Firebreak, p.7
Firebreak, page 7
Mallory drew another card. Whatever she saw there sent a flicker of emotions across her face, leaving her somewhere between amusement and annoyance. “Gimme one more.”
“Seven hearts, blue.”
Mallory pushed her bifocals up and pinched the bridge of her nose. “You know, kid, nobody likes a showoff.”
Bahati blinked at her, confused. “Professor?”
Mallory fanned out a hand of cards, holding them up. Except for the first, each one was correct.
“You were calling out the next card in the deck, after the one I was holding. Gonna have to help you fine-tune that noggin. Impressive work, though. For now, grab a seat.”
The professor riffled her deck of cards from one hand to the other, flowing in an arcing stream, before catching them in her palm and tucking them back in their box.
“All right, kids, good class. Before our next meeting, get yourselves down to the school library and hit the books. You all know that brightburn moss is a good cleansing herb. I want you to find three more that can do the same job and write me a five-hundred-word essay all about ‘em. They don’t have to be indigenous to Firebreak Island, but they do need to be verified by at least two supporting sources from established witches. I give extra credit for a properly formatted bibliography, because I’m old-fashioned that way.”
Olivia raised her hand. “Professor? What if we don’t know how to write a bibliography?”
“Well then, Miss Renn, let me tell you about a magical place where you can find the answers to all of your pressing questions. It’s called…the library. That’s it. Dismissed.” As the second-years clambered to their feet, Mallory beckoned at Amy. “Miss Nettle, a word?”
“I gotta go,” Amy said to Vail.
“I know. Hey, uh…can we hang out, after? I really need some you-time.”
Amy smiled. “Of course. Meet up in the library?”
“I’ll see you there.”
***
It was just minutes since the nightmare, but it had already taken on a hazy, nebulous quality in Amy’s mind, crumbling as dreams do under the cleansing light of the sun. She felt befuddled. She and Professor Mallory sat alone in the hut, the rest of the class long gone.
“It felt real,” Amy said, trying to explain. “Like it was actually happening. But now… I’m not sure it meant anything at all. Maybe it was just my mind playing tricks.”
Professor Mallory carefully wrapped the scrying-bottle in a silk cloth the color of sapphires before putting it back in the storage box. “That doubt is natural. My experience with long-distance scrying suggests it engages the same parts of your brain that light up when you’re dreaming. Our brains are marvelous things, really: globs of meat racked in an endless electrical storm. Put those neurons together, make them click in the right order, and you have a thinking person with a personality and feelings. Marvelous stuff. The downside is that we are not precise engines. We approximate, we estimate, we do our best to interpret the sensations and signals we receive. What did you notice about most of the other students today when they gazed into the bottle?”
“Symbols,” Amy said. “Only a few actually saw the card. The others saw colors and numbers from their memories and had to figure it out from there.”
“Exactly.”
Mallory pressed her hand against Amy’s knee and looked her in the eye.
“When you slipped away, what did you see?”
Elmer, triumphant. The Corpse, about to feast.
And Vail, dead.
“Everything I’m afraid of,” Amy said.
The professor nodded. “You’ve been doing the shielding exercises I taught you, right?”
“Every single day.”
“And have you had any more…interactions with the Corpse?”
“No,” Amy said. For a while, the thing had tried to claw its way into her dreams almost every night. It left messages for her on the bathroom mirrors. But after a few months of constant study with Mallory teaching her to hide her psychic light under a bushel, the unrest had gradually faded.
Mallory nodded, thoughtful. “You’ve been bottled up, by necessity. There’s a good chance that opening yourself to visions so suddenly jolted your brain. If you panic while scrying, even for a moment, it’s easy to send yourself on a bad trip. There was this one time, back in college—” Mallory paused. “Never mind. The headmistress has made her feelings about my college anecdotes clear, and I am not supposed to share them with students. Point is, it’s very likely you were just…clearing out some head-crud. Giving your anxieties shape and form is a way of confronting them.”
“But what if…” Amy started to say. She frowned, trying to wrangle her thoughts, to make her vision make sense. “Are prophecies real? Can people see the future?”
Mallory knitted her fingers together and stretched her arms. She let out a sigh.
“Hoo boy. That is a third-year topic, at the earliest. A little scrying to read a playing card is one thing, but advanced applied prognostication will melt your noodle. Let me give you the shorthand version: there’s no future to predict. No fate, no preordination, no destiny. But that doesn’t mean all prophecies are fake. The ‘future’ as we understand it is made of countless strands of probability. Let me give you an example.”
The professor rose, walked over to a kettle on a hot plate, and clicked it on. The water inside began to heat as she spooned a measure of fresh, fragrant herbs into a strainer. She gestured for Amy to follow her. They stood side by side in front of the kettle.
“Now, given what I’ve just done, tell me what’s more likely to happen in the next thirty seconds. Am I going to offer you a soothing cup of chamomile tea, or am I going to slap you across the face?”
Amy blinked. “Uh…I…the tea? I hope?”
Mallory chuckled. “Exactly. You’re observing details from your environment and using those details to intuit what will happen next. That’s a form of prophecy, and we do it all day, every day. We couldn’t function without it. There’s a reason I harp so much on the importance of intuition for a witch. Intuition feeds into our magic, and magical divination is just a method of looking farther, looking deeper, than what our physical senses can perceive.”
The water began to boil. Mallory clicked the hot plate off, picked up the kettle and poured a torrent of steaming water into each of the cups. The heat washed up into Amy’s face, warring with the sudden winter shiver that rippled down her spine. The splash of water reminded her of the dying submarine. She could still hear it groaning, snapping, dying in the deep all around her.
“I’m a creature of free will,” the professor continued, “and my behavior is not guaranteed to be rational. ‘Rationality’ is highly overrated, anyway. The most self-professed rationalists I’ve ever met were all utterly emotional to the core, convinced of their own superior logic while acting on anything but logic. Anyway, that means that while there’s a ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-et-cetera percent chance that I’m about to serve you a cup of tea, the chance that I’ll slap you instead is non-zero. Magic can’t tell you which, because that decision isn’t definite until I make it and act on it. The best magic can do is refine probabilities and help you see the most likely outcome.”
Amy was still back in the submarine, fixated on the form of Vail. Prone, eyes closed, neck bent all wrong.
Not breathing.
Amy gathered herself. “So even if it was a…a prediction, it’s only what’s likely to happen, not what has to happen? I can change it?”
“You can,” Professor Mallory said, “but have a care. There’s a reason we only teach this sort of thing to upperclassmen, and even then, we only pick certain students for advanced instruction. You’ve met Anahera, right? Leader of the Cups?”
“Sure,” Amy said. “She’s…”
“A space cadet.” Mallory shrugged. “Hey, I call ‘em like I see ‘em. Anahera’s a great kid, and incredibly talented, but she spends most of her waking hours on a plane of existence that most of us can only reach with some exceptionally strong herbs. Sometimes I’m afraid she’s missing out.”
Amy tilted her head. “Missing out?”
Mallory picked up both cups and offered one to Amy. They gently clinked the porcelain together and shared a sip. The tea was fresh, grown and harvested behind the professor’s hut, and its warmth sank into Amy’s muscles like a hot bath.
“A fixation on the future can steal your present away,” Mallory said. “Gone before you know it, and even when you get to the future you’ll only care about the future after that. Life is for living. Take it from an old bird like me. Time’s a lot shorter than you think, and when your youth is gone, it’s gone. Besides, ever heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy?”
Amy nodded. “You cause the thing you don’t want to happen to happen, and it wouldn’t have if you didn’t try to stop it in the first place.”
“Perverse, but…well, that’s magic for you. Hey, try this — whatever you do, don’t think about a pink dancing elephant.”
Immediately, an elephant in a ballet tutu pranced through Amy’s imagination.
“I…can’t,” she said.
Crows-feet crinkled at the corners of Mallory’s eyes as she smiled. “Exactly my point. What we intend and what we do are often two very different things, despite our best intentions.”
Amy sat with that for a while. She still didn’t feel any closer to the truth. She only knew one thing for certain. If she’d seen a vision in that bottle, not nightmares or brain-cruft but a genuine prophecy, then she’d been given a warning. She, and Vail, were going to die.
Not Vail. I can’t let that happen. I have to change the probabilities. Whatever it takes, I have to change them.
“Professor, weird question, but I remember hearing back in my first-year classes that there’s some kind of laboratory at the bottom of the ocean. Is that true?”
Mallory sipped her tea and wrinkled her nose.
“Ugh, yeah, right off the coast. There’s nothing natural about this planet. It’s an artificial pocket dimension that we found in our hour of need and put to our own purposes. Pop quiz: remember what you learned in my class last year?”
Amy nodded. “Firebreak was almost barren. You had to import an entire ecosystem.”
“A lot of magic, a lot of hard work. Near as we can tell, the original settlers — long gone now, and I can guess what happened to them — created this entire world as a testbed for deep-water experiments. They’d open a portal to the surface here on the island, then take submarines down to the lab below. There were signs of a surface camp where the Academy stands now, but it was just rubble by the time we got here.”
The word submarine kicked Amy in the heart like an electric shock.
“What happened to the subs?” she asked, as casually as she could.
Mallory shrugged. “Gone. Probably lost in whatever disaster caused the whole lab to cave in. There’s the ruin of a sub pen on the southern peninsula of the island, but it’s empty. Trust me, it was one of the first places we scouted once Elmer and his rat-friend went on the run. Professor Kamaka and I checked it ourselves. Nobody’s hiding in there.”
Amy digested that. Another question occurred to her.
“The subs and the lab…were they magically shielded or something? I mean, the ocean’s filled with monsters, and the Corpse is right there off the coast. How did they survive?”
“You know hon? I don’t think they did.” Mallory sipped her tea. “Whatever those old dead scientists were trying to accomplish, I know what the result was. I think they made the monsters.”
Chapter ten
As she walked back to the school alone, Murder Mittens stalking protectively in her shadow, Amy felt lost.
If I fixate too much, I could make the vision happen. I get that. But if I don’t do anything, THAT could make the vision happen. And I don’t know which is which until I make the right choice. Or the wrong one.
The rest of the prophecy continued to fade, crumbling at the edges like an old sepia-toned photograph, but one image remained vivid and sharp: Vail.
Whatever it takes. I can’t lose her. Whatever it takes to get stronger, to learn more, to change the future, I’ll do it. No questions asked.
Back within the walls, under the gray stone archways of the school, she beelined for the library. It was her favorite place these days. As a child growing up in Holybrook, the old one-room library — housed in the shell of a bankrupt Pizza Hut — had been the only safe place in a dangerous, hostile world. She couldn’t call the Academy library safe, exactly, but it had quickly become her second home.
It occupied a baroque gallery whose twelve-foot-tall shelves formed a sprawling maze, hardcover books as far as the eye could see and beyond, lit by flickering violet flames that burned under frosted globes in brass fittings. Here and there, students wound through the stacks led by dancing fireflies, the curators of the antique card catalog. The air smelled faintly of sandalwood incense, more like a temple than a library. Then again, to Amy those two words meant the same thing.
The librarian, Adelaide Constance Tiptree, sat at the front desk reading a chapbook in the hot glow of a film projector that clacked, whisper-soft and rhythmic, in the swell of silence. The Victorian lady, prim and proper as always, glowed translucent in the light. The ghost — though she was always quick to point out that she preferred the term un-dead — had been divorced from her physical body many years ago. Her current state restricted her to the library unless someone moved her projector, but Adelaide considered this to be the best possible afterlife and had few complaints. She greeted Amy with a smile and a nod and went back to her reading.
Vail was waiting for Amy alone, halfway down one of the venerable wooden study tables. A study of flora lay open to her left, a lined notebook on her right. She jotted down a few words as she leafed through the pages. She almost jumped to her feet when she saw Amy coming.
They said the same thing at the same time. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“God, yes,” Vail whispered, pulling Amy into a tight hug. “That was humiliating. It’d be one thing if some other kids washed out, but I was literally the only one in the entire class who couldn’t—”
“Amy!” a voice called from the end of the table. She started and turned. Clarke swept toward her, Emile in tow. “Sorry to cut in,” Clarke said, offering an apologetic nod. “Amy, we need you upstairs. Coins meeting.”
He leaned closer and lowered his voice, excluding Vail.
“Kinzie thinks this Elmer guy is building a Resonator and trying to phone home. You actually met him twice, so she wants to pick your brain. Hopefully we can figure out not just what they took but how he took it and how to stop him from getting the rest of the gear he’s gonna need.”
A Resonator, like the one in her vision. She remembered it self-destructing, bulbs blowing out one after another in a storm of powdered glass as Elmer screamed in rage.
No Resonator, no confrontation. And Vail survives.
She squeezed Vail’s hand, then let it fall. “I have to go. I’m sorry…can we get together after dinner, maybe?”
Vail’s face dropped. “I mean, I…I guess.”
Self-fulfilling prophecy. If I say the wrong thing, I could make my vision come true. I need to think this through before I risk it.
“I’m sorry, it’s just…I’ll explain later, okay?”
Not knowing what else to say, she followed Clark and Emile out of the library.
***
Vail sat at the table alone. She stared at the book in front of her, but the words just washed across her eyes, read but not understood. Pointless. It all suddenly seemed so pointless. She was going to fail Mallory’s class, she was going to get sent home, and she was going to end up the way everyone had said she would: dead in a gutter with a needle in her arm.
She was overreacting. Being dramatic. She knew it. That didn’t make it any easier to stop.
Am I asking for too much?
She never wanted to be needy. Never wanted to be a burden on anyone. Hated asking for help. But when she needed it, she really needed it—
And Amy just abandoned me to hang out with her cool new friends.
Why wouldn’t she? Vail understood. Amy was getting everything she wanted. Popularity, knowledge, magic, the chance to travel the multiverse and do and see all the things she dreamed about. A bright and shining future.
She just wasn’t sure if Amy’s vision of the future had her in it. Lately, Amy wasn’t acting like it did.
Why can’t you just tell me? Tell me you want me, and I’m yours forever, Amy. I don’t want much. I just want to hear you say it, and I want you to make me believe it.
I’ve never wanted much.
A fingertip tapped her shoulder. Vail turned fast, heart surging, hoping Amy had changed her mind and chosen Vail over her new friends, and…
…not even close. Behind her stood Gecka and Tullo, steel chessboard scarves draped casually around their throats. Tullo stood back, all silence and swagger, while Gecka leaned close and dragged her fingers through her pumpkin-orange mane, fluffing her curls.
“Hi,” Gecka said.
Vail pushed her chair back and stood toe to toe with her.
“I have had an incredibly bad day so far,” Vail said, her voice murderously soft. “So please understand that no matter what the penalties for fighting in the library are, if you start some nonsense, I will be bouncing your head off this table. Repeatedly.”
“Ooh, we like that.” Gecka glanced back at Tullo. “We like that, right?”
“Sure,” he said, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else.
“Listen, sister,” Gecka said. “I’m not here to fight. I’m the bearer of good tidings.”
Vail fought the urge to flinch as Gecka’s clammy hand fell on her right shoulder.
“Vail Curran, the Sept of Blades requests your presence. Accept or reject?”
Vail blinked.
“Excuse me?” she replied, loud enough that Adelaide looked up from her desk on the other side of the library, put one glowing finger to her lips, and delivered a pointed Shh.
