As it turned out, Luka wanted to go back to the Academy to see patient zero, despite the fact that he was dead. Alice didn't fully understand what he expected to get from a dead person, that they hadn't gotten from the living, but Luka insisted it would help with the timeline, so here they were. They kept referring to him as "patient zero", but the autopsy report had actually listed a name. Matt Young, the first victim of the infection, was stored in a cold basement underneath the hospital. It might have been a morgue, if not for the fact that they had no use for morgues at the Academy. Autopsies were largely pointless, when a healer could just touch someone in order to assess the cause of death. So, instead, Alice's thoughts went to a freezer.

When Alice was younger, her parents had taken her to India for Christmas, so they could spend it with her grandparents. She had been there for two weeks, living with her extended family in a city near Mumbai, where the average temperature in December was close to 90°F. She had returned to the New York winter utterly unprepared for the sudden cold, and stepping off the plane had felt like traveling in time as well as in space, as if she was emerging in a completely different reality. Walking into this basement from the summer heat felt similar. Chills covered her skin, and she was afraid she was going to start shivering.

Meanwhile, Luka seemed entirely unconcerned by the temperature, but stepped steadily towards the body. He stilled when he reached the head, his hand hovering inches above the skin.

Alice tentatively stepped forward, occupied by the strangeness of the body. He was laying on a cold steel table, dressed in pale gray hospital scrubs, likely the same ones they had put him in when he was admitted. The unnatural stillness was the most unsettling thing. Even knowing he was dead, even seeing it in his gray complexion, she expected breathing. His veins looked too dark, blackened, but she didn't know if that was normal. Luka still hadn't moved.

"Luka?"

He startled, his fingers curling into the palm of his hand. He lowered the hand and stepped back.

"What is this?" He asked.

Alice looked between Luka and the body. She didn't understand. "What?"

He took another step back, and shook his head, as if he could change what he was seeing.

"Get Thomas," he said.

She really wanted to get out of this place before she started thinking too much. She was afraid thinking would lead to reflecting. Reflecting on how this was the first dead body she had ever seen, on how this had been a student only a few days ago, on how he was younger than her. But as much as she wanted to leave, she wasn't sure she should.

Luka looked like he had seen a ghost, which made no sense. There was no reason he should know this kid.

"Go," he said. Alice hesitated, trying to assess his mood, but he was too still. She finally did what he told her, hoping it wasn't a mistake, but relieved at the thought of having Hadley deal with whatever was happening.

When she returned with Hadley, Luka had moved outside and was smoking. He was sitting on the ground, back against the brick wall of the hospital building, and he didn't move when they approached. He looked like he was controlling his breathing, forcing air into his lungs in slow, measured breaths.

Hadley approached him, and tugged his hands into his pockets. "What's wrong?"

"You fucking know what's wrong," Luka said. "What the fuck is going on?"

"No," Hadley said, taking a step back. Luka had looked upset, not angry, when he had made the mistake of getting close. "I don't."

Luka pushed himself off the ground, and Hadley retreated further. "That kid," he said, gesturing towards the building. "That's the kid I brought in. He's been here, what? Four months? How the fuck did he get to Mutiny? How the fuck is he the first victim?"

"What?" His surprise looked real, but then, Alice didn't know him well enough to be sure. "Really, Lavrin. I have no idea."

Luka pulled his fingers through his hair. He looked more rattled than Alice had ever seen him, than she would ever have imagined he could be.

"This is all for me," he said, aimed at no one. "Why?"

He grabbed Hadley by his shirt and pushed him into the wall. "Why did you really bring me in for this? Who made you do it?"

Hadley held his hands up in a pointless surrender. "No one," he said, his breath catching. "I made the decision. I convinced the Council. No one made me do anything."

"No. Think, Thomas. Someone must have said something."

Hadley shook his head. "No. There was no one."

"Fuck," Luka muttered.

Alice moved closer. She wanted to think that she would get between them if she had to, but she wasn't sure.

"Lavrin, you're not making sense," Hadley said, trying to nudge Luka off, to get free of his grip. He wasn’t really hurting him, just holding him firmly in place against the bricks at his back.

Then Alice saw Luka's hand curl into a fist, she saw him raise it. She managed to take half a step forward, before he slammed his hand into the wall next to Hadley's head.

"Fuck," he hissed. His hand was bleeding, and Alice was pretty sure she had heard something crack. Hadley scrambled away from him, putting distance between them.

Luka opened and closed his hand a few times, but his fingers wouldn't quite straighten out.

"Hadley," Alice said, stepping closer to him. He was breathing hard, and his eyes looked unfocused. She had to repeat his name several times, before he paid her any attention, and let her pull him farther away from Luka.

"You really don't know what this is about?"

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"No," Hadley said. "How does he know the kid was at Mutiny?"

"He thinks that's where the spell originated, but we haven't verified it. We came here first," she explained.

"And now he thinks this is all set up for him."

"It seems that way."

"What if he's right?"

"Could he be?" Alice asked. It seemed insane to think it could be true. It was far more likely that Luka was just being paranoid, connecting pieces that had nothing to do with each other. She didn’t fully understand what was going on, but maybe it could explain why the spell was so complex, maybe it could explain why Matt was patient zero, but that was hardly enough to draw conclusions. Luka Lavrin was notoriously anti-Council. It made no sense for anyone to target him to get to the Council, since his very involvement in the case would be highly unlikely. If this was about Luka, someone had either set up the pieces perfectly, or someone was just really, really lucky.

"I don't know," Hadley said. "But it is one hell of a coincidence. People who have been here four months do not get invited to Mutiny."

"Okay," Alice said. She watched Luka, who had finally healed his hands and was moving towards them. She shifted herself in front of Hadley, and put up her hand. Luka stopped short of contact, and remained there, an inch away from her palm.

"Let's go," he said.

"Did you—"

"Yes," he said. "I got what I needed."

"Okay," she said. "Go, I'll catch up."

He looked between her and Hadley, but backed up and turned away from them.

"Hadley," she said.

He nodded. "I'll look into it, but I honestly don't think…" He looked towards Luka, and Alice thought she could imagine what he was thinking. It didn't feel right, but it had to be a coincidence. Even if it wasn't, how could they ever hope to pick up the trail of it? If no one had manipulated Hadley into hiring Luka, the thing would have to be set up as a path constructed from small nudges and a lot of faith. Someone would have to know Luka, Hadley, and even the Council, well enough to predict their actions. And if he was right?

Well, in that case, the dominoes had started falling, and all they could do was wait and see where they landed.

"No," Alice said. "I know."

She left Hadley, and hurried towards Luka. She caught up to him, and they stepped out of the gates together. She wanted to say something. She wanted to say a lot of things, but honestly? She finally understood the tension she saw in Hadley, when Luka was around. If he ever chose her as a target for his anger, she would be wary around him as well.

She started to wonder if he had done something to Hadley, when their friendship ended. If that was the cause of the permanent damage between them. It was an awkward twenty minute walk to the station closest to the Academy. Luka wasn't talking and even though Alice had plenty she wanted to say, she couldn't work up the nerve. She spend the time studying the graffiti lining the walls they walked by. She noticed figures repeating. Maybe it meant something, maybe it was just tags, but she tracked them anyway. She started thinking they were some sort of code, as she noticed variations of the same sort of symbols between all the overlapping lettering, the individual tags nearly impossible to decipher.

Once they arrived, the rest of the journey was blessedly quick. They had to jump to North Station first, to access the subway. It was a frequent trip and the amount of time "North Station" had been scribbled on the walls of the Medford West station made it look like insanity, but even with magic, they had to play by the basic rules of public transit: if the line didn't go to your destination, you had to change.

In the subway, he wrote "Government Center" on the wall and jumped. He didn't offer his hand to bring her, but at least he waited for her on the other side. They walked across the red paved square towards City Hall, but then turned away and ducked into the shadows of a parking garage.

She followed him to a door, into a white room lit by fluorescent lights, and through another door. Here they descended into the subway tunnels beneath the city.

"Welcome to Mutiny." He said this in a way that sounded familiar, like once upon a time, he had been used to uttering those words. More importantly, he sounded almost normal.

“If you break the right rules, or express the right kind of dissatisfaction, you might get invited here. There are wards in place, to make it harder for the Council to find it, but it’s not impossible. They would probably try harder, if they really understood what it was, but anyone loyal enough to the Academy to be on the Agent or Council track will never be directly told about it.”

Lights flickered on, though Alice didn't know if it was magic or if electricity was still working down here. The tracks were covered in dirt and dust, clearly no longer in use. The lights lit up the graffiti, which covered everything. Even the pipes along the walls had been painted, and part of the ceiling. It was nearly overwhelming, but looking closer, she noticed how the nature of it differed from the graffiti above ground. There were less words, and more symbols. More artwork, of massive beasts and city outlines.

She remained at the edge, where the walls were colorless.

"What about untethered magic?"

Luka had walked right in, but Alice was still hesitant.

"We know how to do magic without creating incidents."

Luka was scanning the walls, the graffiti, looking for something that would stand out to him. Alice didn't know how much of a help she could be. When he had turned full circle, his eyes came to rest on her.

"You can come in."

If any traps were triggered by entering, she reasoned, Luka would already have triggered them. She didn't feel great about thinking it, but she did feel better about going in.

"The thing about spells," Luka was saying, "is that they can't sustain themselves, at least not for long. So, if the spell is here, and it hasn't burned itself out, or something else is here, it's going to need magic to activate it."

Once she was inside, the graffiti became overpowering. With her back to the narrow entrance, she was surrounded on all sides by color. Even the ground had been painted in some places. It was like being trapped in a psychedelic painting and the effect was unreal, like she wasn't really there. She tried to do what Luka was doing, to look at the individual pieces of art and symbols, looking for something strange.

She thought she could recognize the language of spells, from the one Luka had her do at the hospital, but she didn't know what any of it meant. She didn't know what any of them did. She saw a bright blue dragon, the colors swirling almost like their magic. There were birds, foxes, cats, animals of the city painted like stained glass, multi colored and with sharp edges. Painted words, that blended into something bigger. Cartoons that likely meant nothing, inside jokes. Symbols, both known to her and not. There were dark shadows, with eyes and teeth that seemed to be glowing and a massive golden snake, that wound it's way across one wall.

Alice stepped closer, touching the painted golden scales. Up close they looked like coins, like glittering pennies.

"Lucky Penny," Luka said, next to her.

"What?" She asked, startled by his proximity.

"Also simply known as the Serpent."

"It's real?" Alice hadn't grown up around the mythology of the magical world. Her mother had stayed away from all things magical, as if she was afraid Alice might catch it if she believed, but her father had told her stories of Shiva and Vishnu, of the demons and spirits of Hindu Mythology. She never imagined it might be real. Not like this. Now she had to wonder how many myths were based on reality, and how many myths of this place and this age she simply didn't know.

"Why wouldn't she be?" Luka said, but he was no longer focusing on Alice. He cocked his head and moved closer to the wall. She moved to follow, but he held a hand out.

"Stay," he said, so she stayed.

He was walking towards a hand print painted on the wall in bright green, words saying "try me" printed next to it. Could it really be that simple? Would it take no more than that for people to fall into a trap? Even if they thought Mutiny was safe, could they really trust the people who came here that blindly? Magic wasn't ever safe, not really, and triggering someone else's spell? It seemed reckless. Of course if the people who had access to Mutiny was anything like Luka, perhaps it was a common character trait.

Luka had reached the wall, his fingers brushing against the paint. Alice couldn't just stay back, not if he was going to do something stupid. She had hoped he would be thinking more clearly here. If the wards were still giving him headaches, his reaction was easier to understand. But they were far from the wards here.

"Luka," she warned, walking towards him.

He pressed his palm flat to the wall, and it was eerie how well the hand print fit.