“What’s that all about?” I ask, leaning in to whisper so I don’t attract even more attention. Now that I’m seated, quiet conversation once again slowly swells around us—a sure sign that it all stopped the moment I walked in.
Cedric leans in as well. “They all think you brainwashed the tribunal to give you a second chance,” he says. “After Homecoming, they think you can get into any mage’s head that you want, without even trying.”
“Preposterous,” Flynn says with a snort. “That’d be impossible. I don’t think even your father could do that, Cedric.”
Cedric clears his throat a bit. “Maybe once.”
It takes me a second to understand his meaning. I hadn’t thought about it before but losing a paired mage to death must be even more difficult than a regular death. I wonder what happens when a mage loses their pair, but I don’t want to broach that subject with Cedric. Not right here, right now.
So I just wave my arm and glance at the students behind me.
“I wish I had that kind of power,” I say, with a snort, and lean back in my chair. Immediately the students seated behind me draw in a breath and still themselves until I sit forward again and shoot Cedric a look. “Geez. What are they, afraid I’m going to mind control them or something?”
“That is exactly what they are afraid of.”
The new teacher shows up and instructs us all to take out our textbooks. He has us begin a general warm-up type exercise before we begin in earnest. By the end of class, my head feels like it’s been run over by a dump truck. Both Cedric and Flynn tried their best to help me keep up with the rest of the students, but with the lesson focusing on telekinesis…it is a struggle to say the least.
Cedric has to go straight to work on his project with his father, but he finally gets around to telling us it has something to do with the school’s raised concerns about The Underground.
“The new girl,” Cedric says, “Mathilda. She can’t be the only undiscovered mage that found out she has powers during that blip. We’re more concerned with the fact that no one else has showed up, than we are that they will.”
I’ve wondered that myself before, but never that it might have something to do with the friendly neighborhood crime syndicate.
He leaves us with those thoughts, and Flynn promises to help me with the telekinesis once we’ve both had some rest. Before he leaves me at my dorm, I see a look in his eyes that I don’t understand, and then he leaves me without a goodbye kiss.
That should bother me more than it does, but there is little space left to occupy my mind other than a desperate need for sleep. I flop into my bed and make a promise I won’t fall behind on my studies if I take just one afternoon nap.
That one nap turns into several, and spread out over many days whenever I’m possibly able to squeeze one in. If it was just the classes and the extra studying, I could handle it. But my two meetings with Dr. Fashu bring back hauntingly similar feelings to those two rituals I did on the night of Homecoming, and I often find myself pushed past the point of basic exhaustion.
Before I know it, a full week has passed, and Psychic class is coming around again. I seriously luck out because my next two meetings with Dr. Fashu get canceled. Something to do with The Underground activities again, though no one but Cedric seems to have any idea about what is going on. But even when I ask him, he cannot tell me what it is.
Perhaps that is why, when I do finally get back to Psychic class I haven’t seen him in almost a week. I spent most of the weekend practicing with Kendall and Draven, especially since I’ve found Ritual class is the hardest one to catch up on. All the tiny things that I have to remember get jumbled up in my head as soon as I try to memorize them. Fortunately for me, Draven is patient, even when Wednesday tries to study with us and ends up scorching an entire batch of dried chrysanthemums because she still hasn’t managed to get her Earth powers under control.
I just wish our new Psychic teacher was so patient. I will not say I miss the old one. He always had this way of looking at me like he didn’t know how to blink—or maybe that he didn’t even have eyelids. The new one is about as normal as they come, but he’s always rushing us to complete the current task and move on to the next one.
Flynn does not show up to Psychic class at all on Wednesday. He’s grown increasingly scarce since our shared session with Dr. Fashu, and more than once I’ve wondered if he is purposefully avoiding me. He never did get around to giving me that lesson on Telekinesis, and each time I’ve brought it up, he’s come up with some perfectly valid excuse why he can’t help me at the time.
But I do not dwell on it too long.
For today’s class, the professor hands out paper-thin mirrors and each of my classmates passes the stack on without even having to touch it. Until it comes to me.
I already know where my particular level in that skill lies, so I just grab the remaining handful of floating slabs with my bare hands, take one, and slap the rest unceremoniously on Cedric’s desk where he sits beside me. I’m lucky they don’t shatter.
They don’t rest there even a second before the remainder fly out and separate in the air, each one whizzing across the class to land on the rest of the desks. I wrinkle my nose up at him and nudge his shoulder with my own. “Show off.”
“One can try.”
“As always,” the teacher says now that all they are distributed, “We will begin with a simple exercise to increase your ability to focus.”
For once, when he tells us to pair up, I am not left in the middle of a triangle. This is the first class I’ve attended, other than the Ritual class, where I don’t have two mages by my side. Now that I think about it, it isn’t just any two mages either—one of them is always Flynn. I’ve come to rely on him being here, and now that he isn’t…I don’t like it.
I blame these thoughts for why I am unable to keep my mind focused for more than a couple seconds at a time today. The Psychic teacher has us all pick up the mirrors and hold them before ourselves at arm’s length. I angle mine to catch a glimpse of Whitney behind me, and catch her making duck-lips at herself in the mirror. Something about seeing her returned to her old self already is oddly reassuring. It’s easier to dislike her this way.
“Now, I didn’t hand out all these mirrors just so you can all see how poor this fluorescent lighting is for your looks,” the teacher says. I’m caught off guard by his attempt at humor. It might be mediocre at best, but it’s a nice change from how serious all the other teachers always are. Especially since I’ve gotten back. “Instead, I want you to picture the face of someone you haven’t seen in a while. Someone who you imagine you know very well, perhaps a parent.”
I cringe a little at the mention. I managed to find time to call my mom last week, but I swear she knows I wasn’t telling her the truth about what’s going on. I just don’t know how to broach things without completely making a mess of it all. So I’ll continue to avoid it, for now, or at least as long as I can.
When no one does anything right away, the teacher makes a motion for us to close our eyes. “Picture it in your mind. You might discover that this is surprisingly hard to do.”
I close my eyes as directed and try to conjure an image of my mother. It’s been weeks since I saw her, and though she and I were never particularly close, a pang of guilt settles inside me when I realize how little I’ve actually paid attention to how she looks.
The teacher has continued. “It helps to picture them in a particular situation. Think about specific details. Then, I want you to open your eyes and I want you to project the image of them into the mirror.”
I open my eyes. Before me, for a brief second, I see my mother. Or at least, someone who looks kind of like her at first glance. But the more I look at her, the more I realize I don’t really know exactly how she shapes her eyebrows, or whether or not her nose slopes just so.
I sneak a glimpse at Cedric’s mirror, and I freeze. He has stopped moving too. A beautiful, ebony-skinned woman peers back
at him. She is young. Her hair is long and black, tied up in braids that cascade down her shoulders. The only sign of age on her are the fine lines around her eyes. But they are not the lines of a woman who smiles often, and with kindness. They are deep and turned down, something uncanny and unnerving in their descent.
And then, just as quickly as I see her, she is gone.
Cedric sees me looking, and slams the mirror down on the top of his desk. This time, it does shatter. Glass flies in all directions for a split second. None of the shards make it to the ground. They catch in the air, suspended like tiny drops of rain—and then slowly, so slowly, gather themselves back together on Cedric’s desk. For once, I am not the one breaking things.
Somehow, however, it is still my fault.
The teacher looks quickly from Cedric, to myself, and guesses what happened. “Octavia, you are dismissed.”
“But—”
“And Cedric, I suggest you hold your temper if you wish to remain in my class.”
It is only then that I realize Cedric’s knuckles have gone white.
“You shouldn’t have looked,” Cedric says. His eyes don’t move from where they are glued to the shattered mirror on his desk.
The last thing I want to do is leave, but I do as I am told and gather up my things—still not entirely sure why I’m being kicked out of class in the first place. I wish I could say I did it with dignity, but although the accident itself was not my fault, I still feel shame at being unable to keep it together for long enough to see what it was behind those sad, sad eyes.
16
Octavia
I briefly consider going back to the dorms for another nap. It is rare opportunity these days to be able to sneak one in without raising any alarms. I’ve only just gotten out of the infirmary after all, and even though I insisted that I was better weeks before I was actually let out, there are still moments here and there were I feel like there is still something deep inside me that needs healing.
It makes me think about what Dr. Fashu said, about testing our limits. I certainly got the opportunity to test mine.
Instead, I head to the divination room. I am surprised I find it so easily, given that I tend to take more wrong turns that right. When I push open the door, something about the room is immediately different. At first, I think it is because it is the first time that I have come here alone. I’ve come to associate the room with the faces of my four paired mages as much as I have the old, outdated furniture, the sunny view out this side of the academy towards Manhattan, and the way no matter how many times we try to clean it—magic or otherwise—that same sun lights up all the dust particles in the room mid-afternoon, making the air sparkle.
And then I see it. The light catches off glass and reflects into my eyes, making me throw up one arm in front of my face.
The gaping hole in the middle of the table has been replaced with a massive divination orb. Well, I am sure it isn’t the divination orb, but it is one. I let the door shut behind me and my bad slump onto one of the chairs. I’ve only seen an orb like it on two other occasions, both during the initiation ceremonies. Even that one, an ancient artifact symbolizing the Psychic Mage affinity, is tiny in comparison to this.
Cedric must have been able to convince his father to have it put back but forgotten to tell me earlier. I haven’t been in here in a couple of days, at least not since Wednesday tried to burn the whole place down with flaming chrysanthemums.
The faraway Manhattan skyline is reflected upside down inside it. I reminds me of the marble that I carry with me, a token from Flynn that I’m supposed to try and manipulate as best as I can, using my Earth Magic to practice. I tried last night, remembering how he once used glass to fix my shattered phone screen.
I didn’t have anything broken to fix, but I did think of how once my parents took us up to Vermont to see the leaves change in the fall and I got to see a glassblower working. He would heat the glass until it moved like liquid—something gelatinous and fluid at the end of a stick. But no matter how much I tried to will the marble to do the same, it just remained cold and hard in my hand.
Now, here in the divination room, I squat down in front of this giant crystal ball and peer inside. At first, all I see are more of the details of that reflected city beyond. But I glance over my shoulder at the closed door, and though divination isn’t exactly listed on my sheet of skills I am supposed to be perfecting before the tribunal meets, I think there can’t be any harm in a little deviation from the norm.
After all, it’s better than wasting an entire afternoon of Psychic practice with a nap. At least this is practice of some kind. Or so I tell myself.
I know that the artifacts are enchanted to behave differently than actual magical objects, but I still set myself up in the same way as I was instructed to for the initiation ritual. I lower myself down to the same level of the ball, so that my eyes gaze into the very heart of it. I place one hand on either side, aware of the fact that I will probably leave dirty smudged fingertips on the perfectly polished glass once I’m done.
Nothing happens. My touch does not bring an immediate gathering of mist like it did in the artifact, though I suppose I should have known that.
I think back to this morning’s lesson. We were using mirrors to conjure an image, but I imagine a crystal ball would work better. So I try to picture the image of my mother’s face in my head again. But when I open my eyes, it is not her face staring back. Once again, it is the face of Cedric’s mother. But this time, there is something terribly, terribly wrong.
This time, her eyes are open. They stare inside me growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they are all I can see. The pupils are so wide and black that they swallow up all of the iris. Dark lashes clumped with moisture form smudges of darkness around the outside of red, bloodshot veins. And then I am not looking at them anymore. I am not looking into the ball.
I am inside it.
Or maybe not inside it, but certainly not in the divination room any longer.
The edges of my vision are dark and fuzzy, and the sounds all around me are hollow and distant—like I stand at the end of a long tunnel listening in.
After a second, my vision begins to clear. I make out several figures in the room, but it isn’t until I hear their voices that I recognize who they are. Cedric’s father is the first one who I recognize. Although I can see, it is like there is a film over my eyes. I can make him out, but the details are blurry. Once I know who he is, his voice becomes a little clearer—but it still sounds far off.
“If we had known this sooner, we might have been able to do something. It isn’t her fault that she is this way.”
There is another figure with him, but his back is to me. I don’t recognize him right away, but something about him does seem familiar. When he speaks, I know I have heard that voice before, but I can’t place where.
“I never took you for the sentimental type,” the second figure says.
Cedric’s father stops fiddling with, whatever it was he was fiddling with. I still can’t make it out. I can’t even make his face out clearly. The harder I try, the more elusive it becomes. It’s like a shadow I can see out of my peripherals. As soon as I try to look directly at it, it disappears.
“I’m not. Some magic is just too powerful to waste.”
Something about how he says it, it makes my stomach knot up. Surely, he isn’t speaking about…me? I don’t have time to mull this over.
A third person enters the room carrying a tray.
This third man, who I am guessing is the shopkeeper, bustles around behind the counter. He has to pull a stool out from under the table in order to reach up the top of a set of massive, green cabinets on the back wall. He takes out a book, lays it flat on the table, and starts scribbling inside.
After a second, he tears a page from the inside and hands it to Cedric’s father.
As he does, it is like another layer of the film peels back. It is with this short, suddenly blip of clarity, that I rec
ognize the face of the second figure. The man who spoke, who I knew I should know.
The man who had Draven beaten and bloodied last year, after coercing him to make enough Salamander Brandy to drug an entire school.
I don’t know his name, but I do know who he is.
He’s with The Underground. The same mage crime syndicate that the principal is supposed to be working against.
He takes something off the tray as it is offered to him. Steam curls up from the top of the mug, catching at the short bristles sprouting from the angles of his jaw. He looks Cedric’s father dead in the eye and says, “Then you know what you have to do.”
17
Cedric
I know I overreacted to Octavia looking at the reflection of my mother that I conjured, but I was so angry in the moment that I did nothing to stop the new teacher kicking her out of class. I also know he only did it to protect the rest of the students, but it’s setting a dangerous precedent.
How is Octavia supposed to be able to learn if every time another student gets upset by her, she is the one that is punished for it?
I’ve prepared my apology well before I arrive at the divination room. I tried texting her to make sure this is where she went, but she didn’t respond. I’m not surprised. I would be mad at me too.
But when I push open the door I immediately see it wasn’t anger that kept her from responding. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to respond, it was that she couldn’t.
Octavia is slumped across a crystal ball that’s been reinstalled without my knowing, one cheek pressed to the glass—her eyes open and unseeing.
I can’t get to her fast enough. I don’t even bother shutting the door or worrying that someone might hear my voice when I cry out in the scramble to get to her as fast as possible.
I lift her up from the glass as gently and quickly as I can. For the briefest second her body is completely limp in my arms, the full weight of her hanging like a rag doll from under her armpits where I hoist her up and away from the spelled object.
Adapt: Book Two of the Forgotten Affinities Series Page 9