To live or die at loreli.., p.20
To Live Or Die At Lorelight Academy, page 20
“Hey, stud,” she says, and winks.
Then she grimaces in pain.
Damn.
She almost got out of the way.
She mostly did, actually.
But her ankle…
…Her ankle—the bad one—is trapped between the block of ice and the wall.
“You just can’t catch a break,” I say, shaking my head and moving closer.
“Poor choice of words,” she says, wincing, face red with pain.
“Should I move the block away?” I ask.
She nods.
“I need to see how bad it is.”
I bark out a laugh. I don’t need to clarify that it’s devoid of humor—she can tell by how pale I must be.
“I’m sure it feels bad enough, why do you need to see?”
She pauses, grimacing.
That’s enough for me to read between the lines.
“Because it doesn’t hurt as much as it should,” I answer for her.
She nods.
It’s not the blessing it might sound like at first.
I chip away the ice in a few places and free her foot.
There’s blood frozen into the ice in veins and tiny rivers that make me queasy to look at, as if the ice block has its own vasculature.
But it’s just Farah’s blood.
Once her ankle is fully free, she gingerly curls her leg around to take a look at it.
“We’ll need to take the boot off if we want to take a good look.”
“Hey, William?” she says, and I look her way. “Absolutely fucking not.”
“You think it would hurt?”
“Yah.”
“Well, that’s good, at least.”
I take out the chef’s knife.
“What are you doing?” she asks, the words spilling out, her eyes wide.
“We’ll need to remove the whole foot,” I say, and her mouth flies open.
“Joking. I’m cutting the boot off,” I say, rolling my eyes.
At least I hope I’m joking, I say to myself.
The foot is…rough. It’s not necessarily what most people would define as “foot-shaped” anymore. Even through the boot it’s frosted over with ice.
That explains the lack of pain—when the numb from the cold wears off, this thing is going to be…unmanageable. I don’t know a ton about medicine, but I know enough to know that.
The library back home had books on everything, but with some subjects in greater proportions than others.
Medicine books were difficult to read.
Dry—but interesting, in their own way, and oftentimes with pictures which were more interesting than the words themselves.
I don’t know exactly what the bones in a foot should look like.
I don’t know exactly which complications are lethal versus healable, versus something in between.
As far as I can tell, though, the big cracks are in the ugly but nonlethal places, and the tendons and arteries seem to be intact.
“How is it?”
“It doesn’t seem bad.”
Farah laughs. “Yeah, right.”
I sigh.
“No, I mean like…I don’t think you’re literally going to die,” I say, meeting her gaze. “I don’t know what…what it’ll be like for you after you recover.”
Farah frowns and mutters my own words back to herself, and realizes what I mean.
“You don’t know if I’ll be able to walk normally on it again.”
“Estimating that in either direction would be irresponsible of me. Sorry. But I don’t think you’re going to die. I don’t think.”
It’s the little things.
“Help me up.”
With one hand to brace herself on the wall, Farah rises to her feet.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
I frown.
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t help but feel my usefulness has…dropped.”
I’m a bit ashamed, but I was thinking the same thing.
“No,” I say. “You can still—”
“Will?” she interrupts.
I stop talking, and she nods.
“I’m just sorry.”
I shake my head, but she doesn’t want to hear something contrary, so I leave it.
We both turn our heads as rustling down the hallways reminds me I’ve left one feral still alive. It skulks toward us, crystals half greyed.
It’s pathetic and weakened.
My shoulders collapse. I don’t want to do any more killing.
“Can we not?” I ask it. “Can we…can we talk it out?”
It keeps shuffling forward, snarling.
“Please.”
It roars, flashing canines and incisors coated and grown with crystals.
I walk up to meet it.
Maybe it won’t attack me. Maybe at the last moment, it’ll stop.
If this thing attacks me, there really is no other way.
I think of Albright Tower, where Archscholar Sampson waits. He owes me answers. He owes Farah revenge.
I extend my arm, and my hand.
The creature grabs it with its claws, and for one brief moment, I think maybe we’ve established some diplomatic language here.
Then it searches for the biggest vein on my forearm, opens its jaws as wide as it can, and tries to bite.
I slide my arm away, and my knife is in and out of its skull from under the chin in a flash.
Farah sighs as the creature falls dead to the ground.
I shake my head.
“They really are gone, aren’t they?” I ask quietly.
Farah nods, eyes shut and face screwed up with pain.
I shake my head once more, and stare down at the stone floor of Yoostie as ashes drift slightly across.
Something begins to form in me. Farah’s ankle. Her struggle, and her fate. My future at Lorelight. My grandfather, and Burta, and the bright and shining star they think I am.
The young man they wanted to see soar.
And now I’m more than likely to die violently, cut and eviscerated by claws and teeth of sharp opalescent quartz.
My chest tightens, and I take a deep breath, pulling a handful of emotions and complexities into something more simple, and more useful:
Resolve.
That’s what it is.
That’s what’s forming.
Resolve.
Caught in the jar, maybe…but…
But I’m still the spider. And spiders aren’t helpless. They’re smart. Clever, even. They’re fast, and calculated.
They’re predators.
I can do this.
We can do this.
Ankle or not.
“Can we heal it?” I ask, the thought occurring suddenly. “With magic?”
“First thing I asked myself,” Farah says. “Life magic maybe, though most of the related Scholars and facilities are in the Southeast Petal.”
Hmmm.
Southeast.
Polar opposite us as we are right now. Getting to Yoostie was hard enough.
“You said Yoostie has a little bit of everything, though, right? Is there a possibility?”
“Actually,” Farah says, “there is. Though I can’t ask you to search through Yoostie just for me.”
I blink.
“Yeah…you can,” I say.
Farah refuses to meet my gaze.
“We’re doing this,” I say, and though usually I’m not so good at this sort of thing, a bit of determination does, in fact, end up sneaking its way into the words.
I’m glad for it, and as a bit of relief spreads across Farah’s face, I can tell she’s glad for it, too.
“Whether we’re able to heal that ankle or not. And don’t worry. You’re smart, you’ll find a way to be useful. You’re not the first person in the world to not be able to walk. There’s more to life than getting chased by an angry horde, as productive as that is.”
Farah laughs, and things feel a bit better.
“Fucking ankle,” she growls. Then her eyebrows rise. She’s got a thought. She warbles off the wall, almost immediately putting some weight on her ankle and trying to move toward the corpse of Hap-Sin.
“Farah—” I start to say, keenly aware of how I sound like a disgruntled Burta.
But Farah doesn’t seem to notice or care. She’s limping over to the Infected Scholar, and prying something from within his hands.
She breathes out in a slow exhalation.
When she turns to face me, a small object on a golden chain is dangling from her fingers. It’s a circle of gold, inlaid with a sizeable sapphire of deep blue. Small particles of arctic-blue dust are moving through the deep blue sapphire, trapped within and drifting like it’s a liquid they’re trapped in, rather than a gem.
“I can use this,” Farah says, more to herself than to me. “I can absolutely use this.”
Her spirits seem lifted. That’s good.
I look around at the Infected…or their remnants, at least.
Their crystals are already becoming Concentrate, and I spend a few minutes going around the ashes to gather what I can.
The final count is seventeen rods, one shard, and zero spikes.
The shard comes from Hap-Sin, whose crystals have otherwise been drained by the Concentrate, and therefore can’t become Concentrate themselves.
I take out my little inventory paper, and readjust the Concentrate count. While I’m at it, I make adjustments to our magical tools as well.
Crystal Concentrate
24 Rods (Small)
1 Shard (Medium)
1 Spike (Large)
Scrolls & Magical Supplies
Scroll of Fire Breathing x1, 0 Uses Remaining
Scroll of Gust x1, 0 Uses Remaining
With that finished, I circle back to Farah, who has finished searching Hap-Sin and the other Infected for anything besides Concentrate that might be useful, Hap-Sin in particular.
“Seems like a shame to let those spikes go to waste,” she comments, jutting a pointed, freckled chin toward the large grey spikes sticking from Hap-Sin.
“Unless you can think of a use for them, I think we’ve got to move on.”
I’ve already tried to separate them, but the magnetism is too great.
Farah shakes her head.
“Grab them anyway. We might be able to use them.”
“You don’t think we should stay light on supplies?” I ask, even as I place the heavy spent Concentrate crystals into the bag.
“Actually, I don’t,” Farah says, and smiles enigmatically.
“That little ice necklace really cheered you up, huh?”
Farah shrugs. “I’ve got something neat planned for it. We’ve got to ransack Hap-Sin’s lecture room first.”
This lecture room is not like the others.
It isn’t barren and dusty like the rooms on the other side of Yoostie’s first floor.
It doesn’t hold a casual collection of backpacks, jackets, notebooks, and other mundane supplies like the room we hid inside when we first spotted Hap-Sin.
This room?
This room has seen some things.
The first thing we notice—we can’t help it, after the last few days—is the Infection crystals growing in patches and clusters in seemingly random locations.
Seemingly random.
They are, of course, not random at all.
Something violent happened here, as evidenced by the shattered wooden chairs and leaning backpacks that relinquish their contents, spilling quills and pens and scrolls and journals onto the cruel stone floor.
A pair of spectacles lies trampled on the floor, bent and shattered and useless.
There are signs of…other activity in the room, as well.
More magical.
It’s hard to tell if the scorch marks on the wall, the broken glass bowl and the puddles of water on the floor beside it, or the chair—fighting gravity, wedged impossibly where corner meets ceiling—were simply a professor’s demonstration, or the fight against the Infection when it first broke out.
That’s the strange wonder of Lorelight. Of magic.
Not that I get to experience it firsthand.
I have to dose my dreams through a strained filter, squeezing it like old moldy coffee grounds to barely pass my lips. This is how I have to taste Lorelight Academy. Cold and stale, disgusting and ruined.
It weighs on me.
So much does.
This lost beauty of Lorelight dims further when I notice a red streak of blood on the ceiling, just next to the gravity-defying chair.
Neither Farah nor I speak.
Sometimes, the more tragedy we face, the duller we grow toward it.
We begin our search.
“Anything?” I ask, rifling through a backpack and pulling out a set of yarn and a knitting needle attached to a half-formed red scarf.
“Not yet,” Farah says. “Though I have a feeling I know where the good stuff is.”
“Where?”
In response, Farah inclines her head toward several of the patches of Infection crystals growing in various locations throughout the room.
She gingerly raises herself to her feet with the makeshift cane from the coat rack, hauling herself up on it like death the oarsman, pushing his barge through the swamp of the lost.
Farah hobbles toward one particular cluster and knocks it with the crutch.
Barely visible beneath a crystal encasing is a piece of tan and aged scroll with symbols and inlaid designs.
It’s small—no bigger than my hand.
“I don’t know what spell that is, but it’s using Air and Water magic. I can tell by the colors. Blue for Water, silver for Air.”
She hobbles over to another part of the classroom, and another cluster of crystals, this one slightly larger, the size of my arm maybe.
“This is some sort of magical implement,” Farah says. “A scepter, or something along those lines. Good for channeling magic through.”
The places the crystal has decided to grow resolve any last doubts I had about the relationship between the Infection and magic.
The two are directly linked, and the Infection will seek out magic, gather around it, and focus where it can find it.
It makes total sense.
It explains why Russ and Hap-Sin had such large growths when most Infected students only have what I now call the “rods.”
It explains the seemingly random distribution of the crystals on structures.
In fact…
The Infection might even be moving.
Trying to “get in.”
That’s why structures like the Lounge had crystal Infection on the door and nowhere else.
It also explains why a place like the Lounge—with relatively few magical artifacts and practitioners—was so lightly Infected. Yoostie, where magical practitioners and artifacts alike are in relatively common supply, had a large amount of crystal growth on the door.
And not only that…
I feel a pit in my stomach grow when I think of the staircase up to the second floor of Yoostie, and the seemingly impenetrable wall of pink, orange, and blue crystals that cover it twelve feet high, twenty feet wide, and who knows how many feet deep.
My hand rests on the hilt of the kitchen knife hanging on my belt. It’s done me just fine, so far—minus a handful of close calls.
But with Infected Scholars, second-year students, and who knows what else running around the more magical parts of campus?
Who knows what might wait on the other side of that crystalline wall?
I suddenly wish I had Farah’s talent for calling forth torrents of fire from elegant pieces of paper.
How long are kitchen knives and hand-crossbows and fire pokers going to last?
“We need more Concentrate,” I say aloud, after what I realize is an extended period of silence.
Farah nods.
The feeling settles in.
This is how I’m going to poke my holes.
I begin talking aloud, just to think through the thoughts as they come to me.
“That’s the way out of this,” I say, nodding to myself. “The way through this. The more Concentrate we have, the more tools we can free from the crystal. The more tools we have at our disposal, the more Concentrate we can gather. The more Concentrate we have, the more tools we can access, the more doors we can open. You get the gist.”
“I do.” Farah nods. “And I agree. We arm ourselves. To the teeth,” she snarls, and glances in a direction I can’t help but feel is toward Albright Tower.
“So, let’s break some things out and get at the goods,” Farah says, reaching for the rods I’m clutching in my right hand.
“Hang on—” I say, backing off.
I hesitate.
“We have a limited amount of resources. We have to be smart.”
Farah sighs and shakes her head.
“Duh—I know. But there’s something specific I’m looking for, Will. I’ve taken this lecture, I think. Last quarter. With Hap-Sin. He does it at the beginning of the semester. He shows off a bunch of magical implements, trying to get students passionate and interested. He brings a little bit of everything, and makes the students try them out themselves.”
“You think he showed off something useful? You think it’s still here?”
“Not only do I think it’s still here,” she says, walking over to a lectern at the front of the room with a tiny patch of crystal growth on the surface. “I found it. One here, one there.” She points to a similar patch at the far rear of the lecture room.
It takes six rods to free the small object.
“Can you put this on?” Farah says, leaning backward as I hold the tiny thing—no bigger than my thumbnail—up to the lamplight.
“I don’t know if I’m a ‘single pearl earring’ type of guy. You’ll have to pierce my ears.”
Farah laughs. “Yeah, I could tell by the bad haircut and the goofy smile.”
Bad haircut?
“Bad hairc—”
“Joke, Will. Your hair is fine. Any chance your stylist used, perhaps, the aid of a bowl?”
How does she know about Burta’s haircutting bowl?
“Burta says it looks nice,” I say.
“Whoever Burta is,” Farah says, “she loves you very much.”
