by Anne Zoelle
Will wasted no time setting up a silence enchantment. “He's returning home to check something and then he's going to hunt the other full time. The negotiations have collapsed.” The full time designation might have amused me in other circumstances, as Marsgrove seemed permanently assigned to hunting Mr. Verisetti.
“Thanks, Will. Seriously, thank you.” I squeezed his arm and quickly slung my bag back on. “I may be absent for a day or two. I'll send you a note when I'm back,” I said, my words running together as I backed away. “Then I'm going to dedicate two days to being your work slave for all twenty of your projects.”
I didn't give him a chance to respond or ask any questions I didn't want to answer. I took off to the nearest campus arch and made three jumps down the mountain until I reached Marsgrove's street. I walked carefully inside. The magic seemed extraordinarily relieved to have me back. It sucked in toward me and gave me a little push toward the stairs. I pushed back, walked to Marsgrove's desk, and returned all of the books and papers I had stolen, arranging them quickly according to the mental snapshot I had taken. There was nothing I could do about the missing money, but hopefully that would go unnoticed.
To the delight of the pressing magic, I ran upstairs, threw my trash bags haphazardly in the closet—stuffing pillows and books inside each, with a shirt or sock peeking out, to make each bag look full.
I messed up the bed, tossed two shirts over the desk chair, grabbed a drink from the fridge—crap, what if he checked the back-end supply, wherever it was, and saw I hadn't eaten anything?
My midsection clenched, but I turned on the television. It was too late for second guessing.
I refilled the paperclip box and stuck the rest into my pockets, just in case. It took me a moment of psyching myself up, before I finally closed the door. The magic re-engaged with a snap, sealing me in. The soothing net settled, totally relieved to be back in place and I let it lead me to the bed where I lounged on my stomach and elbows as I might do at home while watching tv.
Marsgrove arrived an hour later.
I could feel his magic press against the door, questioning. The abject fear that ran through me nearly made me fly off the bed and back into the corner with my hands out, ready to defend myself. I took a deep breath, then another, forcing my inhales and exhales to expand and contract my torso normally.
I could imagine him looking through the door, and tried to school my expression into vacant lines. I wanted to crawl under the bed.
I dug my fingernails into the bedspread. Everything was riding on this.
The door clicked open. “Miss Crown?”
One of my fingernails ripped.
“Hmmm?” I said, turning my head slightly, trying to keep my expression as absent as possible.
“You look well.”
“I'm watching a new episode.” I could barely think, and the words came out mumbled and garbled. “Janie and Tommy are dating behind Freda's back.”
I focused on the morphing colors of the tv trying to gather my thoughts. Concentrate. Focus.
Without the magic that usually, readily answered, I focused my thoughts down the edges of a mental pyramid. Calm. Calm.
The fear and panic slowly pushed into the center of the pyramid, desperately bulging the sides of it outward. I allowed some of the soothing magic to trickle in and kept thoughts of calm pushing along the lines, caging them in, allowing the apex of my pyramid to funnel my words and tone.
“Can you believe Tommy?” My voice grew stronger. “Doing that to Freda? And Janie—I thought she was her friend? Don't you think Sonya should say something?”
“Er, yes, surely. I will leave you to your program.” Through my tightly bound fear, I could hear his relief. I could also hear his underlying stress. The negotiations—whatever they truly were—had failed and the danger for his side was increasing. “I was just making sure you were well. Everything looks fine.”
I sent an emotion I didn't feel down my mental construct and produced the best placid, inane smile of which I was capable. “It's home.” I indicated the mess. “Comfy.”
I needed to curb any notions that he might have about cleaning the space. Cleaning would undo my deception.
“Good, good. I'm just going to leave this bag of clothes here for you. I must have forgotten to remove it.” He put my missing trash bag on the ground. “I'll check on you again soon.”
He seemed like such a nice man at the moment. Normal. And yet, here I was caged like a Persian cat. He terrified me.
“Ok.” I waved over my head, fear and adrenaline blasting through my construct as I stared unseeingly at the images flickering on the screen. My back was completely to him. He could do anything to me at the moment.
But the door lock reengaged, and after another agonizing thirty minutes Marsgrove vacated the house. I sagged against the window, where I had scrambled to watch him depart. There was nothing so relieving as seeing his back disappear around the street corner.
Marsgrove was overconfident and exhausted. And like any adult seeing what he expected and hoped to see, he had underestimated his opponent. Thank God.
The soothing field pressed harder, as if it realized it needed to establish a firm hold on me as quickly as possible.
I quickly got to work. Unfortunately, the lock's diabolical nature was still the same, and my hands were less than steady. But a few hours and six paperclips later, I was free again.
Before exiting the house, I took stock of the new items on Marsgrove's desk.
My eyes lingered on a report Marsgrove had left. Upon touching it, a news reel hologram bloomed.
A newscaster I had seen on my reader's news feed before, wearing a trench coat and Darby said, “Is it true about Raphael Verisetti?” The man's voice dropped to a whisper. “Is he one of...those?”
A woman in a posh living room sat with her ankles crossed and her posture perfect. She looked like a bird of prey that would launch at any moment. Olivia would like her. “Previously, he had never given any indication of such abilities. The public should calm themselves. Everything is under control. If we discover that that particular mage type exists again, said mage will be dealt with, as we promised the public long ago.” Her voice was as icy as the smile on her face.
The scene shifted to a woman in an open doorway. “I went to school with him. He and his crowd were a dark, secretive bunch. Spread out in powerful positions now. Should look to them for questioning. I don't care what the authorities say. They didn't all disown him.”
The scene shifted again to a man being interviewed on the street. “Had to be an accomplice at Excelsine or in Lolinet Village. There was an event in both after the Ganymede Circus tragedy. Law enforcement tried to hush it up, but the coincidence makes one wonder. The Department should be allowed to do full sweeps of both.”
I took my finger away, shutting off the hologram. I exited the house shakily. Marsgrove had been right to check on me.
Raphael Verisetti did have an accomplice at Excelsine. An unwitting one.
Me.
Chapter Nineteen: Preparations
For all of my crazed revelations, the only action I could accept was to move forward. I wouldn't let Raphael Verisetti find me or use me again. It was common, spoken-about knowledge that strict wards had been placed on campus to keep him—and all registered terrorists—out. Since he had been a student at the Academy, his blood was registered, making such wards easy.
At least that is what they said.
As I walked back from another session with Draeger, I covertly watched a group of five students wearing round purple hats hold a meeting in a small stone circle near an arch that lead to the fifth circle.
“I want full sweeps of all the twentieth circle arches. Report back at the end of the day.”
Round hats nodded and they set off.
Another small group of three nearby sneered after them. “Useless. They won't find anything new. We should be going through the student registry and looking over new entries. Get Grave
sman on it.”
“He's already on probation for accessing—”
“Do I look like I care? Get him on it!”
Thank God I wasn't registered.
I chewed a fingernail. I showed up as a student for the cafeteria, though. Would I be on that list?
I needed to get Christian raised as fast as possible, then find a way to get us out of here.
All over, campus fell into a tense, anticipatory atmosphere that I tried to ignore by working harder. But eyes were everywhere, weighing and watching.
By the end of my second week, I had fallen into a daily routine:
* magic-breaking work with Stevens,
* chaos fields in sneaked into engineering classes,
* soul binding and cleansing rituals and research in the library,
* shielding and identification practice with Draeger,
* watching the news feed, listening for another Marsgrove alert, and jumping at shadows,
* working off punishments.
All wasn't terrible, though, as I had fallen into a daily routine of steady meals with Will and Mike.
Mike, I'd quickly learned, was Will's roommate. With his easy-going personality and interests, he and Christian would definitely get along when I brought Christian back. Sports came first for Mike, then girls, then food, then weather.
I picked his brain about weather mages and their work as frequently as possible, always liking to hear others speak about their passions and doubly interested because Christian's lightning seemed quite on par with Mike's field.
“If you have the talent, it is the best major on campus. Who else gets revenge by making rain clouds follow people around?”
I snorted and continued fashioning the design for my chaos field, trying to perfect the simulated 3-D space.
“Jealousy is a beautiful thing, Crown. I embrace yours,” Mike said with an affable gesture of acceptance.
It provoked an unwilling laugh. Yes, Christian and Mike would be fast friends.
“So, what are you drawing today?” He pointed at my paper.
“Just a practice piece.” I flipped my page and diverted the conversation. “Materials class with Stevens is fascinating. I've been making and testing pencils. The better the magic in the pencil, the more effortless the animation—and if you make it yourself, it connects and brings everything together. So the magic in the pencil becomes a direct conduit to my magic and intentions.”
Way better than the boatload of concentration and the resulting complete exhaustion that ordinary pencils required.
The paint samples I had tried in the vault—sneaking touches in while Stevens had her back turned—were even more spectacular. Not quite Verisetti-Crown “true” paint, but as soon as I could use paint freely, I had a good feeling about how my rate of progress would increase.
“Watch.” I made a list of the weather events Mike had been relating, then prodded the words into dancing as they arranged themselves into the desired order. The h's and n's were kicking their little legs in a Can-Can rhythm as they moved. The m's started dancing too, but because they had three legs, they kept getting out of beat. I considered using the middle leg as a stabilizer so its outer two legs could lift and extend.
His brows rose to brush the brown fringe of his hair. “You make that look easy.”
I froze. I did? Had I just done something freaky and feral? My x's started doing jumping jacks on the page, their little arms and legs whipping up and down, faster and faster.
“May I try your pencil?” Mike asked, thankfully not sounding horrified or repulsed.
I handed him my pencil and he drew a dark cloud on the page. Drops of rain sluggishly emerged. He looked at the pencil and smiled, returning it to me. “You make good pencils. And seriously, Crown, though you might find pencil-making interesting, most mages would rather pull off their toenails. You should sell them.”
I stared at the pencil. I had been helping Will make sketch templates for his experimental designs, so that he could record his results and tweak his variables in paper simulations. Maybe I could get him to set up a scientific magic booth during the Art Expressionists meetings and we could convert some of our extra items into cash.
I made a note to ask.
Mike and Will were opposite in many ways—Mike had a steady rotation of girlfriends, in a sporty guy, casual way, while Will seemed quite happy dating his research work—but a hum permeated the air when they performed magic together, which indicated a high degree of magic sympathy. It made me wonder about roommates, magic, and Olivia.
Will's lack of a social life—and mine—made it really easy for the two of us to meet. And he was always jazzed about everything he was doing, which was a very Christian trait. Even though their hair color wasn't the same, every once in a while I would catch myself looking at Will's bent head and thinking he was Christian.
Christian didn't like that. He was usually quite vocal about it too.
They were dissimilar in many ways, though. Christian had been a social lion. And it wasn't that Will was socially deficient, he was just wrapped up in his projects. Because I expressed interest in his work, and he in my art, we easily found common ground to chat for hours. This was likely the reason I felt the similarities to my brother.
It made me wonder...maybe I wasn't socially deficient either. Just...otherly focused.
Mike was more like Christian socially and sports-wise, and often made me laugh. Hanging out with the two of them made my heart lighter than it had been since my brother's death.
Will did have some secret life, though. Occasionally, he would get a shifty look on his face, touch his tablet, and say he had to be elsewhere.
When our eating schedules didn't mesh, I braved the cafeteria alone.
I learned from my first experience that I should go to the cafeteria before the rush. Once there, I would snag a free table and pull out my reader. The other seats would fill in eventually. I had met a few nice people that way, though they were fleeting acquaintances in a sea of fifteen thousand.
And I was very careful to stay quiet around or away from mages whose eyes were too quick and too cold in their watching of everyone else. That included Camille Straught and her friends. I avoided their tiered section completely.
But besides spending time with Will and Mike, joining the masses in the cafeteria was worth it for another reason. The food was excellent.
The different serving lines offered various types of ethnic food, something for everyone’s taste—even the mage chefs had lines that allowed their magic to combine the raw ingredients on display into unique, personal concoctions. After a particularly disastrous episode in their red line—in which I had envisioned preparing paella and ended with raw squid tentacles dangling from my hair in seafood dreadlocks—I had avoided it. Neither my magic nor my experience in a kitchen was yet up to the task, so I had stuck to the already prepared food lines since.
But to my half-delight, half-disturbance, the ten-eyed folks read a bit of one's surface magic to make a single food selection for each student in the brown line—and that answering positively to the “caniopidas” question gave them permission to do so. The food they chose was always disturbingly good and perfectly suited to my palate.
More importantly, though, meals were the times when I watched everyone around me and conducted social reconnaissance.
People seemed to be people, no matter what their magic abilities. However, the ability to shape life around them gave mages a slightly more mature outlook. Sixteen-year-olds spiritedly discussed terrorism and political tactics here. And mages like Dare, who I had discovered was nineteen, guarded the gates with their lives.
I wondered if the twenty-two-year-olds on campus withdrew magical Social Security.
When mages performed interesting magic or discussed thought-provoking topics around me, I took note, and researched the topics later—how one embedded spells, the history of magic, how magic actually worked between mages as a conduit and magic as an energy...a thou
sand things that I skimmed and flagged for later study.
Since I watched everything and everyone around me, it was impossible not to notice Nephthys, the girl who had healed me in the library. She sat alone three meals in a row on the second tier, head lowered over a reader. People would sit around her, but no one ever seemed to speak to her.
At the third meal, there was an empty chair next to her, so I decided to brave my crappy meeting skills and join her. Surprised, she glanced up. I gave her a determined smile that I hoped was friendly and not strange. Her eyes were kind, but sad, and I wanted to know her better; to make her smile.
“Do you mind if I join you?”
A small, genuine smile grew on her face. “Please do.”
The dream-like quality of sand and veils she had exuded in the library, hiding strength of character beneath shy innocence, was still present.
“What are you studying?” I pointed to the images on her reader. People were leaping and twirling on the screen.
“I transferred from the Sakkara Institute this season.” She looked a little tense at the admission. “I'm a Terpsichore mage.”
Other than Sakkara being the name of an Egyptian city, I didn't know much else.
“I'm embarrassed to admit I don't know what a Terpsichore mage is.”
She smiled, her face lighting up. “Really? But you noticed...” She shook her head lightly, but her smile stayed warm and her eyes were happy. The feeling suddenly seemed to transfer to me and seep right into my bones. “Ignore my babbling. It is a fancy way of saying that I dance.”
The increased energy made me feel like I was hovering on the edge of the zone—like I'd be able to do anything if I just tipped over and into it. “I paint. And draw odd structures.”
She tilted her head. “But you aren't a muse.” It was not a question.
“Er, decidedly not.” I didn't know what a muse meant in the magical sense, but I was far from anyone's reason for success.
“You were always my reason for success.”