To live or die at loreli.., p.39
To Live Or Die At Lorelight Academy, page 39
So close.
Just beyond the cliff face.
And so hopelessly far.
This is my distance in magic and skill to the artifact in my hand.
I am not powerful enough.
I am too far away.
Too far by miles.
The magic in it does not respond.
I do not turn time back.
Not by a moment.
Not by a fraction of a moment.
It is as hopeless as we estimated. I don’t know why, but…I thought maybe that it would work. I thought that maybe “slim” meant “hope.”
But it doesn’t work.
No, no, no…
Only Lulana.
I can’t use it. Maybe Farah could?
But she’s hours away by now, committing suicide by attempted revenge at Albright Tower.
“It’s not fair,” I plead, dropping the Anastrophe and clamping both hands on Yin-Gata’s neck.
Her life force is bleeding away. It’s soaking my hands and so slippery…I can’t imagine I’m actually stopping any blood from escaping. It’s just soaking my already soaked hands.
Another scream from behind me. The student in the corridor.
Could I have saved her if I had ignored Yin-Gata?
It’s all wrong.
It’s all gone—and it’s all gone so wrong.
Hope is lost.
Chapter
Thirty-One
And then there is fire.
A roar of flame explodes from the entryway leading from Yoostie’s third floor to the Arboretum.
I catch the tail end of it, the glow of fire illuminating my peripheral vision.
What?
An Infected—the one with the scythe arms—comes running from the corridor and into the Arboretum. It’s covered in flame. Then a sword juts through its chest the way its scythe claws claimed a life before.
A dueling sword.
“Will!” a voice screams from behind the Infected, and the sword frees itself.
Someone is on the other side.
Her face is covered in dirt, and ash, and blood, and her long red hair runs wild.
Farah Kitt.
In one hand is the dueling sword, fresh from the body of the Infected. In the other hand is…
In the other hand is a small wooden bowl, carved with a strange scene.
“Will!” Farah’s voice echoes in my ear.
The earring.
I forgot about the earring.
Why didn’t I hear her earlier?
Farah sprints toward us, fast as she can. She’s wearing the earring, too.
“Will, why didn’t you answer me?” she pleads, and I hear her voice come through twice with the slight delay of the earring. “I kept yelling for you! I could hear everything! Why couldn’t you hear me?”
I could hear everything.
“What do you mean?”
Farah slides to the floor beside Yin-Gata’s pale form.
“Hours! I heard everything. Your conversation with Lulana Yin-Gata, everything. I put plenty together. Why didn’t you answer me?”
“I…I couldn’t hear you,” I stammer. “You didn’t come through the earring.”
“Will—I—I’m sorry,” Farah says hurriedly, and drops the dueling sword in favor of a knife. She puts it to her palm.
“What are you doing?” I ask. But I know what she’s doing. “Transfusion bowl?”
She nods.
“I ran here as fast as I could. Yin-Gata bleeding out…I’ve been heading your way for hours. No sneaking. Just sprinting. Wasn’t easy.”
“How does the bowl work, again? A vision-quest thing, right? Should we—”
“Already did it,” Farah says, and cuts her palm, dripping blood into the bowl. “Wish me luck.”
“Farah—let me—” I begin, but it’s too late.
Farah is pouring the blood from her hand into the bowl, and from the bowl to Lulana’s chest, over her heart.
The cut on Farah’s palm opens before our eyes.
“Wish me luck,” Farah says once more. Then her eyes roll to the back of her head, as a torrent of blood flees her palm and plunges into Lulana Yin-Gata’s chest.
Chapter
Thirty-Two
Lulana is back.
Farah is not.
“Ready, and…” Yin-Gata tells me, adjusting my fingers on Farah’s wrist. “And…count.”
For one minute, I count.
“Eighty-five,” I tell her, and she nods.
“That’s good. Now count breaths for thirty seconds.”
I count.
“So what’s her respiratory rate?”
“Eleven.”
“Per minute?”
“Oh, right…Twenty-two? Eleven breaths in thirty seconds, means Twenty-two breaths in one minute?”
“Why are you asking me?” Yin-Gata asks, raising an eyebrow. “Yes, eleven times two is twenty-two. This isn’t math class, Will. This is the easy part.”
“Right,” I say, nodding. “Good.”
“Well, not so fast,” Yin-Gata tells me.
“What do you mean?”
“Twenty-two isn’t great. Not for a healthy young woman her age…but for the blood loss recovery, it’s…fine, but we should keep an eye out.”
I let out a soft breath.
Lulana was awake and thinking before Farah. I suppose we should all be thankful for that—Farah’s transfusion was not done in the best of circumstances. Didn’t have enough time to read Lulana’s journal, of course.
Blood for blood. Thanks to the ritual bowl, that blood perfectly matched the Archscholar’s system—it was accepted readily and desperately. Under controlled circumstances, the person donating the blood has a supply of their own to draw from. Water, some sort of sugar or food.
It’s only thanks to Yin-Gata’s small stature compared to Farah that they haven’t swapped equally critical positions.
That little bit of extra blood—that leg up—is the reason Yin-Gata and I are caring for Farah while she recovers, rather than manically finding a new solution.
Lulana would find it, though.
She’s creative.
“You should do this, by the way,” she tells me after a moment.
“Do what?”
“Medicine. Healing.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“You’re good at it,” she tells me.
“I just stumbled through taking her vitals,” I say with a laugh.
“You’ve got promise.”
“You asked me to multiply eleven by two and it took me ten full seconds.”
Lulana swats it away and shrugs. “Sure, but you’re here, and you want to help, and that’s most of it.”
We share a small laugh, and I try to tell myself that the color returning to Farah’s cheeks is something I really see, and not optimistic thinking.
“You’re creative,” she tells me finally. “You have a good understanding of the tools at your disposal, and how they might work together. You can assess a situation and act. You don’t hesitate, but you are keenly aware of how those actions might impact the system. Will—you would be stellar in medicine.”
I look away, at a suddenly interesting spot on the wall.
Farah isn’t the only one whose cheeks are getting more red.
“Yeah, well…”
“Seriously, Will,” Lulana tells me, and spins me to face her. “The amount of work it takes to learn the human body on this level is…almost unfathomable. But once the human body becomes that situation that you understand so well? You’ll be invaluable. And you’ll make an incredible, wonderful difference.”
I blush more.
“You really think so?”
“I’m modest,” Lulana tells me, and we laugh, because she isn’t. She’s honest, and for Lulana Yin-Gata, flat honesty regarding her capabilities does not come off as modest. “No—really, in most ways I am. Trust me when I say—you’d be a hero.”
I feel a small tear well up at my eye.
“A hero? Really?”
She nods, and the tear at my eye wells up a bit more. I sniff and wipe it away.
“That’d be a nice thing to be.”
Lulana only smiles.
“So,” Lulana says, after waiting a beat for the emotional impact to settle in and pass. “Next semester I’ll petition for you to start taking on a private tutorship under my guidance.”
I bark out a laugh.
“Next semester?” I say, incredulous.
“There will be a next semester,” she says, heading me off.
“With who?” I say quietly.
“Lorelight has ways of protecting its students,” Lulana tells me, suddenly very serious. “This is tragic. But there are survivors. I promise. I warned a group to warn others. I haven’t made it to any of the libraries yet. Have you?”
“No,” I say. “We wanted to make it to one, but we hadn’t yet. Is there a group of…”
“I don’t know,” Lulana admits. “But if students could make it there, they’d be safe.”
I blink.
The world seems to spin underneath me.
“People might be…alive to save?” I stammer.
Lulana nods. “People to save.”
I swallow a lump that’s suddenly caught like a pit in my throat.
Beside us, Farah opens her eyes.
It’s late—maybe even close to midnight—not that the eternal sunlight of the Arboretum would tell us that.
“Is she alive?” Farah mumbles a half an hour later.
Lulana puts her hand on my arm to halt me from speaking.
“She is alive,” Yin-Gata answers in the third person, “and she cannot express her gratitude.”
Farah smiles.
“Good, good,” she slurs.
Farah blinks slowly.
“And the…Ana…an…”
“We have the Anastrophe,” I tell her.
“Let’s…use it…” she suggests.
“I never thought of that,” I reply, tapping my chin.
“Will, shhh…shuddup,” Farah says with a slow laugh, and slaps my arm with a heavy hand.
“We will,” I promise. “Lulana and I have a plan. We’ll cover it in the morning.”
“While you guys do it, I’ll go kill S…Sampson,” Farah promises, and Lulana and I share a concerned glance.
We share a glance because we already know the plan, and Farah’s estimate of it is closer than she knows.
Her zeal is still a tad frightening, though.
The plan is this:
Archscholar Lulana Yin-Gata is the only one of us capable of using the Anastrophe. That much is clear. And, even she, aligning with her affinity and pulling on all of her power and expertise, is not strong enough under normal circumstances.
We need to find a “place of power”—what the Archscholar calls a knot-center. She’s described her magic to me—like she’s a little tiny person in the middle of a shoelace knot, pulling threads with both arms and winding her way through reality.
To stand at the center of the knot means something to Yin-Gata, and—considering she’s the one who’s going to be activating the artifact itself—it means something to Farah, me, and the rest of Lorelight, too.
So a knot-center is our destination.
There are several possible options—including each and every one of Lorelight’s several towers. They all serve as places of power. The closest tower is the one at the very center of Lorelight—the pin that holds the pinwheel petals.
But Lulana wants to stop all this at the source.
We all do.
One tower, therefore, stands apart from the rest. Higher risk, but without a doubt the best option:
Albright, of course.
Chapter
Thirty-Three
We leave the Lounge after stocking up on a minimum of food and water, and a bare minimum of other miscellaneous supplies.
Oh—
And armed to the teeth.
We leave armed to the teeth, too.
At least as much as we can be.
We even bring with us the twelve dueling sentries, silent and looming.
We’ve come a long way in preparedness.
I feel like I’m missing something, though.
Like we still don’t quite have it.
“You have to find something here,” a voice urges in my mind as we approach the tool library, our final stop for gear and supplies before Albright itself.
“For Burta, for your grandfather, for yourself—you have to find something here. You have to make it. You have to live.”
The thought and feeling floods through me, settles in.
Yin-Gata raises an eyebrow as I kneel on the grass outside the crystal-encased shed, and ready both hand-crossbows.
“Remind me—Philip and…?” she asks.
“Mitchell,” I say with a grunt of effort, lining Mitchell’s firing mechanism back and putting a bolt in the slot.
“I guess nowhere in the hero’s handbook does it say you can’t name your weapons everyday names,” she says brightly.
I say nothing, but I smile a bit at the memory of Philip, and smile a bit sadly at the thought of his widower who I’ll one day return to.
Ideally.
What a rough truth.
Beside me, still peering down at me, Yin-Gata cocks her head. “I suppose you missed your chance to name Bywylde.”
“…Excuse me?” I laugh.
“Your sword,” Yin-Gata says, looking to Farah as if expecting some sort of commiserating reaction.
Farah only frowns and shakes her head slightly.
“Your sword,” Yin-Gata repeats, tapping her left hip, referring to the dueling sword hanging at my left hip. “Its name is Bywylde.”
“Be wild?” Farah asks, enunciating the words and waiting for some familiarity that doesn’t come.
It’s Lulana’s turn to hesitate.
“Well…I…that’s your sword. The name is an acronym: ‘Bet You Wish You Listened, Eh?’ Kind of a taunt, really.”
Farah raises an eyebrow, and I mimic the motion.
I take the sword out and examine the blade. The runes along the edge give no hint to its name.
“Wait. The actual name of the sword is the phrase ‘Bet You Wish You Listened, Eh?’”
Yin-Gata laughs.
“That was her style.”
“Whose style?”
In response, the Archscholar nods her head back toward the building we came from.
“Eustace,” the Archscholar says, brow furrowed. Then she blinks. “Where did…where did you get that sword, Will?”
I open my mouth and the words won’t come out.
“He said he found it on the floor,” Farah says slowly. “I…was still pretty deep in painkillers. It didn’t occur to me how…brief that story is.”
I scratch the back of my head. “It’s not a lie,” I admit. “I was being choked.”
“Tell me more.”
“Do you want to know or not, Farah?”
“Sorry.”
“I was close to passing out,” I continue. “Close to dying. I hallucinated a man and a woman, and they had a conversation about giving me the sword, and then it was…there.”
Farah blinks, and leans forward.
Lulana’s reaction is more interesting. She nods, and says nothing.
“I see,” she says finally.
I wait for her to say more, but the Archscholar seems to retreat back within her own mind for a few moments, and doesn’t elaborate.
The door to the tool library is, like many magical buildings, locked with Infection crystal. It requires the use of Concentrate—tapping into the Resonance of the crystals, creating a magnetic relationship between the two, then using my own magnets to “unlock” the door from the other side.
In moments, we’re in.
We’ve been in for a while, now.
I still haven’t given up looking.
“It’s not here, Will,” Farah says, speed-walking behind me as I super-speed-walk through the item-stocked isles of the tool library for the fourth…maybe fifth, time.
There aren’t any Infected in the tool library.
Maybe it hadn’t been opened yet for the morning when the Infection happened.
But that’s a double-edged saw…sword, thing.
Because as lucky as we are not to face any resistance in the tool library itself, the object I’m searching for is, also, nowhere to be found.
“Will, don’t—”
Farah sighs.
“Ugh. I can’t look at you like that. You look like a lonely kid finding out he’s not getting any presents for his birthday.”
I glance down at my folded arms, and casually uncross them, and un-pout my lips.
“What are our resource counts?” she asks.
“Fifty rods, six shards, and one spike.”
“Except we save the spike,” Farah grunts. “For Sampson.”
“So what do we want, then?” I ask, unsuccessfully trying to hide my disappointment about the absence of the rotating saw-blade from my voice.
I don’t really care. I know I should, that just because the rotating saw isn’t here, that doesn’t mean there aren’t useful things.
“Perhaps the reason we’re unsure of which tools to free is that we aren’t clear on our plan,” Lulana says slowly, approaching Farah and me, tapping her chin twice.
It’s a behavior I do myself frequently. And I’ve seen that—the Archscholar, despite being older than us by a handful of decades and of vastly higher rank and power to us, is picking up our idiosyncrasies.
I think…
I think it’s because she wants to fit in.
There’s a little kid in there, I think.
One who maybe didn’t have as many friends as she probably should have.
I don’t mind.
Lulana is a star in my book.
If I had a journal, like she did, the entry on her would be all praise and kindness. She’s my friend, already. That I could promise her truthfully a thousand times over, and she doesn’t have to meld into any personality channels for that to be true.
Lulana is also, above almost everything else—
Smart.
She shows it again now.
I cross my arms and look around.
