Alice drew gradually back from the bed, from Luka, as he stood over the girl. She backed further towards the wall, towards the exit, without meaning to. She still didn't know if she could be infected by just being in the room, and although she took comfort in Luka's lack of concern, she wasn't sure she was brave enough to risk it. Maybe the chance increased the longer she was here.

Maybe she was already infected. She had no way of knowing.

Luka backed away, and ran a hand through his hair.

"So?" Alice asked. He looked back, and seemed surprised by how far she had drifted off. She forced herself to take a step forward.

"It's intricate," Luka said. "I'm pretty sure there are redundancies, traps. A lot of elements that makes it harder to create a spell to counter it. We may very well set off something else, or it might just do absolutely nothing." He looked tired now, like the spells were already tearing at him. Or maybe it was the hopelessness of the situation. "We need to establish a timeline. A better timeline than the guesses made by the Healers."

"What can I do?" She felt useless standing here, observing, but there was a part of her that wanted to get out. Maybe she could be more useful elsewhere.

"How are you with spells?" Luka asked.

Alice frowned. They didn't learn spells. He knew that. "I don't…" She let the words hang in the air, not sure what she had meant to say. Not sure she wanted to admit her ignorance, obvious as it may be.

Luka was quiet for a moment, long enough for Alice to suspect he was suppressing a sigh or maybe even an eye roll.

"Right," he said finally. He scrambled around in his pockets and his hand emerged with a marker. He looked for paper, but finding none, he scribbled on his hand. He spoke while writing. "This is a basic spell meant to determine when the infection originated. When we know exactly when everyone were exposed, we have some data to give to the Oracles. Maybe that will give us something to go by."

He held up his hand. "This is your spell," he said. "I assume you can't read spells either, so I suggest you copy it."

"Um. Are you planning on giving me your hand for reference?"

"No," Luka said, as if there was some obvious alternative. "I expect you to memorize it."

"Right," Alice said, with absolutely no confidence. "Of course."

"The hard part about spells is the construction. The symbol is just a focus. Once you have that, you just push a bit of magic into it, and it does all the work. Okay?"

Alice nodded. "Luka?" She said, barely bypassing Sir. "Are you…?"

He watched her, puzzled, then realized what she didn't want to ask. "It's safe. It hasn't touched me. It hasn't even tried to. With everything dormant like this, their magic doesn't really activate. It has to, if it has to be able to touch another mage. The spell you're going to be using is far less invasive than anything I've been doing, so it should be fine."

She nodded, and exhaled out some of her tension. She still didn't feel comfortable, but she could do this.

Using spells was weird. She could feel the tether to her magic, the way it was taking power from her, but she didn't feel connected to the magic at all. It felt separate from her, like writing with her off-hand. They went from patient to patient. Luka spend a couple of minutes at each bed, then moved on to the next, and Alice assumed he was keeping all the information in his head. Alice had acquired paper and a pen, and was writing notes in between. The time stamps weren't exactly precise, it wasn't like the spell just gave her a time and date. It was all bound into impressions, and she kept feeling heartbeats, which she didn't fully understand. There was a sense of how long the spell had been alive in the mage, how progressed the contamination of their magic was. It wasn't spreading at the same rate, but there was a steady rhythm to it. Sometimes it quickened, but for the most part, it looked like it spread faster during the day, and slowed during the night. If that was true, all of the people in this room had been infected within a day or two of each other. Which made sense, since they had been divided into stages.

She went from unconscious student to unconscious student, and at some point she became numb to the whole thing. They stopped being people, and turned into impressions and data. Until they weren't.

Every single one of these people, were someone she might have walked past in the hallways, or stood in line next to at the cafeteria, but she had no name to go with the faces. It made it easier to pretend they were strangers, that this wouldn’t touch her.

Gwen Mason was not her friend, but she was her classmate. They had barely ever talked to each other, but they would have graduated next to each other. At no point had this felt safe, but she had felt disconnected from it. Now, she had to face the reality, that she was only a few links removed from someone infected. Had Gwen used magic near her lately? Near Teagan, or Nick?

She looked around, scouting for more familiar faces, but there were several rooms of patients left. She couldn’t skip ahead. It was a pointless exercise, a pointless fear. When she bend down to write the symbol on Gwen's arm, her hand was shaking. She couldn't keep the lines straight, and she was afraid of what might happen if she got it wrong. She turned to her piece of paper, turning it over and writing the symbol over and over again until her hand felt steady. It didn't. She couldn't stop shaking. The pen fell from her fingers, and clattered on the floor, but she barely heard it. She stared at the piece of paper, at the circles and lines and dots, none of them even. She couldn't breathe.

A hand touched her shoulder, just the barest pressure. She startled, realizing Luka had been saying her name, and he withdrew his hand.

"I can't," she managed. Her voice nearly broke on the words, and she fought to force back the tears of frustration blurring her vision.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

"Do you know her?" Luka asked, nodding to the unconscious girl in front of her.

Alice nodded. "Yes, but that… shouldn't matter. It doesn't matter. I don't even know her that well."

"Alice," Luka said again. She was still staring at the piece of paper, because she couldn't look at Gwen. Luka tugged it from between her fingers, and she turned to look at him.

"You don't have to do this."

"No. This is silly," she said, with something approaching conviction. "I can do this. I have to do this."

When she saw the sympathy in Luka's eyes, it occurred to her that he understood. His sympathy came from knowing exactly how hard it was to experience tragedy at the Academy. She was in a position to help, and she wanted to, but how was she supposed to deal with the realization that people she knew were dying? Even if she had never talked to them, even if she didn't know their names. They were all students of the Academy, and she knew them. She knew she had to do this, but she wasn't sure she could.

It wasn’t sympathy she wanted. She wished he would lie to her, and tell her she just needed to push through. She wanted to know that it would get easier, even if it wasn’t true.

"Go," he said. "Take a break."

She nodded reluctantly and stepped out into the hall. Her heart was beating fast and she focused on her breathing, trying to calm down and distract herself from thoughts of Academy students dying around her. She leaned against the wall opposite the room she had come from and closed her eyes. She breathed steadily in and out, and eventually managed to very nearly convince herself that everything was going to be okay. She expected five minutes had passed, and attempted to go back inside. She thought of Gwen, of going back in there and facing her again, and she couldn't move. She slid down the wall and buried her head in her hands. Even though they were almost done, she felt useless.

She tried to focus on the data they had, on the details of the infection, trying to be useful some other way. Setting up the facts in her head, she tried to make the entire thing fit into a coherent narrative, and discovered that it really didn't. Something Luka had said didn't add up. The spell was precise, it was riddled with traps, but no Agent would even know what to do with a spell in the first place. No one would try to create a counter spell. No one was ever going to set off those traps, so why put them in? In fact, why do any of this?

She struggled to find a motive, to find any reason to attack the Council in this way. She was still struggling, when Luka emerged from the room. He slid down the wall next to her.

"Are you okay?" He asked.

"Yeah," she said. "I'm okay."

"Good." He leaned his head back against the wall and sighed. "Do me a favor," he said, after a pause. "Go back to Thomas, and get him to put in an urgent request for an Oracle."

"Sure," Alice said, and even knowing it was pity, she was relieved. As eager as she was to get out, she didn't move. Luka looked so tired now, like he might not get up if she left him here. And then there was the thing still nagging at her, the thing that didn't make sense. "Luka?"

He made an affirmative sound.

"Has it occurred to you how weird this is?"

"Which part?" He asked.

"All of it. Why waste all this energy on creating an intricate spell that no one would have the skill to even analyze? Why design a spell that takes more than a week to kill someone? If you wanted to hurt the Academy, and you had this kind of skill with spells, why not just brute force it?"

"Right," Luka muttered. "That. Well, it's harder to attack the Academy with brute force than you might think. As for the rest, it's clearly deliberate. I haven't figured out what it means yet, but I think we're meant to solve it. That's the only reason to give us time." His accent became clearer when he was tired, and now she could better pinpoint the hints of Russian.

"So it's a puzzle."

"Yes," Luka said. "Maybe the clues are in the redundancies in the spell, but I'm not going to gamble with someone’s life to find out."

He sighed, and dragged himself up off the floor. "Either way, we have other things to go on for now, so it can wait."

“Is there a way to tell?” It was a quiet question, possible to overhear, if he wanted to. There was a part of her, that hoped he would.

Luka paused in the doorway.

“Yes,” he said. He turned back, and reached out a hand to her. Even exhausted as he was. Even with another handful of students waiting for him.

“No,” she said. “You don’t have to.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded. She had to be stronger than this.

Alice had felt strange, since Luka had injected her with iron and done whatever he had done to her. It wasn’t a bad feeling, except that she imagined this was what being high felt like. She was too awake, and was stuck with alarming waves of invincibility. It was powerful in a way she wasn’t used to. She got up from the floor as well, and as Luka entered the last room, she turned towards the exit. She felt bad that she couldn't take some of the burden from him. The spells were wearing him down, but she was barely drained herself, having only done a fraction of what he had. She just couldn't see herself going back in. Outside, she took a moment to breathe in the fresh air and appreciate the open sky and the heat of the sun on her skin. She sent a trivial text into her text chain with Nick and Teagan, to reassure herself that they were okay. She wasn't exactly proud of her relief when they both texted back, but she wouldn't be able to focus while wondering. Now she could turn her attention back to the case, and what Luka had said. If it really was a puzzle, did that mean the bad guy was just trying to prove he was smarter than the Agents? What would that accomplish? Maybe it wasn't the most useful thing, trying to figure out a motive for this, but it was the thing her mind got stuck on. Why do this, and why do it like this?

She was still stuck on it when she arrived at Hadley's office. She knocked on his door, and he called for her to come in.

"Hi," she said.

Hadley looked up from his computer, and a look of surprise spread across his face when their eyes met.

"Alice," he said, "back so soon?"

"Luka send me," she said. "We need you to put in an urgent request for an Oracle."

"You made progress?" He asked.

"We have approximate time and date for the initial infection of everyone affected. We're hoping it will reveal some sort of pattern."

Hadley nodded. "Okay. I'll call it in."

"Thank you," Alice said, and turned to leave.

"No, you might as well stay," Hadley said, "it shouldn't take long."

She settled into a chair, while Hadley made the call. She expected it to be a short conversation, and that she would be able to go back to Luka and reassure him that their request was being processed. Then the call was picked up, and he said, "Mage Van Aller." Alice's attention sharpened on the call. He had called Constance Van Aller, the head of the Council. It hadn't occurred to Alice that he might be that well connected, and as the conversation went on, he called her by her first name.

"Has he confirmed it's a spell?"

It took Alice a moment to realize the question was meant for her, and she nodded belatedly.

The tone of the conversation changed at once, the balance shifting to Constance’s side. Hadley supplied brief responses, but wasn’t left much room to speak. It sounded a lot like rejection, and Hadley’s protests were halfhearted at best. When he clearly folded, Alice slumped back in her chair, feeling defeated. It was the only thing they had, one slim hope of getting anywhere, and now it looked like they were back to the start.

"What happened?" Alice asked, when he hung up.

Hadley shook his head. "Confirming that it's a spell means it's an attack, and if we're under attack, the Oracles…" He faded out. "We might as well go find Luka. I'll explain then."

"I can tell him," Alice said, knowing just how productive it would be for Hadley to deliver the bad news.

"No, it's fine," he said. "I'm sure he'd rather yell at me in person."