a trifecta.”

  “You heard Stevens,” I said softly. I had shared the memory of what had happened after he left.

  “Yes. And I'm quite put out that she pinned you with any such feeling of duty like that,” he bit out.

  “I could do it. She's right. Technically right.” I swallowed the dry—no, sterile—air and looked carefully around. “It's not like I'm going to say abracadabra and fix anything. But I have the correct...skill set, or whatever. I could fix it. And because I can, I do have an inherent responsibility.”

  “Or you could let them all burn. It's what they will do to you.”

  I crossed my arms, tucking my hands beneath my armpits. “Let's just find Olivia.”

  “Yes, let's find your wayward roommate,” he said. “Who will tell you what such ridiculous notions these are.”

  He wasn't wrong about that.

  A strange animal, half-cat, half-lizard screeched as it appeared around a pinch in the world—jumping from around its bend and taking us completely by surprise.

  Enough of a surprise that I formed my mental pyramid and blasted magic to encase it—magic that I pulled from the air. The magic rippled out, then up, then out again—the layer shifting almost audibly around us. Wow, well named.

  Next to me, Constantine closed his eyes.

  “Sorry,” I said, cringing. And here I'd thought I'd be all “First Layer cool” and not even think to use magic—but no, when magic attacked, my first response was to respond with magic, apparently. I blamed Alexander Dare for this.

  The gathering mushroom cloud of magic spread over us. The earth rumbled beneath our feet and a hundred bolts of green lightning fragmented the sky.

  In the Second Layer, the backlash from every magic use was contained and distributed, safely dealt with over an intricate system of ever-expanding technology and research.

  In the Third Layer, this system was...not present.

  “Run, Crown.”

  To where? I wanted to say. But instead I grabbed his arm. “We aren't going to make it.”

  “One of us will.” He sounded resigned, even though he nearly had to shout over the howling winds. He pushed me. “Go.”

  His fingers were already glowing, drawing magic, and he was staring upward, preparing. The magic cloud had finished gathering, and it shot down toward the one who was drawing more magic, completely uninterested in me.

  I launched myself at Constantine, shoved him to the ground, and arced the containment field I had strapped to my shoe over the top of us just as the blast hit.

  Pain. Darkness. Blinding light. The backlash swept over the field and upward in a long arc, then made a rapid swirl and hammered down.

  Lightning—completely unnatural lightning—howling winds, and grinding cracks struck and shifted and broke upon us.

  Over and over. Until finally, the hammering grew less and less, and the tendrils dissipated outward in almost caressing wisps.

  The black spots slowly, painfully cleared from my vision. Tinnitus still rang my ears. Mineral dust clogged my nose. And my body...

  “Ow,” I said into the unyielding rock my shoulder was pressed against. My shoulder ached, I had a fractured rib, and something was bruised in my midsection. No stranger to pain, the sensations running through my body were still extremely unpleasant.

  I turned my head to see Constantine staring at me blankly, as if a soul-sucking wind had swept through him and left nothing behind. But a quick—passive magic!—check through our connection indicated he was physically fine. I had taken the brunt of it all as the person connecting with the field.

  I put that on the list of fixes to make.

  “So...the Third Layer sucks,” I said, my words clenching a little, as I looked up at the too-close, warped sky that was now a strange vermillion and sulfur-yellow mix.

  “An understatement,” he said in a clipped voice.

  He was angry with me. I didn't know if it was from me unthinkingly grabbing magic in the first place, or for not running when he told me to. Probably a little of both.

  “I can kinda see why the people who live here might want it fixed.”

  Something wriggled out from underneath me and I shifted to see the animal that had started the whole thing bristle its back fur, hiss at me, then dart away on four short, scaly legs.

  “Well, the lizardcat made it, and so did we, so we can just count this as a small oops, right?” I said, and turned to look at Constantine.

  He ignored the fleeing animal and continued to look at me, gaze intense. “What was that you used?”

  I painfully sat up and looked at the remnants of the field. “Well, it was a prototype of Professor Mbozi's that I tweaked yesterday, then again this morning while I was stuck at Bellacia's. I have a duplicate in my other shoe, but it is a copy with just my magic. I'm not sure we want to try that again before I fine-tune it. I already know three things that need to be adjusted, so don't start,” I grumbled.

  I looked back at Constantine, and for a moment, his expression held a look of longing so fierce that it made me blink. It was gone in that slim, bantam beat of time, a fleeting moment of my imagination.

  “We will be making more as soon as we get home,” he said, brushing himself off as he stood up.

  “Mbozi is going to sigh at me again,” I said, poking at the debris, then pushing painfully to my feet and brushing myself off as well. “This one was mostly his.”

  “He is going to do anything but sigh.”

  I cocked my head at flashes of light bending around the pinches of earth and sky. There were vehicles coming toward us from the distance. “We have company.”

  Constantine followed my gaze and stepped an inch in front of me. “Give me the device.”

  I handed him what Delia had given to me. It was blinking.

  “That is our ride then?” I asked.

  Or our rides, to be exact. A group of vehicles sped toward us, around pinches and strange-looking spots. Rocks kicked up from the tires and flew out in all directions, pinging wildly in the abnormal physics.

  Constantine looked a
t the group of approaching vehicles as they drew closer, and said, flatly, “You have to be kidding.”

  “What?”

  “Peoples set you up with the Ophidians?”

  “Delia set us up with whom?”

  Constantine looked up at the too-low sky, as if seeking guidance from a...lower power.

  “Does it matter?” I asked, as they drew closer. They wore thick goggles and protective gear that covered most of their skin. They looked like extras from an insane version of a magical Mad Max movie. Small serpents covered their vehicles. “Should I be concerned?”

  “Are you ever?”

  “I feel like you are poking fun at me during a high-stress situation.”

  “I'm stating the obvious. However, if they don't kill us outright and strip us of our things, we should make it to our destination in their company.”

  I'd been in a constant state of panic for a week, and we'd just nearly died. Seeing what looked like cannibal outlaws headed our way wasn't the worst thing I could imagine.

  Constantine's hand pulsed with magic. Safe container magic. I touched the ouroboros's cord at my throat to keep a focal point and I hooked into one of the containers secured in my armband. I felt how the magic leaked through it into the ouroboros field, then slid back around. I closed my eyes, feeling the circulation around my body instead of inside, then firmly told my body to use this in a startle response instead.

  The vehicles soon surrounded us. Their wheels did something in the last twenty-five yards to throw debris away from us.

  They stopped. The most intimidating of our new compatriots sat on the largest of the single person vehicles. He-she-it held up a device similar to ours, then nodded at someone behind us.

  I'd been assured that the translator spell would still work with my containers and the magic field generated by the ouroboros ring.

  “Hi,” said the person on the left, in a decidedly female voice, confirming that the translator spell worked just fine. She hopped off her two-seat bike. “Regan, right?”

  “Yes.” I stepped forward, answering to the fake name. “Thank you for helping us.”

  She shrugged. “Getting paid for it. Said it would be a quick trip, though they didn't say where.”

  “Corpus Sun,” I said. “Not too far, I hope?”

  Silence greeted that pronouncement. I shifted on my feet and forced myself to keep looking at the fully-covered person in front of me, instead of checking Constantine's expression. He'd been on edge since we stepped into the Third Layer—but the edge of boredom that was ever present outside of a lab setting or real two-person conversation, was in full effect.

  “Listen, kid,” the girl said—who didn't sound all that much older than me. “You might want to reconsider that. Some heavies in that territory right now.”

  I nodded. “That's why we are going there.”

  Looks and gestures were exchanged. Frequencies—like any active magic—weren't used in Outlaw Territory, but they obviously had some form of communication.

  “Going to need some extra munits for that, then,” she finally said.

  Constantine held out his hand. A magical bomb ticked on his palm. “Or you can do it before I kill all of you and everything around us.”

  The group shifted backward.

  “What are you doing?” I hissed.

  “Making sure they realize that getting us to Corpus Sun, quickly, is really their best option.”

  “You're bluffing,” the girl said flatly.

  “And you, obviously, don't realize who you are dealing with. All I have to do is activate this and watch all of you burn around us. Then, perhaps, I will reassemble the remains of your vehicles and find the place myself.”

  There was a short communication with the large person—man?—who'd had the device, then the girl shrugged. “Fine. Get in. I'm far happier dropping you off there now.”

  She motioned to me. “You, with me.” To Constantine, she said, “You, in the middle of that one.” She pointed to an oddly-shaped vehicle that held three people already.

  Constantine narrowed his eyes.

  “You can be pissed all you like, Privilege, but you're getting on that bike, or you're walking.”

  ~*~

  The girl who wouldn't give us a name said the ride would take three hours. Once we had been riding for about forty minutes, and I felt like we might survive the insanity of the trip around holes of death, other bandits, and places where the earth attacked, I dug a lotus out of my bag.

  Making sure to hook the magic of it under the ouroboros field, I let the healing magic settle into my skin, fixing my fracture and soothing my aches.

  “How are you doing that?” the girl asked, with an askance motion of her head.

  “We hooked up a small, portable system. Personal magic recycler. It's not infinite in its use, but at least it doesn't shift the layer,” I said with a cringe at the end.

  The Ophidian nodded. “We use something like that too. But a littler rougher around the edges. It's hard to test things here without...consequences. You Second Layer folks have a lot more options.”

  It was said without rancor. Just a statement of fact. The Third Layer was a half-gutted world of hardship. But even the harshest deserts contained life.

  At Excelsine, at the pinnacle of scholarly pursuit, I was used to being surrounded by overwhelming magic. Little was impossible at Excelsine.

  Far less was possible here.

  I touched my pocket, where I had the extra set of containers and ouroboros for Olivia. I needed both sets for us to escape. But...

  But these people were doing incredible things with the little that they had. We would have died at least fifty times if we'd tried to walk to our destination. What could they do with more?

  “How could I get something to you, after we get home?”

  The girl cocked her head, but still stared straight ahead, concentrating, and dodging, the numerous pitfalls that Outlaw Territory provided. “Do you think you will get home?”

  “I have to believe that, don't I?”

  “Hope is for fools.”

  “Hope is sometimes the last thing we have,” I said quietly.

  “Hmmm... Well, hope is something that your friend Privilege over there is dearly wishing he had right about now.”

  I looked over to see what she was talking about and nearly laughed at the narrowed look on Constantine's face whose ride wasn't going nearly as well in the larger vehicle as mine was. Also, my driver was way more awesome.

  “Tell you what, kid. You get home, you go through the same contact that got you to us, whoever it was. Then maybe we can talk.”

  I left her a lotus flower, tucked under her seat.

  Chapter Forty-four: Approaching Doom

  After an eventful ride that I was sure Constantine never planned to repeat, the Ophidians stated that “for everyone's protection” we would be dropped off about a ten minutes' walk from Corpus Sun. Without a wave, they took off at high speed into the distance.

  “Well, that was fun,” I said cheerfully.

  “I will make you bleed, darling.”

  I didn't bother trying to hide my smile. I couldn't wait to tell Neph the story when we returned.

  “You will not,” he warned as we started our trek.

  “Oh, I will,” I said. “And, seriously, how do you always know what I'm thinking?”

  “Anyone could have read that from your face.”

  “What about the other times?” I asked.

  He hesitated, oddly, and I zeroed in on it. “Yes?”

  “Practicing Mind Magic is illegal, so let's say that your auditory deficiency affects you in ways other than just making you susceptible to mages with high levels of skill in audition.”

  I thought crazy, secret things all the time. I'd have been taken by some shady government agency long ago, if that were true. Bellacia would have made it happen. And Constantine and Axer could only read me sometimes.

  “Listen, Ren—” he began.
/>   “I can't. I'm obviously terrible at it.”

  That got a reluctant smile from him, which I thought he sorely needed. “When we get back—”

  “Praetorian Tarei has disappeared.” Dagfinn's voice suddenly came through on the only channel that we had connected for the Third Layer—the emergency channel. “I repeat. Tarei has disappeared from campus. He has taken at least three dozen Legion soldiers with him. Do you copy?”

  “Yes,” I said immediately, exchanging a grim look with Constantine. The praetorians knew we were coming.

  ~*~

  We slipped on our cloaks, pulling them securely around us. We had mimicked the shadow cloaks and connected the three cloaks into a network of magic, so that we could still see the people under the others. We'd give the third to Olivia as soon as we found her.

  Delia, Mike, and I had constructed Constantine's and Olivia's off the same pattern as mine, and I took a moment to take pleasure at how well they worked.

  There was a rippling sort of illusion to them—the weather, fiber, and misdirection charms on them tricking the eye. I hadn't used Origin Magic, per se, but I'd used what I remembered of seeing the layers, connecting that vision to reflect in the fabric. We lived in the layer system and were surrounded by it, by definition. Duplicating the qualities visually, so far, had succeeded in tricking everyone's eyes that we tested it upon.

  But tension coiled in me as the town came into view. Olivia was somewhere inside.

  “Corpus Sun,” Constantine said, in a low voice, looking at the small, barren town surrounded by a thin dome. “A less apt name, I couldn't choose.”

  We carefully made our way down the small slope toward the town. From our higher vantage point, I could see inside the clear barrier reasonably well. Two trenches stretched the length of the dome's interior, forming a cross at the center. A clear glass material covered the trenches, allowing roads to cross over the top. I could see magic flowing through the trench and out into the dome. It appeared to be similar to Ganymede Circus in that respect, funneling magic use into strengthening the dome around it as it simultaneously dissipated each magic use into something less dangerous.

  There weren't any visible openings or arches in the dome. “Do we just walk through?”