Maki wormed and zipped through the colourful crowds, squeezing through any space that opened to him, bursting with sudden acceleration and twisting and shaping his body - an octopus of mob navigation. He darted across a road, just avoiding the smoke-farting trundle of a Nommo bus.

It was the curse of weekends. Whereas normally the weeks were filled with the orderly ranks of workers on the move, heads down and shirts buttoned to their throats, on the weekends everybody emerged from their homes to meander. Stopping in the middle of the street to gaze myopically at the latest fashions or blocking entire sidewalks with their aimless wandering. As if no one had anywhere to be.

Maki had things to do and places to be and it didn’t help that his head was still sore from last night with the Professor. The sun was a blazing nail in his forehead and every noise was a jagged glass worm wriggling behind his eyes. Chioté might have been old but that just seemed to mean she absorbed the rum rather than let it intoxicate her, like a dried up piece of driftwood in the rain. 

He knifed his arm between a tittering couple and before they could wonder what was happening he had wedged his narrow body past them. It helped that he was a clear foot taller than most people in Balé. The local stock, the Orundi, were characteristically squat and broad, whereas Maki looked as if he had been pinched at both ends and pulled taut. He was more than that, of course. Lean with the gaunt hardness of a runner, which he was. Sharp featured and topped with a storm-cloud of hair, which every morning he wrangled into some kind of sense. It was too stubborn and springy to be a ponytail - a poodle tail perhaps.

He plotted a route from his vantage point and lowered his chin like a ram about to charge, which given the goatish cast of his unshaven chin, was not the most flattering look for him. 

Most of the time, he was thankful that the office space he rented was set so close to the city centre. It meant that when he remembered to eat he could find a selection of cafés and diners to choose from, even at the stupid hours that he was struck by inconvenient hunger. It was only those two or three days at the end of every week, when suddenly he had to share his street with everybody else. 

“Dr. Engazi!” 

Maki winced, but did not look around. If anything, his pace accelerated, his long legs eating up the distance to the door of his office building.

“Dr. Engazi, wait!”

He shoved his hand into the pocket of his loose linen trousers, scrabbling for his set of keys. The voice was getting closer, he could hear her pressing through the crowd behind him. Why did keys all look the same! 

“I just have a quick question for you!”

He growled, finally finding the right one and ramming it into the lock. He twisted it one way and then the right way, a flush of triumph crossing his face as he tugged the door open. But a hand touched against his back and his heart sank in his chest. He muttered a curse silently, before plastering a smile across his lips and turning in place. 

One of his students, an arm crushing a haphazardly packed binder to her stomach, her young face blooming with questions and an eager curiosity. Maki’s stomach clenched in emotional pain, squeezing out black bile, the melancholic humour. 

“Dr. Engazi,” she breathed, all-conquering. “I’m so glad I could catch you. You move quick!”

He returned with a sick smile. “I was almost safe.” 

She chuckled. One of the Haeponese exchange students. Yisung-something, that was it. His smile had shades of a grimace. It wasn’t that she was too smart, Maki liked smart students, that made his job all the easier. It was that she was too eager. Eager students wanted to talk to him about things.

It wasn’t even as if he was a proper professor. He taught one class at Balé University. Just one. Introduction to Theories of Translocation. There wasn’t even a practical element, it was all in the books. 

“I’ve been having some trouble with the assignment you set last week. I’ve been emailing, but…” She let the sentence trail off and Maki felt a twinge of guilt. Not for ignoring the emails, that was endemic to his character, but for fermenting this escalation in his required efforts. Best to skip right over that though, he wouldn’t want Yisung to feel awkward on his behalf. 

“What’s troubling you?” He asked, while pulling the door open. 

She swept a scrap of paper from her bundle. “None of the books on the reading list are left in the library! I don’t know how to write the essay without a bibliography.” 

“My book should help with that. If you’ve bough-”

“I have bought your book, Professor,” Yisung said, trying to cut through his prevarications. “It’s no-” Her eyes widened as she caught herself about to criticise the Master Work. 

Maki didn’t blame her. He had churned out his textbook after an academic publisher had come to him saying there was a hole in the market that needed filling. A meeting later and with dreams of being the next Holji and Wimot, he had got to writing. Really, he had to be grateful to Yisung for even buying a copy - the handful of ringots he would get on his next royalty statement might even buy him a cheap chapati. 

So he snatched the paper from her hand and held out his hand for a pen, which she dutifully provided. She even held up her binder as a surface for him to write on. 

“Ignore those books then, they are probably too general. You should have gone straight to the journals anyway. I’m too kind in giving you these names after telling you that, but you did track me down…” 

He scribbled a handful of names from the top of his head onto the paper, his handwriting as messy as his mind. One of them would be bound to point her in the right direction, and in any case, it was all useful reading. He had never allowed himself to get glued to a reading list when he was a student. And look how he had turned out!

“Okay?”

She looked at the list like he had handed her the formula for the Elixir of Life and nodded, her mouth opening in a way that Maki suspected was going to pin him in his doorway a lot longer. This is why he didn’t answer emails! Give them an opening and they’ll think he’s got nothing better to do with his time. 

“And now, I’m afraid to say I really must get on. I’ll see you in class… with an essay I hope.” He chuckled, peering around the door as he closed it in Yisung’s face.

He took a deep breath, letting the feeling of Sanctuary suffuse him which was topped off with the click of the lock. It was a security door, one that locked whenever it closed, so he was safe from his students at last. He swept his hands over the springy coils of his hair and then shook out his arms, holding them away from his body, fingers spread, the traditional gesture of a magician about to perform magic.  

“To work!”

He bounded up the flight of stairs, taking them two at a time, long arms swinging as he pumped himself up to the second storey. His office was mostly floor, the walls shedding with maps. Modern satellite surveys of the globe; decades old projections in primary colours showing countries that had since blended and diluted; here and there ancient hand-drawn maps - various countries planted as the centre point and monsters filling the empty seas. Why else have a map made, unless it was to proclaim that the world spun around your axis? 

A section of his floor was a thin slab of slate, just like a blackboard, a must-have feature in any office where magic was going to be performed. When circles and runes needed to be drawn and redrawn, the ease of being able to wipe away the failed experiments could not be over-valued. 

Maki skipped over his floorboard, dancing between the chalky remnants of an earlier experiment, and slapped on his workstation. It was an old ox of a computer, warming up with the sound of a helicopter taking off. He had named it Kukele, after an architect from Hierarchy times who was famous for building monuments that lasted a thousand years. He whistled a tune as the operating system booted up, idly pushing his papers around his desk, looking at titles and his scrawled notes. 

One of them caught his eye, and the tune he was butchering his way through quietly died. He lifted the sheet gingerly, lips still pursed in the undead whistle, as if the paper might burst into flames at any moment. Carefully, he placed it on his lap, his hand snatching the rollerball of his computer, quickly bringing up his digital calendar. 

There was, with tomorrow’s date flashing an ominous purple, a very unhappy flag waiting for him. 

Maki tugged his hands down his cheeks, pulling his mouth into an exaggerated frown. 

“Shiiiiiiiit,” he breathed, his gaze tugged to a corner of the room, wherein lay, with books and papers and boxes of takeaway stacked and strewn and slopped, a large tightly sealed crate. A tightly sealed crate that he had pushed into that corner and reminded himself to deal with long before the deadline date. Which was tomorrow. 

It was his main source of income. The teaching and the writing was pocket money and a way to keep close to the University. What Maki really did for a living was transport by commission. It was mainly urgent deliveries for the small- and medium-sized players in Balé, the companies that couldn’t afford to keep a teleporter on payroll full time. He sent documents that legally had to be hardcopies to and from the signatories; he moved shipments instantly to demanding customers. Once he had even ‘ported in a piping hot meal for the diva Mosquita from her favourite hometown restaurant when she had been on the Balé leg of her tour of Horesh. 

There was another kind of commission though. A type that Maki really, really did try to keep to a minimum, but that were always going to be a part of a freelance ‘portist’s catalogue. There were no custom officials waiting in the slipstreams of etheric travel, no contraband inspections or forms to fill out with self-incriminating tick boxes. Some clients appreciated such facts. 

The crate was of such a species, delivered to Maki’s office by young men with thick limbs and gold teeth. He had been instructed that under no circumstances was he to open the container and that was fine by Maki. It was about the length and width of a sarcophagus and there was no way that he wanted to come face to face with a corpse. Or whatever else Mr. Q. Unknown packed into an unmarked crate.

He sighed and kissed his teeth. First things first. 

With a kick he propelled himself and his chair across the room, towards the small fridge in one corner. He yanked the door open and nodded with approval. Both shelves of the icebox were stacked with canned energy drinks, a particularly syrupy brew called Angel Sweat that most people mixed with vile tasting alcohol. There was also a sad looking cucumber, which Maki ignored. The can popped open with a satisfying tsssch, releasing its chemical scent with a spray. Glugging down the soda, he walked over to the crate, eyeing it up like it was a rival prize fighter. 

Maki swept the detritus off the top of the crate and was satisfied to see that he had already done the most physically demanding part of the project - shaping the mount that would house the beacon. Somewhere in his office was a length of carnelian, a gemstone magically infused with the target coordinates for the translocation, that had been handed to him along with the crate. Each mounting had to be handcrafted from teak to create a space that the unique beacon would slot into. And in an uncommon show of industriousness, it appeared that past-Maki had already done that hard work. He lifted his can in a toast to his once-and-better-self, before pushing the wheeled crate to the centre of his floorboard. 

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

He returned to his chair, plonking down in front of Kukele and clicking open three different programs. There were a lot of calculations he needed to make, the nature of the spelling he was about to do depending on all kinds of gnostic factors; seasons and ley lines and the alignment of the elements, as well as more exoteric knowledge like the spin of the planet and the height differential between locations.

He rolled his head around the pivot of his neck then cracked his knuckles. One final touch was needed. He clicked another program and after a moment’s digital thought, the speakers started pumping out the savannah bass of M’kolo and the Fighting Bees. 

Maki got to work. 

***

Six hours later and Maki blinked, eyelids scraping along his corneas and pressing together, wringing out the kind of soreness that only came from cooking them on an electronic screen after marinating the orbs in two litres of energy drink. With a noise that was something between the hooting of a monkey and the trumpeting of a hippopotamus, he stood, reaching his arms as high as he could, back popping and knees clicking. He unfurled like a golemist’s marionette, just as stiffly and slightly more creepily. 

He pushed a fist into his hair, and like he was dragging his body by the follicles, pulled himself over to the window. Balé had grown on top of a high plateau set in the middle of a vast plain. With the right view, the sunsets were like a cyclopean bead of molten gold settling on the ledge of the horizon, a god gilding the curve of the world. Maki did not have that view. Across from him was a billboard advertising an industrial trade show. Hard-hatted men and women smiling far too wide at wind turbines and oil derricks. The red light of dusk just made them look demonic, the vanguard of some steam-driven invasion force. The tagline of the sponsoring company made it especially unwelcome in Balé: Carnavar; Natural Magic.

Maki huffed and turned back to his computer screen. He really had to stop overloading on that drink, it was frying the few brain cells that kept him grounded. Down the screen a status bar was slowly filling - the software verifying and validating his spellwork. It wasn’t the first time he had run the program today, but he was fairly confident it would be the last time. 

While he waited, he swung about on his chair, twisting to face the project. In the hours since he had started, he had drawn and rubbed out and redrawn glyphs and forms around the crate. A few chalk marks also marred the hard-wearing plastic of the container itself. There was something crawling around the lesser used parts of his mind though, a niggling itch. Had he failed to account for some feature of the packaging? If the crate weighed more than anticipated, it might manifest in some stranger’s house halfway to its destination, or worse, crack open mid-transport and spray its contents across u-dimensional space. But no, Mr. Q Unknown’s goons had given him a manifest with the exact measurements of the package, and Maki had double checked them when it had arrived. Sure, he had written those notes on the back of a receipt for a pile of journals he had failed to read, but the quality of the materials did not speak to the accuracy of his findings. 

It was probably just the contents. Despite his professionalism, and his self-enforced rules of violating client trust - he desperately wanted to know what was inside. Even now, laying his hands on the teak beacon housing, he quested inwards with his university-honed senses, groping for that little tingle that might indicate some forbidden magic- 

His eyes snapped open. The bloody beacon.

Maki stirred into a frenzy. The next half an hour was spent turning over his office. He scrambled through drawers, threw aside papers and books. Precarious formations of empty containers and blank CDs that had stood for weeks were pulled asunder. He looked in places that the gemstone had no business being and chided himself for wasting time when it did not appear there. He was a whirlwind, a hurricane. He was making a mess. 

At the end of Method One, Maki sighed and picked up a book from the floor. With all due care, he slipped it onto its proper place on the shelf. This was Method Two of searching: tidy his office up. Put everything into its place and surely anything extra would turn up. It was the most scientific way of approaching the problem. 

It took significantly longer for Maki to clean his office than it had to unclean it, but he went to it with a purpose that was single-minded. While his computer played music that was more suited to a military campaign, he made piles, filed notes and assigned a corner of the office to the Why Didn't I Throw That Away a Week Ago objects. By the end of it, and with the sun well and truly dipping below the horizon, he had found a pair of what he had to assume was his underwear, a small plastic lion figurine and a picture of his mother. But no gemstone beacon. 

This called for Method Three. 

With a theatrical sigh he slumped onto the coach that had previously been employed as a cradle storing another commission and stared at a map of Horesh. Casually, his mind deliberately emptied of anything resembling the desire to find the beacon, he let his gaze wander. It came to rest on his fridge. Even as he walked over to it, Maki was shaking his head. In the course of his searchings he had open and slammed the fridge four times, each time finding new and invective ways to refer to the unperturbed cucumber. 

But what if he had missed it? He would hate himself if he didn’t check and the gemstone later turned out to be in there. 

It wasn’t, and the cucumber suffered the full measure of Maki’s wrath for once again refusing to be a length of cut carnelian. 

Wiping the cucumber pulp from his hand, Maki dropped onto the couch again, this time his brow furrowed in furious concentration. He had checked everywhere in his office, ergo, the beacon was not in his office. Therefore, it was somewhere else. He pressed his hands to his temples. Where would he have put it? Why would he even have moved it from his office? 

Professor Chioté’s grinning face flashed across his mind’s eye and he groaned loudly. 

It was all coming back to him, albeit soaked in stale rum. She had told him that her latest research efforts had to do with the properties of gemstones and he had brought the only one he had to hand. No doubt it was still in her office in the University. If he was very lucky, she hadn’t started experimenting on it. 

Maki slapped his hand against his thigh repeatedly. “Don’t.Drink.With.Old.People!” 

But he did not allow himself to wallow in self-pity, nor stew in the worry of what Mr. Q Unknown would do to him if his package did not appear in the appointed place. He pulled himself free of any and all emotional dipping pools and rubbed his hands together. If there was any point to the four years he had spent getting a degree and the six years after that obtaining a doctorate, it was that he could get places quickly. 

He moved to the door of his ensuite bathroom, and pulled it closed until the latch clicked. Then he stared at it, lips slowly curling down into a frown. This was a kind of magic he had been doing for years, the one two and three of translocating. He reached for the doorknob and twisted, pushing at the door. Smart kids could do this trick; put a coin in one pocket, pull it out from another. The door budged, but only an inch, so he lowered his shoulder against it and shoved. Step through one door…

…stumble out of another.    

***

Balé University had started its long life as eight towers, one for each of the traditional schools of magic, arranged in an irregular octagon to reflect the constellation of the Hierophant. Over time the remit of the University had grown and the importance of the schools had diminished. New buildings were added, departments were amalgamated or divided. What was once the centre and beating heart of magical education diversified. When the Silicon Revolution had kicked off in the basements of BU’s ur-computer science labs, the upsurge of importance had taken over the entirety of the Tower of Abjuring in less than five years. 

Magic still held a grip on the institution of course. Tradition was too powerful a force, too strong a pull to be so blithely cast aside, despite all the efforts of the University’s Vice-Chancellor. While departments like Philosophy and Sociology were forced to share space in the cramped Tower of Enchantment, huddling under the painted glare of ancient wizards, the magical departments had claimed the Tower of Conjuration, richly appointed and the ostentatious official gateway to the University grounds. 

Maki tripped out of a cupboard door, clattering across the mosaic floor and almost going head first into a fat-bellied pillar. He straightened quickly, peering about with a raised chin, determined that he would not be embarrassed by what had been a fairly impressive feat of nonverbal spellwork. Fortunately, there was no one about at this hour and he was free to get his bearings without having to explain why he had just fallen out of a storage cupboard. It was a favoured exit point for Maki, being within a quick dash to all the lecture rooms he might be assigned to teach in. It made the dreaded morning lecture series just about bearable.  

It also wasn’t too far from Chioté’s office. She was a fixture of the department, the Chimera of the School of Alteration - which was a largely ceremonial appointment, but one she took great relish in declaring at parties. She was also, and Maki made sure that he never told her this, the smartest person he knew. In the early days of computing, when they were brown clicking boxes and the sole refuge of the socially inept, she had been the one to see the potential for computers to work alongside traditional magic. Her program, WellSpelt 1.0 had been the first successful software that could digitally validate spells - saving practitioners the hours of time they would otherwise have to spend manually checking their craft. It wasn’t flawless but it could have made Chioté superbly rich - indeed, some people had got rich off the back of their own derivatives - but instead she had made the code open source and given it away for free.  

The University had carefully guarded her ever since, giving her the freedom to pursue whatever projects she wished and exploiting the prestige her name brought to the institution. For her part, Chioté did not seem inclined to leave.

Maki hurried along the corridors towards her office, his flip flops flapping loudly on the cool stone chips. As well as being his smartest friend, she was also his weirdest friend. While she was balanced right on the cutting edge of the synthesis between magic and technology, she also harboured old-fashioned arcane philosophies, stuff that most academics had safely relegated to the “History of…” sections of the syllabus. 

Pantheism, the Ngiruko and Ngaritu Courts, the Harodine Thesis. Kamula. She had theories for them all, even wrote papers about them. Of course, they didn't appear in the journals that published her articles on gemstone storage lattices - The Dunking Stool couldn't be seen supporting that kind of thing. The Professor didn't seem to mind that her most prolific writings were relegated to pulp journals like Witchocracy. So long as someone was reading them. 

Maki grunted, approaching her door. He was probably the aural equivalent; as long as someone was listening, it didn’t much matter that he thought she was batty and drank all her rum. 

The words Professor Chioté Hounsol were engraved in the door at what Maki presumed was Orundi eye height. He rapped his knuckles against the wood.

"Professor?"

There was no answer, exactly what he had feared, and surely enough, the door was locked. He was starting to feel like the world was enacting a very personal vengeance against him, which was completely unfair, given how highly he valued himself.

Maki considered his options.

He might be able to find a university porter wandering the halls, who might have the key to the Professor's office and whom he might be able to convince to unlock it and allow him to root around unsupervised. Or they might just boot him out and tell him to come back in actual office hours. That was too many mights for Maki, without even factoring in that the porter's room was down three flights of stairs.

Instead Maki pulled a length of chalk from his pocket. Much like an evoker wouldn't go anywhere without a candle, a 'portist always had a stash of chalk secreted on their person. After a particularly long day, Maki had once found a nub nestled in his hair. 

He quickly but expertly drew a circle beside the doorknob. There were probably easier ways of getting through it, but none that Maki could think of that wouldn’t leave a permanent mark. He filled the circle with glyphs, making some rough and generous estimations on things like the thickness of the door. Then he placed his hand on the circle and pushed through it. 

There had been debate in the past that this kind of magic properly belonged under the auspices of the school of Alteration since it transmuted the substance of the door into something permeable. Maki didn’t buy it - he wasn’t changing the door in any way, just bypassing it. Which was helpful when needing to turn the latch of a lock on the other side of a closed door. He rubbed off the chalk as best he could before turning the knob and pushing the door open. 

It swung inwards silently, revealing a pitch black office. Even so, Maki stepped forward cautiously, craning his long neck and leading with a quiet, “Professor?”

There was something very nerve-wracking about entering a dark room without permission. Not only the ever-present danger of being discovered by the rightful authorities, but the creeping sense that the room itself held a malignant disdain for him. Low-hanging light fittings, table edges at shin-height and caltrop-like plugs mysteriously left unplugged. Such was the vengeance of the furnished against trespassers.

Maki wasn’t going to risk it so he reached around the door frame to flick the lights on. 

The first thing he saw were the remains of Chioté's computer, a blown out ruin, the casing cracked and blackened, tangled wires like disembowelled guts. 

Then he saw the Professor herself. She was slumped back in her chair, arms hanging loose by her sides. She stared up at the ceiling. She looked like she could not believe that she couldn't see the stars. 

Finally, he saw the neat little hole in her chest.