Elemental Thief

by Rachel Morgan

  “Finally,” Lawrence whispered. Then he laughed. A genuine grin spread across his features as he stared at the flash drive. “Thank you, Ridley. You have no idea what this means for me and my position.” He looked up. “And the fact that I get to hand you over along with this information makes it even better.”

  “Hand me over?” Ridley repeated at the same time Dad said, “Don’t you dare touch her!”

  But before either of them could do anything, pain sliced through her head, and all she knew was darkness.

  26

  She dreamed of the day the world almost ended. She was in Aura Tower’s penthouse hanging out with Lilah and Josefina Cruz. The three of them had taken advantage of the fact that Lilah’s annoying older brother wasn’t home and had claimed the entire living area for themselves. Blankets were draped across nearly every item of furniture, creating a maze of fluffy tunnels. But they’d grown tired of the tunnels sometime earlier that morning, and the treasure at the center of their blanket maze—Lilah’s brand new robotic unicorn—lay forgotten next to a pile of wrappers from the sweets Josie had snuck past Lilah’s mom.

  It was a good thing Mrs. Davenport wasn’t home now. They all knew she’d freak out at the sight of her lounge. But they’d promised Grace, the nanny, that they’d clean everything up before Lilah’s parents got home. So Grace, whose patience seemed to have no end, had moved all the priceless relics and art pieces to the edge of the room where the girls wouldn’t accidentally knock them over.

  Josie was currently sitting on the cushioned stool in front of the grand piano, playing a near-perfect rendition of the theme music that accompanied their favorite VR game, Dragon Slayer Princess—which was yet another thing Mrs. Davenport didn’t approve of. But Lilah had somehow got hold of a copy, and the three of them played whenever they were at Josie’s place. Right now, though, with Grace watching them from the kitchen while she made lunch, they had to make do with pretend dragon slaying. So Lilah and Ridley leaped about the living room with invisible swords, ducking to avoid invisible flames, and jumping over invisible obstacles.

  “Hey, we could make actual flames,” Lilah panted, coming to a halt and breathing heavily. She grinned at Ridley. “You can do it. You’re super good at that stuff.”

  “No magic inside the house,” Grace called to them. “You know your father’s rules, Lilah.”

  Lilah rolled her eyes. Grace had impeccable hearing. Even when the girls whispered, she always seemed to hear them. Ridley sometimes wondered if she used a conjuration.

  “You’re no fun, Grace!” Josie shouted as her fingers hammered the piano keys.

  “No magic inside the house,” Grace repeated.

  “Fiiiiiine,” Lilah groaned. “Oh, hey, your mom’s calling, Ridley.” Lilah ran to a wall near the kitchen area and touched the screen above the home auto system’s control pad. Ridley’s mom’s face appeared on the screen, along with the interior of her car. “Hi, Mrs. Kayne,” Lilah said, jumping up and down and waving.

  Ridley reached Lilah’s side. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hey, Riddles. Hey, Lilah.” Mom grinned in the direction of her commscreen camera before looking back at the road. “You guys having fun?”

  “We made a blanket maze,” Lilah said.

  “And we’re sword fighting.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Kayne!” Josie squealed, crashing into Lilah and Ridley.

  “Hi, Josie,” Mom said, smiling at the camera again. “So, blanket mazes and sword fighting huh?” she said as her eyes returned to the road. “I hope you’re not making too much of a mess for Grace.”

  “No, no, we said we’d clean up,” Ridley told Mom as Lilah and Josie nodded beside her.

  “Okay, well I just wanted to say hi and tell you I’ll only see you tomorrow. I left a little late, so you’ll probably be asleep when I get home tonight.”

  “Okay. See you tomorrow,” Ridley said.

  “Alrighty. Have fun and be good. Love you lots.”

  “Love you, Mom.”

  Lilah tapped the screen to end the call. Then she leaped around, brandishing a make-believe sword. In her deepest voice, she said, “Beware, princess. Dragons guard this land.”

  “Dragons cannot stop me!” Ridley and Josie shouted in unison. “I will complete my quest!

  “Girls, go wash your hands,” Grace interrupted before they could launch themselves into a full-blown imaginary dragon battle. “Lunch is ready.”

  Lilah lowered her sword hand, her shoulders slumping. “Fine. We can carry on after lunch.”

  Five minutes later, the three of them were seated on stools at the kitchen island eating ravioli lasagne. Grace sat on the other side, watching the news on the screen that popped up out of one end of the island. “Grace, can we watch Milo & Mara?” Josie asked.

  “Yeah, this is boring,” Lilah said. “Oh, wait, is that the big magic thing?” she asked, pointing her fork at the screen where a drone camera was zooming out over something round and copper-colored and probably as wide across as a city block. “They keep talking about it at school.”

  “Yes, the GSMC,” Grace said. “This is historic, girls. We should be watching it. In years to come, everyone’s going to be talking about the day we ended the global energy crisis, and you’ll remember sitting here eating your lunch as you watched it.”

  “Doubt it,” Josie grumbled.

  “If it’s so important, why aren’t my mom and dad watching it?” Lilah asked.

  “They are, they’re just watching it somewhere else on a big fancy screen. That’s how important it is.”

  “Oh.” Lilah peered a little closer at the screen, so Ridley and Josie did the same. Dozens of people stood in a ring around the circular thing, each of them with one hand placed against it. As the camera zoomed further out, they saw a line of people connecting one ring of people to another enormous ring of people. Then another and another, and multiple lines of people extending toward a large body of water.

  “Those are all magicists, right?” Ridley said.

  “Yes,” Grace answered. “This is happening all around the world at this very moment.”

  “Duh, that’s what the G stands for,” Lilah said. “Global.”

  On the screen, the magicists began their conjuration, everyone pulling from the air or the water with one hand while touching either the circular device or the person next to them. Magic materialized, and the screen glowed bright blue. It was like a large-scale dance, every free hand near the device moving in the same way, pushing outward, swinging back in, twisting back and forth, cupping the air, and then trailing fingers in patterns too small to see.

  “Don’t they need both their hands for a conjuration?” Josie asked.

  “Not for magic-energy conversion,” Grace said, her eyes glued to the screen. “That kind of conjuration only requires one hand for movements and one hand touching the … uh, battery? I’m not sure exactly what they call the other part, but it’s basically like a battery.”

  “Oh. We haven’t done that conjuration at school yet,” Josie said.

  “I think you’ll only learn it if you become a magicist,” Grace told her. “Anyway, I heard they’re doing something new here where all the people who’re not touching a battery are just pulling magic and sending it toward the magicists who are touching it. So they can do the conversion conjuration faster, I think.”

  “Okay,” Ridley said. They watched for another minute or two, but by then it was just more of the same thing and it was starting to get boring. She picked up her fork again, but a thunder-like rumble startled her. She looked up, and a second later, the rumble sounded through the screen’s speakers. The blue glow hanging above the gathering of magicists flashed too bright to look at, before the feed suddenly went blank.

  “What happened?” Josie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Grace said, frowning at the screen.

  A second rumble came from outside, louder this time. Then the sizzle and crack of lightning, followed by a crashing boom that sent a s
hudder rippling through the floor.

  “What’s happening?” Josie whimpered, clutching the counter top.

  Grace muttered something beneath her breath, her brow furrowing as she stared past the girls toward the windows on the far side of the living area. Ridley and Lilah spun around on their stools and jumped down. Together, they ran to the windows and looked out. In the distance, in one of the outlying suburban areas, raged the largest fire Ridley had ever seen. “That’s where one of those battery things was,” Grace said, reaching the window with Josie hanging onto her hand. “By Menlow Lake.”

  As they watched, buildings near the fire began heaving and crumbling as the earth cracked around them. Earthquake, Ridley thought, but then lighting zigzagged out of a cloudless sky and struck something too far away to see. No, not lightning, because it was definitely blue. “Is that magic?” Ridley asked.

  “I think so,” Grace said.

  “We’re all going to die,” Josie whispered.

  “But there are panels over the city that reflect magic,” Lilah reminded them. “My dad told me those would keep us safe if anything magical ever went wrong.”

  “They can keep us safe from above, but what about everything out there?” Ridley said pointing a shaking finger at the fires in the distance. “And the magic in the ground underneath us.”

  “Don’t some foundations have arxium built into them?” Grace said. “We’ll be fine, don’t worry.” But Ridley couldn’t help hearing the shudder in her voice.

  “Look up there!” Lilah said. “Those are the panels, right? The arxium ones. They’re moving.” They watched as the panels spread out, while above them, dark clouds gathered unnaturally fast. “They’re, like … making sort of a dome? See, so we’ll be protected from the side as well,” Lilah said, nudging Ridley’s arm.

  “But then the spaces between the panels are way too big,” Ridley said. “They were big already and now they’re just massive. That magic lightning is gonna get through and—” Her eyes shut automatically as magic flashed down into Lumina City. “See?” she said, her eyes opening and her voice now a high-pitched whisper.

  “But … maybe only a little bit of magic will get through,” Lilah said, though she sounded far less certain now. “And we’ll still get protection from the side. So … so we’ll be okay.”

  “I don’t want to be up here,” Josie said, close to tears as she backed away from the window. “We’re gonna fall down like those other buildings.”

  Ridley’s feet remained frozen to the spot as she stared beyond the distant fires. Please be okay, Mom. Please, please, please be okay.

  Then Dad was suddenly there, tugging at Ridley’s hand, pulling her away from the window, and she became abruptly aware that she was dreaming. She remembered that this was the day Mom died. This was the day her entire life came crashing down around her. Nothing would ever be the same again.

  She pulled free of Dad’s grip and spun away from him, desperately clawing her way through the swirling confusion of the dream world and toward consciousness.

  27

  Ridley woke slowly, becoming aware bit by bit of the dull pain in her head, the aching throughout her left side, the hard surface beneath her body. She peeled her eyelids apart as she probed at her memory, trying to dredge up her last waking thoughts before—

  Crap. Her heart leaped into action, sending renewed pain shooting through her head as the scene in her apartment rocketed to the surface of her mind. She pushed herself up and took stock of her surroundings: An empty, unfamiliar room. A closed door. A single window. And no Dad.

  “Dad,” she whispered as her hand rose to the back of her head. Her fingers moved through her hair until she found the source of her headache: a large lump. One of Lawrence’s men must have hit her. “Where are you?” she muttered, climbing to her feet. Her thoughts tumbled over one another, arriving all too quickly at the worst possible scenario. She was alive and trapped somewhere, which meant she was valuable to Lawrence. But Dad wasn’t like her, which meant he wasn’t valuable. Would Lawrence really have left him alive? Left him in a position where he could go to the police and tell them exactly who had broken into his home and abducted his daughter?

  No, came the silent answer. Of course not.

  But he can’t be dead, she thought immediately. He CAN’T be. But the fact that Dad wasn’t locked up here only served to confirm her worst fears. She hurried to the door and twisted the handle, though she knew already that it would be locked. When the door wouldn’t budge, she jiggled the handle more desperately. A sob clawed its way up her throat, tightening her chest and stealing her breath.

  “Stop it, stop it,” she whispered fiercely to herself, stepping away from the door and forcing her hands to her sides. “Don’t. Panic.” She took several deep breaths, then let her magic rise away from her body. Before attempting any specific movements, she nudged the magic toward the door. It curled lazily through the air, brushed against the door, then rebounded instantly in a jagged flash, zigzagging back and forth almost too fast to follow. She stepped backward and out of the way just as the magic erupted into an explosion of sparks and vanished.

  In the darkness that followed, Ridley let out a grim sigh. It was just as she’d expected: an arxium door. Or at least, it had arxium hiding somewhere inside it, since the door appeared to be made of wood. She turned and moved toward the window, where the heavy clouds blotting out most of the light made it hard to determine whether it was late afternoon or early evening. She nudged her magic toward the bars crisscrossing the window. The blue glow drifted slowly, then burst away from the window in a rush of angry sparks. Ridley ducked down, only rising again once the magic had vanished. “More arxium,” she muttered. Another brief magical experiment informed her the floor, ceiling and walls also contained arxium.

  Wonderful. Magic certainly wasn’t going to get her out of here.

  She gripped the bars and peered out of the window. Her eyes took in a perfectly landscaped garden with manicured hedges and white modern art sculptures, and in the distance, a familiar house. “Holy crud,” she whispered. Even if she hadn’t recognized the house, the oddly shaped sculptures would have given it away.

  She was a prisoner on the mayor’s property.

  In his pool house, to be more precise, if she correctly remembered what she’d seen of his garden. It made sense, of course, given who had abducted her. But still, it seemed crazy that Lumina City’s mayor had a room like this on his property. It couldn’t have come about by accident. This room would have been made specifically to confine a person who might want to escape using magic. She doubted she was the first prisoner to inhabit this cell, which meant the mayor of Lumina City—and his son, it would seem—were in the habit of locking up magicists.

  Ridley folded her arms and stared at the door she couldn’t get through. Lawrence said he knew about her magic, but did he know exactly what she could do with it? Hopefully not. Because when he opened that door, she was going to get the hell out of here. How long would it take before he showed up though? Archer said Lawrence was meeting someone at Brex Tower tonight. The shorter, less extravagant version of Aura Tower. Had he left already, or would he come by to check on her before going?

  Wait, hadn’t he said something about handing her over? She frowned in concentration, trying to remember exactly what Lawrence had said before she was knocked unconscious. He was excited to have the flash drive. And even more excited that he’d be able to hand her over along with it. A chill raced across her skin, but with it came a sense of optimism. If she was supposed to be going with Lawrence to Brex Tower, then it wouldn’t be long before he came to fetch her. And she would make sure he never got his hands on her.

  She waited near the window, her eyes glued to the sliding door leading onto the deck outside the main house. Lawrence might approach the pool house from somewhere else, of course, but there was no other door for her to watch, so she kept her eyes trained on it. Eyes she knew must be glowing with magic. She let it rippl
e across her skin and hover in the air around her, ready to use the moment anyone showed up outside the pool house.

  Fortunately, she didn’t have to wait long.

  They came from the side somewhere, not the back of the house, so she was startled by the figures that moved without warning past the window. She shrank back into the darkness, knowing they must have at least seen a blue glow, if nothing else. There were three of them, and she guessed it was probably Lawrence and the two bodyguards who’d been at her apartment. The thought of what they might have done to Dad caused her chest to tighten again. But she fought against the panic. She couldn’t do anything for Dad if Lawrence’s men knocked her out now.

  She let her magic turn her to air and drifted closer to the door as she heard the shuffle of footsteps beyond it. They would be prepared for magic, of course. Maybe they had arxium clothing or bullets or something. But would they be prepared for a mini tornado? She spun the air around herself in an imitation of the magic that had scooped her up outside the wall the night before. It whirled faster and faster, lifting her up and howling past her ears. She couldn’t hear a thing beyond the wind’s roar, but Lawrence must surely be about to open the—

  The door flew open, and Ridley spun toward it. Something hissed, like the sound of a deodorant spray can, but she was already flying out the door and up. She spun higher and higher as nausea hit her stomach. No! she screamed internally as she sensed her body becoming heavier. I am air, I am weightless, I am AIR! She breathed through the nausea, which already seemed to be lessening, and relinquished all control of her magic. She’d always been afraid of going too high. Afraid the air currents might be stronger the higher she got, or that her magic would fail her and she’d fall a great distance. But her desperation to escape overrode her fear.