Chapter Fourteen: Body of the Sun

 

The death tortoise—full of picnic food to last it a week—swam through the sand to the south, then dove beneath with a screech.

I watched it disappear, then moved my attention back to the scorched remains of Corpus Sun.

Peering over the edge of a dune, we watched the factions of terrorists, soldiers, settlers, and scientists move in an uneasy detente under the thin dome I had erected over the entire site in my first negotiations with the Western Territories.

“Lovely. This looks like just the spot to start a revolution,” Constantine said amiably, a direct contrast to his true feelings, as usual.

Axer carefully miniaturized the supplies using the devices' own internal magic, and slung the bag already containing the miniaturized vehicle across his chest as he began scoping out the perimeter with Guard Rock. Constantine’s cat sat at the base of the dune, grooming itself in boredom.

I stared at the cat, then at Constantine—who shrugged in response. We resumed our vigil in tandem.

“Not a revolution,” I murmured.

“Darling, your entire existence is a revolution.”

My magic was still all over the site that surrounded what had once been Corpus Sun. A thin dome—a facsimile of the one that Constantine and I had tiptoed through months ago—covered the remains of the city. It kept out shifts and recycled a finite amount of magic within.

But the real jewel was the thick containment dome at the city’s center. An impenetrable layer of magical Saran wrap pulled an opaque dome over what had once been a five-block radius of shambling buildings, inaccessible at this stage to anyone without the key. A mystery that the Third Layer scientists and engineers on site had been pretending to chip at for months.

I touched the marble, girding myself. “We’ll need to deactivate the appraisal wards.”

Constantine's eyes narrowed in on the Third Layer scientists’ tent, locked down with wards between the exterior and interior domes.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked, looking sharply at me. “This is your test case. Your results may be tainted by our presence.”

I pulled my lips between my teeth, wetting them. “What difference does it make now? It should hide us for a bit in a place we can use magic. Maybe for two days? And we need that.” I tried to smile at him; tried not to let my gaze slide to the sickly gray tinge of his skin.

His complexion was responding less and less to each influx by Axer—two people sharing one, emptying oxygen tank. I swallowed.

“The site already flags my magic,” I said, trying harder to smile. “And authorities from both layers have combed the site outside the inner dome a hundred times and turned up nothing. We might even make it out alive.”

Inessa had spouted the information last term during an effort to taunt me.

“...the evidence against you that Daddy's troops are currently searching for in Corpus Sun.”

Inessa had taunted me, hoping to scare me, but what she'd done instead was give me a heads up that the Legion was trying to access the site. The problem with Inessa’s declaration was that the Legion's search was illegal. And even Legion troops had to proceed carefully. Second Layer forces caught in the Third Layer would technically be considered a declaration of war that Second Layer politicians hadn’t been ready to commit to months ago.

A few whispers in the right Third Layer ears had upped the Third Layer presence immediately. The Second Layer hadn’t resumed their poking—unless they had been very, very careful about it.

The problem with a global police force in the Second Layer that answered to a vast number of politically disparate countries was that they weren't war sanctioned for any but the direst of circumstances. They could be sneaky and underhanded, but they had to get permission from the Council for acts of war.

That was the reason the Department hadn't been able to openly come after me in the Third Layer. Until they got a declaration, they had to be covert. Or they had to lure me to the Second Layer.

With current events in play, we were on shakier ground. A quarter of the Second Layer countries had already signed documents of war while we’d been turtling. It was the holdouts that were keeping troops out of the Third—hampering Stavros just enough to give us time we might not otherwise have. Axer had been right.

“Traces of the two of us and Price are already established here as well. The perfect camouflage.” Axer crouched down. He pointed at nearly invisible blocks of green near the external dome, then similar ones around the internal dome. “Trackers. Multiple types placed by multiple factions. They will go off as soon as someone tries to cross the beams. They need to be disarmed with something that can dissolve, then immediately renew them. But that shouldn’t be a problem, should it?”

He looked at Constantine in challenge, eyes dark, and withdrew a thin tube from his cloak pocket.

I cringed. Constantine had used something like that on the wards at Excelsine, when letting Godfrey and his men onto campus, then sealing up the wards later. And he’d taken it as a challenge since then to make something less detectable for future ill plans.

But even though we’d be using his discoveries to help us, it still didn’t remove the thorn between them that Constantine had put the entire campus in danger—a population Axer zealously protected.

Constantine withdrew a vial filled with a vibrant green liquid and shook it lazily without looking away from the challenging stare of his roommate.

Axer frowned, halting his motion in lengthening the tube. “Is that all of it?” He looked at the ground between our dune and the dome, then at the tube, and the liquid in the vial. He sighed and retracted the tube, placing it back in his cloak.

“Well, I didn’t exactly pack for storming castles,” Constantine said. “This is plenty.”

“And what are you going to do with it exactly, throw it?” Axer said evenly. “Might as well just announce our presence by tossing Ren with it. There are fifteen scouts watching this section of the barrier.”

“Find the prettiest scout and lure her—or him—over to the barrier with your muscles while I deactivate a sliver in the field,” Constantine said lazily.

I cringed.

Axer stared at Constantine. “That is a stupid plan.” He was already pulling devices from the secret pockets and buckles in his cloak.

“And yours is…?”

“It was to drip it through the distribution tube, then walk through the opening like we belonged. But without using magic, the amount of potion we have will never spread that distance. So, Plan B. There’s a flarelizard nest fifty meters from the border on the far side. As soon as the scouts move, you move too.”

We both looked at him like he was insane. Flarelizards spit lava.

“You can’t use magic,” I said. Fighting flarelizards was one thing—I’d seen him fight dozens of things without magic—but mobilizing them? We were going to be a crew of two sooner rather than later.

He shrugged and rolled his shoulders, his own magic tighter than I’d ever seen it. “I’ll be fine.”

“They’ll know we are in the internal field as soon as she opens the seed,” Constantine said, disregarding the imminent death of his roommate and going to the next problem in the plan.

A flash of gold lit the crowd in my peripheral vision, jerking my gaze to the people roaming just inside the external dome. I scanned the crowd, gaze traveling to the right, looking for the source, unease spreading through me. Scientist, settler, two men haggling over some bit of magic, five soldiers sharing a canteen, a small crowd peering at a broadcast, two more scientists, three terrorists, five men in territory clothes...

“They’ll know something is happening, but not exactly what,” Axer said.

Another flash of gold made my gaze jerk to the left of the crowd, search turning more frantic as the boys continued bickering.

“It’s a pretty easy guess.”

“But it will still be speculation. They can’t gain entrance. And every Third Layer faction will try to keep it secret from the other layers. They’ll cite previous problems at the site, if there are any spikes. We’ll make certain there aren’t.”

“You were the one worried about being trapped,” Constantine said languidly, chipped darkness beneath each word. “I’m relieved to see that burden lifted.”

“We won’t be trapped.” Axer was staring at Constantine in challenge as I looked back at them.

I wet my lips. Gold meant only one thing for me in dangerous situations. “Listen, I think—”

Constantine narrowed his eyes at Axer, ignoring me. “You will burn her out.”

“A phoenix burns with new life.”

Subtext underscored their words, but I didn’t care about any of it at the moment. “Seriously, we need—”

Constantine smiled tightly. “Well then, I guess that’s settled. All we need is for you to create a distraction and die with glory.”

“Pirate scum!”

We all whipped our gazes to peer over the dune as voices erupted from the settlement and my unease turned into full blown panic. Five men were fighting in front of the scientist’s tent, and in front of them, the external dome had thinned so significantly as to be a dewy membrane—wobbling on a leaf, waiting to fall.

“Oh, no,” I whispered.

“Someone deactivated two-thirds of the wards in the exterior barrier,” Axer said, eyes narrowed and searching the crowd.

“The recycling magic is still active,” Constantine said, body tight. “But the apprisal spells were turned off.”

My gaze narrowed on a man on the edge of the fight circle gathering outside the scientists’ tent. Hat tipped rakishly low, the brim tilted just enough to let the sun catch the gold cuff hugging his ear. I couldn’t see his eyes, but the edge of his lips curved into a smile, as if he could feel my gaze. A shimmer of a hummingbird rose in the air above his lazily circling hand, then he pivoted and blended into the surging crowd.

Raphael, who was always plotting far in advance.

I murmured the politest swear word I could think of for this situation.

Both boys looked at me. “What?”

“Raphael is here.”

Constantine’s head whipped back in the direction of the fighters.

“You saw him?” Axer asked calmly, his gaze dissecting the surging crowd. He turned the device in his hand up a notch with a flick of his finger. It was indicating all lifeforms within a one-mile perimeter around us and highlighting the details for each life force.

“He’s not a participant, but he started the fight. He disabled the barrier.” I was certain of that.

“He knows you are here.”

It wasn’t a question, but I answered anyway. “Yes.”

“And he disabled the barrier.” Axer tapped a free finger against his thigh. He looked at Constantine’s magic, then mine, before meeting my gaze again. “Can he enter the interior dome? Once you activate your creation?”

I shifted uncomfortably. “I can’t unequivocally say no. He has fewer resources than Stavros, but knows me better. But I haven’t felt a disturbance in the surrounding wards. I’m the only one with the key.” I touched the marble.

Axer’s tapping increased as he surveyed the fight, his body tense—then stopped. He tucked the device into a buckle notch. “We risk it. Let’s go.”

Constantine gaze whipped back. “He’ll try and take Ren.”

Axer tipped his head grimly. “Then you get your chance to do all that you’ve desired.”

Constantine stiffened.

Axer was already moving and I scrambled to follow. “He gave us an opening. We need recovery time and the magic. Even if it’s only for an hour. And we need to contact the others. We’ll deal with Verisetti, if we have to.”

A firework burst, and people began streaming toward the fight from all directions. Guard Rock swung into my hood.

Constantine scooped up the cat, flat gaze on his roommate. “And your proposal—”

“Walk right through the crowd.”

We scrambled over the dune and ran down the slope as if we were scouts joining in. The thin barrier was barely a brush against my skin, but the available magic inside was not, and it called to me. Once in the surge, we began moving sideways. That part was oddly easy. Keep my head down, stay to the edge of the crowd, inch closer to the dome, don’t use magic.

We reached the edge of the interior dome quickly. Under a recycling dome, magic that was not our own was available to use in a way that it hadn’t been in the shift-happy outlands. Axer put his back to us and began skipping tiny devices along the ground and into the crowd. With each flicked device, the emotions of the crowd waved and were manipulated along with the trajectory, focusing the eyes of the crowd to each endpoint. Enough additional mayhem and attention focused elsewhere for twenty seconds, maybe.

Constantine crouched over one of the tracking wards, holding a pair of oddly shaped tweezers I recognized from his lab. He slowly extended the tweezers and carefully scraped the edge of the magic, then quickly repeated the action along a three-foot perimeter.

He tapped the magics into the vial and capped it. Jets of bubbles rolled over the magic, reacting slowly at first, then with more vigor until the only thing left was a chartreuse mixture.

Dipping the rod in the vial, he withdrew it and carefully, but quickly drew a pentagram in the air between the polar points of the three-foot area. The pentagon in the middle of the design flapped inward. We stepped through the flap carefully and quickly and Axer ducked behind us at the last second.

Constantine pulled the shimmering flap back into place in a reversal of movements.

My breath caught to see Raphael leaning against a tent directly opposite our position. Face half-hidden beneath the tilted brim, he smiled. The hummingbird buzzed his lazily circling hand.

My view of Raphael disappeared with the rest of Corpus Sun’s outer frontier, and the lack of magic inside the containment dome gripped me immediately.

It wasn’t like a control cuff, where magic was still available, just hard fought. This was like a null cuff—a null zone without magic at all. Even my ability to feel the boys was absent, even though they were right next to me.

I gripped my panic tightly. Raphael was outside; we were trapped within without magic. Keep going, keep going, Ren. I unhooked the control cuff, though it didn’t matter here whether I had it on or not. The null air around me provoked a numbness, like I'd never feel part of myself again.

The null field wasn't like the wards meant to alert others of our presence. No magic could be created within it. However, it was just that, a field—an unwanted dressing spread thinly on a sandwich, and we just needed to pass through it to find the deliciousness beneath.

As we approached the inner dome, light flashed around us in a sudden intensity that was stunning and purposefully disorienting. A barrier, thick and dangerous, swirled in front of me—full of magic, but not part of the zone.

I swallowed. You can do this. You can. Calm. Creation. Creation with purpose.

I opened my palm and let the rays of light touch the cradled marble. Let the touch unlock a light-filled doorway on the other side of the field. We quickly stepped through.

Into paradise.

Magic whooshed back fully into my control and immediately reached for the boys in a debilitating, almost violent relief. The control cuff slipped from my fingers. Axer caught it and me before I hit the ground.

After two days of travel with limited magic means and in such close quarters, my freed magic immediately sought the two of them and vice versa—filling me in on all the things I’d been missing—then spread to the world around us, already filled with my magic and bits of theirs.

A soaring sky rose in the center of the immense dome, the edges of the clouds and sky tapering gently downward to the ground.

Inside was just as I had imagined it in the pushes. Plants lush with new life spreading their fingers in all directions. Mushrooms and vegetables sprouting from the soft ground. Insects rising with the soil—awaiting predators.

It was a silent landscape, but one brimming with life and possibility.

Once opened, birds and small magical animals would migrate here. Then bigger animals. Then humans.

An Eden waiting to be filled.

The magic in the marble grew more vibrant, pushing against its constraints. I released the last vestiges of all that I had been collecting inside of it.

Magic rich with life lit every surface, glistening on the leaves and vines; on a beetle's wings.

Guard Rock leaped from my hood, and the cat landed on a synthetically-sunny patch of green.

Axer smiled, shook out his triceps, and let the magic he'd been holding inside slowly connect and recycle with the city dome in a long, slow exhale.

Constantine shivered and whispered my name. For once, his emotions were calm, not raging, as he, too, connected to the magic. Aching wonder and bitter triumph mixed with sadness. The dinginess that had been gathering along his skin—forming a muddy gray aura—peeled away.

I let relief override the unease I still felt over Raphael’s presence outside the dome. I let relief overtake the sorrow of what would happen now that the dome’s magic was activated—of what I had set in motion—this event spurring several others that I hadn’t disclosed ahead of time.

Let anyone try and take this relief from me now, though, I thought fiercely, watching the health of both boys renew along with their magic.

“How did you progress this far?” Axer asked, taking it all in with calculating eyes.

“The paintings. I’m not in full control of what I paint, but how it happens...well, I learned how to speed forward the natural cycle within the creation. A day in a minute, a week in an hour, a year in a day.” I let the marble roll around my palm as it spread its light on a sunflower growing, wilting, turning to seed, then growing again with a dozen companions, then a dozen more. Creation. The opposite of destruction. “I now just need to slow the flow. Bring it back to normal.” Root out the destruction.

If only I could do the same within me.

“Speed the natural cycle.” Constantine shrugged in feigned indifference. “No problem. Create a whole new world. Easy.”

I looked at the beetle. “But with the same materials. In the same vacuum that creation first encounters. You gave me those parameters.” For the Second Layer and for the First Layer.

Axer crouched down and dragged his finger through the earth beneath. “If you use too much oxygen or too little nitrogen… You could get dinosaurs. Giant insects. Fish-like beasts.”

I smiled at the marble, holding it up to the light of the sky—a reflection of the real one outside, bending around the null void. “Maybe we will in one of the domes. Couldn't that be marvelous?”

“No,” Constantine said shortly. “And I knew the moment you had me give you the composition of Excelsine's elements, what you planned. That doesn’t mean I think you owe any of this to anyone.”

“You said you didn’t promise anything, was that incorrect?” Axer asked, voice far too mild.

I watched the marble flicker as it released its last gusts. I let my hand slowly fall—memories and bargains swarming me.

 

“Show us, Origin Mage, show us where you have started.”

Half-formed sentences were immediately on my lips—it had only been a month, they should take the kids anyway, humanitarian laws should apply, I was barely more trained than the kids I was bringing in each day, why did it fall on me to save the world?

I held each tumbled, unsaid word in a breath against the roof of my mouth.

I opened my palm, letting magic swirl above the whorls in bubbled domes connected by lightning fast magical routes. “I propose this.”

 

I looked at the nearly empty marble, not Axer. “I never had to formally promise. I was going to fix everything. A little here, a little there. Steady. In a way not even the Second Layer could object. The Western Territory scientists have been monitoring the external progress here. I wanted to...prototype the internal before I showed anyone. Needed to know if I could do it. And with the layer shifts able to hide small things it seemed... Opportune.”

I let my shoulders slump. “Worrisome thoughts.”

“Your prototype is perfect.” Constantine felt heavy with a relief that wasn't just due to his magic being able to relax and connect without control.

I tilted my head at him. “I didn’t think you were that excited about this project. You never seemed to care about fixing the layer outside of the scientific.”

“I care even less now,” Constantine said. “You mistake the source of my relief.”

He narrowed his eyes on his roommate as Axer sunk his fingers into the dirt—streams of magic flowing out as the vegetation bloomed from his magic—relieving him of all the overflowing excess. Guard Rock shadowed him, watching Axer poke around and examine each particle of magic, sometimes copying his motions. Shoring up wards in ways that I hadn't thought of, accelerating habitats and making them lusher, coaxing the bees to do...something—shimmering magic imbuing everything.

“Are we playing house?” Constantine asked.

“If you paid attention to the bees on the Fourth Circle versus the ones in the Midlands, you wouldn’t be asking,” Axer responded mildly, pointing at Guard Rock to repeat the motions with another hive.

Constantine narrowed his eyes and pulled out the two sleek boards of his traveling chair. Then pulled out another set of chair boards for me.

“We’re here. Call Price,” Constantine said. “She’s been going out of her mind without an open link, and one of us is going to need a lobotomy after this.”

I frowned, sitting in the chair next to him. “We don't have a—”

He touched my temple and pulled a thread of magic downward into my palm, his eyes slipping closed for a moment in bliss as he shivered, in full control of his abilities once more. He cupped his hands underneath mine for a long moment before slowly pulling them away, still connected by the wisps of whatever mental magic he had done—flush with power once more and skirting the impossible.

I blinked to see our room at Excelsine form in my hand.

Olivia was alone, scribbling something ferociously at her desk. The heavy, heady relief at seeing her nearly flattened me.

My side of the room looked untouched—though I could see the indentation on my bed that someone hadn't smoothed out all the way. Olivia sleeping there, or Neph.

I swallowed and looked back at my roommate. The wards were reaching down toward her, but there was a stretched feeling, like too many strings pulling in opposing directions.

“Our wards are still in place,” Axer murmured from somewhere behind me, seeing where my gaze was focused. “But it won't be enough soon. Not with the three of us expelled now. She'll be forced to get a roommate.”

“Of course,” I said quickly. “She needs one. It's okay. And...”

Sadness mixed with irritation all over Constantine's emotions suddenly as he cupped the back of my neck with his palm—his other hand still holding the threads of the window to my room. The irritation was standard, the sadness was unusual. “You'll find Price again. And you can be her wonder twin once more and have sleepovers.”

We could make cookie dough and eat it all. Or quiz each other on the latest regulations, legal constraints, and parliamentarian procedures.

Or argue about the portal I painted on the ceiling that dropped stardust on her hair at inopportune moments.

Even if, by that time, we weren't roommates anymore.

“She could do my nails,” I said half-heartedly. “And I could do her hair.”

Constantine paused in the magic he was sending to me, expression disturbed, as if the image of Olivia Price painting nails—or me knowing my way around a hairbrush—was alien to his worldview. “I meant your kind of sleepovers—weird debates and cantankerous cheer. Not a delusional kind.”

Olivia looked up suddenly, as if realizing something was amiss. Her head shot toward my side of the room and naked, pained relief made her sag for a split second before she held out her hand. A glass ball zoomed into her palm, and suddenly I was looking at her eye-to-eye in mine.

“Where are you that you are calling like this?” she demanded. I could feel her magic reaching for mine, and vice-versa. But it was a thin, distant connection under the null zone surrounding our Eden. It was like having a video chat through a pair of old tablets instead of the extended ultra-reality of our hologram visits. “I can barely feel you, though this is better than the alternative of nothing.”

Her accusatory gaze went to Constantine, parked next to me with his hands over his lap working on his string manipulations once more, as if he had picked up knitting and was casually engaged in the hobby after a day at work.

“We are in Corpus Sun,” I said.

“Where?” Olivia’s voice went flat.

“Corpus Sun.”

She narrowed her eyes and touched beneath her ear. “I see that the Third Layer underground verifies that possibility. They are sending twenty units to apprehend anyone who exits the sealed dome in Corpus Sun. Quietly.”

“Well, here we are. Safe!” Completely surrounded! I cleared my throat, searching quickly for another topic. When looking at Constantine, flushed with health, I couldn’t regret our destination. But I’d save up telling everyone our insane exit strategy for later. “Where is everyone?”

It was rare to find Olivia without her own comforting force of people when she was waiting on news.

“Everyone is fine.”

“I asked where they are,” I said slowly. “Not how they are.” None of them had been involved in the Awakenings. There shouldn't have been a status needed on their end.

“We had some mishaps.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why there? You’ll ruin your secret test case.”

I blinked.

“You aren’t subtle. Neither is William.” She waved a hand. “Why are you no longer in the Western Territories' complex where you built a fortress? I’ve been trying to break into Leandred’s mind for days. All of us have.” She looked at him. “Repeatedly. And the Western Territory leaders are being tight-lipped, but all feeds confirmed you left two days ago. Neph has been trying to cut ties with the commune—renouncing her musehood—trying to get off campus ever since.”

I swallowed, tears choking me. I concentrated on Neph’s threads and sent everything in me through the tiny straws the null zone surrounding the city allowed beneath. I felt her shock, followed by a severe return of desperate emotions.

A tear slipped down my cheek. “Don’t let her do that.”

“We are, all of us, half-sitting on her, and half encouraging it to see if we can do the same,” Olivia said grimly. “Marsgrove locked down campus. The Department is trying to get campus turned over again, citing the lot of us as accomplices. Only Marsgrove has been able to keep Neph here, invoking death contracts. No one is pleased, not even him. Why are you there?”

“We were kicked out,” Constantine said, lounging back in his chair, wisps of magic still connecting his hand to mine, even as he worked.

Olivia's brows drew together, then straightened. “Ingrates.”

Constantine absently motioned to her, then to me, in a way that said “exactly.”

“How long can you stay there?” she asked.

I looked at the magic around us, already seeing the wilt at the edges of the world that would happen when it was breached; a world that wasn’t yet ready for mages. “Two days. Maybe less.”

“Ren put in a safeguard against herself in her lovely test case that allows the scientists to enter once they chip their way through,” Constantine said idly, gaze on his project. “Just like she did with the compound. She is such a thoroughly helpful enemy of the state.”

Olivia looked as furious with me as Constantine felt.

“No. It’s my turn,” I said. “Don’t think that I’ve been sidetracked either. What mishaps?”

“There was a faulty retrieval. It doesn't matter. I just pinged their frequencies, so a few should be here soon. I have some troubling news, though, if you haven't seen the reports.” Her brows pinched together. “Alexander Dare is missing. He shut off his links, even to the combat mages. We think the Department might have gotten him.”

“Unfortunately,” Constantine drawled without looking up. “Not so much.”

“He's with us,” I confirmed, crossing the arm that wasn't holding anything across my chest as if it could save me. “We couldn’t use magic. I guess he shut down that system. Not that he’s a robot—I mean, he’s good at control—I’m not, but I promise to try not to end the world again—but not a robot, and he knows how to save up, and he had to use some of it to save Const—”

“Darling.”

“Right,” I cleared my throat. “Anyway, he’s with us.”

Olivia stared between the two of us, then she looked slowly around the space she could see in the warped view of the glassy ball. I raised and tilted my palm, and I could see when she finally spotted him.

I pulled my cupped palm back to rest against my stomach. “The three of us are...on the run?” I said, still unable to make statements without question marks when I knew they would disappoint.

She focused back on me. “No.”

“Yes?”

“No. In my reality, this type of thing doesn't happen.”

That cracked a reluctant smile. “Yeah. It's, um, a little messed up.”

“That's entirely unfair, darling. I haven't killed him yet.”

“Dare's going to bring you more trouble,” Olivia said, as if she too understood that volatility was more perilous than cold dislike.

“You know, Price,” Constantine said, leaning back even more, his roiling emotions calming more than they had in hours. “I think, someday, I might not dislike you.”

“Whatever, Leandred. If I could peel you away from Ren, you'd already be sticking to a waste receptacle somewhere.”

“Likewise.”

For a moment, they both felt oddly serene and in entire accord.

I could feel Axer doing the mental equivalent of an unamused eye roll, and I sent him a feeling of concordance.

Olivia pinned me with her gaze again. “What happened two days ago? I know only what I've seen reported—which might as well be the screams of terrified Tremming rats—and what I got from your tracker.” She watched me as she said it, reading into every twitch and wince I displayed.

“Stavros taunted me about capturing the Awakening mages, then about my brother, I got angry, tried to kill him, didn't succeed, tried to end the world, Kaine ate the praetorians.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “The Origin Book—”

“Kaine ate the praetorians?” Her gaze went to Constantine's for confirmation. “The news said you killed them. There's blurred footage.”

Blurred footage of you trying to end the world, she didn't say.

I rubbed my hand along my throat. “No. Kaine ate them, like Raphael ate Kaine.”

“I want memory balls of everything,” Olivia said, posture tense. Raphael mentions made her tense, too, but for different reasons than Constantine. I decided against mentioning that he was probably a few dozen yards away. And that he had maybe helped us for unknown reasons.

No, silence was probably best here.

“Footage, Ren. Kaine eating.” She made a tense motion.

I shuddered as I pulled the memories to the front of my mind. After trying a few things, I could shoot miniaturized representations around the hologram in my palm. Axer reached over my shoulder and touched the magic, pulling a duplicated thread before moving back. Olivia looked at her own copies with an expressionless face, then carefully put them into a box to revisit.

“I don't know what Stavros and Kaine are doing”—it had kept me up thinking about it—“but the praetorians—”

“Will surely show up again, somewhere else, pieced together in an even more horrific fashion,” she said grimly.

Golems of shadow and malice pieced around human flesh instead of clay. I shuddered again. “Kaine said something about being an Elite soon.”

Axer stiffened mentally in concert with Olivia's body. I grimaced. I had obviously forgotten to retell that part.

“He said that?” she demanded.

“Yes.”

She grimaced. “Origin Elites are mages capable of manipulating existing Origin Magic in small amounts. The Triumvirate, the ones who handle Origin Magic tweaks for the Second Layer, are all Elites. There are five in the Department currently—three handling the magic at any one time—mages who fix and tweak the layers. Think of them as people who apply Band-aids and ointments versus you, a surgeon. They are highly regulated and tracked. It is not a position one seeks lightly. The Equilibrium Society...”

She tapped a finger against her lower lip. “Let me do some digging. The society isn't pleased right now, and are tentatively putting you back on the hit list, but knowing that Kaine is trying to become an Elite might change their tactics. The Praetorian Guard, destroyed, was enough to move a segment of public view against you. But if we could blame it on the soulless Shadow Mage who seeks to control the layers—”

Will, Neph, Asafa, Patrick, Loudon, and Dagfinn stumbled into the room. Relief fully bled through me. Neph dove toward Olivia, fingers curling around hers on the viewing ball and I clutched mine closer to me like it had physical form.

“Delia, Mike, Lifen, Kita, the others?” I asked desperately, using my shoulder to carefully dab away the paint that suddenly formed at the corner of my left eye.

“All accounted for,” Saf said gently. “They’ll be here soon.”

“Brilliant.” Loudon breathed out the word, like they had run a long distance and he was still catching his breath. “You had it. I could see it—the end of the world. I couldn't stop smiling as they ques—”

Will elbowed him sharply. “Sorry we were detained, but we are here!” Will's smile was a little too bright. “The others will be here soon, too.”

“Detained how?” I frowned, unease turning into something else. “Who questioned—?”

“What did you find, William?” Olivia asked him briskly, cutting me off.

Loudon gave me a double thumbs up, pointing at his grin and some mark on his arm. Then mimicked electrocution, tousled curls shaking.

“They tortured you?” I asked in a too-high voice.

“What? No!” Will's eyes were too wide though. “Marsgrove would never let that happen on campus grounds. They simply threa—”

“With a baton!”

“Put fifty thousand munits on the guy with the scar,” Patrick murmured to Asafa, and only because of their position behind Olivia, could I hear it. “Open market hit. I don’t like what he said about Givens’ and Tasky’s families.”

I started shaking. Constantine immediately put his knee against mine and I felt a giant pull from the combined force of his connections through me—magic that seemed to have grown since his forced refusal to use it these past days few days.

Will stumbled over his words. “We still don't know how the Department Awakened one mage, no less twelve at the same time, but we did gather data. A lot of data. Ren, you can't imagine the data. I've been luxuriating in it for days, the numbers—”

I started to collapse the ball.

“Tasky, shut up,” Patrick said abruptly, walking into the front of the viewing frame, eyes narrowed in on me. “Crown,” he barked.

Neph put a hand on Will's arm and I watched numbly as the rest jostled each other with hissing whispers.

“Crown, I'm only going to repeat this once,” Patrick said.

“I’m a danger to everyone. I know. I want you all to disavow me,” I said sharply.

Patrick smiled tightly. “And if you don't listen,” he said deliberately, as if I hadn't interrupted. “Then I will magically reinforce it.” I felt a twist along our distant connection.

“Campus has to be freaking ou—”

“Campus knows that though you do stupid things you are not hunting ferals to kill them and steal their magic, as per the Department party line. Campus knows that there is something rotten happening in Stavros's playpen. Campus remembers quite bloody well how he tried to kill all of us to get to you. Campus remembers that you saved us twice.”

“Okay okay.” My breath was coming in panicked waves. Neph looked like she was gripping the viewing ball so hard she was trying to figure out a way to dive inside. Her fingers were scrabbling, like she couldn’t figure out how to get to me. “Silent support! But you don't need to—”

“We are in this together,” he said darkly. “My stupidly thick connection lines tell me that this will be my grandest adventure—maybe the end of the world as Ludes wants, maybe the saving of it for the Queen. The bonds and ties of community, something bigger than all of us. You can want to keep us out of it all you want—we will defy you.”

Olivia stepped back into the front of the view. “You leave us out, we'll just do it on our own, but without your aid or protection. How do you feel about that, Ren?” Olivia said, voice steady, connection lines visibly pulsing with Patrick's next to her.

“Manipulated.”

Constantine's dark satisfaction nearly overwhelmed me for a moment, drowning out all else.

“Then we feel similarly on this.” Olivia showed a bit of teeth. “But since we are coming at it from the same protective angle, let's let it pass without apology and move on, shall we?”

“People are going to die,” I whispered, but let the connections in—a jumble of emotion. “I don't want—”

“None of us do, and yet, we all understand that if the underbelly of the Department gets their hooks into you, death might be the best outcome. The public might be hoodwinked by the head of the Department right now, but we haven't been so fortunate.”

No one said anything for a long moment. Neph bent her head over the viewing ball and I felt mine tip toward hers in aching reflection.

“So...” Will cleared his throat. “The Department targeted particular areas of the First Layer—close antipodean points, all—with a goal in mind. Not a good one. Something to note after a good long look at the data; it is possible that you may have saved the world by breaking it completely and resetting it.”

Olivia frowned. “Send me that data. Few will swallow the idea, but I'll get it to Bailey.”

Will nodded furiously, tapping something on his arm.

“The Origin Book saved the world,” I murmured, touching my pocket. “Not me.”

Will looked up, and his gaze softened at something he read on my face or in my voice. “I'm sorry.”

Next time the sacrifice would be me. I'd make sure of that. Neph’s head popped up, expression fierce.

“One of the Awakened mages in their custody is still alive,” Will said gently, touching the back of Neph’s hand in the way that I had seen her do to him a hundred times, without taking his gaze from me. “Rosaria Ricardo.”

My breath hitched. The faces of the other mages flew through my mind’s eye. I could feel them, my magic clinging to them in some form still, though I couldn’t locate them.

“Two others I touched are still alive, too,” I said.

“Ren...” Will trailed off, looking at me worriedly. Neph clasped her hand over his, and they gripped them together. “The Department displayed the bodies of the feral mages they captured aside from Rosaria, claiming all of them dead by your hand.”

Rage blew through me, but I grabbed it and held it instead of letting it have its way. With the faces of my friends in front of me, I clasped the edges of the supportive emotions that Constantine was feeding me from them and let those fill me instead. Then I examined the rage, understood that it was there, and let it settle to a simmer under a shell of hard acceptance.

Constantine stared at me in shock.

I looked around the sphere in my palm, charting expressions. The grimness in Olivia and pain in Neph and Will stood out most starkly, while sadness, high-strung anticipation, or darkness swirled in the others.

“The Department is lying,” I said calmly. “At least about the two I touched.”

Will nodded quickly in solidarity, eyes soft. “I believe you. They can say whatever they want about the others, but they couldn't publicly get away with saying Rosaria was dead. Reporters were on scene by the time you pushed her there and they saw her arrive alive—they showed it on live feed.”

“Good,” I said, a bit relieved.

“However...” Will rubbed the back of his neck, a sure indication of more bad news. “The Department is saying Rosaria will expire by the weekend due to the core magic injuries she sustained during the Mass Awakening.”

“Likely so they can sweep her under the rug and take her to wherever they've taken the others,” Dagfinn muttered. “Then to Villain Plan Next: Grab More.”

“And we still haven’t figured out how they do the activation.” Will shook his head. “I still don’t know—”

“Stavros knows how to use Origin Magic,” I said, flexing my fingers. “Maybe even without his Triumvirate casting it. And he is using mine.”

I could see them exchanging loaded glances.

“We can't handle twelve more Awakenings,” Will said quietly. “Without your direct involvement, we couldn’t have handled the five we managed. And elite squads in multiple countries have pledged to help—they are flexing their muscles in anticipation of you returning to the field.”

Part of me pulsed, wanting to flex my own.

“Stavros whittles each new plot to a sharper edge and we scramble,” Will said.

A step ahead. I thought of Raphael’s smile. I thought of Dagfinn’s muttered comment. I thought of all the pieces we had in play, and all the pieces that were still to be placed by Stavros and sacrificed.

“We don’t scramble anymore. We let new Awakenings go,” I said. I swallowed down the sacrifice as invisible pieces were knocked from a newly visible board.

Both Constantine and Axer stilled, then their emotions split in opposing directions. Coiled anticipation, battle lust, and overwhelming approval from Axer, unease and an even frailer hope emanating from Constantine.

Olivia drew in a sharp, alarmed breath and I felt her tugging at our threads, so far away. “Ren—”

“And we don’t free Rosaria.”

The not so invisible piece hurt even more. Constantine’s frail tendrils of an emotion I didn’t often feel in him grew in strength. The emotions from Excelsine were a steady drumbeat of alarm and panic.

“Ren—”

A step ahead.

“Stavros has us on the run. And he'll keep us here. We can't play to two tunes.” I let the emotions come and coil—shame, anguish, guilt. I felt Axer prowling behind me. I let the coil change to acceptance.

Determination.

I blocked out all of them and let the magic flow from me in patterns that turned into painted visions in the air. Like a facsimile of the walls of my room before their destruction, figures fought in the air, lab creations were made, and creatures rose up.

“We need to make our own composition.” I plucked Liam’s musical notes from the ether and the drums of a battle hymn began. “We go after the labs. We figure out what Stavros is doing with the Awakened mages and their magic.”

Save the boys' reputations by exposing Stavros’s... Save the rest by putting down the monster before he could hurt them. I tapped my arm, eyes mechanically locked on Christian’s bracelet—mended by Will so long ago in an enduring sign of heart and friendship.

“We use the data we gather,” I said, swirling the painted air into new patterns. “We find the already Awakened ferals—lying in a cell or on a slab somewhere—we root out Stavros’s plan, then we wipe him from the board.”

“Ren—” Olivia’s voice cracked. “You—”

“Stavros knows how to trap Origin Mages,” I repeated evenly. “And the world knows the danger I pose. My firestorm has come.” I looked at Axer. “Running is no longer an option. I will be running for a long time, unless I fight for my freedom now.”

And for theirs, for they were tying their freedom to mine.

I felt Axer move.

I felt Constantine’s frail hope—whatever it had been—crash and burn, consumed by an amalgamation of emotions so chaotic and thick, that I couldn’t separate them.

“You still have a choice, and despite your lovely words and support, which I will always treasure, I urge you to divorce yourself from me. Things will only be getting worse from here on out. This life has always held an end for me,” I murmured. “My freedom has been a ticking clock from the moment I saw magic spark.”

Olivia’s expression drew itself into argumentative lines. “Ren—”

“What I do with it before...that is what matters.”

“Before what?” Olivia asked sharply.

Rosaria, Samuel, the girl looking to the stars...their images wavered in my palm, no longer blank names on a page. Anger wove together with an inexorable need. Constantine's knuckles were white.

“Before the end,” I said quietly. “I'm going to find the ferals. I will expose what Stavros is doing to them. And I will take him down.”

“Absolutely not,” Olivia said. “I won’t allow it.”

Some of the overwhelming tension in Constantine released.

Axer stepped from behind me, sliding into the frame like a panther about to strike. “Don't you wish her to be the cat, Price?”

Constantine stiffened again—so severely, that the magic keeping the others in view wavered for a second.

“Shive! Is that Dare?” Patrick asked, reflecting the shock I could see on the rest of their faces.

Olivia's throat worked. “I wish her to be neither animal in such a scenario. Stavros will never be the mouse.”

“Then let her be the dragon,” Axer said with a glitter in his eye.

Protecting my hoard. Home, protection, need.

I didn’t have to ask, but my gaze sought Axer’s. He tipped his head and I felt his answering emotion. He was absolutely on board.

All emotion from Constantine went terrifyingly blank, and the view of the Bandits disappeared as he crushed the magic in his palm and rose from his chair.