Firebreak, page 15
“But you’re built different,” Bahati said.
He flicked his fingers and fluffed his hair. “Thank you for noticing.”
“Why?” she asked. A serious question. He paused, then flashed a roguish smile.
“I’m a man of mystery, sweetheart. An unfathomable enigma.”
“No,” she said. “Seriously. I want to know.”
He slouched lower on the hardwood floor, his back to Olivia’s bed, eyes intent on the metal in his hands as he carefully slotted another screw.
“Grew up in a state orphanage,” he said. “Nothing there for me but stale food and a strap across my back, so I jetted early. Fell in with the Ash Boulevard crew. They were the closest thing to a family I ever had.”
“Fell in?” Vail asked. “I thought it was your gang. Like, you were the leader.”
“I was, eventually. After the two ahead of me got popped. Billy Nines always flew too close to the sun. He dreamed big, tried to knock over a jewelry store, and ate a rotary-gun blast in the middle of a crowded intersection. Vasquez was more careful, but he still got cornered by a Valkyrie one night. Zigged when he should have zagged. She…” He fell silent, eyes distant. “She took him apart in front of me. Always knew I was born on borrowed time, but that was the first moment I really felt the clock winding down. And I said, you know…who cares? What do I really want, a Citizen life? Submit, obey, work, and die? Nah. I’d rather ride hard, party hard, tweak some noses and go out in a blaze of glory. At least then…”
He glanced up, brow furrowed, thinking it over.
“At least then,” he decided, “my life would mean something. Nobody but the dead would remember me, but it would mean something.”
***
“Pass me the hex wrench?” Colin said.
Olivia snickered as she stretched over the piles of parts and held it out to him.
“What?” Colin asked.
“Hex wrench.” Olivia spread her hands. “I mean, we’re in magic school. It’s the perfect tool for the job.”
Colin shrugged. He couldn’t argue with that.
Construction of the Resonator’s frame was underway, albeit hampered by the missing parts. They were building a skeleton without all the bones.
“So how do people just…not die every single game?” Bahati held up a metal box while Amy and Vail tried to figure out how to slot a finicky pair of brackets into its base.
“Oh, Puckslam uniforms are based on bomb-squad outfits,” Vail explained. “Which is good, because of, you know, the literal explosives on the rink. Injuries happen, but actual fatalities are really rare.”
“Sounds like Chariot-ball on my world,” Dalton said, sorting through a jumbled pile of parts. “Seriously, just one more screw. It’s gotta be here somewhere.”
“The roughest sport we’ve got is…” Amy paused, thinking about it. “Well, we do have mixed martial arts, which is basically just two guys getting in a cage and beating the crap out of each other.”
“Amy comes from a civilized world,” Vail said, nudging her with her hip.
“We have competitive barn-raising,” Olivia said.
Bahati turned to stare at her. “How is that a sport?”
“Teams are judged on speed, accuracy, and woodworking acumen. Sometimes matches get followed up by the Solo Butter Churn Sprint.”
“I’m picturing cheerleaders wearing overalls and straw hats,” Bahati said.
Olivia blinked. “How did you know?”
***
A thumb-sized focus crystal nestled in a steel housing, the lid still open and dangling on a loose hinge. Dalton struck a tuning fork while Colin pieced through the instructions. Bahati held up the flat of her hand.
“A is up heeere,” she sang, holding the note.
The fork rapped against the steel box and sang out, echoing her voice. As the note stretched, long and true, a small and crackling glow rose from the heart of the crystal. Pink light spread out through hair-thin striations under the purple stone, the blood of magic awakening in its stony veins.
“And that,” Colin said, “looks exactly like it does in the instructions. One node down, six to go.”
Amy stifled a yawn behind her hand. “We’ve got all semester. All in favor of calling it a night and getting some rest?”
No arguments. They more or less cleaned up, shuffling the loose piles of gear to the far corner of the dorm room. It wasn’t tidy, but at least they knew where everything was. All the parts they had, at least.
“I’ll ask Professor Lanca about the missing pieces tomorrow,” Colin said, heading for the door.
“And if that fails,” Dalton said, following him out, “we raid the other dorms for fortune and glory.”
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” Colin said.
“Who said anything about ‘necessary’?”
Amy rummaged in her dresser and tugged out her nightgown. Vail lingered, close.
“We did pretty good today,” Vail said.
The first step of the Serpent Rhythm, Amy thought, recalling the words from her textbook, is an invitation to the dance.
She turned, smiled, seeing a need in Vail’s eyes. No time to strategize or rationalize or overthink it. She had to give her something, to feed that hunger.
Amy moved closer, into her orbit. Hesitant, she raised one hand. Her fingertips trailed along the glossy, silk-soft sheen of Vail’s chessboard scarf.
“It looks nice on you,” Amy said.
Vail’s arms closed around her. Vail pulled her close, her lips warm as they brushed against Amy’s ear.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Chapter twenty-one
“First, an announcement,” Professor Lanca told the class. “After a lot of back-and-forth, the headmistress has made a decision: the Night Market will go on as scheduled, two weeks from tonight.”
He paused, looking less than pleased, as the lecture hall erupted in delighted murmurs and claps of approval.
“All right, all right, listen. While we’re confident the pickets will hold, there’s no getting around the fact that — as some of you know perfectly well, seeing as you were there — our unwanted guests intended to use a Racani hopper as their escape vehicle last year. Now they’re getting another bite at the apple.”
He paced the floor in front of his desk, all business.
“You will use the buddy system. You will not venture off alone. If you see anything unusual or suspicious, no matter how minor, you will report it to a professor at once.” He shot a look at Amy and Vail. “You will not investigate it on your own. I shouldn’t have to say that, and yet, here we are.”
He stopped pacing, leaned back against his desk, and sighed.
“Look, kids. You want to go to the Market. I get it. If I can’t talk you out of it, at least I hope I can talk you into using some good sense. This isn’t just about safety. You know by now that nothing about studying magic is safe. But the Racani are theater people. They make money, in part, by putting on a show. A show where everything is nice and tidy and you can leave your cares and worries at the market gate. I need you to be smarter than that, okay?”
Lanca pushed away from his desk and strolled over to the chalkboard. Vail slid a folded piece of notebook paper over to Amy. She intercepted it with a quiet nod, cupping it under her hand.
“Which brings us to today’s lesson. Let’s talk about…language.”
He wrote the word COMMUNICATION at the top of the blackboard in big block letters.
“The story of humanity is the story of communication. Trying to bridge the gaps between us and find understanding, if not common ground. Every one of you has your own life, your own interior world. Communication is how we express that secret life.”
With the professor’s back turned, Amy unfolded Vail’s note.
“But when communication breaks down,” Professor Lanca said, “it looks something like this.”
He snapped his fingers.
The air in the classroom shifted. The light went dark, tinted with blue, even though the sun still beat strong against the windows. The word atop the chalkboard had changed to XYRALII TEO. Amy stared down at incomprehensible squiggles in Vail’s handwriting, symbols that looked halfway between ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and an algebra assignment.
The room erupted in voices, dozens of voices in just as many languages, an avalanche of panicked babble. Bahati said something, sounding tense, but Amy could only shake her head and gesture at her ear. In that instant, even in the heart of the crowd, every student in the hall was cut off from the others. Each one of them was utterly and completely alone.
Lanca snapped his fingers a second time. The bubble popped. As the light flooded back into the room, voices transformed in mid-syllable, everything shifting back to English. Not English, Amy thought, correcting herself. It only sounds like English to me, just like it’s…whatever everyone else speaks, to them.
“Firebreak’s translation enchantment,” the professor explained. “Without which, as you’ve just seen and heard for yourself, we would not be able to do what we do. It’s not a perfect solution, but that’s because language itself is imperfect. Here’s a fun example: someone want to tell me what an illusion is? Yeah, Ms. Renn. You’re up.”
Olivia swallowed, nervous. “It’s…a deception. A lie.”
“Give me a little more. Get technical.”
“Well, an illusion messes with your senses. It makes you see what the caster wants you to see, not what’s really there.”
“Correct,” Lanca said. “So it might surprise you to learn that most scholars classify the Twenty-Fold Tongue, the official name for our handy universal translator, as an illusion spell. And when you think about it, it fits the criteria perfectly: it alters your audiovisual perception, shows you something that isn’t there — the words you are hearing right now are not the words I am speaking — and technically ‘deceives’ you. That said, it’s a deception that we want and welcome so we can communicate with one another. We have to separate the word ‘illusion,’ from the value judgments that cling to it.”
He walked over to his chair and rested his hands on its back.
“Language,” he said, “is messy.”
Amy unfolded Vail’s note again, almost afraid to look. This time, though, she could read it plainly: We are going, right?
Of course we’re going, she wrote. I have been shoveling horse poop, and I have money. Group outing? and slid it over when Lanca’s back was turned.
“This week,” the professor said, “you’ll be learning a…pocket version of the Twenty-Fold Tongue. A scaled-down, short-term adaptation that you can deploy if you ever find yourself outside the translation field and in need of some good old-fashioned—”
He rose up on his toes and rapped his chalk against the top of the blackboard.
“—communication. With this up your sleeve, you’ll be able to go anywhere, listen to the locals, and understand what they’re saying. Doesn’t mean you can talk like a local or pass as a native: that’s an acting challenge and a research project more than a test of magic, and more up Professor Kamaka’s alley. But you’ll never be at a loss for words.”
Vail slid the page back over to Amy. As long as I get some private time with you, she wrote.
That’s a promise, Amy scribbled back.
“So we start from the roots up,” Lanca said, sketching a complex, swirling glyph on the board as he talked. “You might recognize this from last year. The Seal of Memetic Inculcation is used as the launchpad for…more illusion spells than I’ve ever learned. Its purpose is to lock onto your target’s mind — target including yourself, in this case — and lure the senses into a receptive waking trance. The Seal doesn’t do anything flashy on its own. It’s a French fry.”
That got some chuckles from the audience. The professor looked back over his shoulder with a boyish smile.
“Seriously. You ever eat a plain fry? Of course not. Fries are delivery mechanisms for spices and sauces. This seal?” He rapped the board. “Same idea. You want to cook it to perfection, give it that golden-brown crunch, but the real magic starts when you add the toppings.”
Vail slid the folded note back over to Amy, who cupped it under her hand.
“You’ve already seen this once, back when we went over the Chime-Call — also known as everybody’s first baby steps into the world of illusion-magic. Not the most exciting spell, right? But now you’re going to see how we build onto the framework you’ve already learned, and craft something genuinely useful with it. And if someone needs a refresher on how the Chime-Call works…”
He moved his hand across the gallery, as if preparing to call on someone in back — and then, without warning, his finger snapped toward Amy. “Miss Nettle.”
“The Wyrd Sailor’s Almanac,” she said, not missing a beat. “Chapter…twelve, I think?”
“Excellent.”
He moved on, but not before pointing to his eyes, then pointing to the note under Amy’s cupped hand. Message delivered, message received.
Communication, she thought.
Chapter twenty-two
After class, as Professor Lanca packed up his alligator-skin attaché case, Colin nervously approached him.
“Professor? Do you have a second?”
“Mister Woodrue,” he said. “I might even have longer than that. Hey, heard you were your team’s conductor for the start-of-year field exercise.”
Colin stared down at his shoes. “Yeah.”
Lanca glanced up from his case, quirking an eyebrow.
“What? You upset because it didn’t go that hot? Come on, it was your first time.”
Colin shrugged. “I should have done better.”
Lanca closed his case and set it down, all his attention on Colin now.
“Listen,” he said, “that’s why it’s called an exercise. And it wasn’t a fair one, either.”
Colin nodded slowly. “I did feel like we were set up a little.”
The young professor shrugged. “Yeah, well, that’s because you were. The whole point was to conduct a skills assessment under pressure so we could see where you all stand, what you’re good at, what needs remedial work. Let’s be realistic here — you were never going to beat Jellica and the goon squad. The real test was how you reacted once the simulated bodies started dropping.”
“And I screwed it up,” Colin breathed.
“You held your own, is what I heard. ‘An abundance of potential.’”
“Where’d you hear that?” Colin scoffed. “The only person in that booth with me was Professor Chalk, and…”
He trailed off.
“Professor Chalk said that about me?”
Lanca held up his open hands. “Just passing on what I heard, that’s all. I’m curious though. Usually groups have to assign a conductor by playing rock-paper-scissors or something, because nobody wants the job. It’s a lot more fun being out in the field. But you volunteered. Why?”
“Somebody has to be the designated driver,” Colin said, sheepish now.
“While true, that’s a platitude, not a reason. Want to try that again?”
Colin looked down, off to one side, and retreated into his thoughts for a moment.
“You know I wasn’t always Colin, right?”
Lanca pursed his lips, weighing his words before he spoke, nodding slowly.
“It’s my understanding,” he said, “that dead names are meant to remain unspoken. I admit, I don’t have a lot of experience with this kind of thing…but I do have a lot of experience with magic. And in magic, one quickly learns to appreciate the power of words. So yes, the faculty is aware, but I don’t think any of us will bring it up unless you bring it up first. It’s not something that needs discussion.”
“Thank you,” Colin said.
“Shouldn’t have to give thanks for basic decency, but I suppose it’s scarce in some places.”
“I come from the Land of No,” Colin said, “and I called it that long before I knew there were other worlds to see. See, in my hometown, what the community wants, the agreed-upon standard, always comes first. Then what your family wants. Then what your ancestors want, though that’s really just wrapping up the first two things in a temple and an altar-cloth to make people afraid of going against the grain.”
“You’re not a believer.”
Colin thought about that, then shrugged.
“I was once. But as I got older, the stories they told me as a little kid made less and less sense. Then one day the Admonisher told me that my ancestors were disappointed in me. That I’d dishonored them by ‘acting out,’ by disobeying my superiors. And I thought…why would any god worth following give magic powers to this angry weirdo in a frock? Why does he get to talk to my grandma and grandpa and pass on their words when he didn’t even know them when they were alive?”
Lanca nodded, understanding. “It’s not the spirits you lost faith in.”
“How could I?” Colin forced an awkward, nervous smile. “I mean, especially now. Our librarian is literally a ghost. So yeah, maybe my grandparents are out there, floating in the ether. But I don’t think they’re mad at me, because that’s not what they’re like in my memories. And I don’t think they’d waste one second of their afterlife venting about a kid they loved to a man who’s never loved anything but being in charge.”
Colin began to pace, unshackling his thoughts, giving them a voice.
“I come from the Land of No. Community, family, ancestors. What you want doesn’t matter, can never matter, and there’s no sin worse than rocking the boat. I had to answer to a name that didn’t fit me, wear clothes that didn’t fit me, pretend to be who I was told to be, no matter how much I was screaming on the inside. If I got caught doing anything else I’d catch the back of my old man’s hand. When I stood up for myself, they called me a deviant, a degenerate. When I went along to get along, I was locked into a performance. A role I didn’t want in a play I didn’t want to be in. I felt like a liar. Like I was just lying, all the time.”
