by Chloe Garner
Valerie went to get her bag of clothes, wishing again that she had a decent hairbrush as she pulled her fingers through her hair.
“You heard them,” Valerie said, looking at herself in the tiny mirror on one wall. “We aren’t on a side. We’re on our own side.”
The car rolled to a stop, and Hanson looked out his window at a large brick building with grid-spaced windows.
“What are you doing here, Susie?” Martha asked rhetorically.
“What is it?” Hanson asked.
“Ground School,” Martha said. “Entry level. Even you wouldn’t end up here. It’s below you.”
“Don’t know. That sounds about right,” Hanson said.
“It’s below you,” Martha said more emphatically.
“Ma, I don’t do any magic,” Hanson told her.
“No, but you could,” Martha said vaguely, putting the car back into drive.
“How do you know?” Hanson demanded.
“Because you’re my son, and because your father is your father, and because I sacrificed too much for you to be completely lacking in talent.”
“Val is a natural,” Hanson said. “Did you know that?”
“Do you even know what that means?” Martha retorted.
“It means she makes up magic and it just works,” Hanson said. He knew precious little else, but he wasn’t going to admit that.
“I don’t see why it matters,” Martha said, driving away from the school. “You belong at that school as much as anyone else does.”
“No,” Hanson said. “They took me in because you abandoned me. I don’t deserve to be there.”
“I went there and your father went there, and all you need is someone to teach you.”
“They aren’t going to, ma,” Hanson said, slouching. “I’m too far behind, and no one is interested in it. They’re teaching Val, but that’s because she’s so good and because she’s important. I’m not important. They don’t care if I can do magic or not.”
Martha looked over at him and frowned.
“You can’t defend yourself from the dark elements if you can’t do magic,” she said. “Letting a boy know that magic exists and then not teaching him so much as the basics of self defense? It’s like chumming. Lady Harrington wouldn’t do that.”
“You did that,” Hanson said, raising his voice again. “You failed to teach me anything, but you used me in a spy in your war the whole time.”
“You never complained,” Martha said, and he tipped his head back against the headrest.
“I thought it was just for things like making the dishwasher work again and cleaning stains out of the carpet. I never realized how… big it was.”
“Yes, well, you know now, and what’s done is done,” Martha said. “Why would she have gone to the lowest of the low schools?”
“Val wouldn’t care that it was below her,” Hanson said. “She just would have worked as hard as she could.”
Martha paused, looking over at Hanson.
“Susan wouldn’t have cared, either. She would have expected to go to that school and come out being the best of the best anyway, and she would have thought that it was because she worked so much harder than everyone else.”
“Ma, jealous isn’t a good color on you,” Hanson said.
“Don’t talk like that to me,” Martha said. “You have no idea. The golden girl that everyone thought was going to save us all. She just ran off, and thought that she could turn her back on everyone. Everything always has to be on her terms, her way.”
Hanson sighed.
“Can you just take me back to school?” he asked. “I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” Martha said. “You’re going to help me. If it’s just the one tiniest thing that you happen to know that I don’t, and it makes the difference, you will change the course of human life. Do you understand me? It’s that important.”
Hanson nodded, closing his eyes.
“Wake me up when the tiny detail shows up,” he said, shifting once more lower into his seat.
They abandoned the car.
Susan and Grant were each carrying large backpacking backpacks, while Valerie and Sasha carried one plastic bag each full of clothes.
It was the strangest thing to see, except for all of the other weird stuff Valerie had ever seen, wandering around after school.
It was just city life.
“Are they going to kill someone?” Sasha asked at one point as they walked.
“We’re hoping to prevent something,” Susan said over her shoulder. “But prevention doesn’t rule out killing someone, if that’s what has to happen.”
Sasha shuddered.
“Can I not be there when it happens?” she asked.
“We’re not putting you two in the middle of a fight,” Grant said. “We’re headed to one of my apartments. You can order pizza and watch movies or whatever, then we’ll spend the night there and move again in the morning.”
Valerie sighed.
“It’s no wonder no one can ever find you,” she said. “I thought that being out in the middle of nowhere was hard to find.”
“Never sleep in the same place twice in a row,” Susan said. “It really does make it harder to find you.”
“Does anyone ever just kind of wait around for you to show up someplace, because you’re bound to end up there eventually?” Sasha asked.
“Yes, actually,” Susan said lightly. “Survival School. Other than that, no one has any idea where I’m going to be, least of all me.”
“That sounds exhausting,” Sasha asked, and Susan laughed.
“I thought that I was looking forward to having a single home where I spent all of my time. It was the most maddening thing I ever did in my entire life.”
Valerie smiled at this and shook her head.
“But the apartment was always spotless,” she said.
“I know,” Susan said. “Some days all I did was get angry and clean everything.”
“I’ve seen those moods,” Grant said. “I can’t imagine what you would have been like, without the ability to sit and cast magic.”
“Don’t get me started,” Susan said.
“What are you doing tonight?” Valerie asked, and Susan glanced at her once more.
“Best if you don’t know.”
“But they’re gearing up for another big attack?” Valerie asked, and Grant nodded.
“How did you find out?” Sasha asked.
“I got a tip,” Grant said.
“But you haven’t talked to anyone since you came to get us,” Sasha said. “Or have you been sneaking away?”
“I have an e-mail account,” Grant said. “I go to cafes and check it every day, no matter what.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” Valerie asked. “Doesn’t that make you traceable?”
“It does,” Grant said. “But I use public computers that aren’t attached to me, which means it’s actually easier to track me digitally than magically. The Council has guys who do that, but The Pure prefer to hack everything magically. If it requires a digital expert, an internet expert, they hire it out, and they won’t hire out things that are as sensitive as the spy games.”
Susan nodded.
“I don’t like it, and I won’t touch a computer, but he’s been doing it a long time. I have to assume it works.”
They turned into a building and started upstairs.
Six flights, and Grant went to a door, pressing his palm to the wood and waiting a moment. At first there was silence, but then there was a slow grating noise, one that Valerie instinctively associated with a deadbolt sliding out of its slot.
Grant opened the door and turned on the lights.
There were lights.
It wasn’t a nice apartment, not even compared to the one that Valerie and Susan had lived in all those years, as Susan was pretending they had difficulty making ends meet, but it had lights and presumably it had running water, and there in the corner
there was a television.
It was a massive CRT, but still. It had a cable plugged into the side and everything.
They had TV.
Valerie threw herself down onto the couch, stretching and closing her eyes.
“I’m going to go take a shower, if no one minds,” Sasha said.
“There are towels in the closet,” Grant called after her. “I think.”
Susan went to sit on the floor near Valerie.
“I’ll leave you money for pizza,” Susan said. “The land-line here is warded pretty hard, so as long as you aren’t on the phone for a long time, you ought to be fine. Hang up if they put you on hold and just call back. Okay?”
Valerie nodded.
“Civilization,” she murmured. “Television and phone and internet… Oh, how I have missed you.”
She thought abruptly of her phone.
“I haven’t had a cell phone in months,” she said.
“Good to break that habit,” Grant said. “Takes way too much strength to be untraceable when you’ve got one in your pocket.”
“But what if something went wrong and someone needed to tell you?” Valerie asked. “I mean, is it really that bad, or are you being paranoid?”
“Until you’re actually responsible for your own life, you’re going to have to trust my judgment,” Susan answered. “No cell phones.”
Valerie sighed.
“Not like there’s anyone I’d call, anyway. No one at school has one.”
“What are the rules for cell phones on campus, these days?” Susan asked.
“Upperclassmen can have them,” Grant said. “Last I heard. So long as they leave them in the cottages.”
Susan shifted, and something about the tension of the motion drew Valerie’s attention.
“What is it?” Valerie asked.
“You’ve had too much activity at school,” Susan said. “Just… a puzzle I’ve been piecing at for a while. I haven’t figured anything out yet.”
“Someone is trying to kill me,” Valerie said, turning her head, and Susan nodded.
“Yes. That. I don’t believe they’re trying to kill you, because that would… that would end badly for them, but I do think that they’re trying to obtain you.”
“If they weren’t trying to kill me, they wouldn’t have left a bomb in the hallway,” Valerie said, and Susan frowned, squeezing her hand.
“You know, I don’t have an argument for that. I wish I knew what kind of bomb it was…”
“There were triggers all over the place. Dr. Finn helped me disable all of them, but… It was scary.”
“Demons set it?” Susan asked.
“Yeah, they left it and teleported out,” Valerie answered.
“Glitched,” Grant said from the kitchen. “The word is ‘glitch’.”
“Whatever,” Valerie said. “One second they were there and the next they weren’t, and there were bomb triggers attached to everything.”
“There are too many factions running around with demonic connections at this point,” Susan said. “I used to be able to keep them straight.”
“It’s like going nuclear,” Grant said. “As soon as one of the rival factions makes an alliance, all of the rest of them feel like they have to, to keep even footing.”
“When they go after Light School, they’re never going to see it coming,” Susan lamented. “Grant, I don’t know if I can send her back.”
“We’ll talk about it,” he answered. “But you know we don’t have a choice. You need to be able to defend yourself, and you can’t, while you’re worried about her.”
“Don’t I get a say?” Valerie asked.
“What do you want?” Susan asked, turning to lean her back against the couch.
“I need to go back,” Valerie said, and Susan tipped her head.
“I’m surprised,” she said. “I would have thought that you would hate it there.”
“Oh, I do,” Valerie said. “They’re authoritarian and backwards and they keep locking us in our rooms for days at a time when something goes wrong, but… If I hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have been able to disarm the bomb before someone opened a door and set it off. They would have all died.”
“If you hadn’t been there, odds are good there wouldn’t have been a bomb,” Grant said.
“Yeah, I know,” Valerie said. “But there’s going to be, isn’t there?”
Both adults were silent for a moment, then Susan shifted.
“Tell me what the teachers are doing,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Valerie asked.
“She wants to know how involved they are with the war effort,” Grant said.
“You said you were working for Mr. Tannis,” Susan said. “Is he the only one working for the Council?”
“No,” Valerie said. “They all are.”
Susan nodded, looking over at Grant.
“There’s a reason they’re supposed to keep the wars out of the schools,” Susan said. “It makes them less of a target for the Pure. So long as the Council is routing work through the schools, they’re going to be tactical targets.”
“And there will be another bomb,” Valerie said.
“How are they getting in?” Grant asked, coming over with a plate of food. Everything had come out of a can, but it didn’t look half bad, anyway.
He sat down on an armchair, and Valerie reached over, taking a slice of pear.
“I told you,” she said. “They set something on fire in the hallway and it grew a silverthorn, and it put a hole in the defenses. I killed it back some more after I came back from training with you, but there’s still a hole.”
“And they haven’t figured out how to ward it yet?” Susan asked, and Valerie shook her head.
“Apparently not.”
“Is Alan involved in that?” Susan asked, and Valerie nodded.
“He and Mr. Tannis have worked on it a bunch.”
“That’s not a standard cast, then,” Susan said, looking at Grant. Valerie’s father sighed.
“We can’t get in, Susan. Your mother won’t let us past. We can’t help them.”
“They think you’re with the Pure. The Superiors,” Valerie said to her father. “Ethan told me to be careful.”
“They knew I was alive?” Grant asked, and Valerie nodded.
“Well, okay, I don’t know know that they knew you were alive, but he wasn’t surprised when I told him I’d seen you.”
“Interesting,” Grant said.
“I put down a good cover story for you,” Susan said. “And The Pure know you haven’t been working with them.”
“But if we can make them think that I’m working with one of the separatist groups,” Grant said. “Without being clear about which one, we could get some distance between The Pure and the separatists.”
“I can get some mileage out of that,” Susan said, and Grant nodded, handing the plate across to Valerie again.
“So can I.”
“What’s going on out here?” Sasha asked, and Susan and Grant looked over. Valerie sighed.
“Apparently we’re all still just spying for our parents,” she said, and Susan grinned.
“It’s for the greater good, honey.”
Her parents left.
It was kind of strange, watching them go out the door of the strange apartment and looking over at Sasha.
“We’re unsupervised,” Valerie said, and Sasha shrugged.
“So?”
“This is the first time I’ve been unsupervised since I went to Survival School in the first place,” Valerie said.
“You left,” Sasha said. “I’ve been on campus the entire time.”
Valerie nodded.
“Still, I was supervised the whole time. We should do something rebellious, just to have done it.”
“I’m not sure I know how,” Sasha said slowly, and Valerie shrugged.
“It’s overrated. Pizza?”
They went through the delivery brochures her father h
ad left on the counter and chose their pizza, then Valerie called to order it.
She was wholly prepared to hang up if they put her on hold, but the girl on the other end of the phone took her order promptly and promised the pizza would be there in thirty minutes or less.
Valerie went to sit with Sasha as the redhead scrolled through television channels.
“I don’t know what to watch,” Sasha admitted as she kept looking.
“Everything I was following was either streaming or I’m way behind now,” Valerie said. “Just pick a movie or something.”
Sasha found a rom-com that Valerie had wanted to see, before, and they settled in.
“Your parents are neat,” Sasha said, sitting with her chin on her palms.
“Don’t sugar coat it,” Valerie said. “They stress you out.”
“They do fight a lot,” Sasha said. “And… Did they ever say exactly what they were doing tonight?”
“Nope,” Valerie confirmed. “Pretty much on purpose.”
“But what if something happened?” Sasha asked. “We don’t know how to get in touch with them, and all they do is hide. We’d never find them again.”
“They’d find us,” Valerie said with complete faith.
“But what if we had to run?” Sasha asked. “What if someone came for us?”
“You think they planted a phony phone number on the flier?” Valerie asked. “Who would come here?”
“You said it,” Sasha said. “If you want to catch your parents, you just go someplace they’re likely to end up and wait there. Chasing them is pointless.”
“It is pointless,” Valerie said. “That’s why they have so many hideouts. They wouldn’t have left us here if there was any serious chance someone could find us.”
“I know,” Sasha said. “But your mom wouldn’t have sent you to school if there was any serious chance of a bomb blowing you up, either, and yet…”
Valerie shrugged.
Sasha had a point.
“What do you suggest we do about it?” she asked, and Sasha looked around.
“I bet your dad has a cache of spellcasting stuff hidden around here somewhere.”
“You want to search the apartment and put up our own wards?” Valerie asked, and Sasha shrugged.
“Maybe. It’d make me feel much better, if I had forewarning if something was coming.”
