by Anne Zoelle
My heart increased its speed. No one had irreparably died since I'd been on campus. I had gotten complacent to the fact that magic fixed most things.
“We will start our search through the Midlands first because of all these factors,” Isaiah said.
Dare didn't really move, but all eyes focused suddenly on him. He was looking around at the combat mages. “Three bits, then you check in. No questions.”
He was obviously the voice for all of them, even though he was definitely not the oldest. In fact, I was pretty sure that like Constantine, he was only one year ahead of me.
The combat mages nodded slowly.
Isaiah looked at us. “Justice Squad, your team assignments are already in your tablets. Remember that there are no maps for the Midlands. Each justice group will rely on combat mages to get through. Two combat mages to a group of three of us. Form teams between the two groups and no arguing. Everyone have their emergency buttons?” Everyone nodded, and many people exchanged nervous glances.
I didn't share their fear or explicit self-preservation. Though I came upon new elements and dangers every time I entered the Midlands, there was something I embraced in the chaos—that something lost might be returned.
Plus, I had my “Marsgrove snare” paper on me, if things turned rough. I had trapped two yetis in it a few days back and it had held them for two hours before barfing them back out covered in pulp.
“Form up and let's go.”
I stood and looked at my assignment and grimaced. Peters. But also Isaiah, thank God. Peters gave me a dark scowl, but immediately turned on his heel and approached Alexander Dare. Double great.
Dare raised a brow at whatever Peters said, but he nodded to Isaiah and walked over. His gaze fell upon me and his lips pinched. Still sexy. I was hopeless.
The younger boy he had been speaking to followed him. “Nicholas Dare,” he said. He had the look of a boy who was not yet totally comfortable in his own skin but had had arrogance bred into him. The rest of us murmured our names in response.
“Any cousin of Mr. Dare's is welcome on our expedition,” Peters said obsequiously. I rolled my eyes. Of course, Dare glanced at me right then, and his expression darkened.
I sighed internally. I really needed to get rid of this crush, but for some reason his dark responses only made it grow. As if firmly planting it in the “never happen” category just made it more appealing to dwell upon.
I returned his dark gaze. Crushes rocked because they were fantastical. The real Alexander Dare could bite me.
We got to the Midlands quickly and began scouting. Our tablets and the combat mage devices functioned as magic tracers, but the Midlands gave a lot of false warnings and readings.
I wiped a hand along my brow. I could feel Okai calling me. The urge to paint was overwhelming—the less sleep I got, the more the urge drove me. I aimed my tablet at the ground with shaking fingers, trying to get a read.
Dare was very focused. He was talking quietly to his cousin and pointing at things around them, the epitome of equilibrium and control. I thought of the rock beasts that I had seen him battling here.
A two-foot-tall rock beast popped up in the middle of the street. Isaiah, Peters, and Nicholas scattered to the sides, weapons out. I just blinked at it and stood in my spot. The rock beast—shaped like a pro wrestler in small rock form—looked completely stunned as it looked around. Two feet tall was kind of small, though. Guard Rock, though far smaller, could take him. And it would be no challenge for Dare.
Suddenly it grew to the size of a twenty-year old tree. Peters dove for cover, Isaiah smartly took a step back, and Dare stepped in front of his cousin, staff out and spinning. I wondered if Dare could handle a rock tree. The thought worried me.
The rock beast decreased to a foot tall.
Everyone stared at it. Even the rock beast stared, eyes large as it looked down at its rock hands and feet.
Nicholas was trying to get around Dare, who was holding his left hand out, staff still spinning in his right, the ends producing sparks as it readied for a blow.
“This isn't normal,” Dare said. “Stay back.”
A tutu appeared around the rock beast's waist. It hesitantly poked at the puffed pink tulle.
“Nothing is normal in the Midlands, Ax,” Nicholas argued. I wondered if only Dare's family called him that.
The rock beast suddenly held an ax in each rock hand.
“No. Though chaotic, everything here has a purpose and its own magic.” Dare's very confident deep voice made people want to trust his words. “This is outside of a natural purpose.”
I was a little stunned by that pronouncement. It was true, though, the magic here was chaotic, but not the type of chaos that made pink tutus appear on rock beasts. Hardly dignified.
The tutu disappeared along with the axes and a little business suit appeared instead.
I wiped the back of my shaking hand over my sweating forehead again. Surely...surely I wasn't seeing this. I was so tired and hungry. I knew I should have painted instead of doing that ritual, but time was slipping away.
Roller skates appeared on the rock beast's feet, and one of his feet promptly slipped out from under him and he landed on his back, causing a little rock quake.
“What the...” There were other murmurs of dubious wonder.
“Kill it,” Peters said, moving forward.
Dare's staff moved between Peters and the monster. His eyes were narrowed on the creature. “No.”
“No?” Peters seemed to forget whom he was talking to. “It is abnormal.”
“It is a victim, like everything else on campus that has been acted upon.” He looked around carefully. “We should be looking elsewhere in this clearing. To what is controlling it.”
I looked around me too, thinking of Mr. Verisetti. I didn't know the extent of his traveling abilities, but I knew they were unnatural.
Gold flashed at the edge of my vision, and for a moment I could have sworn I saw my golem in the trees. I blinked, but only greenery remained.
Of course it wasn't my golem. I had made sure to secure him to Okai, along with the other vessels. I didn't think that anyone would appreciate my mad, half-sentient creations running around.
Gold flashed again and my skin prickled the way it had when Mr. Verisetti had put hooks into me.
I cleared my throat. “Do you think...do you think we are looking for a mage?”
Dare looked at me, and I could see the magic he was controlling rolling around him like waves of clear water. I had never been able to see that before. “I don't know.”
I nodded. “Ok.” I took a breath and concentrated on the gold spell I could clearly see on the back of my right hand, surrounding me. Just like my tie to Okai, that gold was clearly a tie to Raphael Verisetti. I let my consciousness float along the threads, tugging them, and let my feet take me where they would.
I could see the rock beast trying to scurry back on his feet, roller skates defeating him. An unhealthy green mist surrounded him, slipping around him in slithering tendrils.
I tried to shake away the vision and concentrate on the gold, but there were new colors everywhere, surrounding everything. And there was something ahead of me. Something in the grass.
Three more steps, and I made eye contact with the savage person hiding in the shrubbery. I jerked in surprise, the gold threads attached to me jerking as well, and the very feral looking and familiar person surrounded by a mist of unhealthy green magic instantly vanished from the reflection of the glass shard. I had run across random shards and objects in the Midlands before, but never one that had made the blood drain from my cheeks as if a vampire had decided to make me his final meal.
My exhaustion cleared as immediate self-preservation instincts zapped through me.
I looked at my hands and let my magic loose. The same green trails of color rose from my skin. My gaze traveled to my left wrist, and with my sudden second sight I could see the pitted remains of my control cuff, almost eat
en through by two dozen tiny speckles of lavender paint.
The paint, I thought numbly. It was the paint. All this time, the paint was what had been eating the cuff. Making it easier for me to do magic, yet harder for me to control. I was nearly an uncuffed mage in a society that was terrified of such a happening.
Perhaps for good reason. I looked at the image of my face in the shard. My features were surrounded by unhealthy green.
It wasn't an object causing the trouble on campus. It truly was a mage and her magic. Not Mr. Verisetti. Me.
I pushed away from the shrubbery, from the mirror shard nestled in the grass at the base of the tree. A mirror which clearly indicated the vestige of perpetration.
They had all been right. It was a feral who was causing all the problems. The sickly green magic on the rock monster was the same as the magic pouring from me.
And finally all of the puzzle pieces fell into place, as if dumped there by a cement truck pouring too fast. Creation magic. In order to truly create out of nothing, I had to pull the matter or magic from somewhere. Physics. Messed-up, magical physics, but physics all the same.
I had killed parts of the mountain. Parts of magic. Like the Origin mages who had pulled nearly all of the magic from the First Layer in order to create the others.
Oh, shit.
My magic had accidentally pulled things in from other layers in order to compensate for elements of my rituals. I had destroyed things in order to create spaces for something else. My map dragons continued to catalog the Midlands—I would see them every once in a while. Temporary constructs were pulled and released, the layer shifts shaking them free. Creating a new being entirely was something far different.
And the magical backlashes hadn't been contained in the Midlands like I had planned. I was either leaving the environs too quickly, carrying my backlashes out of the Midlands and on to campus proper, or my chaos field wasn't strong or large enough. And I purely and simply had not designated spaces to borrow magic from. Spaces that could take a bit of a drain.
I looked down at my wrist. The cuff that Marsgrove had given me was supposed to be unbreakable. It was supposed to control my magic, but my magic had been slipping through the cracks since my visit to Ganymede. My wonderful, insidious paint had been licking away my safety net, and I hadn't even known it. I had been working my tail off, working my magic to the limit each day, and that one small fact—that I had been sapping dry any and all excessive magic—had probably saved the mountain from exploding due to horrible, feral Ren Crown and her freaky magic.
It seemed clear now. My control slips had increased and I had needed to work my tail off to try and gain better control. Magic had been getting easier and easier—magic and energy responding to me instantly, my intentions clearly met each and every time—the storage spaces, my classwork, the pencils. I had even been making great paint. Not up to the lavender standard, but I had made a storage vault painting the other day solely using the newly homemade paint I had crafted with Stevens.
I had thought I was learning and growing more competent. Over-confidence in my intellectual abilities had blinded me, and I had focused on my lack of social skill as my primary weakness.
In fact, the only thing that was surprising, was that I hadn't gotten Christian back through all of this. Magic should be begging me to grant him back.
Instead, I had endangered everyone around me.
Even the one who had granted me life. I looked automatically to Dare. He was looking at me strangely. I wondered if he could see the swirling green—and if he had noticed it on the rock monster. He looked to the grass where I had just been and moved forward.
He would see the mirror shard. And somehow, somehow I knew he would know.
A drop of paint dripped in my mind. Christian.
The four others in the clearing suddenly touched the sides of their necks, beneath their ears. Peters's face drained completely of color.
Isaiah quickly set his frequency to speaker so everyone was getting the same feed.
“All medical mages report in. Twenty-three casualties at Top Circle—nine minutes and fifty seconds remaining. Forty mages in critical care as well. A smoked giant...bone...thing...appeared and is currently razing the literature buildings. Estimated time to Dormitory Circle is less than fifteen minutes. Evacuation signal sounded, casualties mounting, toll growing too high for proper tending.”
Dare was already sprinting. Change rippled over him, a black cloak overlaid his outfit like scales flipping out, then flattening, one after another, all the way down. The bottom of the cloak snapped in the wind as he sprinted through a port on the edge of the Midlands border, then disappeared.
His cousin was hot on his heels. Isaiah was running too. Peters was frozen in a strange state of immobilization, but as combat mages burst through our area, running to port to Top Circle too, Peters rallied.
“Get up to Top Circle to provide support and help. All hands.” Isaiah's voice yelled through the speaker-set frequency of a mage running past me. Everyone else ported to Top Circle. I ran to the dorms.
I was nearly hyperventilating as student-generated holograms sprung up all around me as people shared news feeds. I saw Medical tending the scores of wounded students at Top Circle. Keep it together, Ren.
Bone, smoke, enlargement charm.
Bats during the bell ritual. The tricorn after I had set up shop. The demon that I barely remembered. The narwhal. Countless other incidents.
Some of them had been black magic backlashes and soul-binding ritual repercussions. All facilitated by my eaten-away control cuff. And the storage papers. Where had I pulled the space from? How was I creating the space in those papers? Why hadn't I thought that the space had to be coming from somewhere. In my single-mindedness, I had simply never thought about where. I had been too mono-focused on everything.
Ever since Christian had sparked electricity between his fingers, my world had been turned upside down and everything had been crazy. I just wanted him back.
And instead...I had created a bone giant. From my rib experiment, there was no doubt about that. With a shaky hand, I entered my room. I was responsible for this catastrophe. And I had the only solution.
Things couldn't possibly get worse.
Olivia surveyed me in that narrow-eyed, cool way that she had. “We need to talk,” she said as soon as I had shut the door.
Neph and Will burst through the door behind me, knocking me to the side. “Ren, we need to talk to you. Thank God we found you first.”
Neph slammed the door closed, leaning heavily against it as if she had just run a long distance. They seemed to realize Olivia was in the room at the same time. Will stood awkwardly in the middle of the space, breathing more heavily than normal. “Er...that is, we need to speak to you.”
I thought Olivia might spin around in her seat and ignore them, but her narrow-eyed gaze turned to them, to me, then back to them. “I think we might possibly have the same thing to say.”
Will and Neph looked nervous. “Oh. Just something homework related for us.”
Screams and roars shook the building.
Olivia wore a very jaded look as she surveyed them without response.
“It is a dire homework issue,” Will appended.
A long, strangled scream made me grab my hair in both fists.
“Well, I wouldn't want my roommate to get a bad grade,” Olivia said. “It would reflect badly on me.”
“Yes, exactly. If you could just come with us, Ren, we can get this straightened—”
“I was just thinking I had a proper roommate for once.” Olivia shrugged. “But if you think you can talk her out of raising the dead and into fixing this problem without getting expelled or imprisoned, feel free.”
She turned around in her chair. I could tell that the other two were staring stupidly at the back of her head along with me, but I couldn't get past the pit in my stomach. The abject fear.
“How...how did you know?”
Sh
e just turned and stared at me.
I swallowed and looked at the others. “And you two?”
Will and Neph exchanged a glance. “The eyes of the bone giant are like those black-and-white patterned designs you draw.”
My heart thumped loudly in my chest.
“And we started talking about your...wounds.” They both looked uncomfortable at the admission that they had been comparing notes. “And put things together.”
“Ok.” I took a deep breath. “Ok.”
“Who are you trying to raise?” Olivia asked without emotion.
“My brother. My twin.” I couldn't seem to raise my voice from a whisper. “He died three and a half months ago during his Awakening.”
“You've been experimenting the whole time you've been here,” Will said softly. “Trying to beat the four month mark.”
I couldn't look at him. I didn't want to feel that I had betrayed him by not taking his warnings to heart all those weeks ago, but I had needed to ignore those warnings.
“Yes. Since nearly the minute in the First Layer when I realized I could do magic, I started planning. Before I even asked you about necromancy. Before I even knew there was a time line.”
I could see glances exchanged. A giant tearing sound reverberated through the building.
Neph won the silent exchange and turned to me. “Studying the souls of the dead in a passive, non-invasive way is not a problem, Ren. Trying to raise the dead? There are reasons it is forbidden.”
“The dead don't listen well.” Olivia's expression was perfectly smooth. “It is better to have sentient beings that can follow explicit orders, yet still make moment-to-moment decisions. Very wearing to try and control all of them at the same time.”
We all stared at her. She haughtily stared back. “What? It's why war czars are always ordering their scientists to make golems, even though the scientists continually fail and die horrifically in the process.”
Neph took a deep breath. “Right. Back to raising the dead. Ren, it's invasive. Souls find rest in a very short period of time. You rip them away if you try to bring them back later.”