The sandstorm approached both faster and slower than I expected. As we ran, trying not to stumble on the shifting sand, I thought, it can’t be like the movies, right? They make sandstorms come up really fast for dramatic effect. This’ll be slower.

It was, but not quite slow enough to let us make it inside the palace. By the time the two of us thumped up against the impractically massive wooden double doors only to realise, too late, that they were the kind that were held shut with a big bar on the inside, the sand was around us, obscuring our vision, whipping at our skin, climbing into our noses.

It also wasn’t as deadly as the movies had had me believe. It hurt like hell as it dragged against my healed-but-still-tender burns, and keeping it out of our eyes was a chore and a half, but it was mostly like walking through, well, a storm. We still needed shelter – eventually, it would feel like sandpaper, and we’d die of injury, suffocation or exposure if the storm didn’t let up. But we had plenty of time to figure out how to get the door open.

There had been windows, hadn’t there? Big ones, that had helped me decide how many stories the palace had. I hadn’t been able to see if there’d been glass in them, but a place this old probably wouldn’t have glass, would it? Even if it did, surely I could find a way to break it. I stepped back and raised my lit tablet, trying to make out through the sand… yeah. Yeah, that big ledge of stone, high above, that I could just make out – that was a window ledge, I was sure.

I prodded Kylie. “I’m going to climb up to the window and let us in!” I shouted.

“Can you even do that?”

“Don’t worry! I do this kind of stuff all the time!”

“Aren’t you injured, though?”

“Do you have any other ideas?”

She shook her head and laced her fingers to give me a boost. Securing my tablet safely in its belt pouch first, I stepped into her cupped hands and jumped.

As I scrabbled for purchase in the cracks between the weathered stones and prayed that my torn shoulder wouldn’t give out on me, I was struck by the memory of the time I’d been stupid enough to jump into a tree with a broken leg. This was kind of similar, I supposed, except that there was no plaster on my shoulder to brace it from stress, and falling out wouldn’t mean an embarrassing trip to the hospital with a few more injuries and a house arrest violation on my record, it would mean potentially injuring myself in a sandstorm with no medical help in sight and leaving both of us at the mercy of the sand. Also, the sand itself was making things kind of difficult.

I couldn’t really see the wall I was working with, which wasn’t as much of an impediment as you might think. The real impediment was that I couldn’t really feel it, either. Aside from the mishap with Miratova’s spell freezing the corridor outside her lab, it had been a long time since I’d really been cold. I hadn’t really thought about it, but the indoor parts of Refujeyo were always at a comfortable temperature, and outside was always close to a nice warm Refujeyo room. Here, the chill winds and grainy sand tore at my hands, depriving them of sensitivity, and at my face and legs, depriving me of focus. With no sight and numb fingers, finding any purchase took forever. And any purchase I found with my left hand had to then be negotiated with my right, lest my shoulder give out.

Slowly, I inched my way up the wall. My practice on the climbing wall in the gym helped. I told myself it was just another climb, and that if I fell, a gentle wind would lift me onto a balcony to try again. I couldn’t make myself believe it, but the fantasy enough was a distraction from the mortal terror eating away at me.

If I had control of my spell, this would be a lot easier. I could use it to hold the sand back, like the fire in the lab. But it sat, as usual, dormant and useless. So I relied, as usual, on myself.

Inch by inch.

Just when I was wondering if I’d somehow aimed wrong and gone past the window ledge, my hands found it. It was massive, made of stone blocks as tall as my arm was long and more than wide enough to hold my entire body; I carefully negotiated my way around it and dragged myself up, shoulder screaming as I momentarily forgot, in my excitement, to be careful. I lay on the stone for a second, catching my breath, and then rolled inside.

The change in weather was immediate. I wiped the sand from my eyes and opened them. The storm was still getting inside, violently hurling sand through the windows and piling it up on top of the massive piles left by sandstorms past, but for the most part, the stone walls kept it out and directed the flow of what came through.

Getting down from the window was, strangely enough, a lot harder than getting up. The stone inside the room was significantly less cracked. I really needed to start carrying rope.

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Once I was down, I put myself under the massive board barring the huge entry doors and lifted with my whole body. The bar came free, and the doors slammed open with the wind, nearly smacking into me.

Kylie bolted in.

“I was just about to go looking for you!” she yelled over the howling wind. “I thought maybe you’d fallen!”

“I never fall, I’m amazing!” I shouted back.

Together, we wrestled the doors closed and lifted the bar back into place. This took quite some time. Then we collapsed, exhausted, into a pile of sand and finally took the time to inspect the room.

It was mostly empty.

Well, actually, it was mostly full of sand. But it was empty of any furniture, or obvious indications to its purpose. The only man-made things in the room were several wooden doors in the far wall and what looked like a ruined old well in the centre of the room. (A well? Inside?)

I walked over to inspect it. Yep, it was a well. It even had a little winch thing on top to attach buckets to, although nobody would want to do that now because it was full of sand. And the winch looked pretty badly rusted.

Around it, etched into the solid stone floor, somebody had carved a perfect circle. And spreading out from under the well were four straight channels, all leading deeper into the building, like the splayed fingers of a hand. They’d been carved very deep into very solid stone; even the wearing sand had barely softened them.

“There’s probably better shelter further in,” Kylie said, brushing past me. She opened the door directly in front of us – which had a normal handle, thankfully, not a bar or deadbolt on the other side – and we walked into a windowless, warm and blessedly quiet corridor, lined with more doors.

“Kayden. Look at this.”

Kylie was inspecting the door we’d just come through, frowning. She moved the handle up and down. “Check it out.”

I did. There wasn’t much to say about it, really. It was a door handle, just like you can find in any house. The kind with a lever instead of a knob. A bit rusted, but it still worked.

“It’s a door handle,” I said.

“Exactly!”

“I’m not – ”

“This place is obviously super old! But when was this kind of door handle invented? With the lever?”

“Oh. Good point. Sometime within the past few generations, surely.”

“Which means that this place was being used in that time. Being used enough to bother replacing this door.” She rubbed at the rust. “But not very recently.”

“Maybe it’s still in use by very lazy people?”

“Hopefully they’re too lazy to attack us for breaking in, then.”

The doors to the rooms lining the hall didn’t have modern doorknobs. They had deadbolts inside with little fabric-covered holes in the doors, so you could reach in and undo them. We investigated a few; they were mostly empty, but here or there was a small table or old, rotting straw mattress.

“These are bedrooms,” Kylie noted, nudging a mattress with her toe.

“Servant’s quarters for the palace, maybe?”

“Palace? Feels more like a temple. Maybe the priests slept here.”

“No,” I said, spotting something. “No, I don’t think that’s it.”

The rooms tended to have a couple of metal hooks in the walls, and the one we were in had something hanging on one of the hooks. Trying not to think about the possible spiders in the cobwebs covering the object, I pulled it down. It had been eaten quite a bit by moths, but it was still recogniseable – a mage’s robe. Time hadn’t been kind to the colour, but it was still identifiably red.

I rubbed the fabric between my fingers. Something slick and fine. Silk? I didn’t know fabrics.

I met Kylie’s eyes.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, this kind of makes sense. There had to be a school before the elaborate tunnel system, right? Or where would the money to build all that stuff come from? But I still don’t understand why we’re here.”

I had a theory about that, but I wasn’t ready to share it. Not until I’d thought more, and definitely not alone in the desert like this, far from more knowledgeable people like Max.

“No idea,” I lied, carefully hanging the robe back up. It was obviously abandoned, but I still didn’t feel like I should be touching anything. For the first time in a life of breaking into public buildings and sneaking across neighbours’ rooftops, I had the distinct sense that I was somewhere I was not supposed to be. “You zoned out shortly after we got here, though, and your curse said… it said we’re not here yet.”

“It said what? What exactly?”

“That, exactly. Its words were ‘we aren’t here yet’. Then it gave a prophecy… hang on, I managed to record that part.” I played the prophecy for her.

We were quiet for a little bit afterward.

“Huh,” Kylie said. “That’s a weird one.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah. At least half of that sounds like past context. It doesn’t usually talk about the past unless it has to, to identify someone or whatever. The past’s left out unless it’s needed to make the prophecy understandable. It doesn’t do… history.”

“Maybe you need to know that for the prophecy to be understandable?”

“Maybe. In that case, it’s one of the more complicated ones. I guess we have a murderer this time. A child murderer.”

“The child mightn’t be the murderer. Maybe someone else kills the hero to free the child. Maybe the hero sacrifices themselves to free the child.”

“Maybe. That’d make someone a hero.”

The dormitory corridor was so long that the undirected light of our tablets couldn’t make out the end. Maybe I should start carrying a real torch, too. Rope, torch… I shouldn’t have to carry an explorer’s kit just to go to school, dammit!

We quickly ran into an intersection of corridors. Ours kept going straight, but the one crossing it was slightly, evenly curved to either side. I could see a couple of other corridors cutting across it.

I tried to visualise the layout of the building. The outside was pentagonal, with a big tower right in the centre. We were heading towards the centre on our straight corridor, as were the others intersecting the slightly curved corridor. It was impossible to judge the curvature of the corridor, but from the general design of the building it was probably safe to assume that it was symmetrical, o it was probably a huge circle running around the whole building. Intersecting corridors running to the centre, like spokes on a wheel.

Meaning that anything interesting was probably going to be in the dead middle of the palace.

In that tower.

Unsure of what we’d find, Kylie and I walked forward.