by James Riley
Okay, maybe it made sense to just wait for Sierra to get back to him. If he found out later that Colonel Charles had captured her, he could find a way to rescue her at that point. At least he knew that they wouldn’t hurt her, considering how much Colonel Charles wanted the power of Mind magic.
Or had wanted it, before Sierra’s powers had gone crazy in his office. What had that been? How did her Mind magic work on physical objects? Even if there were spells like that, where had they come from? Had she…
Ugh, none of these thoughts were helping. He was just going to make himself more anxious, if he kept up with questions he couldn’t answer. Besides, he had enough to worry about, with mastering teleportation.
Everything he’d heard about mastering spells at the last school told him he’d need about a week. He’d done it faster at the time, but that had been because Sierra had cheated and stolen spells from other students’ minds for him without realizing she was doing it.
So he’d need to get through another week or so of school, with Colonel Charles and Dr. Opps both now on high alert from what they probably thought of as Sierra’s attack. Not to mention that he was seen by the guards and the security cameras with Dr. Opps after Colonel Charles had been knocked out, so they’d for sure be questioning him soon.
He’d just have to tell Colonel Charles that Sierra had taken over his mind again, like she had at the last school, but now he had no memory of it. It’d be a pretty terrible excuse anywhere else but here, but it wasn’t like they could call his bluff.
Either way, he just had to last a week, and then he’d be on to the next spell, which had to be something interdimensional. The anger he felt at finding the wrong spell returned, and he clenched his fists, knowing he could have had his father back home by now if whoever wrote the book had just put the magic in the right order.
And then there was the matter of lying to his friends. They would have understood, if everything had gone to plan, and he brought his dad back right away. But now things were just going to fester, making everything worse.
But he couldn’t let them risk themselves. He just couldn’t, not for him. Not again. He couldn’t be to blame again for anyone getting hurt, not after failing his dad on the National Mall.
Fort sighed quietly and rolled over onto his side. Sleep was going to be impossible, that was one thing he knew for sure. His mind was just too wound up to let him—
Lighting erupted all around him, like a thunderstorm had struck his bedroom.
“Whoa!” he shouted as the energy sizzled just a few feet from him. He leaped off his bed in surprise, and the bed disappeared behind him, as did Gabriel and the rest of the bedroom. Instead of the school’s ugly green walls, Fort now found himself surrounded by crystal tubes with bolts of lightning passing through them at random, illuminating the area as they passed.
The tubes were built in and around a carefully carved stone cave, pushing in and out of the stone, flowing off in all different directions. Without meaning to, Fort slowly floated along one row of tubes, leading toward what looked like a sort of gate made out of lightning.
As he drew closer, Fort realized that whatever had ahold of him wasn’t going to stop, and he threw up his arms to protect himself from the lightning… only for a hand from behind him to reach out, palm facing the lightning. The electrical energy seemed to part in midstream, turning back on itself, and opening a path through the gate.
Fort tried to turn around to see who it was behind him, but he couldn’t move, frozen in place by whatever force was moving him along. Was this another dream? Or was it more like what he’d seen when Sierra was asleep, her memories coming to life around him?
Any thought of what was happening was thrown from his mind when Fort saw what was up ahead. A huge pit opened wide before him, circled every ten to twenty feet down with buildings made from crystal, with gold and silver roofs. Lightning shone off of everything as it crackled through the tubes that now led into the city, and his mouth dropped open at the sheer beauty of it all.
Here and there he could see movement, something that looked vaguely like people, but he couldn’t see what they were from this distance, especially with just the lightning to see by. There were no other lights in the city, though something seemed to glow in the center of the pit, rising up from the middle of the circles of buildings. It almost looked like a statue made of diamond, but all Fort could see was the very top, and he couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be.
And then a roar shook the cavern, and somehow the city in the pit morphed into a darkened abyss, just as large, but less deep. Even in this strange place, he recognized that roar, he knew that roar by heart. He’d heard it first on the National Mall, and then again below the Oppenheimer School, as well as in far too many nightmares.
One of the monsters roared again in the darkness below him, and huge red eyes opened, staring up at him. Fort heard the sound of claws digging into rock just seconds before the red eyes came straight for him, flying far too fast to avoid.
Fort screamed in terror, knowing there was nothing he could do. The last time he’d faced one of these creatures, he had his magic, his advanced Healing spells that caused pain, but now he was completely defenseless, with no magic except for one teleportation spell. And if he cast that, he’d lose the book of Summoning forever. But if he didn’t, and this thing ate him—
Massive jaws opened wide and swallowed him whole, the creature’s teeth slamming shut behind him. Only now, they weren’t teeth, but instead had morphed into stone stalactites, closing off the entrance to a tunnel Fort now found himself in.
Some light shone in from behind those stone teeth, illuminating the sides of the tunnel, if only barely. A hot wind came from the other end of the tunnel, and Fort felt himself drawn in that direction, floating again against his will.
He could hear something happening down at the other end of the tunnel. There were voices, one that sounded human, and the other…
He shuddered just hearing it. It sounded like… it felt like the voice of an Old One.
He flew faster now, completely out of control of his body, but for some reason, he wasn’t surprised by that. Nothing surprised him here, in fact, even if plenty of it terrified him. That was enough to prove this was all a dream, even if it didn’t matter, because somehow it was also real. It was happening… or had happened already, to someone if not him.
The voices grew louder as he moved, and a strange reflected light began to illuminate the tunnel from that end. Fort emerged into a room that extended far beyond his sight, easily larger than a football stadium, with a rock ceiling so tall that he could barely make it out above him.
And the whole room was filled with gold.
Nuggets of gold, like something you could mine from the ground, were piled everywhere. The mounds of gold were enormous, many threatening to topple over at any moment as nuggets tumbled down from the heights every few seconds.
“Please!” he heard a voice say, and Fort’s heart stopped as he instantly recognized his father. “I don’t know what you want, but—”
“YOU HAVE NO POWER, HUMAN,” the other voice said, reverberating in Fort’s chest from its force. This voice was different from the Old One with the tentacles, though, which erupted in his mind. Whatever this creature was, it was speaking out loud, though that didn’t make it any less horrible. “HOW DID YOU LOSE YOUR MAGIC?”
Fort began to float up alongside the nearest pile of gold, rising to the level of the voices. For now the mounds still blocked his view, but in moments he’d be high enough to see.
“Magic?” his father said. “What… what are you talking about?”
The horrific voice began to laugh, and Fort tried to cover his ears but couldn’t. It was inescapable, that laughter, and it soon began to echo in his mind, changing into something more familiar, into words—
IF YOU WISH TO HAVE YOUR KIN RETURNED, YOU WILL TELL US WHERE TO FIND THE LAST DRAGON.
As the tentacled Old One roared in his mind,
Fort shouted in pain, only to bolt up in bed, the scream dying in his throat. He was back in his room, and it had all been a dream. But he’d seen his father! Had that really happened? Was it a memory somehow?
Was the Old One showing him where his father was so Fort would do as it asked, revealing where this last dragon was, whatever that meant? Maybe it wanted the dragon skeletons in the school?
Gabriel leaned into the room from the bathroom, a toothbrush sticking out of his mouth. “Whoa, you okay?” he said. “You were screaming for a second there.”
“Just a… a nightmare,” Fort said, trying to keep his hands from shaking. “Is… it morning already?”
Gabriel gave him a sympathetic look. “Yeah, it is,” he said. “And I get it. I’ve been having weird dreams too. This place brings ’em out, I think.” He reached over and grabbed one of Fort’s uniforms from the bureau, then tossed it at him. “Come on, get dressed. They’ll hassle me all day if I show up to breakfast without you.”
His roommate popped back into the bathroom, and Fort sighed, picking up his uniform. He felt like he’d gotten no sleep at all, which wasn’t surprising given what he’d been dreaming about.
Maybe breakfast would help, though. If nothing else, today couldn’t go any worse than yesterday had.
He quickly got dressed, then opened the door to find a man and a woman in dark suits waiting for him. “Fitzgerald?” one asked.
“Um,” Fort said, completely panicking.
“Right, this is him,” the other said, grabbing Fort’s arm. “Come with us. Agent Cole would like a word.”
- FIFTEEN -
AGENT COLE TURNED OUT TO be waiting in Colonel Charles’s office. Unlike Fort’s escorts, she wasn’t wearing a suit but instead had a green jacket with the letters TDA printed on the back. She turned around and smiled warmly as Fort entered, extending her hand.
“Forsythe?” she said, and he nodded, trying to play it as cool as he could, considering he was about to have a heart attack. “That’s not a name you hear very often. Is it a family name?”
“My grandfather’s,” Fort said.
“That would do it. Sit, please,” she said, and gestured for Fort to sit in the same seat he had been using the night before. “My name is Christina Cole, and I’m head agent at the TDA in charge of locating our infamous two missing students. Usually, Colonel Charles or Dr. Oppenheimer would be speaking to you now, but unfortunately, both are recovering from the attack last night.”
Fort nodded, trying not to stare at the pieces of the other chair that still lay on the floor. “You want to know if I remember anything,” he said, since Sierra had told the guards that he’d been mind-controlled and had his memory erased. “Is that it?”
Agent Cole sat down in Colonel Charles’s chair and leaned back, her finger steepled in front of her. “Part of it, yes. I’d also like to know what Sierra wanted with you and Dr. Oppenheimer.”
Fort took a deep breath, trying to keep his hands from shaking. “All I remember is going back to my room after dinner last night and reading a book, then waking up in the hallway outside with Dr. Opps walking me back to bed. He told me we’d both been taken over by that girl you mentioned… Sierra, that’s her name?”
“Yes, that’s it,” Agent Cole said, nodding at him.
“Right. Beyond that, I have no idea what happened.” He looked around like he’d never been in the office before. “Looks bad, though. How did the chair break?”
Agent Cole smiled gently, then leaned forward. “Forsythe… do you go by that, or something else?”
“Fort,” he said.
“Fort, I can appreciate that you’ve gotten used to dealing with regular administration here at the school,” she said, looking him straight in the eye. “They’re good at what they do, but there’s a reason that I’ve been put in charge of bringing our two fugitive students back into the fold. I’m very good at seeing through falsehoods, whether magical or otherwise. So why don’t we start again?”
His eyes widened, and he gripped the arms of the chair tightly. “I don’t know what you mean… I told you, I can’t remember anything.”
“Two books of magic went missing last night,” Agent Cole said, standing up to come around toward him. She stopped a few feet from Fort and sat back against the desk. “Now, no one went in or out of the building, so there would have only been one person who could have removed them. Unfortunately for you, he was busy running from my agents last night. So why don’t you tell me where the books are?”
Fort tried to speak, only to swallow the wrong way and launch into a coughing fit. “I told you,” he stammered. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“I’ve got agents searching your room as we speak,” she said, watching him closely. “And this will go much easier on you if you admit what happened before we find anything.”
“You’re searching my room?!” Fort said, incredibly thankful that he’d thought to hide the book elsewhere now. “I’m telling you, I didn’t take any books.”
“So what, you’re going to say Gabriel stole them?” She shook her head, smiling again. “I think we both know better than that.”
“No, I’m not saying that Gabriel did anything. I’m… I’m trying to say that no one… that I don’t know who took the books! I didn’t even know they were gone!” He could feel sweat running down his neck now and fought the urge to wipe it off.
She sighed and leaned in closer. “From what I can tell, you’re not a bad kid, Fort. You shouldn’t even be here at this school. But the colonel decided to bring you in, to see if that would wake Sierra up, and here we are. Now, the connection you shared with Sierra wasn’t your fault. But getting her help to steal the books… that’s not something we can forgive, not unless you tell me what happened so I can fix this.”
“I’m telling you, she was in my head! I don’t know why, or what happened!”
Agent Cole looked down for a moment, then stood up and went back to sit behind the desk. “Do you know what’s going on in London right now?” she asked.
The alert on Dr. Opps’s phone came to mind, but Fort shook his head. “No. They don’t let us watch the news or anything.”
“Sierra and Damian somehow made it on an international flight, but we were waiting for the plane when it landed. They evaded capture but haven’t left the airport yet. I have four squads of agents going terminal by terminal at Heathrow, all wearing these.” She pulled on the amulet chain she had around her neck. “No one’s being let in or out until we find Sierra and Damian.” Her phone buzzed, and she picked it up. “Ah, they’ve swept terminals four and five, and are moving on to three.” She looked at Fort. “Like I said, this will all go easier on you if you cooperate. We’re going to find her and the boy. But if you help us…”
Fort gripped the chair even tighter and shook his head. “Last I saw or heard from Sierra, she and Damian were leaving the old school,” he said quietly. “Other than that, I have no idea what you’re talking about, with any of this.”
She studied him for a moment, then shrugged. “Fair enough! Listen, I hope you’re telling the truth, I really do. I don’t see that as a possibility, but until I find those books, I can’t prove anything.” She paused. “Well, that’s not entirely true. I’m told some of these memory wipes turn out to be just temporary, so I’m sure Dr. Oppenheimer and Colonel Charles will be glad to volunteer anything they remember. And you, of course, should do the same.”
Fort barely remembered to nod, busy wondering what would happen if either of the two headmasters could recall what had happened the night before.
“Don’t worry about your room, by the way,” she said, opening one of Colonel Charles’s drawers. “We’ll put everything back where we found it. Got to run a tight ship here at the Oppenheimer School, you know!”
“Thanks,” Fort said, still distracted.
“Oh, and since you say you’ve just had your mind taken over by a fugitive,” Agent Cole said, pulling out another amulet from the d
esk. “I’m going to need you to wear this at all times. I’ll alert all the guards to make sure you’ve got it on, just in case she tries again.” She held it out to Fort, and he slowly took it.
Sierra? he shouted as loudly as he could in his mind as he sat back down with the amulet. I don’t know if you can hear me, but the TDA is looking for you and Damian with a bunch of agents. They’re going terminal by terminal, and have already checked four and five! You need to run, get out of there before—
FORT? Sierra said in his mind. I CAN HEAR YOU. YOU’RE SURE SHE SAID FOUR AND FIVE?
“Put it on now,” Agent Cole said, and Fort began to put the amulet over his head, stopping to let it get caught in his hair.
Yes! Where are you?
TERMINAL FIVE! IF THEY’RE GONE, THEN WE CAN GET OUT OF HERE. YOU’RE A LIFESAVER!
Agent Cole stood up and grabbed the amulet from Fort’s hands.
YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT WE’VE BEEN THROUGH. I NEED TO TELL YOU—
The agent placed the necklace over his head, and as soon as the amulet dropped against his chest, Sierra’s voice disappeared.
“That’s better,” Agent Cole said, her smile returning. “Now run off to breakfast while we finish with your room. The moment we find anything, you’ll be sure to know!”
Fort nodded and stood up, anxious to slip into the bathroom or someplace private to get the amulet off and see what Sierra had to tell him.
“Oh, by the way?” Agent Cole said as Fort put his hand on the door. “That amulet is a bit… special. I guess Dr. Oppenheimer had Sierra rig a few to knock someone out if they tried to take it off. So make sure you don’t lose it! Wouldn’t want to find you unconscious in the bathroom or something, now, would we?”
Fort just stared at her for a moment, shook his head, then walked out without another word.
- SIXTEEN -
AFTER EVERYTHING WITH AGENT Cole, all Fort wanted to do was see a friendly face. But the chill coming from his friends’ table in the cafeteria made Fort shiver as he entered. Rachel gave him an evil, dead-eyed stare as he walked in, and Jia caught his eye, then immediately looked away. Cyrus at least looked concerned, though considering everything that had gone wrong, that could be about a lot of things.