by James Riley
“None of this says danger to me,” Rachel said. “Weird, yes. Unbelievable, obviously. But not dangerous. Well, not dangerous for anyone but you, I should say.”
Now it was Fort’s turn to look away. “There’s something out there. Something that I think wants Sierra’s power. It felt it when she allowed me to read Dr. Opps’s thoughts, and it appeared in the middle of the officers’ mess. Dr. Opps used some item that he said would keep us safe for now, but he didn’t think it would last very long. So that’s what he’s afraid of, that the longer I stay, the more likely it is that this horrific thing comes back.” He shuddered at the thought of it.
“Seems like you’d want to go home, that being the case,” she said. “Explain to me why you’re not on the first helicopter back to your aunt’s, then?”
“What if it tracks me down there?” Fort said, his voice cracking. “I wasn’t hearing thoughts before, but I’ve dreamed about Sierra ever since the attack. I heard her voice in my dreams, Rachel. What if that thing can sense that, too? I can’t put my aunt in that kind of danger. But there’s more.”
“And what’s that?”
“Colonel Charles wants me here,” he said, staring at the ground. “I don’t know why yet, but he said something about awakening a power that could hurt this thing. And if that’s a possibility, then I need to stay, to learn how to fight back. You should have seen the officers’ mess, Rachel. A whole room full of soldiers, and they were powerless to stop it. It even destroyed Dr. Opps’s medallion thing.”
Rachel frowned and sat down on one of the steps. “I did hear Dr. Opps say that Colonel Charles wouldn’t let you go until you failed a test tomorrow.”
“That’s why I’m here, to make sure I don’t,” he said. “I already mastered one spell—”
“What? There’s no way! Not in two days.”
“So I just need to learn the other two tonight,” he finished. “Because if I fail, I will get sent home. None of the other administrators know why I’m here, so Dr. Ambrose’s test gives Dr. Opps the excuse he’s waiting for. They’ll just say I couldn’t hack it here.”
Rachel nodded slowly, then went silent for a moment. “I’m not saying I believe you,” she said finally. “But I know Colonel Charles, and he wouldn’t let you be here if there wasn’t a really good reason. Not that Dr. Opps doesn’t know what he’s talking about too, though.” She sighed. “I’ll make you a deal. If you fail your test tomorrow, you go home.”
“That’s . . . already the deal I have.”
“But if you pass,” she said, glaring at him, “you and I are going to track down this Sierra girl, wherever she’s hiding, and find out what this is all about.”
Fort just stared at her in surprise. “You’re going to . . . help me?”
“No, it’s more like I’m not letting you out of my sight until I’m sure you’re telling the truth,” she said. “And we won’t know that until we find this telepathic girl. If she’s even here.”
“You’ve got a deal,” Fort said. He pushed to his feet, wincing at the pain in his chest again. “Now if you don’t mind, I really need to practice. When do you want to meet tomorrow after the test?”
“What did I just say?” Rachel asked, settling in. “I’m not letting you out of my sight. That doesn’t mean let’s make plans to meet up tomorrow.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m going to keep practicing until I master the last two spells, so you might be here for a while.”
She crossed her arms and snorted. “Oh, bring it, little man.”
- TWENTY-SEVEN -
BY THE FOURTH FLU VIRUS he’d given himself, then cured, Fort was starting to hate Healing magic. “Utri cor,” he whispered, casting Cause Disease on himself, then read over its twin, Cure Disease, as quickly as he could, before the fever set in again. Both spells appeared on the page, so apparently they were meant to be learned together.
From the benches, Rachel sighed dramatically. “Why does Healing have to be so boring? You should see me practicing.” She pointed her fingers like guns and made little pew pew pew noises. “It’s awesome.”
“I got a personal viewing of that earlier,” he said, wincing at the pain in his chest before casting Cure Disease. “Nenutri cor,” he whispered, and the chills he was starting to feel disappeared. “And if you’re bored, no one’s forcing you to stay.”
“I leave when you leave, New Kid,” she told him, but she didn’t seem as sure as she had been earlier. “I’m still waiting for you to acknowledge how I kept my promise and didn’t protect you when the Chads were bullying you, by the way. You’re welcome for that.”
“You definitely kept your promise, yes,” Fort said, giving himself the flu again. “I can’t tell you how much that helped.”
“That’s the problem with Destruction magic, anyway,” she said, ignoring him. “There’s no real good way to defend against it. That means if you want to beat someone, you always have to be on the attack.”
Is that why you threw me down the stairs earlier? Fort thought, before considering what she’d said. “There’s no way to shield yourself, or, like, take control of someone else’s magic missile and send it back at them?”
Rachel snorted. “Destruction at its core is about tearing things down, not a battle of wills. If someone shoots a magic missile at you, you jump out of the way, then shoot three back at them.”
Fort cured his flu and read over the page again. “That doesn’t make any sense. You can hold fire in the palm of your hand, which means you’re controlling it. Why couldn’t you do the same thing to someone else’s fire?”
“Is one of those diseases making you deaf? Did you not hear what I just said?”
“I heard it, it just doesn’t make sense!” Fort said, giving himself another case of the flu. “This might go faster if you were quiet, you know.”
“Talk to me about what makes sense when you’ve been here longer than two days,” Rachel growled at him, then turned away to mutter quietly to herself.
For the next few cycles of his spellcasting, there was silence, until Rachel leaned backward to lie down on the bench, putting her feet up on the next higher one. “Look,” she said. “I’m just saying that every kind of magic is different. You’ve only learned Healing so far—”
“And had Telepathy used on me.”
“Ugh, fine, whatever. But you don’t get it. Each type of magic is thematic, you know? Healing rebuilds, Destruction tears down. That’s why we’ve got those two books here, so we can practice both of them in the same place. The cool students break some bones, and you boring guys fix them.”
“If Healing rebuilds, then why am I learning how to give people diseases?” Fort asked, wishing every time the chills set in that his shirt didn’t have a hole in it.
“I always figured that was so you could practice the curing spell.”
“No, I mean why would it be in the Healing book to begin with? We’re not just learning how to cure things, we’re learning how to cause them too.” He paused, ignoring the fever for a moment. “You know, I bet there’s an opposite spell in the Healing book for, well, healing, too. Like a Cause Harm spell.”
Rachel laughed. “Uh-huh. Or it could just be that Healing’s completely lame, and you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Fort rolled his eyes, then looked back at the book. “We’ll never find out for sure unless someone learns every spell in the book. And that takes way too long.” He ran his eyes over the spell words for Cure Disease, “nenutri cor,” then raised his hand over his arm, only to pause.
“Cor.” The second part of the spell. He’d seen that word before. And since the spell words disappeared from his head as soon as he cast them, it could only be in one other spell.
Heal Minor Wounds. Those spell words were “mon d’cor.”
That had to mean something, didn’t it?
“Have you ever looked at the spell words?” Fort asked, turning to look at Rachel, who was staring at the ceiling.
; “Maybe I could make, like, a shield of fire,” she said, ignoring him. “That might stop a fireball. Or would it? Maybe the ball would just plow right through.”
Fort picked up the Healing book, then dropped it, letting it hit the podium with a bang. Rachel immediately looked at him upside down. “What did I say about hurting the books?”
“Have you ever thought about what the spell words mean?” Fort said again. “I’m seeing the same word pop up in the first two spells. That has to mean something.”
She shook her head. “You can’t exactly study them that easily, since they disappear. And once you have the spell mastered, you can’t write them down, either. Same thing happens. Only the books will hold the spell words, for whatever reason. Makes learning whatever language it is a bit harder.”
“Okay, but they’re all in your head,” Fort said, feeling a bit dizzy now. “Like this same word, ‘cor.’ ”
She looked at him weirdly. “What word?”
“Cor.”
She paused again, like she was still waiting.
“You really can’t hear me say it?”
“Have you said it?”
“Fine,” he said. “There’s a word that appears in both Heal Minor Wounds and Cure Disease.” He paused, then turned back to the third spell, “Utri cor.” “And in Cause Disease! What do they all have in common?”
“That you’re not going to have mastered any of them at this rate?”
He stuck out his tongue at her. “I guess they’re all about the body in some way. That would make sense, right?” He ran over the next two spells in his head, noticing another repeated set of letters that wasn’t in Heal Minor Wounds, “utri.” “If we figure out the language, we could come up with our own spells,” Fort said, feeling weirdly excited about this, though the fever might be to thank for that. “Do you know what we could do if we knew the language of magic?”
“Get sent home for failing your test tomorrow?”
“My dad gave me something,” Fort said, then braced for the wave of sadness he expected to feel upon mentioning his father. Weirdly, though, it wasn’t as bad as usual. “This brochure, from the Lincoln Memorial. It listed the Gettysburg Address in a bunch of different languages, and my dad thought that’d be a fun way to learn foreign words, you know? Like pick out which ones fell in the same places as the English words, or repeated in the same way. You could do that with magic words, too.”
“Do you have any idea what you’re even talking about?”
Fort couldn’t exactly say yes, not yet. But if that “utri” word was in both of the disease spells, Cure and Cause, then maybe that was what it stood for? “Disease,” or something like it? And if Cure Disease was “nenutri cor,” then that “nen” had to mean “cure,” maybe.
Unless “nen” didn’t mean anything, and was just like a “not”-type word. Don’t cause disease. Or reverse cause disease, maybe? “I think I might be onto something,” he said, his mind whirling with ideas, as well as soaring in temperature.
“Is this what you’re going to tell Dr. Ambrose tomorrow instead of casting your spells?”
“Okay, fine,” Fort said, annoyance derailing his train of thought. He quickly cured himself of the flu, feeling less excited even as his body healed. “Enjoy destroying everything, if you want. Once I pass this test—”
“If you pass, which you won’t—”
“Then I’m going to figure this all out,” Fort said. “Think about it. We could make up our own spells, if we knew what the words meant. We wouldn’t need to wait to master the smaller stuff, and we could jump to the more powerful magic!”
“Are you almost done?” Rachel said, closing her eyes. “I’m getting kind of sleepy, and I don’t have all night.”
“I’m not even a little tired,” Fort said, giving himself the flu again. “I’ll be wide awake all night, just watch!”
- TWENTY-EIGHT -
THROUGH A DREAMLIKE HAZE, FORT found himself running next to Dr. Opps through a door. Damian stood in the middle of a room, his eyes wide, his mouth hanging open, as a creature out of horror books floated in the air above him, its transparent and vaguely humanoid body covered in crystal armor, its tentacle fingers locked on Damian’s head. A helmet in the shape of a screaming skull topped the body, and another mass of tentacles splayed out from the face hole grotesquely.
Whatever it was, Fort knew he’d seen it somewhere before, or one just like it. Through his daze, he barely recalled the officers’ mess from the day before, and a similar set of armor, with tentacles for hands and feet. “It’s back, Dr. Opps!” he tried to shout, but nothing came out of his mouth, and he cursed silently at his own powerlessness.
And that was when he realized where he was. Another memory of Sierra’s, another dream he couldn’t escape.
“Get away from him!” Dr. Opps shouted, pulling a gun from his waist and firing at the creature several times.
Each of the bullets passed through it harmlessly, and Damian slowly raised a hand.
“THERE IS NO NEED to hurt it, Dr. Opps,” Damian said, his human voice flickering in and out with something darker, and much more ancient. “It found me. It can GUIDE US IN OUR USE OF THE BOOKS.”
“Let the child go free now,” Dr. Opps said, not lowering his weapon, even though it was useless.
“THE HUMAN IS NOT UNDER its control,” Damian said. “It joined with me, so that YOU MIGHT UNDERSTAND US. SPEAK FOR US.”
“Sierra, look inside and tell me if Damian’s okay,” Dr. Opps whispered. Louder, he said, “What do you want?”
“It just told you,” Damian said. “It really is here to TEACH HUMANITY TO USE THE POWER THAT’S BEEN REDISCOVERED.”
Sierra slowly reached her mind out toward Damian’s, gently searching around the edges of his consciousness to see if he actually was under the creature’s control. Though she could feel the creature inside his brain, hovering like a terrible coming storm, Damian did seem aware of what was happening and in control of himself still.
Unless the monster was somehow deceiving both of them.
“How do you know about us? Who are you?” Dr. Opps asked, slowly lowering his gun.
“It once lived here, OUR FORMER HOME,” Damian said. “HUMANS LIVED ALONGSIDE US. WE DISCOVERED MAGIC, AND TAUGHT IT TO YOU. BUT YOU WERE NOT READY, so the magic went away, and WE LEFT. BUT YOU ARE NOW CAPABLE, SO THE MAGIC HAS RETURNED. AS HAVE WE.”
Something lit up inside Damian’s head, catching Sierra’s attention. In a human being, she would have thought that she’d just heard someone lying to her. But this creature was so alien, it could have meant anything.
“Why did you leave?” Dr. Opps asked, his fear dropping away in the face of curiosity and excitement. “Where did you go? What should we call you?”
“We apparently used to CALL US THE OLD ONES,” Damian said. “AS WE WERE ANCIENT WHEN HUMANITY FIRST LEARNED TO CRAWL. WE HAVE JOURNEYED FAR TO return to their former home. But they need THE HELP OF THOSE WHO CAN USE MAGIC TO FULLY COME BACK.”
“Why?” Dr. Opps asked. “What use could that be to you?”
“A DOORWAY,” Damian said, and inside his head, the creature seemed to be expanding its reach, like it was searching for something. “OUR FORMER WORLD HAS BEEN LOCKED TO US. OUR POWER ENABLES US TO PROJECT A SHADOW OF OUR FULL PRESENCE, BUT ONLY THAT. WE NEED YOUR MAGIC TO OPEN A DOORWAY SO THAT WE MIGHT RETURN. DO THIS AND YOUR REWARD SHALL BE BEYOND YOUR UNDERSTANDING.”
Damian’s voice had disappeared, and inside his mind, Sierra could hear him begin to scream. “Dr. Opps,” Sierra hissed softly. “We need to get that thing out of Damian now.”
The doctor immediately glanced at her, then turned back to the Old One. “Please leave this child for now, and we’ll consider your offer.”
But the monster didn’t listen, and its hold on Damian’s mind grew stronger. “It’s not leaving,” Sierra whispered. “Should I push it out?”
Dr. Opps swallowed hard. “Please. Give us time to speak about this. But
you need to release the boy.”
Sierra readied a Mind Blast spell and prepared to cast it at the creature, but right before she did, it removed its tentacles from Damian’s head and slowly disappeared into nothingness. Damian toppled to the floor with a groan and went still as Dr. Opps leaped to his side.
“His body is okay,” the doctor said, checking Damian’s pulse. “How is his mind?”
Damian? Sierra called out inside his head. Are you okay?
I think so, came his reply. I feel like my brain just ran a marathon. The Old One’s presence was beyond anything you could imagine.
“He’s okay,” Sierra said as Damian opened his eyes, groaning softly.
“Damian, listen to me,” Dr. Opps told him. “If that thing returns, do not speak to it. Alert me immediately. I don’t know if it’s telling the truth or not, but we can’t take the chance either way. Before we communicate with it again, I want to be prepared. And that means finding a way to send it away if need be.”
“What?” Damian said, giving Dr. Opps an incredulous look. “Are you serious? It offered to help us. It can tell us more about magic than we’ll find out studying those books for centuries.”
“If we open a door so it can come through completely,” Sierra pointed out. “Am I the only person here who just saw a tentacle nightmare beast? Anyone else in favor of burning it with fire?” She raised her hand.
Damian glared at her. “Of course it feels unknowable to us. When it was last here, we barely had written language. Those things discovered magic, Sierra. We could reshape the entire world with their help.”
“Unless it was lying about that,” Sierra said. “And if they’re so all-powerful, why does it need us to open a door for it?”
