Chapter Thirteen: Erstwhile Companions

 

I slipped from the seat and flopped onto the grass six hours later.

We'd found a single patch of green in the middle of the endless wasteland—one with a giant tree—and Constantine had headed for it at speed. Only two sand dragons, a lizardgator, and a rabid Stygian phoenix had interrupted that side trip.

Our plan would have been toast without someone along who could fight without using magic.

Axer was possibly the only one having fun, using the weapons the Ophidians had stocked—a new one each time—challenging whatever monster or pitfall presented itself, as if performing a training exercise.

“Adrenaline junkie,” I muttered.

He could fight a sand chimera with a spoon, but even he was starting to tighten up without using his magic.

The whole trip might have been a grand adventure under different circumstances. Under normal circumstances, we'd have been sharing magic between us in a continuous circuit and not worrying about using any of it for such stringent concealment. But it was too dangerous to freely give in to that desire while there were so many mages tracking us. And while wearing the cuff, I was a sharing liability.

Without it, though...

I’d spent the last two hours trying to swallow down paint after Axer made me remove the metal band. Only a concentrated effort had made it possible.

The bike allowed for a thin sheen of recycling between the riders and the machine, but like everything in the layer, it was thin. Each of us had been working overtime on keeping the paint that had started creeping up my throat contained. Throwing up a portal to the Fifth Layer would immediately end our anonymity.

Each of us had to use the containers strapped to the bike that the Ophidians used on such trips. But where the Ophidians were used to such constrained circumstances, none of us were. The three of us were privileged Second Layer mages—even worse, Excelsine mages—where abundance was taken for granted.

It was like having words flashed and being told not to read them. Reining it in was exhausting. Without the cuff, an explosion was imminent. And with the cuff, the magic buildup was just getting worse.

Axer was literally vibrating with constrained magic as he dismounted. Constantine had jumped off the bike and was crouched some fifty feet in the distance, doing who knew what. But I could feel his own unspent, forcibly capped magic coiling in bigger whorls.

“I’m driving next,” I said. Sandwiched so tightly between them I had barely been able to move, let alone defend us.

“This isn’t a dream, darling,” Constantine called.

“No,” I said quietly. It was sort of the opposite.

I had felt the last of the dragons activate three hours ago, scattering his papered seeds within a hurricane wind and destroying a large section of barren wasteland; prompting an intense global debate over the possibility of our deaths. Axer and Constantine had relished in a dark sort of pleasure in repeating some of the commentary from the communications they were still receiving.

We were listed officially as dead in twelve countries. But that left hundreds of countries that were still searching for us.

We were existing on borrowed time. Eventually one of us would use magic, and a chase worse than the last would begin.

I rotated my shoulders against the earth to ease the clogs and tightness in my neck and back, feeling my aches. This must be what fifty felt like. Mom had been sniping about it for the past year.

“At least we found an actual oasis for a few minutes' respite,” I said.

“This isn't an oasis,” Axer said, slowly rotating his muscles, letting the vibrating magic simmer into a continuous thread that rotated across his skin—a world class athlete pulling his body back into peak shape. For now. He made his own magic bow to his control, thinning it into the loop easily, unlike my fledgling efforts.

“But we need you not obliterating the landscape,” he said. “And if we hit another sand vortex, you were going to say screw it and start remaking the layer right then and there.”

His statement wasn’t...incorrect...and the earth did feel like it was moving beneath me. I shook off the mesmerizing sight of his magic and looked down.

The ground was moving, all at once, like shifting tectonic plates. A horrible, enraged screech split the air, and rotating blades spun in my peripheral view.

“Um…?”

“Death tortoise,” Axer said, not sounding at all stressed about an animal with death in its name and spikes of saw blades rotating along its sides.

“Is it going to eat me?” I let my eyes slip shut, feeling the adrenaline of the last half day start to drain. “I feel like I might let it.”

There was something cathartic about traveling through a landscape where everything wanted to eat you because it was hungry, not because it could use you for world domination.

And maybe because you deserved it.

“Not today.”

Thinking about fault made me go down darker, unhelpful paths, and I had to forcefully corral my emotions. Control. Control, Ren.

“How do I not become...” I shook my head. “How do you do it so well?”

“What, control my desires?” he said lightly.

I regarded him from the ground—or, from a death tortoise shell, I supposed—looking up as he was haloed by the light. “Balance your abilities,” I corrected. “How do you forgo the emotional path?”

He crouched next to me. One finger lifted a lock of hair that had blown into my face and tucked it behind my ear.

“All choices are about emotion. It is how you use your emotions that make the impact of the choice.”

I swallowed. “I have lost my balance.”

“No. You haven’t lost it, you simply have yet to fully gain it. You see balance in me, but I was trained from birth to hide all that I am. I’ve never been allowed to be all I can be.” He raised his hand and I could see a phantom of magic coil there—a wisp of illusion that held a deep crimson hue. “Because of fear. Even my mother, whose powers are known, restrains her abilities to appease the masses.”

He cocked his head. “But now there is you—you who can wipe entire worlds from existence. Sending ten armies to fight you means nothing, for a single assassin would have just as much luck—for the only way to win would be the element of surprise. You have an ultimate power. And no way to hide it. You can use that.”

“Might makes right?”

“Even under a benevolent rule, might always carries the edge. You have a clean slate, in a way, because everyone already knows. They already fear you outright, instead of just fearing the possibility of your power. You have the chance to use your abilities without the firestorm of discovery,” he said, intensity underscored by deep desire. “For the firestorm has already come.”

I watched him. “You suck at motivational speeches.”

He smiled. “I'm not trying to motivate you. You see balance in me, where I see hidden, inactive potential. I see freedom in you, where you see fear.”

I touched his hand. “I don't want you here. Either of you. For your own safety.”

“I know.”

“But you won’t leave,” I said, somewhat wistfully.

“No.”

I stared at him as the sky moved with the lumbering gait of the turtle, and the deadly spikes whirred. “I'm a weakness for you. For all of you.”

“Yes.” He curled a lock of hair around his fingers.

“They will get to you, and your mother, through me.”

His eyes tightened. “They will try.”

“Stavros has already used me against you.”

“And he failed. He will fail again,” he said with certainty.

“I want to believe that. But that means...”

“Yes. It does.”

“Your turn to drive,” Constantine said flatly to him, as he folded elegantly next to me on the other side and stuck his hand into one of the baskets that had been attached to the bike and withdrew a sandwich.

I let my hand drop.

“Vine mayonnaise?” Constantine made a face, and Axer rolled his eyes as he pushed himself to his feet. “Who puts that on caperly bread?”

I felt around the grass, then raised my hand around a stick, offering it to him.

Constantine’s sensibilities were overly offended by the suggestion—roiling over him in a quick, visible wave. I started laughing, some of the tension in my muscles easing.

Not accessing simple magic was slightly hilarious in certain instances—such as watching Constantine's eyes narrow in on the offending sauce and how he was going to get rid of it without calling magic down upon us or using a stick to scrape it.

I was going to have to thank Frost Viper for more than just the supplies.

Axer grabbed several things from the basket and headed to sit behind the tortoise's head.

I sat up and accepted a sandwich of my own—some strange meat substitute and pseudo-vegetable combination that Frost Viper had included—concurrently checking the passive magic of Will's encyclopedia bracelet as we began rolling back and forth across the landscape—like a giant pirate ship in search of rabid world-eating sardines.

“So... It says death tortoises dive into the sand. Should we—?” I rolled a hand back-and-forth.

“I put a compound on its neck that prevents it from being able to put its head in its shell,” Constantine said, carefully using one of his recycling containers and touching a rod to the mayonnaise. The tiniest stream of magic from the rod inched the offending sauce onto a leaf held next to it. “It stops it from diving.”

I stopped mid-bite. “I already checked torturing the wildlife off my agenda.”

“It's a temporary and reversible torture,” Constantine said, removing the last drop of sauce, like every bit was a poison that would kill him. “Furthermore, it is in the animal's best interest to have you survive. The corporatists hate them, and anything that infringes on their profit-only views. Look at this beautiful landscape on which they could construct luxury homes,” he said, pointing at the deformed wasteland of pits, traps, and decay that we were currently tromping through. “Besides, Stavros has never shown a love for anything non-mage... I can guarantee the animal's demise if the Second Layer gains control of you and somehow completes their plan of folding the Third Layer into the Second.”

It was a reminder that I wasn’t the only terror-inducing mage in this game.

Constantine’s expression remained bland, thoughts dark. “In exchange, it will move us to our destination—albeit slowly—without alerting any of our five billion enemies. You can give it half your sandwich, if that makes you feel better.”

I tore a section and carefully set it to the side. “You are sure the compound will wear off?”

“I'd never hurt an innocent soul while you are holding my leash.”

“That's not funny.”

“He's not joking,” Axer said, not turning from the spot where he was nudging the tortoise to keep to its path. They were both oddly tense.

I cautiously poked around. All connection points were still opt-in and strong. “There's no leash anywhere,” I said carefully. “And if there is something—”

“Metaphorical only,” Constantine said nonchalantly.

I frowned at him.

Axer took a drink, gaze quickly traversing the landscape. From another saddlebag, he had dug out some of the special goggles the Ophidians used, and was watching the perimeter with enhanced vision, occasionally dropping chunks of some orange plant into the turtle's mouth in the type of peace offering I was used to him making with outrageous wildlife.

He scratched the underside of his arm. Magic sparked under his skin, even in the internal loop he had set up.

The magic was unattached to either Constantine or to me, but it occasionally reached toward both of us before he could pull it back.

I looked over at Constantine and could see the same thing—but somehow even worse—with magic from far away seeking him out in bursts.

I watched the jagged sky. They were dangerously close to overloading. More so than even I, which was beyond strange. Comparatively, I’d been in a far worse condition when we’d started.

Each of us had already expelled involuntary bits of magic—like the involuntary act of breathing. “Random” patrols had started to inch closer to our location in response to the spikes.

“Are all of us going to blow up when the magic becomes too much?”

Constantine, finished with his food in the way that all boys over the age of thirteen made it disappear, was sketching out something in his long pencil strokes that could later be converted to magic. “Probably. We are too accustomed to intermingled magic. We too often get the sustained pleasure of using each other as outlets in a situation where no other outlet is available.”

We'd had a few of those situations in the last few months, but they'd all been short. Who knew how long we'd be on the run?

Guilt, shame.

In a magic rich environment, they could jettison the magic and use it, recycling their own system with the room wards—but here…

I looked between them.

The tension that had been simmering between them since we'd all started working together had been far lower in the past weeks than when I'd first discovered they were roommates.

But it had never gone.

It was almost a different sort of tension now. Like two broken ends of a string that were alternately trying to reknit or shred the other.

With as drained as I was, I strangely didn’t seem to be in the same imminent danger that they were.

I swallowed and chewed the last bite. “How long are we riding this death trap?”

“For as long as we can manage.”

“This is a good exercise,” Axer said, without looking back. “I work with either no magic or with unlimited resources. Having to keep it so close and share it between such thin parameters is a good exercise in control.”

“Control is your drug,” I allowed.

“Don't worry yet,” Axer said. “We’re fine.”

But by the second day of travel it was obvious that they weren't.

We had avoided two caravans and five strike teams by the edges of our fingernails. And the best warrior of the age had needed to do everything he could to hide every part of himself that wanted to fight. He was brimming with enough magic to shadow a sun.

Constantine's magic, on the other hand, looked dark and sick.

Even Axer became tight-lipped when he looked at his roommate’s magic. “If you continue this way, you'll put yourself into a coma.”

I watched Constantine with a frown while stretching my limbs skyward trying to move around the aches where magic was forming overfilled blocks. Pressure needed release. It was the thing hindering us the most—the three of us were veritable signposts of magic, especially together. We were on borrowed time in more ways than one.

“We can try the field,” I said.

“No,” Constantine said bluntly.

“You could do your roommate thing. You should do your roommate thing.” I frowned.

Roommates—especially ones who got matched due to a level of overwhelming magical sympathy that dwarfed personal hatred—had connections that others did not. They shared magic across layers during the combat competition without breaking a sweat.

“It has been offered,” Axer said in a clipped voice.

“No,” Constantine said blandly.

“Martyrdom suits you ill,” Axer said to him.

“I’ve been balancing Ren for weeks,” Constantine said, and the snap of his emotions couldn’t be contained. “Two days...” He waved a hand.

“Weeks that involved ample outlets and frequent returns to campus. Calling continually on the others without those outlets still gives you their powers, but at the expense of your own,” Axer said. “I can feel the strain.”

I frowned, looking down at my magic, then at Constantine’s. Appalled, I scooted away from him.

“I’m wounded, darling, I have a very nice spell set to prevent cooties.”

“That’s not funny,” I said harshly. “Have you…?”

It was strange, in retrospect, as to why he had kept returning to campus when he always seemed so incredibly irritated to leave—like I was going to disappear while he was gone, but he had to make the trip anyway.

Because he’d had to. “No. I refuse to let—”

“My choice, not yours,” he said lazily. “Is it not?”

“Your magic looks terrible,” I whispered.

“Never.”

“Let Axer fix it.”

“No.”

“I will cut you off, if you don’t.” I touched the threads. “My choice, is it not? You can heal on your own, and so can I.”

Constantine didn't answer for a long moment and I felt the spiking of different emotions before they settled into the more even ones that he had mastered in the past few months. “Fine.”

He grabbed the device we had perfected, and draped the field over them. The conduit opened—a thin beautiful, complex weaving of magic between them.

I stared. Constantine’s magic blossomed, the sickly gray cast disappearing like a shadow hit by a burst of sunlight. Even under the careful magic exchange allowed by the shield, it was glorious. What would it look like, freely flowing between them in waves?

I had seen highly sympathetic mages do magic together thousands of times at Excelsine. Mike and Will's lovely, steady hum, and Patrick and Asafa's compatible bursts of frenetic energy and soothing slides entwining into a thick net. Sari and Bess with their enchanting single hum of overt goodness. Neph's magic with nearly anyone.

It made me wonder what my own magic looked like when intertwined.

“She's going to the Department over my dead body,” Constantine said. I looked up to see he was addressing Axer—something passing between them that I couldn't hear—their bond especially tight when linked.

“I know.” Axer's gaze remained connected to his, a grim set to his mouth—for as soon as he took his hand away, Constantine’s skin started to gray again.

I didn't have to hear their conversation to understand that there might be a path littered with our bodies before the end.