By the time my first pit comp rolled around, magical assassin-incriminating evidence STILL hadn’t magically fallen into our laps, but for once I was too excited about something else to care. Specifically, the competition.
The team we were up against, Zephyr, were as new to this as we were, which was good in that they didn’t have any more experience, but bad in that we knew nothing about them, except that their team name was stupid. (We were the Pheonixes, which… shut up, okay? I didn’t come up with it. I was too distracted analysing Peter for possible murderous tendencies during that meeting, and couldn’t come up with anything better. Also we’d had a half-hour debate on the proper way to plural ‘phoenix’ and if we didn’t use the name then that half hour would have gone to waste.)
We were given a map of the mountain (well, large hill, really) fifteen minutes before the competition, in order to plan our route. Apparently it was a 2-hour course, meaning a really efficient team could do it in one and a beginner group like us would pobably take about four. We could position our four players wherever we wanted on the mountain, so long as one was at the starting line at the bottom with the baton, one carried the baton across the finish line, and the baton was only carried or thrown by team members under our own power – no machines or magical teleportation or trained flying familiars or anything sneaky like that. It was unusually restrictive, compared to the capture the flag competitions I’d seen, but I supposed that if someone whipped out a horse familiar and rode to the top then that would kind of defeat the purpose of the competition. (The hypothetical horse familiar could still come, they just couldn’t carry the baton or player).
The four of us pored over the map quietly for a minute. Some of our route was pretty obvious – there was a long track near the start that could be completely bypased by climbing a bit of rocky cliff that didn’t look safe, exactly, but I’d climbed a lot worse fairly easily, so I’d be the starting player. There was a gentle slope taking up almost a third of the mountain without too many obstacles that Hammond could just barrel up without slowing. We picked out these features immediately, leaving fourteen and a half minutes for Peter and Saina to exhaustively debate which of them should bridge myself and Hammond, and who should carry the baton over the finish line.
I didn’t mind going first. I preferred it, actually. I could do my run and then not have to worry any more. Whoever ended up going last was going to have to wait hours while keyed up and ready to race, and while I was excited, I definitely didn’t want to be excited for hours.
Soon enough, I was being handed the baton (just a shiny metal rod, same as any baton) and preparing to walk into that magical vortex of spells for the second time in my life.
This isn’t like the Initiation, I told myself, watching the rainbow swirl of magic in front of me. This is completely controlled. If the Initiation was like being swept away in a flash flood, this is more of a log flume ride. It’s fine.
I stepped through.
And onto the stony dirt at the base of the mountain.
My opponent was a tall, long-legged girl with the graceful poise of a runner who looked like she could easily outpace me up the uneven, winding trail before us, even though it looked far steeper and more dangerous in person than it had on the map. Good thing I had no intention of using it. It kind of zigzagged up the mountain like several flights of stairs, the drops from one flight to the next being almost vertical but with plenty of handholds. Could I climb it faster than my opponent could run the long way? Probably, given how much the uneven trail was going to force her to slow down. I could definitely climb it a lot faster than I’d have been able to run it.
Within the playing field, we had access to the map, marked with the positions of all eight players. I jammed the baton in my belt and checked that Peter was where I expected him to be and put it away just as the starting klaxon sounded.
Up the cliff I went. I tried not to think too hrd about whether there were any safetly features for if I fell – I hadn’t checked. There would have to be, right? There were a lot of safety features for everything in these events. Well, easiest way for that not to matter was to not fall. I didn’t bother trying to keep track of whether I was progressing faster than my opponent – checking would slow me down. I focused my attention completely on what outcropping to grab next.
Climb. Scramble up onto the path above. Climb. Scramble up. Ignore the thundering heart, the screaming muscles. Climb. Pretend you’re racing Magistus and he’s going to be so fucking smug if he gets to the top first.
Above me, thunder clapped, and my heart leapt into my throat. I’d been too nervous about the competition to check whether it was going to rain on us here, in the Pit, I was in the fucking Pit –
Just climb.
I pulled myself up over the final ledge and yanked the baton out of my belt. My knuckles were white around it, hand trembling – I must be more exhausted from the climb than I thought. I was entering a fairly flat area, graced by trees and grass; according to our plan, this was where I was to hand off to Peter.
On the map, it hadn’t looked so much like a tiny forest.
I jogged into the trees. Peter would be watching the map and be ready to rendezvous with me. Just then, the sky above seemed to open, and cold, simulated rain rushed down, over my head, my back, the trees all around me. I froze.
Something came at me out of the trees. By the time I recognised it as Peter, I’d already dropped the baton and bolted.
You’d think just wildly running off in a blind panic on an unknown mountain in the raind would be incredibly dangerous, but this was a monitored event, with my environment being controlled by professionals. I’d barely made it fifteen metres before I found myself unexpectedly at the edge of the Pit, stumbling off the mountain and into the vast stone room, echoey and confusing. I’d barely started to get my bearings when something grabbed my wrist in a vicelike grip, trapping me.
“Kayden, are you alr – ?”
I drove my elbow blindly towards the sound of its voice without looking and ran as soon as it let go.
Halfway down the corridor, alone, I forced myself to stop running, because whatever the fuck had just happened, my response to it seemed weird and disproportionate even to me. I needed some… space, to think. And calm down. My heart was thundering so hard that I could feel my jackrabbit pulse in my eyes and throat, and I couldn’t hear myself think over the sound of my own ragged breathing. Also, it wasn’t quite as easy to stand upright as it should be. I steadied myself with a hand on the wall.
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I needed some air. The island? No. The thought of that place, and the cabin on it, made me nauseous for some reason. The valley? No; surrounded by cliffs, and I didn’t want to see any cliffs right now. My room? No.
In the end I just kind of wandered some random corridors, sticking to the most deserted ones I could find, until I felt like stopping, then sat back against the wall and stared into space for a bit.
Okay, so. I was supposed to be at a relay race right now. I was not currently at the relay race. So that was a problem. I’d at least done my part of the relay race, so I supposed I hadn’t let anybody down in the process of making a total fool of myself in public. Thank goodness we were too new to the game to have attracted much of an audience. Not too many people except the friends of the contestants would have seen… that.
Somebody was approaching. I jumped, but it was just Max. He walked down the corridor slowly, stopping just close enough to talk without shouting, well out of my personal space bubble. “Hey,” he said.
“Hi.”
He sat down against the edge of the tunnel and stared at the wall, like me. “You alright?”
“Y-yeah. Sorry. I don’t know what that was. I guess I looked like a total fucking idiot, huh?”
“Most people were more interested in focusing on the ongoing competition,” Max replied, which wasn’t an answer and was probably also a lie. He spoke in a calm, gentle tone, like he was trying not to spook a wild animal. “Do you need medical attention?”
“What? No. I’m not injured, I just…” I shrugged. “I’m not injured.”
“Do you know what specifically might have triggered your PTSD?”
“My what?!” I turned to look at him. He was still staring placidly at the wall. “Max, I don’t have PTSD. What?”
“Alright.”
“Seriously, I – people deal with worse stuff – everyone has – sometimes you just have to deal with stuff, alright?”
“Okay.”
“Everyone manages to deal with their lives just fine.”
“Sure.”
“I don’t have PTSD.”
“I heard you.”
“M-maybe you’re the one with PTSD.”
“Yes, probably.”
There wasn’t really much I could say in response to that. I stared huffily at the wall, bracing for his next ridiculous, unrealistic theory.
After some silence, he said carefully, “You might be right. I’m not an expert, and I’m guessing you’re not going to go see one or you would have already, so let’s just take your word for it. But something back there caused you to… something back there upset you. Do you know what it was?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I was mostly thinking about the relay race. Does it matter what it was?”
“Well, yes, if you want to avoid it happening unexpectedly again. Has this happened to you before?”
“No.” Yes. Out on the island, before Mae told be about her Initiation. But it hadn’t been nearly this bad. “Who did I hit?”
“Kylie.”
I leapt to my feet. “Oh no! Is she alright? I have to – ”
“She’s fine. She’s with Malas, it’s all fine, there are no problems.”
“I still can’t believe I hit her.”
“Not your fault. She should have known better than to grab your wrist.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Max shot me a look. “You hate having your wrists touched. You always react violently to it. Normally you just jerk away, but grabbing them while you were already so upset was just asking to get hit on accident.”
“I don’t – there’s nothing wrong with my wrists!”
“Didn’t say there was.” He glanced at my arms. No; my sleeves. My short sleeves. I’d been meaning to switch to long ones again after talking to Magista, but I hadn’t gotten round to shopping yet.
I crossed my arms, like that could somehow hide them. “I started wearing short sleeves after the familiarity mark. It’s to make a Statement.”
He nodded. “I know. Before them you just wore them very loosely; big drapey sleeves, without any proper cuffs or elastic.”
“I like flowy sleeves.”
“You always wore them much tighter before your Initiation.”
I went to cross my arms at that, except they were already crossed, so I just crossed them tighter. “W-what are you, some kind of stalker?”
“No, you idiot, I’m a legacy mage. We’re supposed to notice things about people.”
I set my jaw, indignant. Then I saw a very brief smile flash across his face and realised that he was trying to make me indignant, rather than just freaked out, which made me even more indignant. “Well if you’re so clever, why don’t you figure out what happened back there?”
“I think I can make a guess.” Max was still using his even, don’t-spook-wild-animals tone. “That was the third time you’ve ever been in the spell maelstrom of the Pit, right?”
“Yeah, but it was safe this time.”
“It wasn’t the other two times. People die in the Initiation every year, and the time you chased me under the school… well. Anyway, it was the second time you’ve entered it the, uh, traditional way, right? Just like the Initiation. Do you think it might have had something to do with that?”
“That’s stupid.”
“It’s just a theory.”
“Not the theory, the whole thing. There’s no reason for me to be scared of the Pit, not in this context.”
“The brain isn’t – ”
“Why aren’t I afraid of fire or water, then?”
“ … What?”
“The Initiation was creepy as fuck, but it’s not even close to the most dangerous thing that’s happened to me. I could have been trapped and died, sure, but I got out long before I was in any actual danger. The closest I’ve come to death was on my first day here, when I went swimming in a lake and a monster nearly drowned me. Then, later, I fell in the same lake, and got grabbed by the monster again. So why can I swim just fine, huh? I can put my head underwater, I’m not bothered by things grabbing my legs, and obviously I have no problem working with empowered water, so if being seconds away from drowning didn’t affect me then there’s no reason a creepy encounter with a jumped-up spell construct in the rain should have been a problem. Or when Alania’s lab exploded, and I was literally on fire, but I’m not any more bothered by fire than I was before. So it makes absolutely no sense that the Initiation would cause a problem.”
“You’d think so, but the brain is strange. Sometimes, the things that you think will affect you the most, don’t. Often, people with PT – people can be trig – the stuff that might upset people after something happens to them can be really strange; they can be related to things far less dangerous than other things they’ve encountered, like with you, or related to situations that weren’t dangerous at all, just emotionally affecting, or even related to stuff that isn’t part of the trauma at all. The smell of the hospital where someone’s recovering after an accident, perfectly safe, or the food someone had for breakfast the morning after they were attacked, when everything was over.”
“Well, that’s dumb. I’ve got plenty of dangerous stuff going on already, I’m not going to let my brain throw a hissy fit over safe things.”
“It really isn’t that simple.”
“Watch me.” I turned to walk away.
“Kayden – ”
“What? You’ve got more stellar advice about my mental health because it’s easier to psychoanalyse me than yourself?”
Max flinched at that. “N-no. The opposite, actually. Before you go off to do anything dramatic like you always do, there’s… some things you probably have a right to know. Since they nearly got you killed.”
Okay, fine. I was intrigued. I sighed. “What?”
“I think it’s time I explained why I kept my investigations into the school secret from you, and tried to run off on my own into the spell labyrinth.” For the first time in our conversation, he met my eyes. “The real reason, this time.”