To live or die at loreli.., p.12
To Live Or Die At Lorelight Academy, page 12
When I return from another trip, my arms aching, my knees and lower back sore from hunching over my charge as I usher the barrels down the hall, I find her standing a little straighter and examining the map engraved onto the table with a critical eye and a tracing finger.
“Farah Fox Kitt,” she tells me.
It takes me a moment to realize what she’s doing.
“William Seong,” I say back, smiling in a way I hope conveys the nuance of all this.
“You staff or something?” she asks. “Cook? Or…cleaning crew, or…”
“New student,” I say.
She frowns.
“No robe, I just figured…well, if you are a new student, you’re fashionably late.”
“For better or worse.”
“Hmm,” she says. “I guess…if you were on time, you’d look like one of those things outside. With the crystals. You’d be Infected.”
“True,” I say, patiently.
“You lucked out,” she says, almost offended, as if I don’t appreciate just how fortunate I am.
I’ve had a lot more time to consider this notion than she has, and I can’t keep the note of bitterness out of my voice when I say what I say next.
“Days early, hours early, right on time—it wouldn’t matter. I’d be one of those things. But if I’d been ten or twenty minutes later, I would have arrived to find the gates shut.”
Farah works my sentence through her brain, and realizes.
“You would have assumed the school closed for the semester,” she says, “and gone on your happy way.”
“Crushed, disappointed, and very, very sad,” I say, nodding. “With no idea how lucky I was.”
“But those twenty minutes let you get inside and promptly trapped you here,” she says with a sigh. “Alive and un-Infected, confused, and…hmmm. Yeah. Rough.”
“Rough,” I admit. “But here I am.”
She gives me a strange look.
“Are you a survivalist or something? Thrill seeker? Soldier or something? Some kinda badass?” she asks.
I laugh.
The question is preposterous.
“Ha! Sounds nice. No—of course not.”
“Uh-huh,” she says slowly, and gives me a look like she doesn’t quite believe me but is too polite to call me out.
“You’re just…” She looks around at the hole in the window. At the crossbows, and the fire poker, the water barrels.
She trails off.
“I…”
I falter, and consider.
Really consider.
There’s a block there.
Something keeping me from really understanding myself.
But pieces are there, and I start talking, even though I don’t know what the next words out of my mouth are going to be before I say them.
“It’s scary,” I say, finally.
“Right.”
“It’s…tragic,” I continue.
“Right,” she says, her mouth firming into a line.
“It’s not that I have a background in it, or that I like it, necessarily…or that I’m having a good time,” I say, trying to analyze just exactly how I feel at the same time as I pick my words. “I just don’t want to stop moving and…die, and…well, here I am.”
It’s awkwardly phrased, misses the main point, and I can feel in my chest that it doesn’t quite get at the heart of the matter.
I do catch a glimpse at the heart of the matter, though.
I give Farah a glimpse of that glimpse.
The explanation won’t be helpful to Farah, but I don’t quite mind that. I verbalize it anyway.
I want to say how I feel out loud because it sounds important, and I don’t want to forget I saw this little piece when everything gets crazy again.
I’m figuring the rest out little by little.
Saying this piece out loud will help lodge it, like a single brick while I build the rest of the wall.
“There are a few people in my life who would be crushed if I died,” I say in a stiff and informative tone. “People who think I have my whole life ahead of me. I don’t want to disappoint them.”
Farah gives me a funny look.
“Okay,” she says. “Parental pressure. I get that. Wow, are you a sure fit for Lorelight.” She blurts out a harsh laugh. “I can’t die, because if I did, my parents would kill me. Great. Classic. Sure.”
I laugh a little awkwardly.
“Kinda,” I say.
Except not really at all, I add to myself.
Farah’s found some sort of understanding in that motive, though, even though she clearly thinks it’s screwed up reasoning.
Screwed up or immature.
Or something.
I can’t pinpoint what exactly her problem is with it, but she makes me feel like a little kid now that I’ve said it. Which is stupid, because I don’t even feel the way she’s summarized and repeated back to me.
But I go along with it, and it feels too late to reopen the conversation.
So this is how she’ll see me now, I guess.
“Well,” she says with a sigh, “it should go without saying you’ve done a remarkable job. I guess I should be glad I’ve got you and not some useless freakout…like…like I’ve been. Sorry.”
I blink.
“What do you mean?”
Farah shrugs uncomfortably, and brushes her long red hair behind her ears with a frustrated and practiced motion.
“I’ve been kind of useless.”
“You’ve been fine,” I tell her. “It’s been like…an hour. And what do you mean I’ve done a remarkable job?”
“Look,” she says, gesturing to the lounge. “You went from the parade field and into the Lounge Annex through a horde of Infected students. You fended off one attacker out of nowhere, with no context, and you’ve nailed two Infected straight through the head with a crossbow you don’t have any formal training in.”
“Three,” I say automatically.
She swallows, and I feel like a huge idiot.
“Russ kind of let you do it,” she says quietly, “but sure, notch that on the belt if you want.”
“Sorry.”
She breathes in and holds it, then out. Her nostrils flare, and for a moment, I think I’m about to catch some rage.
“You found your way to a safe location, and have food and water,” she says. “You’ve done well.”
I tell her thanks, but I still feel a little shitty for counting her favorite teacher and mentor on my headshot kill list.
“Technically, three headshots,” a dark part of my mind reminds me. “And brilliant shots, too.”
I shoo the thought away, scorning it.
The lounge is starting to become familiar.
The deep chairs.
The engraved table.
The old, unused fireplace, with its ancient, blackened wood.
Even the food stores and barrels rolled in from the kitchen are starting to look familiar in their corner after just a short time.
The light from the window is moving along the map, and turning from blazing white to yellow, to gold. It tells me the hour of evening.
The sun is setting, and nightfall is soon approaching Lorelight Academy.
For the hundredth time, I draw the comparison in colors between sunsets and the Infection crystals.
I must have been looking at the patch of evening sun, because Farah follows my gaze and seems to understand.
“You said they’re still in their rooms? My friends?”
I swallow.
“If they’re Infected, they’re not your friends anymore.”
“Richardson, Dumaul, Inkidunn, though—they’re still there? I don’t think I can sleep if I know they’re in the building. I think we should…”
Farah takes a deep breath.
“I think we should take care of them.”
I sigh and rise to my feet.
“Give me five more minutes to rest my arms. Then let’s do it.”
She nods.
“You’ll have the crossbow things?”
“Yep,” I say with a sigh. I couldn’t free the bolts I used on Russ. I’m down to fourteen crossbow bolts now.
Farah’s right, though—we need to take care of the other occupants of the building.
“I’ll obviously bring the knives,” I add.
“Right.”
That’s one other thing Farah and I have. We could arm a small militia with the knives we found in the kitchen.
Two full sets are kept delicately in decorative wooden knife holders in the shape of famous kings. They’re made to look like the knives are stabbing the kings in the back.
Each wooden king is staggering, wounded, and pleading with a dozen slots in his back where the knives can be stored.
A bit of morbid humor, I guess.
A bit of real history.
A quirky and suitable place to keep kitchen knives. This is not chef’s work, though. And I’m not carrying a decorative knife holder with me.
No one considers where they’d keep a foot-long kitchen knife while not using it in situations like this.
Soldiers have sheaths.
I’m no soldier.
I have to shove the sharp knife between my belt and pants. I’ll have to just hope I don’t stab myself with it accidentally, I suppose.
“What about you?” I ask Farah.
I haven’t judged the second-year student too hard for it, but her disassociation and distance so far have caused me to neglect to ask her about her skills and abilities.
It only occurs to me just now that Farah is, in fact, a second-year student at Lorelight Academy.
Can she use magic?
Is she…
Is she the combat mage the King Regent has been making sure Lorelight students all, partially, become?
“You ready for this?” I ask. “I have a plan, but if you…”
Farah’s mouth twists into an expression of discomfort.
“I kind of imagined myself opening the door for you,” she says, biting her lip and folding her arms, looking anywhere but at me, or at the hallway where the Infected corpses of Richardson, Dumaul, and Inkidunn pace ferally in their cages.
“I figured I’d just…” She waves with a butler’s “enter, please” gesture. “And then you’d just…shoot them.”
A single eyebrow rises.
I can’t help it.
“I know,” she sighs. “I don’t know why I was imagining that, but that’s kind of what I was imagining. I’ll help more than that.”
“Okay,” I say slowly. “And how, specifically?”
“I know these people, okay?” she snaps. “I know their faces. I know their voices. I know their personalities. I know…”
Her eyes well up with tears.
“I think when we imagine killing the monsters that live in these rooms,” she says quietly, “we imagine killing different sorts of things.”
I nod.
“If it’s too difficult for you…”
“No,” she says flatly. “No. I can do more than open the door. I just have no idea what sort of magic is at play here. I don’t know how to counter it, because I don’t know what to counter. So I might not be as effective as I’d like.”
“I think it might be Resonance magic of some kind,” I say.
She raises an eyebrow, and I even see a small smile twitch at her mouth.
“Oh?”
I dig my hand into my pocket for my crystal shards. It wasn’t the most respectful thing in the world, but I gathered what I could from Russ. Maybe it was his station as a Scholar, or his magical abilities, or just his physical size—but he had more, larger crystals than the other Infected I’ve fought thus far.
There’s a variance to the crystals now.
I’m beginning to mentally sort them by size and shape. I have eleven small rod-shaped crystals, the smallest forms the crystals seem to come in, mostly from the student at the entrance.
Next to them are what I’ve been thinking of as the “shards,” the medium-sized crystals that retain a little bit more of the shape they have before they’re condensed. I have three shards. Finally, there are the spikes.
I only have two spikes, and both came from the side of Scholar Russ’s head. These crystals are large enough to not quite fit in my pocket, and are roughly the length of my hand from wrist to fingertip.
The two spikes I keep on the map table, because they won’t fit easily in any pocket.
Farah listens while I explain what I’ve observed so far about the crystals.
I explain how they condense and turn purple when the Infected dies. I explain how the condensed crystals seem to have a relationship with the Infected crystals, how they cancel each other out and seem magnetized to each other.
The example I use is the trick that got me into the Lounge Annex in the first place—using my condensed crystals to neutralize the Infected crystals that had gathered on the doorframe. I explain the sensation this canceling and magnetism gives me, making me feel like a key sliding perfectly into a lock with an eternally satisfying sensation.
“Sounds like Resonance,” she admits, knitting her eyebrows together and tapping her chin with her fingertip. “But…Resonance is just a way people interact with magic. Not the type of magic itself.”
It’s my turn to frown.
Farah holds her hands up.
“Listen, this is stuff that’s way more advanced than what you cover in the first year. I petitioned to take a higher curriculum class on it, but I didn’t get in.”
“Kinda wish you had,” I say nervously.
She shrugs. “Rates to get in are low…besides—I petitioned to join every upper-level class to see which would take.”
“Wait…really?”
“Yeah,” she says, smiling. “The school caught on but appreciated my gusto. They let me into two.”
“Wow,” I say. “You must be a rising star.”
“Oh, I failed both classes,” she says with a laugh. “I had none of the foundation I needed. But it was…humbling. And no matter what, I earned some style points with the professors for applying for all their classes.”
“But no Resonance.”
“No Resonance,” she says, counting on her fingers. “No Diagrams. No Farsongs. No Poetics. I didn’t get into any of the classes related to how people interact with magic, because the entire point of your first year is to figure out which one speaks to you.”
“I don’t quite get it.”
“It’s like this,” she sighs. “Let’s say you’d never seen colors before. The world was just black and white. And you enrolled in a school, and the point of your first year was to learn to see all the colors, and then at the end, you can pick your favorite.”
“Okay, I follow so far.”
“You’ve never seen color before, right? And then imagine the first week you petition to take Advanced Teal.”
“Advanced Teal?” I ask, laughing.
“Right,” she says, chuckling a bit herself. “You’ve never seen in color before, and you apply for Advanced Teal.”
“So you were rejected.”
“Right.”
“So…” I prompt, flicking my gaze from the setting sun outside to the dark hallway where the monsters that were once Richardson, Dumaul, and Inkidunn wait for us, to the demise of one or the other.
“So magic is complicated,” she says with a sigh. “But it’s also simple.”
“Yeah, sounds really simple,” I say, gritting my teeth in something that might look like a smile if you’d never seen a real one before.
Farah shakes her head.
“Clear everything you think you know about magic from your mind. Listen to me carefully: You’re going to have to learn magic as it is relevant to this—to us. And that’s going to have to be okay. There isn’t the time or infrastructure, or…or the professors around to teach you magic from the ground up. You’re gonna have to scrape by shreds at at time, okay?”
I breathe in.
Everything she said I wouldn’t have time to do is exactly the way I hoped to learn magic—exactly the way I’ve learned everything else.
“Give me a little bit,” I press. “The very basics.”
Farah sniffs, and nods.
“Fair.”
She breaths in, takes a few moments to figure out how she’s going to word this brief lesson, and gets on with it.
She holds up two fingers.
“Two pillars of magic. Just two.”
I nod.
“Pillar One: What type of magic is it? Pillar Two: How do you interact with it?”
I wait for more.
“That’s it,” she says.
I blink.
“What do you mean?”
“Your magical identity is made up of those two things—what type of magic, and how you interact with it. Maybe you and I specialize in the same type of magic, but interact with it in different ways. Maybe you and I specialize in different types of magic, but have the same way of interacting with magic itself. We don’t, because Resonance is how you interact with it, and not how I do it. But that’s the basics for now. Repeat them back to me?”
I take it all in, and nod.
“Two pillars of magic,” I say back. “The type of magic, and how a person interacts with it. I don’t know what type of magic I interact with best, but the way I interact with it is through Resonance.”
“Perfect.”
“What types of magic are there?” I ask.
Farah gives me a look.
“I don’t want to overwhelm you.”
“Just give me a bit.”
“Sure,” she says finally, with a nod. “Life magic. Death magic. Elemental magic. Shadow, Light, what have you. Things like that. For example—Russ specialized in Air magic and Life magic. But he interacted with magic on Instinct, the way you have an affinity for Resonance. Russ would cast without thinking, and the more he planned and thought, the worse at magic he would get.”
I consider this.
I can see how it’s complicated and simple at the same time.
Maybe it’s like going to the same destination but taking different roads. Or like learning the same information but by hearing it in a lecture versus seeing it in a chart, versus learning by doing.
“So when you say you don’t know how to counter the Infection…”
