The Awakening of Ren Crown

by Anne Zoelle

  A list for creating a new being.

  Some of the tension in my shoulders released. Here too, only a list of ingredients was given, and not the amounts or directions, but it was a beginning. Because of the dark magic associated, the cost of making these enchantments would be high—far greater than burns, bruising, or the loss of my hair. I could worry over that later.

  I gently pushed the lists to the device and watched as the information sucked inside.

  I smiled and deactivated the cards, as the first warning bell sounded to indicate my time was up. I yawned again around my smile. Perfect.

  I stumbled out of the room and collapsed into a chair. I was going to have to do some plotting. I would get some blob matter for Will, and keep a tiny bit for when I was ready for Christian.

  It was all moot until I secured Christian's soul, but my paint had animated a rock—a rock that thought itself my guard. Like some mad sculptor or Geppetto and Pinocchio, all of this was worth further study. Clay and metal sculptures and life-sized dolls—making a new being from dirt, if I had to. I would start making molds right away while resting between rituals. Something would work.

  I could only imagine if the roles were reversed...Christian, my seat-of-the-pants twin, would rush in with his charisma and ingenuity blazing on all cylinders, succeeding by a thin margin and laughing all the while, as he planned moment to moment. I, however, was the boring planner twin. Perhaps in this instance it was a point in my favor.

  I would never be raised in time, if the situation were reversed.

  Smiling, I yawned and made my way toward Dorm One while plotting a new strategy.

  Professor Stevens was particular and exacting. She didn't make the kind of mistakes most people might. But as Will had said...club channels. I'd bet anything that blob matter was what Constantine Leandred had stolen from the lab that day.

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Of Blobs and Mistakes

  The terrible, horrible, beautiful man still had it sitting right on his shelf. In plain view. It looked like a perfectly normal ceramic container—one that would normally not demand a second glance.

  I pointed at it. “Ok, Leandred, what's it going to take for you to divide your blob matter with me? And what the hell are you drinking?”

  One perfect eyebrow went up. “A perfectly shaken martini.”

  “You're eighteen.”

  “I will be nineteen in four weeks. Remember to buy me something. And I have the ability to both pour and consume liquid.”

  “Whatever. The blob matter?” I hoped we didn't share a birthday, if even a year apart.

  “What blob matter? You must be mistaken.” He took a sip, then nonchalantly dangled the glass over the arm of the chair, one long leg was slung over the other arm. His ever-present black ribbon hung loosely from a free finger.

  I pointed again. “It's right th—” My finger jabbed toward a picture of a horse. One that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Freaky illusion magic. I crossed my arms. “I know it's there. I saw you take it that day, and I just saw the container.”

  “Blackmail?” He hummed into his glass.

  I frowned at him. “I'm not going to blackmail you, but do you need all of it? If not, I want to buy some.”

  He observed me over the rim of his glass, then languidly poked at the olive. “I'd blackmail you.”

  “No you wouldn't. Come on, what do you want for it?”

  His lips curved in amusement. “I can't decide if you are foolish or brilliant. A bit of both, I think.”

  “Great. Blob matter?”

  He gave an exaggerated sigh. “Fine. You can have one liter. But I want another box. A better one. And I want to design it.”

  His warning about hiding my box sketches rang in my head as his eyes held mine. I was getting that matter for Will and Christian, though. “We'll design it together. Deal?”

  He watched me for a long moment, caramel eyes giving away nothing. Then he tossed down the rest of his drink and waved me away. “Tomorrow night, bring an appropriate vessel in which to contain it. I'm not chasing down blob separations.”

  ~*~

  I showed up promptly, ceramic vessel in hand.

  “First thing's first.” He smirked, then touched the skin on my arm. I felt a flicker of magic test me, then retreat.

  He led me into one of two rooms that was always closed during squad visits, and again the magic flickered over me, verifying permission to enter. To my amazement, the room contained a fully equipped chemistry lab and large worktable.

  The differences between my dorm and Constantine’s were considerable. Constantine’s five room suite was more like a luxury condo than a dormitory. I had no desire to enter the open door to the bedroom, but I wondered what was behind the other closed door. His mysterious roommate's secret lab?

  Designing a box with Constantine was...interesting, to say the least. We bickered across the table for nearly two hours, but I finally started to construct three dimensional edges around the flat box in which I had originally placed him. He was actually brilliant when he was serious, just like Stevens had muttered. But his sincerity was short lived, as if he always remembered some part he needed to play. He preferred flashy magic and verbally shredding those around him, all while holding a martini glass and doing obscene things to the olive with his tongue.

  Two different girls had stopped by to visit him while we'd been designing. He had fielded them in the living room, away from me, but I could hear them clearly enough. He hadn't been...kind...to them, though both girls had continued to sound hopeful as they'd left. Which made me seriously want to go out and shake them.

  I drew the storage box to his specifications, then spent an additional two hours embedding protection wards inside it based on the ones I had set up in my secret lair. While in my zone, I didn't notice too much about what Constantine was doing, but he wasn't an amateur rule-breaker and remained quiet and stayed out of my way. In fact, a few times when he thought I wasn't paying attention, I had seen him working on another project, hair falling into his face as he worked out equations and formulas, black ribbon trailing across his papers.

  Near the end, I had to excuse myself to make a quick trip to the Midlands to activate the sketch with a dab of paint. It worked perfectly. If I had thought he was gleeful before, the expression on Constantine's face when he tested the new storage sketch was downright smug. He immediately embedded a few protections. Anyone else trying to use or steal that paper was going to be sorry—and quite possibly disemboweled. I hoped he was never assigned to the service squad and in charge of anyone's punishment.

  Finished with his project, I cheerfully walked back to the Midlands with Will's blob matter carefully tucked in a ceramic container in my bag. I looked around to make sure no one was watching, then stepped over the high northern border. Immediately, the tug toward Okai bloomed in my chest. I followed the feel of it, dodging three croc-geese, a shade bat, four zombies, and two crumbling buildings. The more I came to the Midlands, the stronger the pull to Okai became and the quicker the building appeared to me, glowing softly, as if it too was eager to work.

  It appeared in front of me during the next Midlands shift. I smiled and entered, patting Guard Rock affectionately as I closed the door.

  My lab was rocking now. I had put together a collection of workbenches and cabinets that I had appropriated from other buildings in the Midlands—a hazardous proposition as I'd nearly been eaten, absorbed, and swallowed by a number of unsavory things while dragging furniture around.

  Guard Rock had poked at the tube a week ago and absorbed another drop of lavender paint while I'd been thinking about cleaning, and he now kept the place neat and tidy. He had no head, but he had nicely formed opposable thumbs and a fine precision grip. He had subsequently moved all of the broken glass upstairs into a storage box I had labeled “shards,” but there was still a layer of dust about two feet in diameter surrounding the Cheval looking glass. Even he wouldn't approach it.

  I had collected appa
ratuses of every kind, and was storing them as neatly as I could. I could really use some magical pegboard.

  I yawned, then shook myself. I couldn’t afford inactivity. There was a reason I had become a mage after Christian died, I felt it, and it was to bring him back.

  I separated the bulk of the blob matter into a second storage container that I would give to Will.

  But the smaller portion...

  I picked up Will's regulator—which I had already tested—then withdrew a magic neutralizer I had procured from Chen Lifen, one of the friendlier members of the malcontents' club who had done a stint on the Neutralizer Squad. The neutralizer would allow me to do a test, and then when I was done, I could use the apparatus to return whatever I was testing back to its original state. That way I wouldn't waste precious materials, or produce a batch of hazardous ones.

  The neutralizer would allow me to use the good old-fashioned scientific method on the blob matter. Change one thing, neutralize it, change another thing, neutralize that. A saving grace, as I didn't have a plethora of matter at my disposal. The original state of the blob was reddish-brown.

  I made a note two hours later that I would need to regulate blob's desire to eat human flesh. Maybe it was just a symptom of the blob matter being a one-foot-tall burgundy humanoid at present—not quite a golem—but Mom would be none too chuffed if Christian ate our neighbors.

  Perhaps I could get rid of his penchant for onions as a by-product of my testing? We could band together against our parents and strike them permanently from the menu.

  I swallowed hard, then cleared my throat and swallowed again, trying to get the block out. I shakily wrote onions in the margin. I'd work on it, then tease him mercilessly.

  ~*~

  “I am entering the Shift Festival,” Will announced at dinner. The ecstatic joy from thirty minutes prior—when I had given him the blob matter—was still present in his voice.

  I stirred my caniopidas soup. Tasty, but hot. “What's a Shift Festival?”

  Nephthys cleared her throat. I looked up to see two of the other people at our table looking at me strangely, mouths agape.

  “What do you mean, what's a Shift Festival?” one of them said.

  “No, Ren said Lift Festival, which is what I heard you say too, Will,” Neph said.

  The skin on the back of my neck turned hot and pinpricks of discomfort crawled. Will already knew, and Neph had figured out how new I was rather quickly, though we had never discussed it.

  Unfortunately, I had invited a couple of people I had seen wandering around to sit with us, then briefly forgotten not to ask magic world-related questions.

  Will smiled brightly. Too brightly. “I...I have been working on a lift. Elevator charm. I think we need to tweak our translation enchantments again, though. Shift Festival. You know, the period between the fourth and fifth full moons every year when there are continual Layer shifts.”

  “Should have done something to eliminate them completely by now.” Mike looked grumpy as he set down his tray to join us. “Weather mages get all our big exams during that time because of the repetitive and horrific disturbances. The professors tortured us last year.”

  Will looked at Mike earnestly, as usual. “The yearly events keep us on our toes. Highly civilized societies need such things. The Nile floods in Egypt in the First Layer, the grasses explode in Taratanga in the Third, the Shumei rains fall in the Fourth...here, in the Second, we can count on the Layer shudders and shifts for scientific and magical advancement.”

  “So what are you going to do as a project, Will?” I asked.

  Mike groaned.

  Will leaned forward, brimming with excitement. “Well, the Layer magic is trying to work out the magic knots and kinks from all sorts of activity, but especially from those caused by traveling. We travel far more in the Second Layer than in any other. It is a daily activity to travel somewhere. Pinching, prodding, waving...” He tapped a finger. “Which is why part of my portal pad design limits the amount of impact on the Layer by skimming.”

  “Please.” Mike put his forehead on the table, narrowly missing his mashed potatoes. “No more talk of skimming, I beg you.” Mike looked up at me, eyes pleading. “He got a permit to test in our room inside of a small travel field. Now everything in our room has been skimmed. I lost a pair of shorts the other day when the pad flew over the top and sucked them into the abyss. Then the pad burst into ash.” He stuck a finger up toward the ceiling. “Mike Bessfort's shorts—a flat pickle somewhere in the layer sandwich. Forever stuck.”

  “Maybe they will come flying out and whack you smack between your eyes, in the middle of the most important meeting of your life,” I said. “Then you can exclaim—'my pickle, my pickle has returned to me!'”

  “Hilarious, Crown.”

  “Or maybe your shorts are toxic,” Nephthys said.

  Will started snickering.

  “Wow, the lot of you are simply a riot today.” Mike pointed his fork around the table. “Will is going to end up as one of those extreme eco-mages, mark my words. Living in a hut without magic.”

  Mike's expression was deadpan, but I could see the sparkle in his eyes.

  Will rolled his eyes, and directed his attention to me. “Lots of people don't want to get rid of the shifts, they just want to use the magic better—like Ganymede Circus used to do, funneling the shift magic through the dome and center statue, then pushing it into the shops. Mages use shift magic for everything from irrigation surges to capturing it for chaos events. Which provides fantastic research possibilities also. Last year I worked on a smoothing function that would unkink a small section of the Second Layer, then power a generator for a year.”

  The other two people looked impressed. “Nice, Tasky,” one said.

  Mike looked at us, expression deadpan again. “Ask him about the results.”

  “Er, how did it go, Will?” I asked.

  Will had turned bright red. “The generator worked. It's, uh, still working.”

  “Wow.” I was impressed. I wondered if I could use that type of energy alteration to power some rituals. Maybe I could use the power from another town like Ganymede? Unless Ganymede had used their shifts to power their daily reconstruction and other towns did the same. Huh. What about—

  “And?” Mike's voice was coaxing.

  Will started rubbing the back of his neck. “It wasn't so bad.”

  There were a few moments of silence, with Will looking agonized, before Mike turned to us. “He stripped the entire delegation of judges of their clothes, smoothing out every wrinkle for fifty feet by simply making any matter that contained a single tiny wrinkle disappear into his generator.” Mike couldn't stop his smile from forming, though it was obvious he was trying to be the comic straight man. “Some lovely, lovely mages on the science and arts council. Gorgeous assets in that department. I never miss one of his presentations now.”

  ~*~

  I waved to a familiar face as I took the last set of stairs back down from Top Circle. If there was one thing to say about community service, it was that it provided a serious avenue for meeting people.

  That had really helped me in other aspects of my campus life. I began keeping an eye out for anyone in the cafeteria who looked out of place or for the loners from the “club” and would invite them to join us. Such choices proved to make our motley table a pretty lively and interesting place to be. Will had started grinning foolishly before he even set his tray down. He had sported a downright sloppily drunk smile after the table-wide debate and antics concerning Foam Magic.

  I desperately wanted Christian to experience this new world with me.

  I stopped, panic gathering in my gut. I hadn't thought about Christian at all during dinner.

  A figure covered in red appeared ten feet away.

  “Demon!” Someone yelled.

  “The terrorists must be here!” a girl shrieked.

  I was forgetting my brother. Losing focus. Chatting like I was normal. Worried abou
t friends and fitting in.

  Forgetting about my brother. For even a moment. I was a horrible person.

  Nausea overcame me and I bent over.

  “Demon! Everyone run!”

  But I couldn't run. Couldn't move.

  “It's powering up a killing blast!”

  Emotion built within me, confusing and horrible. I just wanted things to be right. For everything to be ok. Magic blasted out from around my cuff. I heard an outraged roar, a terrifying boom, then all was silent.

  ~*~

  I spent the next two days away from everyone and their crazy talk about demons, working with Draeger and Stevens and drowning in blob tests and rituals. Christian's voice would alternately urge me to move on with my life, then demand that I help him live.

  I showed up in the cafeteria on the third day with bloodshot eyes. Everyone gave a soft greeting as I set my tray down.

  I...I couldn't be afraid to live.

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Living and Helping

  Early on, I had realized that if Olivia ate in the cafeteria, it was in a nook somewhere unknown to me. Because frankly, I had looked for her as a familiar face in a crowd of strangers and would have very likely attempted to sit with her in those early days, despite her obvious frostiness toward me.

  But...what if Olivia ate in our room all the time? She had a fridge and a microwave. No one visited our room for her except to discuss class work. And through a semi-deduction of her shorthand, I had occasionally seen her check names off of her “minions” list.

  None of those visitors were friends.

  After the brush with the tricorn, she had thawed a little toward me. She didn't snap at me directly or give me frigid glares. The looks were more southern Arctic in intensity now.

  In the grand scheme of her hatred of the world, I thought maybe I rated on her scale as “I hate you slightly less than most of the other people in this Layer.”

  In my new, tentative optimism, I thought, maybe if I made a few overtures, we could achieve a more harmonious relationship. If not as direct allies, then occasional conversational partners.