The Rise of Ren Crown

by Anne Zoelle

  “Of course.”

  All sorts of conflicting emotions were vibrating through him. Ones he couldn't shut me out of.

  I didn't know what I'd done, but part of Constantine's privacy, which he deeply, deeply valued, had been stripped away by my paint. Because of that, I chose not to ask him any questions about what Stevens had said.

  I curled up next to him, like he was Olivia or Neph. Or Christian, who had always run hot in the emotional category. Eventually, some of his tension released. A few minutes later, the remainder collapsed with a sigh.

  He played with a lock of my hair. “I'm not angry with you, not really.”

  “It's okay. I didn't know. About a lot of what Stevens said. And...I'm sorry you can't shut me out fully. I don't know exactly what I did to you, with my Awakening paint.”

  My ultramarine Awakening paint created for fierce protection and patterned after the eyes of the boy who had saved me.

  “Don't you?” he asked, too lightly.

  “Do you?” I looked up at him, my head next to his shoulder.

  He didn't answer.

  Between squad calls and other things, I had been working on lotus flowers, like the one Greyskull had given Axer to help heal him. I had figured that I'd need more than a few healing tokens to take with me to rescue Olivia. Neph had been extremely helpful in the draft of my first two. And as with the roses, which I also continued to create, Greyskull always mysteriously strode by me in the halls of Medical, casually passing items to help me.

  I called over the flower that I was most pleased with, letting it land softly in my palm.

  I put it on Constantine's chest.

  He picked it up and examined it, looking at all the details. “You are getting better. This one should be able to revive you, what, five percent?”

  Five percent was a lot in a battle where every bit might count.

  “Eight. To be used in special circumstances.”

  He handed it back to me carefully. I dropped it on his chest, and immediately pressed the fold in the center. The outer petals dropped down and the magic soaked into him.

  He tensed, but said nothing as the magic worked, healing the ragged edges of whatever he had done between the visit to the vault and returning here.

  “That was for you to use,” he said. “It was specifically created to work with your magic.”

  “And I've given it to you instead,” I said quietly.

  We stayed in silence for a long period of time. I let Constantine break it.

  “I don't think you fully appreciate the dirty lengths the people around you will go to for you,” he said evenly.

  “I don't want anyone to do bad things for me.” I gnawed at my lip. “But I'm trying to rely on others more.”

  “That's a horrible plan, darling. You should only rely on yourself, and me.”

  Tilting my head up, I gave him a look. “I don't want you to do bad things for me either.”

  “I'll do horrible, terrible things in your name,” he murmured, fingertips dragging along my skin.

  I sighed. “That doesn't work on me.”

  “I know. More's the pity.” He smiled and lifted a lock of my hair against his lips.

  It was the closest I'd ever felt Constantine experience contentment.

  Chapter Thirty-six: Spells and Plots

  Armed with a vial of lavender paint made during my Awakening, we arrived at the vault in time to see the back of Stevens's heels clicking away.

  Constantine said nothing as we closed the door. The unnatural lighting illuminated the space, making everything crisp and bright.

  We got everything set up like the well-oiled machine we were.

  Constantine clipped the last spell card into place. “Excellent. Let's find your old roommate.”

  “Constantine...”

  He smiled. “I'm kidding, of course.” He rubbed a fingertip across the rune he had just drawn. “Unless, you want to get rid of both of them? I'm confident the Administration would put the two of us together, if they didn't return.”

  I grabbed his hand and pulled it toward the silver candle. “Not funny. Come on.”

  It was simple really, in the end. One of those Wizard of Oz things where I had the ability in me the whole time. Paint, the connection to Olivia, the remnants of the paper balloon, the ties from the leeches, the leash so lightly stretching between us, even now...

  I would have failed at it on Tuesday, though. Without Marsgrove's fancy devices and someone else providing the horsepower, I had been too mangled to construct or find anything. But here, almost back to normal magically, the connection to my roommate popped up glittering and alive.

  “He knew I'd do it,” I murmured.

  It had been a gift, really. A weird, feral cat leaving a disemboweled bird at your door kind of gift. These three days to get to Olivia had allowed me to get better and still function—to know that Olivia was still alive.

  “What was that?” Constantine asked absently, his focus entirely taken with the arithmetic, the data, and triangulating the location based on the plots we had created before beginning.

  “Nothing,” I said quickly, not wanting to bring up Raphael and see the darkness curl in Constantine's eyes. Because gift or no gift, Raphael would kill Olivia at midnight tomorrow. It was part of the rules in this tick-tocking game.

  Constantine dragged his fingertip over the map, then tapped it on a small dot in a large surrounding area of brown. Brown meant Outlaw Territory.

  “They are in Corpus Sun. A tiny Third Layer settlement with little value.”

  “Maybe it's a terrorist base of operations?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe it is a very convenient spot on which to stage a production. Either way, we will be seeing it very soon.”

  I nodded grimly.

  Constantine pulled his finger across the brown expanse. The very large brown expanse. “However, we can't have you blasting through layers and porting across surfaces to get there, not if we actually plan to return and not be on the run for the rest of your life. Which means, unfortunately, that we are going to need a little help getting there.”

  ~*~

  Which meant it was time to tell the team what I had been up to.

  “I'm leaving. At dawn. To rescue Olivia.”

  No looks were exchanged. They all simply stared back at me.

  “Yeah, Crown. We know,” Loudon said finally.

  I hesitated. “You do?”

  “Well, not about the timing, but from the moment you started assigning us tasks yesterday, it became pretty clear what your goal was,” Lifen said dryly. “You hooked us all together, you and Price. We talk now. We're a group.” The last was delivered deliberately.

  I slumped. “I didn't want anyone to—”

  “We're a group. And all of the devices are going to have our marks on and in them.”

  “You're right,” I said quietly.

  “We are onboard, Crown. Chin up.” Lifen smiled. “The Delinquents' Club doesn't do interventions.”

  “Thanks, Lifen,” I said with a small smile. “Outlaw Territory is the thing that—”

  “Wait, what? I thought we were leaving Price's rescue to Dean Marsgrove,” Warden Wakes, a member of the Epsilon team, who wasn't quite as interconnected, said. His brows were furrowed. “I thought Jordan was joking about Crown's insanity the past two days.”

  I rubbed my sweating palms against my jeans. Time to lay it out there. “The, uh, the situation became worse Wednesday night.”

  Lifen looked dubious. “What could be worse?”

  And I told them. About Raphael Verisetti having Olivia, about Kaine dogging their trail. About my plan to go after them.

  I very carefully kept the knowledge of my own involvement with Raphael a secret between the few people who already knew.

  “Verisetti wants something,” I said, using his last name. “Maybe just to leash me up, I don't know. But this is a trade. He gets me showing up in person, I get Olivia. He lets us go.”

&nb
sp; They exchanged looks. “He's just going to let you go?”

  “He will kill her, if I don't go,” I said woodenly.

  “It's a trap.”

  “Yes. Undoubtedly. I just don't know what kind. But Ra—Verisetti doesn't lie. If I go, if I show, he will release her.” I held up my left hand and put it down on the tabletop. “That doesn't mean we'll make it out. Or even past whatever artificial boundary he has set in his mind. But we'll have a chance. We'll have something. Verisetti doesn't lie. He will kill her, if I don't go.”

  “Crown—”

  “You don't get it. He will kill her. And he's...excited about something.”

  “Excited?” More than one look was exchanged.

  “With him, that could mean that they are going to blow up the planet, or that they are being chased by demons who plan to eat them alive. I don't know. His reactions aren't normal. I'm not an expert,” I said, trying to hide how much I did know.

  “It isn't just that we are talking about Raphael Verisetti, which, hello? But the Department is going to be after you, full stop, Crown,” someone said.

  “Yeah, if Verisetti doesn't get you, the Department will,” another agreed.

  “I know. I have really cheerful options. Still, I'll take the chance over the alternative, which is certain.”

  Looks were exchanged around the table.

  “We can't let it happen,” Warden Wakes said, his voice full of regret.

  Wakes was an older mage, months from graduating, who specialized in container magic and instrumentation. He was a voice of reason, and what he said was very reasonable. We couldn't let Olivia die.

  “We can't let you go,” Wakes said.

  Warden Wakes was full of shit, and not in the least capable of reason.

  “What?” I asked, sure that I heard him wrong.

  “We can't let Verisetti control an Origin Mage, Crown. And, let's be honest here about what you are.” He gave me a look. “We all want to rescue Price, but, the cost?” He shook his head. “We can't let you go.”

  “What do you mean, can't let me?”

  “I mean—” He looked very apologetic as his hand filled with green light. “That we have to keep you awa—”

  His head hit the tabletop with a very loud thump.

  Patrick smiled. “Anyone else?” He looked around the room. “No?”

  I stared at him, then at the back of Wakes' unconscious head, then back to Patrick.

  “You want me to get rid of him?” Patrick tipped his head to the side—a sure sign he was calling someone via frequency. “Right, then.”

  “No, that's not what—” I tried to say.

  A knock on the door interrupted my protest. Patrick snapped his fingers, the door opened and two burly mages walked inside. They hefted Warden up, nodded at Patrick, and exited the room.

  “We'll wipe Wakes and let him back in on the campus-only instrumentation section. Anyone else?” The last was asked in an extremely pleasant tone of voice.

  No one responded. Utter silence permeated the room.

  “Excellent. Now, back to what we were discussing. I thought I heard you say that the situation had changed and they would kill Olivia,” Patrick prompted me.

  He never referred to Olivia by name. It was always “the Queen” or “Her Majesty” or some other grandiose reference.

  I stared at Patrick, pieces connecting sluggishly together.

  Olivia had never wanted me to meet Patrick and Asafa alone. She had gone with me deliberately and specifically at the beginning. I hadn't thought anything more of it—I had just thought she was being protective.

  “Ah, finally cluing in, Crown?” Patrick's smile was sharp. There was nothing fey about it.

  Feck Jordan, who was friends with Wakes said, “And what do we do about Warden?”

  “You are skipping subjects, ladboot,” Patrick chided in a jovial manner, but his eyes were hard. I was reminded again of the interchange with Kaine on Top Circle—how he'd looked specifically at Patrick, Neph, and Delia ignoring all the others—and of the things Olivia had said about the O'Learys back when I'd first approached the boys about their game controller.

  Looking at it from another perspective as I looked at the facial expressions around the table—and actually paying attention to social cues for once—it was very likely that Patrick was the son of some magical mobster in this world.

  Neph's hand drifted across my skin. Youngest son, came across the soft breeze of thought, not part of the family business, but still part of the family.

  Jordan didn't look pleased at being reprimanded, but he also didn't speak against Patrick.

  “We'll keep Wakes in on the campus plans—we need him for his expertise with containers—but we'll fix it so that he is left out of the Crown and Price tasks until too late,” Patrick said.

  “Yeah, and what? Are you going to do this to each of us, O'Leary?” Jordan asked. “Take us out one-by-one like your father and brothers?”

  The people around the table were all poised. The group which had come together through our defense of campus was poised on a knife's edge. Poised to break apart in the shattered fall.

  “When one of our lives is on the line, I'd like to think that wouldn't be necessary,” Patrick said, twirling a rod that he had pulled from somewhere. A number of gazes followed the progress of the slim metal piece. “We were under the initial misconception that Price would get traded in a prisoner exchange, seeing who her mother is. However, that was becoming less and less likely as I watched that hag on the feeds.”

  Patrick caught the shift in my expression and something dark, but far more pleased, took over his. We were agreed on Helen Price.

  With the additional information on Patrick, the past interactions with him took on a different tone. The puckish amusement, the general lack of seriousness, always full of confidence—the kind that came from knowing they were on top. More like...more like school was all a game Patrick was playing. One that he had every assurance he would win, no matter what he did.

  I hadn't paid keen attention to Olivia's reaction to being in their room that first time, because I'd been so nervous of how she was going to skin me for the controller. But looking back...that first interaction had had a lot of undertones.

  They were thick as thieves by the end, with Patrick calling Olivia “Queen” and “Her Majesty” and being delighted in everything. And it just made me wonder...what the devil was going on? I had missed a ton of subtext, very obviously.

  You were slightly busy, Neph said, her mental voice droll, And, quite frankly, more than anything else, your lack of reaction to all of it aided the good relations that developed. I doubt either Olivia or O'Leary are used to people just accepting them as is. A lot of preconceived notions come with their names.

  Patrick continued. “We were also under the impression that Dean Marsgrove had a chance. However, there again, we underestimated. Now, Crown is informing us of an end date, the last moves for whatever game is being played. How she has contact with Verisetti is not my concern. That she is telling the truth is.”

  He looked at Saf briefly, then Dagfinn, and finally Kita. They were a unit, the four of them, inside our larger group.

  “My father had dealings with Verisetti,” Patrick said. “After Salietrex, but before the rest. When it was not determined yet, what his plans were. We had nothing to do with Verisetti after his plans became clear. But Dominic O'Leary said much the same thing as Crown. Verisetti was slippery, sly, but not a liar. He kept the bargains he struck.”

  “Okay. So...should we discuss what is going to happen?” Will said, trying, and failing, to keep his voice upbeat.

  “The details are hazy still,” I prevaricated. Neph's fingers ghosted my skin again, giving me comfort.

  “Well, let's break them down,” Kita said, far too reasonably, in the continuing tension of the room.

  I swallowed. “Sure, okay.” I took a deep breath. “I have to escape Bellacia's notice, so I only have twenty hours to play wit
h. During that time, I have to get past the Legion and Praetorian Tarei, who is tracking me continuously. Get through an off campus arch, none of which are active. Find and go through a port to the Third Layer. Trek through Outlaw Territory to their location. Rescue Olivia and Dean Marsgrove. Travel back doing all the steps in the reverse. All before Bellacia notices that I'm gone—let's call that curfew—and all without getting caught.”

  Every face staring back was blank. Neph was a reassuring presence, but even the rest of the Alpha team, who had already known, were tense as they thought those steps through.

  “Mother of God,” someone whispered.

  “Right,” I said shakily. “Why not, right?”

  “Crown—”

  I curled my hand into a fist. “It doesn't matter. I'm going, and I'll go down trying.”

  “If you get caught,” Lifen said, and chanced a quick look at Patrick, as if making sure that her objection wasn't going to result in certain dismissal and memory loss. “The Department won't just punish you, they'll—”

  “I know.” My fingernails curled into my palms. “And that's why I started a lot of those tasks yesterday morning. Many of them are for all of you. For your protection here. Especially the ouroboros rings. I'm going to make sure they are incredible.”

  The knife-edged precipice held for another moment, then retreated. I could nearly taste it—the way the Community Magic in our group settled. Strengthened even.

  I cleared my suddenly dry throat. “I'm going to do everything I can not to let the Department take over campus due to my actions. But I'm not weighing Olivia's life against what the Department will do. We'll—you'll figure out how to kick them back to the curb, if the worst happens.”

  Silence. Then a few solemn nods. Then a roomful.

  “Any objections?” Patrick asked.

  I looked at Wakes' empty chair, then Patrick. So did everyone else. Asafa waved his hand and the chair disappeared.

  The Community Magic didn't bend.