Firebreak, page 17
The professor ran her fingers along the silver halo, pointing to the black oval at its heart.
“This, on the other hand, is a much more economical option, and easier for a fledgling to work with. Remove the glass from its frame, paint the backing in the deepest black you can find — high-gloss spray paint works best in my experience — and slide the glass back into place. Voilà, a black mirror. Alternatively, you can just paint one side of a piece of glass and use the opposite side for scrying.”
Mallory paused and took a sip of coffee before leaning over again and rummaging in the box.
“By the way, if you can’t find a mirror with removable glass, a cheap picture frame does the job just as well.”
She pulled out a second parcel and peeled back the tape and wrapper to reveal a second mirror. It was palm-sized and shaped like a seashell, mounted in a pink plastic case. Amy squinted, noticed the broken hinges at the bottom of the frame, and realized it was converted from a makeup compact with the powder side snapped away.
“If you’re thinking these things look like they came from somebody’s garage sale,” Professor Mallory said, catching Amy’s expression and giving her a wink, “they most certainly did. This is a lesson I want to drive home for all of you. You’ll no doubt meet plenty of magicians who pride themselves on their jeweled chalices, their master-forged knives, their pentacles carved from exotic stone, and I won’t lie, it’s nice to have pretty things. But the tools don’t make the witch. The witch makes the tools.”
She murmured something under her breath and tapped the compact’s face with her fingernail. Motes of light swirled from the heart of the glass and erupted, bursting loose as a butterfly made of glowing embers. It flapped its newborn wings and soared, fluttering over the students’ heads before veering up toward the sun and vanishing, fading into a faint shower of sparks that winked out before they fell to earth.
“You don’t need money to be a witch,” Mallory said. “You need to be able to improvise, to work dirty and cheap, and use the resources you’ve got to their absolute fullest. Learn that, and you’ll catch the big boys with their expensive toys flat-footed almost every time. All right, I need some helping hands for this one. Let’s go with Miss Nettle and…”
The professor’s gaze fell upon Vail. Then paused, just for a telltale moment, and kept moving. In the corner of her eye, Amy saw Vail’s shoulders tighten, her arms pull inward against her sides. Mallory’s roving finger fell on Dalton, beckoning him to the front of the class.
She gave each of them one of the mirrors. The broken plastic compact fit snugly in Amy’s palm. Mallory directed them to stand at opposite sides of the grassy clearing.
“About twenty feet apart. Perfect. Turn your backs to each other. Class, don’t crowd them, but sit or stand where you can see one of the mirrors clearly. Doesn’t matter which.”
Amy heard jostling behind her, the rustling of fallen leaves as faceless figures filled the black mirror. She heard Dalton’s voice: “If I can’t style my hair in this thing, I really don’t know what it’s good for.”
“This spell,” Professor Mallory said, “is the Conjugation of Glass. These two particular mirrors have already been cleansed, purified, and primed for the job. All you need to do is activate them. I’m going to give you a minute to slip into a light trance state. Class, give ‘em some peace and quiet.”
No pressure, Amy thought. With her back to the class, all she could see was an empty treeline ahead of her, the thick gnarled wood hoarding its secrets, and a slew of empty spectres in the compact mirror’s painted glass.
She breathed, relaxing into the slow rhythm of her heartbeat, mnemonics gently sweeping the worries from her mind as her muscles began to unclench. When the professor spoke again, it felt like maybe five or six seconds had passed. A minute was gone, the hourglass sand stolen, siphoned to feed her magic.
Mallory’s voice was soft and crisp, like the cold breeze that rolled through the clearing, ruffling the grass. “We invoke with the barbarous names. Follow my lead, and pour your intentions into the glass. Don’t worry about memorizing the incantation, you’ll do that later. Just focus and pour. Now repeat: akhas, khordanti—”
The twisting syllables took on meter and rhyme and Amy breathed them into the black mirror, melting into the flow. Her conscious mind sank beneath the sea of words as the mirror grew in her sight, swelling, blotting out the forest behind it and the world behind that.
Then, in an instant, the mirror wasn’t black anymore. It was bright and clear and capturing the morning sun, perfectly reflective.
It wasn’t her reflection in the mirror’s, though. It was Dalton’s, bemused as he stared out at her.
“Whoa,” she heard him say, his voice faint from the far side of the clearing.
His reflection raised his hand and gave a curious wave. She wriggled her fingers in response as the other students jockeyed closer to get a better look.
“And like that,” Professor Mallory said, “your mirrors are sympathetically linked. As you can see, they only pick up images, not sound, so keep that in mind if you ever need to use this spell for long-distance communication. Also, there’s a range limit. The distance depends on how much fuel you shovel into the fire, but for most people it’s about…four hundred meters, give or take?”
Amy couldn’t resist doing the conversion in her head. About a quarter mile. Handy.
“How long does it last?” she asked, her gaze still fixed on Dalton’s reflection. It was uncanny, seeing someone else where your brain said your own face should be.
“The spell is fueled by your own energy,” the professor said, “so once either of you breaks physical contact with the mirror, that’ll end it. Here, I’ll show you.”
Mallory took Dalton’s mirror from his hand. At once, Amy’s window into the other side of the clearing vanished, snapping to matte black paint. She felt jarred, uneasy on her feet from the sudden, hard disconnect, and stumbled a little as she returned the compact to the professor’s folding card table.
“New assignment,” Mallory said, patting one of the shipping boxes. “Everybody, step on up and grab an unprimed mirror. For next week, I want your mirror to be properly cleansed and prepared for spell-craft. Also, commit the Conjugation of Glass invocation to memory. It’s only a few lines, I’m not asking for much here.”
As promised, the collection of mirrors had been harvested from a dozen different yard sales and thrift shops. Amy’s was a Fifties-era hand mirror with cheap plating, the handle tarnished from decades of skin-oil, its patina worn away. She could instantly feel the difference. Where the compact had tingled against her palm, this one was inert, lifeless on its own, waiting for someone to invest it with magic and purpose.
***
Vail was quiet on the hike back to the Academy gates. Amy wasn’t sure what to say, or if there was anything to be said at all. Leaving Vail to her thoughts was probably the best choice, but Amy just couldn’t do it.
“Are you…upset that she didn’t pick you for the demonstration?” Amy asked.
“Yes. No.” Vail shook her head, glaring at the stony forest trail. “I get it. She didn’t want to embarrass me if I couldn’t pull it off. I can’t be mad about that.”
“Still,” Amy said, hearing the unspoken.
“You were never into sports back in school on your world, were you?”
Amy grimaced. “Sports have never been into me.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll tell you something. Doesn’t matter what the game is. When they’re choosing teams, it sucks to get picked last.”
Foraging for the herbs and moss to cleanse their new mirrors felt almost trivial, to a degree that caught Amy by surprise. She still remembered their first months here, when Murder Mittens had saved her from burning her hands on a toxic plant. Everything had been new, a mystery that seemed impossible to solve. Now she knew what to do. Brightburn moss for cleansing, milkroot sap for strength, the rhythmic rhyming chant of the purification spell rising to her tongue and ready because she had learned its beat by heart.
She had leagues to go, but she was learning. They all were.
“The book says the mirrors have to be washed in star-water,” Colin mused. “That’s easy enough. Just have to put some clean water in clear glass jars and leave it out overnight, so it soaks up…”
He made a vague gesture at the overcast sky.
“…this.”
“Mister Orris has a ton of canning supplies,” Amy offered. “I’m sure he’ll let us borrow a couple of jars if we bring them right back tomorrow.”
“We can leave them out in the school courtyard tonight,” Olivia said.
Bahati wrinkled her nose. “Eh, maybe. Vail, I don’t want to put you on the spot, but seeing as you’re friends with Jellica now, for reasons I cannot remotely fathom considering she treated us like crap all last year—”
Vail’s eyes flashed a warning.
“We’re not friends.”
“Okay, bad wording on my part.” Bahati held up an open hand. “Seeing as you have a working relationship with her, then, do you think her ‘no bullying the second-years’ offer is legit or not?”
Vail pursed her lips to one side, thinking it over, then shook her head.
“I wouldn’t put money on it.”
“Right, then. Change of plans.”
They filled three canning jars with fresh water and brought them to the girls’ dorm, lining them up along the windowsill.
“We keep the curtains open tonight,” Bahati said, “and tomorrow morning, we have star-water.”
“Hold up, we’re forgetting one thing,” Vail said.
She headed across the hall to the showers and came back with a pair of towels, folding them tightly and laying them out on the floor beneath the sill, like a safety cushion.
“The crows,” she explained, “aren’t going to like this.”
Chapter twenty-five
Vail was right.
Amy woke, as usual, to the giddy screech of crowsong. The morning chorus sang out from suddenly wide-open windows, a frigid draft flooding the room and ruffling her thin bedsheets. One by one the jars of star-water fell, knocked over by ruffling black wings, and were saved from breaking by the folded towels below.
Olivia sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes and wincing. “Someday I want to figure out how they get the windows open.”
“The question isn’t how do they do it,” Bahati grumbled, “the question is is there any force in the universe that can stop them. Signs point to no.”
Sergeant Pepper, the leader of the feathered band, tilted his head and regarded the jars with glittering eyes. Then he strutted over and gave one of the jars a petulant kick.
“Amy,” Vail said, “you’re the weird animal chick. Translate?”
“He thinks we should be focused on food and food-related magic. Also, he wants breakfast.”
***
After morning classes, Amy and Vail rendezvoused in the showers, hoping the third time attempting the Serpent Rhythm would finally click, weaving the bond that they knew they were supposed to have. The bond they wanted to have.
But the third time wasn’t the charm. Just another failure.
Just another failure. The words were heavy in Amy’s mind.
“It has to be me. I’m the reason—”
“Don’t.”
Vail cut her off. She sat at Amy’s side on the cold tile floor, back to the mildewed wall. Her eyes were fixed on something far off, a world away, some distant and unknowable war. Her hand found Amy’s and squeezed, tender.
“We’re not doing that. We’re not doing blame, okay?”
“Okay,” Amy whispered.
“I think we need to face facts, though. We’re great together, just…not like this. Not for this one thing. And it doesn’t say anything about us, okay? Doesn’t say anything about our…friendship, or what we have together. But we have to nail this spell or Chalk’s going to toss us both out of here, so I think we need to—”
Find different partners.
“I know,” Amy said, fast.
She didn’t want to interrupt Vail. She just didn’t want to hear her say the words.
***
“So Vail says you’re both looking for alternate dance partners,” Bahati told Amy. “I’m your girl. Don’t even need to ask twice. Or once, seeing as I’m volunteering before you ask, technically.”
Amy blinked. “I thought you were paired up with Olivia.”
Bahati rolled her eyes. “Supposed to be. We were going to practice last week, but she was nothing but excuses at the last minute. Supposed to practice yesterday, same deal. She’s really being weird about this thing.”
“Olivia? Weird? Never.”
Bahati slapped Amy’s arm as they navigated the bustling hallway between classes.
“Weirder than usual. I think she’s really freaked out about letting somebody see inside her head.”
Join the club, Amy thought.
“Understandable,” she replied, “but I don’t think Professor Chalk is going to take ‘I was freaked out’ as an excuse for failure.”
“He doesn’t take death as an excuse for failure. You know, I have to wonder: when he and Gecka linked brains, who do you think it was a scarier experience for?”
“Not sure,” Amy said. “One of them is utterly terrifying—”
“And the other one is Professor Chalk. Hey, we’ve got some time and the dorm should be empty right now. Want to go upstairs and give it a shot?”
She didn’t. Finding another partner, even though they’d both agreed it was a necessary thing, felt like a betrayal. The prospect of succeeding with someone else after she and Vail couldn’t get it done felt even worse.
Necessary. She locked the word into her mind like a mantra. This wasn’t what anybody wanted, but the assignment wasn’t going anywhere and the work had to get done. Necessary.
They shut the dormitory door and squared off. Bahati cocked one hip, her pleated skirt swaying.
“You can snap, right?”
“Sure,” Amy said.
Bahati raised one hand, pressing her fingertips together. “Catch this beat.”
She laid down a slow rhythm of finger-snaps. After listening for a moment, feeling the pace, Amy offered her counterpoint. She felt something stirring deep in the pit of her stomach, a nervous-giddy rise like she was sitting in the front car of a roller coaster, preparing for the drop.
Bahati’s hips began to sway, serpentine, one of her arms curling in a languid, circular motion. Amy mirrored her without thinking, following a half-step behind, letting the moves carry her up the hill. Now the roller coaster was electronic, the cart rising up on the digital bars of an equalizer as lights strobed across a nightclub, the DJ’s track louder, higher, louder, higher, focused like a heat-seeking missile on the inevitable break.
Bahati spun on the ball of one foot and Amy mirrored her a second later, falling into syncopation. Amy had the impression of a concert stage, a row of backup dancers—
You’re not the backup. You’re the star.
Wait, did you say that, or did I?
Bahati flashed a cocky grin. Not a word had passed between them, not out loud.
This is our show.
The spotlight found her. So did the crowd, an arena that roared with the force of a thousand lions. Amy recoiled from the sheer force of it, but Bahati caught her in her arms, lifted her, spun her around. Amy’s costume was shiny, hard cut, revealing in too many places and scratchy and too tight everywhere else, but
you get used to it. Besides, it makes our legs look great.
The music erupted and she-they-she started to sing and Amy had never heard this tune before but she knew it anyway, every last word, because she remembered writing the lyrics. She sang of revolution, of dark days now but better ones coming, and the song was sort of about a boy she’d loved and lost but it was also about the here and now, about everyone in this arena, and she knew they’d read between the lines.
Every step of this dance had been rehearsed a hundred times, moves calculated and controlled, down to every last look of challenge in her eyes and every smile for the roaring crowd. I can’t let these people down. They came to see me. It has to be the best concert ever.
Every concert had to be the best concert ever. The small part of Amy that was still Amy thought those were her words, intruding on the memory-vision, but then she realized it was pure Bahati. She saw the real girl under the diva now, was her now: behind the unflappable confidence lay a thousand nervous calculations and a marrow-deep fear of missing a single step.
Some of these people have seen me sing a dozen times, but somebody in this crowd is only going to see me once in a lifetime. Here, now, tonight. So tonight I have to give it everything I’ve got.
She powered through the bridge, belting a blistering chorus and feeling every word. The crowd fed it back to her, the energy in the arena pouring at her in a blistering, raw torrent that lifted her off her feet, giving her wings to fly above the cruelty of the world.
It’s a kind of magic, they thought as one.
***
Amy lay flat on her back in her bed, staring at the flaky eggshell paint on the ceiling, her body empty and trembling. Every muscle in her body burned with a quiet ache. She didn’t remember how she’d gotten here, or how the spell ended, just the white-hot supernova that still burned behind her eyelids. Bahati lay beside her. They shared an exhausted silence for a while.
“Do you ever get over the stage fright?” Amy asked, her voice soft.
“Sort of,” Bahati said. “My first vocal coach taught me a secret. He taught me that the part of your brain that handles fear is the same one that handles excitement. It’s like…almost the same emotion, but one is negative and one is positive.”
Amy ran through that in her head. It felt true.
