by B. C. Palmer
I sat up, slowly, with Hunter’s help. Someone pressed a cup into my hand and I drank the lukewarm water in one go to wash the taste out of my mouth. When it was gone, I finally opened my eyes and wished I hadn’t. Even the dull light of the library was painful. I held the cup out, and someone took it. Hunter was in front of me, peering not into my eyes but at them. “Pupils are normal,” he muttered. “Get more water, she’ll be dehydrated almost. Amelia? Try to focus on my finger.”
I followed the tip of his finger with my eyes. It was difficult, and my eyes crossed a few times, creating two ghostly images instead of one solid, thick finger. He didn’t look pleased by that. “We have to get her down to rest,” he said. “Have another cup, and we’ll get you back to the room.”
Another hand, softer and shaking slightly, took mine and pressed a cup into it. My thoughts were finally starting to settle out of the cloud of dust they’d been in, back into the lakebed of my brain where they were supposed to be. I drank the second glass and finally risked looking around to see Lucas and Isaac both nearby, deep lines of concern around their mouths and eyes.
“Are you okay?” Isaac asked.
“No,” I croaked. “No, I’m not okay, Isaac. I think… I think my parents tried to abort me. And I think maybe they had a good reason.”
Hunter
I didn’t doubt that Mara would report us. I just wished there would be actual consequences. In the end, though, it would just be a slap on the wrist and a warning—probably for Amelia—to be more careful with things like alchemy. The faculty almost never intervened directly. After all, the Academy’s motto even encouraged recklessness. Intellegere, Audere, Voluntar.
To comprehend; to dare; to be willing.
Amelia managed to get back to our room on her own feet with my help and Isaac’s. Once I laid her down and got her blanket over her, Isaac stood nervously by the door while Lucas pulled a chair out as if he thought he would sit and wait for her to wake up.
“You should go,” I told him. “I’ll watch over her. You’ve done enough, I think.”
Lucas glanced up at me but couldn’t hold my gaze. When his eyes dropped, he stood from the chair. “I know you don’t agree with it,” he said, “but you heard her back there. She learned something. She knows something about what happened even if she doesn’t understand the context. When she wakes up, we have to ask her. If we don’t, we may never know what Nathan was trying to do.”
I wasn’t prepared to tell him he was wrong about that. I had Nathan’s notes, every book he’d been studying that was still available at least—some had been taken out of the Academy altogether—but there were giant holes in my understanding. No context to give some of his research meaning. Getting it from a girl who’d been a magician for two weeks, who had no idea where she really came from, though, seemed almost cruel. “Did you ever think that there are some things it’s better not to know?”
Lucas turned on me and peered at my desk, overflowing with books and piles of notes. Crumpled paper filled the bin with failed theorems I hadn’t yet burned to keep the faculty from finding them. To say Nathan’s research was against the Academy’s statutes was likely an understatement. “Did you?” he countered. “Don’t lecture me on seeking out dangerous knowledge.”
“Dangerous to yourself is one thing,” I told him, and Isaac, sweeping my eyes to include both of them. Isaac should have known better. He used to, at least. “Dangerous to someone who didn’t ask for it is another. Leave. I’ll talk to her when she wakes up.”
Isaac looked like he might argue, but instead put a hand on Lucas’s shoulder. The gesture was tender, and familiar. I turned back to my desk so I didn’t have to see them leave together. The stab of pain wasn’t unexpected as it twisted my gut, but it was certainly unwelcome.
I should have known better, should have put a stop to it before it started. It was as much my fault as theirs that Amelia had gone through… whatever it was she’d gone through. That guilt threatened to chew a hole in my stomach, and I attempted to distract myself with my and Nathan’s notes, searching for correlations in the next book on my list to make sense of whatever madness took him before he killed himself. If, indeed, that’s what happened. I had my doubts.
It took Amelia two hours to finally stir. When she did, it sounded painful.
“Hunter?” she asked, groggy, wincing against even the faint light of my desk lamp.
I turned it further away from her and stood one of the bigger books up to shade her eyes from it. “You’re in our room,” I told her, in case she was disoriented. It was possible. Even after purging her system of Isaac’s alchemy, there would be a come-down window as her mind put itself back together in the right order.
Something about her made me want to be like the old me. The one that would brush her hair out of her face and tug her close. The one that would be selfish, who would answer the questions I saw in her stolen glances. I could show her a different vein of magic than this stilted and controlled version they taught here at Rosewilde. I clung to that control now after everything that had happened. It was the only thing keeping me together.
She rolled onto her side and pulled the blanket up to her chin, squinting at me. “How long did I sleep?”
“Only a couple of hours.” I hated that part of me itched to ask what she remembered. Instead, I turned back to the notes. “You should go back to sleep. Rest. You’ll feel better in about a day.”
“Not sure I want to,” she said. “I was having dreams. Not good ones. What did I… what happened to me back there?”
I ignored the question. “Better that you rest, Amelia.”
“My mouth tastes like someone shit in it,” she complained.
“Never had a hangover before?” I asked. I felt my lip twitch upward. Talking with Amelia was like poking a new bruise—it hurt, but in a fascinating way. She threw me off-center, only enough to be noticeable, but it was a distraction I didn’t need.
She groaned, and I couldn’t help looking over to see her rubbing her temples. “Not like this. And I didn’t even drink anything. Is alchemy always like that?”
“Pretty much.” I focused on writing down a note, but not anything important, just to get the point across that I wasn’t going to have a conversation.
Amelia seemed determined, though. She crawled up the headboard into a sitting position and continued to rub her temples. “I remembered things,” she said. “Are they… does that memory pill or whatever—does it cause hallucinations? I mean like fake memories. Isaac said there were dangers to using it.”
“Isaac would know,” I muttered. “He’s the alchemist, not me.”
“They felt real.” She hugged herself, and stared at her palms. “I think my skin is leaking.”
I put the pencil down and turned to her, but the irritation that I tried to muster didn’t quite make it to the surface. Something about the uncertainty in her made me remember who I used to be. Before everything went to shit. “You went too deep,” I said. “Got lost in the… place before birth. Primordial memories, stuff you’re not ever supposed to actually recall. Once time and space are out of the equation, it’s… instead of a memory chain, one thing linked to the next or the one before, it’s all happening at the same time. You can’t navigate, so you can’t get out of it. You have to either wait until the effect wears off, the antidote kicks in, or you have to purge the substance from your system forcefully. It looked like you were too far gone, so I used Maimonides’s Fifth Purge to cleanse your system. It’s meant for poisons but it works just as well on other substances with a minor alteration.”
She stared at me, frowning. “Uh… thanks, then. Is that what I was remembering?”
This was where I should have told her to go back to sleep, more forcefully, or even helped her along. I knew at least one sleeping spell, but she’d probably had enough of that kind of thing for the week, if not the month. I couldn’t help wanting to know, though. “I don’t know. You were incoherent. Do you remember anything?”<
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Her eyes grew distant, haunted, and she gave such a slight nod that I wasn’t sure her head had actually moved. “I think…”
“If you want to talk about it,” I offered, the words coming out on their own.
Amelia shuddered and pulled the blanket closer.
“I can heat the room if you’re cold,” I said.
She pressed her lips tightly together and looked troubled. “The kind of cold I’m feeling, I don’t think you can warm it up. My parents didn’t want me. They talked about aborting me—they tried to abort me. Something about… they tried not to have a baby but ended up having one anyway. They promised someone, some woman, that they would. They argued a lot, and after I was born… I don’t think my father was around much. And my mother seemed sad all the time. And then there was… before.”
She took a shaky breath and closed her eyes tight, maybe against the memory. They would fade again, soon enough. She might remember her early childhood forever, but the other things—the pre-birth memories—those weren’t meant to be contained in the flesh. They would evaporate back to where they belonged in about a day.
Which meant there wasn’t much of a window to learn what disturbed her so much. Gods help me, was I any better than Lucas? I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my palms. “I can write it down if you like,” I said. “Soon, you won’t remember any of that. If you’d rather forget—”
“No,” she said quickly. “No, I don’t think I should. Forget, I mean—it felt important. Or, maybe it’s always like that? I guess I wouldn’t know. What’s supposed to happen before birth?”
I shrugged. “Not my field. You’d have to talk to one of the necromancers, but I think they deal mostly in what happens after death more so than before life. What was it for you?”
“Black,” she breathed softly, before she met my eyes. “Like before the first lights turned on. It wasn’t emptiness, though. Not like space. And there was something there with me. I could feel it pushing me into this world, forcing me somewhere. My mother’s womb, maybe. Not physically, of course. There was this spark on the other side, like a pinprick of light reaching the bottom of the ocean. The thing is… Hunter, I could swear the darkness spoke to me. I didn’t understand what it was saying but I think it was telling me what to do? Like it had a whole plan laid out for me, but it only had a short time to give the instructions. It felt urgent, rushed. Like… fuck, I don’t know. Does that sound crazy?”
The more she spoke, the colder I got. A chill seemed to fill the room, even though I knew the temperature was constant; I’d laid the spell myself. I kept my face impassive. “When it comes to magic, nothing sounds crazy.”
Which was true. But if I didn’t know better, I’d have thought she was telling me that her soul—or at least some part of it—had been handcrafted in the Abyss itself. And that it happened because of something her parents did.
But Nathan wouldn’t have been trying to open up the Abyss. He’d grown obsessive but never truly mad. Not to that extent. Had he?
I turned back to my notes, a new lens seemingly slotted behind my eyes that I couldn’t pull out. All the texts on Abyssal magic were kept securely somewhere that no student would have access to, and hardly any of the faculty for that matter. It was strictly taboo, the sort of thing that could end the world—or worse. Unimaginably worse in the most literal sense; things from that place were utterly alien to the mind.
“Hunter, I’m scared,” Amelia said. “You don’t think… I mean the feel of that place… am I… could I have been born evil?”
She was in tears when I looked up at her again.
“Do you feel evil?” I asked.
She shrugged, then shook her head but didn’t seem convinced.
Lucas, every bit of this is your fault. If I’d been more talented at mental magic, I’d have sent it to him direct. I had to settle with hoping the universe paid him his due, though—not that there was anything remotely just about the universe. “Look, for all we know that’s how we all come into the world,” I told her, though I didn’t believe it. It couldn’t be coincidence that her parents had survived 1999, made some kind of a deal, and then had a magical baby that couldn’t be aborted. Until I knew more, though, I didn’t want to burden Amelia with uncertainty. More than she already had, anyway. No one deserved that. “There are just too many unknowns. Did this emptiness tell you to do something bad? Something evil? Be the next Hitler, or end the world or something?”
“That’s just the thing,” she replied, hands spreading to make two tents under the blanket. “I don’t know. And for all I know, my whole life I’ve been carrying out some kind of evil plan.”
“Ah,” I said, trying to inject some humor into it, “acing your tests, turning in your homework, being valedictorian. Certainly sounds like anti-Christ material. You ever consider running for office? Because I think if any primordial being has an evil plan, it would have to involve being a politician.”
That got the barest hint of a laugh out of her, weak and raspy but real. “I hadn’t considered it, no.”
She yawned then, wide enough that I could hear her jaw when it popped. Amelia winced and rubbed the joint.
“You’re tired,” I urged. “Get some sleep; it’s the only way to feel better. I’ll… well, you know I’m always here. So if you have nightmares and wake up, you won’t be alone.”
Amelia slipped back down, lying on her side again, her pillow gathered under her head. “I know you don’t particularly like my being here,” she said, “but thank you, all the same. For… I don’t know. This. Keeping watch. I wouldn’t want to be alone right now.”
I waved the sentiment off. “Not like I have a choice.”
She snorted quietly. “That’s the Hunter I know.”
I did my best to ignore her after that, turning my attention back to Nathan’s notes and my rough reconstructions. There were glyphs in some of his work that I had no references to, which were in a style that wasn’t present in any culture’s magic I’d been able to find so far.
Was it possible? Had he been trying to summon something from the Abyss?
I kept finding myself looking over at Amelia, though, curled up under her blanket, her lashes dark against her cheeks. I didn’t want to like her; it was easier now, not being connected to anyone. But she reminded me of Nathan. From what I’d learned about her, he’d have loved her. It was almost like Nathan was there, glaring at me and pointing at her. I shook the thoughts out of my head and turned back to the page before me.
It was painful to think that he would have been involved in magic that dark and destructive. I had known him, intimately. We all had. I knew what Nathan wanted to do was dangerous, otherwise he wouldn’t have been so secretive about it. Lucas and Isaac maintained they didn’t know either, that they only helped him because he begged them and so that they could be there if something went wrong. Fat lot of good that did.
Maybe they were lying. Or maybe they didn’t see it either.
Nathan, I asked silently, not expecting an answer, what did you do?
It wasn’t the first time I’d asked the ether. This time, though, another question came unbidden. And what did it have to do with Amelia?
Amelia
By the time I finally woke up, most of Saturday was gone. I did feel a little better, despite the fact that I tossed and turned and woke up from nightmares for about twelve hours. My head still pounded a bit, and my eyes were sensitive. My heart felt like it had been put through a blender and then poured back into my chest, and chunks had been left behind and tossed out in the trash. If there was a such a thing as pain in a person’s soul, I had that too.
I did know Attic Greek now, though. So. There was that.
“What time is it?” I grumbled at Hunter when I finally decided I wasn’t going back to sleep again.
“About four,” he said as he looked over at me. “Another nightmare?”
I nodded as I sat up. “But I don’t think I can sleep anymore. And I’m sort of functio
nal, so”—I gave a half shrug—“I should probably try and use the rest of the weekend to try and study up. Fuck, I’m starving.”
My stomach woke up just a bit later than I did, and complained loudly as I realized the hollow feeling down there was hunger.
“Me too,” Hunter said. “We can poke around the kitchen and find something. Feel like a walk?”
I eyed him warily. “You’ve been awfully… nice. Are you sure you’re okay? I mean, nothing hurts when you do that?”
Hunter leaned back in his chair, arms folded, and gave me a long, surly look. It broke eventually, though, as I stared back at him with as earnest a look of concern as I could manage. “I like my privacy,” he said finally, “and I don’t particularly care for change.”
“But?” I wondered.
He stood, flipping closed his notebook. “But nothing. I don’t like excuses, either. If it’s any consolation, it’s not you that rubs me the wrong way, it’s the change to my routine.”
“And having someone in your space while you do your super-secret research about my parents,” I added pointedly.
“It’s not about your…” He trailed off as I raised both eyebrows at him. “Are you hungry or not?”
“I am,” I muttered, and pushed the blankets off me.
I was still in my uniform, but somehow it didn’t seem to have suffered being slept in. Practical magic—I wished I’d become a magician earlier in life; it would have saved me a lot of time doing laundry. What it did not take care of was my hair, or the fact that I hadn’t showered in a little over twenty-four hours. “But,” I said, “I should definitely clean up first. You want to go ahead or wait for me?”
“I’ll wait.” He started to sit down again. “I could… Lucas and Isaac will want to know that you’re awake. If you wanted me to bring them around, I could have them meet us.”
“Sure, of course,” I said. “I should thank them for… or, should I not? What’s up?”
Hunter’s expression had darkened, and I peered up at him, trying to determine whether this was about me or some personal beef with them. “Hunter?”
