by Chloe Garner
Hanson stared out at the road ahead of him.
“You can’t find them,” he said. “If that’s where Val went, you aren’t going to find her mom. No one can. It’s what they all say.”
“I’ve got you to help me track Valerie, and there is no one else in the world better at tracking Susan Blake than me. I’ve devoted my entire life to observing her, and I can track her magic, so long as she’s actually casting and I can get close enough.”
“What will happen, when you find her?” Hanson asked. “Valerie?”
“That’s up to the Council,” Martha said.
“What about her mom?”
“She was supposed to report in and she didn’t. She had a job and we know that she did it, but she didn’t report in, after that. She’s AWOL, and they’ll deal with it.”
“Deal with it how?” Hanson asked.
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answers to,” she said.
“Will they hurt her?” Hanson asked.
She glanced at him again.
“No one says,” she said. “I don’t think so, because… Well, if only because she’s one of their strongest assets, I don’t think that they’ll hurt her, because they want to rehabilitate her and get her out at work again.”
“What kind of people are you working for?” Hanson asked. “You aren’t certain they wouldn’t torture her?”
“I’m working for the people who are going to win the war,” Martha answered. “Would you rather I be working for the ones who are going to lose?”
“I’d rather you be working for the ones who are right,” Hanson said.
“Did I really not teach you this?” Martha asked. “I thought I had. There’s no such thing as right and wrong, when it comes to people. The situations are always way more complicated than that. No one is actually right or actually wrong. I wouldn’t be working for the Council if they were evil. They aren’t. And they’re truly more right, to boot. But these are the people who are going to go out and make it possible for us to win, to stop the Superiors from taking over and enslaving people. I think that counts as the good guys, right?”
“And what about Valerie?” Hanson asked. “Do you not care what happens to her? You were like a mom to her.”
“I was around a lot as she was growing up,” Martha said. “It doesn’t make me like her mom. And it was part of the job. I needed to be able to track her, too, if Susan ran again. All this time, no one but me knew where she was, just waiting for the moment that the Council needed her again…”
Hanson looked at his mother, horrified.
“You’re the one who told them where to find her,” he said.
“They needed her,” Martha said. “And once you’ve picked your horse, you stick with it. The Council are our only hope of beating the Superiors once and for all, and when they told me that Susan Blake was key to that - was always going to be key to it - I volunteered to follow her and keep track of her, so that they didn’t lose their best weapon. I trust that they are the best chance we have, so when they contacted me and told me it was time… No, I didn’t hesitate.”
“Ma,” Hanson said. “You’re the bad guy. You ruined both their lives.”
Martha looked over at him, then shook her head.
“You have no idea what I’m willing to do to make sure the right side wins this war,” she said. “It’s worth that much. You have no idea.”
They took a room at a roadside motel, not taking anything out of the car. Grant had said something about swapping it for a new one, but Susan had told him that they would burn through their supply of cars too quickly, if they did that.
Valerie could remember a time when Susan had told her that they couldn’t afford a bicycle for Valerie, because she wouldn’t get enough use out of it. They’d never owned a car.
“All right,” Susan had said as she came out of the bathroom, rubbing her hands and arms like she had lotioned, though Valerie could sense that there was more going on. “Let’s send your mom and update to let her know you’re doing okay.”
Sasha sat up.
“Thank you, Mrs. Blake,” she said, and Susan nodded, motioning to the end of the bed.
“Come sit.”
Sasha sat down at the end of the bed, facing Susan Blake in a more trusting posture than Valerie could have imagined herself having, in that moment, and Susan put her hands to either side of Sasha’s face.
“Put your hands around my wrists and focus,” Susan said. “What this is going to do is send a pulse of energy to your mom. She’ll recognize you and she’ll recognize me, and she’ll know we’re together.”
“How will she know that you’re not in trouble?” Valerie asked, and the corner of Susan’s mouth had twitched.
“Because it’s me,” she said simply. Sasha nodded and Susan closed her eyes.
“Focus on your mom,” she said.
Sasha nodded again and Susan drew a breath.
There was a moment.
Valerie didn’t know what it was, even how she’d known it had happened - was it expectation and a guess, or had she actually noticed something - and then Susan dropped her hands.
“I owe her at least that much,” Susan had said, and then Grant had come back with a delivery menu for dinner.
“We have prep work to do tonight, so you two are on your own for entertainment.”
“There are no rats to eat my eyebrows tonight,” Valerie said, pushing her shoes off and going to lay on the bed. “I’m happy.”
“Don’t get used to this,” Susan had warned. “It never lasts long.”
“Why not?” Valerie asked, and Grant had looked over at her.
“Someone is always chasing us,” he said. “One or the other of us. And now there are four of us to come after. Someone will come, and we’ll hide. It always happens. Don’t get comfortable.”
Valerie had given him a glum look, then shrugged and picked up the remote.
“Television,” she said to Sasha. “I can’t tell you how much I have missed television.”
Once, Sasha had helped Valerie to sneak out of their room and to the library in the middle of the night at Survival School.
She’d had thirty- or forty-odd instructions from Sasha, each one a cast that she had to get exactly right, just to get from her room to the library and back.
Breaking into Von Lauv Academy was comparably complicated, foot for foot.
They spent two hours at the motel getting ready, then Susan had spent the entire time casting.
She cast on the car, she cast on Valerie and Sasha, she cast on herself and Grant.
They got to an abandoned lot outside of yet another city that Valerie had managed to miss which one it was, and Susan and Grant sat together for a good five minutes, putting together a cast.
Valerie had questions, but she knew the rules of verbal casting well enough to wait until it was done.
Finally, a blue light went out from the car in all directions, and Grant started the engine again.
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” Valerie said.
“We made ourselves uninteresting enough to escape attention,” Susan said, sitting straight and marking the window next to her head, almost as a nervous habit. “We have to get past all of their defenses one at a time, and if they saw us coming in, inch by inch… Obviously we would attract attention.”
“But the cast had to be specific enough to avoid the defenses detecting it,” Grant said. “There are a lot of layers of work going on here.”
“You’re wasting it,” Sasha said, and Valerie looked over at her.
“No we’re not,” Susan said. “We agree that this is the right thing to do with the knowledge.”
“No,” Sasha said. “If they’re going to attack Survival School, you can’t throw away the knowledge of how to get in at the Superior school on just sneaking us in for a day.”
“I’ve underestimated you, if you think that either of us would turn this knowledge over to the Council to let
them run an attack on the school,” Susan said.
“Well,” Sasha started, then shook her head. “No, the Council wouldn’t attack the school. They wouldn’t. But maybe if we let the Superiors know that we could get in at their school…”
“They’d alter the defenses and then we wouldn’t be able to,” Grant said. “It’s a one-shot thing, it has to be secret, and we aren’t giving it to the idiots on the Council, because they’d tie themselves in knots, justifying an attack on teenagers.”
Sasha balked at this, then shook her head.
“You shouldn’t be keeping this kind of knowledge away from the Council,” she said. “This could be tactically helpful in the war.”
Grant looked back at her.
“We can send Valerie in on her own, if you’re uncomfortable with this, but the point isn’t to gain advantage at the war, at all. The point is to understand how the war that the Council has sold you isn’t even happening.”
Sasha fell silent, and Susan started a new cast.
Foot by foot, they fought their way up a gravel driveway, creeping through the abandoned lot.
And then.
They crossed a line of some kind, and what had been an abandoned lot, Valerie now saw to be an enormous campus of some kind. The grass was well-kept, even here in the middle of the winter, and the bare oak trees were regal all around the school, promising a gorgeous spring.
“Wow,” Valerie breathed.
“This place is huge,” Sasha said.
“It is,” Susan said. “And you aren’t going to be able to ask directions if you get lost. You’ll want to sit together at lunch and try to avoid drawing attention to yourselves. You can pick the classes you want to go to, but they should be in the lecture halls. No classrooms, and certainly no focus sessions.”
“Focus sessions?” Valerie asked.
“One teacher, five students,” Grant said. “For specific skills, niche stuff. Mostly high-level, but some of it would be a good fit for you now.”
Valerie boggled, and Sasha leaned her face against the window.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“Last we knew, it was a student population of five-thousand,” Grant said. “And we’re early enough in the spring semester that you ought to be able to blend in. Just… try to avoid conversations with any of the teachers. Okay?”
Sasha nodded, and Valerie shifted forward in her seat, watching as students wandered outside of the building, talking and laughing and…
“This place isn’t evil,” she said.
“Nope,” Susan said. “Almost everyone is happy to be here. They teach all three magics and while they’ll talk about the risks that go along with using dark magic, they don’t look down on people who have it.”
“People with all three disciplines are celebrated here,” Grant said. “I almost wish your mom had sent you here.”
“They would have held her,” Susan said. “You know that.”
“You still can’t prove that the Council won’t,” Grant answered.
“Lady Harrington wouldn’t let them,” Susan said. “You know that.”
“If she could stop them. Merck is still gaining power with the fear play.”
“What are you guys talking about?” Valerie asked.
“You walk from here,” Grant said. “Just don’t move wrong. You belong here.”
“We don’t have backpacks,” Sasha said.
“Avoid labs,” Susan said, handing back a pair of notebooks and a selection of pens. Sasha sighed.
“I’m going to have a hard time leaving, aren’t I?” she asked, and Susan nodded.
“I’m jealous, myself,” she said. “This isn’t about the secrets, but you may learn some while you’re here, all the same.”
Sasha set her mouth and opened her door.
Valerie got out and walked around the car to stand on the sidewalk.
It was cold out.
She needed to get inside.
She waited for Sasha, then set off toward the front doors.
It was still early, and she was exhausted from odd sleep and getting up too early this morning, but at the same time, she was excited to the point that she had a hard time not bouncing on her toes.
She was doing it.
She was magic-ing her way into an enemy building. She was going to spy on them, and they were never going to know she’d been there.
This was what her mom did. This was what her parents did.
Sasha tucked in against Valerie’s elbow, head down, just following.
Valerie went up the broad front steps and pushed open one of the sets of doors, walking into a long front hallway that echoed with a cacophony of voices.
The place was huge, but it was also packed.
She and Sasha waded through, picking up bits of this conversation and that. Some of the students were talking about classes, but most of them were talking about people. Relationships. Events. Things that were going on within the school. Gossip and teasing.
Valerie felt at home completely.
This was how her regular school had felt every morning.
They walked through, finding the end of the clot of students and going on, looking at doors and walls, trying to figure out how the place was laid out.
“Lecture halls,” Sasha murmured, and Valerie nodded.
They had to be big. So she was looking for hallways that were widely-spaced or had very few doors.
She almost passed the first one, mistaking it for a theater. She widened her eyes at Sasha, indicating, and Sasha went to read the schedule on the back of the door.
“Forest survival and gleaned potions,” Sasha said when she came back. “I want to do that.”
“I feel like I’m cheating on Mrs. Reynolds,” Valerie answered.
“Gleaned potions?” Sasha asked. “I mean… There are some of us who have done it because our parents have done it, but… I want to do that, Valerie.”
Valerie nodded, looking back.
The front hall was emptying and students were making their way toward the rooms. The day was about to start.
“Cool,” she said. “Just… Come over here with me.”
She went to lean against the opposite wall, holding her notebook against her chest.
“What are we doing?” Sasha asked, mirroring her.
“Not being the first people to show up to class,” Valerie said. “We want to get in there before the back is all the way full and there aren’t seats together, but we don’t want to be too early.”
Sasha nodded, looking like she was trying to do complex calculus in her head.
“Don’t worry about it,” Valerie said. “I’ve got this.”
Sasha swallowed.
“Do you know what they’ll do if they catch us?” she asked.
“That’s the last time you use those words today,” Valerie said, raising her head as though she was watching for a friend to come down the hallway. Sasha looked over her shoulder, trying to see what Valerie saw, which would have been the wrong thing except for how natural it felt.
Just waiting on their third friend who would sit with them.
“Okay,” Valerie said a minute later. She followed a group of students in through the double doors and she found a pair of seats halfway down a row about three from the back.
Perfect.
She and Sasha settled in, getting their notebooks ready, and Valerie listened to the conversations going on around them.
It was more related to the class, now, but it still all felt so normal compared to Survival School.
The teacher was a good one. She could tell that from the way the students were talking about the last lecture, and from the fact that the front of the auditorium was filling faster than the back.
A minute later a man in his late twenties came out onto the stage and the lights in the room dimmed slightly. He pointed at the screen behind him, and it lit up with vibrant images that Valerie was actually beginning to recognize.
“All right,�
�� he said. “We left off last week talking about the relationship between the wet light magics and the dry dark magics, and how you can make them work together if you’ve got the right intermediary. So let’s pick back up there.”
Valerie blinked and Sasha began scribbling madly.
It was…
It was without a doubt cheating on Mrs. Reynolds, but it was one of the best lectures on magic Valerie had ever heard.
It made sense.
There wasn’t any percentage light and dark or funny scales for grouping things. For once, the way that the ingredients went together felt like he understood it, like Valerie could understand it, and she found herself taking notes just as fast as Sasha was. The teacher moved fast - he was brutally quick with how he moved from statement to statement, image to image - but it was intuitive. The problem was that she wasn’t going to remember every word of it, and her hand hurt by the end of the lecture with her attempt to capture it all.
She rubbed her wrist as they walked out at the bell, giving Sasha a hard look.
“More,” Sasha breathed. “I don’t ever want to leave.”
Valerie looked up and down the hall.
“All right. Let’s find another one.”
They skipped lunch.
They just went to another class.
There were too many students for Valerie to recognize any of them, but she caught a few whiffs of cliques going by, of hierarchy happening. It was there. The students weren’t suddenly un-petty and fully-matured simply because their school was awesome.
They were just… down to business, for the most part.
The school ran them hard, the same long hours as at Survival School, and the number of them was so huge that no one stood out the way Valerie had, and still did.
It was a good place to be.
Valerie listened hard when she heard students talk about the war, but for the most part they seemed too concerned with the social aspect of the school and with their classes to be talking about the war.
It struck her that it didn’t matter here, the way it did at Survival School.
Granted, there weren’t any demons running around trying to kill everyone, either. So. That made a difference.
They made it to the end of the day - Sasha was running out of notebook - and they went outside, wandering with other students around them, ranging further away from the building. Valerie wondered if her parents shouldn’t have been more clear about what was supposed to happen after classes let out, but she and Sasha spotted the car and made their way over.
