“Scars can be painful, or scars can be numb,” the spellthing informed me, staring into me with those creepily symmetrical eyes. “Yours would have been more useful if they were painful.”

I sighed, already fed up with this. “You left me plenty of painful scars, I think. Enough that I’m still dreaming about you, apparently.” The only dream with the spellthing that I remembered was that one last semester where I’d woken up in the middle of it, but this scene had the feeling of weary habit. Sitting at the familiar table in the cabin, hands clutched around a warm cup of tea, just… felt like something I did a lot. “Have we done this before?”

“Kayden, you know perfectly well – ”

“Yeah, yeah; you’re not the thinkg from the Pit, you’re just a piece of my own subconscious, you only know what I know and can’t give me any new information. In which case I’d rather dream of hanging out at the beach with my friends, if it’s all the same to you.” But it was raining outside. I could hear the rain clatter on the roof. I couldn’t walk out into the rain; that was what I’d come here to shelter from in the first place.

“Sheltering from the rain only works if you expect the rain to eventually stop,” the spellthing said.

I’d had dreams that felt like this before, of course; dreams that weren’t quite nightmares, just emotionally draining experiences where my defenses were lowered in my sleep and I spent the night symbolically obsessing over whatever I was worried about. My curse hurting someone, putting off my homework, a general feeling of the pointlessness of life and inevitability of death… they’d been common, back before Refujeyo. Presumably, everyone had them, when they were stressed. They weren’t like this, though. They weren’t usually lucid. I’d just wake up with the memories of emotionally distressing pointless tasks that made no sense in the waking world, physically rested but emotionally harrowed. Lucid dreaming a conversation with the thing that had nearly trapped me forever in the Pit was new. Except for that one other time. And maybe several other times, if my feeling that this was old territory could be trusted.

“Why am I here?” I asked.

“Because it won’t get better if you pick at it,” the spellthing said, which wasn’t helpful.

“I mean, what specific personal worry am I obsessing over right now? Because I have rather a lot of them and, frankly, none of them are particularly tied to you.”

The spellthing smiled, revealing those rows of disconcertingly identical teeth in a too-wide jaw. It blinked its symmetrical eyes and put its too-long hands on the table. I immediately snatched my own out of wrist-grabbing range.

“Do you even know what any of your personal worries are tied to? You spend so much time hiding from yourself, overanalysing details to procrastinate looking at the big picture. If you want to know, know. You’re the one ignoring my warnings and discarding my gifts.”

“Oh, yeah; great warning!” I snapped. “Telling me I was going to be chosen by destiny. I suppose you thought that was hilarious, huh? Giving a warning that you knew I wouldn’t have the context for until it was too late, over a detail that wasn’t really a choice anyway because Kylie’s life was on the line. That choice was inevitable from the moment Max went down into that place; everything after that wasn’t really a choice. If you really wanted me to have a choice, you would have warned be about that.”

The thing cocked its head. “You make a lot of assumptions about how much I know, and how I can communicate.”

I huffed at this. Lecturing my own imagination was cathartic but not useful. I went to take a calming sip of tea, because that’s what tea was for, and the cup was halfway to my lips before I remembered where I was and set it firmly back down.

“Your friend found the glyphs by watching for what didn’t make sense, finding the errors in the maps. Your other friend navigated using the Destiny for years by taking advantage of its limitations, the sorts of things it could and could not tell her and the time limits involved. You are only investigating what you feel comfortable with, and distracting yourself with frivolities when you run into any rough edges. If you want to navigate a prison, you cannot be afraid to touch the walls. If you want to tend a wound, you cannot flinch at blood. If you want to see a disaster, you must be prepared to look at one. Pay attention to the things you are told. You chose Destiny, you may as well take its advice.”

“I do.”

“No. You tinker with its words like a logic puzzle, but discard answers that you do not want to be true. You don’t believe in Destiny. Only in your limited human ability to link the concepts it gives you.”

I shrugged.

“Whether you help or not, there will be a collapse. What you get to choose is – ”

The obnoxious buzzing of my alarm dragged me to consciousness. I switched it off quickly, before it could wake Saina, then, remembering why I’d set it, sat bolt upright and checked my messages.

It was the morning after Kylie’s little stakeout. At least, it was morning wherever Duniyasar was – sunrise, which was when Kylie’s stakeout ended, and I was expecting a message from her as soon as she got back on campus. The magic moving through the familiarity link wasn’t doing anything unusual, or at least anything more unusual than it normally did when Kylie was at Duniyasar, so I knew she was alive and probably not actively prophesying, but that didn’t give me a lot of information – she could be badly injured, or the assassin might have restrained her and intended to carry her off somewhere, or any number of things might have happened. I checked my messages – nothing from her yet, of course. It would take her a few minutes to actually get back onto campus, and she might hang around a little past sunrise, so there was nothing to panic about. There was a message from Max, summarising his investigations; maybe he’d found the culprit?

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I skimmed the message. Nothing useful. Well, plenty useful – all kinds of little details and potential suspicions about various people, most of which I only knew by name or not at all, but even he admitted in the summary that he had nothing particularly strong. Human lives were complicated, and someone being evasive and nervous and sucking out of a party early could mean that they wanted to assassinate the eldest daughter of the High Crone, or it could mean that they had to get to a remedial casting lesson and were embarrassed about it.

Max had some information that might indicate who to investigate, but he didn’t have answers. I reread the message, looking for Peter’s name. Apparently, Max had managed to engage him in conversation, but the only thing remotely relevant to Saina he found was that Peter was really excited about our upcoming pit comp and a little disappointed that his whole team wasn’t at the party. Max couldn’t risk probing properly, but he got the sense that Peter didn’t know Saina’s true identity.

That was weird, right? Weren’t they friends? Well, maybe it wasn’t that weird; Saina and I had been friends for awhile before she’d told me, and she’d only told me because she wanted to offer Duniyasar to Kylie. I hadn’t suspected a thing. But then, I wasn’t from a mage family, like Peter. Plenty of other legacy kids had figured it out, or at least suspected, so was Peter genuinely unaware, or was he overcompensating, pretending to be clueless because his whole mission was to get close to Saina and –

This wasn’t helpful. I knew this wasn’t helpful. Randomly latching onto people as potential enemies because they’d done one thing kind of weird and creating big paranoid theories about them was not helpful. I’d been here before.

The spellthing in my dream had told me that I was ‘distracting myself with frivolities’. Was this what it had meant? That I couldn’t see the danger to Saina in front of my face, because the truth was uncomfortable, so I was deflecting to the first available target who wasn’t? No, no; I couldn’t think about anyone who was an uncomfortable suspect enough for me to do that. The prophecy cleared me, at least according to Kylie, by how it was structured. It couldn’t be Kylie or Max, because their insights were invaluable in protecting Saina, and if either of them had wanted to kill her they’d just have helped put together a worse plan that let them do so. And anyone else… well, I’d be shocked and hurt if Magistus or Talbot or Alania or someone was a secret assassin, but if I had reason to suspect them, I would, I was pretty sure. I wouldn’t subconsciously avoid the possibility because it was painful.

I was just spinning because I didn’t have any information. And we were on the last day of the full moon, so if the assassin didn’t make a move today, then… then we really didn’t have anything to go on. Except assume that this was the wrong full moon, and try again next month, I supposed.

At this rate, I was going to get through a lot of Star Trek.

“Mmmmn,” said Saina, from her bed. “Mmmnnngngn!”

Oh. I guess my alarm had woken her after all. “Sorry,” I whispered.

“Mgfn.” She rolled over and pulled a blanket over her head.

Alright, then.

Well, I was up. I considered having a shower and waking up properly, but what if Kylie was hurt and messaged me while I was doing that? It could be a good ten minutes before I saw the message! If something was wrong, I wanted to be there right away, to um…

Well, just be there, I guess. If she was hurt, I couldn’t do anything useful. The portal to Duniyasar was in the medical ward, so by the time she was in range to message me she’d already be receiving medical attention, and me leaving Saina’s rooms to go see her would be putting Saina at unnecessary risk. Even if Kylie had great news, if she’d identified the assassin, that wasn’t information I could do anything about immediately, either. Explaining everything and getting them caught was a job for Kylie the prophet and Max the politician, and I still needed eyes on Saina until the assassin was safely locked away. There wasn’t anything I could actually do with anything Kylie might tell me. There was nothing she could say that I would need to see immediately.

I’d never felt so cursing helpless.

Probably shouldn’t go have a shower while Saina was still asleep, anyway. We were, theoretically, completely safe in her room, but I was pretty sure me nipping into the bathroom counted as her ‘straying from my sight’, and while I couldn’t be with her twenty four hours a day, it’d be just our luck that the ‘runes and poison’ in the prophecy meant that while I was in the bathroom, someone would use special secret runes to break into the bedroom and poison her in her sleep. I shouldn’t leave her helpless while she was asleep.

Except that I just had, while I was sleeping, right? Did that count as her straying from my sight? Should we be staggering our sleep schedules? Probably too late to worry about it now. We should have organised this better.

New message from Kylie! I opened it hurriedly with shaking fingers.

Kayden, are you okay?

What? Of course I was okay. Why wouldn’t I be okay? I was the safest person in this little operation. I responded immediately.

Of course I’m okay! No assassins infiltrating this bedroom. Are you okay?

Her reply, this time, was sent to both Max and myself.

I’m perfectly fine. Ran into nobody at Duniyasar except the people I brought. Have a massive headache, but that’s probably from low-level channelling the Destiny half the night for Hua. Max, I’m surprised you and Hua aren’t doing science nerd stuff together yet.

Kayden, I don’t think I like this strategy any more. It puts you in far too much danger. There’s no point aborting now, but we should think of something else for next month, if this is still happening by then.

If this is still happening by then. It probably would be. None of us were getting anything to work with, and between full moons, we had nothing to go on at all.

We were definitely going to have to try to find something else.