by James Riley
“Gee!” Rachel shouted. “Can you get the whole room at once with that? It could take down all the Time students!”
“On it!” Jia shouted as a host of royal guards ran toward her. Rachel pushed them back using solidified air, giving Jia the time she needed to put them to sleep. But before she could get to the rest, Fort’s body froze, black light covering him. Somehow, he could still see and hear, which meant whoever had done it had just frozen everything below his neck.
“I should have left you frozen in your dumb school!” Simon shouted, reappearing at his side. He raised a glowing black hand to Fort’s face. “And don’t expect to be saved now, Fitzgerald. Tim and Amelia are keeping Ellora busy. Even Rachel’s sword can’t stop my spells, not when I’m this close.” He grinned evilly. “What say I send you back to watch the war for a few years, like I did? Serves you right for trying to stop us from changing the world.”
And then he unleashed his magic, and Fort flinched, expecting to be whisked back to the tsunami, or maybe the futures that Jia or Rachel had seen … only nothing happened.
Fort opened his eyes and found Simon staring at him in surprise. And then, almost casually, he collapsed to the floor, a large rock still glowing with red Elemental magic on the floor beside him. “I don’t even need the sword to take you down, Clock Kid!” Rachel shouted from a distance.
As Simon’s magic faded with his consciousness, releasing Fort, Jia sent a wave of Healing magic though the rest of the hall, sending all the various civilians, guards, and even the well-dressed couple near the thrones to sleep. As they all slid to the floor, Ellora and the other Time kids reappeared as well, Ellora’s arms being held by a boy and girl as the three of them fell down, snoring.
Another wave of fire, though, revealed that Damian hadn’t been affected. A blue glow faded around him, apparently having protected him from Jia’s Sleep spell. Not only that, he had William held protectively in one of his claws.
“You’re all so lucky I have more important things to do than deal with you now,” William shouted as Damian roared, sending more flames into the roof. “Otherwise I’d have my personal dragon here show you exactly how much better at Healing magic he is than you are!”
“You’re all traitors!” the dragon roared at them. “I’ll burn you all to the ground before I let you take this book!”
“Shush, Damian,” William said. “We’ve got places to go. Take me to the skies above the city!”
Damian nodded, looking almost embarrassed, then burst through the collapsing ceiling with a flap of his massive wings, sending even more debris tumbling toward the floor.
“We need to get everyone out of here!” Fort shouted.
“I could try to fly them all to safety,” Rachel said, sounding a bit tired, but Fort shook his head.
“You’ve done enough. I’ve got this.” He raised his hands and opened a portal on the floor of the room before Rachel could object, then pulled it up above his head, teleporting everyone away.
The entire group of officials, royalty, guards, Time students, and Oppenheimer School students all landed gently on the floor of the bell tower of Big Ben.
“Seriously, back here?” Rachel said, sighing. “You need to get out more, Fort.”
“I’ve been a bit busy,” he told her. “Plus, I wanted to be up high. We need to see if we can find William before …” He trailed off as he caught something orange out of the corner of his eye.
He ran to the railing around the clock tower, with Jia and Rachel just behind him. Even having seen this before in a vision, the sight of what was happening over London still rocked Fort to his core, and he wanted desperately for it not to be real.
Throughout the city, orange light streamed into the air from far too many sources to count. As the light rose, it merged together, forming a sort of giant, humanoid-looking monster.
A monster with William and Damian floating in the dead center of it, glowing with Spirit magic.
“Why is he doing this?” Fort shouted. “How is destroying a city going to save the world?”
“He mentioned something about the Americans,” Jia said. “But I can’t believe even Colonel Charles could get here so quickly, not with the dome just having come down.”
“Look,” Rachel said, her voice filled with terror as she pointed down. Fort glanced over the railing’s edge to see an elderly couple on the bridge below, the orange light draining out of them, rising into the air to form William’s creature. As the light left them both, they disappeared.
Others tried to run, but it was too late. No matter where they went, the light trickled up from their bodies into the sky, taking everything they were with it.
“He’s taking their spirits,” Fort said, completely in disbelief.
“What?” Jia said. “Can he do that?”
“Apparently,” Rachel said. “He did say he sped up time to study Spirit magic.”
“But we still don’t know why he’s doing this,” Fort said, slamming his fist down on the railing. “These are his people! Even messed up from the magic, he still says he wants to help them. Why take their spirits?”
And then he saw it, and his blood turned cold.
Green portals were opening on the streets below, at least a dozen of them. And from each portal emerged squads of what looked exactly like TDA soldiers, their weapons drawn as they ran toward William’s Spirit monster.
Jia was right: Colonel Charles couldn’t have gotten here in time. So he’d found a shortcut.
- FORTY-THREE -
HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?” JIA shouted. “How can they teleport? We destroyed the book of Summoning, and Damian’s under William’s spell!”
“Please don’t tell me you messed with my mind when I burned it the second time, Fort,” Rachel said, but he shook his head.
“It’s gone, I promise. The only other person who could be doing this would be Damian, obviously, or …” He trailed off, but Rachel completed his thought.
“Or Gabriel,” she said, clenching her hands into fists. “If Colonel Charles let him come back to the school, the colonel and I are going to have a long talk.”
“Looks like you’re going to get your chance,” Jia said, and pointed to the streets below. Fort and Rachel both looked over again, and even from a distance, they could still make out the colonel’s uniform at the front of one of the squads of soldiers.
“Fort,” Rachel said quietly, “get us down there. Now.”
Already ahead of her, Fort opened a portal to a point on the street just in front of William’s monster. As one, he, Jia, and Rachel stepped through and found themselves facing the first squad of soldiers, who immediately raised their Lightning rods.
“Turn back!” Rachel yelled at the TDA forces, waving her sword in the air. “We will take care of this!”
“She’s got a weapon!” someone shouted, and a lightning bolt came sizzling toward them.
Rachel batted it away with her sword and growled loudly. “Did you not hear me? I said, go away! You can’t handle this, not like—”
“Behind you!” another of the soldiers shouted, and Fort whirled around to find William’s giant Spirit foot crashing down toward them from above. He quickly opened a portal, and the three of them fell right through it a moment before the foot landed, cracking the street in half and knocking the TDA forces to the ground.
They emerged on a roof just above where they’d been but quickly teleported again as William crashed his giant hand through the roof of the building they’d landed on.
“There might still be people inside there!” Rachel said from the next roof, pointing at the building, where more orange rivers of light were rising out. “Fort, get them out! Jia, use your magic to help whoever needs it. I’m taking that thing down!”
Fort nodded and opened two more portals, one back to the building they’d just been standing on, and the other to a building closer to William’s height on the monster for Rachel. Fort ran through the first and found a mostly empty office buil
ding, thankfully. But the remaining people who hadn’t yet had their spirits stolen by William were now trapped beneath the collapsed roof.
The first two he found, he was able to teleport back to Jia on the last roof for healing, but the rest were going to take more work: If he shifted the rubble too much, it might collapse in other spots, causing more injuries.
As Fort looked around for a way to save them, again, he couldn’t understand why William would do this. He’d wanted to help fix the world, not hurt his own people! How much of this was the Spirit magic taking him over, and how much was it just magnifying something within himself?
Part of Fort didn’t want to know that answer, since it’d mean he’d have to think long and hard about what he’d seen himself do in Cyrus’s future vision.
“Help!” someone screamed, and Fort ran over to find a woman with an enormous concrete beam pinning her lower half to the floor. “Please, I can’t feel my legs!”
“Don’t worry,” he told her, readying his spell as carefully as he could, hoping to avoid any further collapse. “I’ve got you.”
“You?” she said as he carefully opened a teleportation portal just below her. “But you’re a kid—”
And then she teleported to the roof, and he moved on to the next.
Outside, he heard lightning sizzling almost constantly as more TDA forces reached William, but they didn’t seem to do much good. He had to get back out there to help, but the farther he advanced into the building, the more people he found, and he couldn’t just leave them there.
When he finally teleported what he hoped was the last person to Jia, she stuck her head back through the portal. “Fort, get back here! Rachel needs help!”
He leaped through the portal and quickly saw that things had gotten much worse: Easily half the buildings around William had been destroyed now, including the building where Fort had sent Rachel.
“You need to get me over there!” Jia shouted, grabbing Fort’s arm and whirling him around to point at a different building, where Rachel was swinging her sword at William’s giant hand. She barely missed, and William took advantage of that by punching right through the building beneath her. She managed to catch herself on solid air, but another blow was heading toward her, and she wouldn’t have time to get her sword up.
“Now!” Jia shouted, and Fort opened a portal again, but instead of sending Jia through it, he instead made it big enough to fit William’s entire hand.
The giant fist passed through the portal and out the other side, which Fort had placed directly in front of the Spirit monster’s head, hoping to at least send the creature reeling. But the fist passed right through the Spirit creature’s head, and William pulled it back out of the portal, laughing.
“You think that’s where its brain is?” he shouted, and his voice echoed throughout the city. “I control it, just like I do this country. And I refuse to let you foreign invaders hurt us!”
Someone grabbed Fort’s leg and yanked him down, hard. He groaned as he hit the roof and quickly looked up to find one of the people he’d saved reaching out to strangle him, the woman’s eyes glowing orange with Spirit magic. “Invaders!” she shouted. “You dare fight against our leader?”
“Oh come on,” Jia shouted, sending Healing magic through her former patients, including the one attacking Fort, putting them all to sleep.
But as they fell asleep, each of their bodies began to dissolve into orange magic, and a moment later, the roof was empty. Everything they’d just done had been for nothing. Fort gritted his teeth, looking up at William in disgust. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, and teleported them back down to the ground, where Rachel had just landed.
“Oh, hey,” Rachel said when she saw them appear, leaning over her sword to catch her breath. “How are we doing?”
“Not exactly great,” Jia told her. “You’re okay?”
“Never been better!” she said with a smile, then stood up straight, grimacing at some pain in her back. “Okay, new plan. Fort, you teleport me straight at William, and I’ll sword him. That way—”
“That way what, Cadet Carter?” said a voice, and they all turned around to find a full squad of TDA soldiers aiming their Lightning rods at them.
And Colonel Charles was in the lead.
“That way we will end this, because no one else can,” Rachel finished. “What are you even doing here, Colonel? He can take over your soldiers if he wants!”
“Not my squad,” the colonel said, pulling a necklace out from under his body armor. “Sierra made these, so they should work against this new kind of magic as well.”
Rachel screamed in frustration. “You don’t even know if that’s true! This is what’s wrong with you! You insist on holding us back when you have no idea what’s even going on. But we do! Let us fix this, while you rescue whoever you can.”
Colonel Charles slowly smiled. “I’m sorry, but students aren’t allowed to take field trips without permission.” He raised his hand and pointed at Rachel. “Squad, take them!”
Rachel laughed. “You think your Lightning rods are going to work on us? I’ve got a sword that deflects spells, big man! Just try it!”
“If you insist,” the colonel said as the man next to him aimed something right at Jia and fired.
Rachel swept her sword through where the magic would have been, but instead of lightning or fire, a small dart hit Jia in the stomach. She glanced down at it in confusion before her eyes rolled back into her head and she collapsed to the ground, where she began to snore, completely knocked out.
“Oh I forgot: Tranquilizer darts aren’t magic,” Colonel Charles told Rachel as she ran to Jia’s side. “Isn’t that funny?”
“You monster !” Rachel shouted, throwing up a shield of fire as the soldier readied another shot. His dart passed straight through her fire to hit her in the shoulder, and she too passed out, right on top of Jia, Excalibur falling to the ground next to her.
“And now it’s just you, Fitzgerald,” the colonel said, turning to Fort and raising his hand. “I can’t say I won’t enjoy this. You’ve disobeyed my orders for the last time!”
- FORTY-FOUR -
FORT FRANTICALLY LOOKED FROM THE soldiers to his friends, not sure he could reach Jia and Rachel in time to cast his only Healing spell on them, or that it’d even wake them up. But what else could he do? He couldn’t just leave them there!
“Take him!” Colonel Charles shouted, and Fort realized he’d missed his chance. “And then get me that British kid, now !”
As the soldiers shot their tranquilizer darts at Fort, he threw up a portal in front of him just in time, sending the darts sailing through to the opposite portal, just behind the squad. The tranquilizers hit the soldiers at the rear, and each of them collapsed, unconscious.
“No!” Colonel Charles shouted as Fort teleported Jia and Rachel away to the only safe place he could think of, back to Big Ben, then eyed Excalibur still lying on the ground. He could teleport the sword right into his hand, but again, he’d just be burned: There was no reason to think he was any more worthy now than he had been back in Avalon. If anything, he was a lot less worthy after what he’d seen his potential future self do with Spirit magic.
But without it, he had no chance against William, let alone Damian.
Before he could decide, one of the soldiers sprinted through the portal he’d left open, leaped for him, and tackled him to the ground. The soldier pinned Fort down, then dug a tranquilizer dart out of his belt and aimed it at Fort’s arm.
Just as the soldier struck, though, Fort opened a portal beneath them, dropping them both out over the River Thames, the quickest, softest landing he could think of. As they fell, the soldier dropped the tranquilizer dart in surprise, but Fort managed to grab the man’s protective mental necklace off his neck a moment before they hit the water.
Their momentum sent them plunging into the river farther than Fort would have thought, but he quickly opened a portal for himself, leaving the so
ldier to swim back up to the surface. As he passed through his portal back to the street, a bunch of river water came with him, but that didn’t matter. He couldn’t afford any delays, not with Excalibur just sitting out on the street, waiting for someone to take it.
Only he was too late. The colonel was already reaching for the sword.
“You children think you know everything, don’t you,” the colonel said, sneering at Fort as his hand paused just over Excalibur’s hilt. “You have no idea how to protect a country. Everything I do, I do to keep people safe. And look what you three have accomplished here. London’s destroyed, and there’s a rampaging child threatening to take over the world. Why couldn’t you leave this to the adults, the ones who know better than you?”
“Let me know if you find any adults like that,” Fort said quietly.
Colonel Charles snorted, then reached down to take Excalibur. “Well, I know I’ve got Rachel’s magic sword, so we’ll see what—OW!”
The sword immediately lit on fire as he touched it, and the colonel dropped it back to the ground, staring at it in surprise as the flames died out.
“The sword doesn’t think you’re worthy, Colonel,” Fort said, trying not to smile. “Let me tell you, I’m just shocked. But I can’t stay and argue. I have to go take that monster down.”
“Don’t you take one step, Forsythe!” the colonel shouted, cradling his burned hand to his chest.
“Okay, I won’t!” Fort said, and instead pulled a teleportation circle down over himself. “See? I can follow orders!”
Fort emerged on a roof closer to where William was standing, turning what citizens of London he hadn’t already used for his monster into his willing army. Each person he used his Spirit magic on then ran screaming after the TDA soldiers, roaring about foreign invaders. Fort sighed. Now he’d have to worry about the soldiers and London’s citizens, making Colonel Charles’s decision to come even more of a pain than it’d been before. And that was saying something.
