by Lia London
Hadley started up the steps. “I think better on a full tank, you know.”
I took the hint, and we made our way inside. Mom had always made it a point to keep our fridge stocked with the best stuff so friends would come to our place to hang out. I joked about this, and the next thing I knew, Amity grabbed a pencil and paper from her purse and made a list of snacks and treats for the party. I rolled my eyes. “What do you need me for? You’ve got it all planned without me.”
“Of course we need you!” said Elizabeth.
“You’re the one everyone says ‘yes’ to,” agreed Hadley.
“Just promise me no decorations. This isn’t the prom, okay?” I went to the living room and lay down on the couch. Hadley didn’t follow, but then, he typically never left a snack bar. As I flipped through the channels on the TV, Amity snuck in and leaned her elbows on the armrest behind my head. “So, no floral arrangement or ice sculptures?”
It took me a beat to figure out she was joking. “Elizabeth means well,” I said.
“I know,” she smiled. “And this party’s worth a try. Maybe if we get enough of us together like friends, we can stop the Punkers.”
“Yeah.” Our faces were really close, and I could tell I’d turned red. “Your new haircut looks good, by the way. Nobody would ever know you burned it off.”
She looked flustered and fluffed her hair. “Not too short?”
“Makes your eyes pop,” I said, imitating that stupid fashion guy on the teen celebrity show.
“You’re incorrigible.”
“Whatever.”
“You don’t even know what that means,” she laughed.
“And you’re crazier than a fairy in a chicken coop.”
Her whole body sagged, and she got this dramatic look on her face. “What is that? Some Mage euphemism for…what? Everybody says that!”
I chuckled. “I’ll tell you later.”
She let out a big groan and disappeared back into the kitchen. I found myself smiling up at the ceiling. And then I remembered that the Superintendent was Jack’s mother.
Chapter Six: Miss Flinckey
Monday morning, I was toasting a Jammy Tart with a low flame from my fingers, and Kelsey decided it would be funny to blow it out. She tries that all the time, so I moved my finger out of her reach, but not before she’d filled her cheeks. The next thing we knew, everything flew off the fridge—magnets, pizza menus, drawings, even the cereal boxes on top. Everything. We stared at the mess on the floor, and then she erupted with laughter. She’s still at that age where spills and crashes are hilarious.
“What are you two doing in there?” called Mom from the laundry room.
“Um, I think you need to come see this,” I said, my voice shaking.
Kelsey panicked. “No! Don’t tell her! I’ll clean it up! I’m sorry!” She moved to pick up the debris, but I held her back until Mom walked in.
Mom stopped short. “What happened here?”
“Kincaid!” whined Kelsey.
I puckered my lips like I was blowing out a candle. “She Blew, Mom.”
Mom’s eyes widened. “Kelsey?” She stepped over the spills, and Kelsey cowered. But Mom hugged her. “Kelsey! You have Elemental Magic! Wind! That’s amazing, sweetie!”
Kelsey looked doubtful. “You mean I’m not in trouble?”
“Kincaid will clean up for you, honey,” she said with a glance at me.
“But Mom, I’m late for—”
“Let’s go out in the garden and try some things,” said Mom, leading Kelsey by the hand.
I looked down at the mess on the floor and knew I’d never get it all cleaned up in time. With the broom, I sort of swooshed everything to one side of the kitchen. Then I grabbed my cold Jammy Tart and my backpack and headed out the door.
I saw Amity sitting on the curb about two blocks down and assumed she was waiting for me to walk with her to school, but then I saw her holding her ankle. “What happened to you?” I asked.
“Oh, I was looking up in the sky and tripped. Didn’t even see the hole and fell onto the pavement. Good thing no one was watching. It was a graceless tribute to gravity.”
“You okay?”
“I tweaked the ankle pretty hard,” she said, holding it up toward me. “I don’t suppose you can do that healing trick again?” I tried not to pay attention to the long leg that was attached to the foot, but something got caught in my throat, and I had to clear it. She sat there, with her leg in the air and gave me a heavy-lidded look. “I promise I didn’t plan this so you’d touch me again.”
“Of course not.” I crouched down and took her ankle in my hand and could see it swelling a little. She winced until I got it comfortable, and then I healed her. We kept grinning at each other and looking away, and then looking back and grinning some more, all while I held her foot on my lap. When I was pretty sure she was good to go, I set her foot down.
Amity wiggled her foot back and forth and shook her head like she couldn’t believe it. “That is so cool,” she said. “No wonder so many Mages are paramedics.” She reached her hand up to me, and I lifted her to her feet. After testing her weight on the ankle, she shrugged. “Okay. I’m ready!”
“And we’re running late,” I said. As we reached the edge of campus, she tumbled again. I caught her before she landed in a bush. “What the—? You are Miss Clumsy today!” I looked down at the ground. “A Dirt Hole,” I said. We scanned the area, but couldn’t see any Punkers. In fact, no kids were in sight as the bell rang. “C’mon, get up.”
“I twisted it again. This is crazy,” she said. “Heal me again?”
“No.”
“What? Why not? Can you only do it once a day, or something?”
I helped her up. “I didn’t mean it like that. I want one of the teachers to know about this, though. Let’s get you to the office. Plus, we’re tardy two days in a row, and we need an alibi.”
Amity nodded, and we wrapped an arm around each other to help her hop along. At the steps, I picked her up and Flew to the landing. That gave me an idea, and I looked up. Sure enough. “There!” I pointed above the tree tops.
“Are you kidding me?” groaned Amity. “Is that Jack? I thought I heard something up there.”
“I’m pretty sure it is. That explains two ankle twists in two blocks.”
“Jerks! Doesn’t he have anything better to do than to make sure I never make it to first period?”
I pushed open the doors, and Amity hobbled inside. Instead of finding it empty, the hall was filled with kids sitting against the wall and reading their text books. Most of them looked up at us when we entered, but then went back to reading. Mr. Blakely stood over a few of them, talking to them in his stern, quiet voice, so I knew they were in big trouble.
“These are Wiser kids,” whispered Amity.
Mr. Blakely finally noticed us, and his face reddened. “You, too, Kincaid?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, helping Amity forward.
When he saw her limping, his face changed. “You’re not part of this?”
I looked at all the students’ faces. Some of them were glaring at me. “I…don’t know what ‘this’ is,” I said. “Jack Bagler was out there opening Dirt Holes under Amity repeatedly, so…”
Mr. Blakely made a guttural noise. “I don’t have time for this! I’ve got kids protesting all over the school…”
“I’ll take her to Flinckey.”
“Good idea,” he said, looking tired. He smiled weakly at us. “Sorry about that. Miss Flinckey will have you well in no time. Have her write your pass to class, and…” He paused, lowering his voice. “And maybe you two should plan on arriving at school a little earlier from now on?”
We turned toward the office, passing Wiser kids as we went. A couple of them greeted Amity. When we reached the last girl, one I knew to be a senior also, Amity signaled me to stop. She leaned down and whispered. “Hey, I get what you’re doing, Lindsey, but give Magian High a chance. If we can work toget
her…”
The girl looked at Amity with disappointment written all over her face. “You, Amity? Of all people? After what you were there and what they do to you here?”
Amity stood up and drew a deep breath. She had tears in her eyes and her lips were pressed firmly together. Without another word, she limped into the main office. I followed after her, glancing over my shoulder. I realized that the Corporal transfers were the only ones who hadn’t been complaining or forming any kind of Protest. I wondered if that was just a matter of time, or if they were way more adaptable than the rest of us.
I knocked on the door to Miss Flinckey’s office, a sort of cubicle thing along the wall to the right. The secretary looked over her glasses at us and smirked. “She’s in the faculty lounge.”
“We’ll have to get someone else,” I told Amity.
“For a healing?” asked the secretary. “Good luck with that. All teachers are either in class or helping Mr. Blakely with the kids in the hall. You need to get to class.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said.
Amity grabbed my wrist tightly and whispered, “We don’t have a pass. We need to see Flinckey.”
“The faculty lounge is up two flights of stairs,” I said, gesturing to her ankle. “I’ll have to fly you up, and I don’t know if I’m strong enough. It’s not that you’re heavy, but with the backpacks, too…” Her eyes were pleading, and I gave in. “Okay, come on.”
To my relief, the south stairs were empty, and we made it up the first flight without passing any more students or teachers. The second flight, though, led to faculty-only type things on the third floor: their lounge, storage rooms, and record-keeping stuff. By the time we got to the top, I was about ready to drop her from fatigue, but before I could, she slid out my arms and backed down a couple of steps, and with good reason. There was no floor! We could see the doors to the different rooms, and the walls of the hall stretching away, but the floor was gone. We had a perfect view of the hall one story down, complete with students reading in “protest”.
“Um…Is it normally like this?” asked Amity. “Because I don’t remember ever looking up and seeing the third floor rooms just hanging there.”
“I’ve only been up here a couple of times, but I’m pretty sure I would have noticed a missing floor,” I said. “What do we do now? The faculty lounge is over there, but I can’t fly that high off the ground.”
Amity narrowed her eyes and looked at the space that should have had pale green and gray tiles on it. “This isn’t right.”
“No kidding.”
“No, I mean it’s a ruse, a trick.”
“How can you be sure?”
“You told me yourself that Mages can’t actually make stuff disappear, so it has to be here.”
“But—”
She tugged her backpack off her shoulder and chucked it into the space before I could yell to stop. It landed with a ploff exactly where it should have—if there had been a floor. No one below indicated that they heard a thing.
“How…?”
“It’s some kind of optical illusion. Probably put there to stop us Nomers from coming up here.” She leaned, holding on to my arm, and hopped forward. I flinched, afraid she would plummet, but there she stood. She looked like she was flying. A grin spread across her face and she signaled to me that I should join her.
I took a step and felt solid ground underneath me. It was so weird. I picked up her backpack and handed it to her, and together we shuffled across the nothingness, trying not to look down, yet unable to look away from our feet. As we moved, I thought of how Flinckey always walked. Amity was right. Of course they couldn’t remove the hall. Not if Flinckey couldn’t get around without her Jump or any kind of Travel Magic.
We reached the faculty lounge and I knocked on the door. A moment later, Miss Flinckey opened it. “Well, look who’s here!” she laughed. “You made it past the invisible floor, I see. Good for you.”
“Can we come in?” asked Amity, eyeing the solid-looking floor of the lounge.
Miss Flinckey pulled the door wider and motioned for us to sit on the green vinyl couch near the door. When she saw Amity limping, she said, “Looks like you tried to leap across.”
“Nah, this happened outside.”
“Dirt Holes. Twice,” I said.
Miss Flinckey’s smile faded. “Jack Bagler and his associates?”
“Do I need to answer that?” I asked.
In two minutes, she had Amity doing jumping jacks, all pain gone. As she searched for a stack of blank passes to get us back to class without being marked tardy, I looked around the room. “Is it true that Jack’s mom is the new Superintendent?” I asked.
She stopped searching for a second. “You heard about that?”
“Yeah, there goes the district, huh?”
Miss Flinckey didn’t answer, but her lips tightened. She finally found the passes in a drawer of one of the counters, next to plastic forks and packets of non-dairy creamer.
“How does she think generating all this animosity is going help?” I asked.
Amity nudged me with a wink. “‘Generating animosity’! Good words, Kincaid.”
“I read the dictionary in my spare time,” I said, giving her a goofy look.
Miss Flinckey watched this, half-smiling. Then she sighed and spoke solemnly. “I don’t think Mrs. Bagler cares what she generates, as long as it’s a strong feeling one way or another. Anger is easier to stir up.”
“Yeah, but love has power,” I said. Suddenly I felt like I had a Gel Ball in my throat. I still hadn’t told Amity about that whole thing.
Miss Flinckey glanced at Amity. “Yes, it’s more potent, but it carries risk, doesn’t it?”
Amity looked back and forth between Miss Flinckey and me. “What are you talking about?”
I forged ahead, figuring I’d explain later, or she’d figure out it with that genius brain of hers. “Miss Flinckey, did you really lose your Jump because you loved a Nomer?” I could almost feel Amity’s skin start crawling.
Miss Flinckey’s face lost all discernible expression. “I ‘lost my Jump’, as you say, because I loved the wrong type of person. Not because I loved a Nomer. Mage or Nomer doesn’t matter when it comes to character, does it?”
I looked at Amity. “No.”
Miss Flinckey handed us the passes and then put her hand on my arm. “Don’t waste strong emotion on people who only want to feed off your power. Good or bad emotion, Kincaid. It all requires energy. Jack and his Punkers—or Mrs. Bagler and her grown-up Punkers in pressed suits...They will do what they can to get you to spend your emotional—and thus, magical—energy.” She tapped my chest. “Don’t spend anything on them.” She set her hand on Amity’s shoulder kindly. “Invest your emotions, and you’ll find marvelous rewards.” She winked.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
Chapter Seven: The Library
Mr. Petercriss stared at Amity when she walked into Chemistry. As she turned down the aisle to come back to our lab station, he actually shouted after her. “Aren’t you going to stay in the hall with all your little friends, Miss Griffin?”
Amity and I exchanged a look of surprise, and then she spun around to face him. “Nah, I’m staying in here with my friends,” she said.
That drew a wide variety of reactions, from sneering to thumbs up. She sat down next to me and avoided eye contact with Petercriss. “Is he about to blow me up?” she whispered. I had to cover my mouth to hide my smile. “Hey, maybe he’ll waste some emotional energy hating me,” she giggled. “Wouldn’t that be funny? Was I catching what Flinckey was saying—?”
“Class, quiet down. It’s time to start. We’re diagramming various chemicals today to determine their volatility…”
We settled into quiet paper work and, five minutes later, Amity passed me a sheet filled with labeled bubbles of elements with electrons and protons.
“How do you do that so fast?”
She thumped the page with her finger,
and I looked more closely. It took me a minute to see what she was pointing at. She had drawn diagrams all right, but instead of analyzing chemicals, she had written letters to form words—a note. I read each cluster of bubbles: Do es st ro ng em oti on tr an sf er ma gi c? I nodded. We locked eyes for a long time, and I could tell she was thinking hard. Then, she got back to work, and I took the sheet she’d used as a note and crumpled it up quietly. A couple of minutes later, she passed me another diagrammed note saying we should be careful about the invitations to the party on Friday night because some of the people on the guest list were sitting out in the hall protesting.
Petercriss started down the aisle, checking students’ work. She slid the note under a blank sheet and got to work on the real assignment. I think Petercriss saw her, but when he came to look over her shoulder, he frowned and nodded. He looked at my sheet, too, and said, “I’ll give you credit for not cheating off of your partner’s work, Kincaid.”
I figured that meant I had most of the diagrams wrong, so I started checking over my answers carefully. A few minutes before the end of class, Amity slid another paper over to me. I thought, for a second, she had given me the answers, but it was a single diagram: I th ink I lo ve yo u!
My mouth went dry even as I felt my neck sweat. I took her note and folded it several times. Stuffing it in my pocket, I smiled at her. Before I got the guts to say anything, Petercriss told us to pass our papers forward. I’d only done two pages, but Amity turned in four. She’s amazing.
***
Mr. Blakely’s voice came over the speakers in the hall while everyone was picking their way over Wiser kids’ legs to get to fourth period. “Your attention please: Mr. Whittle has agreed to facilitate a discussion about the student protests. Students who wish to present their complaints are invited to go to the library now. All students who attend will be given an excused absence from fourth period for today only.”
My curiosity was piqued. As I entered the library, I saw Amity. She came up to me. “You, too, huh?” She surveyed the room. “Most of these kids are Wisers. Are the other people Mages or Corporals?”
