Firebreak, page 3
“Speaking of cornered rats,” Mallory said.
“His buddy, the one he calls ‘Mister Shaddock,’ is harder to trace,” Lanca said. “He’s one of those weird outliers from the In-Between. Bunch of terrestrial vermin ended up on a void-ship, sucking down occult radiation from a leaky reactor. Ten generations later, you’ve got rat-people. They’re pirates, scavengers — and in Shaddock’s case, mercenaries. He’s got no loyalties beyond his clan, fights purely for pay, and he doesn’t care where the money comes from. His kid sister freelances as a Network interrogator with a seriously nasty reputation. Presumably that’s how he got introduced to Elmer, who needed a bodyguard for this gig, and the rest is recent history.”
“I’ve encountered their kind before, very briefly,” Professor Chalk said, “back on my homeworld. Though there they mostly work as mechanics. Skilled ones, at that. I never had reason to learn much about them, and I now regret the gap in my education. At any rate, we can handle Elmer and Shaddock. Luring them out of hiding is the challenge. That and finding our resident turncoat before they deliver any more aid and comfort to the enemy.”
Mallory sipped her coffee, curling up in the embrace of her knitted shawl. Her vision went distant for a moment, calculating.
“I might have an idea. Lanca, if you’d be willing to work with me on this, and modify this year’s curriculum just a bit?”
“I’m game,” he said.
“With this list of stolen parts, we can not only see what was taken, we can see what more they’d need to take in order to finish building a Resonator.”
Mallory’s birdlike eyes twinkled with dark mischief.
“I suggest we provide the missing pieces. Sort of. Let’s hand the thief just enough rope to hang themselves.”
Chapter four
The high ceiling of the east wing lecture hall curved downward, and its rough-hewn rafters followed suit, bending like the ribs of a great white whale. A row of arched windows along one wall let in cold, dusty light, illuminating the Dickensian gallery’s stiff-backed chairs, dour wooden desks, and low bookshelves. A row of globes along the windowsill, each one depicting a different set of landmasses, each from a different Earth, lined the polished floorboards with rounded shadows. A Victorian desk sat before a tall black chalkboard, the slate cloudy with the erased words of last year’s assignments.
The second-years filed in and filled the seats, gravitating to familiar faces. Amy and Vail took seats toward the front corner of the room, by the windows, and their friends settled into the spaces around them.
The room fell into a buzz of whispers, the restless students waiting, eyeing the empty desk at the head of the class.
“You know,” Dalton murmured, slouching in his seat and leaning close to Amy. “He pulled the greatest magic trick I’ve ever seen.”
“Professor Lanca?”
“Yeah.” Dalton twirled a finger. “Made his bad reputation disappear. Poof.”
Not entirely, but Amy knew what he meant. Last year, the students had ferreted out the secret that the faculty had been trying to hide: the boyish, charming Professor Lanca had been a professional assassin. As “Red Lanca,” he’d traveled the multiverse, hunting and murdering the enemies of the Network. He’d earned a reputation for brutal efficiency: one curse, one kill.
When they’d arrived last year, there were no fourth-year students. Red Lanca had slaughtered them all, prompting the Saunders Academy to relocate and go into hiding. Chen Lan then captured Lanca and enchanted him with a lethal geas, forcing a mortal enemy to serve as a loyal friend. She gave him the most ironic punishment she could imagine — forcing him to teach the younger students at the Academy, to ensure they never fell prey to a man like him.
Just as word of his history spread like wildfire when it leaked, so did his heroism at the Night Market. Everyone knew that when Amy and company had raced to stop Elmer from escaping, Lanca had joined the fight and nearly died to save them. He was a hero now, a certified Good Guy, and most of the student body — Jellica and her Blades notwithstanding — treated him like it.
Except, Amy thought, that wasn’t the whole story.
She remembered that flicker of hesitation in Lanca’s eyes, that moment when he’d been torn between Elmer’s offer of escape on one side and the gathered students on the other. He played it off after the fact, acted as if his loyalty was never in doubt, but Amy had been standing right there. In that moment, she could read him like a book.
He’d been figuring out which side was more likely to win. Then he’d made his choice.
At last the classroom door rattled open and Lanca appeared, precariously balancing a pair of tall cardboard boxes in his arms, feet unsteady as he lugged them over to his desk. A couple of students rose to help, rushing to help with his awkward burden.
“Ah, thank you, thank you. And hello, everyone!” He gave the room a big, sunny wave. “Welcome to your second year at the Saunders Academy and my class, Intermediate Occult Philosophy. Now, let’s see who read the dormitory postings. Focus crystals up, let’s see ‘em.”
A forest of hands sprouted as one as they raised their instruments high. A focus crystal was a tool for beginning magicians, designed to help harness and direct their natural powers. Amy’s was a thumb-shaped chunk of dark purple stone, almost metallic, blunt and direct. Vail’s was cold and pink with pinpoint sparkles glittering in its depths. It also had a crack, a jagged hairline along its belly, an incurable flaw. Amy remembered pointing it out on their first day of class together, only for Vail to shrug: I still like it. This one is for me.
Amy understood that better now. It was only a flaw if she treated it like one.
“This year,” Lanca said, “the training wheels come off a bit.”
He hopped up to sit on the edge of his desk and clasped his hands together.
“Last year was all about the basics. You learned the rudiments from me, basic principles of natural magic and herbalism from Professor Mallory, Professor Kamaka gifted you with an introduction to orienteering and survival — and probably made you sweat more than any rational person would enjoy — and Professor Chalk…”
“…taught us the meaning of fear?” Bahati suggested.
Lanca cocked a finger gun at her and winked.
“See, if you say it, then I don’t get in trouble for saying it myself.” He spread his hands. “Don’t go thinking you’ve got it made now that you’ve got a year under your belts. We’re still running things on a pass-or-fail basis, and the Arch of Resignation is still in the courtyard if you don’t make the grade. I don’t like saying it that way, but I need you all to know the stakes here. Don’t get lazy.”
On the far side of the room, another of the second-years raised her hand.
“Professor? Isn’t it weird to be holding classes like nothing’s wrong, when…” She gestured to the windows.
Lanca nodded. “We’ve got two Network agents running loose on Firebreak Island. True. But the faculty and I have set up a string of picket markers covering the entire Academy outskirts, and they can’t cross the line without lighting up the night with warnings long before they can get close enough to make any trouble. You’re in here, they’re out there.”
He hopped down from his desk and began to pace as he talked.
“Some concessions have been made. You may notice the student body is smaller now. Recruiting new first-year students is on hold until this crisis is dealt with. For the rest of you, though, our headmistress has decided — and I, for once, agree with her — that keeping things as routine as possible is the healthiest decision for everyone. I mean, would you rather be cooped up in your dorms, locked away like prisoners, or in class and learning to protect yourselves? At least this way you get to keep your minds busy.”
Amy found herself nodding along with her classmates.
“This year, as your competence grows, you may find a distinctive…bent to your magical abilities. Some people are generalists, but most, in my experience, have a knack for a particular flavor of spell-craft. The more you grow, and the more you learn about yourself, the easier it’ll be to find and latch onto that special gift.”
Amy glanced sidelong at Colin. His gift had been obvious from day one: he had such a natural grasp on alchemy and herbalism that he was practically Professor Mallory’s personal assistant now. She tried not to be envious. Then she thought about the Navigator’s Tarot, and how Professor Kamaka had opened a door across dimensions as easily as making a wish.
Amy had spent seventeen years of her life cooped up in Holybrook, a prison where dreams withered on a barstool. No one ever got out and no one ever found a happy ending, they just passed on their broken hopes to the next generation and watched them fail. It was a small, mean town filled with small, mean people who were waiting to die, and she had almost been one of them before the Saunders Academy chose her and gave her a second chance.
The idea of being able to travel — to go anywhere in the vast multiverse, to see, to explore, to learn and experience — was the most intoxicating drug she could imagine. That was freedom. That was true magic.
“A few of you,” Lanca was saying, “will be pulled aside by the faculty and given supplementary coursework to focus and refine your emerging talents. Two important points: number one, this is supplementary extra credit. Number two, if you don’t get the opportunity, don’t sweat it. That means you just haven’t found your special niche yet, and plenty of people are late bloomers. Or maybe you’re so amazingly good at everything that we’re baffled at how to handle you.”
Dalton raised a hand. “Can we just decide to go with ‘amazingly good at everything’?”
Lanca nodded, firm. “You have my permission. Look, kids, you’re going to be surrounded your entire life with people looking to tear you down. Doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, somebody out there can only have a better day by giving you a worse one. Don’t help ‘em do it to you. Some of you are more advanced than the others right now, that’s just how life works, but that doesn’t mean you’re lesser, and it doesn’t say anything about your potential, the magician you can become. The simple fact that you completed your first year at Saunders and you’re sitting in my class proves you’re worthy of being here. What you’ve all got, right now, is a chance to work hard and shine.”
He walked to the blackboard and scooped up a long, thin stick of white chalk.
“As part of this year’s curriculum, you’ll be taking part in a group project. Pick classmates you trust, because you’ll be sharing a grade on this one.”
Amy looked around and met the gazes of her friends, everyone already looking her way, as if they’d appointed her to the role of project coordinator by silent consensus. She still wasn’t sure how she’d acquired the mantle of kinda-sorta-leadership, but she was doing her best to be worthy of it.
“You’ll be building a complicated instrument,” Lanca said, drawing a skeletal tripod on the chalkboard. “This is a Tillinghast Resonator. The Resonator’s inventor was working on a means of seeing and contacting parallel Earths. It projects a bubble of mixed reality around itself, allowing… Okay, remember how I described the different worlds of the multiverse as frequencies on a radio dial? The Resonator makes frequencies overlap. This can result in glimpses of other worlds, even communication with the natives, albeit fragmented and unreliable.”
Sounds like something Elmer would probably love to have right now— Amy sat bolt upright. Elmer and Shaddock were trapped on this island until they either found a way off-world or got word to their allies in the Network to summon an invasion fleet. A Resonator was exactly what they needed. So why is Lanca going to make us build one? Even if that’s the usual curriculum, the timing feels weird. Do they really trust the pickets that much?
“It’s worth noting,” the professor said, “that these can be dangerous machines in inexperienced hands. The inventor found that out the hard way. His prototype attuned itself to a hostile parallel. Something came through that bit his head off like a—”
Lanca caught himself and smiled awkwardly, brandishing his stick of chalk like a magic wand.
“We don’t need to get into that. Point is, your Resonators will be attuned to safe, tested frequencies and set on a brief, strict timer. Going outside the bounds on this project will get you expelled, no questions asked, so don’t even think about it. I’m letting you play with some powerful stuff this year because you proved to me that you can handle it. Don’t make a liar out of me, okay?”
***
After class, Lanca and Mallory met in the hallway. They watched the flow of young bodies, eager minds, until the hum of conversation faded and they were alone.
“How’d it go?” Mallory asked.
“I divvied up the starter parts and made a record of who’s teamed up with who. I’ll do the same with the third-year students this afternoon. You’re sure everything’s been tagged?”
“Me and Lan spent all night on it,” she replied. “The second anyone takes a single one of those components outside the Academy walls, it’ll trigger the alarm to end all alarms. Also — her idea — we wove in a little something extra. Paralysis curse. Whoever our wayward thief is, they’ve got a nasty surprise coming. We just have to wait for them to take the bait.”
Lanca glanced up and down the hall, his eyes narrowing.
“You know how he did it, right?”
“Elmer?”
“It was the Night Market. Same way he got that cursed spellbook into the Anders boy’s hands. Played the friendly old merchant, but actually he was cold reading — watching those kids, figuring out what they wanted more than anything, then offering it up on a silver platter. He knew he’d find a weak one, somebody willing to dance for the bait.”
“Familiar playbook?”
He shot her a look. She answered with a What did you expect? shrug.
“Point is, I said the Night Market was a security threat, and I was right.”
Mallory sighed. “They’re teenagers, Red. Letting them blow off steam once in a while isn’t just healthy, it’s necessary if we want to keep them in line the rest of the year. You and Abraham both forget that sometimes, I think.”
“We’re not the same.” Lanca quirked a rueful smile. “Chalk can’t remember what it was like to be young. Either that or he simply hatched from an egg one fine morning, already a bitter old man. I’d believe that version of events.”
“And you?”
“I remember what it felt like to be young and fearless,” Lanca said. He crossed his arms over his chest and met Mallory’s wizened gaze. “And all the friends I had back then? None of them lived to see their twenty-first birthday. The multiverse is unkind.”
“Only because people make it that way.”
She faced him, lips pursed in a lopsided challenge.
“Your former employers sold you a bill of goods, Red. The cosmos is filled with horrible dangers, of course. Only a fool would argue otherwise. But there’s goodness, too, and wonders. They taught you that everything out there wants to hurt you. But as soon as you start classifying everyone as either a predator or a victim…well, nobody wants to be a victim. And if you’ve been conned into believing that becoming a predator instead is the only viable option—”
“I’m still here, aren’t I?”
She nodded.
“You’re still here.”
After that, they shared an amiable silence.
Chapter five
Dinner that night was electric. The second- and third-year students knew that the window for Sept selection had begun, and while it could theoretically happen at any point during the school year — or not at all, for at least half of the student body — it could be tonight.
Schrödinger’s Christmas present, Amy thought, slicing off a juicy hunk of something that was almost but not quite canned cranberry and stirring it around in a rich red sauce. There’s a present under the tree and also there isn’t a present under the tree, and it’s exactly the one you wanted…and it isn’t.
“I hear the Staves and Coins are really picky,” Colin said, as if preemptively trying to save her from disappointment. She appreciated it. It didn’t help, but she appreciated it.
“Don’t worry,” Dalton added, “if the Coins say no, you can still hang out with the rest of us unwanted losers.”
“Hey,” Bahati said, her voice sharp.
He shrugged. “I’m just saying, my talents only qualify me for the Blades, and I think we all know that none of us are getting tapped by the Blades. Not after last year. I don’t mind, I’ve never been much of a joiner anyway.”
Olivia looked at him over the rim of her water glass. “Weren’t you in a street gang on your world?”
“No, I led a gang on my world, thank you very much. And we weren’t some ordinary street thugs. We had bikes.”
“On my planet,” Amy said, “people in biker gangs are usually these…big, rough, bearded guys covered in tattoos.”
Dalton brushed some imaginary dust from the shoulder of his school blazer.
“Yeah, well, on mine, we wear tailored suits and we look platinum. Everybody used to call me the Ladykiller on Wheels.”
Bahati raised an eyebrow. “That has to be the sixth or seventh nickname that ‘everybody called you’ back home.”
“What can I say? I’m a man of mystery, culture, and style.”
Vail found Amy’s hand under the table and gave it a squeeze.
“Just…don’t get discouraged, okay?” Vail leaned close. “There’s stuff you can control, and stuff you can’t. This goes in the second box.”
Amy knew Vail was right. Well, she knew except for one small corner in the back of her brain, stomping its psychic feet indignantly at the idea there was anything she couldn’t control.
Anahera was coming their way. The fourth-year student, leader of the visionary Cups, walked with an ethereal, dreamy sway, and the silk shawl draped around her shoulders matched the sea-foam blue of her eyes. Her gaze was distant and glassy, like she was focused on something a thousand miles away.
