by Jason Letts
“I can’t believe this is how it turned out. We have to come up with a strategy that isn’t completely hopeless. Rowland, can you make sure you have some material nearby that you can work with tomorrow?” she asked.
“Sure thing. I’ll be able to make something no matter what we’re doing,” he said. Aoi didn’t respond. Turning her head away, she looked over at the group on the other side of the schoolhouse. Roselyn sat with her team in a close huddle. They laughed and joked lightheartedly. Was it really possible they were able to have so much fun? Andrew’s sudden voice brought her back to her own group.
“What should the rest of us do?”
“Anything you can,” Aoi said.
The group spent some time in silence. Nobody could muster much enthusiasm about their prospects. They discussed a few minor points, but the only thing they reached was an understanding that no matter what they were doing, Aoi planned to do it herself. The rest were supposed to do what she said without getting in her way.
After a while, they heard the sounds of Makara dice coming from Roselyn’s group and decided that everything that needed to be discussed had been. They got up to leave, agreeing to get together early before the start of the tournament to report any new ideas.
Mira waved goodbye to her teammates when they reached the big marble boulder. They continued on to the outpost to buy candy, and she couldn’t help but share in Aoi’s disappointment. Her own aspirations were wrapped up with the fate of this team now too.
As soon as she made her peace with the likelihood that things would not turn out well, she turned to take the path home, but a whispering voice came to her after only a few steps. Turning, she saw Yannick emerge from a burrow in the snow.
“I’ve got something for you. Do you have something for me?” he beckoned. He reached into his jacket with one hand and removed a thin metal disc about as wide as an orange. Mira immediately knew what it was and her eyes grew large. But she had not forgotten the words of her parents, and so she kept a cautious distance and a wary vigilance.
“Where did you get it?” she asked, looking into his shaded eyes.
“It required some traveling, but I managed to get it,” he said.
“That’s not what I asked,” Mira snapped. “Did you steal it? Are you a thief?”
Unexpectedly, Yannick began chuckling. He shook his head in amusement.
“No one takes the time to understand my business. They don’t care to look past the surface. Yes, I did steal this. I don’t always have to steal my goods, but this one I did. You still have the choice of whether or not you want to trade, but there is one more option too. Do you want to know more?”
Mira felt torn between her need for the neodymium magnet and the repulsive nature through which it had been brought to her. Anxious to delay the decision, she let Yannick go on.
“That’s good,” he said. “You might just avoid doing something foolish if you listen carefully. I can tell you right now there aren’t too many of these things around. And the shape and size make this especially rare. But I got one in my sights right away, and so I set out tracking it. It took me north of Darmen, to the high mountains where people rarely venture. I expected it to be lying on the ground, but instead this strange old man had it in his secret hideout.
“It didn’t take me long to realize that he was doing experiments on people, unnatural and sickening in nature. Get this, your little piece here was in the machine he was using on ’em. The stealing was easy enough, just waited till he fell asleep and then cut the machine open and took it out. Came back here in a snap.
“Let me tell you something, girl. Nobody would have ever found that man or known what he was doing if it weren’t for you sending me out to find this. I can’t say I stopped him for good, but I sure did a number on that machine and if he needs another one he’ll be hard pressed to find it. Giving me a chance to do this is the service you did for me, and that’s why I’ll let this thing go for just a water filter. So, yes, to answer your question, I stole it. Now you tell me if that’s a bad thing.”
Mira listened intently to his story, and it convinced her thoroughly.
“I don’t have the water filter with me, but I can get it from my house,” she said.
“Fine. I’ll be waiting outside.”
When Mira returned home, she went to get the water filter from the basement and brought it up without her parents knowing. Once outside, she saw Yannick in the bushes across the road, and she went to meet him.
“OK, so this is where you put the charcoal, and then you can run water through,” she said. They exchanged goods, each looking excited about their new possession. “There’s one more thing,” Mira added. “I want my hair back.”
Without any resistance, Yannick reached into his sack and pulled out a small piece of felt. The felt had many hairs sticking out, and Yannick ran his hand over them until one made him look up at Mira. He handed the single strand of hair over, and Mira put it in her pocket, feeling a bit strange because she had never taken such pains over a hair before.
She said goodbye to Yannick and returned home without giving her decision a second thought.
Early the next morning, all of the senior students of Dustfalls Academy gathered in the courtyard of Corey Outpost. Everyone seemed riddled with nerves. A large crowd had gathered on the grounds and the second story balcony to witness the event. The marketplace stalls had all been cleared away. Thick, gray clouds blanketed the sky above the outpost.
The courtyard had been marked into three sections with little flags that poked up through the snow. Fortst looked as domineering and stern as ever. He crossed his hands behind his back and surveyed the line of students with a grim glare.
“We will now commence the senior level Team Trial,” he barked, sounding official. “The results of the Team Trial determines the order of entry for the Final Trial in the spring. Its format is a free-for-all, with a student entering the battleground every minute. The last team to finish today will be the first to enter.
“The courtyard has been marked into thirds, and each team gets an equal amount of wall space. Your objective is for each team member to exit the outpost over the wall. But only one method of exit is allowed, and that method will not be known until your team retrieves a chest buried eight feet underground in your respective areas.
“If you dig too deep, you will crash through Corey’s ceiling, and I’m sure he will dole out the consequences for that. But, as for my rules, doing any of the following will result in immediate disqualification of the entire team. You cannot use the outpost gate until you have retrieved your chest, and only exiting over the walls using the prescribed means will allow your team to finish. You cannot hinder, through power or otherwise, the members of another team. Finally, you cannot receive aid or assistance from anyone who is not on your team.
“Your success today, and in the future, depends on how well you can work together. Now, get to your areas and we’ll wait for Corey to give us the signal to start.”
Once the students had gathered in their thirds, a deep base sound bellowed through the frozen ground. They all sprang into frantic action, digging into the snow. Almost instantly, Jeremy shouted something to his teammates.
“It’s right under here! I can tell,” he called as he ran to one corner of his field. Hearing that Jeremy had just thrust his team into a substantial lead, Aoi released a painful moan. She glanced at Mira, who helplessly scratched and kicked at the surface of the snow. Her team, like Vern’s, had no idea where their chest was. They had no other option than to pick a spot at random and hope for the best.
All of the teams started clearing away the snow. Aoi told Rowland to start forming shovels, and then she started swiping big chunks of snow out from under her. Vern’s teammates kicked and dug at the snow so that he could suck it away, just as Will’s teammates did so that he could blow it away.
They all worked with a mindless exertion that ignored the fatigue building in their legs and arms. The crowd w
atched with enthusiasm and reverie, gauging each group’s progress, predicting winners, and sharing stories of their own school trials. Some travelers watched with a piqued curiosity, having never seen a trial similar to this.
Breaking through to the frozen ground, their progress suddenly slowed and the teams adjusted their tactics. Rowland began handing out a few rudimentary metal shovels and the team started hacking away at the ground with them. Dennis, who had already worked up a sweat, was melting the snow and beginning to soften the ground. Roselyn had stopped digging once they found the dirt, choosing instead to devote herself to singing. Her song evoked a fervor and a passion in her teammates, who dug and cut into the ground with a tireless drive.
“We have to go faster!” Aoi commanded as she flicked dirt and stones up out of her hole without checking where they would go or whom they would hit. When she did look up, she saw Chucky’s greasy, oily hands slipping around the slick shovel.
“You’re not doing anything!” she howled at him.
He looked up from his work, frustrated.
“I’m trying!”
“Try harder. Take your coat off and wrap it around your hands so the shovel doesn’t slip. Either that, or go sit against the wall and let somebody else do it.”
“But I’ll be cold,” Chucky said.
“I don’t care!” she screamed into his face.
Across the courtyard, the first signs of impatience emerged from Roselyn’s team.
“How much farther is it, Jeremy? This has got to be almost eight feet,” Mary whined through breathless exhaustion. But he didn’t respond until his group hit against a large boulder.
“I must have made a mistake. I thought this was the chest. That means it has to be way over on the other side,” he groaned. His entire team rushed to the new spot and began to dig all over again.
When Vern’s team reached what they thought was the correct depth, they decided it would be more effective to widen their hole instead of digging a new one somewhere else. Dennis, Kurt, Sophie, and Dot kicked at the walls while Vern sucked out the loose rubble.
Mira watched her captain pawing at the earth with her bare hands like it was as soft as pudding. Maniacal intensity possessed Aoi as she tore through the ground. Mira poured all of her energy into her digging, fearful that Aoi would punish her. But it was Vern’s team that struck the chest first, and the crowd joined in the team’s excited cheer.
“It’s about time!” Vern laughed. “Let’s see what we got here and then wrap this thing up.” Together with Dennis, he ripped the chest out of the ground, and everyone crowded around at the bottom of their hole to see what it contained. The chest had a thick lock on it, and the team puzzled over the best way to open it.
The other teams quickly realized there was more to this chest than they thought after Vern’s team had been silent for some time. All of a sudden, his team emerged from the hole carrying the chest over their heads. They carried it up the large stairs to the second floor and rounded the corner to get to their area.
“You guys hold it up, but make sure I’m the one to push it off so it collides with the ground at the right angle,” Dot said.
Furious that her team was losing, Aoi took an angry swing at the dirt and her hand collided with the chest. She instantly yanked it out and spied the heavy lock. Over and behind her, the team could hear a loud crash. Aoi looked at the lock and then she looked at the wooden frame with its metal linings. Without a moment’s hesitation, Aoi punched through the wooden frame.
“Where is it, Jeremy? How could they have found it before us?” Will called with an angry inflection. Roselyn noticed the meager progress Jeremy had made.
“He’s deceived us,” she whispered from the top of the hole. She turned her head to survey the remaining area. It seemed like such a massive expanse of blind hopelessness now. Carrying a smug and satisfied expression, Jeremy wiped his hands on his pants and abandoned his work.
“How could you!” Will growled through clenched teeth as he gave Jeremy a shove against the dirt wall. When Jeremy got up, centipedes and ants crawled around from his back. They complimented his wicked grin and taunting eyes.
Vern’s team raced back down the stairs to find the chest had fractured against the ground. They kicked at it and quickly broke their way through. Sticking his arm in, Vern began pulling out the contents. Handing them over to Kurt, he delivered a carrot, a scarf, a corncob pipe, and two pieces of coal. They raced out of the hole to get to work on escaping over the wall, but they realized the mistake they made when they got to the surface.
“Dennis, you melted all of the snow!” Dot moaned, looking around at the bare ground covering more than half of their territory.
“This way!” Vern called to his team. He stopped and gave directions to Dennis. “You need to cool down. Take a rest for a bit and then come when you can warm the snow but not melt it. We need it packy, OK?” Alongside the rest of his team, Vern sprinted through the gate into the snow-covered field in front of Corey Outpost.
Aoi found the same items in her chest, and she barked at her team to start rolling snow and piling it up against the wall. The snow they had already moved gave them a big head start over Vern’s team.
The students on Vern’s and Aoi’s teams packed and pushed the icy snow together. The snow, however, refused to pack because it was too cold to carry moisture. The more they tried to pack the snow, the more it slid down and sloped outward.
“We’re gonna need a lot more than this!” said Mira, alerting her teammates. They took their shovels, ran out of the gate, and started ferrying snow back in.
While outside, they saw the members of Vern’s team turn fist-sized snowballs into hay-bail sized snow rolls. Like an ox pulling a plow, Dennis casually strolled a few feet in front of his teammates, who harvested the snow, and directed it back through the gate toward their section of the wall. Before long, several such rolls as tall as any of the students lined the wall in Vern’s area.
The peak reached the second floor walkway, which the students realized they would need to incorporate into their pile and have it lead up to the top of the wall. As long as they had enough snow it would be possible to run right up the side and off the edge.
“Finally! What a relief,” Roselyn cheered when her team struck the chest, but she scratched her head over how to get through the lock. “I think it’s safe to assume we have to do the same thing. Let’s start piling snow. We can still do this!” But she looked at how far behind her team was, marked by the two rising snow piles. They may have already lost.
Her area looked like a minefield, but Jeremy troubled her more than any of the holes. He sat in the snow watching the heated race between the other teams.
“Why would he want to risk finishing the academy at the bottom of the class? That would be worse than death,” she said to herself. She hurried to move the snow along with her teammates.
Across the courtyard, Mira called her teammates’ attention to a new problem.
“We should pile snow on the other side of the wall too, so we land without getting hurt!”
“Are you crazy?” Aoi responded after heaving a shovel-full of snow onto the pile. “They’re catching up! We need to get this over and done with as soon as possible!” Urgency and desperation rang in her voice, and Mira saw her glance up to the top of the heap to calculate if she could make the jump. They carried most of the snow up to the second level and packed it on from there, while trying to avoid looking at the neat and organized rolls stacking up along the wall on the other side.
Once the massive mound consumed the second floor, Aoi decided it was time to start sending people over.
“Mira, you go first! Everyone else, keep piling snow!”
The mountain suddenly looked more terrifying, but Mira swallowed her fear and took some space for a running start. From a full sprint, she leapt at it and attempted to stomp and pull her way up. She sunk into the soft snow and it felt like she wasn’t going anywhere. But the frozen clumps and
icy chunks held enough to support her climb. She felt the snow give way behind her, but she made her way up.
Her heart pounded in her chest and she gasped for air, drowning out the sound of the cheering spectators. She was all alone in an avalanche. Reaching up her arm for her next advance, it startled her when there wasn’t any snow to grab. She looked up and saw only a sea of clouds. She stood up and looked at the long drop down. The wind tossed her hair and the fresh air felt good in her heaving lungs.
She turned back to look behind her. She could see her path all the way down to the bottom, where Aoi was frantically waving her arms and telling Mira to jump. Vern’s team stacked the snow bails; it wouldn’t be long before they too made their ascent. Turning back to the drop off, she tried to convince herself that the snow would cushion her fall.
Aiming for a thick drift of snow, she jumped from the top and let gravity take over. She felt weightless for a moment, but then the ground rushed up from under her and smacked into her. Mira crashed into the snow and a raw tingle went through her body. She took a few deep breaths and then scrambled to get up.
The rest of the team hurriedly repaired the damage Mira had done during her ascent and the next climber prepared himself. Mira could hear Andrew straining and puffing before he even got near the top. Seeing him emerge, she quickly hustled out of the way. She watched him jump and then spin in the air, finally landing on his upper back.
Fearing that he had seriously injured himself, Mira rushed over to the pair of legs dangling in the air. But when she pulled him out, all she saw was a big grin on his face.
“Two down, three to go. We’re gonna win this thing!”
Together, they rushed around to the front and entered the outpost through the gate. Roselyn’s team still had a long way to go, but it looked like only one more roll would be enough for Vern’s team to make it over.
Andrew and Mira made it back to their area just in time to watch Rowland muscle his way up the mountain of snow. He furiously leapfrogged his way up, straining to make progress against the sinking snow. His ascent seemed to be nothing more than an act of pure will. But he grew exhausted and weary at the top, dropping over the edge with none of the tenacity that propelled him there.
