The Broken Academy 4: Pacts & Promises

by Jade Alters

  “Dad,” I plead with the man named Jonah, “This guy had Jason. He was going to kill him! I was trying to save him!” I wail. I don’t even know how, but I’ve trapped his burly arm in the searing grasp of both my hands. He pulls back from me, hard, but I just can’t bring myself to release him. Not when I know… it will be the last time.

  “Let me go, Cecelia,” he orders. I can see in his eyes that he’s already decided what the truth is, no matter what I say. I don’t want to poison his memory of me further by cursing or screaming. So, against every instinct in my body, I unclamp my fingers from around his arm. Jonah and the thin woman turn for the door.

  “I think it’s best for everyone that we give her some space, like you said, doctor,” the woman says on her way out.

  “I’d like to keep your daughter here for the next few days for observation…” the doctor prattles on. Like I’m some case study. The rest of what he says is inconsequential. Not worth remembering. All I remember is that I wanted to wring his neck in my hands. That, and what my mom says next.

  “Keep Cecelia as long as you want,” she says, just before the door closes behind her. It was the last time I saw her. I knew it would be too, from the moment she said that.

  That makes me realize - this is a memory. I’m living a memory. But… no. My parents are Horace and Deliah Dalshak. They never abandoned me in a hospital, though some things they’ve done were worse. This isn’t mine. I shouldn’t be here. I have to-

  The lights set into the ceiling amplify until it’s too bright to see. I’m consumed, along with the entire hospital, and the world of memory.

  Emery,

  The Forbidden Shelves, Reading Room

  I suck down the biggest gasp of air my lungs can handle. I roll over onto my knees, hacking from the shock of reality. When I notice the book splayed open on the stony ground beside me, I slam it shut, instantly. With that, I see the back of my hand, which I know quite well. It’s the right color, and I’m back in my Academy uniform. I look up to the boundless, twisting corridors of the Forbidden Shelves. I’m back. This time, I’m sure of who I am, because who I was is sprawled out on the floor before me, twitching. The book I’d chosen from section MLVI, in the bottom-right corner, lays open beside her head. Cece’s fingers twitch while her eyes roll around behind the blankets of her eyelids.

  “Cece,” I call out to her, my voice hoarse. I scrape my knees across the ground on my way over. There’s hardly time to care about a little blood smear on the floor. Who knows if I’m actually free from that memory trap, or if I could be pulled back under any second? I slam the book beside her head shut. She continues to twitch and writhe. I give her face a firm smack. Nothing, so I serve up another. On my third windup, Cece shoots straight upright, gasping for sweet waking air, much like I did.

  She turns her head towards me with the wildest eyes I think I’ve ever seen. I can tell by the look in them that she wasn’t able to think her way out of the memory trap like I was. How could I blame her? I used to build traps derived from a similar technique. Cece’s not sure if she’s looking at another memory or a mirror.

  “It’s me, I’m real. Emery. You’re Cece. Getting it?” I prompt her. That seems to snap her back to some semblance of sanity. She jams a palm into both eyes and rubs them while she shakes her head.

  “What the fuck… was that?” Cece grumbles.

  “I think… the maze guided us to books that were meant to trap us in our own memories. Bad ones. I’ve… developed similar tricks,” I explain in the slowest, calmest voice I can. It takes most of the sentence for Cece to pry her face out of her hands. “So, when we looked into each other's books instead, we were trapped in each other’s memories. It’s the only reason I realized it was a trick.”

  “So you saw…” Cece murmurs. Her foggy eyes fall down to the cover of the accursed book.

  “You were in the hospital,” I whisper.

  “Oh.” I don’t know that I’ve ever heard such a dense note of agony. In that oh, a million sensations of torture froth to escape. Cece tames the urge to release them by rubbing her arm and asking, “Did… did your parents really try to kill you? At Point Arena?” I gulp a thick knot down my sandpaper throat.

  “Yes,” I manage to get out. Cece and I share a spot to stare at on the floor. Then, just as suddenly as we awoke, she throws a hand out at the tomes that captured us.

  “Fuck this place,” Cece snarls, and both books ignite. I don’t have it in me to scold her this time. Fuck this place, I agree in my head. The smoke twists upwards, into the darkness over our maze of bookshelf corridors, while the stony platform beneath us pops free.

  “No way,” I mutter, while Cece throws a fist in the air in triumph.

  “If I’d known it was that simple, I’d have torched the whole damn place when we got here!” she laughs as the same chunk of stairs that delivered us to the maze takes us deeper, to new depths of the Forbidden Shelves.

  “I’d have tried to kill you,” I admit, chuckling along.

  “Runs... in the family, huh?” Cece teases, cautiously, to see if I’ll slug her. I actually snort at how ruthless it is.

  “At least my family didn’t run from me,” I counter.

  “We’re fucked up,” Cece chuckles as our platform floats down.

  “Yeah,” I agree. Light overtakes us again as our stair crumbles to dust and dissolves right as we arrive on a shimmering, suspended platform. A central, stony stem joins it with two others just like it.

  The Mystic Core

  Emery,

  The Forbidden Shelves, Depths of Balance

  I take an instinctual pace towards the edge of our platform. I want to gauge our surroundings, get a feeling for what this next trial could be. But no more than a few steps out from the center, a wicked vibration jostles the floor beneath me. I can hardly see anything beyond the shining platform beneath us, but it almost looks like we’re sinking, just a little bit.

  “Hey. Come check this out,” Cece calls to me. I squint through the light to find her silhouette. With each step I take closer to her, the quake of the ground heightens even more. But the vertigo floating through my skull is different this time. Are we… rising? I stop a few inches behind Cece, who appears to me as a human-shaped hole in the light from beneath us.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Right here in front of me, there’s some kind of… bridge, or arm, or something,” Cece tells me. She shifts to one side of it so I can see, at least partially. It’s no good, with all the light. But maybe… There’s powerful trickery here, from an age well before anything I could conjure, but it’s worth a shot. I put the tips of my index fingers to the corners of my eyes. I suck down a slow, but deep breath, and snap with my middle fingers and thumbs. The trick works like a charm. With a new light-filtration screen added to the lens of my eye, I can see everything. “Are you… looking at it?” Cece asks, flattening her fingers over her own strained eyes.

  “Here,” I call to her. I put my pointer fingers in the corners of her eyes and impart the trick of light-vision.

  “Thanks,” Cece nods between rapid blinks of adjustment. Then she sees what I see. All around us. “Whoah.”

  “Yeah,” I can’t help but agree. Cece and I stand atop a thick, shimmering disk of stained glass. It’s emblazoned with the sigil of the Eye of Light and Shadow, a stunning design of a human iris, with the pupil divided not unlike the yin and yang of Taoism. I’ve seen the symbol used in old texts to refer to Magicians. The thing she noticed in front of her is, in fact, an arm, connecting our platform to a gigantic white crystalline pillar. Floating above it is a huge mass of light. It looks like a bright white explosion that’s been trapped in a finite space, unable to expand. Something like a star.

  “You think… that’s…” Cece mutters as she gazes up into the glorious white light.

  “I can’t imagine what else it could be,” I say. I gaze into its glory for a few idle seconds before I’m able to refocus on our task. “The challenge is: ho
w do we get to it?” The long arm that connects our glass disk to the pillar is sloped steeply down. It looks to be some slick sort of metal, too. Walking down it would be out of the question.

  “Think we could hug that little arm and slide down?” Cece wonders.

  “It would be perilous at best,” I say. “Besides, I think this disk moves up and down. Like a scale. If one of us slid down the arm, the balance might well shift and throw the slider off.

  “So… what if I transform? I could just fly over to it,” Cece suggests instead.

  “Seems too easy, but… I guess it’s worth trying,” I shrug. Cece is already posturing to change before I even finish my sentence. Fists ball up at her sides. Her feet flatten, muscles tense, and then she screams. Cece falls on her knees. Her nails scrape down the sides of her forehead. I’ve never watched her transform closely, but I think I’d have noticed before if this was part of the routine. I slide across the glass to her and grasp her shoulder to shake her out of it. “Hey, what the hell is going on? You alright?”

  “It… doesn’t… want me… here…” Cece growls between twisting fits. She seems to be physically wrestling with her own body, or something trapped inside it.

  “This place was sealed with knowledge from the Age of Legends… there may be secrets about Dragons here, too. The Ancients didn’t want any Dragons gaining power over them,” I conclude. By the time my reasoning has worked its way out, Cece’s writhing is complete. She rubs the side of her head to soothe the last of the aftershocks from whatever just happened to her.

  “Then… you figure it out,” Cece spits. She tries to refuse my hand when I offer it to her, but I pull her up anyway. Then both of our heads shoot to the right, at a sound from somewhere beyond the edge of our disk.

  “Hello?” someone’s voice echoes from far away. Cece and I share a frantic glance.

  “Do we answe-”

  “Hello?” Cece screams over me, into the shadow beyond our disk. But the answer comes from somewhere entirely different.

  “Cece?” A voice I vaguely recognize echoes out from somewhere on our left. It sounded almost like River. Cece trots forward to the edge of our platform before I can stop her. With the trick of light vision on my eyes, I can see now that our disk does, in fact, sink the slightest bit. When I see how insignificant it is, however, I cautiously follow in Cece’s wake. From the edge of the stained-glass disk, I see what this place really is. A gigantic scale.

  The crystal pillar acts as an anchor, with three branching arms for three stained glass disks, the scale’s “baskets” so to speak. The other two glass panes are far beneath us because they both house one more body than ours does. On the left are River, Rock, and Hoster. They stand atop a shimmering platform with the sigil of the Allform, an amalgamous blob used in ancient texts to represent the malleable form of Shifters. On our right are Helena, Darius, and Bart. Their platform glows with the design of the Earthforce. A circle, crisscrossed with fire, raindrops, and wind blades representing the ancient Witches and Warlocks in harmony with nature, is on the glassy floor beneath them. As we make it all out, it hits me. The maze… was this its intention all along? A three-platform scale, representing the three allied supernatural races that built this place… for me, Helena, and Rock and River to end up on these exact platforms… the word coincidence doesn’t seem to fit the magic of it.

  “Can you hear us?” Cece bellows down into the dark. Her voice bounces out and back twice before a reply follows it.

  “Barely!” Bart screams back. “Something’s messing with my hearing!” It doesn’t help that they can’t see as well, either, without the light vision trick on their eyes.

  “Probably the same thing that stopped you from transforming,” I say to Cece. “But that means their Vampire abilities are still working, in a limited capacity.”

  “What are you getting at?” Cece raises me a suspicious eyebrow. I grab her arm to walk her to the edge of our disk, so she can see what I see. I illustrate my explanations with points of my extended finger.

  “This whole system works like a big scale. We’re up high because the other two platforms each have one more person on them than ours does,” I preface.

  “I gathered that much,” Cece pouts. “What does it have to do with Bart and Darius’ Vampire hearing?”

  “We need to coordinate to get to the Mystic Core,” I tell her, clenching my teeth to maintain some level of patience. If she would just grow an ounce of patience and listen to me, we might actually make a halfway decent team. “If all three of our platforms were balanced in weight, someone could cross the arm to the Mystic Core and deactivate it.” Cece’s lips scrunch over to one side of her face as she plays with the scenario in her mind.

  “We send one person from each group of three onto the arm… that leaves two on every platform,” she realizes.

  “Yes,” I affirm. “Bart and Darius’ Vampire hearing is suppressed, but it works well enough that they can hear us, barely. The problem is the other group. I don’t think they can hear a damn thing,” I tell her. Cece stares at me, dumbfounded on how all of this reasoning will come around to a solution. When it does, I have an idea she won’t be the biggest fan. “I know it didn’t work out too well when you tried to use your Dragon form… but that’s not all you are.”

  “Man,” Cece puts her head back for a long sigh. A worried hand scratches the back of her head.

  “It’s the only way we’re going to get through to them. Hoster’s an Astral, too. Maybe you can connect with him? Just long enough to get a message across?” I coax her. Cece takes a few idle paces around our glass platform, weighing the pitfalls of the plan with its necessity. “Or you could try to Dragon up again and fly over to them.”

  “Would you just…” Cece starts out full of rage, but it quickly trickles away. She knows as well as I do how limited our options are. A long shot is the only one we’ve got. “What… what’s the message?” I scratch the side of my face while the draft builds itself in the back of my mind.

  “This will probably cause you pain, so it’ll be best to deliver a one-time message, with a signal to look for. We can scream all we want at no expense to Darius and Bart, so let’s have that group act first, and the other group second,” I figure.

  “Can you condense that into something I can actually use?” Cece pouts. I try not to let annoyance get the better of me; I did all but admit I’m asking her to hurt herself.

  “Tell Hoster to walk out on the arm of their disk when he starts to feel the platform fall. Then we scream to Darius and Bart for one of them to walk out on their arm. That will shift the weight, and cause the platform with three people on it to fall. Then Hoster goes. Make sense?” I do my best to outline it for Cece.

  “I… think so. Except I don’t know Hoster from a hole in the wall,” Cece asserts. “It’s my spirit powers we’re relying on here, so I say we send someone one of us trusts from each group. I’ll ask Hoster to send River.”

  “Fair enough,” I sigh. Though I understand Cece’s constant need for an element of control, it’s whittling the thread of my patience thin. “Then from the other group, we send Helena. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” Cece nods. She sinks to the glassy platform, legs crossed. She flattens her palms over her thighs and slows her breathing. After a few seconds, I have to lean in and stare closely to see if she’s breathing at all. Then she tips and thumps on the glass.

  Even with Hoster, I was never able to fully adapt to how odd it is when a spirit leaves the body. I watch her, listless on the ground, wondering if she’s technically alive, dead, or some unnamed in-between category. Then she scrunches up tight. Cece kicks, then curls up, then kicks again in a fit of convulsions. I shoot down to the glass beside her. My hands find her shoulders, which are strung tighter than a compound bow.

  “Cece!” I call to her while she shakes and twists. “Cece!” I try to open her eyes, but her pupils are massively dilated, and the whole ball can’t seem to stop spinning. My God… what d
id I-

  “The fuck!” Cece screams as she bucks up so fast we click foreheads.

  “Agh!” I cough. A little spurt of blood shoots from my nose, over my lips. “I… could ask you the same!” The wipe of my arm across my face draws a long crimson streak on my uniform.

  “Sorry, I… I have no idea where I just was,” Cece blinks, her eyes dull and frozen. She stares at one particular spot of empty space over my shoulder. “Or where I… where is this?”

  “The Forbidden Shelves…” I murmur, massaging the dented bridge of my nose. “Did you… get the message to Hoster?”

  “I… yeah. I found him in the Blue Plane, then… then I don’t know. Some crazy place with these weird, twisted up… oh man. Forbidden Shelves. Right,” Cece mutters, more to herself than me. With each hard blink, she seems to return just a little bit to reality. She still looks dangerously absent when she tries to stand. I’m hardly in better shape, lightheaded from our collision, but I stand with her. We both do our best to shake it off before we head back the edge of the stained glass platform. “River knows what to do,” Cece says, suddenly, and with such newfound confidence that I’m inclined to believe her.

  “Alright… then we’re ready?” I ask. When Cece and I meet eyes, I see most of her faculties back in place. We share a nod before I turn back out to the platform below us on the right. “Darius!” I scream across the distance. “Find the arm that connects your platform to the central pillar! Have Helena walk across it to the Mystic Core!” My message shatters into a thousand bouncing pieces that collide, overlap, and blast one another out. I wait for a few hopeless seconds, wondering if he was able to understand a word of it. But then,

  “Now?” Darius’ voice flings faintly across the air. I smile at the sound of it.

  “Yes!” I scream back. Cece and I wait on the edge of our platform, fingers and teeth clenched in anticipation, until finally, our platform starts to rumble. It’s working, I chant in my mind to assure myself we’ve made the right choice. That we’ve solved the puzzle. I can hardly believe it, but our platform descends the slightest bit with each cautious step of Helena and River out onto their respective metal arms. It’s working.