by B. C. Palmer
“No,” I said quickly, and a bit loudly only because her hand rose just slightly as if she might pop them in at the same time. “No, that would be very bad. The white pellet is to initiate the effect, the black one is to shut it back down.”
“Oh,” she said. “Good to know.” She picked up the white pill.
“Wait,” Lucas said, smiling as he chuckled and put a hand on hers. “Not yet. You want to wait until sundown. Alchemy is touchy like that. Then, make sure and set a timer, and take the black pill about half an hour before sunrise.”
“That’s—” I started, but was silenced when Lucas looked at me with desperation. I covered it by clearing my throat but not very well, I thought. He owed me. “That’s correct. Sunset tonight will be at seven thirty-five. I’d recommend taking the white pellet about seven forty. Sunrise tomorrow will be at around seven twenty, so, for safety’s sake, you should take the black pellet around seven. Or earlier, even.”
“If you like,” Lucas said, “we can stay up with you. Help you study.”
Amelia considered the pellet a moment longer before she folded the paper back around both of them and tucked the packet into the pocket of her blazer. “Well, I was planning to haunt the library,” she said. “Is it okay to drink coffee with these things?”
“Should be just fine,” I said with a shrug.
“I’ll make a carafe and bring it along,” Lucas offered. “So? Is it a date?”
I was of two minds about being with her while she was in that state. On the one hand, I did have panacea available, in the event that she was sent somewhere terribly dark—which was possible depending on what had happened to her in her life, especially taking the substance at night, when the memory would be open to repressed and hidden information in the subconscious.
On the other, the guilt might eat me alive.
“I suppose,” Amelia said slowly, “assuming you can both behave yourselves? I really do need to get all of this into my brain, and I don’t want to waste any time with ‘lessons’.” She curled her fingers in air quotes. “Deal?” She was adorable and I kind of hated Lucas at that moment. And myself.
Lucas crossed his heart. “Absolutely.”
She looked to me, eyebrows raised, a bit of a wry smile playing over her lips. I knew that look and wished I was in the mood to return it. “You have my word.”
That settled, she stood. “All right then. I’ll see you after dinner tonight?”
“We’ll walk you to the library,” Lucas said.
She stood and went to collect her books.
“Leave those,” I said. “We’ll take them. No sense in hauling them around, and you should take a little break between now and then. Let your mind rest.”
Amelia never seemed to like taking help she didn’t ask for, but in this case she relaxed a bit and gave us a nod. “Okay,” she said. “I’m not gonna pretend they aren’t heavy. Um… thank you, Isaac. And you, Lucas. I appreciate it.”
She bent and gave me a kiss on the cheek. It lingered after she stood, and she gave Lucas the same gift before she left the room, closing the door behind her. We both watched her go and waited for her footsteps on the floor outside to recede.
I shot Lucas a pained look. “Must we really do this?”
He waved a hand. “She’ll be perfectly safe. We’ll be with her. I know you don’t like subterfuge, Isaac.” He took my hand and kissed my knuckles. “I’m sorry to put you through it. But this could be our one shot. The more time that passes…”
“I know,” I said. “I know. And it pains me to think that Hunter could be right; that Nathan might be out there, somewhere, suffering. I have nightmares.”
Lucas cupped my cheek with his hand, the one Amelia had kissed. “Yeah, I’ve seen them. Me too. We’ll be careful, and take care of her.”
“If we told her,” I said, “it would be easier.”
“We will,” he promised. “We just can’t do it yet. After this, if she remembers something. I want to be careful with her.”
“Should we invite Hunter?” I asked. “So he can be there if she remembers anything important?”
Lucas’s hand dropped away and he flopped into his chair. “How’d he react to you before?”
I sighed. “Not well. But if we need to pull her out faster than the medicine will allow, it would be good to have him there.”
Lucas nodded. “Fair enough. Ask him; see what he says. But either way, we’re doing this. Yes?”
I stood and gathered my blazer to go find Hunter. More than likely, in his room. “I don’t see that there’s any turning back now,” I said as I stalked out. “May the gods forgive us.”
Amelia
I watched the clock in the dining room as I ate some kind of French chicken I couldn’t pronounce easily. Whatever else the Academy might be guilty of, bad food wasn’t on the list of my frustrations. The clock ticked down to seven thirty, and I had finished devouring the savory food. I looked for Lucas and Isaac, the packet of alchemical study aids Isaac had given to me already burning a hole in my pocket, itching for me to take them.
But, I gathered that alchemy was as tricky as any other kind of magic. It was best to follow Isaac’s instructions.
I found them at the sophomore tables, but they seemed to be involved with a conversation that I didn’t want to interrupt. I could just meet them at the doors when they left. Except, as I turned to leave, Lucas called for me.
“Amelia! All done?”
I turned to find him grinning at me, and approached him and his group of friends. “Amelia, these are Charles, Layla, and Melissa. This is Amelia, brand new to magic.”
Three unfamiliar faces appraised me and shot knowing looks at Lucas.
“Pleasure,” Melissa said. She had dark, short hair and a thick bar of black eyeliner on her eyelids. “Welcome to the Academy.”
I wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic or not, so I smiled as pleasantly as I could. “Thanks. I was happy to learn it wasn’t for stage magic.”
The other two, Charles and Layla, giggled into their hands and shared a look that I swear was more than just a glance. There was a strange pause in which they froze before turning back to their food with barely suppressed smiles.
“Those two are telepathic,” Isaac said. “I swear, sometimes they forget the rest of us need to use our words.”
“Happy to,” Charles said. “If you really want.”
Lucas stood from the table, his cheeks tinging pink. “And on that note, we should go before Charles and Layla embarrass us too badly.”
“Nice to meet you all,” I said and made room for Lucas and Isaac to get past me as we walked to the courtyard exit. I leaned into Lucas. “What was that about?”
Isaac snorted. “Layla’s a particularly talented seer, with a minor in telepathy. Charles is the opposite. Probably they caught a look at some of Lucas’s thoughts. Or mine.”
I started to ask what would have been embarrassing about that but it took me about another second to do that math on my own. “Er… so they know about…?”
Lucas took my hand and hooked it casually through his elbow. “One day, it’ll really settle in for you—everyone here pretty much knows everything about everyone. Once you’ve got the requisite language skills, I’ll show you the necessary spells to keep your mind and other business private, but until then you may as well just get used to it. On the one hand, it makes everyone here kind of like a very big, very open, very non-judgmental family. On the other, well… you get to realize over time that everyone is just as weird and perverted as you are.”
“So was anyone watching when we, you know…?” I found myself a little uncomfortable even now, as if there were a hundred pairs of eyes watching me from all directions. I looked around, trying to see if anyone was staring at me in disgust.
Lucas only nudged me gently with a shoulder. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Anyone looking on could only have been envious.”
“You think a lot of yourself, don’t you?” I asked.
My arm felt comfortable in his, I realized, as if it fit there naturally.
He laughed and his eyes sparkled as he smiled at me. “What makes you think I meant envious of you?”
There was no good response to that so I kept my mouth shut. The last of the sunlight was beginning to fade, but there were still another ten minutes until I was safely on the other side of dusk. I changed the subject before things got out of hand which, I suspected, they would if I let Lucas have his way entirely. “I recall you promised a carafe of coffee?”
“Already there,” Isaac said. “Along with a surprise guest. You’ll never guess who we managed to cajole out of his cave.”
I couldn’t have, and shook my head, pinching my eyebrows quizzically. “Who?”
“Don’t be alarmed,” Lucas said, “but we managed to convince Hunter to join us. To help study.”
Isaac stared straight ahead, and when I glanced up at him his jaw was tense. Something didn’t sit right with that.
“Why?” I asked. “And how? I was pretty sure he only left for classes, and I’m not convinced I’ve seen him eat.”
“Isaac impressed upon him the importance of helping a fellow student,” Lucas said, guiding me through the halls.
“Something like that,” Isaac agreed.
I puzzled over that. I knew there was some kind of water not yet under a bridge between Lucas and Hunter. The exact nature of it was a mystery, though. Besides that, however, was the fact that, as far as I could tell, Hunter not only didn’t like me—he specifically disliked me, a small issue I hadn’t managed to figure out or remedy and had honestly been so busy that I couldn’t give it enough thought to change anything.
“Hunter,” I repeated. “My roommate, Hunter? That Hunter? Angry giant Hunter?”
Lucas chortled. “I’m going to tell him you said that. That’s a good one. On the nose.”
Isaac gave Lucas a long-suffering eyeroll and pulled open the doors to the west wing hallway. “Don’t antagonize the man, Lucas.”
“I’m still not clear on why you invited him,” I said as I walked with Lucas through the doors and we turned toward the library with Isaac.
“Hunter’s fluent in Akkadian, Sumerian, and several African languages,” Lucas supplied. “You’ve got twelve hours, give or take, so we figured you may as well make the most of it.”
I wasn’t sure how long that made the list, but something about cramming that much information into my neurons seemed… not entirely safe. “Are you both sure this is okay?” I asked. “I mean, safe? From what I know about the brain, it seems like it’s a bad idea to go shuffling a billion new connections around my cortex, you know? Maybe I should stick with one language at a time, take one a weekend?”
Isaac shook his head as he held the door to the library open. “You’ve really just got the one chance every six months or so. Alchemy is safe when administered thoughtfully, but there are some minor short-term side effects. It’s best to let it process out of your system entirely before employing it again. Taking another dose of this stuff too soon probably wouldn’t be catastrophic, but it might be uncomfortable. Imagination could become new memories, you might drag up some ancestral memories from your DNA—and only the really traumatic stuff actually gets written into the proteins, so it would all be bad. Animal attacks, spiders, snakes; all the stuff we’re sort of instinctually wary of.”
“Awesome.” I began to wonder if maybe this was a bad idea after all. “But none of that’s going to happen tonight?”
Isaac turned away to close the library door behind us, even though it would have closed itself. When he turned around, he wouldn’t look at me. Instead, he scanned the bookshelves. “No. Nothing like that. Ah, we put your books on a table in the back. I’ll see if there’s anything else I can pull. You two go on.”
Lucas led me to the spread of tables at the very back of the library—where, as promised, there was a tall metal pitcher and the faint scent of coffee—while I looked over my shoulder at Isaac as he disappeared into the languages section. “He seems nervous.”
“Oh, he’s just a nervous sort,” Lucas said. He let my arm go finally and pulled a chair out for me. “He made the pellets himself, and I would trust my etheric body in the hands of his alchemy without question. Isaac is talented, almost a prodigy. Alchemy is his primary path. Still, he’s plagued with self-doubt like all the greats are. He’d hate to be responsible for harming you, but I assure you that’s just his perpetual sense of inadequacy, no doubt instilled by his father.”
I arched an eyebrow at Lucas as I pulled the textbook on Attic Greek to me. That one would be first, in case I had to stop or something—I wasn’t going to pass my thaumaturgy class without it. “Not a problem you suffer from.”
“Not even a little,” he said, chipper as he took a seat in the chair opposite me and leaned it back precariously on two legs. He grinned and winked at me. “I’m definitely a prodigy, and I know it.”
“And what’s your path?” I asked.
His tongue slipped over his bottom lip suggestively as he wet it and folded his arms over his chest. My face turned traitor again, heating up as the memory of his lips against my skin ghosted over me. “I’m a dual-mage,” he said. “Two paths. Enchantment, which is—”
“Laying persistent spells on objects and people,” I said, “I did read the primer.”
“Well, then I suppose you know what sex magic is then, too.”
I didn’t mean to bite my lip, but I did, and harder than I meant. Lucas chuckled suggestively, and Isaac appeared around the edge of one of the shelves with four more books in his arms. Mara followed behind with three others.
My eyes widened as they delivered the tomes. “Uh… even if I remember everything perfectly,” I said, “how am I supposed to read all of this?”
Mara opened a book to a random page and picked it up to show me. I barely got a look before she snapped it shut. “What do you remember?”
“Nothing,” I complained, “I didn’t have enough time to even see what book it was.”
“When you take the pellet,” Isaac answered, “you’ll have a perfect memory. You don’t have to waste time processing what you’re reading, you just need to monitor your thoughts a bit as you flip through books, and take a short break when you feel overloaded. Your unconscious mind handles the rest. Even that page is in your memory somewhere now, perfectly preserved—more or less. You’re just not aware of it. With the right prompting, you’d recall details automatically. It’s seven forty-seven now.”
I peered past Isaac as Mara retreated, searching. “Where’s Hunter?”
“He’ll be here,” Isaac said. “He’s almost never on time. For anything.”
“Ready?” Lucas asked.
I took the paper packet out of my blazer pocket. Lucas muttered a spell—Pressman’s Mug—and conjured a translucent copy of the mug that a magician named Edgar Pressman had once shunted into the ‘ideal world’. It was in the primer, but I hadn’t mastered it. Lucas poured me a cup of coffee and passed it to me. Already sweetened and the right amount of cream, the way I liked, which might have been him paying attention or might have been the product of an enchanted carafe. Either way, I popped the white pellet into my mouth and washed it down.
“Now what?” I asked.
Isaac sat down next to me. “Now we wait. You’ll know when it’s working.”
And in about five minutes, I certainly did.
Lucas
Isaac and I had both taken the memory formula before, so both of us knew the look when we saw it. Amelia’s eyes widened by degrees until they actually looked bigger on her face than was natural. She gazed around the room, a look of amazement overtaking her until she finally let out a quiet laugh. “Eight hundred and thirty-seven books,” she said. “From right here, I mean. Lucas—you’ve got 28,072 hairs on your face. That I can see. Holy… wowsers. Fuck, this is crazy.”
“Book,” Isaac instructed and flipped the Greek textbook open to page one. “Just look at
each page, give it about a second.”
Amelia nodded excitedly and scooted closer to the table to look at the page. She began turning them as he’d suggested. “I wish I’d had this when it came time to study for the SATs,” she muttered. “I would have—oh, wow, I can remember every single question and answer. Shit, I knew I gave the wrong answer to question eighty-seven in the math—god, Mr. Canner actually aged like five years from freshman year to senior, I never noticed before, and… did he get divorced sophomore year? He stopped wearing his ring, it was—”
“Focus,” Isaac urged and tapped the book. “Don’t get lost in the memories, you’ll go down a rabbit hole. Next page.”
“I see what you mean,” Amelia said. “Good thing you’re here. Okay… okay, page sixty-four.”
With occasional prompting, she kept turning pages. By the time she was almost done with the book—around six hundred pages—Hunter finally showed up.
He looked surly—which was always true these days—and had his big hands jammed into his pockets.
“Hunter,” Amelia said without looking up. “I recognized the sound of your breathing, isn’t that crazy? Everyone’s breath is like a fingerprint; I never realized before.”
Isaac tapped the remaining page of the Greek book. “Focus, Amy.” His voice had softened. Amelia would realize later, most likely, how much affection the man had in his eyes for her.
She gave a nod and turned the page.
“Just started?” Hunter asked.
I nodded, not wanting to distract Amelia by speaking while she absorbed the textbook, and pushed a chair out with my foot.
Hunter glanced at it, then at me, and turned away to sit at another table entirely, waiting, and looking unhappy about it. Isaac spared him a look as well, but Hunter only turned his face away, hands clasped on the tabletop.
At about this time, Amelia was no doubt absorbing every sensory detail in her vicinity. She might not track it all at once, but it would stick with her. Memories made under the influence of the Memento Vitalis formula had a special kind of quality to them—they stuck with a person, etched forever into both neurons and the mental body itself, where it gradually soaked into the subconscious mind like tea into water. I didn’t envy the headaches she’d have, but they only lasted a few days and it wasn’t anything a few ibuprofen wouldn’t take care of.
