When I came to, the first thing I noticed was how stiff the mattress was. Everything was white: the ceiling, the curtains on all sides. There was beeping, whirring, a flurry of little sounds ping-ponging around me. I’d never been in a hospital before, but I didn’t know where else this might’ve been. The only remaining question is whether I was still at the embassy’s facilities and I was a little bit fucked, or I’d already been shipped off to a private hospital and I was thoroughly fucked.
“No.” The sound from my throat was hoarse and weak. My body ached all over, my arms and side dully throbbing and my head pounding. I tried to sit up and felt my skin peel away from the bed cover, room-temperature air hitting my sweaty back and causing little pricks all over. “No, I shouldn’t be here.” I pushed the sheets back and shifted around, trying to get comfortable in the stiff frock they’d stuck me in.
A hand brushed aside the curtain in front of me and in came a nurse, a sharp-eyed woman with roughened hands. “Quiet. Lay back, now,” she ordered gently, giving my shoulder a gentle push. “You’re mildly concussed; you need to rest.”
“Not here,” I protested, laying back nonetheless. “No, send me back home. I refuse treatment. I refuse -”
“Shh,” she ordered again. “Rest. You won’t owe anything.” She hurried back out, the heavy curtain flapping behind her.
“You can’t be sure of that,” I called after her, but she was already gone, or she pretended not to have heard. I remembered the events of what I assumed to be the previous day. Kar was gone. Not that I cared, or not that I should’ve cared, but he was gone. I’d been scooped up by Cypher and taken to that house, and then scooped up by mages when Lanu left me for dead. Hell, she acted like I should’ve been thankful that she didn’t turn me over to the mages but it was all a stunt; she knew they’d get me anyway. She probably hadn’t even planned to use me as a bargaining chip for the house, probably just wanted to scare me into joining her and, if I refused, act like she was doing me some kind of favor by ultimately deciding against it.
“Hello? I refuse treatment,” I tried again. Nothing. I found myself tempted back into sleep, even though I’d just slept. For how long? I had no idea, given that any lingering tiredness could’ve easily been due to all the fighting and running as much as a lack of sleep, and it’s not like they left a clock by my bedside. Anyway, in a couple seconds I was out again.
When I next woke up, the nurse was back at my bedside, nudging my shoulder. I shrugged it off, gave her a weird sort of half-snort half-snarl that put a wry smile on her jaded face. I noticed she was holding a tablet in her other hand. “I’ll need to run some tests. You’ll be performing a series of tasks; they’re pretty simple, but you need to be awake and alert. Are you ready?”
“Ready?” I repeated, bewildered. “No, no, I don’t want . . .”
She gave me a disapproving look and poked her head outside my stall. She exchanged a few words with whoever was standing immediately outside. Despite my protests, he entered, clad in a black jumpsuit. I recognized him. His hair was different - yeah, he’d shaved it all off - but the sallow cheeks, those dark eyes, that square jaw were the same. “You’re . . .” I started.
“Yeah, got a few in here who recognize me.” He turned to the nurse. “This the one?”
She nodded. “Yes, this is her. Your analysts thought she’d make a good prototype.”
He scoffed. “My analysts? Know fuck-all about them, they just send ‘em to me and I take over from there, training and all. Starting to think it’s just a lottery.”
“Well, this one’s the subject of your initiative, is she not?”
I noticed something felt off about my head. I sat up a bit and put my fingers to my temple. I slowly slid them over the smooth surface of my bare scalp. “You cut it all off,” I muttered.
“Yeah,” the mage laughed. “Guess we’re matching now.”
“Just to be clear,” I started, “You’re Helt Kassian, right?”
“Yeah,” he confirmed. “Though it’s General Kassian now, much as I hate it that way. Miss my Magefucker days. Traitor to the cause, I know.”
The nurse started up a spell on her tablet. “You can get his autograph later; right now I need you to sit up a bit - yeah, just like that; here, let me get the pillow behind you - and read this passage for me.” She procured a book from her coat and opened it to a seemingly random page; she handed it off to me, pointing at the start of a paragraph in the middle. “Starting here. Helt?” she prompted. He made his way to the opposite side of the bed and held out his hand with the relaxed, steady form of a mage.
Suddenly I was underneath those black fingers, those faceless masks again. I gasped and scrambled back, gripping the plastic headboard. “Oh, fuck,” I gasped. Wasn’t even a sound that came out, just a pinched sort of pressure at the back of my throat.
“Steady, now, steady,” the nurse insisted, her hands suddenly firm on my shoulders. I hated that, the way she touched me, jerked me around; it was like every time she did that she was telling me she knew better than me.
Helt was looking at me with eyes full of pity and that just made it worse. The afterimage of those mages was gone now, and I was back to sitting more or less stationary on the bed, my dignity even more damaged than it already had been. “Fuck, I saw, I saw -”
“Don’t worry about it, you’ve been through a lot,” Helt said. He meant it, too.
The nurse picked up the book, which had been thrown to the floor during my spasm, and found the page again. “Alright, let’s try that again. You won’t panic this time, will you?”
I shook my head, took the book from her. “No, I’m all good now. But I’ve gotta ask,” I continued, “What’s all this mean? You said something about a prototype, and -”
“Just read,” the nurse interrupted. “I’m on a tight schedule, and also not the best person to ask. Kassian can explain later. If he has time. Okay, starting right here.” She pointed out the paragraph again, and Helt brought his palm up, situated it right in front of my forehead.
The font was tiny. Don’t know quite what they were testing for, but I had to wonder if whatever Helt’s magic was doing could make it past my furrowed brow. “Alright. ‘While the origins of Condouth’s central structure, the four-mile-high Kau . . .’ I don’t -”
“It’s cow-sue,” the nurse corrected. “Alright, we’re gonna have to start over. Helt, just keep the spell going on your end, okay? I’ll restart the recording.” A couple moments passed. “Okay, Raena, now.”
I cleared my throat. “‘While the origins of Condouth’s central structure, the four-mile-high Kausough, are unknown, some scholars propose that the building dates back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Both its interior and exterior features have likely been renovated countless times. While the exterior of its lower levels is constructed of glass and polished gneiss, the upper levels are coated in polyvinyl cryptide, the magically synthesized material that also comprises the building’s skeleton. This is the only known use of polyvinyl cryptide in architecture (its primary application being military).”
“That’ll be enough,” the nurse concluded. Helt brought his hand down. Only now did I realize that I had been hearing a high-pitched hum. I felt tension I didn’t know I was carrying dissipate as the noise came to a sudden stop.
“So? How’s it looking?” Helt asked.
The nurse contemplated. “It looks like we have a potential point of insertion; I don’t want to draw any conclusions, though, not until we’ve run the course.”
“Insertion?” I questioned, desperate. “The fuck are you inserting?” Helt gave me this fake little tight-lipped smile. “What’s going on? Nurse? Hello?”
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Helt laughed. “You hear that? She still thinks you’re a nurse. This, Raena,” he continued, turning to me, “is Dr. Avia Eindiss, and she’s gonna be the one putting a chip in your head.”
“Alright, Helt, I’m gonna need you to keep doing what you just did. Raena, I’m gonna ask you a few questions, simple math.” They did these tests for well over an hour. Just random tasks, as far as I could tell, ranging from reading passages in a book to listening to music to answering various trivia, and Avia kept talking about “potential points of insertion,” which scared the shit out of me. Not to mention that bit about me being a prototype. But, evidently, her schedule was more important than my comfort and every effort I made to get some answers out of those two was met with the same indifference.
And what the fuck happened to Helt? I mean, I’m not saying that his conscription was voluntary, but I would’ve liked to think he’d fight back, as impossible as that might’ve been. I imagined him in my position, getting prepped for chip installation, scared and clueless in a hospital bed. And here he was, a general calling the shots. He seemed perfectly comfortable, perfectly acclimated. And he didn’t seem, you know, out of it. A lot of people thought that as soon as you got a chip put in you, you became a mindless killing machine. But no, Helt seemed pretty lucid.
“Alright; that’s all we need,” Avia confirmed after several tests. “Raena, you’re free to go, but I expect you at reception at precisely five thirty tomorrow. That’s when we’ll perform the installation.”
“Wait -”
“Here, put these on,” she interrupted, procuring a neatly folded set of clothing to replace my current smock. “I’ll send someone down to get you where you’re supposed to go.”
“Don’t bother. I’ve got her,” Helt said.
“But general -”
“It’s fine. She deserves an explanation.”
“Alright, suit yourself.” She left promptly and I was left alone with Helt.
“Confusing, right?” I nodded. “Yeah, they tell you fuck-all here,” he said in a half-whisper, glancing around. “Avia’s a hardass, you probably figured that out. And I haven’t been of much help to you either, I know.”
I grimaced. “No, you really haven’t.”
“Anyway, put those on.” He started toward the opening in the curtain. “I’ll be waiting right outside.”
He let the curtain fall closed behind him and I put on the scrubs. I noticed I was all bandaged up where I’d suffered minor scrapes; somehow, it was worse seeing myself like this than it was looking in the mirror back at Lanu’s place, dried blood and wounds clearly visible. Made me feel like a victim or something, this way.
I followed Helt out through the curtain. The light outside was blinding. The whole room was an immaculate white, two identical rows of stalls like mine on either side. I blinked a couple times, stretched my stiff back. “Feels weird, huh? Being a mage,” Helt noted.
“Yeah, if that’s what I am,” I replied. “Am I? I mean, last I heard, you all - I mean the King’s guys, the mages - weren’t too happy with me.”
“Hey, I don’t know what you did, but whatever it was, it landed you here instead of in prison or the morgue, so feel lucky. And yeah, you’re a mage. Well, sort of. The mages are gonna see you as a philosopher, and the philosophers are gonna see you as a mage. You’re the first in what I hope will be a line of hybrid units who are a mix of both. Come on.” He beckoned, leading me through the corridor out into a small lobby, then past that into an elevator. He punched in a code and I felt a jolt of vertigo as we started up. “See, the philosophers aid us remotely, giving us spells on the go as they’re needed, but they don’t know shit about what happens in the field. I figured we could use someone like a philosopher who could come with us, someone who could carry a tablet with them and whip shit up on the fly but also have the normal spell slots equipped with whatever they think they might need up and ready to go. Think we’ll call you a spellweaver, though the name’s still up for debate.”
The elevator slid to a halt and the doors opened. Outside was the most lavish room I’d ever seen. But, like, in a mature way, if that makes sense. Made the heavily ornamented trappings of Lanu’s house look like something a kid dreamed up. There were all these abstract shapes hanging from the ceiling, these big sloping supports in various shades of beige and brown, gold floor patterns that twisted every which way and behind it all a massive, sloping window out of which I could see only sky. “This is the embassy?”
Helt laughed. “No, dumbass, this is the palace.”
“We’re in Condouth?” I couldn’t drag my eyes from that ceiling. It was just too much. There were people everywhere, too, people in clothes I’d never seen before. They were light and airy, little strands of cloth spiraling outward, all held together by bands of heavily embroidered leather. No more jeans and t-shirts, I guess.
“Yeah, weird, I know,” Helt commented. “You’re gonna have to get used to wearing shit like that. Saw your vest, by the way. Nice job, shame it’ll have to hang on your wall for a while.”
“Thanks,” I said timidly. I glanced down at my scrubs as Helt beckoned me further, led me up a series of suspended staircases that wove through the - I’m not even sure what to call them - sculptures that hung from the ceiling. “What if I say no?” I ventured.
“What do you mean?”
I spoke a little louder, as loud as I dared to. “What if I say no? Like what if I simply don’t do what I’m told? What if I don’t want to be a mage or a philosopher? I know how conscription works, I just . . .”
He looked back at me sadly. “Then you go to prison until you decide to cooperate. And if you never do, then you end up dead. You think I chose to be here? I resisted at first. Hell, made you look like the very model of complacency. Threw fists, refused to leave my quarters - which were a shithole compared to what yours are gonna be, since I guess the King has you pegged as a philosopher first and foremost - but they broke me. And I didn’t wanna die, I’ll be honest with you. Wasn’t about to go down in the name of a cause when there wasn’t anyone around to make me a martyr.”
I kept glancing around, looking at the ceiling, at the walls. Felt like I wasn’t even indoors, the place was so big. I locked eyes with a man walking by. His disapproving stare reminded me of Avia’s. “Yeah, me neither,” I agreed. “Why don’t you have to wear one of those . . .”
“Togas?” he laughed. “I’m a mage. If you’re a mage, you’re invisible in the palace. It’s a hard loop of quarters, training facilities, rec hall, mess hall for most of us.” He leaned in, pointed around discreetly. “These bastards, doesn’t matter to them if you’ve been in the force for years, you’re always just a soldier to them. It’s not like the title of ‘general’ means anything to them. Yeah, if you spend all your time around mages or with whoever’s working on projects for us, it looks like I call the shots. But who do I take orders from? The King. And who does he listen to? These fucks. All investors, landowners, hell, even gangsters. You’ll find a representative or two from Cypher here, though they won’t be elven. No, they’ll be a hand-picked human, someone already used to dealing with court bullshit.”
I considered for a moment. “They’re not scared of you?”
He laughed again. Each laugh was just a little more bitter than the last. “Nah, they’re not scared.”
“Do you wish they were?”
He smirked, shook his head. “Come on. Just a bit more to go.” We took another elevator up through the palace, all the way up to the philosophers’ quarters. This one had a wall of glass through which you could see the whole sprawling city of Condouth, all skyscrapers and waterways. We shot up and another wave of vertigo hit me, this one more intense than the last. I noticed that we were going at a bit of an angle, so about halfway up I looked down out of the window and saw the smooth slope of the palace revealing itself bit by bit below us. I felt my ears pop. The city became a gray blur, penetrated by the shimmering reflection of the sun off of the waterways.
“This place really four miles high?”
“Yeah,” Helt confirmed. “You get used to it. And here’s where I leave you.” Several minutes after the ride began, the elevator finally started to slow, and when the doors opened to reveal another hall like the last one, the physical vertigo of the elevator gave way to a more conceptual vertigo, an idea of the sheer size of the building. There could be a thousand halls like the one I was stepping into, the one I’d just left, within the confines of the tower. This one was emptier than the last; it was like an entire apartment complex in here, with doors arranged in neat columns, spiral staircases leading to the upper ones. There were a few people lounging on the furniture arranged in a jaunty minimalist pattern on the ground floor. Well, as ground as a floor could be three-point-something miles in the air. “Your quarters are third from the left. See that one?” I confirmed that I did. “Yeah, top level, right there. I’ll see you later.” He got back in the elevator and I was alone.
Tentatively, I climbed the spiral staircase, noticing the smooth polish on the railing and the spotless marble of the steps. Whoever was walking up these things, they weren’t tracking much dirt in. And once I got into my apartment - well, my quarters - I felt this rush of exhilaration followed by a deep sense that there was something wrong with me. I didn’t think I should’ve been able to be this excited under the circumstances. Hell, a mage was the last thing I’d ever want to be. But as I entered the space, I couldn’t help the fluttering in my stomach.
This was more space than I had ever needed, ever imagined I would need. Maybe Morji’s place was bigger, but this was all mine. There was a fully fledged kitchen. Not a bathroom that’d been turned into a kitchen, not a fridge and a microwave shoved into a corner like there was at my family’s place in Methulum, where you had to go downstairs to a bigger communal kitchen to cook something on a stove. No, a real goddamn kitchen.
And there was a big floor to ceiling window that let a ton of light in. And there were stairs leading up to a loft that had a huge-ass bed; super soft, too. Hell, there was even a piano at the far end of the room, and I had to wonder whether everyone had a piano or if somehow I’d just gotten lucky enough to get the room with the piano. And regardless of how I thought I should feel about it, I found myself just a little more ready to get a chip planted in my head.