Being dragged into things he wanted no part in was something Magic was used to. The last thirteen years of his life consisted of a series of unfortunate events regarding excursions he was forced to partake in at his sister’s behest. When he was younger, she would drag him all across town to teach him schoolyard games he didn’t want to learn. She bugged him to run errands with her that she couldn’t be bothered to do by herself, insisting that it was more “fun” to go together.
Mira was the reason why he did things growing up and Magic had simply gotten used to the fact that, whatever his sister wanted to do, she was going to make sure that there was something for him to benefit from, even if he had no initial interest in tagging along.
This felt almost exactly like that, the excited pull towards an adventure he didn’t want, except this was nowhere remotely close to an adventure. This was a reckless, headfirst charge into danger that Magic couldn’t stop.
Elsie dragged him down a long, narrow hallway that made his skin crawl. He didn’t know what the point was of having everything on this floor be so close together. Maybe it was just to keep the tech all in the same space, but surely that could have been done in a manner that didn’t make the place feel claustrophobic.
Focus, he reminded himself as Elsie prattled away a few paces ahead of him. Focus on the objective.
“...the place where we keep most of the notations and supplies for experiments is this room over here,” said the girl, swiping her badge against the padlock. It beeped and Magic flinched at the noise, taking a few steps back. Elsie, with a hand on the door handle, looked at him with a raised brow. He didn’t like the judgment in her stare. “You good?”
“Fine,” he said. He was not, in fact, fine and was trying to spend most of his energy suppressing the jumpiness of his nerves and the phantom tickle in his nose and mouth so as not to draw any more attention to his reaction. “What kind of research do you keep in here?”
“Just the basics. A lot of the research results come here. It’s our biggest database storage room, so any of the larger…experiments tend to happen in here. Between the noise of the experiments and the running of the machines, this room specifically is basically soundproof. Wouldn’t want the noises to distract from the other Alchemist studies. Oh, and you can drop the supplies off at that desk over there if you want.” Elsie motioned towards an empty desk in the back and Magic made his way through the room trying to both take in his surroundings and not look too much like a newbie.
He couldn’t help his staring. The room was littered with machines and chemicals in tubes that lined some of the shelves on the wall. Along some of them were masks with tinted lenses, not so dissimilar to the ones he was wearing and as he dropped the duffel he was carrying to the ground, Soma made a small grunt of pain from her spot in confinement.
Elsie cocked her head to the side at the noise. “Did you say something?”
“No,” Magic said. “Just … my stomach. Very vocal.”
The girl shrugged and made her way towards him, large steps making up her stride until she was nearly shoulder to shoulder with him. Magic took a small step away in the direction of the other glasses, grabbing one and holding them up to his face. “Does the research include ophthalmology?”
“No, Avery,” said Elsie with a quick roll of her eyes. “This tech we got from some notes that were sent over from Droidell’s HQ. All the locations are required to be in constant communication. What one building knows, the others have to know, too so we’re all on the same page. Those glasses are just one example.”
“That so?” asked Magic, turning the object over in his hands and praying she’d give him some space.
“Mhm.” Elsie made small pirouettes across the room, tiny little spins with her arms held out as though she were presenting all of the technology in the room. “It’s a requirement. If one location makes a major breakthrough, they have an obligation to share it. Otherwise, Jax goes on a bit of a rampage.”
There, again, that name.
Jax.
One name and a whole lot of trouble attached.
Magic placed the glasses on the desk, glad he’d played the “newbie” card in this particular plan. “Have you ever seen Jax, Elsie?”
“No. Never had to see the guy to know that I’m luckier to be in this location.”
“What’s he like?”
Elsie’s motions stopped and one of her legs hovered out to the side in midair before slowly, surely, brushing the floor. Once she was standing up right, she placed her arms in front of her, hands clasped so tightly that Magic could see her knuckles blanche. Her eyes, traitorous brown and white, were wide, almost fearful. “What you don’t know now won’t kill you.”
Yes, he thought, it will. “As someone new, I should have some idea of what to expect.”
The half-sight dropped her gaze, scuffing the tiled floor with her shoes. “Jax is a menace,” she said. “He rules each of the satellites with an iron thumb—he’s kind of like our overseer. Our Scarlet Runner—our leader—is a man named Holst, who I, for one, am lucky to be serving. He doesn’t treat me differently all things considered.” Elsie looked back up at him, but her attention was slightly off to the side of Magic’s head, as though she were staring at something just behind him. “I know he sees me differently, though. I would rather take that in this building than deal with Jax’s dictatorship in the west.”
“What’s the difference between them? Aren’t they both still after people like you?”
“Holst sees me as a useful field scout. Jax would’ve seen me as a useful lab rat. They aren’t the same.”
“What happens if your use runs out?”
“Then I get removed. Permanently. He values me for my ability and sees it as a way to get ahead. It’s why a lot of us are given the choice. Join or be experimented on and die. I like living, even if it means sacrificing everything I know.”
“How does that make Holst any different from Jax if both will keep you hostage or killed? It’s the same goal, just a different execution.”
Elsie stared at him, the silence in the room broken only by the heartbeat Magic heard in his ears. She took in the sight of him again, scanning him up and down more than once. He did the same, his gaze falling once to the ID card looped around her neck before meeting her eyes. There was nothing in them but resignation.
“You aren’t like the others here, are you?” she asked softly. “You aren’t here of your own free will.”
“No,” he replied, “not exactly. I don’t share the same sentiment as them.”
Magic could’ve sworn he’d seen her shoulders drop in relief. “Good. Then what happens in this conversation, stays in this conversation.” Elsie motioned for Magic to follow and he trailed after her towards a large desk littered with notations and chemicals. She pressed her thumb against her tongue and began flipping through some of the papers. “I don’t know exactly what they want from people like me,” she went on. “Grunts like me aren’t allowed to know anything beyond what we’re told. It takes a special kind of person to know more about what goes on behind the scenes. Like one of the Alchemists who got transferred here a while back—or so I’m told.”
Magic squinted, taking over the job of pawing through the notations on the desk once Elsie stopped and began pacing parts of the room. There was nothing on the page that made sense to him aside from the occasional diagram with labeled parts. One such diagram labeled the features of the fabled miryala flower, another labeling an image that Magic assumed to be Locht based on what he could remember from the Beast’s shadow in the Maidenwoods. “Were they known for anything?”
“Apparently he was well known in the Droidell HQ. A prodigy in the Alchemy Department there and Holst valued his input enough to give him special access to plans and other information. As far as I know, he was transferred the year after I was … brought here. And I’ve been here for about eight years. You kind of remind me of him, Avery, with the way you talk.”
The statement felt like a jab, but Magic didn’t think Elsie meant it that way. Not with that tone, that high-pitched, second thought kind of way. “Because we’re western?”
“No, you just have similar thoughts. I spoke with that Alchemist maybe … once or twice? He always seemed like he had other places he wanted to be.”
“Other errands to run?”
“No, silly. Like he didn’t want to be here at all.”
Magic nodded, only vaguely paying attention. Elsie must have seen it as a sign to continue talking, but he wasn’t really listening, only tuning in to the occasional sentence that went in one ear and out the other. It reminded him a lot of when he would sew on his front porch while Mira would scale a nearby tree, rambling on and on about bakery business when they were younger. He was specifically trained in this kind of background noise tuning and focused himself to the task of taking in the scribbled notations. A lot of it was useless jargon, chemicals he didn’t know the name in, words in a foreign tongue he could only gather a few words from but not enough to make coherent sense.
It sucked, not having enough knowledge to tear the words apart, to drink in knowledge that was inaccessible to him.
He thought that, maybe, there would have been something useful in these notes about the Scepters or what they had planned to do with the Vessels. Maybe when all was said and done, Magic could take the knowledge of what he found and remembered and bring it back to Jovie or Vallian when they found him, presumably, in the lower level with Delilah.
For a while of searching, skimming through graphs and charts and numbers, he thought the information useless. That there was nothing he was going to find that made any comprehensible sense in his brain.
Then something caught his eye and his fingers stopped sliding across the page, fixated on a date at the center of the page.
December 16th, 0038. The day of Chrome’s mine collapse.
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It wasn’t possible.
It wasn’t possible, and Magic knew it wasn’t possible because that was an accident. It was a faulty system in place that caused the structures to collapse. There was no way.
Elsie kept talking, but Magic didn’t hear—couldn’t hear—over the hammering of his heart, couldn’t pay attention to anything other than the burning in his mouth and of his skin, the way even dragging his finger down the sheet to find anything to dispel the idea that the collapse wasn’t just the average mine collapse seared his skin to the point of discomfort.
Black ink popped off the page as Magic leaned closer, skimming line after line with an obsessive stroke of his finger. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be possible. More than that, he didn’t want it to be possible.
But the devil in the details stood out to him like a glaring set of lights. Because not too much further down was a set of lines that made Magic feel as though he’d been stabbed multiple times in the chest.
Result: Partial success; chemical attempt successful; total mine collapse of Chrome’s tunnels. Twenty-seven casualties, bomber included. Spectacle has escaped the premises.
Capture Attempt: Negative; Ori’s location still unknown at this time. Further scouting needed to determine the true nature of the Spectacle’s newest place of refuge.
Alchemy Analysis: Chemical usage successful; large scale catastrophe created desired results. Notations and formulas have been safeguarded at this time for use in the future. All sister locations see page 47 for chemical makeup.
Alchemy Sign-Off:
Curtis Brookes
Vallian Roenthall
Magic couldn’t breathe.
Each line, each word was a visual he saw and a sensation that arose uninvited. Smoke. Clouds. Ash. The feeling of dirt beneath his hands and dust in his eyes. The burning of his skin as acidic soot clung to him like flaming barbs digging into his skin, the grip of predator claws.
The panic he could feel crawling up his throat like bile.
Stars, he felt sick and his skin, despite the prickling sensation he felt along his entire body, was cold and clammy.
Garbled noises warbled in his ears and it wasn’t until Magic felt something on his shoulder pushing down into his arm that gasped for air and slapped at it. Skin connected with his and his palm flared. The lights were too bright; he could hear the buzzing in the bulbs. Even the silence, still as it was, felt overwhelmingly loud.
Magic stumbled over himself in his attempt to create space and when Elsie reached a hand out to grab his jacket, the panic made its way out.
“Do not,” he snarled, “touch me!”
“Avery, what happened?” Elsie prodded and the manner in which she said it—soft, cautious, like he was nothing more than a feral animal on a frenzy—made him even more irritated. “You stopped talking. I thought, maybe, you found something interesting but then you started breathing really weird, and I—”
“Don’t speak to me that way.”
“In what way?”
“Like I’m a fragile piece of glass you’re trying not to drop on the floor and shatter!” Elsie winced and had Magic not felt so on edge, not had tunnel vision skewing his focus, he might have felt bad. And he did, for a moment, but it was overridden by the panic and the fear and sting of betrayal he felt just standing in the building. “Do not talk to me that way. Don’t ask, just …” He couldn’t figure out how to end his statement and settled for reaching to grab the edges of the desk until the corners dug into his palms to create a different kind of sensation: hot, wet, and copperish. Anything to ground himself away from the terror in his head.
It pained him, to be gripping the metal this hard, but Magic would deal with that particular reality later.
“Was it something you found?” Elsie ventured, sounding unsure of her question. Like she didn’t know if it was something she should be asking.
Magic didn’t know how to word an answer on his lips and he was too tired to snap back as the panic and the fear made their ways out, so he just nodded his head, hoping it would suffice.
“Sorry,” she went on after a brief moment of silence, and Magic knew she was saying it as a courtesy—everyone always did—but it didn’t do anything to make him feel remotely close to stable. “Cardinal life is hard. I mean, I don’t even know what happened to my baby sister. She was too young to be of any use scouting, so they—”
A sharp cry of pain interrupted Elsie’s speech and both she and Magic turned in the direction of the noise. It made his ears ring, how shrill and loud it was, but what made Magic’s stomach drop wasn’t the fact that the noise was sudden, it was what made the noise.
The duffel bag he’d dropped off in the back of the room was writhing as though it had been imbued with a life of its own. Soma, from her place of captivity, was squirming around, jabbing at the bag as though trying to break herself free. Her screams echoed off the walls of the research room and, before Magic could run over to the bag and unzip it to set her free, her antlers punched through the teeth, snapping the zipper. It clinked to the ground as Soma threw herself onto the floor, shrieking and whining like a wounded animal.
Which, of course, she would be if there was anything happening to Jovie two floors above.
Survival and fear kicked in, briefly taking hold of rationality, steering Magic into focus. He didn’t know what kind of pain Jovie was experiencing, but it had to have been excruciating for Soma to be whining and bucking around the way she was.
“Soma,” he said, running to crouch by the jackalope, “what happened?” It was a useless question; there was no way for him to understand a single word she said despite the yaps that came out of her mouth in an imitation of speech. Magic didn’t know what to do to calm the Spectacle’s pain and, as her shrieks died to whimpers and whines, he glanced over at Elsie and was about to ask her for help until he spotted her hand at her hip, hovering over her pager.
He realized then that no one would have heard Soma scream because of the soundproof nature of the room. Were that not the case, a horde of Cardinals would have likely swarmed the room.
Which meant that cavalry was just one message away from figuring out that the Spectacle and her Vessel were here.
“Elsie,” Magic whispered, just loud enough to talk over Soma’s cries as she settled down. “Put your hand down.”
“You’re one of them,” she murmured. “The ones that work with her. The Northern Spectacle.”
“Elsie—”
“Is she here? The Celez Vesza, is she here?”
Magic stood up slowly, one hand held out towards the girl, the other out to the side to guard Soma. Elsie looked between him and the rabbit on the floor, her eyes getting more and more shiny with each movement they made. Magic couldn’t try to imagine her confliction, but he recognized the uncertainty in the way her fingers wiggled just above the pager attached to the side of her belt.
“Fourth floor,” Magic said. “They have her in containment and whatever they’re doing to her now is harming Soma. We have to get there and help her, but we can’t do that if you call the Cardinals on us.”
Still, Elsie stood there, grazing the tech with her fingers. Her eyes were trained heavily on the blue rabbit, tears spilling over to slide down her cheeks.
“El,” Magic said again, taking a small step towards her and this time she looked at him, orange hair sweeping in front of her face. “Please don’t alert them.”
“You don’t understand,” whispered Elsie, her free hand fidgeting with the ID around her neck, the other pinching the top of the pager. “This is my job. What I’m here for. Holst will have me killed if I let her go.”
I like living, even if it means sacrificing everything I know.
He looked at the girl in front of him, took in her wild stare. Elsie had the pager in her hand now and before she could do anything, Soma squeaked.
Magic whipped around to face the jackalope; she was still hunched into herself, curled to brace the pain, but she was chittering in strings of words he couldn’t understand. But Elsie could and when Soma continued to speak, the girl lost her footing and sank to the ground on her knees. Tears ran down her face like twin rivers and she nodded her head frantically. “Yes,” she whimpered. “Yes, I do.”
Soma’s offer was foreign to his ears. Elsie’s plea wasn’t.
“Please,” begged the half-sight, the suffering girl. “Please save me.”
Before Magic could ask what was going on or even comprehend the situation, he watched Soma bow her head and let loose the tendrils from her antlers. Like dangerous snakes, they coiled and weaved through the air until they latched onto Elsie’s wrists, forehead, waist. The Cardinal gave Magic a weak smile as the color drained from her skin. Elsie seemed to harden into stone, toppling over from the weight of her betrayal. Dust clouded when she hit the floor, a corpse dressed in traitorous colors.
Magic staggered back as the tendrils retreated. The hammer of a heartbeat returned in his chest and he struggled to get his bearings. As Soma’s tendrils retreated from the body—the corpse, he corrected himself—he knelt beside Elsie and just…stared.
He didn’t want to stay. But he felt as though he had to, that someone had to sit and wait for Elsie’s spirit to cross.
Well, that…and everything felt far too familiar. The dust…the smoke…
On impulse, Magic dug his nails into his already sore palms, wincing at the static up his arms.
Soma’s hooves clacked on the floor until they stopped at his side, patient and faithful like a dog. She made a small sound, almost like an apology, head bowed, but Magic didn’t want an apology. He simply wanted to be left alone to grieve the girl who didn’t choose this life. He hadn’t known her long, but Stars, he hadn’t wanted her dead.
The Spectacle pawed uselessly at the floor before stepping around Elsie’s body, nudging the ID lanyard off her neck. It slipped easily onto Soma’s own, though it scraped across the ground in a way that irritated his ears, set fire to his nerves.
“Pick that up,” he muttered, and Soma lifted her head up, keeping the plastic suspended in the air.
“Tell Jovie we have it,” Magic continued and, for the first time, he wasn’t afraid of the whisper in his voice or the way it sounded. It wasn’t meek, or fearful. It was brimming with restrained anger. No, not just anger.
Rage.
Soma took a shuffled step back as Magic reached forward to take the badge from the rabbit’s neck and stood as he looped it around his own. It didn’t feel right; it skeeved him out to have taken it from a dead body, even one that probably would have offered it to him, were she still alive.
The jackalope closed her eyes, ears flicking up and down like a pair of antennae as Magic walked the length of the room.
He hadn’t meant to come back to the desk with the notes and the graphs. It was a tether, drawing him close, anchoring him to something that should have stayed in the past. And now it was here…
Lights flashed in warning red, alarm piercing the soundproof confines of the machine room. Muffled as it was, it still sent his nerves into overdrive. Papers crinkled under his grip in an attempt to keep himself stable as something cold slid onto his shoulders and looped around his ears to block the noise. Weight pounced on the back of his shoulders and it took Magic a few seconds to realize that Soma had leapt onto his shoulders, her abilities blocking the sound and keeping him sane.
Soma nudged him in the back with her hindpaws, but even with the silence in his head, something was still buzzing, still gnawing at him.
His attention was on the details of Chrome, its collapse, the people it orphaned. The people it destroyed.
He should’ve left it behind. Should’ve left it to rot. To burn away to cinders and soot; dust and ash.
Magic didn’t care.
He took the papers and ran.