Saina looked me up and down and opened her mouth to speak, but I cut her off.

“I’m fine,” I said, “and I don’t want to talk about it.” It had been a couple of days since the pit comp, and there were a lot of thing I didn’t want to talk about.

“Okay,” she said. “Want to practice that wood softening potion again? I’m sure we’ll get the simmer right eventually.”

“Heck yes.”

So we grabbed a workshop and started measuring ingredients. It was a potion we’d been trying for a couple of weeks and we just couldn’t seem to get it right.

“So how have you been?” I asked, carefully measuring pine ash. “Still drunkenly celebrating our victory?”

“Oh yes, that’s me. That’s exactly what I’m like.” Saina turned our portable burner on and started very, very slowly heating a beaker of empowered water. “Actually, I’ve been making lists.”

“Lists?”

She pulled a small notebook out of her pocket. It was one of those diaries they sell to tween girls, all pink and covered in hearts and stars with a little leather strap around it with a tiny lock. She unlocked it with a key on her charm bracelet, flipped it open and handed it over.

She had written a long list of names. I recognised a few of them as fellow students. Each had a bunch of tally marks next to it, and several had little notes – things like ‘Prudence’s cat?’ or ‘July 14th’, nothing that made any sense to me without context. I frowned at it for a second before realising what was going on.

“This is a list of suspects.”

“Yeah. You’re wrong about Peter, but you made a good point. The people I trust are the people I should be suspicious of. I need to be proactive about this whole assassin thing and – ”

“Please don’t get yourself killed investigating.”

Saina rolled her eyes. “This sort of thing happens occasionally. People like me are taught how to handle it. I know what I’m doing.”

“Fair enough. I just… I’ve had to suspect my friends of stuff before, and it sucks. Perhaps I should – ”

“Do you know anything about most of these people? Or even know what would count as suspicious behaviour for them?”

“Well… no.”

“Don’t worry, Kayden. Max and I can handle this.”

“Right.” I did feel better about her including Max, although she probably had a lot of suspects he didn’t know, either. “I’ve got the ash here. Is the water ready?”

“Give it a minute. The instructions say ‘light simmer’, but I’m sure we got it to a light simmer last time and it still – ”

And that was when the alarm went off.

For an alarm, it wasn’t overly loud or shrill. I supposed that in a place where interrupting people’s concentration could result in them accidentally setting things on fire, startling them wasn’t a great feature for an emergency system. It was an insistent buzzing that lasted about five seconds, then stopped. After living through a couple of school disasters I’d bothered to actually read the school’s emergency procedures, and knew it would sound again in fifteen seconds.

We took a few seconds to turn off the heat sources and skim the room for anything that would be dangerous unattended before heading out into the hall. The crystals lighting the hall had changed colour, one half of each crystal green and the other red, so that looking one way down the hall showed a line of green and the other, red. We followed the green toward the nearest evacuation point.

“Do you think – ?” I began.

“It’s nowhere near full moon,” Saina said.

“Right, but if the prophecy was about the last full moon, and we foiled it but the assassin’s still out there, they might try at any time.”

“I don’t think they’d do anything that would trigger an evacuation. This has to be something else.”

“Any chance it’s a drill?”

“Since when has this school ever had emergency drills?”

“Honestly I’m surprised they have emergency procedures at all,” I muttered. “This place is a death trap.” I wondered how many people were just now looking up what this alarm and coloured lighting even meant. I couldn’t be the only person who avoided reading the terms and conditions, so to speak.

The magic inside me thinned and drained away as Kylie moved quite suddenly out of range – she must have reached an exit. A few minutes later, Saina and I reached and exit, and the magic flooded back. We found ourselves under a cloudless sky and in a broad, open field, filled with vaguely confused students milling about and a handful of stressed-looking staff.

Kylie and Max jogged over.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Hi,” Max said, “are you two alright?”

“Uh, yeah. Should we not be? What’s happening?”

He shrugged. “I don’t have much in the way of details. Instruktanto Ahuja says there was a cave-in, and there’s some kind of problem with the ventilation system, so nobody’s really in danger, but…”

“But getting everyone out of the mysteriously collapsing caves is probably a good idea. Yeah. Now what?”

“Now they’ll have to find and repair the problem,” Saina said. “Who knows how long that’ll take.”

“Ahuja says it might be as long as a week.” Max scowled. “He said that they have emergency accommodation, but they’re going to encourage everyone who can go home to do so.”

Sweet, bonus holiday! Then I thought through the actual logistics of the situation and my heart sank. My parents lived in a town I was completely unfamiliar with now, and it wasn’t like they could return to my hometown on such short notice. I was about to spend a week in a new place, trying to figure out how to ask my parents ‘hey, did you guys cut me up when I was a baby and just never tell me about it?’ I still wasn’t… ready to think about that. I definitely wasn’t ready to talk about it. The next week was going to suck.

Max was still looking quite unhappy, too. “Well,” I said, “we can all just not go home. It’s not full moon next week, but if they take longer we’d be cutting it pretty fine, so Saina and I should stay anyway, and if Kylie’s prophet training – ”

“Can’t,” Saina said, shaking her head. “What would I tell Mum? She’ll definitely want me home while they sort this out.”

“My parents would also be difficult to convince,” Max said. “Even if Saina was staying, we can’t exactly tell them that she’s in danger, so that wouldn’t work as justification.”

“You don’t need her,” Kylie pointed out. “You have us.” She tapped the mage mark on her cheek. “Tell your family that you need to observe Kayden and I right now and don’t have time to see them. That would work, surely?”

“Oh… yes. Yes, that would work.”

“Great,” Kylie said. “You can spend half the week with me and half with Kayden. Assuming Kayden’s parents are fine with that.”

“I… don’t think I need to get my parents involved,” I said. “I might just get a motel room in my hometown and hang out with my friends. My parents don’t live there any more, so.” I glanced at Saina. “Of course, if this does stretch more than a couple of weeks, and we need to worry about the full moon…”

“If it stretches longer than a week, I’ll tell Mum,” she said reluctantly. “But I’m sure it won’t. They’ll want to fix this up as quickly as possible. If it really is a cave-in, in the place everyone’s trusting to look after their children… that doesn’t look good.”

“I’m more concerned by the ventilation system failure, actually,” Max said. “It’s true that it would take quite a while for a lack of ventilation to become dangerous down there, but… well. Cave-ins, earthquakes, things like that, are unfortunate but not difficult to explain, when they happen. But I’ve never heard of a failure of the school systems before.”

I shrugged. “Ventilation systems are boring. Why would you have heard of them? ‘Oh, the air was stale for a few days two years ago and a technician fixed it’ – that’s not news. It could happen all the time.”

Max shook his head. “I researched the, ah, boring parts of this school’s history extremely thoroughly when I was looking for – ” he glanced at Saina – “um, when I was studying it last semester. The whole thing is on a magical network, the same as the intranet, and it’s possible that failures simply aren’t recorded anywhere that I have access to, but that’s very unlikely. I’ve never heard of any of the magical school systems failing.”

“Yes, you have,” Kylie spoke up. “In out initiation semester.”

Max frowned. “What?”

Kylie looked to Saina. “You said once that it used to be easy for a prophet to get from the school to Duniyasar. You said that all she’d have to do was cast the prophecy while entering a school portal.”

“Long ago, yes. That particular doorway was closed, for obvious security reasons.”

“How was it closed?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, was it taken out of the portals, or just… metaphorically bricked over? With some kind of charm or something that could fail? Because in our initiation semester, I accidentally cast my spell while walking back into the school, and Kayden and I ended up at Duniyasar.”

Saina shot me a sharp look. “You never told me that.”

I shrugged. “It, um. Never came up?”

“I’ve tried to repeat it,” Kylie continued, “since you gave me Duniyasar. But it doesn’t work any more. I chalked it up to some weird fluke, but…”

“But it is a failure of a school system,” Max said thoughtfully. “Interesting.”

“You think they’re related?” I asked.

“Probably not. Impossible to say for sure; two occurrences isn’t a pattern. It might just be that failures of everything here are more common than my research suggests.” He shrugged.

“What did I say?” I grinned. “This school is a death trap.”

“To be fair, the death count is remarkably low,” Max pointed out. “It’s just very dangerous.”

“If the death count is low, doesn’t that mean it’s not dangerous?” Saina asked. “By definition?”

“Luck plays a factor.”

“In the short term, sure, but over the decades that should even out, so the longer a span of time you look over the more accurately the death count should reflect the danger…”

Ugh, why did I keep making friends with pedantic nerds?

I drifted away from the group for a bit, mentally planning just how I was going to handle this impromptu holiday. My parents would be ticked off when they found out, but I honestly couldn’t bring myself to care. I was pretty sure I had enough Australian money for a week in the cheap motel. I had some Refujeyo money, too, but the currency transfer was a real pain, and even that was running out. At this rate, it wouldn’t be long before I would need – perish the thought – a job.

Lost in the marvellous clutch of financial planning, I almost jumped out of my skin at the voice directly behind me. “Hey, Koala.”

“Mae.” I glanced around. “Where’s Terry?”

She shrugged. “Probably at another exit?”

“Wow, I was beginning to think it was impossible for you two to go anywhere without each other.”

“Oh, come off it.” Mae took a long drag on her cigarette. “So, this, huh?”

“You’ve been here for several years, right?”

“Wow, calling a girl old. Rude.”

I ignored this. “Has this ever happened before? Cave-ins or ventilation failures or anything?”

“Oh, is that what’s happening? Nobody tells me anything.”

“Have you ever had to evacuate?”

“Nope. There’s usually a couple of accidents per year, spell mishaps and fires and whatnot, but I’ve never seen anything big enough to evacuate.”

“I hope nobody’s trapped or panicking in there.”

“I’m sure the teachers will find them.”

Just then, Instruktanto Ahuja called out. “Can everybody come and get checked off the evacuation checklist, please! There’s no need for alarm. We’ll update you on the situation shortly.”

“You know,” Mae said conversationally, “saying that there’s no need for alarm is the best way to make everybody suddenly very alarmed.”

“Everyone seems alright,” I shrugged. I wasn’t all that alarmed.

With how my life was going, a cave-in was barely a memorable event.