Death Flag

  She looked extremely amused for a moment, but then a sadness flashed through her eyes. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” she said, shaking her head. “It was actually quite entertaining. I’m happy to have met you, and I enjoyed your honesty.” She tilted her head to the side just slightly as she examined him, and he was once again struck with that same feeling he had every time he was being watched by a Guardian. She held his gaze for a moment, and then she said, “There’s something about you that intrigues me. Would you allow me to read you?”

  “Read me?” Madison asked, instantly suspicious. “Read me how?”

  “It is one of my talents,” she said softly. “Although, it is often more of a burden than a gift. I can sometimes see things about a person . . . about their nature or their personality . . . and, sometimes, about their future.”

  Madison’s curiosity grew by the second. He’d implicitly accepted the fact that magic was real, however begrudgingly. After all, he could see it work, so he had to. But this was something different. She was offering to tell him something about himself—something that he might not even know. First the discussion with that clone in the testing room with him telling me that there are things I don’t remember and skills I’m not using because I don’t remember I have them, and now this. It’s starting to feel like the universe is trying to tell me that there are things I need to figure out about myself.

  He sighed heavily and then nodded, although reluctantly. No matter how much he was exposed to it, he didn’t think that he’d ever get used to magic. He’d been healed by it while he was unconscious, he’d been burned and frozen, and he’d been transported into completely different worlds. This was different, however: this was the first time he could remember giving his consent to someone using it on him ahead of time. It was also the first time he could remember someone asking his permission first.

  She stepped closer until she was only inches away from him, and he could once again smell the lingering scents of wind and cold. She reached up and wrapped her hands around his neck, interlacing them together behind his head, and then tilted her head back so that she could look him directly in the eyes. Madison stared down into their frosty, blue ice. It might have been the magic, and it might have been his imagination, but he would have sworn that they were actually sparkling in the dim light. It was like looking into a frozen, bottomless lake that went on forever.

  She leaned closer to him, lightly brushing against his chest, and he felt something similar to the sinking feeling he experienced while he was in the testing room. It started at the nape of his neck as an electric tingle that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, and then it made its way down his spine and then into the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t a lurching, sinking feeling, but something more akin to a nervous flutter.

  Madison realized he was suddenly hypersensitive to everything going on around him—the warmth from her hands locked behind his head, the slightly-cool breeze that brushed against his skin and rustled her long, silvery hair, and the presence of someone so very close to him. He stood before her, and as he gazed into her eyes, it was like everything else from the world receded. His world shrank down until there was nothing left in all of existence except for him and her. And then it exploded.

  Scientists theorize that the universe was created by a sudden, volatile explosion of high-density matter under extreme temperatures—a single explosion that started the formation of the cosmos. If he had been there to witness it, Madison imagined that this is how he would have felt. He felt like an ant next to a mountain; a grain of sand in the desert. He was simultaneously aware of how infinitesimally small his place in the universe was and yet how connected he was to everything else around him. He felt vulnerable and naked in a way that he hadn’t mere minutes ago as he stood in front of her without any clothes on. In that moment, there was nothing she couldn’t find out. He felt connected to her in that moment in a way that he never had anyone else before.

  He stared down into the swirling pool of ice that was her eyes, and he knew that she was reading him. Images flashed through his mind’s eye as the magic worked its course. He saw fields of hay on a hot summer afternoon, woods in autumn filled with colored leaves and rich, earthy tones. He saw clear streams that started on mountains and flowed forever and plains of grass that stretched into the horizon. He saw a frozen wasteland—a world of snow and ice that never thawed and was filled with people huddled around fires as they tried to keep warm, and he saw boundless oceans with white-capped waves and howling winds and raging storms.

  Then everything turned dark and twisted. Everything was stained with blood. Soldiers marched to war; a legion, shrouded in darkness. Men killed one another. Crops burned in the fields; they withered and dried and turned black from drought and disease. Homes burned. More men died, fighting in the streets against armored soldiers. Women died protecting their children. Children cried in the streets over the bodies of dead loved ones. Eyes glowed red in the dark, and claws scraped across bone.

  Madison watched himself as he fought shoulder-to-shoulder on the battlefield. He watched an army stretch out like an ocean in front of him and then fall away like grass being mowed. City streets ran red with blood in the middle of the night and bodies piled up. The man on his left died. The man on his right died. The witch stood before him, taunting him with words that he couldn’t hear.

  And then nothing. The images stopped, and she heaved a single massive breath and choked on a sob as it died in her throat. He hadn’t noticed it until now, but there were tears streaming down her face. She looked broken and forlorn and desperate, and he thought that it was the single most heart-wrenching thing he had ever seen. She stared at him with a mixture of fear and pity, and yet there was also a curiosity there.

  For once, he was at a loss for words. “I . . . Did you . . .?” he stammered, trying to find the right thing to say without actually coming up with anything.

  She opened her mouth as if she was going to say something but then closed it and shook her head instead, quickly pushing her way past him and heading back toward the main building in a rush. He watched her go, her silvery-white hair shimmering in the moonlight until it too disappeared into darkness.

  He felt a pang in his heart as she brushed by him. It was like watching the most beautiful flower in the world be carelessly crushed underneath someone’s heel to see her respond like that. He didn’t even know this young woman’s name, and he was already empathizing with her in a way that was dangerous.

  “More mysteries . . .” Madison took a deep breath and started making his own way back. He was at a complete loss for how he should even take that. Like everything else, he had been handed a box filled with riddles and obscure images, and he was going to have put it together like a jigsaw puzzle while blind.

  I wonder who she is? he thought to himself as he carefully made his way between the trees. I haven’t really met any magicians yet, but that was definitely something unexpected. I’ve been blasted, and I’ve been frozen, but that was . . . different . . . and extraordinary.

  He finally made it out of the forest, and as he looked up at the sky, he realized that it was much closer to dawn than he had realized. He remembered her saying that she had taken an early-morning walk to clear her head and think, but he hadn’t put two and two together. Rather than taking the time to go through the building and navigate the random turns, he simply started walking around it instead. It would take slightly longer than if he successfully made it straight through, but it would also be substantially shorter if he couldn’t focus and got lost instead. And, considering how much was on his mind at the moment, he didn’t really trust himself to stay focused on any one single thing.

  Despite being an official day for classes and training, it was still too early for anyone to be up yet—a fact that Madison was thankful for as he made his way to the infirmary. He wanted to pick up a few supplies without having to worry about dealing with people asking nosy questions, and with the way gossip traveled
around here, the entire campus would know every move he made as soon as they woke up and headed to breakfast.

  His stomach growled at the thought of food. I wonder if they’re going to be serving breakfast today. Sandra said that the dining hall was closed for preparations last night, but does that mean that I shouldn’t expect anything today as well? He wistfully thought about his lost sandwiches, and his stomach growled again.

  Alright, where did I find that gauze last time? He stuck his head into a few rooms at random, but he was a bit worried about pressing his luck. He had absolutely no idea which room was which or how many patients might be there at any given time, and each door he opened was a gamble as to whether or not he might run into someone. There have to be nurses or assistants or whatever they were on shift around the clock, right? I guess I could just ask for it without arousing too much suspicion if worse comes to worst.

  Finally, after several tries, he opened a door and found what looked like a medical cabinet positioned right next to the door. There was a bed against the corner underneath an open window, but it appeared to be unoccupied. There was a fair bit of light coming in from the window, but he left the door standing open so that the dim lighting from the hall would help as well. He pulled open the first drawer, the same place where he had found it so easily last time, but didn’t see anything that resembled gauze, so he started digging around in all the others. Finally, after digging around for what seemed like forever, he grabbed ahold of a cottony-feeling roll.

  Just as he was about to withdraw it, he saw something explode out of the bed on the far side of the room. He only had a moment to jump back out of the way as small body spun through the air and landed just beside where he had been standing. There was a glint of steel as a weapon flashed through the air, and Madison quickly jumped back another step into the hallway. He heard a small growl when the blade failed to connect with anything, and something triggered in his memory.

  “Wai—”

  He started to hold his hands up in a gesture of patience, and he was going to ask the person to stop, but it was too late. The small form launched itself forward again, aiming at where he stood in the hallway. He reacted before he even realized it, simply stepping to the side and out of harm’s way. She tried to stop herself when she realized what was going on, but she had far too much momentum by that point, and she careened headfirst into the wall with a small crash before crumbling to the stone floor in a small heap.

  Madison grinned broadly as he realized who it was. “You really dive into things headfirst, don’t you?” he asked teasingly.

  The small girl looked up at him dazedly. It took a good moment for her to realize who he was, but a glimmer of recognition eventually flashed through her eyes. An instant later, Shayna was on her feet. “Cree—!”

  Madison stepped forward and pushed his hand against her mouth to silence her before she could scream. She had already made enough noise trying to jump him in the room, and the last thing he wanted was for her to scream in the hallway and wake up everyone in the building.

  “Hush,” he said quietly but sternly. “People are trying to sleep, you know.”

  Rather than fighting him, her eyes simply grew wider over his hand. When she didn’t try to scream again, he nodded back toward the room they had just vacated and indicated for her to follow him back in. He fished around in the cabinet while she stood watching him, her face twisted into a scowl, before finally pulling out the roll of gauze.

  “Thanks,” he said, smiling at her politely and holding up the medical supply so that she could see what he was after. “That was a lot of work for this little thing. Welp, see ya.” He turned to leave, but he already knew he wasn’t going to make it very far.

  “Wait,” she hissed.

  He turned back around and looked at her expectantly. “Wait a minute,” he asked in a quiet voice. “Do you always sleep fully dressed?” She wasn’t even wearing the pajama-like clothing that they had dressed him in when he had been there before. She was wearing something similar to what he had seen her in the morning of the day before minus the thin armor she had originally worn: simple tight-fitting black pants; a loose black shirt; and a pair of shoes.

  “What?” she asked, clearly taken aback by his sudden question.

  “Your clothes,” he said, gesturing to her. “Do you always sleep fully dressed with shoes on?”

  Angrily, she hissed, “It’s a good idea when there are perverts trying to sneak up on you in the middle of the night!”

  “Wait, you had someone try and sneak up on you? Like, to take advantage of you?” Madison asked in shock. “Who lets kids just roam around in the night like that anyway? Shouldn’t all young children be in bed by dark?”

  She growled at him again, a rather tiny sound. “I’m not that young!” she cried defiantly.

  “Hey, hey,” he urged. “Keep your voice down. You don’t want to wake everyone up, do you?”

  “Why?” she asked cheekily. “Afraid that you’ll be exposed as the depraved man you really are when someone catches you here sneaking around in the dark?”

  “Uhh . . . Well, no. Not really. I just figured you wouldn’t want anyone to figure out that you’re actually trying to sneak out of here, that’s all.”

  “Wh-what? How did . . .?”

  “The boots, Shayna.” He pointed down at her feet. “Even if you sleep with your clothes on—which is totally absurd, by the way—no one ever sleeps with their shoes on. That’s just insanity.” Then, casually, he tacked on, “Hey, what day is it, by the way?”

  “What?” she asked, now clearly confused by his sudden switch in topics. “What do you . . .?”

  “You really aren’t yourself this early in the morning, are you? What day is it? Is today the day the envoy arrives? Or was that yesterday?”

  She stared at him without moving, only blinking a few times, so he purposefully took a breath and repeated himself, speaking much slower than he had before. “Is today the day the envoy arrives, or—”

  “Today,” she finally answered, interrupting him with a scowl “And don’t talk to me like that. I’m not a—"

  “Yeah, yeah. You’re not a little kid. Got it. Okay. Great! Okay, thanks. Well, see ya,” he said, turning to leave again.

  “Wait!” she hissed for a second time.

  Madison spun back around again. “This act is getting a bit old,” he said.

  “You went into the testing room, didn’t you?!” she whispered accusingly. “That’s why you don’t know what day it is!”

  “Was that a bad thing?” Madison asked innocently. “Was I not supposed to? I just kind of assumed that adults could just sort of . . . ya know . . . do their own thing, so . . . should I have gotten a permission slip from a Guardian first, or . . .?”

  “Screw you,” she said plainly.

  Madison purposefully put a stupid grin on his face. It was just too easy to tease her. It shouldn’t even be allowed it was so simple. “Ah! There we go! Now I know you’re wide awake!”

  But she ignored his latest jab. “What were you doing in there?” she asked. “People don’t just normally go running back to the testing room the first chance they get, you know. That’s sort of weird. Wait a minute, didn’t you get your ass kicked by those guys yesterday? Someone came running in telling everyone about the new guy getting beaten up by Nicholas and Gregory, but . . .” She trailed off as she looked him up and down. “You look like shit, though that’s typical for you so far, but you don’t look messed up. If they’d gotten you as bad as I heard, you’d probably be limping around right now.”

  “Ah, yes. Now that you mention it, I did have a run in with a few particularly-nasty gentlemen yesterday—and at least one woman—though I couldn’t identify her or them if I tried. They stuffed my face full of some nasty white powder, and I couldn’t see or think of anything else while they beat the shit out of me.”

  Shayna nodded. “Eye-bore. It was something cooked up by an amateur alchemist. Well, he wasn’t actually an
alchemist . . . He just sort of called himself that. There hasn’t been a true alchemist in hundreds of years. Anyway, it’s pretty nasty stuff. Neither of those two has the balls to fight someone head-on and alone, so they typically rely on dirty surprises and cheap tricks like that to win.”

  “Duly noted,” Madison replied, actually grateful for the advice. “I guess those really were the ones Warren warned could after me just to get into Randall’s good graces. Wow. Look at us getting along and trading information like old friends!”

  Shayna rolled her eyes at him. “What were you doing in the testing room?” she demanded. “And don’t try to change the subject.”

  “Actually, you’re the one who changed it, not me,” Madison pointed out. “And what do you think I was doing? I was testing something.” Okay. I was actually talking to an exact clone of . . . Madison stopped that train of thought and laughed. “Okay. I was talking to an exact clone of myself who told me that he knows everything I know—even the stuff that I know that I don’t remember that I know—and that, to figure it all out, he was going to have to teach me.”

  She looked at him dumbfoundedly, and he couldn’t help but laugh again. “Scout’s honor!” he said, holding up a hand.

  “You’re definitely not a scout. You’re not even a rogue,” she said suspiciously, clearly not willing to believe his claim. “And what scout has honor? They’re all nothing more than trained assassins. Who’s ever heard of honor among assassins?”

  “Only among thieves, right?”

  “What? What thief has honor?! Oh my god!” Shayna stamped her foot petulantly. “Stop trying to confuse me!”

  “So, what day is it?” he asked again.

  “You didn’t miss a day,” she finally answered with a huff. “It’s almost morning. How long ago did you come out?”

  Madison had to actually think about that one. “A couple of hours ago, I guess. I went swimming and met someone, so I sort of lost track of time. I went in late yesterday afternoon, so I guess I missed just over half a day? Not too bad.”