by Jade Alters
“River, stop! Don’t make me…” I start to plead as I compress her against the wall. But she won’t stop screeching in my ear. If she hears a word I say, she doesn't care. “You know what? Fuck this.” I shut my eyes tight. I tense up. I let myself get just as angry as I want to be with the girl, bad day or no. Smoke and heat distortions swirl out from around me. My sheets go up first, followed by the curtains, then River’s bed. The fire swirls around us, threatening to become a raging furnace in seconds.
“Stop! You want to bring Serge here on your first day together?” a third voice, another woman’s, shrieks from somewhere above us. I tilt my head back to find it, but there’s only a little silver sprinkler head jutting from the ceiling. It is a little odd how it shimmers blue right before it opens up. A massive umbrella of pressurized water unfurls to every corner of the room.
“Hey, where the hell are you? Is that in my head? Are you a Dragon?” I scream at the sprinkler, the least likely, but only suspect. I keep River sandwiched against the wall until my fires start to sizzle out around us. Until River’s monkey-muscle relaxes behind me. Only then do I step forward and let her slide off my back. A horrendous crackling sound behind me marks her transformation back into her original, human form. Her stretched-out clothes drape from her frame as she drags herself to the window, to let the smoke out.
“I’m not a Dragon, but technically, everything’s in your head,” the woman’s voice fills the room again. I look around for her until she comes down to see us on her own. Out of the sprinkler.
I back right up against the wall again when the blue light from the little silver head sprays out like a cone of water, then gathers to one spot at the center of the room. The sapphire light floats there, its shape flickering back and forth between that of a candle-flame without a candle, and something almost like the outline of a woman. It drifts towards me.
“You… What the hell are you, now?” I demand. I even turn my head away when she gets close enough to outstretch…something. It looks like an arm one second, a wavering tentacle the next.
“Stephanie. Your other roommate. I’m an Astral,” she tells me.
“A-a-a-Astral?” I repeat like a record at a DJ’s table. The little blue wisp chuckles, a sound that I suspect will haunt my nightmares for the next few days.
“Yeah. Like Astral projecting? You’ve heard of it?” Stephanie asks.
“Ye-ye-yeah,” I tell her, “What, so your body is somewhere else?”
“Maybe,” Stephanie tells me, with a chilling lack of concern, “I wouldn’t know. Even if I found it, it’d be no good to me anymore. Probably been rotting for years.”
“Oh,” I gulp. Despite my terror, I force my hand up to her best attempt at one. If I can have just one creature on my side in this whole place, it’s worth it, even if haunting me is the only way to hang out. I’m both hardly surprised and horrified when my fingers pass right through hers. “It’s- ah, nice to meet you. I’m Cece, I’m sure you heard.”
“Same to you,” I hear the smile in Stephanie’s voice, an odd thing when I can’t see it. She twists around like a cloud as she moves across the room, to one of the curtains that stubbornly goes on burning. “You don’t happen to be able to put your own fires out, do you?”
“No,” I admit, “My homeschooling on my…condition, I’m afraid, was lacking,” I tell her.
“Oh, boo-hoo. Poor lost little Dragon doesn’t know who she is,” River mumbles. I take another stomp towards her. The sound serves as a reminder of just how easily I can launch her out of our window for a closer look at the gorgeous view below. Then I remember she can be any animal she wants, and the threat falls flat. She turns to glare at me.
“What the hell is wrong with you? What do you want me to do?” I demand.
“Hey, guys,” Stephanie tries to interject.
“Do? Nothing. I didn’t want you here at all!” River shouts over her.
“And you’d rather make the worst of it than the best?” I scream back. I take another stomp towards her.
“Cece. River,” Stephanie tries again, but we’re locked in it now. I trudge all the way to River, but my eyes have to dart down to follow hers. Her form bubbles and compresses down to the shape of a mouse, which shoots across the room like lightning. My gaze fixes on her in rage at first, but that alleviates quickly at a sight that turns my stomach.
River’s shape bursts back up to the shape of a cat, which stumbles into the wall. Then her fur straightens while her body expands to something between a dog and a bear. She loses all definition for a few jarring seconds. From the conglomerate of beastly appendages, I see wings, claws, tails, ears and fangs jut out in every direction. When she finally gets a handle on it again, she rises back to human height. She takes her original form, green eyes streaming over as her torn clothes cling to her sweaty body.
“You…can’t control it,” I realize. Just like me, catches in my throat before I have the chance to say it.
“Fuck you,” River fills the void with. I bunch up my fists again.
“Hey! Both of you! We’ve got to get these fires out before Serge-”
Stephanie is cut short by three loud booms. Knuckles on the outside of our door.
“Wing Supervisor! Open up!” a man booms through.
Serge Dalshak,
The Broken Academy, D Wing
This is perfect. Just what I need. Another troubled soul in D Wing. As if River wasn’t enough, with her constant screaming and smashing. And they went and put the new girl in a room with her? I don’t care what kind of space concerns we’ve got. I don’t care how many other rooms are at full capacity already. It was a shit idea, and I’d tell Horace myself if he asked. But does anybody bother to ask me? No. Why would they - I’m only the Wing Supervisor. I’m only the one who gets woken up at two in the morning or pulled out of class because of their shit ideas.
I mock the Council in my head on my way down my dorm hall. Hmm, we’ve got a Shifter with anger issues and virtually no control over her form in D Wing. We’ve already found her a roommate she can’t possibly hurt, so there’s that. But what could we possibly do to improve her situation? Oh, I know! Cram a Dragon with anger management issues of her own, and the juvenile record to show for it, in there with her! I’m sure Serge will handle it. Much as the thought of it all makes me grind my teeth, here I am. Outside room 5D. The newly adjusted plaque outside the door reads River Murtagh, Stephanie, Cecelia Ford. The smoke seeping out from around the door frame marks the reason my Dorm Monitoring Amulet started to shimmer. I lift my fist and imagine the door is my father’s head. I can picture the speech he’d give me about this being a responsibility that comes with the Dalshak name. I pound the door three times.
“Wing Supervisor! Open Up!” I shout. Inside, I hear some shuffling, then some chatting. I give them all of two seconds to come to their senses - it isn’t a request. “Come on, River. You can’t afford another write up.” That quiets the conversation inside. I figure either she’s ready to comply, or she’s just squeezed the last of the air out of her new roommate’s throat. The door lock clicks open. I don’t bother waiting for her to open it for me.
“What can we do for you, Serge?” Stephanie chimes from the back of the trio. The place and the girls in it are an absolute disaster. Curtains and sheets are scorched. Everything in the room is soaked. There are more than a few dents and tears in the walls. I have to squint through a curtain of gray smog to see the girls, too.
“I like you, Stephanie. Don’t ruin it by playing dumb for these two,” I dispel her act of innocence at once. We’re talking a partial room renovation here - does she really expect me to believe this is the work of over-toasted pop tarts? “Who wants to tell me what the hell happened here?” The girl I only recognize from pictures in her new entry profile steps forward first.
“River and I…just had a hard time getting acquainted is all,” she tells me. I do everything I can to fix my eyes on hers, to fight the temptation of her rolling, athletic curv
es. They peek here and there, out of the fringes of her underwear and bra. It isn’t too hard to keep my gaze fixed, though - not with those eyes. They glower like two crystal balls under a countryside night sky. I search them for the criminal I read about in her file. Expelled from more than one high school for property destruction. Thrown out of college for arson. A résumé of lost jobs, from literal firing. No matter how I search those eyes, though, I only see a fierce, but confused girl. “I suppose…I could have come on less strong.”
“I warned you to let go of me,” River mutters under her breath. She crosses one arm over her torn, misshapen shirt to rub her other arm.
“Yeah, but you didn’t have to-”
“Alright, I’ve heard enough from both of you,” I cut them short. Both of them bite their tongues, but I can see their thirst for the last word in their clenched jaws. “Here’s what we’re going to do.” I give them the chance to interrupt they so desperately want. It’s Cece that takes another mistaken step towards me.
“I’ve had enough of being jerked around by you people,” she growls. Stephanie reaches out to stop her with an ethereal hand, but it’s too late. She tries to pass by me. I rub my fingers into a tense snap. The sun flares through the window, a bright screen to white out the entire room. When the light flashes out, Cece and River are laid out flat on the carpet side by side. I close my eyes to reach them. I pull the strings of the place I’ve “sent” them tight on my twitching fingers. In the grasp of my trick, they’re wherever I want them to be, even while their bodies lay out on the carpet.
For now, that place happens to be a never-ending kaleidoscope of black and white. It’s like an infinite chessboard, folding over on itself for an unsettling eternity all around them. Though River and Cece float in identical prisons, they see neither one another nor me. After all, this isn’t the first time I’ve had to use a trick like this to sort out roommate issues or contain a threat as Wing Supervisor. For these two, I figure it’s enough just to cast the illusion of a prison. No need to break out the real tricks and trap them, body and all. Not yet.
“Cece. We’re your people now. Your advocates. Your advisors. We’re the people who’ve been where you are now. You and River both had an unfair surprise dropped on you, but you have to trust the Council. There’s always a reason for what they do,” my voice booms through her illusory prison. Even their shit ideas, it’s true. It’s a bitter pill River’s been in this place a handful of times before, so she just floats on, arms crossed in indignant patience. Cece, however keeps turning herself over, kicking to probe for sensations like gravity and space.
“You… You know who I am?” Cece calls out into the twisting chess board. “You must have read a file or something. I mean you’re a Wing Supervisor… What’s that, like a hall monitor here?” I can hear in her voice she doesn’t mean it as an insult.
“You…could put it that way,” I try not to laugh.
“Then you must know…how little talk means to me. After the things that happened, how everyone just left… You’re my advocate? Try letting me out of this…whatever-the-hell-this-is, and I might believe you.”
“I can’t do that until I’m certain you and River aren’t a threat to one another. Or all of us,” I tell her. The authority in my voice warns Cece not to challenge me, but somehow I doubt it reaches her. “If I bring you to River, will you make peace?”
“I can’t make peace with that girl. She doesn’t want it,” Cece tells me. A knot twists up in my gut at the whole situation. She’s not wrong. But I can’t exactly leave a tremendous fire hazard unchecked right down the hall from my own room.
“I’m going to need you to try,” I tell her, not unkind, but firm.
“I tried already,” Cece defies. I crack open one of my eyes back in their dorm room to watch as Cece’s body begins spiraling out heat waves. I grit my teeth at the means I’m forced to consider. Not on her first day… I can’t send the girl into a void on her first day. It’s precisely that, that gives me the gusto to say like I mean it:
“I said I’m going to need you to try. Not want. Need. When I say something like that, Cece, it isn’t optional. Let me tell you something,” I tack on the end of my sentence before she has the chance to cut me off again. “What’s happening to you right now is what we Magicians call a trick. For the most part, that’s all they are. A trick of the brain. Right now, your body is on the floor of your dorm room back at the Academy. This place you’re in… It’s not real. That being said, there are no novice Wing Supervisors. If I need to, I can trick more than just your brain. I can trick light and matter into doing things they don’t normally do.”
“Get to it, Serge. What are you threatening me with?” Cece bounces back. I’m not sure exactly why - I don’t even know the girl - but it hurts to hear my name scrape off her tongue with such disdain. I can’t say I blame her in the slightest. If only it wasn’t here, like this, I might tell her just how much I envy her honesty. With others, with herself. A Dalshak Magician could never unleash the fire like this so openly, and risk tarnishing everything our family built.
“If you continue to prove yourself a threat to yourself and others, I’ll have to relocate all of you to a different sort of containment. Body, mind and whatever else you believe in. And it won’t be this place. That kind of prison is different. Sick as you might be of my voice right now, you’ll miss it if I send you there,” I warn her. Maybe it’s the prospect of the prison, or the genuine desire not to push it in my voice, but Cece finally stops flailing. She stares blankly into the checker-patterned eternity around her.
“Go on then,” Cece cringes. For a second, I think it’s a dare. Then she adds, “lift the curtain. Bring me to her.” My eyes flit behind my closed eyelids while my fingers dance around, tapping out percussion on my palms. It is more like a curtain than she knows, a rippling illusion of a wall that I pull up from between her and River. The two rotate to face one another in the cascading twilight. “I’m sorry I moved in too fast on you. You need space, you got it… Keep the fuck away from me,” says Cece.
“Sounds like the deal of a lifetime,” River bites right back. I wait the two out another second for any last minute posturing, or even a legitimate strike. Neither of them moves an inch. The snap of my fingers is thunderous in the illusory space. The sound splinters my chessboard prison into a thousand cracked shards and dissolves them to nothingness. Of course, only my two inmates see this as their eyes flutter open at the ceiling.
“You two uphold that agreement, or we’ll have this meeting again, in a very different place,” I warn them. Cece and River’s eyes roll around to one another, then to me. Once they’re reoriented in the physical, I offer each of them one hand. River and Cece pull themselves up. Cece’s skin rests on mine for all of two seconds, which is enough to warm my entire arm. The world around us is suddenly cold and clammy by comparison. I back up a few steps to the door, though I’m not about to leave just yet. Not until I see what kind of start they get off to.
“Hey, Cece…I’m about to go out to lunch. Do you…want to-”
“I’m going to stay in for the day, thanks,” Cece cuts Stephanie short. She turns around, shoulders past River, and plops on her singed bedsheets.
“Oh…okay. I’ll see you later, then,” Stephanie says. Now locked into her plan, she drifts right through my chest and rides a gentle breeze down the hallway. I hang back to watch, until River breaks for the shower and slams the door.
“Awesome,” I sigh to myself, “You two are going to be…just fine.” We’ve at least left the realm of combustion, it seems, so I turn my back to the disaster of a room. “I’ll be back later with new sheets and curtains.” On my way out, I feel Cece’s hot gaze on the back of my head. I can’t help but wonder if it’s misplaced hate, or something else entirely. I can’t help but wonder how many more times this term I’ll be back to this room with replacements.
Second Day Blues
Cece The Broken Academy, D Wing
I keep m
y face down in my pillow. When the drool spreads around me like a halo from an old stained glass window, I turn on my side. I stare at River’s A.I.M. poster. I even think about igniting it from across the room a few times. I listen to the pipes feed water to River’s laborious shower through the wall. I imagine her flopping around the tub as a salmon or a trout, with a sinister little chuckle. Stephanie’s arrival right through the wall shocks me upright for a few seconds, but I have no interest in leaving my crisp little bed. As far as I’m concerned, the Academy doesn’t need to get much bigger than the edges of my sheets.
I’m not sure if I sleep or not, at all, that night. Every time I let my eyes close, I see the rolling kaleidoscope of black and white. Every time I start to drift off, I feel the haunting weightlessness of being suspended there. It keeps my eyes cracked all through the night as I fade in and out of twilight. Before I know it, the sun’s made its comeback through the window. It goes for round two with another stab at my eyes. I turn away from it and pull the sheets over my shoulder. I focus on the first thought that pops into my head to help get back in the sleeping zone.
Serge… Who does he think he is? Wing Supervisor… I picture his skin, almost as dark as mine, beaded with sweat the way it was when he came for his visit yesterday. I wonder if it was nerves or the heat. I wonder if he’s really half as powerful as he made himself sound. His hazelnut brown eyes were certainly stony enough. He had roughly half the cut of meat of myself, and on a more slender frame too. Yet he knocked me out with a snap. A Magician. Like the ones who hid Lee’s crew at the hospital. I wonder, as I lay on my bed failing to sleep, if I’d have been better off prodding him harder. Letting him fling me into some illusional prison of light and shadow.
