“Well, this will either be great or terrible,” Max said, leaning against a bed force field and folding his arms expectantly. “Where are we?”

“It’s quite simple, when you think about it,” I said. “I guess it just requires a situation that most people don’t encounter very often. After all, most people keep their familiars within their range all the time, right? I don’t know what our range is, exactly, except that it’s bigger than the distance between our most distant classes and smaller than half of Australia, which is a pretty big margin. But I do know that we’re slipping out of range all the time. When Kylie goes outside with friends, when I go out to train for pit comps, whatever; every time we go through one of those portals, her magic can’t reach me.” I started pacing. “Except.”

“Except?” Kylie asked.

I grinned at her. “Except when you’re at Duniyasar.”

“Oh! You’re right! I never thought about it, but the link works fine when I’m training.”

“Exactly! When we were apart on the full moon, I could feel it the whole time, so I knew you were alive. I mean, you even gave the Heiress prophecy at Duniyasar, and I heard it in my mind. Our link was perfectly strong. We must be close to Duniyasar.”

“That can’t be right,” Max frowned. “Duniyasar is on flat desert sand. There are no mountains anywhere near it. I very much doubt that the nearest mountains could be within your range.”

“A-hah!” I thrust my finger at him triumphantly. “Here, you make a classic error, my friend. An assumption that I, too, made, but that is clearly wrong. Whoever said we’re in a mountain?”

He blinked. Glanced around at the stone walls. “Um…”

“All we know is that we’re in tunnels built into rock. Nobody ever said that that rock has to be part of a mountain. We assumed that, because all the exits open into mountainsides and cliff faces, but they’re portals! What’s on one side tells us nothing about the other! If I were building portal exits to a tunnel network, I’d put them in rock faces too; that’s just the neatest and most natural-looking place to put the doors! The ones that lead to Duniyasar are just in stone arches, so they clearly don’t have to be in rock faces. We just keep walking our of cliffs or mountains and making the completely erroneous assumption that that must mean that we were inside a mountain, but it doesn’t. In fact, if I had to guess approximately where we were in relation to Duniyasar, I’d guess that it’s probably…” I pointed straight up.

“Oh,” Max breathed. “We’re underground. When they moved the school from Duniyasar, they didn’t head off to some secret location. They dug into the stone beneath the sand.”

“It’s a point of power, isn’t it?” I asked. “One of the seven most powerful magical areas in the world? Where better to put a magic school? Where better to find empowered water?”

“Wait,” Kylie said. “Duniyasar is a point of power, it empowers everyone, but it specifically has a strong effect on prophecies. If we’re actually at Duniyasar right now, shouldn’t my spell be working as well as it does there, all the time?”

“Not necessarily,” Max said thoughtfully. “Remember, a lot of how magic works is based on human perspective and beliefs. The points of power are rooted in the earth itself, but the uplifting of prophets is about human design, about the building and its form and history. ‘Duniyasar’ means ‘world’s head’ or ‘world’s crown’; the tower might not be impressively tall by modern standards, but it’s symbolically tall, an elevated place for prophets to climb and see far. The raised perspective, the star charts, the construction and belief and history of the tower itself… these things are all important. The earth under the tower is going to be powerful, but it makes sense that it doesn’t necessarily carry Duniyasar’s affinity with prophecy.”

“It’s got an affinity with one prophecy,” I pointed out. “This is Malas’ locus, right? One of his spells is a prophecy. But that’s probably just coincidence.”

We were distracted when all of our tablets notified us of a new message. Saina, informing us that she’d made it back to campus without getting assassinated. I breathed a sigh of relief as I replied with a quick acknowledgement.

I’d gotten to see my friends, solved a big mystery, and nobody had died. Refujeyo should have emergency evacuations more often.

“I expected she’d be safe, since it wasn’t full moon and we didn’t find anyone last full moon,” Max said, in blatant defiance of the relief on his own face.

“Do we have a new strategy for next full moon?” I asked. “Or any way to deal with the problem before then?”

“Nope.” Kylie didn’t look up from her tablet. “Ready for three more days of Star Trek?”

“Jealousy’s not a good look on you, Kylie. I know that lounging about watching TV is a lot more fun than doing something boring and stupid like learning how to cast an absurdly powerful, world-famous spell, but it’s hardly my fault.”

“Ugh, don’t remind me. Lydia’s really excited about this full moon.”

Max winced. “Ugh, I forgot. The supermoon?”

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “super moon? What the fuck is a super moon?”

“In my experience,” Max sighed, “it’s a chance for very boring people to get together and discuss very boring politics while they eat tiny sandwiches and stare at the sky together.”

“The supermoon,” Kylie announced dramatically in a truly atrocious Lydia impersonation, “is a special time for us, Kylie. The light of our astral sister not only shines upon us fully, but from a place closer than usual. As a prophet, you are a child of the sky, and with the energy of Her light, Fionnrath’s Destiny can achieve truly wondrous insight.”

“Previous sarcasm rescinded,” I said. “Watching TV for three days actually does sound better than your lessons.”

“Hey, did you two get a message from di Fiore?” Max asked, frowning at his tablet.

“Um… no?”

“Hmm. Apparently his uncle is teaching here now. He was going to come in next semester but there was some squabbling over responsibility for the evacuation and one of the head researchers has completely voluntarily decided to seek employment elsewhere.”

“Wow, that sounds like a fascinating soap opera that I’m going to completely ignore,” I said. “Is he taking any of our classes?”

“Just wizard and master level students, I think.”

“Any chance he’s given up on the whole ‘Alania’s arranging some kind of political supergroup with the students she’s supervising’ thing?”

“After the familiarity thing and the Destiny thing? Not a chance.”

“Ugh.”

Max stood abruptly and stretched, bones clicking like an old man’s. “Well. I need paper. I’ll see you guys later.”

“You have a tablet,” Kylie pointed out. “What is it with you and paper?”

“I just prefer it. Especially when I’m mapping the school. I’d rather not map that on anything with access to the school intranet, for obvious reasons.”

“You’re still mapping the school? Didn’t you solve that big mystery?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Celebrate. We’ve all solved the big mysteries we wanted to solve when we came here. Kylie knows a lot more about her spell, you’ve mapped the school, and despite everyone’s doubt, despite everyone thinking it couldn’t be done, I have Shown Them All, mwa-ha-ha, and determined where we are. Now we just have the unsettling and potentially fatal mysteries left, like finding assassins.”

“But you two haven’t considered how your spell not being empowered here, Kylie, and how your location theory, Kayden, affect my maps. These are valuable data. If you’re right about Duniyasar, then there might be a power axis to build the entire structure around and – well, you’ll see when I’ve figured it out, I guess. I’m going shopping. I will be several hours.”

“Several hours to shop?” I asked suspiciously.

He shrugged.

“You’re not going to – ?”

“No, I am not going to run off to die in a giant spell labyrinth. I swear to you that the next time I run off to die in a giant spell labyrinth, I will tell you. Seven Points, I do it one time…” he muttered as he dashed out of the room.

I put that out of my mind and caught up with the vitally important business of responding to messages from everyone I knew to gossip about the evacuation. Given the general level of high-strung paranoia in my social circle, I was a little disappointed in the lack of out-there conspiracy theories. Even Talbot seemed to accept the general consensus that some higher-up had fucked up some bit of magical maintenance and Definitely Voluntarily Resigned as a result, which was boring. Not that I needed more conspiracy theories in my life, but it would’ve been relaxing to discuss a low-stakes, obviously bullshit one rather than deal with the plots actually affecting me and my friends, for once.

Max returned about five hours later, a bundle of nervous energy. His voice was incongruously calm when he asked, “How are you guys doing?”

I raised an eyebrow at him. He glanced at one of the lighting crystals on the wall. Oh, this was a ‘maybe it’s paranoid to think we’re being listened to but I’d rather be paranoid than have this heard’ kind of conversation. Kylie must have caught it too, because she put her tablet down and stretched. “Fine, but I need some fresh air,” she groaned. “We’re barely back and I already hate caves again.”

“I had the same problem and went for a wander,” Max said, “and found this place with a fantastic view. Do you guys want to see?”

“The only other thing on my schedule is homework,” I said, “so yes, I absolutely do want to see.”

Max put on his Composed Face and we strolled through the school and, eventually, out onto a mountainside. I swore and tucked my hands into my armpits. “You could’ve warned us about the weather!”

“It’s a mountain. Mountains are cold.”

“You didn’t say we were going to a mountain! We could’ve brought coats – ” I stopped talking. Stared. Because Max, grinning, had just pulled three mobile phones from his bag, and was handing them out.

The phones weren’t modern. They were the kind with actual little rubber buttons that only showed clunky black letters and numbers on a tiny screen. The kind where you had to press a key four times to send the letter ‘s’. Then he pulled out some kind of collapsible solar panel, quickly set it up, and offered me a charging cord.

“What,” I said.

“It was Melissa’s idea!” His grin widened. “We found an international carrier and set up a few plans. The service is patchy, really patchy, but from up here we can get a signal. Meaning we can contact the outside world without going through Refujeyo, so long as you like texting.”

“How expensive is this?” Kylie asked.

“Not expensive enough that I need to explain the bill to my parents. Just remember to allow for a lot of charging time on a solar panel like this, and keep them turned off if you take them inside the school, since electronics are against the rules and all that.”

I stared at the phone in my hands, recalling long nights of trying to figure out some kind if written code, of debating what I could and couldn’t put on paper for Chelsea and Melissa. Why hadn’t we thought of this before?

“Raising the next question,” Kylie said. “Do any of us actually know the phone numbers of the people we want to talk to?”

“I do,” Max said, tapping his temple. “I have Melissa and Iluka’s numbers. You guys can get everyone else’s from them, I assume.”

I felt dizzy, and I didn’t think it was the altitude. I glanced back at the cave leading to the school – the school whose location I was pretty sure we knew. I glanced at the phone in my hand, which I could use to talk to my old friends and family whenever I wanted. The mystery of Refujeyo, the confined corridors, the long wait times on communication outside, had all made it feel like a separate world, somehow. Like I had two lives in two different realms. That had never really been true, but only here was I confronted with the concrete, physical reality of that. Once this phone charged, I could text Melissa and tell her where in the world I actually lived. She could text back immediately. As if we were still in our houses next door to each other. That made me feel… something.

I had no idea what.