The Protection of Ren Crown

by Anne Zoelle

  I flew toward the vortex instead.

  “Ren!” The door shut on Olivia's scream.

  Motion slowed, and the feel of the drop of paint in my mind lit the magic around me. I could see the magic, layering one thread, one line, one sheet, one slab...one upon another in an infinite sequence. I could see the possibilities of the world. And in that last moment…a possibility for myself. I flung my right hand around a glittering turquoise ward striping the air and pulled it to my chest, tangling it together with the pencil and picks in my left hand. Thrusting them in front of me, I hit the vortex as hard as if it was a brick wall and told it to let me through.

  The library screamed as I was sucked harshly inside.

  Stygian blackness, then a flash of light illuminated the gloriously mechanical and magical Hall of Locks—which I had desperately, and absurdly, wanted to visit—then darkness and another flash.

  I was painfully spit onto a textured, multi-colored floor.

  Olivia was crouched behind a padded bench on the floor—a floor that was strangely far below me. She was holding her midsection. Art glittered everywhere. We were in what appeared to be one of the deep alcoves near the atrium.

  “Liv, up here,” I wheezed.

  Her head whipped up and she stared at me in horror. The skin around her eyes bunched, her lips painfully compressed. “You idiot.”

  “I know.” I pushed roughly to my feet, coughing and spraying a mist of crimson toward the floor. Instead of splatting on the floor, though, the blood swirled around my ankles like real mist. Unease gripped me. But Olivia was alive. That was such the important part of this equation. And, hey, me too, bonus! “Where—?”

  Detonations echoed weirdly in the distance. The alcove was strangely inactive, but clay and rock littered the floor in front of Olivia's bench. Whatever the library was doing to people—turning them to stone before crushing them?—there was no blood to be seen other than that upon our skin. Unless the library was drinking down whatever fluids it spilled. And...it was better to think about other things.

  “Don't touch her!” Olivia's voice was harsh as she reached toward me, then snatched her hand back. “Stop!”

  I whipped around to see a woman walking toward me—a woman draped in beautifully mixed oils, with excitement vibrating her painted features. Ripples of her excitement flowed around us.

  Flowed around us...on canvas.

  Absolute terror crawled up my throat. I was inside the Kinsky painting. I had thought of it. I had thought of the painting before I'd thrown Olivia through the door. I'd been awash in thoughts of paint when I'd hit the vortex.

  The woman's painted hand dipped inside the folds of her dress and she pulled out a piece of paper, similar to the paper that had been held by the painted woman in Ganymede Circus. She motioned me closer, her movements elegant, but edged by anticipation. The paper pushed against the texture of the air, riffling out the colors of the piece.

  I stepped toward the woman without conscious thought, enthrallment swallowing my terror.

  “Ren, don't!”

  I turned as an explosion rocked the hall behind Olivia, cutting off any further words. Stone teeth descended from the alcove's arch. Olivia's yells had alerted the library to her presence. My heart leaped to my throat. I was not doing this again. No.

  The paint turned liquid beneath my touch and rolled up my fingers, as I grabbed for my roommate. Library air pulsed around my freed fingers in waves echoing the beat of my heart. The cuff around my wrist—the one meant to keep my magic from acting on uncontrollable urges—sizzled as the surface coating of the paint touched the edge of the flexible metal. The paint streamed upward, like rivulets of lava slicing through the final pieces of something supposed to be unbreakable. My magic burst completely free.

  I grabbed Olivia's wrist and before she could say anything, before the terror could completely form on her face, I pulled her inside, wrapping thoughts of safety around her as I did. The noises from the library turned distant.

  I could feel Olivia's terror... I could feel...everything around me. I tucked her against my back, holding onto her wrist, as I turned to the painted woman.

  The woman said nothing—she just smiled and extended her hand—but I could hear the echo of speech and nonverbal communication in the painted textures flowing and swirling around us. I carefully accepted the paper from her fingers.

  Words drew upon the page as I pulled it toward my chest.

  Over my shoulder, Olivia read the words aloud in a rasping voice. “What do you seek?”

  The woman looked at me expectantly, then motioned to the note in my hand. “Answer, magic, direction,” her paint whispered.

  “A path home,” I answered her, light-headed but certain.

  “No.” Olivia's voice held the strangest tone. “The Second Layer Depot.”

  Oils swirled around us and I struggled with the split-second decision, while uncontrolled magic surged everywhere. Trapping the magic in my mind, everything slowed, and loose drips of paint suspended in the air as others whirled around us.

  “The Second Layer Depot,” I said, concentrating on Olivia's directive instead of where my magic wanted to take us. The four words spread on the page.

  I held the paper out to the woman. She covered my hand with hers and smiled. Kinship, need, aid, her paint said. Brilliant, swirling color replaced shadowed light and her features changed, the lines of her body swirling outward into the world around her, and pulling us inside.

  Simply looking at Kinsky's paintings—both in the hall and in Ganymede—had moved me. His use of color and texture and emotion was extraordinary. But being inside that art was like nothing I had previously experienced. In the battle rooms at school, where simulations became real in the mage's mind, the experience was still the mage's own. Here...it was as if I was in another artist’s mind, blending memories and echoes of feelings together and producing new reflections with every movement.

  I kept a tight hold on Olivia's wrist even as I was overwhelmed with the world around us.

  Colors mixed with snippets of sound. I could taste our desperation to escape from the library. No, I could taste Kinsky's desperation to escape from...shadows...darkness, a collar?

  “Find it.”

  “Escape.”

  “Destroy.”

  The words were not mine, and they were not the vanished woman's, but they echoed in my head, trying to find purchase.

  Turquoise mixed with fuchsia, sea salt, and rhubarb. Tastes, sounds, and textures mixed in patterns that made sudden, ringing sense for a split second—the secrets of the universe, unraveling in a single moment, only to be lost in the next.

  Doorways formed in Munch-like whorls—brushstrokes that beckoned and repelled. No, not those. Not yet, a voice whispered in my head. The Second Layer Depot. I held the thought in the front of my mind and tightened my fingers on the paper still gripped in my left hand, and on Olivia who I gripped in my right. I didn't look back at her, in case this was a place of myth where she would be released should I turn. I moved through the paint, pulling oil along the interior path of the canvassed world. Half-expressed memories and emotions bombarded me with every movement.

  It was overwhelming. I looked at the paper in my hand, trying to concentrate on the words written there in turquoise ink.

  Whorls of a turquoise path curled in front of me. I followed it, feeling the paper tug me along.

  What if I had asked for...something else? Possibilities stirred and doorways formed and swirled apart on my sides, underneath me, overhead.

  What if I had asked for knowledge? The path in front of me abruptly changed to silver and Olivia's hand began to slip.

  No. Protection. I crushed her slipping fingers in mine and screamed The Second Layer Depot in my head.

  The turquoise path jerked back to center and a door at the end shot toward us, opening wide and swallowing us in kaleidoscopic paint.

  We flew through endless space, then were spit out, face down on a mirrored f
loor.

  Magic washed over me in a wave.

  My mirrored image in the floor morphed—teal eyes turned brown, medium reddish-brown hair shortened to buzzed black. And––

  “I'm a guy,” I said, a little panicked. My magic overloaded and sent streams bouncing around the mirrors that composed every surface of the room, and the color streams reflected a thousand times in the infinitely-mirrored reflections.

  “Shut up.”

  My magic stopped panicking at the familiar voice, and I looked over only to immediately panic anew when I saw a green-eyed, brunette male.

  “Oh my God, I sucked us into an opposite dimension.”

  “No you didn't. Shut up.”

  Olivia grabbed my arm and her magic blunted the sudden, uncontrollable surge of mine. Overwhelmed by the trek through the painting, my thoughts were completely overloaded.

  I snapped my panic-stricken lips closed. The active magic she was channeling grounded me and clued me in to other things as I touched the magic that had washed over me a moment before. I took a few deep breaths. Olivia's magic. Olivia had cast an enchantment, changing our features and rendering us males. That meant she knew where we were and thought we were still in danger.

  “Later,” she said forcefully. Even as a boy, she was the master of a tight-lipped “I will crush you, if you don't listen” expression. “I am furious with you. You are an idiot,” she said, her voice shaking a bit.

  From her bag, she tugged the control cuff that Marsgrove had given her days ago when we'd been in line to leave campus.

  God, I didn't want that on my wrist. Especially after the temporary high of complete freedom in a world of paint. But reality was quickly returning. I had to wear a cuff. I had nearly destroyed my parents' house—and everyone in it—the last time I was without one. That I might lose control and act on fleeting desires unchecked by conscious thought was more terrifying than wearing something that stifled me.

  I nodded stiffly and closed my eyes.

  When I didn't feel it clamping onto my arm, I looked to see what the holdup was. She was staring at my wrist. More importantly, at the figures drawn there.

  Two new butterflies drew forth from their cocoons, their wings touching.

  A mage's shifting tattoos showed a direct insight into her current thoughts or an important event, and were thus, highly personal. There were fringe groups on campus who preached to the freedom of showing the tattoos at all times, but the vast majority of mages kept them covered, usually by the control cuffs which were legally required to be worn in the Second Layer.

  Olivia snapped the cuff into place, her fingers shaking.

  I felt a pang as my magic abruptly settled underneath, caging the beautiful feel of unrestrained glory.

  Glory that would obliterate everything around me the moment I forgot to consciously regulate my magic. I didn't want to blow up my parents. Nor could I go bare-wristed to the government inquiry on campus that was scheduled after winter break. Heck, I'd probably be arrested the moment we stepped out of this room if I didn't have the cuff clamping my wrist.

  Olivia checked her bag twice—unzipping, then zipping it again—before nodding, satisfied. She rose, all shakiness clamped by tight control. “Okay, Reno, let's go.”

  A hysterical laugh bubbled up as I looked at our reflections in the thousands of mirrors, large and small, distorted and clear, surrounding us on the walls, ceiling, and floor. It made me deeply hungry to know how the painting worked. It had tapped into a port system somehow. “Lead on, Oliver.”

  She grimaced, then limped toward a distorted mirror made of hundreds of bottle-glass bottoms, and swiftly turned one of the circles. The door opened and we stepped into a hallway in the Second Layer Depot.

  A hundred different types of mages and strange creatures streamed by. My eyelids slid shut in relief. “Oh, thank God.”

  “Don't get giddy.”

  Alarms sounded and people cleared to the side with us as a group of mages with buckled collars shot past on a flying skiff. Heading toward the Hall of Knowledge, I'd bet.

  “Take care with your words.” Olivia's finger twitched and I looked in the indicated direction. There was nothing there for a moment, then suddenly there was—as if Olivia pointing it out had made it real. A disc on the wall blinked, a thousand eyes shifting in a thousand directions. There was something very sinister and menacing about it. “Physical spells are easily seen through if one is looking for them.”

  We turned a corner and the disc disappeared from view, but the tubes and tunnels and all of the mages and animals surrounding us were suddenly a lot less whimsical and fascinating.

  Olivia's controlled and precise magic rippled over me as we walked through the halls that ran in twisting spokes from the central area of the Depot. I felt bits of the enchantment loosening, felt my hair grow longer the farther we walked. Surreptitiously glancing at her, I noticed her eyes were almost hazel once more, and her hair was one shade off from her natural color.

  Mages in battle cloaks strode past, and chaos burst around us as people opened feeds and holograms, trying to see what was happening. My gaze fixed upon one group of soldiers in particular, and one mage in particular. Ultramarine eyes narrowed on me and I couldn't breathe until we turned the corner and I lost sight of Alexander Dare.

  Two hall turns and three large crowds later—all filled with melees of magic, chaos, flying vehicles and creatures—Olivia and I were female again.

  As we moved closer to the main room in the Depot, where the First Layer Checkpoint was, I found it harder to breathe. There was no way Dare had recognized me. And with Olivia's magic, no way was anyone tracking us. No way.

  “Hurry and keep up.” Olivia smoothed her hair. “We need to check most of our magical equipment in a locker and I will not be late returning to your house.”

  I wanted to talk about the mages in black cloaks. About us nearly getting eaten. About the vortex and door. About being engulfed in the painting.

  She shot me a hard look and I nodded sharply to indicate that we would wait until we were home. Safer.

  Everything would be fine.

  My new metallic cuff glinted under the magical lights of the Depot.

  Control had been washed away by paint, like everything else in my world. But apart from my previous control cuff, everything else had survived—Olivia, her bag, my bag, the ward papers.

  We were fine.

  I looked at the walls with their hidden discs and at the occasional person dressed completely in black with a gaze far too keen. I pushed against the pit in my stomach that said we were anything but fine.

  Chapter Two: Two Worlds Into One

  “Ten minutes to dinner, Ren, Olivia, dear!” Mom's voice came from downstairs.

  Olivia's expression turned unreadable at the “dear” on the end of Mom's statement, but she merely said, “Thank you, Mrs. Crown,” in her coolly polite voice, raised just enough to reach downstairs at the perfect volume.

  Three days in the non-magical world at my parents' house had showcased Olivia as the perfect guest. However, my parents, who were used to Christian's rowdy friends, weren't quite sure what to do with my utterly poised and coldly polite roommate who acted far more like a thirty-year-old than one only a few months past eighteen.

  I drew my fingers along Christian's burial sketch that Olivia had slipped through the checkpoint for me our first day here, and took strength and solace from the flowers within the sketch that swayed with vitality on top of the burial mound, waving along with the gentle, interior breeze.

  The winter sun had set in the aftermath of the afternoon's life-and-death situation, and evening, family time, and sorrow were now upon me.

  I had never experienced a birthday the way most children did—where one special day was mine alone. And I wished with everything in me that I wasn't experiencing it now. That I didn't see my parents' smiles stretched and overly happy every time our gazes met—as if trying to remind themselves to be joyful of the fact that a
t least one of their children had lived to be eighteen.

  I carefully put the sketch on my pillow and sat on the edge of the bed. I repeated the phrase from Dealing with Death for the hundredth time—grief took time, not magic—and focused on Olivia while itching the skin around my new cuff.

  “Stop touching your cuff,” Olivia said, without looking. “You don't need magic here. Concentrate on that. It is required practice for Second Layer magic users to spend extended periods of time in the non-magic world. Anyone too reliant on magic never has the sense to use their brain first.”

  Having said that, the container of magic Olivia refilled each day was only an inch away from her hand. But I understood. Magic had become so much a part of my life in the last few months that having it repressed completely was a strange and unwanted feeling, and one I didn't want her to have. Knowing that she could get out of trouble, if needed, made me feel better.

  We had attached the hard-won new wards to the walls as soon as we had returned, then escaped from my parents to discuss our disastrous afternoon.

  Olivia had never directly addressed my magic's proclivities...and even now she didn't directly say why I had been able to access Sergei Kinsky's painting. As if saying Origin Mage aloud would make it real.

  We had found out after we had arrived back home that a dozen public libraries and museums across the Second Layer had been simultaneously attacked. The news feeds hadn't disclosed what was missing, if anything, but it was noted that all of the affected institutions contained Origin Magic collections.

  Perched rigidly on my desk chair, Olivia observed the muddy paint, ink, and chalk that my magic had hideously mixed in the destruction of my room's artwork when my magic had awakened nearly ten weeks ago. The mediums had pooled and dried into a barfy brown at the base of my walls. Years of artwork destroyed in a ten-minute blitz of painted bloodletting.