Iolus set up a few more spell generators and stepped back as the rock wall burst open. Water tore through the tunnel, and yet the barrier held fast. Safely on the dry side, Iolus wrapped his hand in flames and used the light to study the churning wall he had created. Then, he sent Aikon through the barrier to continue picking away at the stone as he exited through the wind barrier, leaving the spell intact to protect his secret. He couldn’t risk anyone finding this and notifying Kovax—or, worse, disabling any of the spell generators and flooding the entire network of tunnels.
On his way out, he studied the rotting faces all around him. If the Risen Ones had noticed anything strange going on in the tunnel, they didn’t show it. Most likely, they just didn’t give a damn.
And that was perfect, too.
CHAPTER 29
M ilo closed both of his eyes and opened the left one. All he saw was blackness. He nearly tripped over his own feet.
Sevarin steadied him as Milo blinked at his surroundings.
“Are you okay?”
Milo continued with a hopeless groan. “Not now. This can’t be happening now.”
“Whatever it is, your uncle can fix it.”
Hopefully that was true. There was nothing Uncle Manny didn’t know how to fix with his array of spells, endless funds, and expert knowledge of technology, yet Milo’s eye felt like a thing made of stone. How could anything—magic included—possibly reverse its condition?
“I need to see him,” Milo said, breaking into a run.
“All right, just watch your step.”
A shout from behind made him stop.
“Milo!”
It was Emma. She and Lily were jogging toward them, followed by Owen, Gunner, and Barrel.
“Where’s Garig?” Sevarin asked, when she arrived breathless and red-cheeked. “Did he say anything about what happened?”
Emma shook her head. “He and Kellan left through the back and mounted a pair of levathons. What if they go tell the Archon?”
Anxiety worked its way through Milo’s gut like a parasite. The Archon might take it personally that Milo had just humiliated his son in the cafeteria. Hopefully the man would take Milo’s blind eye as proof that he had come under some sort of spell.
“Oh, gods,” Emma said. “Milo. Your eye. What’s wrong with it?”
“I don’t know. Something—some presence took over back there. I wasn’t myself. Then I came back, and my eye…”
He touched it gently. Lily placed her hand on his forearm and lightly rubbed it. She looked terribly concerned.
“We need to see Uncle Manny,” Emma said.
“That’s where we were headed,” Sevarin said. “Come on.”
“Wait,” Milo said. “Don’t miss class because of me.”
“Dude,” Owen said. “Your left eye looks like a golf ball. Who cares about class right now?”
“Um…” Gunner shifted uncertainly on his feet. “We have Marvels of Humankin Engineering in thirty minutes.”
Barrel punched Gunner’s shoulder.
“What was that for?” Gunner protested, rubbing himself.
“Can you be a tad more sensitive, Gun-woo?”
Barrel only used Gunner’s formal name when he was annoyed. Gunner’s cheeks went pink.
“Sorry, Milo.”
“No, you’re right,” Milo assured him. “The rest of you need to go to class. I can deal with this alone for now.”
“You can copy my notes,” Lily said. “You’ll be fine by tomorrow. I know you will.”
They all turned at the sound of a heavy thump. A levathon had just landed in a nearby field of grass. The rider was a girl Milo recognized from the hotel. She dismounted and ran up to them, her blonde hair a mess from the wind.
“What now?” Owen said.
“Milo?” the girl said. “Milo Banks from room 102? You’ve been staying at my mom’s hotel?”
Feeling self-conscious at the way she was looking at his eye, Milo uttered a quiet, “Yeah, that’s me.”
“Your uncle sent me. He’s there right now. He wants you to gather your friends and meet him. He says it’s urgent.”
“Did he say what it was about?” Sevarin asked her.
The girl shook her head. “No, but I’ve never seen him look so upset.”
“Oh crap,” Milo said. “Word travels quick around here. I’m finished.”
“Don’t say that,” Lily told him.
Owen clapped Milo’s back. “Guess that means we’re not going to class. I’ll hail a cab.”
The girl mounted her levathon and flew back to the hotel, leaving the orphans to make their way back at a steady jog. Milo was glad they hadn’t chosen to talk. He didn’t feel like talking.
EMMANUEL WAS STANDING outside the hotel when they arrived. The owner’s daughter had parked her levathon next to him and gave the orphans a worried look as they approached.
“Thank you, Shelley,” Emmanuel told the girl, handing her a bill.
She shook her head and pushed the money back. “Keep it. I needed a bit of fresh air, anyway.”
She shot Milo a sorry look before darting into the hotel.
When she was gone, Emmanuel fixed his gaze on the orphans.
“Good. You’re all here,” he said. He did a double take when he saw Milo’s face. “What in the gods happened to you?”
Milo tried to find the words to explain. He was glad when Emma took over.
“We think someone cast a spell on Milo in the cafeteria. He dropped his lunch all over another student, and then he went blind in his left eye. You have to help him, Uncle Manny.”
Emmanuel studied Milo’s face through a slight wince. They were almost the same height now, his uncle only one or two inches taller, and yet Milo felt once more like the scared, fourteen-year-old kid he had been the first time they had met behind Ascher’s ranch. He looked away in embarrassment.
“Hold still.”
Emmanuel raised his right hand, pointed a finger at Milo’s left eye, and zapped it.
“Ow!” Milo stumbled back, covering his face. The sting had mostly been in his eyelids; the eye itself was numb “What was that for?”
“Look at me.”
He steadied himself and removed his hand from his face. Nothing had changed.
“It didn’t work.”
“Then it’s not a spell,” Emmanuel said. “What I did right there was meant to detect a magical gloss or infusion. I sensed nothing of the sort.”
The man’s voice had come out laced with curiosity. Milo knew that tone. It meant his uncle had encountered a puzzle he found interesting. It also meant he had no idea what Milo’s problem was—not yet, anyway.
“Tell me you can fix it, Uncle Manny.”
Emmanuel’s eyes narrowed into slits behind his sunglasses. “Your body is reacting to a spell that occurred, and may still persist, somewhere inside your mind.” He shook his head. “It’s low magic. If it happened inside the academy, then we’re dealing with a force that’s on the cutting edge. Magic combined with technology, most likely.”
“So if it’s in my mind, we can reverse it, right?” Milo said.
“Not if the damage has been done already. It appears that your mind has shut down that organ as some sort of response mechanism.”
Emmanuel looked away suddenly, as if a painful emotion had spiked inside of him.
“What’s wrong?” Emma said, noticing his change in demeanor.
Her uncle sighed. “This comes at a bad time. We all need to talk. Come upstairs.”
They settled into the bedroom Emmanuel had rented for himself. It was as sparsely furnished as Milo had come to expect from his uncle. Blinking his good eye at his surroundings, he saw a neatly made bed, a dresser, a writing desk, and blank sheets of paper pinned to the walls. The blank sheets were probably maps that only Emmanuel could see with one of his signature spells.
The only thing that seemed out of place was a pile of bags he had obviously packed in anticipation of a long trip.
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Milo stood by the desk and waited. The other orphans took up positions around the room with Emma being the only one to sit on the bed. She began kneading her hands together, and Barrel, noticing this, sat next to her and put a hand on her wrist to soothe her. Everyone was silent as Emmanuel closed the door and leaned against it with his arms crossed over his chest.
“I have to leave Ayrtoros for a few weeks. An old friend is in danger. She needs me, and we need her.”
“One of the Champions?” Sevarin said.
“Pris Walksprite. She’s trapped in a town on Ankhar’s Northern Frontier, under attack by creatures only magic and advanced weapons can defeat. Her Sargonaut strength won’t do her much good against this kind of enemy.”
“Let me come with you,” Sevarin said. He walked into the room’s center, shoulders squared. Did he hate being in class that much? Or was he suicidal?
“Like I said,” Emmanuel told him firmly, “Sargonaut strength won’t do much good. If I could have any of you by my side, it would be Milo.”
Milo stepped forward. “I’ll go.”
Emma was so alarmed by this that she shot up from the bed.
“You can’t leave us!”
Emmanuel motioned for her to relax. Barrel tugged her back down and put his arm around her, but the look of horror on her face remained.
“If you need me, I’m there,” Milo told his uncle.
Emmanuel took a step toward him and Sevarin. His arms were still crossed.
“Not in your condition. Besides, you kids are far too young to put yourselves in these situations. You came here to learn how to fight, not get killed before your first midterm. I had better not catch wind of any of you leaving campus to engage in battle. Do you hear me?”
The orphans nodded, all except Milo and Sevarin, who gave each other grim looks. They went back to stand by the desk.
Barrel was the next to speak, and he sounded offended. “I understand you feel you have a duty, Emmanuel. What I don’t get is how you can abandon us for the sake of a former soldier who left the Forge and wants nothing to do with us.”
“I don’t blame any of you for thinking that way. But Pris Walksprite is essential to our cause. Uniting the Champions is what’s going to save you kids in the event things get really dangerous.” He took off his glasses, slipped them into his shirt pocket, and cast his cool gaze over all of them. “You’ve probably noticed by now that one of you is missing.”
“Oscar,” Sevarin said. “Where is that little scamp?”
“Oscar was not accepted into the Rogue Tail program,” Emmanuel said in his typical stern manner.
Milo smacked his fist against the writing desk, startling everyone. “That’s not fair. You said all of us would be admitted.”
Emmanuel looked down at the rug and shook his head. “He can’t phase, and phasing is essential for Rogue Tail training. I tried to convince him to join the Core Studies program, but he ran off. Andres took a levathon and went out searching for him. I’ll figure out a way to get him in. Mark my words.”
Milo shook his head and looked out the window. Across the street from the hotel, a dog lifted its leg and urinated on a decorative tree. A gray monkey lowered itself from a branch and screeched at the dog, scaring it off. That gave Milo an idea. If Oscar were anywhere right now, it would be in the forest outside the city. He once told Milo that the forest was the only place in which he didn’t feel like a freak.
“We’ll find Oscar,” Milo said, facing his uncle. “But what about you? Will you be back? Sounds to me almost like you’re saying goodbye.”
Emmanuel put his sunglasses back on. He seemed to be considering Milo’s words. Instead of a response, however, he crossed the room to the writing desk. Seeing his intent expression, Milo and Sevarin stepped aside.
The orphans watched as the magician opened a large drawer and pulled out a transparent plastic bag. It was full of rectangular white boxes big enough to hold watches or pairs of sunglasses.
He handed one out to each orphan and kept one for himself. He placed two more—presumably Andres and Oscar’s—on the desk.
“We can use these to stay in touch, but I can’t promise I’ll always be able to respond. The storms in the Northern Frontier kill almost all kinds of transmissions, both mechanical and magical in nature.”
Milo opened his box to find a layer of tissue paper inside. He folded it back to reveal a golden circlet like the ones he had seen other students wearing earlier.
“What are they?” Emma said, lifting hers and studying the pale crystal in the center. “It’s beautiful.”
Sevarin let his dangle between two fingers, studying it as if it were a ridiculous piece of women’s jewelry he would never consider wearing.
“Kinda girly, if you ask me,” he said.
Barrel placed his over his forehead, satisfied at the snug fit. “It’s just my size.”
“That’s a surprise considering how big your head is,” Owen said.
“My head houses something called a brain,” Barrel replied haughtily.
“They’re called Arabands,” Emmanuel explained. “Just released for the first time a few weeks ago. They’re still too expensive for the average buyer, but I thought each of you could benefit from having one.”
He slipped his Araband around his forehead and demonstrated how to use it. “You can touch the crystal to activate Ara. She’s an artificial intelligence that’ll recognize your fingerprint and respond only to your commands. Ara possesses a wealth of information and is always connected to the lumosphere. Just don’t wear these during an exam at school, all right?”
With a single tap, Emmanuel summoned a misty floating marble of white light from his crystal. The others followed along. Milo found that if he grabbed the light, he could stretch it into a display against his palm, complete with an operating system that showed him colorful, three-dimensional icons.
Sevarin tossed his display at the carpet, where it instantly unrolled to form a rectangular screen. A pretty brunette dressed in a uniform smiled up from the floor. Her hair was gathered in a tight, shiny bun on the top of her head. Her pleasant smile exposed a row of perfect, white teeth.
“What’s your name?” she asked Sevarin.
He answered as awkwardly as if the woman had asked him out on a date.
“Um—Sevarin Bapoto, miss.”
“Nice to meet you, Sevarin. My name is Ara, and I am at your service.”
Sevarin’s face lit up in amazement. “Wow. That is mighty.”
“Yes,” Ara agreed. “Arabands are the result of cutting-edge advances in luminotronics, courtesy of Pantheon Technologies. We summon the new gods of the digital age to make your life easier.”
Owen whispered into his palm screen. “Ara, take off your shirt.”
“Gross,” Emma hissed at him.
“That goes against my code of ethics,” Owen’s version of Ara told him.
Emmanuel clapped his hands once.
“Turn them off,” he ordered everyone. “Now. Quickly.”
Milo tapped the crystal on his forehead, causing his ball of light to shoot back into its resting place.
“These aren’t toys,” his uncle said, slipping his own Araband into his pants pocket. “They’re how you kids are going to keep in touch with each other. If one of you loses an Araband, another one of you can help locate it. I had these custom built with tracking devices, so you always know where your friends are.”
“An invasion of privacy, sounds like to me,” Barrel said. He had placed his Araband back in its box and set it on the bed.
“It’ll keep us safe,” Lily argued. “It’s not like we’re going to spy on each other.”
“I don’t know about that,” Emma said, casting a suspicious glance at Owen, who responded with a dramatic, “Hey, what did I do?”
Milo looked away from them. If only he could feel as light-hearted as his friends. But as cool as the Arabands certainly were, they didn’t change the fact that he was now blind
in his left eye—and might be for the rest of his life. How could a fancy, floating computer replace what he had lost?
“Another thing—” Emmanuel told them, “stay away from those fountains while I’m gone. I still haven’t figured them out. Everyone clear on that?”
The orphans looked at each other and nodded. Only Milo, it seemed, had a problem with this.
“But it might fix my eye.”
“Milo,” his uncle said, “stay away from the fountains. Trust me on this. They could do more damage than good.”
Milo sighed sharply and said no more. Maybe later, after his uncle left…
“Emma,” Emmanuel said, singling her out with a rather intense stare. “Remember what we talked about. Practice your Sight. Let me know what you see of our enemies.”
Emma gave a solemn nod, yet the look they shared was drenched in secrecy, as if they were communicating partly by telepathy. Milo was about to inquire when his uncle suddenly looked down at his wristwatch.
“Now, you all have classes to attend,” he said. “Milo and Sevarin, I’d like you to hang back for a moment. The rest of you…” He steepled his fingers against his forehead. “Light guide your step.”
Milo and Sevarin remained by the desk. Lily gave Milo a hopeful look on her way out. At the door, Emma threw her arms around her uncle in a tight embrace. Emmanuel responded with just as much affection, even kissing the top of her head.
“I love you very much,” he said. “All of you. And I’ll be back soon.”
“Promise?” Emma said, looking ready to cry.
Emmanuel gave her a very particular look, as if they were alone in the room. “I promise you, Emma.”
Once the others were gone and the door had shut, leaving only the three of them, Milo went and sat on the edge of the bed.
“I don’t know how to feel about this,” he said.
Sevarin sat up on the desk and rested his elbows on his knees. “Me neither. So we should just go to class, pretend everything is normal?”
“You’d better,” Emmanuel said. “But first I need you boys to do me a favor.”
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