I had seen Roslyn use her sound dampening thaumaturgy several times without hesitation, and she had said in her email that she had wanted to use a retooled version of my ‘Chanel spell’ limited to what I had already paid for the next thaumaturgy lesson. There was only one conclusion I could draw from that: Thaumaturgy could be reused without paying the Price for it again.
And if it could be reused… could it be altered?
I needed to be quick if I was to have any chance of making my potentially extraordinarily stupid plan work, so as Jaeden, Craig, and I followed the secretary out of the gym to the main office, I immediately opened the email from Roslyn again and from there the magic detection code she had sent me. It was complex, enough so that it made my head swim looking at it, but thankfully I didn’t need to go hunting. What I needed was right at the top, nice and prominent.
[using Self.Senses.BodyTemperature>100.0F]
The implication was obvious. Using the magic detection spell as written would sacrifice my sense of when my body temperature rose above exactly 100 degrees Fahrenheit as the Price. What was less obvious was how that particular Price related to the spell itself. Earlier that day, Roslyn had said a thaumaturge performed thaumaturgy by using their apparatus to make a connection between this reality and another reality they were connected to—a place that played by different rules. She’d also told me in the email I should be prepared to discuss how the Price works relates to the thaumaturgy itself. Could it be that Paying the Price wasn’t just a ‘Pay X Price and get Y access to breaking reality’ sort of deal? Was there some other way the Price related to the spell?
My foot caught a bit on the lip dividing the gym’s lacquered wood floor from the tile of the hallway. Not enough to make me fall, but enough that I stumbled. Jaeden gave me a mildly concerned glance, whispering, “Are you reading or trying to say something? Maybe wait until we’re not moving?”
The hushed suggestion attracted another leer from Craig, though the secretary didn’t seem to notice. The office wasn’t in sight yet, but it wasn’t that far away from the gym, so it was only a matter of time. I threw Jaeden an awkward, apologetic smile I could only hope conveyed my appreciation for the thought then dove back into the code.
I needed to focus, and I needed to be fast. The Price influences thaumaturgy, and maybe that was purely as a cost of entry. But if it was more, how might it relate to the spell? I had no chance of dissembling Roslyn’s magic detection spell in the amount of time I had, much less under pressure, but I realize I might not need to. I already knew what the spell did, and I knew what the Price for it was. Both the spell and the Price affected senses, and my gut told me that was important. Did the Price mean the spell thaumaturgy would only be active while I was running hot? Maybe. It could also be the nature of the Price had to match to the spell? Trading a sense for a sense. Except that logic got weak when I applied it to my ‘Chanel spell’ and broke down entirely with regards to my time loop spell.
The time loop. Roslyn had come to my house about the time loop, and she had said something about ‘the price for that much power.’ That was definitely a way the Price influenced the spell, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought about it sooner. The greater the scale of the thaumaturgical work, the higher the Price! Roslyn had even confirmed that, saying she couldn’t imagine how high the cost would be to loop the entire world. And I had forgotten, too focused on breaking the loop to remember.
I resolved that when I got out of that mess, I would look into memory magic, or maybe something to make me extra smart. I couldn’t afford to keep missing little details like that.
And speaking of missing things, I nearly missed turning into the office. Luckily, Jaeden put a hand on my shoulder to keep me from blindly continuing on.
“Like I said,” they told me, a little exasperated. I gave them another awkward smile, embarrassed by my blunder but also panicking. We were at the office, and I hadn’t pulled my plan together yet!
“Principal Williams wants each of you to give your side of the story,” the secretary said as she stepped over to the closed door off the office, hand poised to knock. Looking between Jaeden and me, she added, “We’ve already heard from Craig. Which of you wants to go first?”
Bless them, Jaeden took one look at me and the dismay on my face, and promptly volunteered, “I’ll go first.”
The secretary knocked, announcing Jaeden, then indicated a series of seats for Craig and me before returning to her own desk, where the nameplate declared she was ‘Aubrey Croft.’ Ignoring Craig’s continued sneering, I took a seat and buried myself in my tablet. I had a stay of execution for now, but I needed a solution, pronto, and I was the only one who could make it happen.
There were only two things I was almost completely certain about. First, there was a relation between the scale of a thaumaturgical work and the severity of the Price, and second, any work paid for could be reused. Everything else was a maybe, so I set all of it aside but for the one gamble I was considering. If a work could be reused without incurring a new Price, then could I adjust it? Write a weaker version, so long as I stayed within the scope I already paid for?
If I slipped up and accidentally admitted the truth about thaumaturgy or having once been ‘Ervin’ to Mr. Williams, could I loop time and try again?
Hand shaking, I copied the loop program and opened the duplicate, the ache in my teeth worsening. This was stupid, I was being so stupid. What if I was forced to Pay the Price again? No, I couldn’t afford to think like that. I had Paid enough to loop an entire day for most, if not all, of the town. Surely I could loop thirty seconds? And it wasn’t like I was necessarily going to do it. I just needed a contingency, a backup in case I dropped the ball.
I got to work.
> [using Self.AbilityToTalk]
>
> while (inPrincipalWilliamsOfficeAtJEM)
>
> {
>
> if (revealedThaumaturgyOrErvinToPrincipalWilliams)
>
> {
>
> ReverseTime(PrincipalWilliams.lastThirtySeconds);
>
> }
>
> }
>
> public time ReverseTime(lastThirtySeconds, var reversed = null, int length = null)
>
> {
>
> if (length == null)
>
> {
>
> length = lastThirtySeconds.length;
>
> }
>
> reversed[lastThirtySeconds.length - length] += lastThirtySeconds[length - 1];
>
> if (reversed.length == lastThirtySeconds.length)
>
> {
>
> return reversed;
>
> }
>
> else
>
> {
>
> length--;
>
> return ReverseTime(lastThirtySeconds, reversed, length);
>
> }
>
> }
There, I thought, as I put the finishing touches on the program. I didn’t know it would work, not with certainty. But my best guess was that by setting the Price to the one I had already paid, the spell should just fail if the Price wasn’t valid, like the stupidly basic attempt to make myself female I had made at the dinner. And if it worked…? For the duration that I was in Mr. Williams’ office, if I admitted to having been Ervin or that I was a thaumaturge, then the past thirty seconds would reverse for only Mr. Williams. I couldn’t think of any other safeguards I could put in. If anything was going to be limited enough to fit within the scope I had paid for with my voice, then surely this was it.
Naturally, as if to spite me, those limitations immediately came back to bite me.
“You’re a pervert, you know.” Craig’s whispered accusation cut right into me as I finished my prep. “Admit it. You want to look at the girls in the locker room, don’t you?”
Oh come on. That was not fair. I had planned the entire program exclusively around admissions to Mr. Williams about thaumaturgy and me having once been Ervin… and I did want to look at the girls in the locker room. They were attractive, of course I wanted to! That was why I had been so careful to keep my eyes in safe places, so I wouldn’t accidentally violate anyone’s privacy!
I couldn’t deny it without being forced to tell the truth, and probably without the context that I didn’t look at them. I couldn’t carefully tell him the truth either because Craig was a nasty jerk who would absolutely selectively listen to that truth. And telling him nothing? That would no doubt fuel his twisted perception of me even more. The best I could do was deflect and delay, to try and buy time for the principal to finish with Jaeden or for Craig to get distracted.
Switching to the TTS app as slowly as I dared, I cautiously typed out and ran, “I’m trying to focus on my work, Craig. Why do you always insist on being crude and hateful? Do you have nothing better to do than harass me? Take your accusations and leave — me — alone.”
That response caught Craig off guard, and honestly, me too. I hadn’t expected to have my inner writer sneak out like that. Perhaps because Creative Writing class was still fresh on my mind? Or maybe it was a side effect of being forced to really plan out what I was going to say instead of just saying it. Either way, Craig was left floundering for precious seconds, which was good, on top of the better part of a minute it took me to write all that, which was even better. What was less good was Mr. Williams didn’t come out yet, and Craig didn’t let up.
“Eugh, trying to talk like a chick too?” A nasty little grin twisted the corner of his lips like the curling edges of paper lit on fire. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you dodging my question, you freak.”
And that, of course, was when Mr. Williams’ door opened and Jaeden stepped out. I couldn’t have timed it worse if I had tried.
“You’re up next, Chanel,” they said, giving me a thumbs up and a wink. I wasn’t sure if I had ever been more perplexed by what ought to have been two commonplace gestures, but I was too flustered by my failure with Craig and the situation we were in to contemplate it any further.
I stepped into the belly of the beast.
“Miss Scrivens,” the principal greeted me with a smile almost swallowed whole by his overgrown, gray mustache. “Please, close the door and have a seat.”
Mr. Williams’ office was no different than it had been my last visit just yesterday. Largely spartan, the focal point of the narrow room was an L-shaped, particle board desk that looked like it had been pulled straight out of an IKEA catalog and plopped into the middle of the office. The sole decorations were a single 3.5 x 5 frame propped up at the corner to face the principal and a combination nameplate-display for a pen made from a lacquered, black wood and shining brass. A positively ancient LCD monitor one step removed from its CRT cousins was set against the wall in front of an even more antiquated keyboard and mouse set whose eggshell, off-white color did not match the gray of the monitor whatsoever and in desperate need of a scrubbing to remove the accumulated detritus of the decade plus since they had been installed at the desk. I couldn’t see the computer attached to that equipment, but I could hear the deep thrum of its fan trying to keep the machine cool.
Beyond that, there was the paperwork. Lots and lots of paperwork. Piles of it were laid out everywhere on the desk and on top of the filing cabinets in the back corner of the room by the window, all in what was either an arcane, regimented organizational system or else a brilliantly constructed imitation of such a system. The only allowance of free space on the desk was what was strictly necessary for the keyboard and mouse to be usable (and only just, in my opinion), and the space directly between the principal’s plain black office chair and the two stocky chairs with precious little padding for guests.
I settled in one of those and fought down the urge to fidget as Mr. Williams settled back deeper into his chair, the strain on his waistcoat lessening. In my lap, I pressed the TTS button for, “Hello,” then switched to The Coder—just in case.
“Yes, hello indeed. It feels like just yesterday that you were in here with your mother, Miss Scrivens,” he said, plucking two pieces of paper from one of the stacks and looking them over with a critical eye. “Monday to Friday, just like that. Funny, isn’t it, how that fumigation made the week pass in the blink of an eye? Time does seem to fly by in this little town of ours.”
His tone was no less jovial than it had been yesterday—‘Monday’ to him—but I tensed all the same, a wave of goosebumps crawling over me.
“This matter with Mister Stark sounds rather open and shut, so you need not worry about it any further,” he continued, almost dismissively. “Miss Fitzwilliam has admitted to her actions and will be appropriately punished.”
I frowned, primarily because Jaeden was pretty vocal about their preferred pronouns but also because I had expected them to deny what happened. Craig wasn’t well-liked on our bus, even among the gamers, and my recollection of when he had still been at Meckleville Elementary School with me, he hadn’t been liked then either. Jaeden hadn’t exactly made a lot of friends by being openly non-binary, but if they had maintained their innocence, it would have been a he-said-they-said situation. Mr. Williams and the staff would have needed to locate students who had witnessed what happened, already a potentially difficult feat, and then they would have needed to give up Jaeden. There was a very real chance that Jaeden might have gotten away scot-free.
“The truth is, Miss Scrivens, I would really like to talk about you, and why I seem to have the wrong records for you.”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Teeth aching, I pressed Run. I would just have to hope I was correct that my altered spell wouldn’t exact another Price. A quiet warmth settled into my gut. For better or worse, my loop was active.
“You see, Mister Stark spun a tale about an Ervin Scrivens, who was dressing as a girl and had gone into the girls’ locker room, and at first, I found this rather alarming and sent for you and Miss Fitzwilliam, so I could get to the bottom of this. However after hearing from her side of the story, I realized Mister Stark must have confused you and your twin brother. An honest mistake.
“Except…” Mr. Williams laid the papers he had grabbed earlier on the empty span of the desk before me. “I now find myself confused.”
The paper on the left was a somewhat grainy photocopy, horizontal bands of irregular faded gray running over the slightly askew scanned document. My birth certificate, issued by the now defunct Washington County Hospital on August 8th, 1998. More accurately, it was Ervin’s birth certificate. And it was the other paper, the completely blank sheet, that Mr. Williams indicated with a tap tap tap of his finger, with a quirk of his mouth and pinch of his eyes.
“I don’t seem to have your birth certificate on file, Miss Scrivens.”
‘It’s always better to guide elucidation however you can, whenever you can,’ Roslyn had said earlier that day. I let Jaeden go first instead of taking the chance to guide the elucidation, and the bill had come due. Just as Mom had unexpectedly decided I was actually her daughter Chanel, Mr. Williams had concocted the notion that I was my own twin. The devil was in the details—or in this case, the lack thereof. I was abruptly very grateful for my safety net. I had envisioned it as a precaution in case I slipped up in the course of explaining the incident with Craig. This conversation had just steered into far, far more dangerous territory.
I switched back to the TTS app on my tablet and started carefully prepping my response. Forging documents for myself on top of explaining the disappearance of Ervin was not possible, so there was only one path forward that I could see. I had to convince Mr. Williams he was mistaken.
“Sir, I don’t have a twin. The only brother I have is my older brother, Booker, who graduated last year,” I tried, hoping this wouldn’t be an uphill battle.
No good. He slowly shook his head, eyes still pinched. For a moment, he let the silence linger, considering, then he reached out, picked up the fancy pen from its slot in his nameplate, and spun it once between his fingers.
“Do you know how long I have been principal at this school, Miss Scrivens?” he asked. I blinked in confusion and shook my head. I had no idea how long it had been or where he was going with that.
“Thirty years. I was principal here before you were born. I was principal here when your mother and father passed through these halls. That is a very long time, do you not agree?” When I hesitantly nodded, he continued, “When you’ve worked somewhere as long as I have, you become… a bit of a creature of habit, shall we say. You may find it odd, but I consider my job here a sacred duty. Nothing is more important to a society than its children because they are its future.”
He pulled the blank paper closer to him, the stark white sheet sliding across the surface with a ghost of a whisper. “To that end, I have a bit of a ritual I perform every year, the day before the school year begins in earnest. I take this lovely pen—a treasured gift I received to celebrate my appointment here—and I write the name of each — and every — student in my care. I write their name, their parents’ names, where they came from; their history. And every year, I enter the school year with clarity, knowing exactly who has been entrusted to me.”
The long, pained creeaak of his chair filled the office, sending a shiver down my spine, as he paused to lean forward. He pushed the paper with Ervin’s birth certificate on it closer to me and tapped a spot on it with his pen. There, right where he had indicated, was ‘Ervin Scrivens, birth certificate,’ spelled out in black ink and crisp, neat handwriting.
“Every document I receive, I make a note to myself, crystallizing its relevance.” He swept his hand around him, indicating the room as a whole and its piles upon piles of paper. “And while my organizational system may seem arcane to others, I always know where to find information about my students.
“I know the history of every student who has passed through these halls in the past thirty years, Miss Scrivens. I know both of your brothers. I know your mother and father. I know their parents’ names, though they were never students of mine. And I can easily find the paperwork to verify all of that. Needless to say, I am very concerned indeed that while I recall you, I can find neither your name on my annual ledger nor any documents in my possession regarding you.”
His speech concluded, he leaned back in his chair once more, the horrible creeaak of it like the strike of a gavel rendering final judgment.
For a solid minute, neither of us said anything. Him, because he had said his piece. Me, because I was completely dumbfounded. I was up the creek without a paddle, and the godforsaken boat had a hole in it with nothing to plug it. There was nothing I could do. I could envision no path forward. There was absolutely no way I could possibly explain to a man who purportedly remembered every single student he’d ever had why only Ervin was a student here, but his ‘twin sister’ wasn’t—
Wait. Every student? Every document? For the past thirty years?
My eyes swept over the dozen piles of paper on his desk and the cabinets at the back of the room as I picked up my tablet and typed, TTS saying, “Sir, that’s incredible. You remember all of that and can find all of those documents, just like that?”
His mustache twitched. “Just like that, Miss Scrivens. While I appreciate the flattery, I would appreciate an explanation even more.”
I needed to buy time. If I was right about this, then there was only one solution, one way out, and I needed time to make it work. “May I please see my mother’s birth certificate, sir?”
Mr. Williams was openly scowling at that point. “Miss Scrivens—”
I practically smashed the, “Please,” I had in my saved TTS messages. I pressed it twice more for good measure. “Please. Please.”
With a long suffering sigh and an almighty screech of his chair, Mr. Williams stood and moved to round the desk. For a terrifying second, I thought I had pushed too far, then he said, “If you insist this is truly pertinent… Records that old are in storage. One moment.”
I switched back to The Coder immediately, duplicated the loop again, and got to work. The changes to ReverseTime were easy, but the while loop gave me pause, my teeth aching. Reversing Mr. Williams wouldn’t be enough, but how could I account for everyone at once? I backed out of The Coder, pulled up my browser, and typed into the search bar, ‘how to group variables in code.’ That didn’t give me the results I needed at the top, and the deeper I scrolled, the more my eyes began to cross. I had the wrong term. I had the wrong term. It was functionally a grouping, but I couldn’t remember the right term for it!
Then, to my dismay, Mr. Williams came back in. He hadn’t been gone for three minutes, if that! But sure enough, he swept around his desk back to his chair, and dropped a file on his desk before rifling through the stack of paper inside for a few seconds before producing exactly what I had requested, the birth certificate of one Lynn Fenwick.
“Anything else you require?” he asked with more than a dollop of sarcasm. “You could hand me a list of names to find, and I would find them, Miss Scrivens. Now what — is — going — on?”
But I wasn’t listening to him anymore. I was checking the time and comparing it against the class schedule and my rough guesses for when we had been grabbed from class and when Jaeden had gone in to give her side of the story to Mr. Williams. My fingers were practically blurring over my tablet as I slotted the last puzzle piece into play, courtesy of the unwitting principal.
“Miss Scrivens,” Mr. Williams demanded, his patience finally beginning to fray, “I have been extremely forthright and patient with you, and I require an answer.”
> [using Self.AbilityToTalk]
>
> var list = new List
>
> list.add(PrincipalWilliams);
>
> list.add(JaedenFitzwilliam);
>
> list.add(CraigStark);
>
> list.add(ChanelScrivens);
>
> foreach (person in list)
>
> {
>
> ReverseTime(person.lastTwentyMinutes);
>
> }
>
> public time ReverseTime(lastTwentyMinutes, var reversed = null, int length = null)
>
> {
>
> if (length == null)
>
> {
>
> length = lastTwentyMinutes.length;
>
> }
>
> reversed[lastTwentyMinutes.length - length] += lastTwentyMinutes[length - 1];
>
> if (reversed.length == lastTwentyMinutes.length)
>
> {
>
> return reversed;
>
> }
>
> else
>
> {
>
> length--;
>
> return ReverseTime(lastTwentyMinutes, reversed, length);
>
> }
>
> }
I’ll give you an answer, I thought, in twenty minutes ago.
“Miss Scrivens—”
Run.
----------------------------------------
In the space between one second and the next, the world lurched, folding in on itself, and I found myself in the middle of the gym. The sensation of sitting one moment and standing the next was wildly disorienting, but not nearly as much as I was by being run over.
I crashed to the very unyielding gym floor in a tumble of bodies and limbs with a wordless cry of alarm, and it was only once my hip was screaming at me nearly as loudly as my teeth were that it finally, properly registered what had just happened.
“I didn’t see you there, I’m sor— Chanel?!”
I burst into pained laughter, rocking back and forth like a madwoman unable to control the cascade of giggles flooding forth. It had worked. My first intentional thaumaturgy had worked!
“How are you here?” Haven, my accidental assaulter, hissed, the severity of his demand entirely at odds with my mirth. “The secretary came and got you at the beginning of class!”
That killed my humor. The secretary. I hadn’t reversed the secretary! I snatched my tablet from where it had fallen to the floor beside me, huffed a sigh of relief that the screen hadn’t shattered, and nearly dropped it all over again in my mad scramble to write the question, “Do you know the secretary’s name?” in TTS.
“Chanel—”
I nearly injured my finger, I jammed it into the, “Do you know the secretary’s name?” again so hard. Craig might already be in the office. I needed to reset her immediately!
“No, I don’t know the name of the secretary,” Haven insisted as he climbed to his feet and held out a hand to help me up, even as he insistently repeated, “Now how — are you — here?”
“Hiya, Chanel.” I ignored Haven’s hand, turning to find Dani had walked over, basketball in hand, a slightly dazed look on her face. “I missed you coming back from the office. How did—?”
I hit the button for, “Do you know the secretary’s name?” again, and Haven dropped his hand with a look of annoyed defeat and exasperation.
“Mm? Mrs. Croft, you mean? The lady who came and got you, right?”
Yes! Croft! Aubrey Croft, I thought, finally recalling the nameplate I had seen. I swapped to The Coder as quickly as I could, deleted the lines for Jaeden, Craig, and myself, and changed PrincipalWilliams to AubreyCroft. Only once I hit ‘Run’ did I finally breathe a sigh of relief.
“Are you finally going to explain what is happening,” Haven groused, clearly unhappy with having been ignored.
I nodded, pulling my feet under me to stand, and took the hand he offered again. Opening the notepad, not wanting any of our nearby, staring classmates to hear, I wrote, [Mr. Williams is a thaumaturge.]
Whatever explanation they had expected, that was not it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t expound on that further just yet because Jaeden trotted over with Nico in tow, saying, “Hey, just a heads up, but Craig still hasn’t shown up to class. He’s probably gone to the principal’s office to rat me out, but don’t worry, I’ll make sure they know you had nothing to do with me smooshing his twig and berries.”
I wasn’t sure what Haven was scowling at more. Jaeden having also unexpectedly reappeared in the gym, their crude euphemism, or the untimely interruption. On Dani’s part, she just seemed uncomfortable with the reminder of the earlier violence, which Jaeden seemed to notice, if their apologetic grimace was any indication. As for me, I was still trying to get a grip on the situation, so I would be prepared for this next iteration. The past half hour hadn’t happened for the five of us my thaumaturgy had affected, but that didn’t mean the rest of the world had reset along with us. I needed to be ready because I would only get so many chances to get through the coming conversation.
“Why admit it?” I asked via TTS, the quiet lilt of the device completely failing to capture my complete confusion.
“Why wouldn’t I?” Jaeden replied with a wide grin that had Nico rolling his eyes with fond exasperation. “That was satisfying. Besides, we may not talk much, but ain’t no way I’m gonna let that pathetic little ant pick on the only trans girl in school.”
I swear my jaw nearly fell off, it dropped so hard. That answered one question but asked so many more! In all my worry about handling first my inability to get to my gym clothes then the situation with Craig and Mr. Williams, I had completely forgotten to question why Jaeden had interfered to begin with. I had avoided Jaeden and Nico like the plague out of fear that any amount of association with them would cause problems at home, yet they just… stepped in? Like that no less?
And beyond that, once more, elucidation had left me completely floundering. I had no idea how many of my classmates thought I was cis, trans, or along the same lines as Craig! Roslyn’s warning that I needed to guide elucidation whenever and however I could was making a painful amount of sense. This whole situation was wildly out of control and confusing, and there was next to nothing I could do about it at this stage.
But there was one person whose elucidation I absolutely had to handle, and seeing the secretary and Craig enter the gym from the main hall solidified my resolve. I started towards them even before Mrs. Croft started speaking with a clearly confused Coach Cassell. He picked up his whistle from where it hung around his neck, but he stopped short of blowing it, the act unnecessary as I arrived with Jaeden hot on my heels.
“Scrivens? Fitzwilliam? You two are, uh, wanted in the office?”
Managing Coach’s elucidated explanation for why he remembered us going to the office twenty minutes ago was the least of my concerns, so I simply followed Mrs. Croft and Craig back towards the hall.
“Hey,” Jaeden whispered, as we approached the threshold. “Careful not to trip.”
I grimaced, having forgotten that complication of looping. I hadn’t given it much consideration before while the repeating-day loop was still active, more concerned with breaking the loop than understanding it, but some things carried over between iterations. Was my thaumaturgy imperfect? Perhaps because of the break from where the loop ended and the rest of the world began. Or because experiences changed people, and wiping their memories wasn’t enough to stop them from bringing something new to each successive iteration.
More importantly, how would Mr. Williams be affected? When she had explained elucidation, Roslyn had said it was the Unaware who elucidated, and there was absolutely no way Mr. Williams was an ordinary man. Nobody had a memory so good that they could remember every single student and their parents for thirty years, that they could effortlessly produce a document picked at the drop of a hat. No, Mr. Williams was a thaumaturge, and I could only assume that his ornate pen was his apparatus.
The only question was, was he an unwitting thaumaturge? Someone who had, like I had, unknowingly tapped into another reality and brought its rules into ours? And whether he was or not, could I exploit that without lying? The one thing I knew for sure was that I needed to go first. Last time, Mr. Williams had come out of his meeting with Jaeden convinced I had a twin, and I couldn’t let that happen again.
“Principal Williams wants to speak with you both,” Mrs. Croft said when we arrived at the office, stepping over to his closed office door, hand rising to knock.
“I’ll go first,” my tablet lilted when I ran the TTS message I had put together on the way over, its synthetic voice mirroring Jaeden’s volunteer, “I’ll go first.”
“No.” She rapped her knuckles three times against the wood and opened the door. “He wants to speak with you both.”