by Chloe Garner
“Just do it,” Ethan said evenly. “I’m not letting you leave me here like a sitting duck for them to use as bait for you later.”
Valerie nodded, looking up at him.
“This might hurt,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“The bodyshield that you put on us,” Shack said. “You could re-do that, right? After?”
Valerie nodded.
“Anything that hits him before I get it back on would stay,” she said, and Ethan nodded.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Just do it.”
He put his hand over her wrist and squeezed it, nodding.
She reached into her clothes, taking out the bag of dust there that she’d intended to use to take the magic off of something that she couldn’t get through. She put it against his stomach, holding it flat and crushing the pellet inside of it that mixed the other active magic ingredients with the powder. Ethan gasped and tipped his head back against the wall, his jaw clenched hard.
“You okay?” Shack asked, and Ethan shook his head.
“No,” he gasped. Valerie kept working, feeling the layers of magic strip away under the powerful cast. His grip tightened painfully on her wrist, and she tried to ignore it, knowing it had to be worse for him.
Finally the cast flickered out, not finding any more magic to dispel, and Ethan slumped to the floor. Valerie stood, getting out her wand and putting it to his forehead, feeling the same roiling contrast between his magic and hers, and she pulled it together, faster this time as his breathing sped up. Flicking the cast toward his feet, she felt it tighten and close, and he put his head back against the wall again.
“We shouldn’t go undefended here,” he said. “It’ll crush us.”
“That cast isn’t going to block all of the other things they can do to you,” Valerie said. “I had tailored casts for everything…”
“Keep moving,” Shack said. “No changing it now. He can move. Let’s go.”
Valerie looked over at him, feeling resentment for how clear-minded he was, then helped Ethan up.
“I’m sorry,” she said, starting for the stairs.
“Don’t be,” he answered. His face was sweaty. “You did what you had to do.”
She squeezed his hand and they ran down the stairs.
Shack hit the door at the bottom of the stairs at speed, casting as he went, and something popped violently, the door flying open. Valerie and Ethan ran after him, Valerie dreading what they were going to find on the other side of that door.
It was a broad hallway, tiled to shoulder-high, lit with the same odd black light as upstairs. The casts on the walls here were melted, too.
“You did good,” Shack observed, and Ethan grinned.
“I want credit for that in a class, someday,” he said.
“Don’t hold your breath,” Shack muttered, continuing forward.
“Does this look lab-y?” Valerie asked, and Ethan nodded.
“Looks more like a lab than a prison,” he said. “Labs want light. Prisons like to be dark.”
At least there was that.
They went down the hallway, the magic pressure against them growing with each step, and Valerie stopped, going through everything she was carrying.
The walls were cast too hard for her to use them, but the tile floor had promise to it. She took out the marking stick again, putting the protective symbol on the floor that had been on the back of the door, growing up.
Ethan stopped, looking down at it.
“That’s intense,” he said.
“You can cross it, though,” Valerie said, frowning. “It’s just supposed to be protection magic.”
“No, I’m getting it, too,” Shack said, standing next to Ethan. “That is intense. I mean…” He put a foot out and hopped over it. “I can go across it, but it’s got a lot of power in it.”
Ethan put a foot out and hesitated a moment longer.
“I don’t think I can,” he said.
“I mean, it’s light magic, I think, but I didn’t…”
Valerie paused, straightening. She took out the oil that she’d used on all three of the others and took his hand, putting the mark on the back of his hand.
There was a moment as the mark sizzled and cooked, then it settled in and Ethan nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Yeah. No, that’s different. I can do this.”
She took a step back and he hopped over the mark.
He looked back at it and tipped his head.
“Huh,” he said.
“What?” Valerie asked.
“Just, it’s a lot better than it was a minute ago. Don’t know if it’s the cast on the floor or on my hand, but… That’s a lot better.”
Valerie listened, hearing voices around the corner. She ran along the hallway, putting her back against the wall. Shack and Ethan came to join her.
“I’m glad,” she whispered, and Ethan nodded.
The voices were urgent, footsteps approaching quickly as Valerie, Shack, and Ethan stood with their backs pressed against the wall.
Three men and a woman passed them, beginning to turn down the larger hallway and spotting them immediately.
“What?” the woman said. “It can’t be you who are causing all this trouble.”
“I’m half-tempted to let them go,” one of the men said. “Just kids. Only fair to give them a head start.”
He motioned at them.
“You guys had better just hold it there,” he said. “Whatever it is you think you’re up to…”
Ethan tossed his stun cast, and the man who had been speaking took a half a step back, looking at the floor.
“Now, I’ll admit, I did not see that coming,” he said, raising his eyes to look at them again. “Who’s helping you?”
The woman took a step to the side, taking out a wand and pointing it at them. Shack dropped a counteracting spell on the floor and Valerie remembered with a hard gut check just how vulnerable Ethan was.
She stepped in front of him, as though that was how magic actually worked, and she took her own wand out, casting contra to what the other woman was casting. The three men also had wands out by this point, and she could hear them, somewhere in her instinctive understanding of what was going on, casting every one of the spells that Valerie had built for Mr. Tannis, one at a time.
The protection spell that Shack had dropped was specifically designed for these, though it would have been fascinating how different the casts were from the ones Valerie had ultimately designed. Would have been, if not for the fact that Ethan was no longer protected from them.
They were trying to cook his chest.
Among so many other things.
The magic from the woman’s wand crackled and sputtered against Valerie’s, though the woman was much stronger and much more experienced.
This was exactly what Valerie’s dad had taught her.
She was sitting back, strong, forcing the woman to attack her and simply deflecting or dismantling everything.
Building was harder than destroying, so long as she kept to that mindset.
She was destroying the other woman’s magic, not trying to build a defense for the woman to tear down.
And it worked.
Except that the men only had a simple defense cast between them and Ethan, with Shack doing everything he could to keep up.
Valerie needed something potent, something intentional to turn the fight. Eventually, one of the casts was going to get through, and it wasn’t going to be like in Mr. Tannis’ room, where the warding there kept him from ever really experiencing an attack.
No.
Ethan was going to get the full brunt of the whole thing, and…
… it was probably going to kill him.
They were immune to their own magic.
The stun spell had proved that.
If she was going to use one of their casts, it was going to have to be in an entirely new and novel way, or else it would fall flat, and she might miss her opportunity.
Ethan’s hand was still bloody from the glass upstairs.
That was something.
Blood magic.
She didn’t want to do blood magic.
His dark magic, and the way it mixed with her own.
It was different.
Valerie blocked, deflected, disarmed, trying to get something to bounce back in a way that would catch one of them, but they seemed unconcerned by anything that got close. At some point, Shack apparently decided to just try to go hit them, and the woman held up a hand, giving him a disappointed look, and Shack stumbled back against the wall again, holding his shoulder.
Ethan was spinning casts, as well, but they weren’t doing any good.
They needed to quit. They were wasting all of her prep work, and it was obvious none of it was going to do anything.
The problem was, the space between them and the scientists was getting smaller and the air was filling with drifting, fluorescent smoke that was beginning to overwhelm Valerie’s defenses.
She needed to do something, and she needed to do it immediately.
She took a step back, grabbing Ethan’s hand and putting her fingers to one of the open wounds there. He stiffened - that had to have stung - but he didn’t interfere. Valerie turned to the wall, looking for an open spot that she could work with, and she painted the defensive symbol her mother had kept on the back of their door, adding to it with magic she’d learned with her dad. It took all of… fifteen seconds… and then everything went quiet.
“Whoa,” Shack murmured as Valerie turned back around again.
The scientists were still casting, but it just… There was a gleaming silver bubble around the three of them, and not even sound was making it through.
“I didn’t think that was possible,” Ethan said. Valerie looked at the four scientists, watched the magic bounce off of the defensive shield, then took a step back and turned her attention to Ethan.
“You have to stay here,” she said.
“Nope,” he answered, and she shook her head.
“The casts that they’re using, if they hit you, it will kill you,” she said. “What part of that is ambiguous?”
“I’m not sitting in a bubble while you two risk your lives,” Ethan said, and she nodded.
“You’re right. Shack is staying here to defend you if they find a way to get through my magic.”
“What now?” Shack asked. “I was with you to right there.”
“I have to do this on my own, from here,” Valerie said. “Everything goes well, I’ll come back and we’ll work out how to get out of here, but…”
“Val,” Ethan said. “We aren’t getting out. You see that, right?”
“Don’t know about you, but I’m still planning on it,” Shack said, and Ethan shook his head.
“We have to keep moving, yes. They’ve got a whole building of people to converge on us. But we aren’t going to fight our way back out of that. Okay? Just… We need to keep going. What happens happens.”
Valerie shook her head.
“No. I will come back. Okay? I promise. I don’t care what I have to blow up to do it, I will get back to here, to you guys. Maybe we don’t make it out from there, but… Ethan, I can’t bear it, to watch them cook you from the inside out and then have to go on and try to do something. Stay here and stay alive.”
“Guys,” Shack said. “Not gonna die. Just saying. Right?”
Ethan looked at the scientists. One of them had left, was walking quickly down the hallway toward the stairs.
“We don’t have much time,” he said, and Valerie nodded.
“I know. I need to go. Now. Stay alive, okay?”
“Are you sure this thing holds with you not in it, anyway?” Shack asked, and Valerie nodded.
“If Ethan leaves, you’re in trouble, but it’s his magic as much as mine holding it, now.”
Shack nodded.
“Good luck.”
“Are you kidding me?” Ethan asked. “We’re not letting her go out there on her own.”
“You walk through this bubble after me, they’ll kill you,” Valerie said. “Nothing to stop it. I’ll be right back.”
She gave him a grim smile and nodded, then turned and walked through the silver barrier on her own.
There was an alarm going off, and shouting as the scientists tried to get through her cast. Mr. Tannis told her all the time that louder only seldom meant more powerful; evidently she’d managed to bother them.
She felt the first cast hit her barely a step later, and then another, but she was already running.
If they were going to deal with her, they were going to have to leave Ethan and Shack alone.
That would be worth it.
At the end of the hallway, she found a large, open area that wasn’t at all unlike the lab space at school, with long stretches of benches supplied with standard equipment and ingredients, large bottles of oils and powders. Over there against the wall, there were tanks of gas, and Valerie’s mind buzzed with the opportunities those presented, but she kept running, stopping dead in the middle of the room and looking back at the four scientists who were running after her.
Valerie might have been slow, but they were slower.
She had moments to think and then act, if she was going to do it without them interfering.
She put her hands on her ribs, just thinking through what was there, what was still left.
A lot of the benches were in various stages of use, and the place was crisp with active magic. How they could expect anything to work the way they anticipated it would with this much magic going on around them… Valerie couldn’t imagine.
She needed to be careful, because there was every chance of reactions that she couldn’t predict…
It occurred to her quite suddenly that the cast to remove magic ability was probably here. If they were working hard on it - and that was the point, wasn’t it? - they might have even been working on it before the alarm had gone off.
They were getting close, and she still didn’t have a plan.
Just blow it up?
Just blow it up.
Sure.
The red toolbox full of fire magic.
She wanted magic that attacked magic, that burned through magic, that…
But she also needed to destroy the records.
Paper.
Digital.
She needed to set them back.
Far enough that they couldn’t risk doing it again before the Council won the war.
Or the Shadows did.
She liked the idea of that.
Something that attacked an idea.
How do you attack an idea?
Why hadn’t she thought about this before?
Because.
Because.
Because this was how she did magic.
She just… did it. She’d planned her way down here, and while she wasn’t entirely impressed with how that had gone, she was here, right? That was the goal.
There were supposed to be five of them, and everybody was supposed to be storming through, launching successful attacks and winning and stuff, even Sasha…
This had not been a good plan.
Nope.
It did not resemble a good plan.
But she was here and that had been the point. And now…
Red powder and fire magic called to her, and she reached into the folds of cloth under her shirt, taking things out. Working almost exclusively off of the band of ingredients that Samantha Angelsword had given her, she sat down on the floor - not trusting the benches to be clean of magic - and she began combining things.
It was going to be powerful and it was going to be targeted, though the details were still fuzzy as she worked at it. The other magic users were there, and one of them started toward her to try to stop what she was doing. Valerie took a vial out of her wraps and opened it with her mouth, flicking the fluid inside it in a loop around her. Green flame sprung up from the floor. It wasn’t going to take a
lot to make it through that, but what she needed was time, not good defense.
She needed to survive.
Just long enough to set off this cast.
Whatever it was going to be.
Two of the other scientists had gone to a desk and were finishing off a cast that they had prepped there.
That was one that Valerie needed to be aware of.
It could be something Mr. Tannis hadn’t worked with before, that Valerie hadn’t seen before.
It didn’t matter.
It really didn’t.
If she was aware or not.
She just needed to finish the cast.
Burning.
It was going to burn through everything.
She was grateful that Ethan and Shack were in a blood-magic bubble around a corner from here, because Valerie wasn’t sure that she, herself, survived it.
Did she want this?
Was she willing to do it?
She certainly wasn’t going to stop.
There wasn’t a point thinking about it, because no matter who did what, Valerie was finishing this cast.
She was finishing it.
She could feel the way the room shifted, as the scientists set off their cast. The air chilled and the noises in the room - ones she hadn’t even been aware of before - stilled.
She found it harder to move, like she was popping her joints free of frost as her fingers worked, and her tongue struggled not to slur the words that she now had to speak much louder to get them to continue to build.
She wasn’t sure if it was time that had slowed or just her, but she struggled against it, knowing that she was reaching the end of her cast but feeling how close she was to being completely locked up. The potency of the ingredients was waning, and she needed to finish the cast as quickly as she could, if she stood any hope of it working.
She wasn’t going to get another shot at this.
Her fingers were locking up with a sense of finality, and she watched with frozen eyes as the scientists gathered around her waning ring of fire, just waiting for it to go out.
She’d been so close.
It was just…
She got one more motion, squeezing an eyedropper of pink fluid over top of everything.
It fell completely normally into the pile of casting ingredients, disappearing into powders and fibers and oils and everything else, and there was a noise, like a suction cup sticking to a wall.
