“What now?” Simon asked.

“How should I know? You attacked me, you lunatic; you figure it out.” Oh man, I was bleeding everywhere.

“Hey, I didn’t start this. You robbed me; I was defending my property. And you clearly know something about this place, so spill.”

“You want to know what I know about this place?” Was my wrist or nose the more serious injury? Both were bleeding a lot. Didn’t matter; I had no way to treat either. “Fine. What I know is that the water level is going to rise until this beach is underwater. It’s going to keep rising way up above our head, up to that tunnel at the top of the sand pile there, and that thing in the water is going to drown us. That’s what I know about this place.”

“Can we get to that tunnel? Where does it go?”

“Back to the school, but you can’t run up the sand. You’re welcome to try.”

“What about climbing up the cliff?”

“Are you any good at rock climbing, Simon?”

He crossed his arms. “It can’t be too hard.”

I rolled my eyes. “That part over there is climbable by an amateur, but there’s no way you’d be able to edge over to the tunnel opening. I might have a slim shot at it, but I’d probably fall and drown trying. I actually brought some rock climbing tools that could have saved our lives about now, but somebody dumped my backpack into the water.”

“Well, next time I’ll just let the weight drown you, shall I? Honestly, you’re making me kind of wish I had.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He rolled his eyes at me, like this wasn’t worthy of comment.

“Last time we were here, we climbed the easy part of the cliff over there and waited for rescue.”

“Last time… okay, glossing over that. Will that work this time?”

“It’d work a lot better if someone hadn’t bitten the shit out of my wrist right before I needed to climb with it, but… maybe. Last time Miratova found us after she noticed the water had risen, because she was using it for… something? I didn’t ask. Point is, with her current condition, I have no idea whether anyone would notice we needed help.”

“Well that’s just great, isn’t it? That’s absolutely fantastic.”

“Hey, you pushed us down here!”

“If you’d been here before, you should’ve known about the drop!”

“I didn’t drop off a cliff in a strange tunnel last time!”

“Well how did you get here, then?”

“I… slid down that sand pile over there, when running through that strange tunnel. Different tunnel. The geography of this place makes no goddamn sense, but hey, what else is new?” I glanced over at the lake. The water had already started to rise.

“Well then,” Simon said. “I guess we climb, don’t we? And if nobody comes for us, then… then we figure it out.”

“Sounds like a fantastic plan.”

“If you have a better one, I’d love to hear it.”

It was slow going. Simon was inexperienced, and my hand wasn’t working all that well – Simon had bitten deep. I was already looking forward to a lecture from Malas, but hey, at least I could blame somebody else this time. Fortunately, there was no hurry in our climb; the water still had quite a way to rise before it was a threat, so we took our time.

How had I ended up here, again? Sure, the school was full of portals and it wasn’t unusual to be able to walk in two different directions and end up at the same place, but it was a big school. Surely there were a lot of other horrible deathtraps that my rotten luck could have steered me to.

Eventually, we settled on a small ledge at about the right height, and waited.

“You’re bleeding a lot,” Simon observed.

“Wow, really? Whose fault is that?” The bleeding had, in fact, mostly stopped. But I was still angry about it.

“You robbed me!”

“Yeah, because you were making suspicious back alley deals in the middle of your big murder plot!”

“I swear, Kayden, I will push you into this water if you – ”

“Oh great, murder threats. I mean, you just pulled me out of that water, so – ”

“A waste of effort, if you ask me!”

We both fell silent, staring across at the tunnel, waiting for someone to appear. Nobody came. The water rose higher.

Nobody came.

After about an hour of silence broken with occasional attempts at miserable small talk that quickly turned to arguments, Simon said, “I don’t think anyone’s coming. We’re going to have to swim for it.”

“That thing will drown us if we do.”

“No, it won’t.” He raised his fist. “The Guardian Ring will protect me. And I’ll protect you.”

“Is that the Guardian Ring, though? Or is it a forgery?”

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

“It’s good enough.”

“No, this is important. Because if you’ve managed to steal the Guardian Ring from – ”

“Steal? Steal?! It’s my ring! You stole it from me!”

“You abandoned it. I don’t think us discovering it in Miratova’s staff counts as ‘stealing’.”

“What staff? What are you talking about?”

Right, right; the staff hadn’t been part of Simon’s plan. He’d just dropped it in her cauldron, and a while later I’d shown up and punched him. So much was going on, it was getting hard to keep things straight.

“Listen,” Simon said, making an obvious effort to keep calm, “I got us to the shore, didn’t I? We just have to do that again. It’s not even very far.”

“How do I know you won’t let me drown?”

“Because, you walking nuisance in the shape of a human being, if I were willing to drown you I would’ve done that already. But I’m not the killer here, am I?”

“What do you mean you’re – ”

Simon pulled me into the water.

I made a grab for the rocks, but once we were in I had little choice but to follow him to the shore. Soon we were crawling into the tunnel, gasping and trying to rub feeling back into numb limbs.

“You’re a strong swimmer,” I said.

“Normally a lot stronger.” Simon got shakily to his feet. “I’m on about four hours of sleep after the delay getting back from the Lumina last night. Which way is the school?”

“This way. What do you mean, the delay? You got back from the Lumina a few days ago, right?”

“No, there was an issue and we had to rush back late. How far?”

“Other people went, right? Was everyone delayed? Can anyone verify that you only got back last night?”

“Why does that matter? Look, I vote that neither of us tell the staff about what just happened. They don’t need to know, do they?”

“Sure, I’ll ask Malas to heal my incredibly suspicious bite wounds without any explanation. Seriously, though; last night?”

“Why do you care?”

“I just do. This is really important, okay? You guys got back last night?”

“Yes. About an hour before Magical Theory class. The whole thing was rather a pain.”

That’s why the Fiore had looked so tired throughout class! “And others can verify that? I mean, a lot of people went, right?”

“We came back with the Mitchells and Kynan’s Vessel. Why is it any of your business?”

Because that mean that Kylie’s false alarm, which she was so confident had been about Miratova, had happened while Simon was still away from school. Which meant…

“You didn’t attack Instruktanto Miratova,” I said.

Simon rolled his eyes.

“Seriously, you haven’t attacked her. At all.”

“I know that. So do you. Did you hit your head on the rocks or something?”

“You know I don’t know that! If I knew that, why would I be saying the opposite?”

“Because you’ve been trying to frame me for months! Why would you be framing me if you actually thought I was guilty?”

“I’ve never framed you for anything!”

“Oh, yeah? How did you end up with the Ring, then?”

“From the staff! How did it get there, if you didn’t attack Miratova?”

“What is this staff you keep talking about?”

We’d reached a blue-lit corridor. Simon paused to pull up a map.

“Okay,” I said, “Clearly, somebody’s playing us for fools, and one or both of us is working on bad information. You tried to buy the ring back off me, which means you knew the one you were already wearing was a fake, even though you’d been pretending it was real and I’d broken it.”

“You mean this one? I only just got this – ”

“No, the other fake! The one you’d been wearing for months, pretending I’d broken it!”

“Wait. That really was a fake? Why did you steal it, then?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The ring! You broke into my room and stole it. The next day, I tried very reasonably to buy it back from you, and you just decided to taunt me about how much trouble you were making for me with my family and leave.”

“Simon, I’ve never stolen anything from your room.”

“Yeah, that’s not going to work. I know it had to be you, because it was in my desk, behind the force field. Nobody else could’ve gotten in there, but with your curse…”

“My curse can’t break force fields.”

“Really? Then what happened to Miratova’s lab? What happened to my ring?”

“You happened to… no. I thought you did, but…” Ugh, this was complicated. But I had an idea of what might have happened. It needed more thought, but… “Simon, anyone can get through those force fields. You don’t have to break the force field to do it. Anyone who could’ve gotten into your room could’ve stolen your ring.”

“How?”

“Not telling.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t like you and I don’t want you to know. Why would anyone take the ring at that point, though?”

“Well, Magista had finally talked me into sending it off for analysis. I wanted to prove you’d broken it, you know? So if they’d looked and found a fake…”

“So someone stole your ring at that point, to cover their tracks. You and I were set against each other from the beginning. Simon, you should know that the reason I knew your ring was fake was because we found the real one was involved in the lab explosion, as I’ve said. It’s currently in the hands of the professionals.”

“So I have been framed.”

“Yeah, but not by me.” We were approaching a more crowded corridor; soon, it wouldn’t be safe to talk about this any more. “We can’t talk here. But I have an idea of what’s going on, and I’m going to prove it and clear both our names. And you’re going to help me.”

Later on, clean, dry and with our various wounds tended, after I’d had a lot more time to think, I rushed to catch up with Simon just as he was about to enter his room.

“Hey!”

“Oh, it’s you. So this plan?” He pushed the door open.

“Right. Well, if you didn’t attack Miratova, then – ” I stopped; Simon had put a finger to his lips. He strode into the room, waving me in and closing the door behind us.

“Hey, guys!”

No answer. Good.

“If you didn’t attack her,” I continued, “then that means – ”

But he had a finger to his lips again. He walked, peeking under his roommates’ curtained beds, looking for feet.

“Okay,” he said, “we’re alone. You can talk.”

“Creepy and paranoid. Must be a fun combination for your roommates. As I was saying, Max has been making a fool out of both of us. I’ve suspected he was setting you up for a while, but I dismissed the suspicions because… well, anyway. I think he’s setting us against each other.”

“You ‘think’? I’m reluctant to accuse the Acanthos heir without, you know, evidence. As much as I really want you to be right.”

“Right. Proof. That’s where I need your help. See, for any of this to work, he needs to have forged a fake Guardian Ring, switched it with your real one, broken your real one and pretended to find it in the staff… anyway, he needs to have contacted a forger at some point.”

“His grandmother could do that for him. She knows a lot of them.”

“So I’ve heard. And he keeps all his letters to his grandmother in the top drawer of his desk. The evidence we need is going to be in those letters, but they’re going to be in code that me, a poor plebian child of the commonfolk, won’t understand. You might.”

“Possibly. They might have a unique code.”

“You’ve got a better chance at figuring it out than me. Anyway, you also know forgers, unless you want to try to convince me that that guy I saw you with in the tunnels was a stranger you just happened to bump into, so you’ll know the… the names and language and whatever. So here’s what I’m thinking – we strike at Magista’s party. Class schedules change and study sessions get cut short, so day-to-day there’s always a risk that Max will walk in on us, but there’s no way he’d be rude by leaving a party early. I’ll wedge our door open and keep an eye on him at the party, while you go through his mail and find what we need.”

“That’s far too dangerous. You share a room with him; why don’t you snag his mail, bring it to me, and I’ll look through it then?”

“Because he’s suspicious of me. I might have… already told him I suspected him, so…”

“Why on Earth would you do that?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time, okay? Anyway, anything that takes too long risks him noticing. We have to do this all at once; one action, without giving him time to realise what’s happening and find some way to counter it. With my plan, the only risky time is the length of the party, and he’ll be very easy for me to keep an eye on.”

“… Fine. At the party. But if this doesn’t work…”

“Of course it’ll work. It’s foolproof.”

What could possibly go wrong?