by Chloe Garner
“Why didn’t you stop them?” Valerie asked.
He looked toward the cave entrance for a moment, considering.
“That’s what’s hollowed Gemma out,” he said. “Not being able to fix it every time. This is one where she found out too late, and we couldn’t get the information routed to the Council in time.”
“And a lot of people died,” Valerie said, not accusing. He nodded.
“A lot of people died.”
“Because they failed. Again.”
“Because The Pure failed again,” Grant agreed.
“Why doesn’t Mom stop it?” Valerie asked. Grant snorted.
“She’s always had it in her head that she could,” he said. “I’m not certain that she wasn’t the one who caused the accident that ultimately killed the Separatist scientist. I don’t know what she’s doing. No one has heard from her since the whole thing started.”
“You don’t know how to find her and ask?” Valerie asked. He laughed at this.
“No one knows how to find your mom when she doesn’t want to be found,” he said. “There’s no telling what resources the Council used to track her down, with you.”
“How did you find each other before, when I was conceived?” Valerie asked.
He hesitated.
Tipped his head at her.
“Now there is Susan Blake’s daughter,” he said. “I don’t know if it would work, but I could probably try. Seeing as she might think I’m dead, the odds go down, but it’s an interesting tactic.”
“How did you find each other?” Valerie asked. He shook his head.
“That magic is over your head, just now. You need to practice.”
She sighed, and he grinned.
“Defend yourself.”
She was learning so much.
Her father was right - he understood how she thought so much better than anyone at school, and he trusted her to try things and that her mistakes wouldn’t kill the both of them. She was picking up some languages for spoken casting, and her mixed potions were… She could actually choose what some of them were going to be in advance.
It was the procedural magic, though, the ritualistic and pattern-based stuff that was really coming home for her.
It was fun.
If she’d been willing to admit it, it was the most fun she’d had in as long as she could remember. Magic was real, and it was a field for her to play in. Her father didn’t constrain her by what she was doing or how, so long as it worked, and he often sat and watched her casting with an odd expression on his face that she’d come to recognize as an affection for the memory of her mother.
Mostly, though, she resented being here.
There was nothing to do when he got tired of her during the afternoons, and there was no one to commiserate with when he lost his temper at her or mocked her mother for failing to teach her anything of importance.
There were only so many times that Valerie could stand up for her mother before it became pointless and frustrating for both of them.
Sitting down at their evening meal one night almost two weeks after he’d taken her out of the School of Magic Survival, he handed her a bag of trail mix and a bottle of water.
“I need to tell you that I’m not the man your mother married,” he said, sitting back against a wall and propping his heel up on his toes.
Valerie looked at him benignly for a moment, then raised her eyebrows and shook her head.
“All right,” she said. “Who are you, then?”
“I certainly used to be,” he said. “But your mother… She has sort of a marvelous stabilizing influence on everyone around her.”
“The assassin,” Valerie said. For weeks, maybe even months now she’d been feeling like maybe she’d never known her mother.
“Yes, the assassin,” he said. “But that really isn’t what she does. Anyway, no, I don’t think she would even love me, anymore, if we didn’t have history. Maybe she wouldn’t love me at all. I was never… I’m good at magic. At Light School, that’s all anyone tends to see, that you’re better than everyone else. It made me into the golden boy, right up with her, king and queen of the prom, if you will. But I wasn’t even really ever that guy, even back then. And… There weren’t a lot of people who knew it, but your mom was one of them. And she didn’t care. She saw what was good in me, and she loved me for it.”
He shifted, looking down at his feet for several moments before he spoke again.
“I always wanted to be the man that she thought I could be… I got close, there for a while. We fought the war, we had you… we were powerful. But…” He shook his head. “You shouldn’t judge her for what I am now. I’m not who I was. And I can blame the war, to everyone else, but I have to tell you the truth. It’s because she isn’t there anymore.”
He looked Valerie in the eye again, and she blinked, looking at her knees.
“I loved her,” he said. “I want you to know that. I still do. But whatever you may think of me, don’t put that on her.”
“I feel like I never knew her at all,” Valerie said. “She never talked about anything that happened before I was born. I mean, at all. I had the pictures of you, but she didn’t even talk about that. Everything was a secret and I never had any idea at all.”
“She was protecting you,” Grant said after a moment. “I can see it now. I thought… Well, nevermind what I thought. She could see the future for you, the way it was, and she took you out of it. I’m thinking that maybe I never looked at it from her perspective, how you would have grown up. I still can’t believe she didn’t teach you a stitch of magic, but… Getting you away from the council… I’d have done it, now, but back then I never would have gone along, even if I’d been there to discuss it with her. She did right by you.”
Valerie was about to say something - she really was - though she wasn’t ever going to find out what.
“Get down,” Grant shouted, leaping toward her and shoving her to the side as something very loud and very hot went past.
Valerie scrambled off of the ground, trying to get her feet under her without getting up as a face disappeared around a corner.
“Defend yourself,” Grant growled, working his thumbs over his fingers as he stared at the doorway.
Valerie ran to the table of casting ingredients, her hands finding things - some of which she’d used and some of which she’d never touched before - and she started mixing.
Crush, strip, drown, mix, and then she was looking at a rapidly-congealing ball in the bottom of the mortar and pestle. The vanny powder had desiccated the genua oil, leaving a sticky lump that was holding all of the rest of the ingredients together.
And she didn’t know what to do with it.
It felt, for a moment, like playing mud-pies in the back lot with Hanson, having pulled together all of the various things available to mix with the mud, it really left little to do with it but start over.
On a reflex, she fished the mass out of the mortar and tossed it behind her, reaching for a stack of ben reeds. She would split them along their fibrous axis and take the individual hairs out…
Something behind her lit off with a whoosh of flame, and Valerie turned to find an arc of purple flame that ran from floor to ceiling in the red-rock cave. Grant was shouting, and there was a fight going on, on the other side of that wall, but it put out enough noise that it was hard to hear specifically what was going on, and she could only just see it in the occasional gaps in the flame.
It was a gorgeous purple.
She’d never known anything would burn that color.
Struggling not to be distracted by it, she returned to the… the reedy thing there whose name she had just known, stripping fibers out of it and…
… tying bows.
Tying freaking bows.
Why?
Like anyone was going to tell her.
She tried to ignore the violence of noise going on behind her and continued to work.
Defense?
Maybe.
She wasn’t quite ready to give it that much credit, unless you went with the ‘good offense’ version of the idea, but she’d kept them away from her as her father fought.
She marked her arms, back of the wrist to the outside of her elbow on both sides, with a bluegreen paint that she’d made, as Grant looked over his shoulder.
“You need to get out,” he said. “Now.”
“And go where?” Valerie asked, putting a hand up and speaking the four words he’d taught her to stop heat-based magic. The paint on her arm sizzled, but it held.
“Up and out,” he said, grabbing something off of the table and starting to mark the floor with it. There were words from around the corner that Valerie couldn’t make out, but Grant lifted his head to listen for just a moment.
“And then what?” Valerie asked.
“If you stay down here, you will die,” he said.
“I thought that using magic down here was impossible,” Valerie said.
“Supposed to be,” he answered. “We’re standing in one of the biggest holes in that rule, and apparently these guys don’t know the risks they’re taking, casting so close to the cave’s affect. Either way, I need you out of here so I can take care of just myself.”
“I’m doing my job,” Valerie protested and he nodded exaggeratedly.
“The gusset flame was impressive. I’ll give you that. And you… I’m proud of you. But you have to get out. I’m going down there, down that way, and they aren’t going to see you. They’ll think you came with me. You sneak out behind them and you just run, okay?”
“No,” Valerie said. “I’m staying with you.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head and very quickly reaching up to take her chin between his thumb and the crook of his index finger. “No, you’re going to live, because that’s what we’re good at. And the way you live is…” He pointed. “That way.”
He continued working, smashing two sets of ingredients together in his palms, then listening for another moment.
“Five seconds,” he said. “Then you move. And you go as fast as you can. Okay?”
“Dad,” she said.
He gave her a quick smile, then nodded.
“Trust me,” he said, putting both hands on the ground in front of her feet. “Don’t move until the time is up.”
Four.
Three.
Two.
The men came around the corner and Grant took off like he was unprepared. Valerie only just managed to stifle the instinct to go after him, as the men gave chase, a blue electricity crackling among them.
One.
Zero.
They took another second to make it out the other doorway into a narrower section of cave that led to a section that had some beautiful white crystals growing along the corners. Valerie watched after them, then bolted the way they’d come.
She hadn’t been out of the caves since she’d come down with Grant, but she had a pretty good idea the path back out, as she’d covered almost all of it every day since she’d been there.
She hit sunlight and threw both arms across her face, even as she knew it was only dusk.
“Over here, kid,” a voice called, and Valerie squinted to find Gemma sitting on the hood of the hug black truck. Valerie looked over her shoulder.
“You have to help him,” she said. “They’re chasing him…”
The ground shook and Valerie stumbled.
“Over here,” Gemma said again flatly. “It isn’t for us to help him fight. We just sit up here and wait to see who survives. Like always.”
Valerie walked away from the cave entrance backwards, watching it as a plume of dust shot out of the earth.
“Where’s their car?” Valerie asked.
“Apparently they didn’t know exactly where the cave was,” Gemma said. “They parked about a mile away, back that way.”
She motioned with her thumb.
“And you were just going to sit up here and wait?” Valerie asked. “Why didn’t you warn us?”
“You think you get cell reception down there?” Gemma asked. “You’re lucky I found out about it at all. I’ve only been here about a minute and a half.”
There was another large explosion that Valerie felt with her feet more than she heard it, and she looked at Gemma with urgency.
“Please,” she said. “Please go help him.”
“Not my job,” Gemma said. “If he loses, somebody has to go back and keep an eye on The Pure and let the Council know when they’re about to go kill another stadium full of people.”
Valerie let her shoulders drop.
“You’d let him die for that?” she asked.
Gemma gave her a hard look, then shook her head.
“I’m no good to him. Didn’t train at spellcasting like he and your mom did. What I’m good at is politics and reading lies. It’s exceedingly hard to lie to me. Makes me everybody’s favorite person, once they’re up high in leadership. Makes me pointless in combat.” She paused. “But if they kill him, I will kill you myself, for putting him in this position.”
“No,” Valerie said after a moment. She went to climb up onto the hood of the truck next to Gemma. “No, you won’t. Because that isn’t who you are. You might leave me for them to kill me, or just leave me to certain death from exposure, because that’s fate killing me, or whatever. But you aren’t going to kill me. You still think you’re one of the good guys.”
Gemma looked directly at her for a moment.
“Think you’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?” she asked. “You’ve never been betrayed by someone you love, and you’ve never betrayed someone you cared about. Maybe you’re right about me killing you by negligence rather than with a weapon, but that smug happy idea that you’ve got the world on a string is going to be all the more painful when you lose it for how certain you are of it.”
“How did they find him?” Valerie asked. “I thought no one knew about this place.”
The truck rocked back and forth.
“From the way they’re going after him, they don’t know about this place,” Gemma said. “Best guess is that they tracked you. You’ve got something on you that they got a hook into, and it took them this long to resolve the magic down to where they could find you. If they’ve got the right magic and actually stopped to think before they went charging down there, they’ll have figured out it was your dad who took you, and he’s dead, whether or not he walks back out of that cave, right now.”
Valerie shuddered.
“You need to hear it like it is,” Gemma said. “Been protected too long in the bubble your mom made, and then again at school. This idea that students can just be, can just blithely go about their days like nothing is going on out here? Those days are coming to an end, and fast.”
“Is that how it was before?” Valerie asked, and Gemma shook her head.
“The Pure have their game together. Took a long time for the Council to form, the first time, so they think that they’re a long way ahead, compared to last time, but The Pure know what they’re up against, and they know where the weak points are. You are a weak point. They are going to come for you, they are going to come for the sons and daughters of every man and woman fighting them. They believe that hard that magic is a danger to humanity and that it should be purged from the latent population. You are just the collateral damage required to distract and disable your mother.”
There was another shudder and Gemma slid off the truck, standing with her shoulders up, alert, and watching the hole in the ground where a slight kick-up of dust followed the unheard explosion.
Valerie had very little available to her to defend herself with, at this point, but she went to stand a few strides away from Gemma, braced. If they beat her dad, they at least had to go through her.
“Tell me again why we didn’t run?” Valerie asked.
“Because if they know that your father is alive, they know that I’m a traitor, and I’m dead no matter what happens next
,” Gemma said. “And because if he needs me, I will be here.”
There was a howl from underground, a man’s voice triumphant, and Gemma relaxed.
“Now that is something you don’t get to do every day,” Grant said, climbing up out of the cave and shaking off his shirt.
“Should have left her to die,” Gemma said. “You’ve compromised both of our major safehouses.”
“I have more,” Grant said, grinning. He had blood rolling down the side of his face from a cut up at his hairline, and little pockmarks on the other cheek like something had exploded near his face, but he was happy.
“None so readily available at need,” Gemma said.
“You need to take her back to school,” Grant said.
“I’ll do no such thing,” Gemma said, taking half a step back.
“Yes, you will,” Grant said. “Because I need to clean up here and finish the spell to close out the time loop, so that they stop looking.”
Gemma sighed.
“You take such risks,” she said. “She isn’t worth all this.”
“And yet, I’m the one who gets to choose,” Grant said, brushing dust and debris out of his hair. “I’ll see you in Macon.”
Gemma sighed.
“I can’t drive up to the school,” she said. “They’ll know I was there. I don’t have your warding.”
“The truck will make it,” Grant said.
“I don’t know where it is,” Gemma said, as though it was a trump card.
“Valerie does,” Grant said. “Stop arguing. This isn’t negotiable.”
“Less and less is, it seems,” Gemma said, then shook her head and turned to go back to the truck.
“Wait, no,” Valerie said. Grant looked at her expectantly and Valerie paused, wondering if this wasn’t really what she wanted, anyway. To go back where her mother had put her, where she trusted the adults and she wasn’t in the middle of a war.
Well…
