Tessili Academy

by Robin Stephen

  Fras cut him off before he could finish his sentence. “Not just any student, Nylan. Your student. You were handler on the opportunity in question, were you not?”

  Nylan looked up at the other man, feeling his gut stir with disgust. He could never quite set aside the visceral feeling of repulsion he experienced whenever he was in close quarters with an orderly. Fras was no exception. This was a caricature of a man – his voice strangely high, the lines of his body too soft, too round. “I was. The injury was not evident when she returned because it was inflicted by magic. The way it emerged is consistent with our research. A deflected spell will leave a mark, but it can take several hours before it becomes visible to the eye.”

  High Orderly Fras sat up a little straighter in his desk. His soft cheeks quivered with contained irritation. “So you decided to break every access rule we have, barge into the senior dormitory well past faculty hours, and risk unsettling the three most dangerous operatives we have at our disposal?”

  It had been a rash thing to do. But Nylan hadn’t been able to wait. For one thing, if the wound was magical in nature it could disappear at any time. He’d needed to see for himself, to be certain. And he had seen. Now he must deal with the enormous implications of that one narrow, blue-tinged gash.

  “With all due respect, Fras, I seem to be the only one who recognizes the severity of the situation. Do you not understand what the mark means?”

  The question hung in the slowly dawning room. Outside, the sky was brighter. The hesitant cheeps of sleepy birds drifted in through the windows. The two orderlies with Fras seemed suddenly very busy with their notes.

  Fras stood, leaning forward to place two meaty palms on the desk. “She did it herself, Nylan. She cast her own spell, bungled it, and it hit her arm, leaving the mark.”

  Nylan began to protest, to explain why this was impossible on several levels, but Fras slapped the table with one enormous hand. The shock of the loud sound surprised Nylan into stillness.

  “That is what happened.” Fras grated these words out between clenched teeth, annunciating each one as if it was its own sentence. “And as for you, Nylan, if you ever set foot inside my walls without authorization again, my orderlies will shock you senseless before you’re two steps past the gates.”

  ◈

  Kae drifted out of the dorm room, heading for her first class. She murmured a soft, “See you,” over her shoulder, and was gone.

  Elle, who was finishing at the wash basin, turned to look at Jey with a plaintive expression. “I don’t know how I’m going to do it,” she said. Her voice was quivery, her eyes wide.

  Jey looked at her friend with a mix of sympathy and worry. Elle, like Jey, could now remember. With Jey’s spell knitted into place around her tessila, the flashnodes no longer affected her. Which meant she could remember Nylan’s strange intrusion into their room, and everything that had happened this morning. She also, like Jey, retained a general if imprecise understanding of the academy as a whole. But she had no specific memories of anything that had happened before Jey had cast the spell.

  Jey had tried to explain everything, but she was afraid she’d done little more than make Elle afraid. The other girl had jumped visibly every time the flashnode had gone off this morning. Afterwards, each time, Kae had gone still and silent, then said something that was either repetitive or apropos of nothing. Elle had seemed to grow more disturbed as the morning had progressed.

  Now it was time for them to separate and make their way through the day ahead of them, pretending to be like all the other students.

  Jey tried to be reassuring. “It’s easy,” she said. “Move slowly and look blank any time anyone says something to you. If your tessila is on a holdstone, do answer questions, but pretend it takes you forever to come up with the answer. When in doubt, don’t say anything at all.”

  Outside, they heard the click of the neighboring dorm’s door falling shut and the soft step of other students moving past the room. Elle took a deep breath, looked at herself in the mirror, and held out her finger. Her tessila alighted there. “Ok. Right. Easy.” She took a step towards the door, then looked back over her shoulder. “Aren’t you coming?”

  Jey was sitting on the edge of her bed, Phril perched on her shoulder. “You go ahead.” She forced a quick smile. “Probably better for us not to be out and about together for now. It would be too easy to make a mistake.”

  Elle nodded, gave Jey one last, long look, and stepped out the door.

  Jey sat a moment longer, staring down at the soft slippers on her feet. Her heart was pounding so hard Phril was getting concerned. She waited several beats, making sure Elle wasn’t coming back. Then, she opened her hand.

  A syringe lay in her palm. The glass tube was warm with the heat of her skin, the needle bright and sharp in the early light. She stared down at it in a mix of fear and wonder.

  She remembered taking it from Nylan. She’d seen him tuck it into his vest and turn for the door. She’d recognized the moment as an opportunity she was unlikely to ever have again. She’d done something, then, something she didn’t fully understand. She’d woven a spell. She’d done it without thinking, and it had resulted in Nylan and the orderly going still for two heartbeats. It had been enough time for Jey to lunge forward, snatch the syringe from Nylan’s vest, and return to her position behind the orderly. A moment later, she’d tucked the syringe beneath the corner of her mattress.

  In the aftermath of Nylan’s visit, with the orderlies swarming the place and carrying on, with trying to pretend she’d forgotten what had happened after the flashnode went off, with worrying Elle would give them away, she’d almost convinced herself it hadn’t happened.

  But when everything had calmed down and she’d crawled, at last, into bed, she’d checked and felt the cold, hard cylinder where she’d left it.

  Now, she stared at the small amount of clear liquid inside the tube and tried to decipher what she felt. Last night, the very sight of Nylan had filled her with a sense of deep, abiding hatred. But the syringe had excited her. Until he’d held out his hand. Give me your tessila.

  Jey squeezed her eyes shut, trying to remember more. She had no time. In a few more minutes she’d be late for class. But if she waited, every hour that passed would increase the chance that Nylan would realize the syringe was missing, that he would connect it to her, that he would come asking questions.

  Phril, stressed by her agitation, pressed his small body closer to the warmth of her neck. It was the horror of the thought of him in Nylan’s hand that gave her the courage. She rolled up her sleeve, pausing to note the pocked galaxy of pale scars in the crook of her elbow. She took a deep breath, inserted the needle into her arm, and pushed the plunger.

  For half a second, nothing happened. Jey removed the syringe and flopped back onto her bed to tuck it into the nook in the wall with the stolen holdstone. She was becoming quiet the little thief, she thought with a wry sense of satisfaction.

  Then, as she began to sit up, she felt the change. The drug she’d injected raced through her veins like fire. She had to clench her teeth to contain a scream.

  And then, Jey remembered. Jey remembered everything.

  ◈

  “Face your partner, bow. Now orderlies, place your hand. Ladies, touch the shoulder. Good. Begin.”

  The violin started up. Jey let herself be guided into the first steps of the intricate dance. This time, she did not hesitate. She flowed through the dance in perfect, smooth execution, never missing a beat. Up the row of dancers, she saw Elle stumble. But she didn’t look, didn’t let her head turn. She kept her face blank, serene, false – the caricature of a pretty doll.

  After Jey had injected herself, she’d spent approximately 15 seconds steeped in all-consuming rage. She’d looked around at her familiar dorm room in blind anger, feeling the sharp prickle of magic in her fingertips, knowing, suddenly, she could blast the flashnode to shards of glass. She could rip the door off its hinges, light the quiet
garden of the dorm cloister on fire. She could stalk through the academy and murder every orderly, every professor. She could do it before they knew what hit them.

  But then what would happen? She’d have two dozen terrified, broken girls on her hands, and nowhere to take them. She was certain the orderlies had a contingency plan – some prescribed action to take in the event a girl somehow did what Jey had done, and remembered.

  So, she did what they had trained her to do. She sat up, took a moment to smooth her dress and her face, and went to class.

  Now, at least, she had some time to think. Her body knew the dance. The hall was silent except for the rustling of skirts, the pale notes of the violin, and Professor Tucram’s low litany of instructions. When Jey had come in today, she’d feared, briefly, there would not be enough holdstones for all the tessili – that her first theft would be revealed in this moment. But there were enough stones on the high table. Which meant there was a good chance the missing stone had been noted. Whether or not anyone suspected her, Jey could not know.

  She couldn’t know, so she put it out of her mind. She had to focus on what she did know. She whirled through turn after turn. More and more memories surfaced in her mind. Most of them took place at night, riding out across the moonlit road towards the glittering town that lay in the valley below, holding a passive echo spell in place around herself and her horse, so anyone who might be able to see them would not register her presence.

  Mostly, she remembered Nylan – his glittering, hard eyes. She remembered the agony of being parted from Phril, the implicit consequences of failure.

  And she remembered something else, too.

  Graduation.

  Just thinking that word was enough to cause the blind rage to try to rise again. She pushed it aside. Anger would not help her right now.

  Graduation happened every fall. Every fall, the seniors walked across a small stage, shook the dean’s hand, and received a diploma.

  And every fall, Jey now knew, the seniors died.

  “L134, eyes straight ahead. No craning about like that.” Jey heard Professor Tucram speak her friend’s number. She had to fight the urge to look up the row of dancers to check on Elle. Now that she knew everything, now that she could remember, she worried she’d been premature with casting her spell on Elle’s tessila. She didn’t envy the confusion her friend was now experiencing, the stress of trying to blend in, of feeling conspicuously awake among a group of sleepwalkers.

  Jey no longer felt that way. She, after all, had been trained extensively in the art of deception. She’d spent hours learning how to read a room, to asses threat levels, to infiltrate her target and carry out her mission. She was a weapon – the culmination of 13 years of careful crafting.

  Now, she wondered if it might be kinder to pull the spell off Elle’s tessila, to expose her again to the muddling effects of the flashnodes. As the dance took her closer to the top of the hall and the bright row of tessili basking on their holdstones, Jey could feel how easy it would be. One little tug, and her spell would come free.

  The dancers whirled, soft shoes whispering. The violin played. Jey was soon two pairs from the top, one pair, none. She reached out for the spell.

  Elle’s purple tessila occupied a stone towards the far end of the table. As Jey focused, the small creature opened its eyes. They locked onto Jey. The tiny animal seemed to understand what she would do. It deflated, somehow. It closed its eyes again. Where before it had seemed content, now it seemed desolate.

  Jey hesitated. The dance moved her on. As she wove her way through the steps, she let the spell settle back into place. She understood, now, that she would not do it. The thought of erasing what Elle had begun to learn felt a little too much like murder. And while Jey had most certainly committed murder before, she’d never done it of her own volition.

  ◈

  Elle, Jey and Kae walked into their rooms together, white skirts swishing, tessili darting in the air around their heads. Jey closed her eyes and took a deep breath as the door latched behind them. They’d made it through the day, at last.

  Kae, looking dreamy, wandered towards her easel. She stopped before it and stood considering the half-finished painting there as if she’d never seen it before.

  Elle headed straight for the couch and flopped onto the cushions. Now she gazed at Kae with a look of haunted horror. “When are you going to tell Kae? You’re going to put the spell on her tessila, too, aren’t you?”

  Kae’s tessila, a bright speck of green in the air, swept up to perch on the edge of the canvas. Jey sighed and took her normal seat on the opposite end of the couch. A hairbrush lay on the table. She seemed to recall an endless stretch of evenings, of brushing out Elle’s hair, of weaving it into a braid, of tying the braid off with a golden ribbon.

  She shuddered and faced her friend. “Elle,” she said, “there’s more.” Jey herself had managed to avoid using a spritzer all day. She’d seen Elle use one several times. She now suspected it was the effect of the spritzer’s drug that Nylan’s shot had eradicated. “Give me your hand,” she said.

  With a little grimace, Elle sat up. She leaned forward, setting her cool fingers in Jey’s.

  Jey closed her eyes. She tried not to think overly hard about what she was doing. What she knew about magic was accessible to her now, but also dim, somehow. It was as if those memories were behind a screen of some kind, comprehensible only through use. She could have cast the passive shield spell on Kae’s tessila in a heartbeat, but she couldn’t have explained to Elle how to do the same.

  Now, she tried to feel inside her friend’s body, comparing it to what she could feel of herself. Over the course of the day, she’d become increasingly aware of a problem. If the spritzer drug blocked her access to certain memories and Nylan’s drug restored those memories, she had a finite amount of time. Tonight, an orderly would come into her bedroom. He’d set his hand on her forehead, watch the rise and fall of her chest. Then he would mist the air above her with the drug that would make her forget.

  She couldn’t let it happen. The very thought of it made her skin prickle with terror.

  Jey spoke to Elle, making her voice low and gentle. “You can make new memories, now, but you’re blocked from your old ones. It’s because of the spritzer, the drug we inhale several times a day.”

  Elle nodded. Above them, the flashnode went off. Kae, across the room, went briefly still.

  Jey tried to focus more deeply on her friend. “I can’t get more syringes. It was only the sheerest dumb luck I ever got one in the first place. Which means, we need another way.”

  Elle’s brow crinkled. Jey could see the tension in her, the fear and confusion. On reflex, Elle reached for the spritzer bottle that sat on the low table next to the couch. Then she froze, grimaced, and let her hand fall back to her lap.

  That gave Jey an idea. She reached for the bottle herself and set it in her lap. Then she closed her eyes.

  She tried to approach the problem. There was the drug in the bottle, and there was the drug in her friend. The drug affected her friend’s ability to remember. She thought about weaving a spell that would be attracted to the drug, that would burn it up like Nylan’s shot had done.

  Across the room, Kae continued to paint. Jey rose, collecting a saucer from the tea tray. She unscrewed the top of the spritzer and poured a few drops of the drug onto the saucer. Then she closed her eyes, wove a spell, and released.

  She felt magic pour from her. She felt it react with the drug. There was a soft glow in the air above the saucer, then the little pool of liquid was gone.

  Jey turned to Elle, who was watching her with wide, dark eyes. “I can try to burn the drug out of your veins,” she said. “If I succeed, you’ll know everything.”

  Elle looked at Kae, who wasn’t showing the faintest curiosity in what they were doing. She gave a tremulous laugh and said, “What if you don’t succeed?”

  Jey felt her heart give a clench. She lowered herself back i
nto her seat. Around them, the academy was quiet. The orderlies went out of their way, she knew now, to keep it that way, to make the place feel peaceful, serene, and safe.

  It was all a horrible lie.

  She looked her friend in the eye. “I don’t know,” she said. As far as she could recall, she’d never tried any magic like this before. It was improvisational. What had worked in a saucer might not work in the human body. But she had no time to come up with anything better. “It could kill you, I suppose.”

  Elle closed her eyes. Her tessila, purple and small, shoved his way into the curl of her relaxed hand. Elle said, “We’re going to die anyway, soon. Aren’t we?”

  Jey looked at Kae. She was still painting, her face smooth and blank, untroubled. “Yes,” Jey said. “We have six months, at the most.”

  Elle looked down and ran her finger along her tessila’s chin. Her eyes were luminous with tears. She said, “Then we have to try.”

  ◈

  A storm blew in with nightfall. When an orderly came into their room to close the windows, all three girls were engaged in perfectly normal activities. Kae was painting. Elle had taken up an embroidery hoop. Jey was holding a sketchbook and a pencil. Phril was on the table, posing.

  None of the girls reacted when the orderly entered. He moved quickly but smoothly, drawing the windows shut and latching them against the rain that was starting to patter on the panes. As he left, he said over his shoulder, “Almost time for bed, girls.”

  They all made small, vague noises of assent. Then the door closed.

  Kae turned to look at the door, eyes hard. “I can’t think why we shouldn’t kill them all now.” Her voice was low, full of the burning anger Jey felt in her own heart when she thought about all that had been done to her.

  Elle tied off a piece of thread. Her voice was mild when she answered. “You don’t mean that, Kae. For all we know the orderlies don’t know any more than we did.”

  Jey listened to them talk with a sense of quiet wonder. It had worked. Her clumsy, improvised spell had worked. She’d blasted the drugs out of her two friends. They’d spent the last hour practicing, each taking a deep inhalation of the spritzer mist, then letting the others burn it away. All three of them found the spell quite easy to execute.